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The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology
Tom Shippey


The definitive guide to the origin of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, from The Hobbit to The History of Middle-earth series – includes unpublished Tolkien extracts and poetry.The Road to Middle-Earth is a fascinating and accessible exploration of J.R.R.Tolkien’s creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Tom Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien’s professional background led him to write The Hobbit and how he created a work of timeless charm for millions of readers. He discusses the contribution of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales to Tolkien’s great myth-cycle, showing how Tolkien’s more ‘complex’ works can be read enjoyably and seriously by readers of his earlier books, and goes on to examine the remarkable 12-volume History of Middle-earth by Tolkien’s son and literary heir Christopher Tolkien, which traces the creative and technical processes through which Middle-earth evolved. The core of the book, however, concentrates on The Lord of the Rings as a linguistic and cultural map, as a twisted web of a story, and as a response to the inner meaning of myth and poetry.By following the routes of Tolkien’s own obsessions – the poetry of languages and myth – The Road to Middle-earth shows how Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Elder Edda and many other works form part of a live and continuing tradition of literature. It takes issue with many basic premises of orthodox criticism and offers a new approach to Tolkien, to fantasy, and to the importance of language in literature.This new edition is revised and expanded, and includes a previously unpublished lengthy analysis of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations and their effect on Tolkien’s work.












THE ROAD TO

MIDDLE-EARTH


Revised and expanded edition







TOM SHIPPEY













Dedicated to the memory of

John Ernest Kjelgaard

lost at sea, H.M.S. Beverley 11 April 1943




Contents


Cover (#u889055c0-cc09-544d-b869-b175054e46e3)

Title Page (#uc9175de1-7534-52a1-9203-19990f8e8d0d)

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (#ulink_2fd70023-ebdd-504a-9059-63371391ad54)

CHAPTER 1: ‘LIT. AND LANG.’ (#ulink_a28bee8b-a1d4-5e4e-96ea-3d392a934e66)

CHAPTER 2: PHILOLOGICAL INQUIRIES (#ulink_d92f2343-b20b-538f-a9ed-d37be3d0318a)

CHAPTER 3: THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR (#ulink_7856f774-a06e-59e9-b0c0-720b24a176c8)

CHAPTER 4: A CARTOGRAPHIC PLOT (#ulink_653251d3-00b7-52c0-aefa-41f9316b0d31)

CHAPTER 5: INTERLACEMENTS AND THE RING (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 6: ‘WHEN ALL OUR FATHERS WORSHIPPED STOCKS AND STONES’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 7: VISIONS AND REVISIONS (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 8: ‘ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE’ (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 9: ‘THE COURSE OF ACTUAL COMPOSITION’ (#litres_trial_promo)

AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX A: TOLKIEN’S SOURCES: THE TRUE TRADITION (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX B: FOUR ‘ASTERISK’ POEMS (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX C: PETER JACKSON’S FILM VERSIONS (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND ABBREVIATIONS (#litres_trial_promo)

Books published by Tom Shippey (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (#ulink_186c9d3e-af96-5427-8381-bec80f3282f5)


My involvement with Tolkien’s fiction now goes back almost fifty years, to a first reading of The Hobbit some time in the mid-1950s. My first attempt to comment publicly on Tolkien did not come, however, till late 1969 or early 1970, when I was recruited, as a very junior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, to speak on ‘Tolkien as philologist’ at a Tolkien day organised by some now-forgotten association. It was my good fortune that Tolkien’s secretary, Joy Hill, was in the audience, and asked me for a copy of my script to show the Professor. It was my further good fortune that he read it, perhaps out of good will to Birmingham and to King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which we both attended, he (with a gap) from 1900 to 1911, and I from 1954 to 1960. Tolkien furthermore replied to it, with his habitual courtesy, in a letter dated April 13th, 1970, though it took me a very long time to understand what he meant, as I discuss below.

It was not till 1972 that I met Tolkien in person, by which time I had been promoted from Birmingham to a Fellowship at St. John’s College, Oxford, to teach Old and Middle English along the lines which Tolkien had laid down many years before. Just after I arrived in Oxford, Tolkien’s successor in the Merton Chair of English Language, Norman Davis, invited me to dine at Merton and meet Tolkien, who was then living in college lodgings following the death of his wife. The meeting left me with a strong sense of obligation and even professional piety, in the old sense of that word, i.e. ‘affectionate loyalty and respect, esp. to parents’, or in this case predecessors. After Tolkien’s death I felt increasingly that he would not have been happy with many of the things people said about his writings, and that someone with a similar background to himself ought to try to provide – as Tolkien and E. V. Gordon wrote in the ‘Preface’ to their 1925 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – ‘a sufficient apparatus for reading [these remarkable works] with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired'.



In 1975, accordingly, I contributed an article on ‘Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings’ to the volume of Essays in Memoriam edited by Mary Salu and R. T. Farrell, essentially an expansion of my 1970 script. In 1979, however, I followed Tolkien’s track yet again, this time going to the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at the University of Leeds, which Tolkien had held more than fifty years before. This only increased the sense of professional piety mentioned above, and the result was the first edition of the present work, which appeared in 1982. I assumed at the time that that would be my last word on the subject. But since then, of course, the whole ‘History of Middle-earth’ has appeared, twelve volumes of Tolkien’s unpublished drafts and stories edited by his son Christopher, as well as a volume of academic essays including some new material, and the ‘reconstructed’ editions of the Old English Exodus and Finnsburg poems: each separate publication a valuable source of information, but also of some trepidation to the writer who has committed himself to explaining ‘how Tolkien worked’ or ‘what Tolkien must have been thinking’. A second edition of The Road to Middle-earth, in 1992, accordingly tried to take some of this material into account.

A further thought, however, had slowly been growing upon me, first expressed in the article on ‘Tolkien as a Post-War Writer’, delivered as a lecture at the ‘Tolkien Phenomenon’ conference at the University of Turku, Finland, in 1992, and printed in the proceedings of that conference, Scholarship and Fantasy, edited by Keith J. Battarbee. This thought was that I had from 1970 always thought of Tolkien as a philologist, a professional ancestor, one of a line of historical linguists descended essentially from Jacob Grimm, of ‘Grimm’s Law’ and ‘Grimms’ Fairy Tales’. I had in other words habitually seen him, to use the linguists’ term, ‘diachronically’. But language can and should also be viewed ‘synchronically’, and so could Tolkien. What happened if one considered him in the literary context of his time, the early to mid-twentieth century? My unconsidered assumption had been that he had no literary context, that he was a ‘one-off’ – certainly the impression one would get from reading any literary histories of the period which happened to mention him. But if one reflected on Orwell and William Golding, Vonnegut and T.H. White, C.S. Lewis and even Ursula Le Guin, several of them close to him in age, or experience, or date of publication, a different picture emerged: one of a group of (as I have called them) ‘traumatised authors’, writing fantasy, but voicing in that fantasy the most pressing and most immediately relevant issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century – questions of industrialised warfare, the origin of evil, the nature of humanity. This ‘synchronic’ view of Tolkien took shape in my book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). (Grammarians will note the absence of an article before the first word of the sub-title.) I hope that my two books now complement each other through their different approaches, though they present essentially the same explanations of the central works.

The present third edition of The Road to Middle-earth naturally allows and obliges some reconsiderations, especially as a result of the new information contained in ‘The History of Middle-earth’. On the whole I feel my first edition got off relatively lightly, confirmed as often as disproved. The rolling years and volumes have allowed me some clear hits: ‘angel’ as Tolkien-speech for messenger, see note 11 to chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo), and c.p. Treason of lsengard, p. 422; or the importance of Old Mercian, see below (#litres_trial_promo) and c.p. Sauron Defeated, p. 257. Of course when it comes to philology, a real discipline, one ought to get things right. I was pleased when Anders Stenström, staying with me in Leeds in 1984, found in a Leeds journal for 1922 an anonymous poem in Middle English which we concluded was by Tolkien; but almost as pleased when the emendations I proposed to the text as (mis)printed were confirmed by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s manuscript (see the journal of the Swedish Tolkien Society, Arda, vols. 4 (for 1984) and 6 (for 1986), for the poem and Stenström’s account of his search).

Meanwhile some unmistakable wides have also been called: in my allegorisation of ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (#ulink_27610c58-4eee-5695-9ff9-c330ea22ba79), I should not have written ‘his “Tree” = The Lord of the Rings’, but have put down something much more extensive; despite p. 87, Sauron was not part of Tolkien’s ‘subsequent inspiration’ but there already; while on p. 308, writing ‘There is, in a way, no more of “Middle-earth” to consider’ was just tempting Providence. Even more significantly, my 1982 discussion of ‘depth’ in Tolkien (#litres_trial_promo), was extensively answered by Christopher Tolkien a year later in his ‘Foreword’ to The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1, pp. 1–5, with a further note in Part 2, p. 57. It is clear that all my discussions of Tolkien were affected by reading his works (as almost everyone does) in order of publication, not order of composition. It is a temptation to try to remedy this retrospectively, but I have not done so. Studying Tolkien’s fiction as it developed in his own mind, possible now as it was not in 1982, would be a different book. In general, then, I am happy to stand by what I published in 1982, and again in 1992, remembering the data I had, and expanding or updating wherever necessary.

Yet I do turn back to the letter Professor Tolkien wrote to me on April 13th, 1970, charmingly courteous and even flattering as it was from one at the top of his profession to one then at the bottom (‘I don’t like to fob people off with a formal thanks … one of the nearest to my heart, or the nearest, of the many I have received … I am honoured to have received your attention’). And yet, and yet … What I should have realised – perhaps did half-realise, for I speak the dialect myself – was that this letter was written in the specialised politeness-language of Old Western Man, in which doubt and correction are in direct proportion to the obliquity of expression. The Professor’s letter had invisible italics in it, which I now supply. ‘I am in agreement with nearly all that you say, and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper: especially about design as it appears or may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of actual composition’. It has taken me thirty years (and the perusal of fifteen volumes unpublished in 1970) to see the point of the italics. Tolkien, however, closed his letter to me with the proverb: ‘Need brooks no delay, yet late is better than never?’ I can only repeat his saying, question-mark and all.





CHAPTER 1 ‘LIT. AND LANG.’ (#ulink_d0377835-d663-566a-a4d0-3436bd202e64)

Old Antipathies


‘This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.’ With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgement of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.


(#litres_trial_promo) It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of course very few adults (or children) read anything right through more than once, still less anything as long as The Lord of the Rings. However it could not have been more wrong. This did not stop critics continuing to say the same thing. Six years later, after the three separate volumes had gone through eight or nine hardback impressions each, Philip Toynbee in the Observer (6 August 1961) voiced delight at the way sales, he thought, were dropping. Most of Professor Tolkien’s more ardent supporters, he declared, were beginning to ‘sell out their shares’ in him, so that ‘today these books have passed into a merciful oblivion’. Five years afterwards the authorised American paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was moving rapidly past its first million copies, starting a wave which never receded even to the more-than-respectable levels of 1961; and which has been revived in the 21st century to levels Toynbee could not have dreamed of.

The point is not that reviewers make mistakes (something which happens too often to deserve comment). It is that they should insist so perversely in making statements not about literary merit, where their opinions could rest undisprovable, but about popular appeal, where they can be shown up beyond all possibility of doubt. Matters are not much better with those critics who have been able to bring themselves to recognise the fact that some people do like Tolkien. Why was this ‘balderdash’ so popular, Edmund Wilson asked himself, in The Nation (14 April 1956). Well, he concluded, it was because ‘certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a life-long appetite for juvenile trash’. Some twenty-five years before the same critic had delivered a little homily on the subject of intolerant responses to new fictions, in his book Axel’s Castle:

it is well to remember the mysteriousness of the states with which we respond to the stimulus of works of literature and the primarily suggestive character of the language in which these works are written, on any occasion when we may be tempted to characterise as ‘nonsense’ ‘balderdash’ or ‘gibberish’ some new and outlandish-looking piece of writing to which we do not happen to respond. If other persons say they do respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.


(#litres_trial_promo)

A good rule, one must admit! But Mr Wilson had evidently forgotten it by the time he came to read The Lord of the Rings: or perhaps every time he said ‘we’ in the passage just quoted, he really meant ‘you’.

Very similar play is made with pronouns in C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy (1975), a book dedicated to the thesis that no work of modern fantasy has remained ‘true to its original vision’ but one which like Edmund Wilson’s review does at least confront the problem of Tolkienian popularity – of course much more evident in 1975 than 1956. Dr Manlove also thinks that the whole thing might be mere national aberration, though he prefers to blame the United States and ‘the perennial American longing for roots’. Or could it all be due to mere length?

Doubtless there is such a thing as the sheer number of pages the reader has had to turn that can add poignancy to the story – one almost feels this is the case as we come to the great close of Malory’s epic. But not with Tolkien’s book, for we have never been very much involved anyway.


(#litres_trial_promo)

Who are ‘we’? Readers of Modern Fantasy? Readers of The Lord of the Rings? There is no sensible answer to the question. For all the display of scholarly reflection this is, just like the bits from Messrs Toynbee and Wilson and the TLS reviewer, once more the criticism of blank denial. Some people may like reading Tolkien – after fifty years and scores of millions of readers the point is nowadays usually grudgingly conceded – but they are wrong to do so, and whoever they are, they are not ‘us’! Tolkien’s ‘mission as a literary preservationist’ declared Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times Book Review (22nd April, 2001, p. 35) has turned out to be ‘death to literature itself’.

In an exasperated kind of way Tolkien would, I think, have been particularly delighted to read Dr Manlove’s essay, and probably (see below (#ulink_6f2e23c9-1549-5454-a0fe-998edfc94525)) Ms. Shulevitz’s review as well. He had run into criticism like Manlove’s before, indeed it is a major theme of his tauntingly-titled British Academy lecture of 1936, ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’. The critics he had in mind were critics of Beowulf, but they were saying pretty much the same thing as Manlove on Tolkien: Beowulf didn’t work, just like The Lord of the Rings, it was intrinsically silly, and ‘we’ weren’t involved with it. ‘Correct and sober taste’ Tolkien wrote, ‘may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us – the proud we that includes all intelligent living people – in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures’ (‘Monsters’ p. 257). Tolkien had not, in 1936, realised how quickly ‘correct and sober taste’ could stamp ‘puzzlement’ out, and ‘pleasure’ along with it. However, for the rest he might just as well have been writing about responses to his own fiction. No doubt he would have felt honoured, in a way, to find himself as well as the Beowulf-poet driving critics to take refuge in threadbare and hopeless ‘we’s’.

The similarities between responses to Beowulf (as analysed by Tolkien) and to The Lord of the Rings do not end there. If one looks at Tolkien’s remarks about the Beowulf critics, one can see that the thing he found worst about them was their monoglottery: they seemed able to read only one language, and even if they knew a bit of French or some other modern tongue they were quite incapable of reading ancient texts, ancient English texts, with anything like the degree of detailed verbal insight that was required. They relied on translations and summaries, they did not pay close attention to particular words. ‘This is an age of potted criticism and predigested literary opinion’ Tolkien wrote in 1940 in apologetic preface to a translation of Beowulf which he hoped would only be used as a crib; ‘in the making of these cheap substitutes for food translations unfortunately are too often used’ (p. ix). Now this could hardly be said about The Lord of the Rings, which is after all mostly in modern English. Or could it? Were people really paying close attention to words, Tolkien must have wondered as he read through the reviews? Or were they just skipping through for the plot again?

His irritation surfaced in the 1966 Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, where he wrote, rather cattily:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. (LOTR, p. xvi)

Probably this was, strictly speaking, unfair. All the reviewers I have come across do seem to have read the book right through with no more than a normal run of first-reading miscomprehensions. However it is a surprising fact that Edmund Wilson, who declared that he had not only read the book but had read the whole thousand pages out loud to his seven-year-old daughter, nevertheless managed consistently to spell the name of a central character wrong: ‘Gandalph’ for ‘Gandalf’. Edwin Muir in the Observer preferred ‘Gandolf’. This may seem purely trivial; but Tolkien would not have looked at it that way. He knew that ‘ph’ for ‘f’ was a learned spelling, introduced sporadically into English from Latin from about the fourteenth century, mostly in words of Greek origin like ‘physics’ or ‘philosophy’. It is not used for native words like ‘foot’ or ‘fire’. Now in the rather similar linguistic correspondences of Middle-earth (they are laid out in Appendices E and F of The Lord of the Rings, for those who haven’t already noticed) it is clear that ‘Gandalf’ belongs to the latter set rather than the former. ‘Gandalph’ would accordingly have seemed to Tolkien as intrinsically ludicrous as ‘phat’ or ‘phool’ or come to that ‘elph’ or ‘dwarph’. He could hardly have conceived of the state of mind that would regard such variations as meaningless, or beneath notice. As for ‘Gandolf’, that is an Italian miscomprehension, familiar from Browning’s poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ but wildly inappropriate to a work which does its best to avoid Latinisms.

No compromise is possible between what one might call ‘the Gandalph mentality’ and Tolkien’s. Perhaps this is why The Lord of the Rings (and to a lesser extent Tolkien’s other writings as well) makes so many literary critics avert their eyes, get names wrong, write about things that aren’t there and miss the most obvious points of success.


(#litres_trial_promo) Tolkien thought this instinctive antipathy was an ancient one: people who couldn’t stand his books hadn’t been able to bear Beowulf, or Pearl, or Chaucer, or Sir Gawain, or Sir Orfeo either. For millennia they had been trying to impose their views on a recalcitrant succession of authors, who had fortunately taken no notice. In the rather steely ‘Preface’ to their edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which the word ‘criticism’ is conspicuously shunned), Tolkien and his colleague E. V. Gordon declared that they wanted to help people read the poem ‘with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’ (p. v). Doing the same job for Tolkien ought to be easier, since he is so much more our contemporary than the Gawain-poet; on the other hand Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile. However nothing is to be gained by applying to it the criteria of ‘correct and sober taste’ of the great but one-sided traditions of later English literature, of those ‘higher literary aspirations’ so haughtily opposed by Anthony Burgess to ‘allegories with animals or fairies’ (Observer, 26 November 1978). These lead only to the conclusion that there is nothing to be said and no phenomenon to consider. Still, something made Tolkien different, gave him the power so markedly to provoke these twin reactions of popular appeal and critical rage.




The Nature of Philology


Whatever it was, it almost self-evidently had something to do with his job. For most of his active life Tolkien taught Old English, Middle English, the history of the English language; in doing so he was competing with teachers of English literature for time, funds and students, on the whole a thankless task since for all that Tolkien could do the current was setting firmly away from him and from his subjects. Tolkien was by all accounts as capable of keeping up a grudge as the next man, and his minor writings often show it. The anthology of Songs for the Philologists which he and E. V. Gordon compiled, later to be privately printed in 1936, contains at least two poems by Tolkien attacking teachers of ‘Lit.’; one of them, titled variously ‘Two Little Schemes’ and ‘Lit. and Lang.’ the worst he ever wrote; so bad indeed that it makes me think (or hope) that something must have gone wrong with it en route between poet and printer. Meanwhile he was from the start of his learned career barely able to use the word ‘literature’ at all without putting inverted commas round it to show he couldn’t take it seriously, which suggests that Ms Shulevitz’s ‘death to literature’ remark would not have disturbed him. Thus his famous article on ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’,


(#ulink_43966433-c37a-5a75-b5b3-847ae26906e5) published in 1929, opens with the remark that: ‘The Ancrene Wisse has already developed a “literature”, and it is very possible that nothing I can say about it will be either new or illuminating to the industrious or leisured that have kept up with it. I have not’ (‘AW’, p. 104). There are variants on the same innuendo at the start of the Beowulf lecture of 1936 and in the Sir Gawain ‘Preface’ of 1925. Of course there is a reason (of characteristic deviousness) for this repeated Tolkienian joke, and one which can easily be extracted from the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which Tolkien had himself worked in youth. There one can find that the meaning which Tolkien foisted on to ‘literature’ is indeed recognised, under heading 3b: ‘The body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject’. But why should Tolkien insist on using that one when heading 3a is less narrow and much more generally pertinent: ‘Literature’ meaning ‘literary productions as a whole … Now also, in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’? The sting for Tolkien lay in the illustrative quotations which form the backbone of the definition, of which the sixth reads ‘The full glory of the new literature broke in England with Edmund Spenser’ i.e. in 1579. The true mordancy of that opinion may not appear till later. It is enough to note that if you took the OED seriously you could argue (a) that the valueless accumulation of books about Beowulf and the Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain were all ‘literature’ under heading 3b, but (b) the original and creative works themselves, all very much pre-1579, were not, under 3a. Naturally no one would be stupid enough to put forward such a proposition seriously and in so many words. Still, Tolkien did not think these semantic tangles entirely fortuitous; the OED might not mirror truth but it did represent orthodox learned opinion. It was typical of him to note the confusion and the slur it implied, to use the one to avenge the other – ‘literature’ was ‘books about books’ the dead Latin ‘letter’ opposed to the ancient English spirit.

Yet what this obsessive playing with words shows, better than anything, is that beneath the fog and fury of academic politics, Tolkien realised that all discussions of ‘language’ and ‘literature’ were irretrievably poisoned by the very terms they were bound to use. When he was not simply playing for his side, he accepted that ‘lang.’ was just as foolish a rallying-cry as ‘lit.’. In his manifesto of 1930, ‘The Oxford English School’ he even suggested that both terms should be scrapped in favour of ‘A’ and ‘B’ – thus attempting, with something very close to lèse majesté, to introduce the curriculum of a ‘redbrick’ university, Leeds, to the ivory towers of Oxford, with sad if entirely predictable lack of success.


(#litres_trial_promo) The same article makes it clear that he thought both ‘linguistic’ and ‘literary’ approaches too narrow for a full response to works of art, especially early works of art, and that furthermore what was needed was not some tame compromise between them (which is all most Schools of English usually manage to provide), but something as it were at right angles to both. This third dimension was the ‘philological’ one: it was from this that he trained himself to see things, from this too that he wrote his works of fiction. ‘Philology’ is indeed the only proper guide to a view of Middle-earth ‘of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’. It is not Tolkien’s fault that over the last hundred years ‘philology’ as a term and as a discipline, has been getting itself into even worse tangles than ‘English literature’.

Dictionary definitions are, symptomatically, unhelpful. The OED, though conceived and created by philologists and borne along by the subject’s nineteenth-century prestige, has almost nothing useful to offer. ‘Philology’ it suggests, is: ‘I. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation … polite learning. Now rare in general sense.’ Under 2 it offers ‘love of talk, speech or argument’ (this is an offensive sense in which philology is mere logic-chopping, the opposite of true philosophy); while 3 recovers any ground abandoned in 1 by saying it is ‘The study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. (Really one branch of sense 1.)’ So ‘philology’ is ‘lang.’ and ‘lit.’ too, all very charitable but too vague to be any use. The Deutsches Wörterbuch set in motion by Jacob Grimm (himself perhaps the greatest of all philologists and responsible in true philological style for both ‘Grimm’s Law of Consonants’ and Grimms’ Fairy Tales) could do little better, defining philologie with similar inclusiveness as ‘the learned study of the (especially Classical) languages and literatures’. The illustrative quotation from Grimm’s own work is more interesting in its declaration that ‘none among all the sciences is prouder, nobler, more disputatious than philology, or less merciful to error’; this at least indicates the expectations the study had aroused. Still, if you didn’t know what ‘philology’ was already, the Grimm definition would not enlighten you.

The matter is not cleared up by Holger Pedersen’s assertion of 1924 that philology is ‘a study whose task is the interpretation of the literary monuments in which the spiritual life of a given period has found expression’


(#litres_trial_promo) (for this leaves you wondering why ‘spiritual’ has been put in and ‘language’ for once left out); nor by Leonard Bloomfield’s aside a year later, when, proposing the foundation of a Linguistic Society for America, he explicitly rejected the term ‘philological’ and noted that while British scholars tended to use it to mean ‘linguistic’, Americans would prefer to keep the latter term and to revere philology rather more from a distance as ‘that noblest of sciences … the study of national culture … something much greater than a misfit combination of language plus literature’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Anyway some Britons were very far removed from his position. John Churton Collins, nineteenth-century man of letters and candidate for an Oxford Chair, had written in 1891 (it was part of his campaign to keep men like Joseph Wright, Tolkien’s tutor, out of any prospective English School at Oxford):

it [i.e. philology] too often induces or confirms that peculiar woodenness and opacity, that singular coarseness of feeling and purblindness of moral and intellectual vision, which has in all ages been the characteristic of mere philologists … [it] too often resembles that rustic who, after listening for several hours to Cicero’s most brilliant conversation, noticed nothing and remembered nothing but the wart on the great orator’s nose.


(#litres_trial_promo)

Opinions such as this clung on a long time in England. Tolkien wrote in 1924 ‘“Philology” is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things that the late war was fought to end’ (YWES 4, p. 37). When I first read this I took it to be a joke. However just three years before the British Board of Education had printed a Report on The Teaching of English in England which declared, among much else, that philology ought not to be taught to undergraduates, that it was a ‘German-made’ science, and (this comes in a footnote on p. 286) that by contributing to German arrogance it had led in a direct way to the outbreak of World War I.

Philology was ‘the noblest of sciences’; it was literary; it was linguistic; it was German; it was Classical; it was different in America; it was about warts on noses; it was ‘the special burden of the Northern tongues’ (Tolkien speaking, ‘OES’ p. 780); also ‘the special advantage they possess as a discipline’ (Tolkien once again, in the same sentence). This begins to sound like the Babel of conflicting voices which Tolkien guyed so fiercely in his lecture on Beowulf, except that in this case the final universal chorus of all voices ‘it is worth studying!’ would clearly be somewhat ragged. If no single answer to the question ‘what is philology?’ can be found, at least few authorities would dissent from the view that the redefinition of philology – the moment when it stopped being used in the OED’s vaguest senses of ‘love of talk’ or ‘love of learning’ – came in 1786 when Sir William Jones informed the Bengal Society in Calcutta that Sanskrit resembled Greek and Latin too strongly for this to be the result of chance, but that all three, together with Germanic and Celtic, must have ‘sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists’.


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Obviously this thought must have crossed many minds before 1786, for even between English and Latin, say, there are enough similarities – one, two, three, unus, duo, tres – to make one think there may be some sort of a connection. But until the turn of the eighteenth century such speculations had foundered immediately on the great reefs of dissimilarity surrounding the occasional identical rocks. After all the main thing anyone knew about languages was that they were so different they had to be learnt one at a time. The great alteration Jones and his successors brought to the problem was the idea of looking not for chance resemblances – which had already been used to ‘prove’ relationships all over the map – but for regular change. Bad in modern Persian had the same sound and sense as ‘bad’ in English (remarked A. E. Pott in 1833), but that was just coincidence. On the other hand xvahar in Persian was originally the same word as xo in Ossetic, and both were related to English ‘sister’; furthermore the intermediate stages could be inferred and on occasion recovered.


(#litres_trial_promo) Like many mental revolutions, this linguistic one depended on being counterintuitive. It was also to an intense degree comparative, using many languages to explain and corroborate each other; and, since different stages of the same language could be used comparatively, by nature overwhelmingly historical. ‘Philology unfolds the genesis of those laws of speech which grammar contemplates as a finished result’ says a citation in the OED, dated 1852. Its author did not mean ‘philology’ in any of the senses quoted from the OEDabove (#ulink_68a14176-cb2a-54e1-95b4-8c2f6764627e); he meant comparative philology, the science inspired by Sir William and carried on through many inheritors to Professor Tolkien himself. One may remark that the confidence with which ‘genesis’ is approached was characteristic of the time.

By 1852, indeed, ‘the new philology’ had many triumphs to look back on, with several yet to come: one might pick out the prize-winning essay of Rasmus Rask in 1814, on Old Icelandic, and on the relationship of Scandinavian languages to Slavic, Celtic, Finnish and Classical ones; the enormous ‘Comparative Grammar’ or Vergleichende Grammatik of Franz Bopp in 1833–49, which covered Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic and German; the Deutsche Grammatik (1819) of Jacob Grimm, and all their many successors.


(#litres_trial_promo) The point which all these works brandished was the intensely systematic nature of discovery, expressed as time went on increasingly by the word ‘laws’ (see OED citation above), and on the analogy of physics or chemistry by the association of laws with discoverers: Grimm’s Law, Verner’s Law, Kuhn’s Law, Thomsen’s Law, etc. There was and still is something insidiously fascinating about the relationships these laws uncover, in such detail and such profusion. Latin pisces is the same word as Old English fisc, observed Jacob Grimm, or indeed modern English ‘fish’; pes is the same as ‘foot’ and pellis as ‘fell’ (the old word for ‘skin’). What about porcus and ‘pig’ though, where the p/f alternation breaks down? Well, there is an Old English word fearh which corresponds properly, noted Grimm, its modern descendant being ‘farrow’, again an old or dialectal word for a ‘birth’ of piglets. The mill of comparisons will not work on basic or standard or literary languages alone, but demands ever-increasing grist from older or localised or sub-standard forms. The reward it offers is first an increasing sense that everything can be worked out, given time and material, second an exciting tension between the modern meanings of words – words everyone has known all their lives – and what appear as the ancient meanings. ‘Daughter’ in modern Hindustani comes out as beti; yet there is a connection between the two languages in the word dudh, ‘milk’. In ancient days, it seems, a word like Sanskrit duhitar meant ‘the little milker’; but the job was so often given to daughters that task and relationship became fused. It ‘opens before our eyes a little idyll of the poetical and pastoral life of the early Aryans’ enthused Max Müller,


(#litres_trial_promo) whose lectures on comparative philology bowled over not only (or not even) the learned world in the 1860s and after, but also London’s high society. Comparison was the rage: it didn’t tell you only about words, it told you about people.

But somewhere towards the end of the nineteenth century things had begun to go wrong. As is obvious from all that Tolkien ever said about literature and about philology, he felt that he had taken over (perhaps unfairly, but possibly not) a losing position in the academic game from his predecessors. Why – he could hardly have helped wondering – was that? Why had philology so ignominiously belied its promise?

Probably the short answer is that the essence of comparative philology was slog. There is something wistful in Tolkien’s astonished praise of the ‘dull stodges’ of Leeds University (Biography, p. 111), in his insistence that at Leeds anyway ‘Philology is making headway … and there is no trace of the press-gang!’ (Letters, p. 11). For matters were different elsewhere. No science, Jacob Grimm had said of philology, was ‘prouder, nobler, more disputatious, or less merciful to error’ (my italics). All its practitioners accepted, to a degree now incredible, a philosophy of rigid accuracy, total coverage, utter right and utter wrong: in 1919 the old and massively distinguished Eduard Sievers happily put his reputation on the line when he offered to dissect a text provided unseen by Hans Lietzmann, and to show from linguistic evidence how many authors had composed it (he had already done the same thing to the Epistles of Paul). He got Lietzmann’s specimen totally wrong. But no one said the idea of the test itself was unfair.


(#litres_trial_promo) Further down the scale, the discoveries of Grimm and his successors as far as Ferdinand de Saussure (now famous for inventing ‘structuralism’ but before that a student of Ablaut) were communicated increasingly to students as facts, systems of facts, systems divorced from the texts they had been found in. We must have philology within English Studies, wrote F. York Powell the Icelandicist in 1887, ‘or goodbye to accuracy’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The claim was false – you can be accurate about other things besides sound-shifts – but after seventy years of unbroken progress for the subject it was also damningly unambitious. Looking back many years later, R. W. Chambers (the man who turned down the Chair of Anglo-Saxon which eventually went to Tolkien in 1925) summed up success and failure by observing that in 1828 ‘the comparative philologist was like Ulysses’ but ‘Scoffers may say that my parallel is all too true – that students of comparative language, like [Dante’s] Ulysses, found only the mountain of Purgatory – Grimm’s Law, Verner’s Law, Grassmann’s Law – rising in successive terraces of horror – and then were overwhelmed …’


(#litres_trial_promo) Scoffers said exactly that; their viewpoint became dominant; comparative philology seen as ‘hypothetical sound-shiftings in the primeval German forests’


(#litres_trial_promo) went into a decline nearly as precipitate as its rise.

This is why ‘philology’ has first the old vague sense of ‘love of learning’; then the new nineteenth century one of ‘study of texts leading to comparative study of language leading to comprehension of its evolution’; and in the twentieth century the specialised meaning, within departments of English Studies, of ‘anti-literary science kept up by pedants (like Professor Tolkien) which ought to be stopped as soon as possible’. But these interesting semantic changes leave something out: the ‘spiritual life’ waved at by Holger Pedersen, the ‘national culture’ saluted by Leonard Bloomfield – or, to put it another way, the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.




Lost Romances


For philology, after the Rask-Bopp-Grimm breakthrough, had moved in other directions beside the phonological and morphological. The mill of historical comparison called increasingly for fresh material, and one natural effect, besides the study of language in general, was the study of languages in particular. Scholars became much more interested in unread texts; they also became spectacularly better at reading them, at producing dictionaries of stone-dead languages. As Tolkien noted himself (‘Preface’, p. xii), the word hós(e) in Beowulf was never found anywhere else in Old English, so that one would have to guess at its meaning from context, were it not for the fact that philology proved it was the ‘same’ word as Old High German hansa, as in ‘Hanseatic League’, with the meaning ‘retinue’ or possibly ‘band of people connected by mutual oaths’. The dead languages furnished comparative material; the comparative material illuminated dead languages. Men learnt to read Hittite, recognised as an Indo-European language in the 1920s (with marked effect on Old Testament studies), Tokharian (another Indo-European language once spoken by steppe-nomads but now represented mostly by texts preserved accidentally in an oasis in Turkestan), more recently to decipher ‘Linear B’ (an exploration of Cretan archaeology which would have been impossible in a pre-Bopp era). Much obscurer discoveries were made. A whole nation was theorised to lie behind the tiny fragment of Kottish, a language spoken when it was investigated by only five people. Holger Pedersen said of their relatives the Yenisei that they seem to be ‘the last remnants of a powerful folk who, with the Thibetan empire as their southern neighbour, ruled over a great part of Siberia, but were at length compelled to submit to the Turks’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Yet of their rule no traces remain other than linguistic ones. The romance of these investigations can still be felt. It is a large-scale analogue of Muller’s remarks on duhitar, of the awareness that some forms even of modern language took you back to the Stone Age (as in English ‘hammer’, cognate with Old Slavic kamy, ‘stone’). The romance became stronger, perversely, the closer it got to home.

Thus Old English itself looked very strikingly different after the philologists got hold of it – and it was they who insisted on calling it Old English instead of Anglo-Saxon to mark what they saw as an essential continuity. The story of Gothic, however, was even more dramatic. Some awareness of this language had been around from an early period. People knew that such texts as the Uppsala Codex Argenteus were in Gothic, that the Goths were an East Germanic tribe who had overrun parts of the Roman Empire from about AD 376, that they had been converted to literacy and Christianity, and become linguistically extinct some time round the eighth century. Philology shattered this picture. For one thing Gothic became suddenly more than comprehensible, it became vital: it was the earliest Germanic language recorded at any length, Germanic was the area of most philologists’ main interest (they were mostly Germans), and Gothic exhibited, in ways that Old English and Old High German did not, stages in the history of all the Germanic languages inferable from but not recorded in its cousins. So, modern English says ‘old’ but ‘elder’, Old English (in its Early West Saxon form) eald but ieldra, both say (more or less) ‘to heal’ but ‘hale (and hearty)’. For these Gothic offers respectively altheis, althiza, háiljan, háils. The common element deduced is that when an -i- or -j- followed a or ái in old Old English (this goes back to the time before Englishmen had learnt to write) speakers began to change the earlier vowel into e, ae – with similar changes affecting other vowels. Where there is a succeeding -i- in Gothic there is a change of vowel in Old (and often still in modern) English; not otherwise.

This phenomenon, known as ‘i-mutation’ became one of the most familiar horrors of university philology, but there is in it something both mysterious and satisfactory: a whole series of things which people said, and still say, without in the least knowing why, turn out to have one very old but clear, 100 per cent predictable reason. It is almost like genetics. No wonder that Grimm said Gothic was a ‘perfect’ language, Tolkien (‘EW’, p. 38) that it took him by storm. A further stage in the developing romance of ‘Gothia’ was the thought that the Goths might not be extinct. At some time in the 1560s one Ogier van Busbecq, a Fleming then acting as ambassador in Istanbul, had heard some foreigners whose speech sounded familiar. He recorded a list of words from them and printed it in 1589. They proved to be Gothic, nearly a thousand years out of place. Their interest aroused several centuries later, scholars could for a while entertain the hope that a living Gothic was still somewhere in existence, as a kind of Abominable Snowman of language. Alas, it wasn’t. But at least it became clearer how Gothic had survived, in the remote Crimea, and it became possible to piece together once again the history of a vanished people.

It is not too much to say that this language and this people haunted Tolkien all his life. As is noted by Christopher Tolkien (UT, p. 311), the names of the leaders of the Rohirrim before the dynasty of Eorl are not Old English, like everything else in the Riders’ culture, but Gothic, e.g. Vidugavia, Vidumavi, Marhwini, etc. (see LOTR, pp. 1021–2). They function there to suggest language behind language and age behind age, a phenomenon philologists so often detected. On a larger scale the Battle of the Pelennor Fields closely follows the account, in Jordanes’s Gothic History, of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, in which also the civilisation of the West was preserved from the ‘Easterlings’ and in which the Gothic king Theodorid was trampled by his own victorious cavalry with much the same mixture of grief and glory as Tolkien’s Théoden. Perhaps the most revealing remark, however, comes in a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher after the latter had read a paper on the heroes of northern legend. In this he praised his son’s paper for the light it shed on men and on history, but added:

All the same, I suddenly realized that I am a pure philologist. I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names! Several people (and I agree) spoke to me of the art with which you made the beady-eyed Attila on his couch almost vividly present. Yet oddly, I find the thing that really thrills my nerves is the one you mentioned casually: atta, attila. Without those syllables the whole great drama both of history and legend loses savour for me. (Letters, p. 264)

The point is that Attila, though a Hun, an enemy of the Goths under Theodorid, and a byword for bloody ferocity, nevertheless does not appear to bear a barbarian name. ‘Attila’ is the diminutive form of the Gothic word for ‘father’, atta: it means ‘little father’ or even ‘dad’, and it suggests very strongly the presence of many Goths in Attila’s conquering armies who found loot and success much more attractive than any questions of saving the West, Rome or civilisation! As with duhitar, ‘little milker’, or kamy as a cognate for ‘hammer’, the word tells the story. Tolkien went on in his letter to say that in his mind that was exactly how The Lord of the Rings grew and worked. He had not constructed a design. Instead he had tried ‘to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo’. Literary critics might not believe him, but philologists (if any were left) ought to know better.

Atta, Attila: what’s in a name? One answer is, a total revaluation of history. It is instructive to look at older and newer editions of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first published 1776–88). Gibbon knew the Goths from many Roman and Greek historians, including Jordanes, but these were his only sources of information and he could not imagine another one. ‘The memory of past events’, he remarked with classically-educated superciliousness, ‘cannot long be preserved, in the frequent and remote emigrations of illiterate Barbarians’ (chapter 26). As for the great Gothic king of the fourth century, he said, ‘The name of Hermanric is almost buried in oblivion’. It did not stay buried. ‘Hermanric’ turned up in recognisable form in Beowulf (not printed till 1815) as Eormenric. The same name and man, with little stories attached, appeared also in the Old English poems Déor and Widsith. As Ermenrich he survived into the Middle High German romances of Dietrichs Flucht, Alpharts Tod, and many others. Most powerfully, Jörmunrekkr turned out to be a most prominent character in the Old Norse poems of the Elder Edda, which had lain unnoticed in an Icelandic farmhouse till the 1640s, and not been published in full till Rasmus Rask did the job in 1818. The ‘illiterate Barbarians’ were not as forgetful as Gibbon thought. They could at least remember names, and even if these had been affected by sound-changes in the same way as other words, no archaic poet produced anything as false as Gibbon’s ‘(H)ermanric’. From the joint evidence of old poems in English, Norse and German one could in fact deduce that the king’s name, though never recorded in Gothic, must have been *Aírmanareiks.

And, as with ‘Attila’, there is a thrill of old passion lurking in the name, buried though this may be in editors’ footnotes and the inferences of scholarly works. The tales of Ermanaric’s death vary. He committed suicide (round AD 375) for fear of the Huns, says an early Roman source. Jordanes tells a more complicated story of treachery, punishment and revenge. The Old Norse poems, more grisly and more personal, insist that Ermanaric was attacked by his brothers-in-law for murdering their sister, and was left after their death under a hail of Gothic stones – for on them no weapon would bite – to survive as a heimnár or ‘living corpse’, a trunk with both arms and legs cut off. This last tale seems totally unlikely. But it does preserve some agreement over names and incidents with Jordanes: maybe something peculiar and tragic did take place during the collapse of the Gothic Empire in the fourth century. To the philologist who compared these versions there was a further charm in guessing what strange chains of transmission and quirks of national bias had transformed king into villain. Had the defeated Goths cast him as a scapegoat? Had he been made a wife-murderer to gloss over the feelings of those Goths who changed sides and joined the ‘Easterlings’, calling the Hunnish king their ‘little father’? Had Crimean Goths sung lays of Ermanaric to Norsemen of the Varangian Guard in the courts of the Greek emperor? Tolkien followed these inquiries closely, buying for instance the volumes of Hermann Schneider’s Germanische Heldensage as they came out 1928–34,


(#ulink_ad4a067b-3c47-59fc-a5a9-556f4ceb4763) and claiming in 1930 (‘OES’, pp. 779–80) that Gothic was being studied under his direction not only for sound-laws but ‘as a main source of the poetic inspiration of ancient England and the North’. As he said in the letter quoted above, the legends of heroes had a fascination in themselves; they were also part of ‘a rational and exacting discipline’.

Philology illuminated the Dark Ages. Certainly, when it comes to Gothic chieftains, J. B. Bury’s revised edition of Gibbon (in 1896) proceeds with a new caution! But the essential point – it is a point which Tolkien’s academic predecessors had signally failed to grasp, with consequent ruin for their subject – lies in the immense stretch of the philological imagination. At one extreme scholars were drawing conclusions from the very letters of a language: they had little hesitation in ascribing texts to Gothic or Lombardic authors, to West Saxons or Kentishmen or Northumbrians, on the evidence of sound-changes recorded in spelling. At the other extreme they were prepared to pronounce categorically on the existence or otherwise of nations and empires on the basis of poetic tradition or linguistic spread. They found information, and romance, in songs and fragments everywhere. The Lex Burgundionum of King Gundobad opened, as had been known for centuries, with a list of royal ancestors, Gibica, Gundomar, Gislaharius, Gundaharius. It took philology to equate nos. 1, 3 and 4 with the Gifica, Gíslhere and Gúthhere of Old English poems, nos. 1 and 4 with the Gibeche and Gunther of the Germans’ epic, the Nibelungenlied. Simultaneously it became apparent that the epic had a kernel of truth: the Huns had wiped out a Burgundian king and army in the 430s (as Gibbon had vaguely noted), some of the names were authentic, there had been a continuing tradition of poetry from fifth to twelfth centuries, even if it had all vanished and never been written down. Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, indeed mentioned the Burgundians’ songs with distaste in a sixth-century lyric. ‘The learned and eloquent Sidonius’, Gibbon calls him. ‘How gladly would we now give all his verses for ten lines of the songs in which these “long-haired seven-foot high, onion-eating barbarians” celebrated, it may be, the open-handedness of Gibica, or perhaps told how, in that last terrible battle, their fathers had fallen fighting round Gundahari’, wrote R. W. Chambers more sourly.


(#litres_trial_promo) The change of viewpoint marks an enormous if temporary shift of poetic and literary interest from Classical to native. It also shows how philology could seem, to some, the ‘noblest of sciences’, the key to ‘spiritual life’, certainly ‘something much greater than a misfit combination of language plus literature’.




‘Asterisk-Reality’


Nevertheless Sidonius’s poems had survived, and the Burgundian epics hadn’t. There was an image forming in many men’s minds of the days when an enormous Germanic empire had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, only to go down before the Huns and disperse into settlements everywhere from Sweden to Spain – but the image remained tantalisingly on the edge of sight. ‘The ill-grace of fate has saved hardly anything … of the poetry possessed by the eighth, seventh and earlier centuries’, lamented Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘It grieves me to say it’, said Axel Olrik, ‘the old Biarkamál, the most beloved and most honoured of songs in all the North, is not known to us in the form it had.’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets’, wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf (‘Monsters’, p. 271). Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the ‘field of Northern scholarship’ as ‘a vast plain, filled with dry bones’, up and down which there walked ‘a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go; old languages could be understood, old stories edited and annotated, but living speakers could not be found. Nor were the poems left usually the poems most ardently desired.

That is why the characteristic activity of the philologist came, in the end, to be ‘reconstruction’. This might be no more than verbal. From the circumstance that English and German both change the vowel of ‘man’ in the plural to ‘men’ or Männer, you could infer that Primitive Germanic, of which not one word has ever been recorded, would have said *manniz, producing as usual ‘i-mutation’. The * is the sign of the reconstructed form, proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used widely ever since. On a higher level you might reconstruct a language. Schleicher indeed wrote a little fable in ‘Indo-European’, that ‘common source’ for Sanskrit, Latin and Greek which Sir William Jones had suggested. Avis, jasmin varna na a ast, dadarka akvams, it began, ‘A sheep, which had no wool on it, saw a horse …’ Schleicher’s colleagues were not much impressed, and indeed the researches of Verner, Brugmann and de Saussure in the 1870s prompted H. Hirt to offer a corrected version of it some years later; no language changed as quickly in the 1870s as Primitive Indo-European, ran the philological joke.


(#litres_trial_promo) But the method itself was not seriously questioned, only the answer reached. In between these two extremes an editor might find himself rewriting a poem. Eorl sceal on éos boge, worod sceal getrume rídan, says the Old English poem Maxims I, ‘earl shall on horse’s back, warband (worod) ride in a body’. Most warbands in Old English history marched on their feet; and anyway worod fails to keep up the poetic alliteration. Éored is the proper word here, say the editors, and it means ‘a troop of cavalry’, being related to the word eoh, ‘horse’, cp. Latin equus. It’s true that the word is used by itself only twice elsewhere in Old English, and only once correctly – the word and idea must have become unfamiliar. But that is no deterrent. The post-philological editor can assume he knows more, indeed knows better than the native speaker or scribe, if not the original poet – another reason, be it said, for beliefs like Tolkien’s, that he had a cultivated sympathy with the authors of Beowulf or Sir Gawain or ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ which even the poet’s contemporaries had not and which would certainly never be reached by straight ‘literary criticism’.

Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely: it is impossible to avoid mentioning the fact that the very core and kernel of Beowulf criticism in the last hundred years has been the story of ‘the fall of the house of the Scyldings’, which, as it happens, neither the poet nor any other ancient writer ever got round to explaining, but which was ‘reconstructed’ in great and (to my mind) totally convincing detail by a succession of scholars up to R. W. Chambers. But the vital points to grasp are these:

(1) The thousands of pages of ‘dry as dust’ theorems about language-change, sound-shifts and ablaut-gradations were, in the minds of most philologists, an essential and natural basis for the far more exciting speculations about the wide plains of ‘Gothia’ and the hidden, secret trade routes across the primitive forests of the North, Myrkviðr inn ókunni, ‘the pathless Mirkwood’ itself. You could not have, you would never have got the one without the other.

(2) In spite of the subject’s apparent schizophrenia and the determination of its practitioners to make nothing easy, philology was, for a time, the cutting edge of all the ‘soft’ or ‘behavioural’ sciences, literature, history, sociology and anthropology at once. That is why it attracted such a following and why Jacob Grimm, for instance, could hope to sell his dictionary, the Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, to a mass-audience as something designed for entertainment.

(3) In this entire process the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality. The whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call ‘*-’ or ‘asterisk-reality’, that which no longer existed but could with 100 per cent certainty be inferred.

(4) In a sense, the non-existence of the most desired objects of study created a romance of its own. If we had the lost Gothic ‘Ermanaric-lays’ we might think little of them, but find them lame, crude or brutal; quite likely, the very first version of the Nibelungenlied (composed in the ashes of the Burgundian kingdom) was just an attempt by the poet to cheer himself up. But the fact that these things do not exist, hover forever on the fringe of sight, makes them more tantalising and the references to them more thrilling. There is a book by R. M. Wilson called The Lost Literature of Medieval England, which Tolkien must often have read – see note 24 (#litres_trial_promo). The Lost Literature of Dark-Age Europe, however, would be a title almost too painful for words. Still, it would cover plenty of material. The best lines about King Arthur are not the long explicit descriptions of the later medieval romances, but those in the almost deliberately uninformative Welsh triads, e.g. from the Black Book of Carmarthen:

Bet y March, bet y Guythur,

bet y Gugaun Cledyfrut;

anoeth bid bet y Arthur

‘There is a grave for March, a grave for Gwythur,

a grave for Gwgawn Red-sword;

the world’s wonder a grave for Arthur.’


(#litres_trial_promo)

As for Old English, my guess is that the most stirring lines to Tolkien must have come, not even from Beowulf, but from the fragment Waldere, where an unknown speaker reminds the hero that his sword was given by Theodoric to Widia ‘because Wayland’s child let him out of captivity, hurried him out of the hands of the monsters’. Somewhere in the Dark Ages, this seems to suggest, there must have been a legend, a story of how the Gothic king *Thiudoreiks was stolen away to the land of giants, to be rescued after long adventures by his faithful retainers Widia and Hildebrand. Why did the giants take him, where and how did they live, what were their relations with humanity? Once upon a time many people must have known the answers: the story survives in a decadent form in the medieval German romances of Das Eckenlied, Sigenot, Laurin and others, while there is an intensely irritating scrap of a Middle English poem on the subject tucked into a dull sermon on humility:

Summe sende ylues, and summe sende nadderes:

summe sende nikeres, the bi den watere wunien.

Nister man nenne, bute Ildebrand onne.

‘Some sent elves, and some sent serpents,

some sent sea-monsters, that live by the water.

No one knew any of them, but Hildebrand alone.’


(#litres_trial_promo)

What must it have been like in Old English – a poem not about monsters erupting on humanity, as in Beowulf, but about men going into the heart of the monsterworld, for adventures in the ‘Ettenmoors’ themselves! But fate had snatched that prospect (almost) into utter oblivion.




The wilderness of dragons, the shrewedness of apes


Probably the most disheartening conclusion to be drawn from this brief review of intellectual history is that the history of English studies in British and American universities has been forever marred by incomprehension and missed opportunities. Professor D. J. Palmer has shown how the birth of the Oxford English School in particular was accompanied by desperate struggles between language and literature, philologists and critics, ending not in mutual illumination but in a compromise demarcation of interests.


(#litres_trial_promo) Quite possibly the philologists were most to blame in this. Peter Ganz, Professor of German at Oxford, has pointed out that Jacob Grimm’s chief intellectual defect was a refusal to generalise.


(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed as he neared the end of his Teutonic Mythology (four volumes in the translation of J. S. Stallybrass, and 1887 pages) Grimm wrote a ‘Preface’ referring to himself as a gleaner, whose observations he left to ‘him who, standing on my shoulders, shall hereafter get into full swing the harvesting of this great field’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But actually there was no field left to harvest; while few would relish the thought of spending a lifetime putting someone else’s observations in order, without the fun of first collecting them! So the impetus of philology ran out in a series of Primers and Readers and Grammars, endless academic brickmaking without any sign of an architect. No wonder the early critics got annoyed. On the other hand they showed little magnanimity, or even curiosity, once they got control.

The overt result for the young Tolkien must have been that, when he returned from World War I to Oxford University in 1919, he found himself once again in a battle being fought by two sides from deep entrenchments, and one whose stalemates were as unlikely to be broken as the greater ones of Ypres or the Somme by frontal offensives. Still, both sides kept trying them. Tolkien did his best to make peace. His 1930 ‘manifesto’ led at least to the elimination of some academic ‘No Man’s Land’, during the syllabus campaign of 1951 he even emerged from his trench to fraternise with the enemy (till C. S. Lewis stopped him, see Inklings, pp. 229–30). But a covert result may have been that he gave up hope, at least from time to time, of penetrating other people’s vested interests and making them understand the appeal of the subjects he would have liked to teach. His jokes on the subject get wryer, his gestures of rapprochement – ‘the boundary line between linguistic and literary history is as imaginary as the equator – a certain heat is observable, perhaps, as either is approached’ (YWES 6, p. 59) or ‘the “pure philologist who cannot do literature” … is as rare as the unicorn’ (‘OES’, p. 782) – these become more perfunctory and finally disappear. What was possibly a natural bent towards reserve became more pronounced; it is hard to escape the feeling that in some of the interviews given after celebrity had arrived Tolkien was still liable to give easy or unnoticedly ambiguous answers to save the trouble of explaining something which he knew had proved incomprehensible many times before. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had made his point, whether it had been intellectually apprehended or not; and the hostile or even malignant reaction it evoked from so many on the ‘lit.’ side was only what he might have expected.

Indeed, to go back to the animus The Lord of the Rings created: it is striking that next to the books’ sheer success the thing that irritated reviewers most was their author’s obstinate insistence on talking about language as if it might be a subject of interest. ‘The invention of languages is the foundation’, Tolkien had said. ‘The “stories” were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse’ (Letters, p. 219). ‘Invention’ of course comes from Latin invenire, ‘to find’; its older sense, as Tolkien knew perfectly well, was ‘discovery’. If one were to say of nineteenth-century philology that ‘the discovery of languages was its foundation’, one would be stating literal truth; as often, probably, Tolkien was playing with words, juxtaposing the languages he had made up out of his own head with those that others had found or ‘reconstructed’ all over the world, so aligning himself yet again with his professional inheritance. Meanwhile the second sentence, though no doubt personally true again, might almost have been said of Ermanaric or Theodoric or the nineteenth-century vision of a ‘historical’ King Arthur. An element of generalisation underlay the particular application to Tolkien’s own case.

This remained completely unperceived by his critics. ‘He has explained that he began it to amuse himself, as a philological game’, translated Edmund Wilson. ‘An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity – that is, then, what The Lord of the Rings really is.’ Philology, you note, is peculiar but not serious. Lin Carter (who prepared for his commentary on Tolkien by looking up ‘philology’ in ‘the dictionary’, to little profit – maybe it was the wrong dictionary) professed the same opinion even more blankly, if kindly, by claiming that Tolkien was really interested in ‘the eternal verities of human nature’, and that the appendices of The Lord of the Rings needed to be seen that way and not just as ‘the outgrowth of a don’s scholarly hobbies’. The idea could be right, but the notion of ‘scholarly hobbies’ is singularly naive. Neil D. Isaacs, also writing in Tolkien’s defence, took the blunder on by asserting that ‘Tolkien’s own off-hand remarks about the importance of philology to the creative conception of the trilogy need not be taken too seriously’, and R. J. Reilly put the tin lid on the whole discussion by saying, in attempted refutation of Edmund Wilson, that The Lord of the Rings can’t have been a philological game because it’s too serious, and therefore, seemingly, cannot possibly be philology. ‘No one ever exposed the nerves and fibres of his being in order to make up a language; it is not only insane but unnecessary.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Like the reviewers quoted at the start of this chapter, Mr Reilly here makes a factual statement about humanity which is factually wrong. The aberration he talks about may not be common, but is not unprecedented. August Schleicher exposed the nerves and fibres of his being to make up Primitive Indo-European, and had them shredded for his trouble. Willy Krogmann, of the University of Hamburg, not only came to the conclusion that the Old High German Hildebrandslied (the oldest German heroic poem) must originally have been composed in Lombardic, a West Germanic language surviving outside ‘*-reality’ only in a handful of names, but also reconstructed the language and rewrote the poem, publishing his new edition as late as 1959. No one, as far as I know, went so far as to reconstruct the Burgundian Nibelung-story, the first Ostrogothic Ermanaric-lay, or the Danish Ur-Beowulf, but such thoughts were in many minds. The only extant Gothic poem is by Tolkien, ‘Bagme Bloma’, in Songs for the Philologists, reprinted and translated in Appendix B below; nor was this his only attempt at poetic reconstruction, see Letters p. 379. The drives towards creativity do not all emanate from the little area already mapped by ‘literary’ criticism. Awareness of this fact should have aroused a certain humility, or anyway caution, in Tolkienian commentators.

As it is, some of Tolkien’s earliest writings seem to carry a certain foreboding truth. It has already been remarked that he tended to open learned articles with attacks on, or ripostes to, the ‘literature’ or the ‘criticism’ of his particular subject, whether this was Chaucer or the Ancrene Wisse or translators of Beowulf. Probably the sharpest and most revealing instance comes in the British Academy lecture on ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, as Tolkien moves on from the melancholy state of Beowulf criticism as a whole to the remarks of W. P. Ker and then of R. W. Chambers – philologists whom Tolkien respected but who he thought had given too much away to the other side. ‘In this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge’, wrote Chambers, of a subject the Beowulf-poet had neglected for the sake of monsters, ‘we have a situation whichhol the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.’ ‘A wilderness of dragons!’ exploded Tolkien, repeating the phrase and grasping instantly its deliberate syntactic ambiguity (between phrases like ‘a field of cows’ and phrases like ‘a pride of lions’):

There is a sting in this Shylockian plural, the sharper for coming from a critic, who deserves the title of the poet’s best friend. It is in the tradition of the Book of St. Albans, from which the poet might retort upon his critics: ‘Yea, a desserte of lapwyngs, a shrewednes of apes, a raffull of knaues, and a gagle of gees.’ (‘Monsters’, p. 252)

Geese, knaves, apes, lapwings: these formed Tolkien’s image of the literary critic, and they are emblematic respectively of silliness, fraud, mindless imitation and (see Horatio in Hamlet V ii) immaturity. But there is a multiple barb on the second phrase, the ‘shrewednes of apes’. For ‘shrewednes’, like most words, has changed its meaning, and as with ‘literature’ Tolkien thought the changes themselves significant. Nowadays it means (OED again) ‘Sagacity or keenness of mental perception or discrimination; sagacity in practical affairs’. Once upon a time it meant ‘maliciousness’, with particular reference to feminine scolding or nagging. No doubt the transit came via such phrases as ‘a shrewd blow’, first a blow which was meant to hurt, then one that did hurt, then one that was accurately directed, and so on. In all these senses Tolkien’s remark was ‘shrewd’ itself. It creates a vivid if exaggerated picture of the merits and demerits of the literary profession seen en bloc: undeniably clever, active, dexterous (so exemplifying ‘shrewdness’ in the modern sense), but also bitter, negative and far too fond of ‘back-seat driving’ (see ‘shrewed’ in the old sense) – overall, too, apish, derivative, cut off from the full range of human interests. It would be a pity for his claim to ring true. But the history of reactions to Tolkien has tended to uphold it. One can sum up by saying that whether the hostile criticism directed at The Lord of the Rings was right or wrong – an issue still to be judged – it was demonstrably compulsive, rooted only just beneath the surface in ancient dogma and dispute.




(#ulink_6f2e23c9-1549-5454-a0fe-998edfc94525) The letter ð here is used in several Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse quotations throughout this book. Like the other (runic) letter retained almost into the modern era, ‘þ’, it stands for ‘th’. Thus Meiðhad = Meith-had = Maid(en)hood. The work mentioned is a treatise on ‘Holy Virginity'.




(#ulink_60980b00-cb5a-5d34-9b5b-be14cd5079e9) His signed copies are in the Taylorian Library at Oxford.





CHAPTER 2 PHILOLOGICAL INQUIRIES (#ulink_4c3cec91-692f-5da0-89f7-5baac67607a4)

Roads and Butterflies


The Grimms and Tolkien prove that philological approaches to poetry did not have to exclude everything that would now be called ‘literary’. Still, their attitudes were sharply distinct from those now normal among literary critics. For one thing philologists were much more likely than critics to brood on the sense, the form, the other recorded uses (or unrecorded uses) of single words. They were not, on the whole, less likely to respect the original author’s intentions, but their training did make them prone to consider not only what a word was doing in its immediate contexts, but also its roots, its analogues in other languages, its descendants in modern languages, and all the processes of cultural change that might be hinted at by its history. It might be said that to Tolkien a word was not like a brick, a single delimitable unit, but like the top of a stalactite, interesting in itself but more so as part of something growing. It might also be said that he thought there was in this process something superhuman, certainly super-any-one-particular-human, for no one knew how words would change, even if he knew how they had. In one of his last published poems, a tribute in Old English to W. H. Auden, with facing page modern English translation, Tolkien begins by calling Auden a woðbora, and ends by promising him lasting praise from the searoþancle.


(#litres_trial_promo) The first noun is translated ‘one [who] has poetry in him’, the second as ‘the word-lovers’. ‘Word-lovers’ is, however, etymologically parallel with ‘philologists’, while the first element of wóð-bora is also the word recorded in the god-name Woden, or Othinn, and in the archaic adjective ‘wood’, meaning ‘crazy’; it refers to the mystic rage of bard or shaman or (as we now say) berserker. Poets and philologists, Tolkien felt, were the ones to appreciate that.

An associated difference was that philologists were more likely than critics to believe in what one might call ‘the reality of history’. One good reason for this was that they tended to work with manuscripts rather than printed books, and the former are much more instructive than the latter. In some cases they have been physically written by the original poet or author; in others they have been corrected by him; in others they all too clearly have not, with incomprehension so thick on the page that one can visualise the author’s baffled rage were he ever to guess (as Chaucer did, occasionally) what had happened or was going to. The sense that ghosts cluster in old libraries is very strong. Another reason for the feeling of intimate involvement with history, though, lies in the philologists’ awareness of the shaping of present by past – the stalactites of words again, but also the creation of nation-states by language-separation (e.g. Dutch and German), the growth of national myth from forgotten history (as with the Finnish Kalevala), but perhaps as much as anything the fastening down of landscape to popular consciousness by the habit of naming places. Less than thirty miles from Tolkien’s study stands the prehistoric barrow known as ‘Wayland’s Smithy’. Its name is more than a thousand years old; perhaps it was in the mind of King Alfred (born at Wantage seven miles off) when he interjected into his translation of Boethius the outcry: Hwæt synt nú pæs foreméran ond pæs wisan goldsmiðesbánWélondes? ‘What now are the bones of Wayland, the goldsmith pre-eminently wise?’ Alfred might also have thought of Wayland as the father of Widia, who in the lost poems released Theodoric from the power of the monsters; maybe Alfred had heard them sung. But though the poems had gone, and the monsters with them, and ‘Wayland’ no longer meant anything at all to English people, the name survived down the centuries and carried with it a hint of what once had been. Such chains of association littered the landscape for Tolkien; they did not have to be confined to books. When he said that ‘History often resembles “Myth”’, or when Wilhelm Grimm refused to segregate ‘Myth’ from ‘Heroic Legend’, both had entirely prosaic reasons for doing so.


(#litres_trial_promo) They knew that legend often became a matter of everyday.

Something like these two awarenesses, of continuing history and continuing linguistic change, can be inferred (admittedly with the aid of vast quantities of hindsight) from the first thing Tolkien ever published, bar a few lines in school and college magazines: the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ in Oxford Poetry 1915.


(#litres_trial_promo) This begins:

I am off down the road

Where the fairy lanterns glowed

And the little pretty flittermice are flying:

A slender band of grey

It runs creepily away

And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.

The air is full of wings,

And of blundering beetle-things

That warn you with their whirring and their humming.

O! I hear the tiny horns

Of enchanted leprechauns

And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming.

This is, admittedly, not very good. Indeed one can imagine the response to it of the literary ‘side’, full of armèd vision, not to mention critical temper. ‘Why’, it might ask, ‘do we have the past tense in line 2 and the present everywhere else? Does this mean the “fairy lanterns” have gone out and the “I-narrator” is pursuing them? Or could it be that the author is stuck for a rhyme to “road”? As for “a-sighing” and “a-coming”, these look like scansion devices, mere padding. But in any case there is nothing in nature to suggest that the hedges and the grasses were “sighing” at all, while the “creepiness” of the road is just something the poet has decided to project on to the landscape from himself. That’s why we don’t believe the “I-narrator” when he says he hears “tiny horns”! And what about “enchanted leprechauns”? Does that mean they’ve been enchanted by someone else; or that they’re enchanting; or are all leprechauns enchanted, i.e. magic, i.e. not-real? The poet gives himself away. This is an evasive poem, a self-indulgent one. “Off down the road” indeed! Road to nowhere!’

So the critical indictment might run, and it is hard to counter. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will have noted further the as yet undiscriminating use of ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’ and later ‘goblin’, not to mention the quite cross-cultural use of ‘leprechauns’ and the insistence (later to be most strongly abjured) on the little, the tiny, the insect-like. Still, there are hints of hope in the poem after all, and better questions to be asked than those which have been.

What is this ‘road’, for instance, the ‘slender band of grey’, the ‘crooked fairy lane’? It clearly is not a tarmac one; on another level it is to be a recurring Tolkienian image:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began …

And oddly, G. B. Smith – Tolkien’s school and college friend, killed the following year in Flanders, to have his poems posthumously published with a foreword by Tolkien – had addressed himself to the same theme in a poem four pages earlier in the Oxford Poetry collection:

This is the road the Romans made,

This track half lost in the green hills,

Or fading in a forest-glade

’Mid violets and daffodils.



The years have fallen like dead leaves,

Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed

(Such as the autumn tempest thieves),

Since first this road the Romans made.


(#litres_trial_promo)

Now this theme of time is intensely Tolkienian (if one may be permitted to put it that way round). The last sight of Lórien in The Fellowship of the Ring published thirty-nine years later, is of Galadriel singing Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen! ‘Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees …’ (LOTR p. 368, and see also Fangorn’s song, p. 458). In this case the hope which G. B. Smith expressed in his final letter to Tolkien before death – ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them’ – appears against all probability to have been fulfilled (Biography, p. 121). However the clue to follow, for the moment, is ‘the road the Romans made’.

It may seem perverse to seek to identify this road, but on the other hand it isn’t very hard. There are only two Roman roads near Oxford, and the better-preserved is the old highway from Bath to Towcester, still visible as a straight line across the map but dwindled along much of its Oxford stretch to a footpath. It is now called ‘Akeman Street’, like ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ a name of some fascination for philologists. It implies for one thing an old and massive population change. No town in Roman Britain had a more simply descriptive name than Aquae Sulis, ‘the waters of Sul’, and so prominent were its mineral springs with the Roman spa around them that even the Anglo-Saxons began to call it æt baðum, ‘at the baths’, and later Bath. One of them wrote a poem about the site, now called The Ruin. However they also called the town Acemannesceaster, ‘Akeman’s chester’ or ‘Akeman’s (fortified) town’. That is why the Bath–Towcester road acquired the name ‘Akeman Street’; the people who called it that knew it went to Bath, but had forgotten that Bath was ever Aquae Sulis; they were invaders, of a lower cultural level than the Romans, and soon they ceased to use the road for anything like the traffic it had once carried. Its name and its decline in status from highway to footpath bear witness to the oblivion that can fall on a civilisation. But what was the reaction of these invaders to the historical monuments they could hardly help seeing in their new land, the stone roads, the villas, the great ruins which they (as in The Ruin) called vaguely the eald enta geweorc, ‘the old work of giants’? Place-names again give suggestive clues.

About nine miles north-west of Oxford and half a mile from Akeman Street across the river Evenlode stands a villa, excavated in 1865 and once the property of some Romano-British noble. It is distinguished by the remains of a fourth-century tessellated pavement in different colours. The village nearby is called Fawler. To most people, including its inhabitants, this name now means nothing. But once it was Fauflor, a spelling recorded in 1205, and before that, in Old English, fágflór ‘the coloured floor, the painted floor’. There can be little doubt that the village was called after the pavement; so the pavement was still visible when the invaders came. Why, then, did they not occupy the villa, but chose to live instead on an undeveloped site a few furlongs off? No one can tell, but perhaps they were afraid. A further twist in the story is that there is another fág flór in Anglo-Saxon record, in the great hall of Beowulf, haunted by Grendel the maneater:

on fágne flór féond treddode,

éode yrremód; him of éagum stód

ligge gelicost léoht unfæger.

‘The fiend stepped on to the painted floor, angrily he paced; from his eyes there stood an ugly light, like fire.’

So wrote the poet, in one of his classic passages of ‘Gothic’ suggestion. Could Beowulf have been sung in Fawler? What would its inhabitants have thought? Tolkien knew Beowulf, of course, virtually by heart, and he knew what ‘Fawler’ meant, for he hailed the etymology with delight in his 1926 review of the Introduction to the Survey of Place-Names; such work, he pointed out, is fired by ‘love of the land of England’, by ‘the allurement of the riddle of the past’, it leads to ‘the recapturing of fitful and tantalising glimpses in the dark’ (YWES 5, p. 64). He was interested in the names of roads, too, for he had argued the year before that ‘Watling Street’ was an old name for the Milky Way, ‘an old mythological term that was first applied to the eald enta geweorc [i.e. the Roman road from Dover to Chester] after the English invasion’ (YWES 4, p. 21). Nor did he forget Bath and The Ruin. Legolas’s ‘lament of the stones’ on page 276 of The Fellowship of the Ring is an adaptation of part of the poem. At some stage of his life Tolkien must certainly have noted all the strange implications and suggestions of ‘Akeman Street’.

Did he know them in 1915, and share them with his friend G. B. Smith? Is the quest for Fairyland in ‘Goblin Feet’ a kind of translation of the quest for the romantic realities of history? Probably the answer to both questions is ‘No’. However, disentangling fact from inference as carefully as possible, one can say first that Tolkien and Smith evidently shared a feeling for the ancient roads, the ‘old straight tracks’ and ‘crooked lanes’ of England; second that Smith even in 1915 appreciated the sadness of the relationship between what these are and what they were; third that before many years were out it would be certain that Tolkien appreciated the same thing much more fully, with a wealth of reference to history and poetry and present-day reality. Even in 1915, one might say, a road, a real road, could possess a ‘creepiness’ for him which was based on some factual knowledge, not entirely self-generated. Philology would reinforce this. But already one image in his poem drew on some historical force.

Further, Tolkien was already thinking of words as ‘stalactites’. ‘Flittermice’ in line 3 is not normal English. According to the OED it was introduced in the sixteenth century by analogy with German Fledermaus, for ‘bat’. However ‘bat’ is not recorded in Old English, and it is possible that some ancestor of ‘flittermouse’, e.g. *fleðer-mús, was natural to English all along, but never got written down. There is an apparently similar puzzle over ‘rabbit’ (for which see below (#ulink_119c1c06-c1c2-5b7c-a614-57598d8c4f74)), which Tolkien at least signals awareness of in the second stanza by using the odd term ‘coney-rabbits’. Finally ‘honey-flies’ in line 30 is elsewhere unrecorded. From context one would think he meant ‘butterflies’. Perhaps he was aware, though, of the unexpected scatological sense of that innocent-looking word in Old English – a language which has had many rudenesses pruned by educated usage. He could have found out by looking ‘butterfly’ up in the OED, and at least it had occurred to him to wonder why butterflies were always and for no apparent reason so called. These verbal creations admittedly do not add much to the overall effect of ‘Goblin Feet’, but they exemplify an attempt to combine philological insight with poetry. Both roads and words hint at the early complexity of Tolkien’s inner life, its unusual combination of emotion with inquiry.




Survivals in the West


Such hints, of course, fizzle out immediately. The Silmarillion had begun its sixty-year gestation by 1914,


(#litres_trial_promo) but in 1915 Tolkien went off to the war in which G. B. Smith was to die. On demobilisation he was preoccupied with the problem of earning a living, first in Oxford with the OED, then in the English Department at Leeds University, finally, with secure status and no lure of further advancement, back in Oxford again in 1925. He published nothing (bar the note to Smith’s posthumous collection of poems) for five years after ‘Goblin Feet’, and a good deal of his subsequent work was written for simple motives – money, or to keep his name in front of the people who counted, who made appointments ‘with tenure’. Much of his inner life did find its way into the twenty or thirty poems contributed to various periodicals or collections between 1920 and 1937; Tolkien’s habit of thriftily rewriting them and using them in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil shows how important some of them were to him.


(#litres_trial_promo) Still, it is fair to say that these remain by themselves thin, or uncertain. The brew that was to become his fiction needed a good deal of thickening yet; and this could only come from the interaction of poetry with philology.

From this point of view one of Tolkien’s most revealing pre-Hobbit pieces is his almost unread comment on ‘The Name “Nodens”’ for the Society of Antiquaries in 1932.


(#litres_trial_promo) This virtually repeats the story of ‘Fawler’. In 1928 excavations on a site near Lydney in the west of England had revealed a temple devoted to some kind of mystery cult and still flourishing in the fourth century, i.e. well after the introduction of Christianity to England. The temple was eventually abandoned as a result of the barbarian and also non-Christian English, who however had their own cults. As with the villa at Fawler the Lydney temple fell into disuse – but not completely into oblivion. The iron-mines not far away were remembered: and whether because of them or from a continuing superstitious respect for the site, it was given a new Anglo-Saxon name, persisting to modern times — Dwarf’s Hill. The Society of Antiquaries made no comment on all this, but in the story and the place-name one can hear the echo of a hopeless resistance from the Darkest of Dark Ages, pagan to Christian, pagan to pagan, Welsh to English, all ending in forgetfulness with even the memory of the resisters blurred, till recovered by archaeology – and by philology. For Tolkien’s job was to comment on the name ‘Nodens’ found in an inscription on the site, and he did it with immense thoroughness.

His conclusion was that the name meant ‘snarer’ or ‘hunter’, from an Indo-European root surviving in English only in the archaic phrase ‘good neat’s leather’. More interesting was his tracing of the descent of Nodens from god to Irish hero (Núadu Argat-lam, ‘Silverhand’), then to Welsh hero (Lludd Llaw Ereint, also ‘Silverhand’), finally to Shakespearean hero – King Lear. Even Cordelia, Tolkien noted, was derived from the semi divine Creiddy-lad, of whom was told a version of the story of ‘the Everlasting Battle’, which interested Tolkien in other ways. Shakespeare can naturally have known nothing about ‘Nodens’, or about Beowulf (a poem in which some have seen the first dim stirrings of ‘Hamlet the Dane’). That did not mean that the old stories were not in some way working through him, present even in his much-altered version. Like ‘Akeman Street’ and ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, Tolkien might have concluded, even King Lear could bear witness to a sort of English, or British, continuity.

And one could say the same of Old King Cole. Tolkien never actually rewrote his saga in epic verse (though one can now see why he remarked casually of Milton, ‘Monsters’, p. 254, that he ‘might have done worse’ than recount ‘the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse’ – it would have been a monster-poem, like the lost ‘Rescue of Theodoric’). Still, he would certainly have recognised the ‘merry old soul’ as a figure similar in ultimate origin and final ‘vulgarisation’ to King Arthur or King Lear.


(#litres_trial_promo) This interest in the descent of fables probably explains why Tolkien did try his hand at two ‘Man in the Moon’ poems, ‘Why The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon’ (which appeared first in 1923 and was collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil thirty-nine years after), and ‘The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked’ (also out first in 1923 but to achieve far wider circulation as sung by Frodo in Book I, chapter 9 of The Fellowship of the Ring, ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’). No one would call either of these serious poems. But what they do is to provide a narrative and semi-rational frame for the string of totally irrational non-sequiturs which we now call ‘nursery rhymes’. How could ‘the cow jump over the moon’? Well, it might if the Moon were a kind of vehicle parked on the village green while its driver had a drink. How could the Man in the Moon have ‘come by the south And burnt his mouth With eating cold plum porridge’? Well, it doesn’t seem very likely, but perhaps it points to an ancient story of earthly disillusionment. If one assumes a long tradition of ‘idle children’ repeating ‘thoughtless tales’ in increasing confusion, one might think that poems like Tolkien’s were the remote ancestors of the modern rhymes. They are ‘asterisk-poems’, reconstructed like the attributes of Nodens. They also contain, at least in their early versions, hints of mythological significance – the Man in the Moon who fails to drive his chariot while mortals panic and his white horses champ their silver bits and the Sun comes up to overtake him is not totally unlike the Greek myth of Phaethon, who drove the horses of the Sun too close to Earth and scorched it. Finally, the reason why Tolkien picked ‘the Man in the Moon’ for treatment rather than ‘Old King Cole’ or ‘Little Bo-Peep’ is, no doubt, that he knew of the existence of a similar ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, in Middle English and from a time and place in which he took particular interest.

This is the lyric from Harley Manuscript no. 2253, now known generally as ‘The Man in the Moon’.


(#litres_trial_promo) It is perhaps the best medieval English lyric surviving, and certainly one of the hardest, prompting many learned articles and interpretations. However three points about it are clear, and all gave it especial charm for Tolkien. In the first place it is extremely bizarre; it is presented as a speech by an English villager about the Man in the Moon, asking why he doesn’t come down or move. It also has a very sharp and professional eye for English landscape; the villager concludes that the Man in the Moon is so stiff because he has been caught stealing thorns and carrying them home to mend his hedges with (an old image of the Moon’s markings is of a man with a lamp, a dog, and a thorn bush, see Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i). Finally, for all the poem’s thick dialect and involvement with peasant life, it is full of self-confidence. ‘Never mind if the hayward has caught you pinching thorns’, calls the narrator to the Man in the Moon, ‘we’ll deal with that. We’ll ask him home’:

‘Drynke to hym deorly of fol god bous,

Ant oure dame douse shal sitten hym by.

When that he is dronke ase a dreynt mous,

Thenne we schule borewe the wed ate bayly.’



‘We’ll drink to him like friends in excellent booze,

and our sweet lady will sit right next to him.

When he’s as drunk as a drowned mouse,

we’ll go to the bailiff and redeem your pledge.’

And without this evidence, clearly, the indictment will be quashed! It all sounds a most plausible way to work, and one which casts an unexpected light on the downtrodden serfs of medieval England – not as downtrodden as all that, obviously. Their good-natured resourcefulness seems to be an element in the make-up of Tolkien’s hobbits. More significantly, the poem makes one wonder about the unofficial elements of early literary culture. Were there other ‘Man in the Moon’ poems? Was there a whole genre of sophisticated play on folk-belief? There could have been. Tolkien’s 1923 poems attempt to revive it, or invent it, fitting into the gaps between modern doggerel and medieval lyric, creating something that might have existed and would, if it had, account for the jumble and litter of later periods – very like Gothic and ‘i-mutation’.

One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in AD 419, or after Harold died at Hastings in 1066. The post-Roman era produced ‘King Arthur’, to whose cycle King Lear and King Cole and the rest became eventual tributaries. Tolkien knew this tradition well and used it for Farmer Giles of Ham (published 1949, but written much earlier), the opening paragraphs of which play jokingly with the first few lines of Sir Gawain. However he also knew that whatever the author of Sir Gawain thought, the Arthurian tradition was originally non-English, indeed dedicated to the overthrow of England; its commemoration in English verse was merely a final consequence of the stamping-out of native culture after Hastings, a literary ‘defoliation’ which had also led to the meaninglessness of English names like ‘Fawler’ and the near-total loss of all Old English heroic tradition, apart from Beowulf. What, then, had happened to England and the English during those ‘Norman centuries’ when, it might be said, ‘language’ and ‘literature’ had first and lastingly separated?

Tolkien had been interested in that question for some time. Not much was known about Early Middle English, and indeed several of its major texts remain without satisfactory editions today. However, one important work was evidently the Ancrene Wisse, a ‘guide for anchoresses (or female hermits)’, existing in several manuscripts from different times and places, but one of few Middle English works to be translated into French rather than out of it. With this were associated several other texts with a ‘feminist’ bias, the tract on virginity Hali Meiðhad, the saints’ lives Seinte Juliene, Seinte Marherete, Seinte Katherine, the little allegory Sawles Warde. All looked similar in dialect, and in sophistication of phrase; on the other hand their subject-matter meant they were unlikely ever to take the ‘literature’ side by storm. What could be said about them?

Tolkien began with a review of F. J. Furnivall’s edition of Hali Meiðhad, in 1923; he went on to make ‘Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography’ in Review of English Studies (1925), most of them drawn from Ancrene Wisse, and some of them incidentally interesting, like the remark that medi wið wicchen must mean, not ‘meddle with witches’ but ‘bribe, purchase the service of witches’, apparently a known practice to the author of the ‘Rule’. In ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ in the same periodical that year he spent enormous effort on the single word eaueres from Hali Meiðhad, arguing that it did not mean ‘boars’ as the OED had said, but ‘heavy horses, draft horses’. Philologically this was interesting as showing a Germanic root *abra-z, meaning ‘work’ and connected with Latin opus. Mythologically it was interesting too as showing an image of the devil galloping away not on fire-breathing steeds, but on ‘heavy old dobbins’ – a contemptuous barnyard image of evil. All very well, but still, some would have said, distinctly peripheral.

The breakthrough came with Tolkien’s article for Essays and Studies (1929), ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, the most perfect though not the best-known of his academic pieces. This rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess. In Old English a distinction was regularly made between verbs like hé hiereð, híe híerað, ‘he hears, they hear’, and hé lócað, híe lóciað ‘he looks, they look’. An -að ending could be singular or plural, depending on what sort of a verb it was attached to. This clear but to outsiders utterly unmemorable distinction was, after Hastings, rapidly dropped. Two manuscripts, however, one of Ancrene Wisse, the other of its five associated texts, not only preserved the distinction but went on to make another new one, between verbs within the lócian class: they distinguished e.g. between ha polieð, ‘they endure’, O.E. híe poliað, and ha fondið, ‘they inquire’, O.E. híe fondiað. The distinction had a sound phonological basis and was not the result of mere whim. Furthermore the two manuscripts could not have been by the same man for they were in different handwriting. Evidently – I summarise the chain of logic – they were the product of a ‘school’; so were the works themselves, composed in the same dialect by another man or men; and this ‘school’ was one that operated in English, and in an English descended without interruption from Old English, owing words certainly to the Norse and the French but not affected by the confusion their invasions had caused. To put it Tolkien’s way:

There is an English older than Dan Michel’s and richer, as regular in spelling as Orm’s [these are two other relatively consistent writers of Middle English] but less queer; one that has preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England. (‘AW’, p. 106)

It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conqueror.

There are several signs here of Tolkien’s underlying preoccupations. One is the power of philology: the regularity and rigour of its observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts. These observations are incontestable. They are also suggestive, permitting us to make informed guesses at, say, the level of independence of western shires in the twelfth century and the nature of their race-relations. They pleased Tolkien further because their implication was so clearly patriotic, that there had been an England beyond England even in the days when anyone who was anyone spoke French. In that way they also corroborated the impression of self-confidence made by the ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, itself an example of what Tolkien in that article (p. 116) called ‘the westerly lyric, whose little world lay between Wirral and the Wye’. As for the Ancrene Wisse itself, Tolkien had little doubt that the ‘soil somewhere in England’ to which it should be ascribed was Herefordshire, a decision confirmed by later research. All in all the picture these inquiries gave was of a far-West shire, cut off from and undisturbed by foreigners, adhering to the English traditions elsewhere in ruins. If only such a civilisation had endured to be the ancestor of ours! Tolkien, with his family connections in and nostalgic memories of Worcestershire, the next most-western county to Hereford and like it a storehouse of Old English tradition, felt the pull of this ‘might have been’ strongly and personally. In a revealing passage at the end of the article (p. 122), he noted a few exceptions to his general rule and remarked:

Personally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and B before us and silently point to these forms, they would thank us, pick up a pen, and immediately substitute the -in forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it was pointed to.

The ghosts would be gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them.

This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse we might find them difficult people. There is a streak of wishful thinking in Tolkien’s remark near the beginning of this article that if his argument was sound, English in the west at that time must have been ‘at once more alive, and more traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else’. He was used to having ‘traditional’ literature viewed as dead: it was nice to think of a time when tradition was rated higher than modern fashion. Still, it is hard to say his sentiment was wrong. It was based on rational argument, and the whole theory integrated (as theories should) many thousands of separate facts which had been needing explanation already. With hindsight one can see that this philological vision of ancient Herefordshire was a strong component of Tolkien’s later conception of the hobbits’ ‘Shire’, also cut-off, dimly remembering former empires, but effectively turned in on itself to preserve an idealised ‘English’ way of life. But ‘the Shire’ is fiction, and philology fact. The questions which begin to show themselves in Tolkien’s work from about this time on are: how far did he distinguish the two states? And how much of his later success was caused by reluctance to admit a distinction?

Connections are exemplified in Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara land’, published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, ‘Ethiopian’, but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’, (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’, (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly ‘guess-work’, admittedly ‘inconclusive’? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something ‘which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems’.


(#litres_trial_promo) A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the ‘Balrog’ in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not ‘put-on’, but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends.




Allegories, Potatoes, Fantasy and Glamour


One may now see in rather a different light the four minor prose works written by Tolkien in the late 1930s and early 1940s, those years in which The Hobbit came to term and The Lord of the Rings began to get under way – the years, one may say, when Tolkien turned away from pursuing his trade and began instead to use it. He knew he was doing this, as one can see from the little allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (published 1945, but written c. 1943). Since Tolkien said in later years that he ‘cordially disliked’ allegory, it is perhaps worth repeating that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly is one.


(#litres_trial_promo) The story’s first words are, ‘There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make’, and to any Anglo-Saxonist this is bound to recall the Old Northumbrian poem known as Bede’s Death-Song, memorable (a) for being in Old Northumbrian, (b) for being so clearly the true, last words of the Venerable Bede, England’s greatest churchman, all of whose other works are in Latin. This goes: ‘Before that compelled journey (néidfáerae) no man is wiser than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be judged to his soul after his deathday, good or evil.’ Obviously someone should have said this to Niggle! But the lines also give a good and ancient reason for carrying out the basic operation of allegory, which is to start making equations.

Thus journey = death. Niggle the painter further = Tolkien the writer. One can see as much from the accusation of being ‘just idle’, softened later to being ‘the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees’, or to being unable to organise his time; Tolkien was sensitive to accusations of laziness, but it is clear enough that he was a perfectionist, and also easily distracted.


(#litres_trial_promo) Niggle’s ‘leaf = The Hobbit, his ‘Tree’ = The Lord of the Rings, the ‘country’ that opens from it = Middle-earth, and the ‘other pictures … tacked on to the edges of his great picture’ = the poems and other works which Tolkien kept on fitting into his own greater one.


(#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile the garden which Niggle does not keep up looks ominously like Tolkien’s professorial duties; the visitors who hinted ‘that he might get a visit from an Inspector’ remind one of that discourteous colleague of Tolkien’s, who even after The Lord of the Rings came out snapped ungraciously ‘He ought to have been teaching!’


(#litres_trial_promo) One can go on making these equations, and one is supposed to; the essence of an allegory, Tolkien thought, was that it should be ‘just’, i.e. that all the bits should fit exactly together, compelling assent (and amusement) by their minuteness. If one realises that, there is a certain bite in the place where Niggle does his painting. He keeps his great canvas ‘in the tall shed that had been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown potatoes)’. Niggle sacrificed potatoes to paint. What did Tolkien sacrifice to The Lord of the Rings? The real answer is, articles like those on Ancrene Wisse and the Sigelware; after 1940 (when he was only 48) Tolkien wrote only five more, and two of these were collaborations and two others not entirely academic in style. Still, Tolkien never went over to despising the advancement of learning. It is Niggle’s expressed gratitude for Parish’s ‘excellent potatoes’ which persuades the First Voice to let him out of the Workhouse (= Purgatory). One could say that the whole tale expresses both Tolkien’s self-accusation and self-justification, and that its solution in Heaven lies in Niggle and Parish, the creative and the practical aspects of Tolkien himself, learning to work together – though what they work on, you notice, is very definitely Niggle’s Tree and Country, not Parish’s potatoes at all.

Tolkien was giving up the academic cursus honorum in the late 1930s, and he knew it. How did he justify this to himself, and how far could he reconcile the claims of ‘potatoes’ and ‘Trees’ (= scholarship and fantasy)? These questions underlie, often unsuspectedly, the three critical works roughly contemporary with ‘Leaf by Niggle’, i.e. ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ (published 1936), ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (first version 1939), and the ‘Preface’ to C. L. Wrenn’s revision of the Clark Hall translation of Beowulf (1940). None of these contains very much philology in the narrow sense of sound-changes or verb-paradigms, and they have accordingly been fallen on gratefully by commentators who never wanted to learn any. However, philology still remains their essential guts; while they lead forward to fantasy they also look back to and rest always on an intensely rigorous study of ‘the word’.

So, to take the last piece first, the ‘Clark Hall’ introduction has only one main point to make, and that is that words mean more than their dictionary entries. What happens if you look up Sigelware in the standard Old English dictionary of J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller? It says ‘the Ethiopians’, and that’s all. What of éacen, a word in Beowulf? The dictionary says ‘Increased, great, vast, powerful’. To ‘the enquirer into ancient beliefs’, wrote Tolkien, only the first was right, for éacen meant not ‘large’ but ‘enlarged’ and denoted a supernatural addition of power. As for runes, Bosworth-Toller translated the Beowulfian phrase onband bead-urúne (meaninglessly) as ‘unbound the war-secret’, while Clark Hall tried ‘gave vent to secret thoughts of strife’. ‘It means “unbound a battle rune”’, declared Tolkien. ‘What exactly is implied is not clear. The expression has an antique air, as if it had descended from an older time to our poet: a suggestion lingers of the spells by which men of wizardry could stir up storms in a clear sky’ (pp. xiii-xiv). Fanciful, the shades of Bosworth and Toller might have said. If the facts point to fantasy, Tolkien could have retorted, fantasy is what we must have! The ‘Preface’ is in a wider sense a protest against translating Beowulf only into polite modern English, a plea for listening to the vision contained, not in plots, but in words – words like flæsc-homa, bán-hús, hreðer-loca, ellor-síð (‘flesh-raiment’, ‘bone-house’, ‘heart-prison’, ‘elsewhere-journey’). The poet who used these words, Tolkien wrote, did not see the world like us, but:

saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth (middangeard) beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas (gársecg) and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life (læne líf), until the hour of fate (metodsceaft), when all things should perish, léoht ond lif samod [light and life together]. (p. xxvii)

He ‘did not say all this fully or explicitly’. Nevertheless, the insistence ran, it was there. You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words; like place-names or Roman roads or Gothic vowels, they carried quite enough information all by themselves.

The same insistence on ‘the reality of language’ permeates the British Academy lecture of 1936. There, however, it is further intertwined with beliefs about ‘the reality of history’ – rather curious beliefs which Tolkien does not seem to have wanted to express directly. The general flow of the lecture is in fact extremely sinuous, causing great trouble to the many later Beowulfians who have tried to paraphrase it; it abounds in asides, in hilarious images like the Babel of conflicting critics and the ‘jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research’, in wildernesses of dragons and shrewdnesses of apes. However a vital point about it, never directly stated or defended, is Tolkien’s conviction that he knew exactly when and under what circumstances the poem was written. ‘At a given point’, he says (his italics, p. 262), there was a fusion, reflected in the poem; at this ‘precise point’ (p. 269) an imagination was kindled. Since there is no unquestioned evidence at all for the date and place when Beowulf was composed (it could be anywhere from Tyne to Severn, from AD 650 to 1000), one wonders what Tolkien meant. But the nearest he approaches to an answer is via allegory once more, in his little story of the man and the tower, on pp. 248–9.

This runs as follows:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings … They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old home? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

Now, as with ‘Leaf by Niggle’, everything in this story can be ‘equated’. ‘The man’ = the Beowulf-poet. The ‘friends’ looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history. The ‘tower’ with its view on the sea = Beowulf itself, with its non-scholarly impulse towards pure poetry. More difficult are ‘the accumulation of old stone’, the ‘older hall’ (also ‘the old house of his fathers’), and ‘the house in which he actually lived’. From this one can deduce that Tolkien thought that there had been older poems than Beowulf, pagan ones, in the time of the Christian past already abandoned; they are the ‘older hall’. However debris from them remained available, poetic formulas and indeed stray pagan concepts like the Sigelware; that is the ‘accumulation of old stone’. Some indeed of this was used for Biblical poems like Exodus, in which the Sigelware figure, part of the new civilisation of Christian Northumbria (or Mercia), the new civilisation being ‘the house’ in which the man ‘actually lived’. Rejected bits were nevertheless used by the poet to build his poem or ‘tower’; and they are pre-eminently the monsters, the dragon, the eotenas and ylfe, ‘elves’ and ‘giants’, words once common but used either not at all or very rarely in the rest of Old English literature.

The gist of this is that no one, friends or descendants or maybe even contemporaries, had understood Beowulf except Tolkien. The work had always been something personal, even freakish, and it took someone with the same instincts to explain it. Sympathy furthermore depended on being a descendant, on living in the same country and beneath the same sky, on speaking the same language – being ‘native to that tongue and land’. This is not the terminology of strict scholarship, though that does not prove the opinion wrong. What it does prove is that Tolkien felt more than continuity with the Beowulf-poet, he felt a virtual identity of motive and of technique.


(#ulink_2f969b32-e163-5a6c-a618-f50d4d189ddc) Nowhere was the identity stronger than over ‘the monsters and the critics’, the latter deeply antipathetic to both of them as Tolkien thought he had proved – the former deeply interesting. But what did the dragon, for instance, mean to the Beowulf-poet? For him, Tolkien argued, dragons might have been very close to the edge of reality; certainly the poet’s pagan ancestors could have thought of dragons as things they might one day have to face. Equally certainly dragons had to the poet not yet become allegorical, as they would to his descendants – the dragon as Leviathan, the devil, ‘that old serpent underground’, etc. Yet even to the poet a dragon could not be mere matter-of-fact. He was indeed phenomenally lucky in his freedom to balance exactly between ‘dragon-as-simple-beast’ and ‘dragon-as-just-allegory’, between pagan and Christian worlds, on a pinpoint of literary artifice and mythic suggestion. One sees why Tolkien insisted on a ‘precise’ kindling point of imagination, a ‘given point’ of ‘fusion’, a ‘pregnant moment of poise’. Knowing exactly when the poem was written was part of knowing its exact literary mode, and that literary mode was the one he himself wanted! But the circumstances of the modern literary world made things much harder for him than for his mighty predecessor and kindred spirit.

‘A dragon is no idle fancy’, wrote Tolkien. ‘Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even to-day (despite the critics) you may find men … who yet have been caught by the fascination of the worm’ (pp. 257–8). This last sentence is true mainly of Tolkien, whose 1923 poem ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ is about a dragon-hoard and self-evidently Beowulf-derived.


(#litres_trial_promo) The one before is no doubt true as regards ‘significance’, but smacks of special pleading; Tolkien didn’t want dragons to be symbolic, he wanted them to have a claw still planted on fact (as well as ‘invention’). What did he mean by ‘no idle fancy’? The truth of it is, I think, that Tolkien was very used to scrutinising old texts and drawing from them surprising but rational conclusions about history and language and ancient belief. In the process he developed very strongly a sort of tracker-dog instinct for validity, one which enabled him to say that such and such a word, like éacen or beadurún or *hearwa or éored, was true, even if unrecorded, meaning by ‘true’ a genuine fragment of older civilisation consistent with the others. All his instincts told him that dragons were like that – widespread in Northern legend, found in related languages from Italy to Iceland, deeply embedded in ancient story.


(#litres_trial_promo) Could this mean nothing? He was bound to answer ‘No’, and hardly deterred by the thought that ‘intelligent living people’ would disagree with him. After all, what did they know about butterflies, let alone dragons! Still, though dragons, and balrogs, and Shires, and silmarils were all taking shape in his mind as fiction, and were all simultaneously related to philological fact, he had not at this stage evolved a theory to connect the two. Possibly he never quite managed to make the link.

He had a determined try in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ three years later. However this is Tolkien’s least successful if most discussed piece of argumentative prose. The main reason for its comparative failure, almost certainly, is its lack of a philological core or kernel; Tolkien was talking to, later writing for, an unspecialised audience, and there is some sign that he tried to ‘talk down’ to them. Repeatedly he plays the trick of pretending that fairies are real – they tell ‘human stories’ instead of ‘fairy stories’, they put on plays for men ‘according to abundant records’, and so on. This comes perilously close to whimsy, the pretence that something not true is true to create an air of comic innocence. However, beneath this, and beneath the very strong sense that Tolkien is ‘counterpunching’ to a whole string of modern theories which he did not like (fairies were small, only children liked fairies, Thórr was a nature-myth, etc. etc.), it is just about possible to make out the bones of an argument, or rather of a conviction.

The conviction is that fantasy is not entirely made up. Tolkien was not prepared to say this in so many words to other people, to sceptics, maybe not to himself. That is why he continually equivocated with words like ‘invention’ and ‘no idle fancy’, and also why a good deal of ‘On Fairy-Stories’ is a plea for the power of literary art; this is dignified with the form ‘Sub-Creation’, and to it are ascribed the continuing power of Grimms’ Fairy-Tales, the (partial) success of Macbeth, the very existence of ‘fantasy’ as an art-form – views Tolkien also expressed through yet another neologism, the word and poem ‘Mythopoeia’, eventually to be published in later editions of the collection Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1988). Bobbing continually above the surface of these rational and literary opinions, however, are other, more puzzling statements. By ‘fantasy’ Tolkien declared (with a long haggle over the inadequacies of the OED and S. T. Coleridge), he meant first ‘the Sub-creative Art in itself’, but second ‘a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image’. The last phrase is the critical one, for it implies that the ‘Image’ was there before anyone derived any expression from it at all. The same implication lurks in Tolkien’s own autobiographical statement, à propos of dragons, that ‘Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie’. Making up dragons is Art; ‘glimpsing’ them and the worlds they come from is not. Tolkien would not let ‘fantasy’ mean either the one (rational) or the other (mystic) activity, but kept hinting it was both. He does so particularly, through the whole of the essay, with the idea of ‘elves’: these, he insists, may be (1) ‘creations of Man’s mind’, which is what nearly everybody thinks, or (2) true, i.e. they ‘really exist independently of our tales about them’. But (3) the essence of their activity even as ‘creations of Man’s mind’ is that they are also creators, supreme illusionists, capable of luring mortals away, by their beauty, to the ‘elf-hills’ from which they will dazedly emerge centuries later, unaware of the passage of time. They form an image, a true image, of the ‘elvish craft’ of fantasy itself; stories about them are man-made fantasies about independent fantasts.

There is a strong sense of circularity in all these statements, as if Tolkien was hovering around some central point on which he dared not or could not land, and it is easy to dismiss that central point as mere personal delusion. We are back, indeed, with ‘creepiness’, that quality that ‘Goblin Feet’, in one view, thrusts subjectively on to something in reality perfectly ordinary; but which, in another view, stems from something still perfectly real and rational but which Tolkien was much better at detecting than most others. It seems to me that this ‘real centre’ was philological, and that Tolkien could not express it in ordinary literary terms. He came closest to it, in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, when he brushed past the edges of single words, especially spell and evangelium. These two words are related, historically, for the Old English translation of Greek evangelion, ‘good news’, was gódspell, ‘the good story’, now ‘Gospel’. Spell continued to mean, however, ‘a story, something said in formal style’, eventually ‘a formula of power’, a magic spell. The word embodies much of what Tolkien meant by ‘fantasy’, i.e. something unnaturally powerful (magic spell), something literary (a story), something in essence true (Gospel). At the very end of his essay he asserts that the Gospels have the ‘supremely convincing tone’ of Primary Art, of truth – a quality he would also like to assert, but could never hope to prove, of elves and dragons.

There is a better word, though, buried in Tolkien’s remarks, which I can only conclude he decided not to discuss as being too complicated for a non-philological piece; he would have done better to focus on it. This is ‘glamour’. Actually Tolkien may also have been too revolted by the semantic poisonings of modernity to want to discuss the word, for now in common parlance it means overwhelmingly the aura of female sexual attraction, or to be more exact female sexual attraction at a distance – a showbiz word, an advertiser’s word, false and meretricious, taking a part in such nasty compounds as ‘glamour-girl’, ‘glamour-puss’ and even ‘glamour-pants’. The 1972 Supplement to the OED concedes the point and adds the coinages ‘glamourize’, ‘glammed-up’, and even ‘glam’ (a word Tolkien would have especially hated as showing that the old word used in dialect and in Sir Gawain for ‘mirth, merriment’, glam, glaum, was so dead as to be no competitor). The main G volume, published in 1897, however tells a story not much happier. ‘Glamour’, it alleges, is a made-up word, ‘introduced into the literary language by Sir Walter Scott’. What it means is ‘Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one’; from this sense has evolved the idea of ‘A magical or fictitious beauty … a delusive or alluring charm’, and so, pretty obviously, the cardboard senses of today. Tolkien would have been more interested in the quotation cited from Scott, which says ‘This species of witchcraft is well known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus, and was supposed to be a special attribute of the race of Gipsies’. What he knew, and what the OED didn’t, was that exactly this phenomenon was at the centre of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which begins with the Gylfaginning or ‘Delusion of Gilfi’, and includes within that the highly prominent and amusing tale of the delusion of Thórr by sjónhverfing = ‘aversion of the sight’ = deceptio visus = ‘glamour’. ‘Glamour’ was then well exemplified in Norse tradition and never mind the gypsies.

Further, the word was evidently by origin a corruption of ‘grammar’, and paralleled in sense by ‘gramarye’ = ‘Occult learning, magic, necromancy’, says the OED, ‘Revived in literary use by Scott’. Cambridge University had indeed preserved for centuries the office of ‘Master of Glomerye’, whose job it was to teach the younger undergraduates Latin. Tolkien must have been amused at the thought of a University official combining instruction in language – his own job – with classes in magic and spell-binding – his own desire. He wrote of the parson in Farmer Giles of Ham (a figure underrated by critics, but having some of the good as well as the bad points of the professional philologist), ‘he was a grammarian, and could doubtless see further into the future than most’. But once again Tolkien knew more than the OED. The first citation it gives under ‘gramarye’ in the ‘magic’ sense is from the ballad of ‘King Estimere’, ‘My mother was a westerne woman, And learned in gramarye’. How right that a ‘western’ woman should know grammar, like the sages of Herefordshire! How pleasing if the study should turn out to have a few practical advantages. But besides, the vital facts about ‘King Estmere’, as Tolkien could have observed from a glance at the introduction to the poem in F. J. Child’s famous collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), were that its closest analogues came from Faroese and Danish (which once again related ‘glamour’ to the ancient traditions of the North); and that the philologist Sophus Bugge had gone so far as to relate it to the Old Norse Hervarar saga. This itself is possibly the most romantically traditional of all the Norse ‘sagas of old times’; it contains fragments with a claim to being the oldest heroic poetry of the North; and it was edited and translated in 1960 by Tolkien’s son Christopher, under the title The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise.

Þess galt hon gedda fyrir Grafár ósi, er Heiðrekr var veginn undir Harvaða fjöllum.

So writes the forgotten poet: ‘The pike has paid/by the pools of Grafá/for Heidrek’s slaying/under Harvad-fells’. But, Christopher Tolkien comments, ‘the view is not challenged … that Harvaða is the same name in origin as “Carpathians”. Since this name in its Germanic form is found nowhere else at all, and must be a relic of extremely ancient tradition, one can hardly conclude otherwise than that these few lines are a fragment of a lost poem … that preserved names at least going back to poetry sung in the halls of Germanic peoples in central or south-eastern Europe’. One could hardly have a more romantically suggestive comment, or a more rigorously philological one, for as Christopher Tolkien footnotes, ‘The stem karpat- was regularly transformed into xarfap- by the operation of the Germanic Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law)’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Glamour’, ‘gramarye’, grammar, philology – these were on several levels much the same thing.

One can see now why Tolkien used the same word for both the characteristic literary quality of Beowulf, a ‘glamour of Poesis’ (‘Monsters’, p. 248), and for the characteristic but maybe not literary quality of ‘fairy-stories’, the ‘glamour of Elfland’ (‘OFS’, Tree p. 6). He did not know quite what he was detecting, but he was in no doubt that he felt something consistent in many stories and poems which could not all be the work of the same man. It might after all only be the result of age and distance, the ‘elvish hone of antiquity’, or we might think the distorting glass of philology; it might point to some great lost truth in the areas of utter historical darkness of which he was so conscious; it might be a memory, or a prophecy, of Paradise, as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’; or, again as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’, it might be mankind’s one chance to create a vision of Paradise which would be true in the future if never in the past. Tolkien’s theories on all this never coalesced. Still, we can say that the quality he evidently valued more than anything in literature was that shimmer of suggestion which never quite becomes clear sight but always hints at something deeper further on, a quality shared by Beowulf, Hervarar saga, ‘Fawler’, ‘The Man in the Moon’, ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, and so much else. This was ‘glamour’, the opposite one may say of ‘shrewdness’ – for as the one had climbed into favour the other had been debased, in simultaneous proof of the superiority of ancient over modern world views. If Tolkien took ‘glamour’ too seriously, translating it into an entirely personal concept of fantasy, he had at any rate precedent and reason. As Jacob Grimm wrote (it is quoted under the definition of philologie in the Deutsches Wörterbuch):

You can divide all philologists into these groups, those who study words only for the sake of the things, or those who study things only for the sake of the words.

Grimm had no doubt that the former class was superior, the latter falling away into pedantry and dictionaries. Of that former class Tolkien was the preeminent example.




(#ulink_3b24f417-6fc2-5073-9b5f-a08ee7768e81) The tower looking out over the sea, for instance, is a strong and private image of Tolkien’s own for what he desired in literature. The 1920 poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ begins ‘I know a window in a western tower/That opens on celestial seas …’ In The Lord of the Rings (p. 7) the hobbits believe that you can see the sea from the top of the tallest elvish tower on the Tower Hills; but none of them has ever tried to climb it.





CHAPTER 3 THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR (#ulink_b7e0ea68-5bc4-5722-994b-ea1dc8adec62)

The word and the thing: elves and dwarves


Sigelhearwan, Nodens, Fawler, fancy, glamour: stripped of its layers of scholarly guardedness, the essence of Tolkien’s belief was that ‘the word authenticates the thing’. This was a belief grounded on philology. Tolkien thought, indeed he knew, that he could distinguish many words and word-forms into two classes, one ‘old-traditional-genuine’, the other ‘new-unhistorical-mistaken’. From this he went on to form the opinion, less certain but still highly plausible, that the first group was not only more correct but also more interesting than the second; it had compelled assent over the millennia, it had a definite ‘inner consistency’, whether or not that was the ‘inner consistency of reality’ or merely of Secondary Art.

These beliefs go a long way towards explaining Tolkien’s sudden displays of scrupulosity. In 1954 he was ‘infuriated’ to find that the printers of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings had gone through it, with the best will in the world and in conformity with standard English practice, changing ‘dwarves’ to ‘dwarfs’, ‘dwarvish’ to ‘dwarfish’, ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, and so on. Considering the hundreds of changes involved (and the cost of proof correction) many authors might have let the matter ride; but Tolkien had all the original forms restored (see Biography, p. 290). In 1961 Puffin Books did much the same thing to a reprint of The Hobbit, and Tolkien complained to his publishers (Letters, p. 313) at greater length. His point was that even in modern English many old words ending in -f can still be told from new ones by their plural forms: old words (or at least old words of one particular class in Old English) behave like ‘hoof’ or ‘loaf’ and become ‘hooves’, ‘loaves’, while new ones (unaffected by sound-changes in the Old English period) simply add -s, as in ‘proofs’, ‘tiffs’, ‘rebuffs’. Writing ‘dwarfs’ was then, to Tolkien’s acute and trained sensibility, the equivalent of denying the word its age and its roots. Much the same reasoning had led Jacob Grimm, many years before, to leave the word Elfen out of his dictionary altogether, as an English import, replacing it with the native form Elben (which no one actually used any more) – his argument is repeated almost verbatim in the advice to German translators in Tolkien’s ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, p. 164. Even more than ‘dwarfs’ Tolkien disliked the word ‘elfin’, since this was a personal and pseudo-medieval coinage by Edmund Spenser – the poet hailed by the OED’s citations as the dawn of modern literature, and also the man whose first poem, The Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, was ornamented by the most offensive gloss that Tolkien probably ever encountered. In quick succession this declared that for all its age ‘that rancke opinion of Elfes’ [sic] should be rooted ‘oute of mens hearts’ as being a mistaken form of the Italian faction the ‘Guelfes’, and was in any case a Papistical notion spread by ‘bald Friers and knauish shauelings’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Tolkien would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot, or as Roman Catholic! All round, the gloss no doubt confirmed him in the belief that modern and erroneous spellings went with stupid and self-opinionated people.

Belief was reinforced further by the history of the word ‘fairy’. The OED, true to form, said that this was the word that should be used: ‘In mod. literature, elf is a mere synonym of FAIRY, which has to a great extent superseded it even in dialects.’ But whether this particular fact was true or not, Tolkien knew that much else of the OED’s information on such points was wrong. Its first citation for ‘fairy’ in its present sense is from John Gower, 1393, ‘And as he were a fairie’; but as Tolkien remarked in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree p. 8), what Gower really wrote was ‘as he were of faierie’, ‘as if he had come from (the land of) Faërie’. Just above the OED cites the earlier poem of Sir Orfeo as evidence for the belief that ‘the fairy’ could be a collective noun, ‘the fairy-folk’: ‘Awey with the fayré sche was ynome’, i.e. presumably ‘she was taken away by the fairy-people’. Tolkien made no overt remark on the matter, but his translation of Sir Orfeo, published in 1975, has the line correctly translated, ‘By magic was she from them caught’. ‘Fayré’ in that context means ‘glamour’, the deceptio visus of the inhabitants of Fairyland. The gist of these observations for Tolkien must have been that ‘fairy’ in its modern sense was a newer word than the OED realised; that it was furthermore a foreign word derived from French fée; and had been throughout its history a source of delusion and error for English people, ending in the compound words ‘fairy-tale’ and ‘fairy-story’ which as Tolkien observed in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ were badly defined, uninformed, and associated with literary works (like Drayton’s Nymphidia) bereft of the slightest trace of sub-creation or any other respectable literary art.

Good writing began with right words. Tolkien accordingly schooled himself to drop forms like ‘elfin’, ‘dwarfish’, ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’, and eventually ‘goblin’, though he had used all of them in early works up to and including The Hobbit.


(#litres_trial_promo) More importantly he began to work out their replacements, and to ponder what concepts lay behind the words and uses which he recognised as linguistically authentic. This activity of re-creation – creation from philology – lies at the heart of Tolkien’s ‘invention’ (though maybe not of his ‘inspiration’); it was an activity which he kept up throughout his life, and one which is relatively easy to trace, or to ‘reconstruct’. Thus there can be little doubt what Tolkien thought of the ‘elves’ of English and Germanic tradition. He knew to begin with that Old English ælf was the ancestor of the modern word, was cognate with Old Norse álfr, Old High German alp, and for that matter, had it survived, Gothic *albs. It was used in Beowulf, where the descendants of Cain include eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, ‘ettens and elves and demon-corpses’, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the seven-foot green giant with his monstrous axe is described nervously by bystanders as an aluisch mon or uncanny creature. The wide distribution of the word in space and time proves that belief in such creatures, whatever they were, was once both normal and immemorially old, going back to the times when the ancestors of Englishmen and Germans and Norwegians still spoke the same tongue. Yet what did the belief involve? Considering concept rather than word, Tolkien must soon have come to the conclusion that all linguistically authentic accounts of the elves, from whichever country they came, agreed on one thing: that the elves were in several ways paradoxical.

For one thing, people did not know where to place them between the polarities of good and evil. They were the descendants of Cain, the primal murderer, said the Beowulf-poet. They weren’t as bad as that, imply the characters in Sir Gawain – actually the green giant plays fair and even lets Sir Gawain off – but they were certainly very frightening. It was wrong to offer sacrifice to them (álfa-blót) concurred all post-Christian Icelanders. On the other hand it might have seemed a good idea to propitiate them; if you didn’t, Anglo-Saxons perhaps reminded each other, you might get wæterælfádl, the ‘water-elf disease’, maybe dropsy, or ælfsogoða, lunacy. There was a widespread belief in ‘elf-shot’, associated on the one hand with the flint arrows of prehistoric man and on the other with the metaphorical arrows of diabolic temptation. The consensus of these references is fear.

Simultaneous with that, though, is allure. Ælfscýne is an approbatory Anglo-Saxon adjective for a woman, ‘elf-beautiful’. Fríð sem álfkona, said the Icelanders, ‘fair as an elf-woman’. The standing and much-repeated story about the elves stresses their mesmeric charm. It may be ‘True Thomas’ on Huntly bank who sees ‘the queen of fair Elfland’, or a young woman who hears the elf-horn blowing, but either way the immediate reaction is of desire. True Thomas disregards all warnings to make off with the elf-queen, does not return to earth for seven years, and (in Walter Scott’s version) leaves immediately again as soon as he is called. The medieval romance of Sir Launfal ends with the same glad desertion. For women to run off with elves was regarded with more suspicion. ‘Lady Isabel’ in the Scottish ballad saves her maidenhood and her life from the treacherous elf-knight she herself has summoned, and at the start of The Wife of Bath’s Tale Chaucer makes a series of jokes about elves and friars, the burden of which is that the latter are sexually more rapacious than the former, though the former had a bad reputation with young women as well. The allure and the danger are mixed. Indeed a common variant of the ‘young man/elf-queen’ story ends with him in despair, not at having been seduced but at being deserted. It is the memory of former happiness, the ‘disillusionment’ of loss of ‘glamour’, which leaves Keats’s character ‘Alone and palely loitering’.

Now one can see very easily how such an apparent discrepancy of fear and attraction might in sober reality arise. Beauty is itself dangerous: this is what Sam Gamgee tries to explain to Faramir in The Two Towers, when interrogated on the nature of Galadriel, the elf-queen herself. ‘I don’t know about perilous’ says Sam (pp. 664–5), replying to Faramir’s highly accurate remark that she must be ‘perilously fair’:

‘It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it. But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame.’

One could say the same of Sir Launfal’s lady, or True Thomas’s. One can also see how the rejected wives and fiancées, or husbands and fathers of people under elvish allure would concoct a very different story! Before long they would have the ylfe in exactly the same category as Cain – or Moloch. But this would be a second-hand opinion, and a prejudiced one (like those of Boromir, or Éomer and the Riders, LOTR p. 329 or p. 422).

It is in fact the strong point of Tolkien’s ‘re-creations’ that they take in all available evidence, trying to explain both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion often gives the elves (and other races) depth. In Lothlórien we can see Tolkien exploiting, for instance, variant ideas about the elves and time. Most stories agreed that humans returning from Elf-land were temporally confused. Usually they thought time outside had speeded up: three nights in Elf-land might be three years outside, or a century. But sometimes they thought it had stood still. When the elf-maid sings in the Danish ballad of ‘Elverhøj’, or ‘Elf-hill’, time stops:

Striden strom den stiltes derved,

som førre var van at rinde;

de liden smaafiske, i floden svam,

de legte med deres finne.

‘The swift stream then stood still, that before had been running; the little fish that swam in it played their fins in time.’


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Did the discrepancy disprove the stories? Tolkien thought it pointed rather to what C. S. Lewis called the ‘unexpectedness’ of reality,


(#litres_trial_promo) and paused to explain the phenomenon in The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 379. There Sam thinks that their stay in Lothlórien, the ‘elf-hill’ itself, might have been three nights, but ‘never a whole month. Anyone would think that time did not count in there!’ Frodo agrees, but Legolas says that from an elvish viewpoint things are more complicated than that:

‘For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’

His remarks harmonise the motifs of ‘The Night that Lasted a Year’ and ‘The Stream that Stood Still’. They are in a way redundant to the mere action, the plot of The Lord of the Rings. Yet they, and many other incidental turns, explanations, allusions,


(#ulink_f13556d5-3986-5fca-ac67-f1ba3d0538c1) help to keep up a sense of mixed strangeness and familiarity, of reason operating round a mysterious centre. This feeling Tolkien himself acquired from long pondering on literary and philological cruxes; it explains why he laid such stress on ‘consistency’ and ‘tone’.

To cut matters short, one can remark that Tolkien went through much the same process with the ‘dwarves’. This is also an old word, cf. Old English dweorh, Old Norse dvergr, Old High German twerg, Gothic *dvairgs etc. It seems to have cohabited with the word for ‘elf’ over long periods, causing a sequence of confusions over ‘light-elves’ ( = elves), ‘black-elves’ ( = ? dwarves), and ‘dark-elves’ ( = ?), which Tolkien never forgot and eventually brought to prominence in the story of Eöl in The Silmarillion. More interesting is some slight sense in various sources that men dealt with dwarves in a way they could not with elves, on an equal basis marred often by hostility. The seven dwarves help Snow-White in the familiar fairy-tale (from the Grimms’ collection), but in ‘Snow-White and Rose-Red’ (also from Grimm) the dwarf combines great wealth with sullen ingratitude. The association with gold and mining is strong, as in the site of ‘Dwarf’s Hill’; so are the stories of broken bargains, as when the Norse god Loki refuses to pay a dwarf the head he has lost, with Portia-like quibbles, or when Loki again strips the dwarf Andvari of all his wealth, even the last little (fatal) ring that Andvari pleads for.


(#litres_trial_promo)Inter uos nemo loquitur, nisi corde doloso, says the dwarf in the eleventh-century German poem Ruodlieb, with hostile truth: ‘among you (men) no one speaks except with a deceitful heart. That is why you will never come to long life …’ Both the longevity of dwarves and their tendency to get into disputes over payment are remembered on several occasions in The Hobbit. Their ‘under-the-mountain’ setting there is traditional too. The great Old Norse poem on world’s end, the Völuspá, links them with stone: stynia dvergar fyr steindurom, ‘the dwarves groan before their stone-doors’. Snorri Sturluson (a kind of Northern Lazamon) says that they ‘quickened in the earth … like maggots’, while his Icelandic countrymen long called echoes dvergmál, ‘dwarf-talk’. The correspondence between such separated works as Snorri’s Prose Edda (thirteenth-century Icelandic) and the Grimms’ Kindermärchen (nineteenth-century German) is indeed in this matter surprisingly, even provocatively strong, and Tolkien was not the first to see it; the Grimms themselves observed that such things were a proof of some ‘original unity’, des ursprünglichen Zusammenhangs.


(#litres_trial_promo) Zusammenhang: a ‘hanging together’. That is very much what Tolkien thought of all these tales, and the phenomenon remains no matter what interpretation one puts on it.

However, both with elves and with dwarves there is one further factor to which Tolkien gave great weight; and that is literary art. No matter how many cross-references he could find and use, it looks as if he gave greatest weight and longest consideration to single poems, tales, phrases, images, using these as the centre of his portrayals of whole races or species. Naturally it is a speculative business to identify these, but I would suggest that the ‘master-text’ for Tolkien’s portrayal of the elves is the description of the hunting king in Sir Orfeo; and for the dwarves is the account of the Hjaðnin-gavíg, the ‘Everlasting Battle’, in Snorri’s Edda. These give further the ‘master-qualities’ of, respectively, evasiveness and revenge.

To take the simpler one first, the story of the ‘Everlasting Battle’ is as follows: once upon a time there was a king called Högni, whose daughter was Hildr. She, however, was abducted in his absence (some versions say seduced by a master-harper) by a pirate king called Hethinn. Högni pursued them and caught up at the island of Hoy in the Orkneys. Here Hildr tried to make a reconciliation, warning her father that Hethinn was ready to fight. Högni ‘answered his daughter curtly’. As the two sides draw up to each other, though, Hethinn makes a better and more courteous offer. But Högni refuses, saying: ‘Too late have you made this offer of coming to terms, for now I have drawn Dáinsleif which the dwarves made, which must kill a man every time it is drawn, and never turns in the stroke, and no wound heals where it makes a scratch.’ Unintimidated by words (like most Vikings) Hethinn shouts back that he calls any sword good that serves its master, and the battle is on. Every day the men fight, every night Hildr wakes them by witchcraft, so it will go to Doomsday.


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This story is one, evidently, of remorseless pride flaring only in taciturnity; its centre is Högni’s decision to fight rather than look for a moment as if he could be bought; the ‘objective correlative’ of pride and decision is the sword Dáinsleif, the ‘heirloom of Dáin’, which the dwarves made and which knows no mercy. The sword Tyrfing in the Saga of King Heidrek edited by Christopher Tolkien is virtually identical – dwarf-made, cursed, remorseless, leading to murder between close relatives and the final lament, ‘It will never be forgotten; the Norns’ doom is evil’. These qualities, it seems, are those which Tolkien chose and developed for his dwarves. Thorin and Company act out of revenge as well as greed in The Hobbit, the long and painful vengeance of Thráin for Thrór is the centre of what we are told of the dwarves in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, Dáin Ironfoot himself incarnates in Tolkien’s Middle-earth the whole tough, fair, bitter, somehow unlucky character of the dwarvish race.


(#litres_trial_promo) It is not too much to say that the ‘inspiration’ of their portrayal as opposed to the more laborious element of ‘invention’, springs directly from Snorri and the Hjaðningavíg and ‘Dáinsleif which the dwarves made’. To use Tolkien’s phrase, this was a ‘fusion-point of imagination’, once met never forgotten.

As for the elves, their fusion or kindling-point would seem to be some twenty or thirty lines from the centre of the medieval poem of Sir Orfeo, itself a striking example of the alchemies of art. In origin this is only the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the fourteenth-century poet (or maybe some forgotten predecessor) has made two radical changes to it: one, the land of the dead has become elf-land, from which the elf-king comes to seize Dame Heurodis; two, Sir Orfeo, unlike his classical model, is successful in his quest and bears his wife away, overcoming the elf-king by the mingled powers of music and honour. The poem’s most famous and original passage is the image of the elves in the wilderness, seen again and again by Orfeo as he wanders mad and naked, looking for his wife, but never certainly identified as hallucinations, phantoms, or real creatures on the other side of some transparent barrier which Orfeo cannot break through. To quote Tolkien’s translation:

There often by him would he see,

when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

the king of Faerie with his rout

came hunting in the woods about

with blowing far and crying dim,

and barking hounds that were with him;

yet never a beast they took nor slew,

and where they went he never knew … (SGPO pp. 129–30)

Many hints from this took root in Tolkien’s mind: the shadow-army with its echoing horns which was to follow Aragorn from the ‘paths of the dead’, the ‘dim blowing of horns’ as a ‘great hunt’ goes past the silent dwarves in Mirkwood in The Hobbit, and in The Hobbit again the image of the fierce, proud, impulsive, honourable elf-king who imprisons Thorin but will take no advantage in the end even of Bilbo. Stronger than anything, though, is the association of the elves with the wilderness – an idea corroborated to Tolkien by the many Anglo-Saxon compounds such as ‘wood-elf’, ‘water-elf’, ‘sea-elf’ and so on – and with the music of the harp, the instrument by which Sir Orfeo wins back his wife. It may even have seemed significant to Tolkien that in Sir Orfeo the elves freed and rewarded their harper-enemy for his skill, while in some versions of the Hjaðningavíg the dwarvish weapon Dáinsleif condemns Hjarrandi (the Northern Orpheus) not just to death but to death everlastingly repeated. A whole conflict of temperament between two species is summed up in the detail, and a conflict of style. However, the further one traces Tolkien’s debt to ancient texts and fragments, in this matter, the more one realises how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North – if only someone would dig it out. To quote Shakespeare’s observations on another Enchanted Wood which sensible people can make nothing of (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i):

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images,

And grows to something of great constancy;

But howsoever, strange and admirable.

I do not suppose Tolkien would have liked the down-grading of ‘fancy’, nor the comedy of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed. Bully Bottom, though, has a Tolkienish bravura; and Hippolyta’s feeling that ‘there must have been something in it’ was his own.




Creative anachronisms


It was by similar processes of ‘reconstruction’ that Tolkien arrived at his ‘orcs’ and ‘wargs’, later his ‘ents’ and ‘woses’.


(#ulink_154b362a-ae0a-503f-8b36-7f8034389f4c) None of the foregoing, however, offers any help at all with ‘hobbits’. If ‘the word authenticates the thing’, they are not authentic, for ‘hobbit’ is in no sense an ancient word. Nor indeed does their genesis seem to have had any element of ‘invention’ in it; it was pure ‘inspiration’, without any trace of thought at all. The moment of the word’s arrival has in fact been recorded by Tolkien, and subsequently by Humphrey Carpenter:

It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’ (Biography, p. 230)


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The incident seems a perfect example of the creative unconsciousness: the boring job, the state of combined surface concentration and deeper lack of interest, the sudden relaxation which allows a message to force its way through from some unknown area of pressure. It is reminiscent of the flashes of insight which solve scientists’ problems in dreams (like von Kékulé the chemist and the snake with its tail in its mouth). But what has philology to do with an event so mysterious and so personal?

Tolkien had no opinion to offer himself. In a letter in the Observer (20 February 1938), he answered speculation by saying ‘I do not remember anything about the name and inception of the hero’, and denied (without total certainty) that the word ‘hobbit’ could have come from prior reading in African exploration or fairy-tale, as had been suggested. He thought that earlier writers’ hobbits, if they existed, were probably ‘accidental homophones’, i.e. the name was the same but the thing was not. Much later, in a letter he seems never to have posted (Letters, pp. 379–87), he observed that though he could often remember acquiring names this process played little part in the construction of stories. It is somehow typical that the OED should have claimed (Times, 31 May 1977) to have identified Tolkien’s ‘source’ and ‘inspiration’ in J. Hardy’s edition of The Denham Tracts, Vol. II (1895), which declares that ‘The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles … hobbits, hobgoblins’. The word ‘hobbit’ is there, but in a run of distinctly insubstantial creatures which hardly correspond to Tolkien’s almost pig-headedly solid and earthbound race. Words are not things: the name ‘hobbit’ may seem to be for the researcher, a dead-end.

Even dead-ends have their uses, though (see below (#ulink_1b5728df-bb6f-5c04-a791-e5eaa0bbe7af)). This particular one prompts several thoughts. One is that although Tolkien accepted the word as coming from outside, not being rooted in antiquity at all, he nevertheless did not rest until he had worked out an acceptable etymology for it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ is of course the first sentence of The Hobbit. Not quite the last sentence, but on the last page of the last appendix of The Lord of the Rings, is the note on the word ‘hobbit’ which gives its derivation, viz. from Old English *hol-bytla, ‘hole-dweller’ or ‘hole-builder’. Holbytla is an ‘asterisk word’. It was never recorded, but nevertheless could, is even on the whole likely to have existed, like *dvairgs. Furthermore it makes the magic sentence of inspiration into a tautology: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-liver…’ What else would you expect? The implication is that the inspiration was a memory of something that could in reality have existed, and that anyway conformed to the inflexible rules of linguistic history: as a word ‘hobbit’ was more like ‘dwarves’ than ‘elfin’.

The next point is that Tolkien did admit one possible source in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922), the story of the near-disgrace and abortive self-discovery of a complacent American businessman; to this theme the journey and the nature of Bilbo Baggins show some correspondence. But the source that Tolkien emphatically rejected is the word ‘rabbit’, of which so many critics have been reminded. ‘Calling Bilbo a “nassty little rabbit” was a piece of vulgar trollery’, he wrote, ‘just as “descendant of rats” was a piece of dwarfish [sic] malice’ (Observer, 20 February 1938). ‘Certainly not rabbit’ he affirmed later. Internal evidence runs against him here, however, for it is not only the trolls who think simultaneously of Bilbo and rabbits. Bilbo makes the comparison himself in chapter 6 of The Hobbit, when he sees the eagle sharpening its beak and begins ‘to think of being torn up for supper like a rabbit’. Three pages later the same thought occurs to the eagle, ‘You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one.’ Thorin shakes Bilbo ‘like a rabbit’ in chapter 16, and much earlier Beorn – admittedly a rude and insensitive character – pokes Mr Baggins in the waistcoat and observes ‘little bunny is getting nice and fat again’ (p. 123). He is in a sense repaying the insult Bilbo offered earlier (p. 109), when he thought Beorn’s ‘skin-changing’ meant he was ‘a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels’. But the multiplicity of names gives a further clue to Tolkien’s real thoughts, incubating since 1915 and the neologism ‘coney-rabbits’ in ‘Goblin Feet’.

The fact is that ‘rabbit’ is a peculiar word. The OED can find no ultimate etymology for it, nor trace it back in English before 1398. ‘Coney’ or ‘cunny’ is little better, going back to 1302, while ‘bunny’ is a pet-name used originally for squirrels, as it happens, and not recorded till the seventeenth century. The words for ‘rabbit’ differ in several European languages (French lapin, German kaninchen), and there is no Old English or Old Norse word for it at all. These facts are unusual: ‘hare’ for instance is paralleled by Old English hara, German hase, Old Norse heri, and so on, while the same could be said for ‘weasel’ or ‘otter’ or ‘mouse’ or ‘brock’ or most other familiar mammals of Northern Europe. The reason, of course, is that rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only round the thirteenth century, as imported creatures bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like mink or coypu. Yet they have been assimilated. The point is this: not one person in a thousand realises that rabbits (no Old English source) are in any historical way distinct from mice (O.E. mýs) or weasels (O.E. weselas), while the word is accepted by all as familiar, native, English. The creature has further established itself irreversibly in the folk-imagination, along with wise owls (O.E. úlan) and sly foxes (O.E. fuhsas). But if an Anglo-Saxon or Norseman had seen one he would have thought it alien if not bizarre. Rabbits prove that novelties can be introduced into a language and then made to fit – of course as long as one exhibits due regard to deep structures of language and thought. ‘If a foreign word falls by chance into the stream of a language’, wrote Jacob Grimm, ‘it is rolled around till it takes on that language’s colour, and in spite of its foreign nature comes to look like a native one.’


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Now this situation of anachronism-cum-familiarity certainly has something to do with hobbits. The first time that Bilbo Baggins appears in close focus he is ‘standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe’. Smoking later appears as not just a characteristic of hobbits, but virtually the characteristic, ‘the one art that we can certainly claim to be our own invention’, declares Meriadoc Brandybuck (LOTR p. 8). But what are they smoking besides pipes? ‘Pipeweed, or leaf’, declares the Lord of the Rings Prologue firmly. Why not say ‘tobacco’, since the plant is ‘a variety probably of Nicotiana’? Because the word would sound wrong. It is an import from some unknown Caribbean language via Spanish, reaching English only after the discovery of America, sometime in the sixteenth century. The words it resembles most are ‘potato’ and ‘tomato’, also referring to new objects from America, eagerly adopted in England and naturalised with great speed, but marked off as foreign by their very phonetic structure. ‘Pipeweed’ shows Tolkien’s wish to accept a common feature of English modernity, which he knew could not exist in the ancient world of elves or trolls, and whose anachronism would instantly be betrayed by a word with the foreign feel of ‘tobacco’. Actually Bilbo does use ‘tobacco’ on page 6 of The Hobbit, and Gandalf mentions ‘tomatoes’ not much later. In the first edition. The third changes ‘cold chicken and tomatoes’ to ‘cold chicken and pickles’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and after that the foreign fruit is excluded. ‘Potatoes’ stay in, being indeed the speciality of Gaffer Gamgee, but his son Sam has a habit of assimilating the word to the more native-sounding ‘taters’ – Tolkien notes elsewhere that the word was borrowed into colloquial Welsh from colloquial English as tatws, in which form it sounds much less distinctive (‘EW’, p. 34). But in fact the scene in which Sam discusses ‘taters’ with Gollum (LOTR p. 640) is a little cluster of anachronisms: hobbits, eating rabbits (Sam calls them ‘coneys’), wishing for potatoes (‘taters’) but out of tobacco (‘pipeweed’). One day, offers Sam to Gollum, he might cook him something better – ‘fried fish and chips’. Nothing could now be more distinctively English! Not much would be less distinctively Old English. The hobbits, though, are on our side of many cultural boundaries.

That, then, is their association with rabbits. One can see why Tolkien denied the obvious connection between the two: he did not want hobbits classified as small, furry creatures, vaguely ‘cute’ just as fairies were vaguely ‘pretty’. On the other hand both insinuated themselves, rabbits into the homely company of fox and goose and hen, hobbits into the fantastic but equally verbally authenticated set of elves and dwarves and orcs and ettens. One might go so far as to say that the absence of rabbits from ancient legend made them not an ‘asterisk word’ but an ‘asterisk thing’ – maybe they were there but nobody noticed. That is exactly the ecological niche Tolkien selected for hobbits, ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ (LOTR p. 1, my italics). It is not likely that this role was devised for them before the arrival of the inspired ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’, any more than the etymology from holbytla. Still, the amazing thing about that sentence, looking back, is the readiness with which it responded to development. The first half of it helped to anchor hobbits in history, via holbytlan, the second to characterise them in fiction, via the anachronisms associated with the rabbit-analogy. Such complexity could be the result of prior unconscious cogitation or later artistic effort. Either way, ‘hobbit’ as word and concept threw out its anchors into Old and modern English at once: ‘grammarye’ at work once more.




Breaking Contact


This preamble makes it easier to say what Tolkien was doing in The Hobbit. Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him, he felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left; Beowulf or The Saga of King Heidrek stimulated the imagination but did not satisfy it. Accordingly he created a sort of ‘asterisk-world’ for the Norse Elder Edda. The dwarf-names of ‘Thorin and Company’, as well as Gandalf’s, come from a section of the Eddic poem Völuspá, often known as the Dvergatal or ‘Dwarves’ Roster’. This is not much regarded now, and has been called a ‘rigmarole’, a meaningless list; The Hobbit implies, though, that that meaningless list is the last faded memento of something once great and important, an Odyssey of the dwarves. As for the landscape through which Gandalf, Thorin and the rest move, that too is an Eddic one; ‘the pathless Mirkwood’ is mentioned in several poems, while ‘the Misty Mountains’ come from the poem Skirnismál, where Freyr’s page, sent to abduct the giant’s daughter, says grimly to his horse:

‘Myrct er úti, mál qveð ec ocr fara

úrig fiöll yfir

þyrsa þióð yfir;

báðir við komomc, eða ocr báða tecr

sá inn ámátki iötunn.’

‘The mirk is outside, I call it our business to fare over the misty mountains, over the tribes of orcs (þyrs = orc, see note above (#ulink_154b362a-ae0a-503f-8b36-7f8034389f4c)); we will both come back, or else he will take us both, he the mighty giant.’

All that Tolkien has done, in a way, is to make place-names out of adjectives, to turn words into things. But there is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher all ready to cook’. Yet he has a place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us) all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.

His name, thus, is Baggins, and he lives in Bag End. This latter name had personal and homely associations for Tolkien (see Biography, p. 234). But it is also a literal translation of the phrase one sees often yet stuck up at the end of little English roads: cul-de-sac. Cul-de-sacs are at once funny and infuriating. They belong to no language, since the French call such a thing an impasse and the English a ‘dead-end’. The word has its origins in snobbery, the faint residual feeling that English words, ever since the Norman Conquest, have been ‘low’ and that French ones, or even Frenchified ones, would be better. Cul-de-sac is accordingly a peculiarly ridiculous piece of English class-feeling – and Bag End a defiantly English reaction to it. As for Mr Baggins, one thing he is more partial to than another is his tea, which he has at four o’clock. But over much of the country ‘tea’, indeed anything eaten between meals but especially afternoon tea ‘in a substantial form’ as the OED says, is called ‘baggins’. The OED prefers the ‘politer’ form ‘bagging’, but Tolkien knew that people who used words like that were almost certain to drop the terminal -g (another post-Conquest confusion anyway). He would have found the term glossed under bæggin, bægginz in W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (London: Oxford University Press), for which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928. Mr Baggins, then, is at the start of The Hobbit full of nonsense, like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien: he takes pride in being ‘prosy’, pooh-poohs anything out of the ordinary, and is almost aggressively middle middle-class in being more respectable than the Tooks though rather ‘well-to-do’ than ‘rich’. If he went much further in this direction he would end up like his cousins the ‘Sackville-Bagginses’ – they, of course, have severed their connection with Bag End by calling it cul-de-sac(k) and tagging on the French suffix -ville! Yet Bilbo’s heart is in the right place (also like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien). He likes flowers; he is proud of his ancestor the Bullroarer; if not quite ‘as fierce as a dragon in a pinch’ he is at any rate no coward; and like his name he is ample, generous, substantial, if undeniably plain and old-fashioned. He has therefore not entirely lost his passport into the ancient world, and can function in it as our representative, without heroic pretensions but also without cynical ironies. He is admittedly a bourgeois. That is why Gandalf turns him into a Burglar. Both words come from the same root (burh = ‘town’ or ‘stockaded house’), and while they are eternal opposites they are opposites on the same level. By the end of The Hobbit, though, Bilbo as burglar has progressed so far as to rub shoulders with heroes, even to be (just) considerable as one himself.


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The early moves of The Hobbit depend very much on this tension between ancient and modern reactions. It begins almost as satire on modern institutions, with Mr Baggins’s language particularly taking some shrewd knocks: the more familiar it seems the more fossilised it is. Thus Bilbo’s ‘Good Morning’ is no longer a wish offered to another person, but either that, or an objective statement, or a subjective statement, or all of them together, or even a gesture of hostility. ‘“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”’ His ‘not at all’ means ‘yes’, his ‘my dear sir’ means nothing, and when he says ‘I beg your pardon’ he no longer has any sense that he is asking for anything or that ‘pardon’ might be a valuable thing to receive. Against this the dwarves’ ceremonious style of salutation – ‘At your service!’ ‘At yours and your family’s!’ ‘May his beard grow ever longer!’ ‘May the hair on his toes never fall out!’ – may seem pompous and indeed be insincere, but at any rate it is about something, not just semantically empty. Similarly Bilbo, trying to be business-like, flees to abstractions, only to have the narrator expose them: ‘“Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth” – by which he meant: “What am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?”’ Thorin, though long-winded enough, does not talk about calculations, but about things:


(#ulink_b9038c8e-940a-5912-9b1a-7b6c4fa9229a) the dwarf-song which opens their conclave centres on the misty mountains cold and grim, on harps, necklaces, twisted wire, pale enchanted long-forgotten gold. No wonder the hobbit feels ‘the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves’. In the first clash between ancient and modern ‘ancient’ wins easily; in an entirely proper sense (res = ‘thing’) it seems much realer.

In any case the narrator has his thumb firmly on the balance. His voice is very prominent throughout The Hobbit (as it is not in The Lord of the Rings), and as has been said it provides ‘a very firm moral framework by which to judge’


(#litres_trial_promo) – elves are good, goblins bad, dwarves, eagles, dragons, men and Beorn all in different ways in between. Besides building up morality, though, it more interestingly tears down expectation. The narrator’s favourite phrase is ‘of course’, but this usually introduces something unexplained or unpredictable: ‘That, of course, is the way to talk to dragons’, or ‘He knew, of course, that the riddle game was sacred’, or ‘It was often said … that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd’. Sometimes these and similar remarks introduce information. More often they create a sense that more information exists round the edges of the story, and that events are going according to rules only just hinted at, but rules just the same. Adjectives like ‘the famous Belladonna Took’ or ‘the great Thorin Oakenshield himself’ imply a depth of history, statements like ‘no spider has ever liked being called Attercop’ one of experience. The frequent remarks about legendary creatures of the ‘Trolls’ purses are the mischief’ kind furthermore blur ordinary experience into the magical, while the question ‘what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall?’ is very much in the style of ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ The child reader senses, perhaps, the sportiveness of all this, and delights in it; the adult, as he goes along, finds himself succumbing to the ancient principle that ‘redundancy is truth’ – the more unnecessary details are put in the more lifelike we take fiction to be. The underlying point, though, is that the narrator is there cumulatively to express a whole attitude to the archaic-heroic setting: casual, matter-of-fact, even unimpressed, but accordingly lulling. He gets the landscape, the characters and the ‘rules’ through the modern barriers of disbelief and even, potentially, of contempt.

The way The Hobbit works in fact shows up well in any comparison of Chapter 2, ‘Roast Mutton’, with its analogue in the Grimms’ folk-tale of ‘The Brave Little Tailor’. In this latter a tailor (the trade was synonymous with feebleness, as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II III ii) kills seven flies at a blow, and is so emboldened that he starts a career of violence and monster-killing. He bluffs his way through a contest of strength with one giant, and frightens off a whole gang of them: ‘each of them had a roast sheep in his hand and was eating it’. Sent by the king to catch two more, he hides up a tree and throws stones at them till they quarrel and kill each other: ‘they tore up trees in their agony and defended themselves’, he says airily when he shows the bodies, ‘but all that does no good when a chap like me comes along who can kill seven with one blow!’ Bilbo starts off very much as a ‘little grocer’, but he never shows anything like the ‘little tailor’s’ resource or effrontery; an omni-competent character would destroy any modern story’s action. Instead he is presented very much as a reader-surrogate, driven on by shame to try to be ‘The Master Thief’ (like the character in Asbjörnsen and Moe’s Norse folktale) but hampered by utter ignorance of the rules of the game. He is caught by one ‘fact’ which neither he nor the reader could have predicted – trolls’ purses talk – and saved by two more: wizards can ventriloquise, and ‘trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again’. ‘As you probably know’ is here the final blow in Tolkien’s strategy of ‘counter-realism’. Nobody knows that; indeed it isn’t true; in a traditional tale no narrator could get away with so shamelessly exploiting the gap between his world and his listener’s, because of course there wouldn’t be one! However in The Hobbit the combined assurance of Gandalf, the narrator, the trolls and the dwarves outweighs the ignorance of Bilbo, and the reader. As it happens the belief about being underground before dawn is as traditional as belief in trolls and dwarves at all, going back to the Elder Edda and the end of the Alvíssmál, where Alvíss the dwarf is kept talking till daylight by Thórr, and so turned to stone.


(#ulink_1c0548d6-4b7b-5312-8a74-fb851b6bf31f) Inventive resource is very strong in The Hobbit, over words and races and characters and events. The book’s distinguishing characteristic, though, is its sense that all these things come from somewhere outside and beyond the author, forming a Zusammenhang as solid as everyday’s and on occasion no more irrational.




The Ring as ‘Equalizer’


This ‘illusion of historical truth and perspective’ is, of course, as Tolkien himself said of Beowulf, ‘largely a product of art’ (‘Monsters’, p. 247). And sometimes the art ran out. Tolkien himself admitted (Observer, 20 February 1938) that twice he got stuck. He did not say where, leaving that for later researchers to make fools of themselves over, but it may be argued that the first few chapters of The Hobbit consist mostly of disengagement and playing down the readers’ collective sense of doubt. As late as the start of chapter 4 the company is halted again (for the third time), and there is a sense of the author groping for intellectual justification. In the mountain-storm Bilbo looks out and sees that ‘across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below’. Giants never enter the Tolkien universe again – Gandalf accepts their existence for a second in chapter 7 – and the passage is a failure of tone; it reads like an old interpretation of giants as ‘nature-myth’, i.e. as personifications of the avalanche like Thórr and his hammer personifying thunder and lightning. This is too allegorical for Middle-earth. But the story takes off very shortly afterwards, with the capture by the goblins (incidentally still too close to munitions workers as the trolls were to labourers), the escape, the goblin runners pursuing ‘swift as weasels in the dark’, and Bilbo’s forcible detachment from the dwarves. Crawling along the tunnel hours later ‘his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career’, comments Tolkien, ‘but he did not know it.’ A turning-point in Tolkien’s career too, for from this came most of his subsequent inspiration – Gollum, Sauron,


(#litres_trial_promo) eventually The Lord of the Rings itself.

But no more than Bilbo did Tolkien realise this at the time. As he testified later (LOTR p. xv), glimpses in The Hobbit ‘had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring’. The ring changed its significance even between editions of The Hobbit.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the first matters were relatively straightforward: Bilbo found the ring, met Gollum, they agreed to hold a riddle-contest, the stakes being Bilbo’s life against Gollum’s ‘precious’. Bilbo won, but since by accident he’d acquired Gollum’s ‘precious’ already he asked to be shown the way out instead. The sequence works, it excuses Bilbo of any charge of theft (he’d won the ring fair and square) but as anyone familiar with the Ring in its later manifestations will see, the amazing thing is Gollum’s readiness to bet his ‘precious’, bear the loss of it, and then offer to show the way out as a douceur. ‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition”’ (Hobbit first edition, p. 92). In the second and subsequent editions his last words are ‘Thief! Thief! Thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it for ever!’ Furthermore Gollum’s charge is arguably true, since in this version the deal was Bilbo’s life against any nominated service, such as showing the way out. In both versions Bilbo gets the ring and the exit, but in the latter one it is his claim to the ring which is shaky.

Now, Tolkien integrated this second thought into his story marvellously well, even keeping the first version as an excuse Bilbo had told with uncharacteristic dishonesty to put his claim to the ‘precious’ beyond doubt. However, it is the first thought one should keep in mind while considering the genesis of The Hobbit. And here the obvious point, surely, is that the ring is just a prop: a stage-prop, like the marvellous devices common in fairy-tales or legends (there is a wish-fulfilling ring in the Grimms’ ‘The King of the Golden Mountain’, and a cloak of invisibility), but also a prop for Bilbo’s status with the dwarves. It is a kind of ‘Equalizer’. After acquiring it Bilbo remains in most ways as out of touch with Wilderland as before: he cannot dress meat or dodge wargs, and when in chapter 15 Balin asks if he can make out the bird’s speech he has to reply ‘Not very well’ – the narrator, still maximising the distance between him and everyday Middle-earth normality, adds ‘(as a matter of fact, he could make nothing of it at all)’. He cannot even tell when crows are being insulting. But the ring makes up for this. Before he had it he was essentially a package to be carried, his name as a ‘burglar’ nothing but an embarrassment even to himself. With the ring he can take an active part. He uses it straight away to get past the dwarves’ look-out and raise his prestige – they ‘looked at him with quite a new respect’ – and then to save his companions first from the spiders and second from the elvish dungeons. The problem after that is in a way to maintain his status without simply reducing it to the accident of owning a magic ring. Tolkien takes some trouble over this, observing in the wood-elves’ dungeon that ‘One invisible ring was a fine thing, but it was not much good among fourteen’ – so that credit for that escape is Bilbo’s – and after the fight with the spiders that ‘knowing the truth about the vanishing did not lessen [the dwarves’] opinion of Bilbo at all; for they saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions.’ There is something provocative in this last statement, for it seems to deny that owning a magic ring could be an accident. Still, the very arguability of Bilbo’s status shows how the ring changed The Hobbit: it brought a new possibility of action which would be simultaneously ‘heroic’ and credible, it developed the opposition of ancient and modern motifs into something like a dialogue.

The main subject of that dialogue is courage. Few modern readers of Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or the Icelandic ‘family sagas’, can escape a certain feeling of inadequacy as they contemplate whole sequences of characters who appear, in a casual and quite lifelike way, not to know what fear is. How would we manage in such a society? With our culture’s characteristic ‘softness, worldliness, and timidity’


(#litres_trial_promo) would we be fit for anything but slavery? To this self-doubt Bilbo Baggins makes a sober but relatively optimistic response. His style of courage shows up when he is in the dark and alone. He faces fear first in the escape from Gollum, when he takes a ‘leap in the dark’ rather than kill a defenceless enemy (this comes only in the second edition). A more significant scene is when he faces the giant spider and kills it ‘all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else’. A third is as he creeps down the tunnel to his first sight of Smaug, but stops as he hears dragon-snoring ahead. Tolkien lays great stress on this:

Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did … (p. 200)

Such scenes remind us that even Samuel Colt’s ‘Equalizer’ did not make all men heroes: it only made them all the same size. They also provide a behaviour-model which is not quite beyond emulation (no one can fight a dragon, but everyone can fight fear). Mainly they place in a kindly light that style of courage – cold courage, ‘moral courage’, two o’clock in the morning courage – which our age is most prepared to venerate.

They further expose the dwarves to something like the satire turned on Mr Baggins’s modernisms at the start of the story. Thorin Oakenshield, for all his heroic name, sends Bilbo down the tunnel, and the rest do little but look embarrassed. The narrator insists (p. 199) that ‘they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble … as they did in the case of the trolls’, but he may not carry entire conviction. When he escaped from the goblins Bilbo had just decided he had to go back into the tunnels and look for his friends when he found his friends deciding just the opposite about him! ‘If we have got to go back into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him’, is their last word. Maybe Gandalf would have talked them round. But before this begins to sound like treason against the images of the ancient North (the ‘great contribution’ of whose early literature, Tolkien had said, was ‘the theory of courage’, ‘Monsters’, p. 262), it needs to be said that The Hobbit’s dialogue contains many voices. There is something splendid in the narrator’s reversion to laconicism at the end, when he says (as a matter of course) that since Thorin is dead Fili and Kili are too; they ‘had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother’, a motif immemorially old. Much can be said too for Thorin Oakenshield, while for some considerable stretch of the story, say chapters 6 to 8, one can see Tolkien exploring with delight that surly, illiberal independence often the distinguishing mark of Old Norse heroes. Gandalf’s own reaction to being treed is just to kill as many enemies as possible; the rescuing eagles are, the narrator says euphemistically, ‘not kindly birds’; there is a fine scene of sullen insolence between Thorin and the elf-king; but the centre of the whole sequence is Beorn.

He is in a way the least invented character in the book. His name is an Old English heroic word for ‘man’, which meant originally ‘bear’, so that naturally enough he is a were-bear, who changes shape, or ‘skin’ as Gandalf calls it, every night. He has a very close analogue in Bothvarr Bjarki (= ‘little bear’), a hero from the Norse Saga of Hrólfr Kraki, and another in Beowulf himself, whose name is commonly explained as Beowulf = ‘bees’ wolf’ = honey-eater bear, and who breaks swords, rips off arms and cracks ribs with ursine power and clumsiness. Beorn keeps bees too; is surly in disposition; not to be trusted after dark; and ‘appalling when he is angry’, a description not altogether different from being ‘kind enough if humoured’. The dwarves and Bilbo see both sides of him, but perceive them as one. On their second morning they find him in a good mood, telling ‘funny stories’ and apologising for having doubted their word – it has been confirmed by two prisoners:

‘What did you do with the goblin and the Warg?’ asked Bilbo suddenly.

‘Come and see!’ said Beorn, and they followed round the house. A goblin’s head was stuck outside the gate and a warg-skin was nailed to a tree just beyond. Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend … (p. 124)

‘The heart is hard, though the body be soft’, said Tolkien of fairy-tale readers. But actually in context Beorn’s ferocity is attractive. It goes with his rudeness and his jollity, all projections of that inner self-confidence which as Tolkien knew lay at the core of the ‘theory of courage’. ‘What do you believe in?’ ask whole sequences of kings to Icelandic wanderers in sagas. ‘Ek trúi á sjálfan mik’, runs the traditional response, ‘I believe in myself’. Killer-Glúmr, an axeman like Beorn, widens this to believing in his axe and his moneybag and his storehouse as well. Both characters have the air of men who have ‘been into’ a crisis of existentialism – and straight out the other side, leaving the crisis sadly tattered.

The solitary conquest of fear: the fierce denial of it. These two conceptions, one modern, one archaic, circle round each other most of the way through The Hobbit. It would be wrong to say they are ever resolved, but they do at least reach climaxes of anachronism and clash of style near the end; first in the death of Smaug, then around the Battle of the Five Armies.

To take these in order, it may be said that killing Smaug is the basic problem of The Hobbit, and not just for the dwarves. Tolkien had few models to work from: Beowulf kills his dragon in plain fight, but without surviving, as is also to happen at Ragnarök with Thórr and the Midgard Serpent. Sigurthr kills Fáfnir in the Edda by stratagem and via the notorious draconic ‘soft underbelly’, Vítharr at Ragnarök again is to slay the monstrous Fenriswolf by putting foot on lower jaw and hand on upper and tearing the beast apart. This last is implausible for men or hobbits, Beowulf’s case and Thórr’s are depressing, and Sigurthr’s frankly too obvious to be interesting: Tolkien thought of something like it to begin with, but if the dwarves are well up on ‘stabs and jabs and undercuts’ then probably Smaug would be too. In the end he had to use a variant on ‘soft underbellies’, but to it he adds a notion as anachronistic to old-style ‘heroism’ as are Bilbo’s decisions in the dark. This new element is ‘discipline’.

Like ‘glamour’, ‘discipline’ is a much-altered word. Its earliest English meaning, in the Ancrene Wisse, is ‘flogging’; the lady anchorites, says its author, must well tame their flesh mid herde disciplines. Later on the word comes to mean teaching or training, especially military training or drill; by the eighteenth century it covered the whole complex business of priming, loading, cocking, presenting and firing the ‘Brown Bess’ infantry musket to the beat of drum, a ritual which if carried out perfectly left British redcoats invulnerable to direct assault (as at Culloden), but when bungled left them, as an OED citation says, ‘fit only for the contempt and slaughter of their enemies’ (as at Falkirk the year before). In Tolkien’s day the word had come to signify the most prized of all British imperial qualities, a specialised cold-bloodedness and readiness to take punishment which the OED finds itself unable to define. Its classic case was perhaps the wreck of the Birkenhead troopship on 25th February 1852, when 500 soldiers found themselves on a sinking ship with inadequate lifeboats in a shark-infested sea. They were drawn up on deck, maintaining, says the Annual Register for 1852, ‘perfect discipline’, and told eventually to jump overboard and make for the few boats which had been launched. But the ship’s captain begged them not to, as the boats with the women in would inevitably be swamped. ‘“Not more than three”’, he reported, ‘“made the attempt.” Under this heroic obedience to discipline the whole mass were engulphed in the waves by the sinking of the ship.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The event became a part of British mystique, as did the quality. Lord Kitchener asked Tolkien’s army of 1916 to show ‘discipline and steadiness under fire’, with typical attention to passivity. Nothing like this can be seen in early Northern literature; the analogue to the Birkenhead disaster in The Saga of Eirik the Red has indeed a Norseman giving up his place in a lifeboat, but he does it with characteristic personal bravura (and rudeness).


(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless Tolkien had been taught to value discipline, and it solved his problem over Smaug.

It is Bard the Bowman who kills Smaug, heroically enough with a lost arrow saved as a family heirloom for generations. Before that, though, Bard has figured as a nameless participant in a crowd scene about the giving and taking of orders. He has the trumpets blown, the warriors armed, the pots filled with water and the bridge to the land thrown down; it is this last precaution which daunts Smaug for a moment as he sweeps in over the cold fire-quenching lake. Then the dragon is faced with ‘a hail of dark arrows’ from platoons of bowmen, urged on by ‘the grim-voiced man (Bard was his name), who ran to and fro cheering on the archers and urging the Master to order them to fight to the last arrow’. Fighting to the last round is of course the traditional phrase; being a ‘discipline’ concept it post-dates musketry. But Tolkien has here transferred the ethic of Waterloo or Albuera back to ancient days. He does it again as the dragon shatters the town and the townspeople break for their lifeboats: ‘But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard …’ The phrase ‘hold one’s ground’ is not even recorded by the OED till 1856, though there is a parallel in the Old English poem Maldon, where the English are exhorted to ‘hold their stead’ (which they don’t). Not that holding their ground does these particular archers any good, or Smaug any harm; he is killed by the last arrow, the one particular arrow shot heroically by Bard. Still, the whole pressure of the scene is towards modern coolness and preparation, not ancient ‘berserk’ fury (a ‘berserk’ being a ‘bear-shirt’, a man like Beorn). It is discipline that does for Smaug: discipline and that element of ‘complacency’ (OED 1650) which lets Smaug neglect his armour and so betray himself successively to hobbit, thrush and man.

The death of Smaug, like Bilbo in the dark, lets us see courage in a modern way. Their obverse is the Battle of the Five Armies (where Bilbo disappears from sight and heroic displays come from Thorin, Fili, Kili, Dain and especially Beorn), and the unusually complex scene of debate before it in chapter 15. Here Bard and Thorin oppose each other, and do so in highly unchildlike and ratiocinative style. To summarise Bard’s proposition to Thorin, he says in essence: (1) I have killed the dragon, so I deserve a reward, (2) I am also the heir of Girion lord of Dale, and much of Smaug’s treasure was his, so I should have it back, (3) Smaug’s destruction of Laketown has left destitute the people who helped the dwarves, and they deserve repayment, especially as (4) the dragon-attack was the dwarves’ fault (or actually Bilbo’s). To these points – split up in the original by heavy rhetorical questions – Thorin replies in the same mode, though not the same order. He ignores (1), perhaps out of pride, rejects (2), on the ground that Girion is dead and so can have no claim, and half-accepts (3) and (4); in dwarvish style he agrees to pay a fair price for earlier assistance, but refuses compensation for the dragon-attack since that was Smaug’s business not his own. Finally he refuses to parley under threat and asks a rhetorical question himself: ‘It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid to our kindred, had you found the hoard unguarded and us slain’.

The laborious legalism of this is straight out of Icelandic saga: one thinks of the hero of The Saga of Hrafnkell ticking off the appropriate compensations for the murders he has committed, the hamstringing he has suffered, loss of goods during feud and even the natural increase of animals during periods of confiscation – all coexisting, of course, with an ethic of ruthless violence. It is clear that Tolkien was all but enchanted by that ethical and literary style. The whole scene is presented very much for our admiration, and when later on Dain and the dwarves of the Iron Hills appear, their stilted ceremoniousness – ‘But who are you that sit in the plain as foes before defended walls?’ – rings much more powerfully than the narrator’s modernistic translation: ‘You have no business here. We are going on, so make way or we shall fight you!’ Nevertheless between these two moments another scene has intervened, marked by the greatest cluster of anachronisms since chapter 1: Bilbo’s delivery of the Arkenstone to Bard, the Elvenking and Gandalf.

Bilbo has all along been (nearly) immune to the paraphernalia of heroism. He would like to see himself in a ‘looking-glass’ when Thorin outfits him with mithril armour, but fears he looks ‘rather absurd’, especially when he thinks of his neighbours on The Hill back home. He also listens with dismay and disapproval to the proud speeches of Bard and Thorin, and takes his own steps to break heroic deadlock.

‘Really you know,’ Bilbo was saying in his best business manner, ‘things are impossible. Personally I am tired of the whole affair. I wish I was back in the West in my own home, where folk are more reasonable. But I have an interest in this matter – one fourteenth share, to be precise, according to a letter, which fortunately I believe I have kept.’ He drew from a pocket in his old jacket (which he still wore over his mail), crumpled and much folded, Thorin’s letter that had been put under the clock on his mantelpiece in May!

‘A share in the profits, mind you,’ he went on. ‘I am aware of that. Personally I am only too ready to consider all your claims carefully, and deduct what is right from the total before putting in my own claim.’ (p. 250)

This speech and speaker could hardly be less like the ones that surround it. Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax-deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English till 1604, and then only in Aberdeen, ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later, ‘total’, not used as here till 1557, ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo. But what is the effect here of this final sharp juxtaposition between Bard and Bilbo, ‘hero’ and ‘businessman’?

It does continue The Hobbit’s strong vein of comedy. It also leads to a sort of ‘eucatastrophe’, to use Tolkien’s own term, as Mr Baggins and the sympathetic reader with him find themselves and the modern code of humility and compromise regarded with gratifying wonder by the Elvenking and Gandalf himself. Still, the comedy is not all one way, for Bilbo remains faintly ridiculous; no one should see The Hobbit as a straight progression from satire against the modern world to satire against the ancient one. What chapter 16 and the scenes around it do most powerfully, perhaps, is to enforce a plea for tolerance across an enormous gap of times and attitudes and ethical styles. On the one hand there is Bilbo Baggins, with his virtue of ‘moral courage’ or readiness ‘to encounter odium, disapproval, or contempt rather than depart from what he deems the right course’ (first recorded 1822); his corresponding vice is ‘self-distrust’ (1789). On the other we have Beorn, Thorin, Dain, whose virtue can only be described by such a non-English noun as the Old Norse drengskapr – magnanimity, the awareness of being a warrior and so on one’s dignity, the quality Dain shows in ratifying Thorin’s agreement even though Thorin is dead – and whose vice is a kind of selfish materialism. Neither side is better than the other, or has any right to criticise. The contrast is one of styles, not of good and bad. Accordingly, though throughout The Hobbit there have been scenes where the pretensions of one have been exposed by the other (Bilbo sneering at Thorin’s elevated language, p. 198, Gloin cutting Bilbo very short at p. 19), by the end even the two linguistic styles have become invulnerable to each other’s ironies:

‘Good-bye and good luck, wherever you fare!’ said Balin at last. ‘If ever you visit us again, when our halls are made fair once more, then the feast shall indeed be splendid!’

‘If ever you are passing my way,’ said Bilbo, ‘don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!’ (p. 269)

There is not much in common between the language of these two speakers; nevertheless it is perfectly clear that they are saying the same thing. Going on from his beliefs in ‘the reality of language’ and ‘the reality of history’, Tolkien was perhaps beginning to arrive at a third: ‘the reality of human nature’.




The bewilderment of Smaug


This is a slippery and a dangerous concept. If there is one thing which twentieth-century anthropology has proved, it is that people are different, and that even matters which appear entirely natural or instinctive are so enmeshed in nets of custom as to make it impossible to detect ‘human universals’. There is no sign that Tolkien took any notice of modern anthropology, but then he hardly needed to. Ancient texts would provide him with any number of examples of how what is now considered natural might be in another age unthinkable, or vice versa. People’s behaviour all too evidently changes. But isn’t there something underneath the nets of custom that remains the same? Something that would link modern Englishmen with their Anglo-Saxon ancestors just as philology sees, beneath a thousand years of change, essential continuity between the language of Beowulf and that of today?

Tolkien must have been brooding on this question for many years. In 1923 he published in The Gryphon (the magazine of Leeds’s Yorkshire College) a poem called ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’, the first version of what was to become in 1970 ‘The Hoard’. The first title is better, though, for it means ‘the gold of ancient men, wound round with magic’, it is line 3052 of Beowulf’, and it points to a notorious difficulty in that poem over the hero’s motives. When he went to fight his dragon he appeared to do so for the best of reasons, i.e. to protect his people. On the other hand he also showed a keen interest in the treasure, which the dragon was only trying to guard, having been provoked by the theft of a cup by a passing runaway (or ‘burglar’). At one point indeed, in a violently-disputed passage, the poet seems to say that there was a curse on the gold, so that the man who plundered it ‘should be guilty of sin, be shut up in devil’s haunts, bound in hell-bands and tormented grievously. Yet by no means too eagerly had Beowulf before gazed upon its owner’s treasure of gold with the curse on it.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Was Beowulf guilty or not? Did the curse punish him or not? Certainly the hoard he wins brings death to him and disaster to his people. Maybe this is also a punishment for the spark of avarice the poet is hinting at. But then maybe the dragon-curse is itself avarice. So Tolkien suggested in the 1923 poem, tracing in successive stanzas the transmission of a treasure from elf to dwarf to dragon to hero and ending with the picture of an old and miserly king overthrown by his rivals and leaving his gold to oblivion. All the characters in it are the same: they begin with vitality, mirth and courage, they end in age, wealth and squalor. Their decline is caused by gold. Could their progress also be a kind of analogue of human history, beginning in heroic endeavour and ending in ‘commercialism’, ‘materialism’, ‘industrialism’, that whole series of distinctively modern concepts which nevertheless centre if not on gold, on that ‘idolatry of artefacts’ which C. S. Lewis called, in evident agreement with Tolkien, the ‘great corporate sin of our own civilisation’?


(#litres_trial_promo) If one does think that for a moment, there is a further corollary: just as old miser grew out of young hero eager for treasure, so the ‘great corporate sin’ of modernity must have had some ancient origin. This sinful continuity between ancient and modern must have been on Tolkien’s mind as he finished The Hobbit.

There is in the final chapters a continuum of greed. Least reprehensible is the Elvenking’s: he likes artefacts, but for their beauty, and is satisfied in the end with the emeralds of Girion. Bard is more modern in tone, but is let off as well since his motives are so clearly constructive. Bilbo too, with his ethic of being ‘well-to-do’ rather than vulgarly ‘rich’, is relatively immune. The dwarves, though, have very strong feelings about treasure, especially their ‘pale enchanted gold’ or gold galdre bewunden;


(#litres_trial_promo) they even put ‘a great many spells’ over the trolls’ hoard, just in case. As soon as they come within range of Smaug’s treasure its spell starts to work on them. They send Bilbo down the tunnel; they rejoice prematurely; on first sight of the treasure they have to be dragged away from it by Bilbo, ‘not without many a backward glance of longing’. Finally Thorin himself is obsessively determined to give nothing to Bard or elves or Lakemen, and when forced to disgorge by Bilbo’s theft of the Arkenstone, thinks against normal dwarvish behaviour-patterns of breaking his word. ‘So strong was the bewilderment of the treasure upon him, he was pondering whether by the help of Dain he might not recapture the Arkenstone and withhold the share of the reward.’

‘Bewilderment’ is a good word there. In modern parlance it means ‘mental confusion’, which is fair enough as a description of Thorin’s state; he has no idea how he will reach his ends, or what these ends are, only that parting with treasure is not among them. The modern sense however arises from the physical one of being ‘lost in the wild’, and Thorin is that too, being stuck in the centre of the Desolation of Smaug with plenty of gold but little to eat; he could end up as literally ‘bewildered’ as the Master of Laketown who, fleeing with his city’s share of the treasure, ‘died of starvation in the waste’. There is even a third sense of the word to remind us of the visible, tactile source of the treasure’s power, the quality that makes the dwarves run their fingers through it: it means ‘a tangled or labyrinthine condition of objects’, says the OED, quoting (1884) ‘What a bewilderment of light and color met her eyes’. When one thinks of the dim images of gold and jewels and ‘silver red-stained in the ruddy light’ which is Bilbo’s first glimpse of the hoard, one sees that this sense for ‘the bewilderment of the treasure’ is appropriate too.

Thorin’s ‘bewilderment’ is physical and mental and moral as well. The ‘dragon-sickness’ which he and the Master of Laketown catch is also simultaneously magical and moral. At the bottom of it there lies an old superstition which says that dragons are actually misers who have in greed and despair walled themselves up alive, ‘lain down on their gold’ as sagas say. Naturally the gold on which they have brooded (see Hobbit, p. 243) exudes a miasma of avarice. Yet one has the sense of an external force meeting an internal weakness, especially strong in the artefact-worshipping dwarves, and in the Master whose mind was given ‘to trades and tolls, to cargoes and gold’, who despises old songs and speaks on occasion (p. 233) with a distinctive post-Industrial Revolution modernity. This is in fact a complex and successful presentation of the motives behind a real historical change; one might usefully compare the scene at the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), where the revolutionaries against the Automated State turn obsessively, with their first success, to tinkering with machines. Both books are making the same sort of (not very liberal) point: things, metal things, are genuinely fun to play with, but it’s very hard to stop the fun from getting out of hand, though only in the twentieth century have we become really aware of that. Hence the ‘continuum of greed’ from Elvenking to Master. Hence, too, the brooding from 1923 on the word galdor. Besides ‘spell’ and ‘bewilderment’ it also means ‘poetry’; you could say that the ‘enchantment’ of the treasure is a kind of wicked equivalent of ‘glamour’.

There is however another character in this continuum, indeed at one end of it, and that is Smaug. His name is another ‘asterisk word’, being the past tense *smaug of a Germanic verb *smugan, ‘to squeeze through a hole’, as Tolkien said in his 1938 Observer letter; also the Old Norse equivalent of an Old English magic word found in a spell wið sméogan wyrme, ‘against the penetrating worm’. But he has a mental sense as well as a physical one, since O.E. sméagan also means ‘to inquire into’ and in adjectival form ‘subtle, crafty’.


(#litres_trial_promo) All round it is appropriate that Smaug should have the most sophisticated intelligence in The Hobbit.

Bilbo’s conversation with him is indeed a brilliant stroke. Like so much in the book it has a model in an Eddic poem, Fáfnismál, in which Sigurthr and Fáfnir talk while the dragon dies of the wound the hero has given him. Like Bilbo, Sigurthr refuses to tell the dragon his name but replies riddlingly (for fear of being cursed); like Smaug, Fáfnir sows dissension between partners by remarking on the greed that gold excites; the dissension actually breaks out when eating the dragon’s heart helps Sigurthr to understand bird-talk (another prominent Hobbit motif). Nevertheless Fáfnismál once again did not offer Tolkien enough. It drifted off into mere exchange of information, it contained as Tolkien said of Beowulf too much ‘draconitas’ and not enough ‘draco’, not enough of the ‘real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own’ (‘Monsters’, pp. 258–9). Tolkien therefore set himself to repair this gap, and did so once more by introducing a strong dose of anachronistic modernity.

Thus the most remarkable thing about Smaug is his oddly circumlocutory mode of speech. He speaks in fact with the characteristic aggressive politeness of the British upper class, in which irritation and authority are in direct proportion to apparent deference or uncertainty. ‘You have nice manners for a thief and a liar’ are his opening words to Bilbo (their degree of irony unclear). ‘You seem familiar with my name, but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?’ He might be a testy colonel approached by a stranger in a railway carriage; why has Bilbo not been introduced? At the same time the ‘bestial life’ of the worm keeps intruding, as he remarks on Bilbo’s smell and boasts parenthetically ‘I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf – none better’, or when he rolls over, ‘absurdly pleased’ like a clumsy spaniel, to show the hobbit his armoured belly. One result is a frequent and vivid sense of paradox, which the ancient world, innocent of scientific rationalism, could hardly have developed: Smaug has both wings and weight, as we are reminded when he leaves his lair and ‘float[s] heavy and slow in the dark like a monstrous crow’ (my italics); and in the cold reptilian belly he keeps hot fire, which peeps out from under his eyelids when he pretends to sleep and flashes ‘like scarlet lightning’ when he is amused. The paradoxes, the oscillations between animal and intelligent behaviour, the contrast between creaky politeness of speech and plain gloating over murder, all help to give Smaug his dominant characteristic of ‘wiliness’, and what the narrator calls with utter modernity (the noun dates in this sense from 1847) his ‘overwhelming personality’.

All this gives great plausibility to another unexpected datum which the narrator springs on us, i.e. ‘the effect that dragon-talk has on the inexperienced’, the ‘dragon-spell’ which keeps prompting Bilbo to run out and confess. No ancient text contains any such motif, but as Smaug oozes confidentially on – ‘I will give you one piece of advice … I suppose you got a fair price. Come now, did you? … Well, that’s just like them … I don’t know if it has occurred to you … Bless me! Had you never thought of the catch?’ – he assumes the ‘Old experienced’ end of the polarity so strongly that it is no surprise for Bilbo to find himself pressed towards the ‘young innocent’ one. Yet the combined magico-moral effect (is it ‘spell’ or is it ‘personality’?) reminds one also of the ‘dragon-sickness’ that Smaug and his treasure between them seem practically and magically to generate. The character of Smaug is part of a Zusammenhang: nothing could be more archaic or fantastic than a dragon brooding on its gold, and yet the strong sense of familiarity in this one’s speech puts it back into the ‘continuum of greed’, makes it just dimly possible that dragon-motivations could on their different scale have some affinity with human ones – even real historical human ones.

If one followed this line of reasoning too far The Hobbit could appear suddenly as a roman à thèse, or even an allegory, in which Bilbo Baggins as Modern Man embarks on his Pilgrim’s Progress (or Regress) into Fantasy, only to find that at the very heart of his monsterworld there is none other than an embodiment of his own worst nature, Greed or even Capitalism itself, skulking on its gold like a fiercer Miss Havisham. The moral would be that all bourgeois must turn Burglar, or something of the sort. Of course such a reading would only be a joke. Still, if by no stretch of the imagination an allegory, The Hobbit does begin to show by its conclusion some flickers of the ‘large symbolism’ Tolkien saw in Beowulf and tried more positively to reproduce in The Lord of the Rings. In its last scene, the conversation between Gandalf, Bilbo and Balin, the wizard is allowed to make the point that metaphors can ‘after a fashion’ be true, that romance and reality are differences of presentation not of fact. The logic of what he says is that if the matter behind old songs can contain someone as prosaic as Bilbo then maybe even the prosaic events of today will sometime be the matter of old songs. There is accordingly a reality, and a continuity, in human nature, even dwarf-hobbit-human nature.

Yet the reason why this hint should not be taken further is obvious enough. Most of The Hobbit suggests strongly that Tolkien did not work from ideas, but from words, names, consistencies and contradictions in folk-tales, things as localised as the dissatisfaction with Fáfnismál which produced Smaug, the brooding over the riddle-contests of Vafðrúðnismál or The Saga of King Heidrek which led (somehow) to Gollum. The two most powerful fragments of all ancient poetry for Tolkien at this time, I cannot help thinking, were the two similar bits from Beowulf and Sir Gawain which imply there are whole worlds the narrator simply cannot get round to. The Old English poet hints at the ‘wide journeys’ which Sigemund the dragon-slayer made, ‘the wicked deeds and battles which the children of men’ (but maybe not of monsters) ‘never knew clearly’. His medieval successor says of Sir Gawain six centuries later that he would never even have reached his main adventure ‘Had he not been stalwart and staunch and steadfast in God’, so many were his clashes with worms and wolves, with wood-trolls ‘and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells’. In exactly the same spirit we are told that even going home Bilbo ‘had many hardships and adventures before he got back’, since ‘The Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it in those days beside goblins’. Some of them have been half-glimpsed already: eyes in the darkness, ‘old castles with an evil look’, ‘startled ears’ responding to the news of the death of Smaug. But in essence the plot of The Hobbit is a tour through darknesses, with no more connection between Gollum and the eagles and Beorn and the spiders than that of one-after-another. The true end of The Hobbit, as opposed to the last scene of chaos and tidying-up,


(#ulink_3c1a8bef-0c48-5328-beac-5b0832b87361) is the regretful farewell to the Wild just before, as archaic Took cedes to Edwardian Baggins:

They came to that high point at morning, and looking backward they saw a white sun shining over the outstretched lands. There behind lay Mirkwood, blue in the distance, and darkly green at the nearer edge even in the spring. There far away was the Lonely Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale.

‘So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!’ said Bilbo, and he turned his back on his adventure. (p. 271)

Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it. Insofar as the two worlds are related it is because the ‘inner consistency’ of Secondary Art must necessarily (in order to be consistent) be the same as that of Primary Art or truth.




(#ulink_21b3377c-a46c-505b-a833-f5d619599406) There are too many of these to fit into an argument: one might note, though, that the skill of Tolkien’s elves in archery goes back to ‘elf-shot’; that their association with the sea and their taking of Frodo is very like the passing of Arthur in (and only in) the account of Lazamon, a twelfth-century Worcestershire poet whom Tolkien regarded as the last preserver of Old English tradition; that the gifts of Galadriel correspond to stories preserved in English and Scandinavian family traditions such as that of ‘the Luck of Edenhall’ or the one recorded in Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter, part 2, ch. 6; that ‘elvishness’ is a quality recognised in men several times in The Lord of the Rings, but also ascribed to himself by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Tolkien makes no use, however, of the very common ‘changeling’ belief.




(#ulink_eb2ed21b-cfa9-5033-a54f-88e684b26f0a) ‘Orcs’ go back to the orcnéas, the ‘demon-corpses’ of the Beowulf-poet, and to another Old English word orcþyrs, ‘orc-giant’. ‘Wargs’ are a linguistic cross between Old Norse vargr and Old English wearh, two words showing a shift of meaning from ‘wolf’ to ‘human outlaw’. For the ‘ents’ see below (#litres_trial_promo) and note Tolkien’s own comment in Letters, p. 208, that ‘As usually with me, they grew rather out of their name, than the other way about’. The ‘woses’ are perhaps primarily an apology for Sir Gawain line 721, where wodwos is offered as a plural, though historically a singular derived from Old English wudu-wása. It would not have escaped Tolkien, though, that his office at Leeds University (like mine) stood just off ‘Woodhouse Lane’, which crosses ‘Woodhouse Moor’ and ‘Woodhouse Ridge’. These names may preserve, in mistaken modern spelling, old belief in ‘the wild men of the woods’ lurking in the hills above the Aire. See further Tolkien’s notes on ‘Orc’ and ‘Woses’ in ‘Guide’.




(#ulink_1b5728df-bb6f-5c04-a791-e5eaa0bbe7af) I do not know the origin of the personal name ‘Bilbo’, but can record that on one occasion I found myself using Ordnance Survey map no. 161, of S. Herefordshire, to locate churches of similar date to Ancrene Wisse and preserving fragments of the early Anglo-Norse style of stonework. As I did this my eye moved west from Kilpeck to Wormbridge to Abbey Dore to a hill called ‘Great Bilbo’. The Place-Name Survey has not done Herefordshire yet, and I have no explanation for the name; maybe Tolkien had one of his own.




(#ulink_57f21d85-2f4f-55bc-87f5-e343a5addc29) The contract he finally does deliver on p. 22 is typically more practical than Bilbo at his most business-like had thought. It covers profits, delivery, travelling expenses, but also defrayal of funeral expenses, ‘by us or our represenatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for’. This means, ‘you or all of us may die, and also be eaten’.




(#ulink_5691d223-e66c-5279-b859-3815592fb18a) There is a further weak analogue in the Grimms’ tale no. 195, ‘The Grave-Mound’, and a much stronger one in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (London: Bodley Head, 1945), end of chapter 16. There, though, the tale is given a moral significance, a little like Tolkien explaining ‘elf-time’ in Lothlórien.




(#ulink_46d6dc02-ae96-5f0d-b6d3-7734ff02feae) Even this, I suspect, has a philological root. In the 1928 introduction he wrote to W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, mentioned above in connection with ‘Baggins’, Tolkien had said that it was important to observe ‘the changes in sense that take place when words of more “learned” origin are adopted and put to everyday use in dialect (see keȩnsil, okshȩn, inséns)’. But okshȩn in Huddersfield dialect meant not ‘auction’ but ‘mess’. ‘Shu’z nout but ȩ slut; ȩr eȩs ȩz ȩ feȩr okshȩn’, quoted Mr Haigh, or for non-natives, ‘She’s nothing but a slut; her house is a fair auction’. When he gets home Mr Baggins finds his house a ‘fair auction’ in both senses. Not only are they selling his goods, they are failing to wipe their feet on the mat! The word has become a ‘fusion-point’ of outraged respectability.





CHAPTER 4 A CARTOGRAPHIC PLOT (#ulink_5b5ce892-6904-5b6b-b9fa-e408e9120d6a)

Maps and Names


Seventeen years went by between the publication of The Hobbit and that of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is true that in the interim a World War was fought, and Tolkien’s family grew up, while Tolkien himself was committed to many professorial duties which, as he later insisted, he did not neglect. Nevertheless the main reason for the long hiatus was the pace and nature of Tolkien’s own creativity. He remained absorbed in Middle-earth, to it indeed he dedicated his ‘years of authority’ as a scholar; but he found the composition of The Lord of the Rings a matter which had to be allowed to obey its own laws. Thanks to the publication of (in particular) volumes VI to IX of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, we now know a good deal more about this process than we did when this book was first written.

To begin with, one can see that Tolkien was perhaps taken aback by, and was certainly not prepared for the success of The Hobbit and the very natural demand by his publishers for a sequel to it. As we again now know much more clearly, and as is discussed in chapter 7 below, he had been working on what was to become The Silmarillion for many years, and had a great deal of material available from that. He sent selections from this corpus to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, in November 1937 (The Hobbit had been published in September of that year), only to have them politely rejected, probably on the basis of a partial reading, a month later.


(#litres_trial_promo) Stanley Unwin wanted a sequel, not a prequel, and more about hobbits, not about elves. Between 16th and 19th December 1937 Tolkien accordingly began to write on from the end of The Hobbit, calling his initial chapter, as it was to remain right through to final publication, ‘A long-expected party’. However, what is bound to surprise anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings who then reads through Tolkien’s early drafts in The Return of the Shadow is quite how little Tolkien had in the way of a plan, or even of a conception.

Bilbo’s ring certainly came into the story. But it is (according to a note written perhaps a couple of months after starting) ‘Not very dangerous, when used for good purpose’, see Shadow p. 42. As Christopher Tolkien points out, the ring remains for some time no more than a ‘highly convenient magical device’, the ‘central conception of the Ruling Ring’ being ‘not yet present’; the moment when this ‘central idea’ came to Tolkien is still not clear, see Shadow pp. 70, 87, 227. Meanwhile the character who was to become Aragorn, or Strider, begins his career as ‘a queer-looking, brown-faced hobbit’ called Trotter, who always wears wooden shoes, first encountered just like Aragorn in The Prancing Pony in Bree. ‘Trotter’ gave Tolkien immense trouble: at least three times he wrote ‘Who is Trotter?’ as a note to himself, and came up with repeated discrepant guesses – he was a cousin of Bilbo, he was a hobbit who was also a Ranger, he was an elf in disguise – only to fix eventually on him as a human and descendant of the Men of the North. Even after the character had become fixed as the tall and long-legged Aragorn, though, Tolkien stuck determinedly to the increasingly inapposite name ‘Trotter’, even writing in the defence of it which was to survive into the finished version of The Lord of the Rings as the defence of ‘Telcontar’ (see respectively for the above Shadow pp. 137, 210, 214, 223; Treason p. 6; War p. 390; and LOTR p. 845). As Christopher Tolkien repeatedly notes, his father could be extremely tenacious in holding on to a scene through several revisions, while at the same time sharply altering its context and meaning. But in these early stages it would be truer to say that Tolkien was ‘sleeepwalking’ his way towards a plot than that he was proceeding according to a plan. I look back with some shame (see ‘Preface (#u18c934c0-6607-597b-bb93-9787598f17c9)’ to this edition) on my early attempt to diagnose one from Tolkien’s finished product. No wonder the Professor would have liked to ‘talk more’ with me ‘about design as it appears or may be found’! He would have told me that the design I was anxious to find simply wasn’t there, not from the beginning and possibly not at all. Nevertheless, to quote Bilbo, ‘Not all those who wander are lost’. While Tolkien did not have a grand design or central conception, had made no plans for a sequel to The Hobbit, and could not directly use his ‘Silmarillion’ material, he was not entirely without pre-existing resources. Something of what was going on in his mind is revealed by one of the major differences between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: their use of maps and names.




Maps and Names


In The Hobbit names are astonishingly rare. There are of course the twelve dwarves, all taken from the Dvergatal poem, and apprehended I suspect by most readers as a homogeneous unit broken only by Fili and Kili, who are young, Bombur, who is fat, Balin, who is kindly, and Thorin, who is boss. There are few elf-names, and none of those which do occur – Bladorthin, Dominion, Girion, Galion, Moria, Esgaroth – is at all prominent in the story. The Elvenking remains anonymous in The Hobbit and is identified as Thranduil only in The Lord of the Rings p. 234. The only hobbit surnames given are Baggins, Took and Sackville-Baggins (this last to prove an anomaly in Middle-earth and a failure of tone), with ‘Messrs Grubb, Grubb and Burrowes’ the auctioneers at the very end. Elrond, Azog, Radagast, the ravens’ onomatopoeic Roäc and Carc – these all but complete The Hobbit’s list. A common practice for Tolkien at this stage was simply to make names out of capital letters. Thus Bilbo lives in a tunnel which goes ‘not quite straight into the side of the hill – The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it’. The stream at the foot of The Hill is called The Water, the hobbits’ town on The Water is called Hobbiton (near Bywater), and so on into Wilderland, where we find the Misty Mountains, the Long Lake, the Lonely Mountain, a river called Running and a valley called Dale. Even ‘Gandalf’ is actually a name of this type. It also comes from the Dvergatal, where it is near Thráinn, Thorinn and Thrór, but Tolkien evidently regarded it with some suspicion since it contained the element -álfr, while it was his opinion that elves and dwarves cohabited only in the pages of the OED. So what was ‘Gandalf’ doing in a dwarves’ roster, and anyway what was a ‘gand-’? If Tolkien looked in the Icelandic Dictionary of R. Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson he would have found the opinions that the meaning of gandr was ‘somewhat dubious’ but probably ‘anything enchanted or an object used by sorcerers’, while gandálfr was either ‘a wizard’ or maybe a ‘bewitched demon’. He concluded, clearly, that this dictionary definition was once again wrong, and that gandr meant ‘wand’ or ‘staff (the common property of wizards as one can tell even from Shakespeare’s Prospero or Milton’s Comus). Accordingly when Gandalf first appears ‘All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff’ (my italics).


(#litres_trial_promo) He turns out not to be an elf, but by the end of The Lord of the Rings it is clear he comes from Elvenhome. ‘Gandalf’ is in fact, then, not a name but a description, as with Beorn, Gollum, the Necromancer, and other people, places and things in The Hobbit.

Since The Silmarillion, with its developed nomenclature, was already in existence, it would be wrong to say that Tolkien in the 1930s was not interested in names. It does look, though, as if he was not sure how to bring them into fiction, especially if they were English names. Yet the point had caught his attention. As The Hobbit neared completion he focused on the problem with sudden clarity – as one can see from Farmer Giles of Ham, not published till 1949, but composed apparently in the period 1935–8, i.e. overlapping with the final production of The Hobbit (see Bibliography, pp. 73–4). This throws many interesting sidelights on Tolkien’s fictional development. For one thing it is the only one of his stories set unmistakably in England, and while its history is that of nursery-rhyme


(#litres_trial_promo) its geography is remarkably clear. Ham is now Thame, a town in Buckinghamshire twelve miles east of Oxford. Worminghall is four miles away and Oakley, which had its parson eaten, five. The capital of the Middle Kingdom, ‘some twenty leagues distant from Ham’, sounds like Tamworth, the historical capital of the Mercian kings, sixty-eight miles from Thame as the crow flies (a league, NB, is three miles). Farthingho in Northamptonshire, where once ‘an outpost against the Middle Kingdom was maintained’, is on a direct line between those two places about a third of the way from Thame – proof of the ‘Little Kingdom’s’ lack of territorial ambition. Wales, where the giants live, and the (Pennine) mountains where the dragons live are on this parochial scale suitably far off. And when Farmer Giles refuses to listen to tales about the folk ‘North over the hills and far away, beyond the Standing Stones and all’, he means Warwickshire, probably, whose boundary with Oxfordshire runs by the Rollright Stones.

All in all it is extremely unfair of the imagined ‘editor’ of Farmer Giles to criticise its imagined ‘author’ for feeble geography; that ‘author’, like Tolkien, ‘lived himself in the lands of the Little Kingdom’ and knew what he was writing about. But what is the point of this sudden precision? Evidently, Tolkien wanted to recreate a timeless and idealised England (or rather Britain) in which the place and the people remained the same regardless of politics. The story of Farmer Giles is therefore largely the triumph of native over foreign (for in Giles’s court ‘the vulgar tongue came into fashion, and none of his speeches were in the Book–latin’), as simultaneously of worth over fashion and of heroic song and popular lay over pompous pernickety rationalistic scholarship. In all these ways Farmer Giles




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