Tolkien Studies

Volume II

Edited by

Douglas A. Anderson

Michael D. C. Drout

Verlyn Flieger

West Virginia University Press

Morgantown 2005

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review

EDITORS

Douglas A. Anderson

Michael D. C. Drout

Verlyn Flieger

EDITORIAL BOARD

David Bratman

Marjorie Burns

Carl F. Hostetter

Gergely Nagy

Tom Shippey

Richard C. West

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (ISSN 1547-3155) appears annually in April. It is published by West Virginia University Press, P.O. Box 6295, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-6295; www.wvupress.com; e-mail: press@wvu.edu. Subscription rates: Institution: $120/year; $224/2 years; individuals $60/year; $112/2 years. Outside the USA (all funds in US dollars) add $20 for air-expedited delivery. Send subscriptions (checks payable to WVU Press) plus change-of-address requests (include old address with new address) to Tolkien Studies, P.O. Box 6295, West Virginia University Press, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-6295.

Material in Tolkien Studies may be photographed for the noncommercial purpose of educational or scientific advancement. Formal permission must be sought for all other purposes from the publisher.

Copyright © 2005, by West Virginia University Press.

All rights reserved.

Volume 2 (2005) by West Virginia University Press

ISBN (hardback) 1-933202-03-3

Cover photograph courtesy of The Oxford Mail.

Support for Volume 2 of Tolkien Studies was provided by Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts.

Contents

Editors’ Introduction

Conventions and Abbreviations

“And She Named Her Own Name”: Being True To One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth

Richard C. West

Richard C. West: A Checklist

Compiled by Douglas A. Anderson

Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon

Miryam Librán-Moreno

The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire

Judy Ann Ford

World Creation as Colonization: British Imperialism in “Aldarion and Erendis”

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem

“Tricksy Lights”: Literary and Folkloric Elements in Tolkien’s Passage of the Dead Marshes

Margaret Sinex

Tolkien and Modernism

Patchen Mortimer

Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius

John Wm. Houghton and Neal K. Keesee

A Definitive Identification of Tolkien’s “Borgil”: An Astronomical and Literary Approach

Kristine Larsen

Love: “The Gift of Death”

Linda Greenwood

Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth

Michael J. Brisbois

Obituary: Humphrey Carpenter (1946 – 2005)

Douglas A. Anderson

Notes and Documents

The Birthplace of J. R. R. Tolkien

Beth Russell

J. R. R. Tolkien and W. Rhys Roberts’s “Gerald of Wales on the Survival of Welsh”

Douglas A. Anderson

Gilraen’s Linnod: Function, Genre, Prototype

Sandra Ballif Straubhaar

Little Nell and Frodo the Halfling

Dale Nelson

Book Reviews

Addenda and Corrigenda to the 2001-2002 Tolkien Studies Bibliography

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2001-2002

David Bratman

Bibliography (in English) for 2003

Compiled by Michael D.C. Drout with Melissa Smith-MacDonald

Notes on Contributors

Editors’ Introduction

This is the second issue of Tolkien Studies, a refereed journal dedicated to the scholarly study of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien Studies is the first academic journal solely devoted to Tolkien. As editors, our goal is to publish excellent scholarship on Tolkien as well as to gather useful research information, reviews, notes, documents, and bibliographical material.

With the exception of a lead article in each issue (solicited from acknowledged experts in the field) all articles published have been subject to anonymous, external review. All articles require a positive judgment from the Editors before being sent to reviewers, and articles that the Editors agreed upon had to receive a least one positive evaluation from an external referee in order to be published. In the cases of articles by individuals associated with the journal in any way, each article had to receive at least two positive evaluations from two different outside reviewers. All identifying information was removed from the articles before they were sent to the reviewers, and all reviewer comments were likewise anonymously conveyed to the authors of the articles.

Douglas A. Anderson

Michael D.C. Drout

Verlyn Flieger

Notes on Submissions

Tolkien Studies seeks works of scholarly quality and depth. Substantial essays and shorter, “Notes and Documents” pieces are both welcome.

Submissions should be double-spaced throughout and use parenthetical citations in the (Author page) form. A “Works Cited” page should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. All citations to Tolkien’s works should follow the “Conventions and Abbreviations” of Tolkien Studies.

Self-addressed, stamped envelopes should accompany all correspondence unless the author wishes to communicate via email and does not wish the hard-copy manuscript to be returned, in which case this requirement is waived.

Electronic submissions are preferred. These may be sent to any of the editors or to the Tolkien Studies email address (tolkienstudies@wheatoncollege.edu) as attachments. Microsoft Word is the preferred word-processing program.

Tolkien Studies encourages researchers to send us offprints of articles for inclusion in the yearly “Bibliography” and “Year’s Work.” Offprints, hard-copy manuscripts, and correspondence should be sent to:

Tolkien Studies

c/o Prof. Michael Drout

Wheaton College

26 East Main Street

Norton, MA 02766

Books for review should be sent to:

Tolkien Studies

c/o Douglas A. Anderson

P.O. Box 493

Marcellus, MI 49067

Electronic submissions may also be sent to any of the following:

Douglas A. Anderson <nodens@locallink.net>

Michael D. C. Drout <mdrout@wheatoncollege.edu>

Verlyn Flieger <Verlyn@mythus.com>

Acknowledgments

The Editors would like to thank Wheaton College, Norton, MA, Provost Susannne Woods, and Wheaton Research Partners for their support. The efforts of editorial assistants Stefanie Olsen and Melissa Smith-MacDonald contributed a great deal to the success of the issue, as has the support of Paula Krebs, Marilyn Todesco, Rebekah Long, Dennis K. Lien, Vaughn Howland, and Raquel D’Oyen. It has continued to be a pleasure to work with West Virginia University Press; thanks to Patrick Conner, and especially to Hilary Attfield for all her work in the production of the issue. We owe a special debt of gratitude to our anonymous, outside reviewers, who have far exceeded our expectations and in their collegial service have contributed so much to Tolkien Studies.

Conventions and Abbreviations

Because there are so many editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, citations will be by book and chapter as well as by page-number (referenced to the editions listed below). Thus a citation from The Fellowship of the Ring, book two, chapter four, page 318 is written (FR, II, iv, 318). The “Silmarillion” indicates the body of stories and poems developed over many years by Tolkien; The Silmarillion indicates the volume first published in 1977.

Abbreviations

B&C

Beowulf and the Critics. Michael D. C. Drout, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 248. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2002.

Bombadil

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

FR

The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1987.

H

The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Douglas A. Anderson. Second edition, revised. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Jewels

The War of the Jewels. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Lays

The Lays of Beleriand. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Letters

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Lost Road

The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Lost Tales I

The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Lost Tales II

The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

LotR

The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien; the work itself irrespective of edition.

MC

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Morgoth

Morgoth’s Ring. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

PS

Poems and Stories. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Peoples

The Peoples of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

RK

The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin 1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

S

The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Second edition. London: HarperCollins, 1999; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Sauron

Sauron Defeated. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Shadow

The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Shaping

The Shaping of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

TL

Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books, 1964; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Expanded as Tree and Leaf, including the Poem Mythpoeia [and] The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

TT

The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Treason

The Treason of Isengard. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

UT

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

War

The War of the Ring. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

“And She Named Her Own Name”: Being True To One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth

Richard C. West

Picture the scene as the quest of Beren and Lúthien comes to its climax. The fortress of Thangorodrim, walled by mountains, redoubtable, all but impregnable, has defeated supernaturally powerful armies of Elves and will not be conquered until the Valar (one might say the gods themselves) form an army to come against it. In the “nethermost hall, that was upheld by horror, lit by fire, and filled with weapons of death and torment” (S 180) is the throne room of its ruler, attended and guarded by fierce wolves, Orcs, and many Balrog-lords (Lays 296). (We may remember that in a later age a single Balrog proved a formidable enough foe for the Fellowship of the Ring.) On the throne sits a darkly majestic figure. Once he was one of the best and brightest of the Valar, in Tolkien’s mythology the godlike or (from a more Christian point of view) the angelic beings who helped imagine and shape the universe before the Creator gave it being, albeit he was one whose contributions often marred the design. Now he is that design’s chief adversary (in Hebrew, a satan), seeking to bend that creation to his own selfish will. He is named Melkor, “He who arises in Might” (S 340), but by this time is more often called Morgoth, the Black Enemy (S 341). He is lame in his left foot from a wound inflicted by the mighty Elf-King Fingolfin, who dared to face him in single combat but was killed in a terrible battle. His once-handsome face is scarred by the talons of Thorondor, Lord of Eagles (S 180). On his head he wears an iron crown in which are set the three Silmarils which he stole, and which alone preserve the light and power of the Two Trees that once (before they were destroyed at his instigation) illuminated the land of the Valar.

It is a scene that might daunt the hardiest. Indeed, the great hero Beren, who is in the shape of a wolf, hides beneath the throne, terrified. This is not because he lacks courage, either physical or moral: “…yet was he braver than most,” as the narrator of “The Tale of Tinúviel” puts it (Lost Tales II 11). He has been fighting guerrilla warfare for most of his life, slain many fearsome enemies, stood up to an Elf King, endured a harsh imprisonment, deliberately taken an arrow meant for Lúthien, and passed through many other perils on the quest to reach this point. He will accomplish many more valorous deeds after this. But in this scene he is facing what, in Tolkien’s mythology, is essentially the Devil himself in his very seat of power, and Beren is only a mortal man. To be scared out of one’s wits is a touch of realism within the fantasy.

The contrast makes Lúthien’s courage all the more remarkable. Not only does she confront Morgoth in his inner sanctum before his fiendish court, but she throws off the disguise that has allowed her to enter Thangorodrim, and further, as the summary in chapter XIX of The Silmarillion so startlingly phrases it, “and she named her own name” (S 180). Clever Morgoth had already seen that there was another person under her bat-disguise, recognizing the skin-change magic that had transformed her, so she loses little by discarding that. By giving her true name, however, she has, in mythological terms, placed herself in his power.1 It is perhaps the single greatest act of courage in the entire history of Middle-earth, which is not lacking in courageous actions.

Lúthien takes an enormous chance, but it works. Moreover, it works because she tells the truth. She says she has rebelled against her father by coming, and she has. Her father forbade her to go there, tried to get her to promise not to, and even imprisoned her (however comfortably) to prevent it. She says that the folk of Middle-earth whom she has met speak of the evil of Morgoth and his minions (and they do), but that she does not necessarily believe everything she hears (which is true of anyone) and has come to see for herself (which she has). If perhaps she finds the reality even more appalling than the reports, this need not be mentioned. She admits that Morgoth is wise and powerful, as he is, but does not add that his considerable abilities have been put to evil uses. She teasingly suggests that a place might be found for her in his service, and, well, so it might. She claims to be a good dancer, which is modest given what we have been shown earlier, but is still true. She says she hopes to please Morgoth with her dancing, which she does, and furthermore she succeeds very well indeed in this. Her plan depends on it, in fact.

Morgoth is himself an accomplished deceiver, but he is disarmed by her truth. Children who rebel against the well-intentioned dictums of their parents are not uncommon, so her tale is quite plausible. He realizes that in any case the daughter of King Thingol will be a valuable hostage. Having taken on the form of an aggressive male, he does not perceive any danger from an apparently delicate maiden (as he might have had it been a warrior who confronted him, whether a man like Beren or a shieldmaiden like Éowyn, or if he had detected an outright lie). Indeed so much has he deteriorated since he descended from the heavens that he lusts after this beautiful creature. So he leaves her free to sing and to dance, feeling he can imprison her later if need be, or otherwise make use of her as he will. Thus she has the opportunity to cast Morgoth and his entire court into an enchanted sleep, she and Beren recover a Silmaril and escape (though not without further difficulty), and evil has defeated itself.

Now, to some extent the analysis above may give a false impression, since the tale of Beren and Lúthien was never given a final form by its author. As was typical of Tolkien, the plot remains basically the same from the first version in 1917 onward, but it grows a great deal in the telling. Characters are added (like Gorlim the Unhappy or the faithful King Finrod ) or replaced (as Tevildo Prince of Cats is dropped but Sauron takes over his function) or changed (the minstrel who regularly plays while Lúthien dances is initially her brother, later a rival suitor for her hand), motivations are sharpened (asking Beren to obtain a Silmaril is done in jest in the original version, later as a cunning means of sending him to what should be certain death), Beren is sometimes a Man and sometimes an Elf, incidents are added and expanded, and, of course, the names of characters change quite often. My analysis quotes from three separate versions, but it closely follows the late summary, and I think it represents Tolkien’s latest thoughts insofar as we can discern them.

A major part of the evolution of the story is that, in the beginning, Lúthien Tinúviel does lie. Sometimes. So does Beren. Moreover the narrator gives justification for it. Thus says an Elf named Vëannë while telling the “Tale of Tinùviel” to Eriol the mariner: “Now all this that Tinúviel spake was a great lie in whose devising Huan had guided her, and maidens of the Eldar are not wont to fashion lies; yet have I never heard that any of the Eldar blamed her therein nor Beren afterward, and neither do I, for Tevildo was an evil cat and Melko the wickedest of all beings, and Tinúviel was in dire peril at their hands” (Lost Tales II 27). Similarly, earlier in the same version, Beren, captured by Orcs and brought before the Satanic being at that stage called Melko, falsely claims to have come to serve the Dark Lord. And the narrator Vëannë offers this opinion: “Now the Valar must have inspired that speech, or perchance it was a spell of cunning words cast on him in compassion by Gwendeling [Lúthien’s mother, later named Melian], for indeed it saved his life, and Melko … was willing to accept him as a thrall of his kitchens” (Lost Tales II 15).

Thus at an early stage (these passages date from 1917 into perhaps the mid-1920s) Tolkien found it morally acceptable for his heroes to dissimulate at least in dire circumstances, when it was a choice between lying or losing their lives, and those being deceived were themselves liars having their own weapon turned against them. “Tevildo…himself a great and skilled liar, was so deeply versed in the lies and subtleties of all the beasts and creatures that he seldom knew whether to believe what was said to him or not, and was wont to disbelieve all things save those he wished to believe true, and so was he often deceived by the more honest” (Lost Tales II 27). Those who lie readily expect others to do the same, and so may be caught in the trap of their own making in the same manner as Tevildo. A common theme throughout Tolkien’s fiction is that evil defeats itself in the end, and this is one example. But another theme is that it is dangerous to use the weapons employed by evil even with good intentions to defeat it: the plot of The Lord of the Rings turns on this point, that one who used the One Ring to overthrow Sauron would thereby be corrupted and merely take Sauron’s place as a new Dark Lord. The passages in which Tolkien defends the deceit of his heroes show how uneasy he felt about this: they protest too much, bringing in magical helpers, Huan the Hound of Valinor or Melian the Maia or the Valar themselves, to buttress the claim that lying was acceptable in the circumstances. To his Christian sensibilities, lying is too serious a sin to be lightly excused.

Part of the difficulty is that his models were pre-Christian mythologies in which mendacity could be held up as admirable, but even in those the matter is somewhat ambivalent. Homer’s Odysseus, besides being a courageous and skilled warrior, is crafty, always ready with a trick, quick to lie and aided by the gods in doing so. Yet the straightforward Achilles, who never stoops to stratagems, was admired as much or more by the ancient Greeks. In Norse mythology the devious Loki works sometimes on the side of good but more often of evil, while Odin the seeker of wisdom is also the patron god of oath-breakers, but it is blunt and honest Thor who appears to have been the most widely worshipped (Davidson passim). For in all times and places people know that for any society to function we must be able to trust one another, yet are aware that people do tell lies and can have a sneaking admiration for a clever trick that can bring success even if it is undeserved. Not to over-state this, however, it must be admitted that appreciation for being true to one’s word among our ancestors in pagan societies, while a factor, was muted. Achilles and Thor were admired more for their enormous strength than their (relative) honesty. It is in Jewish and Christian belief that God’s word is inviolate.

For an illustration of the sensibility common in pagan religions consider the story of Thor’s journey to Jotunheim, the land of the Giants, that would have been familiar to any medieval Norseman. The thunder god feels he has been shown up as weaker than the Giants, being (among a number of tests) unable to lift a large cat or empty a drinking horn, when actually he almost moved the Midgard Serpent from encircling the world and nearly drained the seas, but was prevented by supernatural illusion from realizing what was really happening.2 Part of the point of the story is Thor’s divine power, and part is that cunning can overcome even this. Probably the audience appreciated both, yet were on Thor’s side that the trickery is unworthy. Thor is often presented as not being overly bright, but that is not so for Loki, who was one of Thor’s companions on this journey and was equally deceived.

The early drafts of Tolkien’s private mythology show the same ambivalence, with the Valar usually acting like the good angelic powers of the Judeo-Christian tradition (the more so the more he revised it), but sometimes like the crafty pagan gods. When they decide that the evil Melko (as his name stood at that stage of composition) must be imprisoned for the good of everyone else, and so they need to get him out of his underground fortress and preferably without disastrously rending the world to do it, they lie to him with flattering words, promising to build him a magnificent hall if he will return with them to Valinor to take his place as the greatest among them. “Flattery savoured ever sweet in the nostrils of that Ainu, and for all his unfathomed wisdom many a lie of those he despised deceived him, were they clothed sweetly in words of praise…” (Lost Tales II 15). Even Manwë, the chief of the Valar, pretends to do homage to Melko so that they can get close enough to capture and chain him. It is the mighty but hot-tempered Tulkas “who even of policy could not endure to see the majesty of Manwë bow before the accursed one” (Lost Tales I 104) who precipitously seizes Melko before the play-acting can be completed.

There is a curious echo of this phrase in a cancelled passage in the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, when Gimli states, “But one thing I know, and that is, not for any device of policy would Aragorn set abroad a false tale” (War 425 n. 34). Where Tulkas will not dissemble “even of policy,” neither will Aragorn “for any device of policy.” Gimli is also one who is truthful,3 and he respects Aragorn for being above using a falsehood for any political advantage. Yet there are limits to this, and not dishonorable ones. Aragorn spends most of his life concealing his true name and his royal lineage from all but a trusted few, and this is a “device of policy” to keep Sauron from discovering that an heir of Isildur is alive to provide a royal rallying point and possibly unite the enemies of the Dark Lord. But it is not lying to withhold the whole truth from people who do not need to know it, and, whether he is known as Thorongil in Rohan and Gondor or Strider in Bree, he does not dissemble what quality of man he is, and he wins respect. Again and again he risks both his life and his hopes of regaining the throne of his ancestors in order to keep his word to protect the hobbits in the wilderness or the people of Rohan at Helm’s Deep. While people who are themselves treacherous may falsely jeer at him as “Stick-at-naught Strider” (FR, I, xi, 193) to good folk he is rightly known as a man true to his word.

Being truthful is not always such an easy thing to do, however virtuous one’s intentions. When Thorin Oakenshield is captured by Goblins and questioned by their king as to what he and his fellow Dwarves are doing in their territory, “obviously the exact truth would not do at all” (H, iv, 110). He begins by saying “Thorin the Dwarf at your service,” which could be dangerous if taken literally, but it is a formula regularly used when introducing oneself throughout The Hobbit and the ever-helpful narrator affirms this “is merely a polite nothing” (H, iv, 109). He goes on to explain that they took shelter in a cave without any thought of troubling the Goblins, the narrator observes “That was true enough!” (H, iv, 110) and we know this to be the case since Thorin’s party had no idea there was anyone else nearby. The further explanation that they are on their way to visit relatives is not so truthful, though in the end they will call an army of their people to come help them defend the treasure they recover from the dragon Smaug. Yet travelers waylaid by bandits are not under any obligation to reveal all their business, so prevaricating a little is a venial sin at worst, particularly when Thorin must know that this is basically another polite nothing that is not going to deceive the Great Goblin. The ethics of the matter are less clear in a parallel scene later (H, viii, 221) when he is similarly questioned by the Elvenking who does have a right to know why his subjects have been disturbed at their woodland revels, and so deserves a truthful reply, but even so the answer that the Dwarves are lost and famished and looking for help should be sufficient truth without telling all about their private quest.

Curiously, the one in The Hobbit who commits perhaps the worst violation of the truth is the titular hobbit himself, Bilbo Baggins. Not that he is really untrustworthy. “I may be a burglar…” he says, “but I am an honest one, I hope, more or less.” (H, xvi, 331) and even Thorin, from whom he stole the Arkenstone (though with the noble intention of trying to enable the contending factions to make peace), calls him “good thief” in the end (H, xviii, 348). When he converses with Smaug (in chapter xii) and inadvertently reveals more than he intends, that the cunning old dragon can discern much of the real meaning hidden in riddling talk is because he suspects the hobbit is trying to stick to the truth, though disguising it, rather than inventing outright falsehoods. Bilbo’s fault is really an afterthought on the part of his creator, when Tolkien decided to revise the already-published book to record that the hobbit found and confiscated the ring of invisibility, while the tale that he had been given it by its previous owner was an invention to justify keeping it. Gandalf takes this uncharacteristic action by a usually truthful person so seriously that he feels it warrants the close investigation that propels the events of The Lord of the Rings. And Tolkien the author takes it so seriously that he feels that what might appear to some to be a small prevarication provides a credible motivation for Gandalf to act in this way.

Truthfulness is basic to the warp and woof, the underlying structure, of Tolkien’s fictional world. The accepted ideal is to tell the truth and to keep one’s word, and in general the characters do, while for those who do not, like Gríma Wormtongue, this is never treated lightly. Any oath that is given is expected to be kept by the hearers; it is usually intended to be kept by the speaker, and penalties naturally ensue if it is not.4 Even the evil characters pay more than lip service to speaking the truth. Gollum does not lie to Frodo, for instance, and on their journey toward Mordor he keeps to the letter of his oath not to harm him, though he does violate it in spirit by misleading him to where Shelob might do the harm. What makes him most distrustful of Frodo is being lured to where Faramir’s band can take him prisoner, even though this is done only to save his life, by words that are not lies (Frodo merely asks Gollum to come away with him) but still less than the whole truth.5 Nor does Gollum cheat during the riddle game with Bilbo (only afterwards does he go back on his promise to guide the hobbit out of the caverns).6

There is what might seem like a throwaway line, but which in its casualness indicates how embedded this ideal is in Tolkien’s world, in the first encounter of Faramir with the hobbits. In a scene parallel to that in which the entire Fellowship agrees to be blindfolded during the approach to Lothlórien so that Gimli is not singled out for this mistrustful treatment, Faramir has Frodo and Sam blindfolded to protect the secret location of Gondor’s military base in Ithilien. That he apologizes for this necessity is courtly and courteous, something that might not be expected given the exigencies of war, but it is in character for him and so not surprising. What is astonishing is that he also says: “‘They will give their word not to try and see. I could trust them to shut their eyes of their own accord, but eyes will blink, if the feet stumble’” (TT, IV, v, 281). Faramir is one of the noblest characters in the book7 and it has not taken much interaction with Frodo and Sam for him to judge astutely that they are of the same mettle, but such trust in the word of relative strangers in a perilous situation indicates what behavior good people in Middle-earth may expect from one another.

This inherent acceptance of truthfulness as what should ideally be part of the natural order seems to me to have two primary sources: Tolkien’s Christian religion, and his profession of philology. To a Christian, God is Truth (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”), and His creation reflects this. In Dante’s Inferno liars are placed in the eighth of the nine circles of Hell but murderers above them in the seventh circle. A modern ethicist might wish to reverse this, but Dante is being quite orthodox. We might understand this as a theological technicality in that sins of the spirit (such as lying) in Christian terms are much worse than sins of the flesh (such as murder). That is, any sin is bad enough, but harm done to the immortal spirit is worse than harm done to merely mortal flesh. Nor is this all an abstraction without sociological basis. The fabric of society depends on mutual trust, which large lies may harm badly, and which even small lies can erode. Much of the evil done by the likes of Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman or Smaug is ascribed to their mixing truth and falsehood to sow dissension and distrust.8 And on the individual level, our apparently boundless capacity to lie to ourselves is at the root of many personal as well as societal problems.9

Tolkien’s professional life was devoted to the study of language, of words. It is in words that we can encapsulate truth, but it is also words that make lies possible. As evil is a corruption of good (to use Christian terms that would be familiar to Tolkien), so lying is a corruption of language. It is all but inevitable that this will become a common theme in his writing. I fancy that Tolkien may have seen the improper use of his field of study almost as a personal affront. Consider, for example, his ire in Letters no. 97 at someone who thought that the name Coventry must come from Convent and that to argue anything else was not “in keeping with Catholic tradition.” He shows this to be nonsense, per the actual history of the words. “As convent did not enter English till after 1200 A.D. (and meant an ‘assembly’ at that) and the meaning ‘nunnery’ is not recorded before 1795, I felt annoyed” (Letters 112). (The beginnings of the city of Coventry date much earlier, from Roman times.) Since the argument misunderstands and misuses words and prefers ideology to truth, Tolkien does not see it as truly Catholic.

It is related to his profession as a scientific scholar of language that Tolkien was also a wordsmith, a writer of fiction and poetry. Some philosophers have seen fiction and poetry as forms of lying, and the matter has been argued since Plato’s Republic. Tolkien’s own preference was for “history, true or feigned” (FR, Foreword, 5). That is, a work of fiction mimics what a modern reader would call a factual or “true” history but is understood to be “feigning” this, not to deceive anyone but in a game played by author and reader for aesthetic effect, yet a serious game in which the apprehension of some truth about the human condition is part of the experience. We see both sides of this in The Hobbit when Beorn tells Gandalf and Bilbo and the Dwarves: “‘It was a good story, that of yours [about fighting Goblins in the Misty Mountains and killing the Great Goblin]…but I like it still better now I am sure it is true.’” (H, vii, 182). Of course the story is “true” only inside the fictional world, all aspects of which are “feigned history” from the point of view of our primary world. But in this short sentence we see Beorn both enjoying a rousing tale, and wanting it to express something true.

In this Beorn speaks for all readers, and for his author. It was entirely natural for one of Tolkien’s Christian upbringing to create a fantasy world in which Truth is so enshrined. Yet he also knew that the ideal of truth must often be tempered with other virtues, such as courtesy, privacy, or just not having a right or need to know someone else’s business. And it is only human to want to think that people caught in the sort of tight places that typically occur in tales of adventure may perhaps be forgiven a little trickery to get out alive. There are many scenes in Tolkien’s fiction that reflect this tension, far more than the ones mentioned in this essay, though they are representative. Indeed all the tragedy of Middle-earth stems from lies working people’s pride and greed and other weaknesses: “Thus with lies and evil whisperings and false counsel Melkor kindled the hearts of the Noldor to strife; and of their quarrels came at length the end of the high days of Valinor and the evening of its ancient glory” (S 69).

But as he wrote and revised his tale of Beren and Lúthien penetrating the inner sanctum of Morgoth, it must have pleased him to progress from their having to use outright mendacity, to his final version where Lúthien is able to deceive the Father of Lies—without herself telling a single lie.

Notes

1 Bilbo, for example, is careful not to reveal his proper name to Smaug (H, xii, 279), just as Sigurd conceals his from Fáfnir in the Fáfnismál in the Elder (Poetic) Edda, lest they give the dragons that they respectively face power over them. Names also represent power in the Biblical tradition, as when Adam names the beasts in the Book of Genesis.

2 The story is told at length by Snorri Sturluson in the Gylfaginning in the Younger (or Prose) Edda.

3 When he is insulted at the prospect of being blindfolded in Lothlórien due to Elvish mistrust of Dwarves, he protests “I am known to be true of word” (FR, II, vi, 362).

4 For a survey of this matter in The Lord of the Rings, see Holmes (249-261).

5 “It would probably be impossible to ever make him [Gollum] understand or believe that Frodo had saved his life in the only way he could” (TT, IV, vi, 297). Indeed Frodo risks his own life, for he offers himself to be shot if Gollum should slip away.

6 “For one thing Gollum had learned long long ago was never, never to cheat at the riddle-game, which is a sacred one and of great antiquity” (H, v, 128); quoted from chapter v of the 1st edition of 1937.

7 “ ‘I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood’” (TT, IV, v, 272).

8 E.g, “the evil truth was enhanced and poisoned by lies” spread by Melkor (S 128).

9 There is an extended examination of this matter in Peck.

Works Cited

Dante Alighieri. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. Volume 1: Hell. Harmondsworth, Middlesex and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1950.

Davidson, H. R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1964.

Holmes, John R. “Oaths and Oath Breaking: Analogues of Old English Comitatus in Tolkien’s Myth.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004): 249-261.

Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Curing Human Evil. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

The Poetic Edda, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Lee M. Hollander. 2nd edition, revised. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962.

–––, trans. from the Icelandic with an Introduction by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1929.

Richard C. West: A Checklist

Compiled by Douglas A. Anderson

Books:

Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist

Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970

Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981 [Revised eition]

[Based on earlier work published as “An Annotated Bibliography of Tolkien Criticism” in Orcrist, no. 1 (1966-67): 52-91; Supplement One in Orcrist, no. 2 (1967-68): 40-54; Supplement Two in Orcrist, no. 3 (co-published as Tolkien Journal, 4 no. 1; whole no. 11; 1969): 22-23; Supplement Three in Orcrist, no. 5 (co-published as Tolkien Journal, 4 no. 3; whole no. 14; 1970-71): 14-31. Material from the first two issues of Orcrist was revised and published as “An Annotated Bibliography of Tolkien Criticism,” Extrapolation 10 no. 1 (December 1968): 17-45. A highly selective supplement is “A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981-2004.”]

Tolkien-Related Critical Articles and Reviews:

[untitled], Christian Scholar’s Review 6 (1977): 352-353.

[Review of Tolkien and The Silmarillion (1976) by Clyde S. Kilby.]

[untitled], Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 9 no. 3 (1998): 247-250.

[Review of A Question of Time (1997) by Verlyn Flieger.]

[untitled], Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 21 (2004): 114-116.

[Review of The Annotated Hobbit: Revised and Expanded Edition (2002), ed. Douglas A. Anderson.]

“‘And She Named Her Own Name’: Being True to One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth,” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 1-10.

“Contemporary Medieval Authors,” Orcrist, no. 3 (co-published as Tolkien Journal, 4 no. 1; whole no. 11; 1969): 9-10, 15.

[On T. H. White, C. S. Lewis, and Tolkien.]

“The Critics, and Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis,” Orcrist, no. 5 (co-published as Tolkien Journal 4 no. 3; whole no. 14; 1970-71): 4-9

[Reviews of The Tolkien Relation (1968) by William Ready; Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings (1969) by Lin Carter; Good News from Tolkien’s Middle Earth [sic] (1970), by Gracia Fay Ellwood; Tolkien and the Critics (1968), ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo; Shadows of Imagination (1969) ed. Mark R. Hillegas; J. R. R. Tolkien (1969) by Catherine R. Stimpson; and several studies of C. S. Lewis.]

“Her Choice Was Made and Her Doom Appointed: Tragedy and Divine Comedy in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen.” In [the so far untitled Proceedings of the 2004 Marquette Tolkien Conference], ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, [forthcoming 2005].

“The Interlace and Professor Tolkien: Medieval Narrative Technique in The Lord of the Rings,” Orcrist, no. 1 (1966-67): 26-49.

[Revised, but omitting the appendices, as “The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings,” see below.]

“The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings,” in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lodbell. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1975: 77-94. New York: Ballantine, 1980: 82-102. Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 2002: 75-91.

[A revision, omitting the appendices, of “The Interlace and Professor Tolkien: Medieval Narrative Technique in The Lord of the Rings,” see above.]

“Progress Report on the Variorum Tolkien,” Orcrist, no. 4 (co-published as Tolkien Journal, 4 no. 3; whole no. 13; 1969-70): 6-7. [Notes about perusing the Tolkien Papers in the Archives of Marquette University.]

“Real-World Myth in a Secondary World: Mythological Aspects in the Story of Beren and Lúthien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance. London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 259-267.

“Setting the Rocket Off in Story: The Kalevala as the Germ of Tolkien’s Legendarium.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004: 285-294.

“The Status of Tolkien Scholarship,” Tolkien Journal 15 (Summer 1972): 21.

“A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981-2004,” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4 (2004): 1015-1028.

“Tolkien in the Letters of C. S. Lewis,” Orcrist, no. 1 (1966-67): 2-16.

“Túrin’s Ofermod: An Old English Theme in the Development of the Story of Túrin,” in Tolkien’s Legendarium, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000: 233-245.

Selected Other Criticism:

“Author Studies,” Chapter 8 in Fantasy Literature: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Neil Barron. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990: 389-406. Revised version, combined with entries by other critics, as Chapter 10 in Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet, ed. Neil Barron. Lanham, Maryland, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1999: 471-527.

[This chapter evaluates book-length treatments in English of writers of fantasy literature, including Tolkien.]

“Humankind and Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception in Peter S. Beagle’s Fiction,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 1 no. 3 (1988): 47-54.

[Reprinted, under the original title, “Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality,” see below.]

“Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception in Peter S. Beagle’s Fiction.” In The Dark Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Ninth International Conference on the Fantastic and the Arts, ed. C. W. Sullivan III. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997: 59-64.

[A reprint, under the original title, of “Humankind and Reality,” see above.]

“Letters of C. S. Lewis to E. Vinaver,” ed. Richard C. West, Orcrist, no. 6 (1972-73): 3-6, 24.

“Malory and T. H. White,” Orcrist, no. 7 (1973): 13-15.

“Medieval Borrowings in the Fiction of Poul Anderson,” Unicorn 2 no. 5 (1973): 16-19.

“Mervyn Peake’s Shorter Fiction,” Peake Studies 1, no. 3 (Winter 1989): 25-31.

“The Sign of the Unicorn: The Unicorn Motif in Selected Works of Modern Fantasy.” In Selected Proceedings of the 1978 SFRA National Conference, ed. T. J. Remington. Cedar Falls, Iowa: University of Northern Iowa, 1979: 45-54.

“The Tolkinians: Some Introductory Reflections on Alan Garner, Carol Kendall, and Lloyd Alexander,” Orcrist, no. 2 (1967-68): 4-15.

“Warren Lewis: Historian of the Inklings and of Seventeenth-Century France,” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, 14 (1997): 75-86.

Editor:

Orcrist, the journal of the Tolkien Society at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (founded 1966). Nos. 1 (1966-67) and 2 (1967-68) co-edited by Richard C. West and James B. Robinson; nos. 3 (1969-70) through 8 (1977) edited by Richard C. West.

Parallel Lives:

The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon

Miryam Librán-Moreno

1. The nature of the problem1

It is commonly said that Tolkien based most of his legendarium on Northern literature, favoring above all Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Germanic and Finnish sources. While it cannot be any serious scholar’s purpose to contest the general truth of this assessment, the undeniably pervasive influence of Northern literature should not be allowed to drive out, on principle and without careful case-by-case examination, each and every possible competing source from other mythologies (Stevens 120-1). There is a great deal of Greek mythology assimilated and transformed within the legendarium, albeit unacknowledged.2

A Classical myth, so far overlooked, may have shaped the story of the last members of the Hurinionath, Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor their father. The overlooked story is the account of the Telamonian Ajax’ fate, with the consequences it brought on his brother Teucer and their aged father Telamon. Consideration of this new paradigm might aid in understanding Tolkien’s creative process by illuminating the nature and purpose of the changes between Tolkien’s first drafts and the final, published version.

A brief look at the lives of Ajax and Teucer, sons of Telamon, Lord of Salamis, follows here (Jebb ix-xxiii). Ajax was the favored son and legitimate heir, Teucer a bastard son by a war captive. Ajax and Teucer took part in the Trojan War on behalf of their fatherland, Salamis, and were greatly distinguished because of their courage and prowess. After Achilles’ death, Ajax rescued his corpse from among a swarm of enemies intent on desecrating it, while Odysseus protected his back. The arms of Achilles were then given to Odysseus instead of Ajax, who went mad with anger, killing the herds of the Greeks, believing them to be the Greek leaders. Ajax then committed suicide. Teucer ensured that his brother received an honourable burial. Once the war ended, Teucer returned home, but he was banished by his father, who mistakenly thought that Teucer was responsible for the death of Ajax. Teucer went to Cyprus, where he founded the town of Salamis and ruled as king.3

Tolkien often depicted mythical father-son relationships in his work.4 His unfinished tale The Lost Road was based on the pattern of the repetition of a similar father-son relationship throughout myth and history.5 This story contained the kernel of one of the central events in Tolkien’s legendarium, the Drowning of Númenor, and justified much of his subsequent literary creation. The portrait par excellence of father-son relationships in The Lord of the Rings is precisely the backstory of Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor. The summary of the events given above, however bald, might still indicate part of the appeal that the story of the sons of Telamon would hold for Tolkien: a favored but deeply flawed son (Ajax), his worthier but overlooked brother (Teucer), and the aging, irate, stern father (Telamon) who blamed the youngest for the death of the eldest.

2. Points of comparison between the sons of Denethor and the sons of Telamon

2.1. Ajax and Boromir

I will divide this section in three parts: external traits, psychological traits, and an analysis of Boromir’s madness in light of the Greek epic convention of double motivation.

2.1.1. External traits (Jebb ix-xvii, Garvie, 1-2). Ajax and Boromir are both the eldest and most beloved sons of their powerful fathers, Telamon Lord of Salamis and Denethor Lord of Minas Tirith.6 Both characters are explicitly characterized as rash, bold, forward persons who delight in war for war’s sake.7 Both the Telamonian and the son of Denethor are repeatedly described as “enormous” in size, head and shoulders above the rest, their strength, physical beauty and size constantly highlighted in the narrative.8 Ajax’ stock epithet is ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν, traditionally translated as “bulwark of the Achaeans,” a qualification Boromir shares with Gondor in general.9 Boromir’s and Ajax’ characteristic and distinctive equipment is a shield, as opposed to their brothers’ bows.10 Despite their eagerness for and joy in battle, both characters are curiously defensive warriors, at their memorable best when with unshakeable courage they assume the defence and protection of their group against a sea of enemies and impossible odds.11 They are slow to retreat and do so only reluctantly and under unbearable pressure.12 They are, by common consent, the best warriors in many generations, second only to the absent Achilles or the shadowy king who may or may not return.13

Their larger-than-life qualities are also evident even in death. Both Ajax and Boromir are so tall and heavy that special effort and collaboration are required for such a simple task as raising and carrying their corpses.14 Both are singled out for novel or uncommon burial, to mark the special qualities of their death,15 and are laid out for burial with their armor.16 The family of both fallen warriors suspects treachery in their unexpected demise, given their strength and valour, although it soon proved to be otherwise.17 Their death is a nearly crushing blow to the army they led and the people they defended,18 but it is recognized as a necessity and, to that extent, lauded, despite the pain it gives the people who loved them both.19

2.1.2 Psychological traits (Jebb xii, Knox 144, Garvie 14). Both are good speakers, brief, powerful, self-assured and to the point,20 although Boromir and Ajax characteristically mistrust the power of the word and prefer to let their actions speak louder.21 They are uninterested in anything that does not immediately bear on physical prowess and martial deeds.22 They strongly loathe duplicity, and disdain tricks and operations performed under cover of the night as things fit only for thieves.23 They value open war and actions, and demean stealth and secrecy, even when employed for a good end.24 The worst insult they can conceive of is “trickster.”25 Both, while stern and lordly, have a kindly streak towards those who are under their protection,26 and are surprisingly tender with and protective of their younger brothers. 27

However, their positive traits are not sufficient to earn them unreserved regard, something of which they are painfully aware.28 Both are proud loners and tend to keep to themselves if left to their own devices (Knox 144-7).29 As a natural consequence of both bravery and aloofness, they bring up the rear, the most dangerous and solitary position (Hesk 41).30 They have frequent disagreements with their ranking superiors, although their nobility compels them to be courteous and deferent, however grudgingly.31 They are relentlessly driven and committed to the imitation of the choices and deeds of their awful fathers, who are the focus of their “sense of public disgrace” (Heath 180-1), to the point of speeding their own self-destruction.32 Both are too proud to ask for any boon or help, even when sorely needed (Hesk 138-9).33 Further, they are given to perilously scoffing at any aid given by the supernatural and the intangible.34

2.1.3. The madness scene and its aftermath (Hesk 136-41). So far, all these points of comparison, while numerous and reasonably close, might be explained away as so many coincidences in stock themes or unwitting reminiscences caused by a common epic background. However, the ultimate cause and nature of Boromir’s death can be successfully and profitably illuminated by appealing to a unique and distinctive feature shared by the Greek epic and tragic genres, and prominently used by scholars to explain the cause for Ajax’ madness and subsequent death: the so-called “overdetermination” or “double motivation” (Janko 3-4).35 Briefly explained, the principle of double motivation dictates that gods seize on some of the doomed man’s pre-existing, not necessarily negative, character traits, and proceed to exaggerate them until said traits become flaws. A supernatural intervention works through human character-based decisions to trigger a disastrous error of judgement (ἁμαρτία, in Aristotelian terms), a momentary moral blindness (ἄτη) that leads to madness and, following closely, ruin (Dawe 95-107, Padel 166-87, 249-59). Thus, free will and fate—divine providential intervention and human responsibility over one´s own actions—are presented as equally potent and colluding forces that do not negate each other (Gill 16-7; Taplin 75-7). The involvement of a supernatural power, however irresistible, does not relieve human beings from their moral accountability in their own fall. This was one of the leading ethical considerations in Homer and Greek tragedy.36

How was Ajax affected by this “double motivation”? After the death of his cousin Achilles, Ajax carried his body off the field of battle while Odysseus kept back the Trojans (Little Iliad fr. 2 West). Ajax asked for Achilles’ arms as a mark of his own honor, for he considered himself worthier of their possession than any other living Greek (Ov. Met. 13.1-122). However, the panoply was then allotted to Odysseus instead of Ajax, who went mad with wrath, and plotted to kill in revenge the Greek commanders who had robbed him of what he considered rightfully his on account of his deeds (Soph. Ai. 40-1). But Athena intervened. The goddess twisted Ajax’ pride and his overwhelming sense of duty, shame and honor to encourage him to carry on with his vengeance. She did so by casting a temporary blindness on Ajax in order to divert him from his true targets and thus preserve the lives of her favored Greek leaders (Soph. Ai. 44-67). As a result, Ajax, in his god-sent frenzy,37 merely butchered the cattle, all the while believing them to be the Greek chiefs who had wronged him (Soph. Ai. 364-7). Athena, severely angry after Ajax’ boastful words and culpable self-reliance, had retaliated against his excessive pride by triggering and then exacerbating a madness attack (Heath 171-4; Padel 91-2; Garvie 156, 160), whose sole purpose was blinding Ajax to the identity of the victims of his vengeance (Soph. Ai. 776-7). But Athena could not create anything from nothing, and thus she used Ajax’ fatal obsession with his own honor as a lever to engineer his frenzy and fall (Hesk 148). When Ajax recovered his wits and realized the extent of his disgrace, he resolved to commit suicide to regain some of his lost honour and sense of worth (Soph. Ai. 457-80).

The double motivation present in Ajax’ madness, namely his own culpably intractable pride and Athena’s forceful intervention, could make sense of the rôle Galadriel’s test played in Boromir´s temptation and fall. The narrative stresses fairly often that Boromir had already something within him that made him susceptible to the call of the Ring, and that he took his peril with him into Lórien:

“Perilous indeed, fair and perilous, but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil within them” (FR, II, vi, 353).

“‘Speak no evil of the Lady Galadriel!’ Said Aragorn sternly ‘You know not what you say. There is in her and in this land no evil, unless a man bring it hither himself. Then let him beware!” (FR, II, vii, 373).

“Folks takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it... 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. Now Boromir...”(TT, IV, v, 288).

However, it is no less often repeated that Boromir first saw clearly that he desired the Ring when confronted with Galadriel´s probing test, and not earlier:38

“It’s my opinion that in Lórien he first saw clearly what I guessed sooner: what he wanted. From the moment he first saw it, he wanted the Enemy´s Ring.” (TT, IV, v, 289)39

“‘To me it seemed exceedingly strange’, said Boromir. ‘Maybe it was only a test, and she thought to read our thoughts for her own good purpose, but almost I should have said that she was tempting us, and offering us what she pretended to have the power to give.’” (FR, II, vii, 373)40

This is, lastly, the opinion of the man who knew Boromir best of all, Faramir, whom deep love did not blind to his brother´s faults:41

“‘Boromir, O Boromir!’ He cried. What did she say to you, the Lady that dies not? What did she see? What woke in your heart then?42 Why went you ever to Laurelindórenan, and came not by your own road, upon the horses of Rohan riding home in the morning?” (TT, IV, v, 289)43

Aragorn himself had previously acknowledged that those who passed through Lothlórien ought to expect a change of some sort:

“Say not ‘unscathed’, but if you say ‘unchanged’, then maybe you will speak closer to the truth.” (FR, II, vi, 352)

Notice that the fulcrum on which Galadriel’s test was based is not an out-and-out character flaw, but an initially positive trait which, once augmented to excess, becomes a vice:44 just as Athena perverted Ajax’ great sense of honor and pride into irrational shame in order to madden and blind him (Hesk 59), the desire for the Ring that Galadriel’s test awoke in Boromir disfigured Boromir´s protectiveness and sense of responsibility to his people until it turned into a megalomaniac, self-centered near-despotism.45 Boromir genuinely believed that the policy of the Council in doing away with the Ring was unwise, in that it involved willingly squandering the definitive weapon against Sauron. It was also cowardly, in that stealing unnoticed into Mordor could only be achieved in secrecy, disguise and stealth, not in open battle with a host of men at his command and glory to be won.46 Like Ajax, Boromir is consumed by thoughts that his good offices have been of no avail and met with no gratitude. Indeed, he agonizes that Gondor is perishing while a Halfling, and not the Captain-General of the West´s armies, has been entrusted with the weapon that would terminate the war and save his City.47 In keeping with the epic belief in double motivation, the supernatural intervention that launched Boromir on his path to an early death is perceived as fated and necessary,48 and yet he, as a human agent, is wholly responsible for his actions, regardless of how overwhelming the divine prompting was.49 The introduction of the “double motivation” paradigm from Greek Epic and Tragedy would thus aid in illuminating the dual nature of the Ring (Shippey 140-6), which appears to be “in several ways inconsistent” (Shippey 142): according to this explanation, the Ring may work both as a “sentient creature” and a “psychic amplifier”50 without necessarily violating the principle of non-contradiction.

There are several common details in Ajax’ and Boromir’s experience of temporary, externally induced madness, stemming from the shared concept of double motivation. Nobody notices the creeping onslaught of the fit, not even those closest to them.51 The assault on their reason is described in astoundingly similar terms of strangely gleaming eyes, a concept Tolkien remarked upon several times in his narrative and which was the main symptom traditionally used to describe Ajax’ imminent frenzy.52 Another one of the traditional symptoms of madness is that both men talk to themselves as if to someone present.53 The divine visitation that caused Ajax’ madness leads him to act in a wholly uncharacteristic way: the scoffer at secrecy and nightly missions forgoes his obsessive love of frankness and directness and uses deceit to be revenged upon his enemies (Winnington-Ingram 17; Garvie 128-9; Hesk 75).54 Similarly, Boromir, the lover of truth and direct action, falls back on veiling hostile intention beneath half-truths and pleasing words.55 The resort to deceit dishonours them beyond atonement, however forced upon them by external intervention.56 Ajax and Boromir even fall so low as to attempt gloatingly to use their vastly superior strength, for which they are famous, against weaker subordinates or defenceless confederates.57

Once the passing frenzy runs its destructive course and the two of them discover what they have done in their temporary madness, they become speechless and paralysed with horrified shock.58 After regaining their wits, however, both act again according to their true nature: unable to see beyond their shame at their irrevocable loss of honor, they seek atonement and shelter in voluntary death, be it suicide or self-sacrifice.59 To disguise their intention, both use language that is deliberately ambiguous, hiding their meaning while not telling a lie.60 Boromir takes it upon himself to defend his charges to the last drop of his blood. Ajax briefly considers going off on his own against the whole Trojan army, to die in battle with what little honor he could regain, before he finally resolves on taking his own life.61 The final thought of both moribund men goes back to their own beloved fatherland, far away from which they are going to die.62 Their last words on earth trail off into a profoundly unsettling silence, evidence of the characters’ failure at communication.63 And precisely in their death the apparently defeated can claim that they have conquered and been saved.64

Their death, however, is not the end: legend had it that both passed away from this earth to dwell eternally in a paradise-island, Ajax in the White Isle, Boromir beyond the Sea, maybe into the West:

ἡ Πυθία Λεώνυμον ἀπέστελλεν ἐς νῆσον τὴν Λευκήν, ἐνταῦθα εἰποῦσα ... ἀκέσεσθαι τὸ τραῦμα. χρόνῳ δὲ ὡς ὑγιάνας ἐπανῆλθεν ἐκ τῆς Λεῦκης, ἰδεῖν μὲν ἔφασκεν Ἀχιλλέα... καὶ τὸν Τελαμῶνος Αἴαντα (the Pythian priestess sent Leonynimus to the White Island, telling him that there he … would cure his wound. In time he was healed and returned from the White Island, where, he used to declare, he saw Achilles, as well as ... Ajax the son of Telamon, Pausanias 3.19.13).

Compare with:

The River had taken Boromir son of Denethor, and he was not seen again in Minas Tirith ... but in Gondor in after-days it long was said that the elven-boat rode the falls and the foaming pool, and bore him down through Osgiliath, and past the mouth of Anduin, out into the Great Sea at night under the stars. (TT, III, i, 19; my emphasis)

This passage seems to be a reminiscence of the concept of a funeral boat reaching Tol Eressëa, seen in Lost Road (ca. 1937): “And they thrust him forth to sea, and the sea took him, and the ship bore him (cf. “and Rauros, golden Rauros, bore him upon its breast” TT, III, i, 20) unsteered far away into the uttermost West out of the sight or thought of Men. Nor do any know who received him in what haven at the end of his journey. Some have said that that ship found the Straight Road” (86; my emphasis).65 Notice the verbal similarities between both accounts.

2.2. Teucer and Telamon, Faramir and Denethor (Ganz 694-5).

Leaving aside Ajax and Boromir, the points common to the younger brothers may now be considered. Teucer and Faramir, both second sons, are in constant dread of their aged fathers’ temper and opinion.66 Although Faramir and Teucer live in the shadow of their seemingly more courageous and bold brothers, neither resents his place, being of the opinion that no one could possibly be a better warrior than Ajax or Boromir.67 They have a reputation for gentleness against the stern grimness of their brothers, but they are like true steel when their temper is put to the test.68 Where Ajax and Boromir are hoplites par excellence, warriors best suited for close combat and for standing their ground with their heavy shields, Teucer and Faramir are especially skilled with the bow, although they are brave warriors themselves.69 The courage of the younger brothers is sometimes called into question, but when the pinch comes they prove to be as valiant as their elder brothers.70 The brothers fight side by side always, Teucer shooting his arrows from behind Ajax’ great shield in battle, and falling back to take refuge behind his brother when danger increases.71 Ajax and Teucer were so inseparable that sometimes they are called Αἴαντε, “the two Ajax,” just as Boromir and Faramir famously share a common element in their name.72 The men under Teucer’s and Faramir’s command have such trust in their courage that they would follow their captains without protest even to the most dangerous places.73 Among their less endearing character traits their startling ability to cut devastatingly to the quick with carefully-chosen, lethally precise words should be mentioned.74

Telamon and Denethor, the aged fathers, anxiously awaiting news of their long-departed elder sons,75 view with some suspicion the actions of their younger.76 Some observers note the undeserved pressure the merciless fathers put on their second sons.77 Teucer and Faramir are the first in their immediate family to learn of their brothers’ deaths.78 When Telamon and Denethor learn of their heirs’ unexpected and unexplained demise, both, mad with grief and anger, irrationally blame their guiltless younger sons for the death of their much-beloved first-borns.79 The nature of the grievance they hold against their younger sons is that they did not die on behalf of or in place of their brothers.80 Telamon and Denethor, crazed by the complete wreck of their houses after the loss of their heirs, proceed to ensure unreasonably that the ruin of their stock is indeed total by doing away with their sole remaining sons.81 Telamon banishes Teucer from Salamis, his homeland, exile being in Greece but a lingering and deferred death sentence.82 Similarly, Denethor, under cover of strengthening the outpost of Osgiliath, forces Faramir to accept a mission tantamount to suicide.83 Faramir and Teucer are trapped between a hopeless situation at their own home and a desperate war, while being surrounded by enemies on all sides, as a result of their brothers´ death.84

But fate is kinder to these apparently more insignificant, although more prudent and self-regarding, younger brothers. Against all odds, both Faramir and Teucer survive. Not only that: after the war, while their elder, more promising brothers died untimely and in disgrace, they quietly acquire a princedom by their own merits, Salamis in Cyprus for Teucer and Ithilien for Faramir, and foreign royal women for their wives, Eue or Eune of Cyprus and Éowyn of Rohan.85 One last, and touching, point of comparison remains: Teucer named his second child and only son “Ajax,” after his dead brother. Faramir called his own “Elboron,” in whose own name part of the name of Boromir might be discerned.86 It must be noted that, while possible, it was unusual that a Greek father should forgo the name of his own and his wife’s sire and name his son after an uncle (Matthews 1022).87 It was also uncommon for a Númenórean father to do likewise.88 Thus, the similarities between the unusual actions of both Teucer and Faramir stand out all the more.

Doubtless, most of the points of comparison discussed above might find parallels in disparate and multiple sources from other cultural traditions. Nonetheless, the Sons of Telamon hypothesis has the material advantage of providing a single, cohesive, and unified story frame to explain all such parallels. Needless to say, despite the common points there are numerous and telling differences between both set of tales in form and in content. It would be surprising had it been otherwise, given that Boromir, to mention but one of the characters involved, is clearly a composite figure out of what Tolkien had called the “Cauldron of Story,”89 in whose person shades of Roland, Judas, Sir Gawain suffering temptation, Unferð, Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm´s son, and Scyld Scefing, among others, may be found. Thus it would be unwise to posit a single source of inspiration for the story of this family to the exclusion of everything else. However, the main lines of the Greek mythical narrative are surprisingly similar to Tolkien’s,90 and the presence of a possible Greek angle need not negate the existence of other Northern parallels for Boromir, Denethor or Faramir

3. Narrative benefits derived from the introduction of the parallels with Ajax and Teucer in the final version of The Lord of the Rings

It must be noted that, when Tolkien first conceived of the “tale that grew in the telling,” Boromir´s character and fate were subject to great variations, Denethor as we know him did not exist, and Faramir had yet to walk out of the woods of Ithilien to greet his creator.91 The differences to be observed between the first incarnations of the tale of the sons of the Steward and the final drafts and published version may be attributed to the introduction of the set of parallels between Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor on one hand, and Ajax, Teucer, and Telamon on the other.92

It is very noticeable that those details from the definitive tale of the sons of Denethor that resemble more closely the story of the sons of Telamon, as explained above, were initially missing in the first versions of the narrative, before the prolonged halt of the story at Moria (ca. 1939-1940). It is “(significantly) not said that Boromir´s eyes glinted” as he gazed at the Ring (Treason 146). The account of the blowing of the war horn on setting out from Rivendell was missing, as were Boromir’s words about refusing to depart like a thief in the night and the mention of his shield (Treason 165). Galadriel’s intervention was in the beginning unrelated to Boromir’s assault on Frodo, originally conceived as a betrayal, not a passing madness: there was no suggestion of Galadriel’s test at Lórien, and Boromir attacked Frodo at the Angle between Blackroot and Anduin (Treason 207-8, 218). Similarly missing from the first version was the passage where Boromir hesitated to enter the Golden Wood and voiced his mistrust of their inhabitants (Treason 243 n.47). That Boromir did not realize his lust for the Ring until Lórien did not occur to Tolkien until the final draft for that chapter (War 169 n.35). Turning now to Faramir and Denethor, the leader of the Gondorians who found Frodo and Sam in Ithilien was not yet Faramir son of Denethor, but the entirely unrelated Falborn son of Anborn, who played no further part in the narrative (War 136-7). Falborn did not become the brother of Boromir until Tolkien wrote of his having the “vision” of Boromir in his elven-boat (War 147).93 The idea of a suicidal mission to Osgiliath was not initially Denethor’s, but, shockingly, Faramir’s (War 330, 333). Denethor’s behavior to his younger son was, on the whole, significantly gentler and more outwardly loving than in the published version (War 332-3).

Taken together, all these changes seem to point to the introduction of a new idea into the narrative between 1939-1941 and 1944-1946,94 an idea that resembles closely enough the well-known tale of Ajax’ madness and his brother´s fate. It is interesting to note that in 1944 Oxford University Press published a book entitled Sophoclean Tragedy by the Oxonian Greek scholar and famous wit, Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra, whom Tolkien mentioned in a 1952 letter (Letters 162). Bowra’s analysis and treatment of Sophocles’ Ajax, albeit flawed and highly questionable, became very influential in the forties and fifties. Perhaps Tolkien had discussed details with Bowra or read some preliminary work from this book. They certainly collaborated in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, co-edited by Bowra and published by Oxford University Press in 1944. In addition to their being both Oxford professors, Bowra and Tolkien also shared a deep and abiding interest in Germanic and Norse epic poetry.95

Be that as it may, after the transformation of Trotter from hobbit to Man, and the slow unfolding of the tale of Aragorn (Shadow 393, 430-1; Treason 277-8), it soon became evident that Boromir, at first the only Man of the Fellowship, was redundant.96 Tolkien’s initial plans for him were singularly unflattering, as he had intended to draw him as a Gríma-esque villain, an out-and-out traitor who met his death at Aragorn´s hands (Treason 210-14). And yet, Tolkien needed a better motivation for the rather gratuitous “wild wanderings” of Merry and Pippin along the Entwash and their meeting with Fangorn, and only then did he hit on the expedient of transforming said aimless wanderings into a forced march to Isengard. Merry and Pippin’s fateful and fundamental encounter with Fangorn, then, was made contingent on Boromir´s death,97 now morally ennobled and made a doomed hero rather than a treacherous villain. Tolkien might have patterned the fall of this prototypically flawed hero, and the repercussions of his death on his family, after the similar case of that other great but fatally imperfect tragic hero, Ajax. This would not be the first time that Tolkien attached a preexisting and altogether unrelated story from a different mythic continuum and fitted it to suit his legendarium: he did so when he inserted his idiosyncrasic version of Plato’s Atlantis in the heart of the legends that would eventually form The Silmarillion.98

Why select Ajax and Teucer, out of the vast number of Greek heroes, as tragic paradigms for Boromir and Faramir? Several answers can be given to this question. Just as the Sophoclean Ajax is a remnant of the old Homeric code, challenged and made obsolete by the new values of Sophocles’ contemporary society (Knox 145-51, Hesk 140-1), Boromir is a tragic hero from the “old school,” for whom “the wages of heroism is death” (MC 26). He is out of place, superseded by the more modern and successful kind of heroism displayed by Aragorn, Faramir, or the hobbits.99 That Tolkien could, on occasion, pattern his heroes after traditional tragic models is shown in the figure of another old-fashioned, excessive,100 flawed character, Túrin Turambar, the protagonist of a “tragic tale” explicitly modelled on the Sophoclean Oedipus the King, among other sources (Letters 150). It must be noted that when Tolkien chose to explore the faults of the traditional epic spirit, and the unwanted consequences of old-fashioned, excessive, prideful, and entirely self-centered “heroism,” he did so by casting them in the guise of a verse drama,101 “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son,” a meditation on the events narrated in the fragmentary epic poem The Battle of Maldon. Tolkien would resolutely condemn Boromir, as he explicitly condemned Beorhtnoth, for his excessive, one-sided, and ultimately fatal concern with honor and pride. By assimilating Boromir’s life and death to the tragic paradigm supplied by Ajax, the reasons for Boromir’s behaviour are explained in such a way as unfailingly to arouse the reader’s pity, grief, and empathy;102 but Denethor’s elder son is still not absolved of blame. Understanding does not equate absolution or even forgiveness in the harsh moral world of Greek Epic and Tragedy. However, Tolkien made Boromir’s fall typologically significant, and not only worthier of pity and lament, in a larger and unexpected sense. It is generally recognized that one of the most rewarding tools to aid in the interpretation and understanding of Tolkien’s legendarium is the hermeneutical principles of prefiguration, recapitulation, and typology.103 Boromir’s “Tragedy” may function as a prefiguration of the fundamentally tragic and nearly Aristotelian “drama” that will be staged and played out at the Sammath Naur, with Frodo, Gollum, Sam, and the Ring as its protagonists. The same inextricable mixture of supernatural prompting and moral accountability (double motivation) that explains but does not absolve,104 the same turning-point based on a disastrous error of judgement (ἁμαρτία, Aristotle, Poetics 1453a8-12, Rhetoric 1427a34), and the same in-depth exploration of those two genre-defining tragic emotions, pity and fear (δι᾿ ἔλεου καὶ φόβου, Aristotle, Poetics 1449b27), are echoed by and lie squarely at the metaphysical core of the awful drama represented in Mount Doom.105

As for Teucer and Faramir, Tolkien gained the obvious narrative benefit of increasing the moral stature of the latter by making his hardship all the more compelling and moving while avoiding the trap of bathetic melodrama. Faramir’s plight is starkly “tragic” in the prototypically Sophoclean sense, that is, as revealed in the unflinching examination of an ethical dilemma caused by the fatal clash of an individual’s character-based, unnegotiable moral choice (Faramir´s decision at Henneth Annûn) with a conflicting political and ethical stance upheld and enforced by a higher authority (Denethor´s policies).106

There might be a deeper and subtler gain in selecting Teucer as a partial hypotext for Faramir. Tolkien adorned Faramir´s person with the virtues of self-possession, determination to do what is right at whatever cost, and quiet courage, which were some of Teucer´s most visible character traits. But there was more to Teucer than civic braveness and love of duty: he had pity and forgiveness for those he loved, even when he had been most grievously harmed by their behaviour. Helplessly weakened by extreme old age, without support and companionship because of his own previous decisions, the once-fearsome and dreaded Telamon was ousted and banished from his home island. Teucer, although comfortably settled in his new princedom of Salamis in Cyprus for a few years now, received intelligence of his father’s plight. Far from gloating at the “poetic justice” visited on Telamon´s head, Teucer crossed the “wide wide sea” instantly to restore Telamon to his throne and home by force of arms (Ribbeck 419-25). The cautiously hopeful ending to the painfully strained relationship between father and son may offer a hint to aid us in our understanding of Faramir’s feelings for his father, unrecorded in the narrative, after the latter´s violent demise: pity, forgiveness, and abiding love.107 By introducing the story of Telamon and Teucer as a hypotext and unobstrusively highlighting the parallels, Tolkien inexplicitly conveyed all the necessary information on Faramir’s probable emotional reaction without once breaking this character’s decorous restraint and modest reserve with uncharacteristic, too-direct self-revelation.

4. Possible objections

Assuming that Tolkien patterned the Sons of the Steward theme closely on Classical sources, two questions remain: why did he not specifically acknowledge their existence? There is not a single mention of Ajax, Telamon, or Teucer in his published work. Would it be reasonable to forgo Anglo-Saxon or Norse parallels and posit such a deep acquaintance with disparate Classical writings, considering that Tolkien himself confessed that most of his inspiration was drawn from Northern material?

4.1. Silence about his sources on Tolkien’s part

Tolkien was strongly opposed to manic Quellenforschungen, and was hostile to any heartless dismembering of any organic literary universe while hunting for literary influences, an attitude that is very apparent in most of his published lectures and addresses and in his private correspondence.108 In point of fact, the mere anticipation of having a work he had written “in his life-blood” (Letters 99) dissected in the process of such a scrutiny fairly distressed him:

“I fear you may be right that the search for sources of The Lord of the Rings is going to occupy academics for a generation or two. I wish this need not be so. To my mind it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive, whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered that is the most interesting thing to consider”

(Letters 418).

While it is true that Tolkien occasionally referred to works that had kindled his creative process and affected the creation of his legendarium in a general sense, like Kullervo’s runos in the Kalevala (Letters 214), Plato’s dialogues Critias and Timaeus (Sauron 289, cf. Letters s.v. “Atlantis”), Beowulf (Letters 30-31) or Cynewulf´s Christ (Letters 385-86), this antipathy to meaningless source-hunting led him to keep silent on, or even deny, clear parallels of detail between earlier literature and his own published corpus.109 The reason for his reticence seems natural enough: Tolkien was not so much interested in the “bones” (the preexisting or source material) as he was in the “soup” they formed,110 that is, the traditional literary material as processed, rearranged, adapted, and creatively presented by the author. It was meaning, interpretation, significance, and integration of the sources into a novel frame or artistic context that Tolkien considered worthy of attention and study.111

Therefore, absence of acknowledgement should never be taken to imply unawareness or neglect of literary tradition in Tolkien’s case. This conclusion is more compelling because he expected readers to recognize, without his prompting, which Classical parallels were latent beneath his published works—“as a mere reading of the synopses would show”(Letters 376).

4.2. Tolkien’s purported neglect of Classical literature

The view expressed in the subtitle of this paragraph seems to be contained in Letter 45, written in 1941, which has been taken as evidence for Tolken’s antipathy for the Classics:112

I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the ‘Classics.’ (Letters 55)

Notice, however, the usage of scare quotes, and the carefully worded phrase “as an undergraduate,” as opposed to “now” or “even to this day.” This is not the place to list exhaustively all references or every bit of evidence that proves Tolkien’s deep knowledge and continuous use of the Classical languages and their literatures.113 It shall suffice to remember three salient points on this head: first, Tolkien started to study Latin and Greek at age eleven, at King Edward´s School in Birmingham, the backbone of whose curriculum was formed by both Classical languages (Carpenter 27, 34).114 Second, the education he received in Classics was strong and deep enough to prepare him to make debating speeches in Attic Greek in his Debating Society at age eighteen, and to render effortlessly into Greek and Latin verse Shakespearean poetry; as a result of which he was awarded an Open Classical Exhibition at Exeter College, Oxford (Carpenter 48-9).115 Thirdly, Tolkien never hid the fact that Ancient Greek was precisely the language that triggered his appetite for devising invented tongues as an adolescent (Carpenter 36). That is to say, his Classical education can hardly be described as perfunctory or superficial, and we should be very surprised indeed if none of it was ever apparent in his subsequent writings.

While it is true that Tolkien formally abandoned Classics in 1913 and started to read in English, going on to graduate with first class honours in English in 1915 (Old Icelandic being his specialty) (Carpenter 63), it is no less evident that he never truly left Greek and Latin literature behind. As time passed not only did he not see any sort of incompatibility between his enjoyment of Greek and Latin and his love of Old English, Gothic, and Old Norse: he also returned to the old Classic languages.116 He continued to dispel notions that his only sources of inspiration were Northern ones and to make assurances about the influence of Classical literature in Letter 294, written in 1967:

Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction’. That is not true. The North-West of Europe, where I … have lived, has my affection, as a man´s home should…. But it is not ‘sacred’, nor does it exhaust my affection. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language…. That is also untrue for my story, as a mere reading of the synopses would show. (Letters 376)117

As usual, Tolkien revealed “something of the teller´s own reflections” (Letters 233) in his writings. He represented the indissoluble, intimate mix of Classical and Northern influences in his life and writings in the thinly disguised literary self-portrait included in the story that introduces the kernels of most of his legendarium, The Lost Road (“closely modelled on my father’s own life,” as Christopher Tolkien put it in Road 53). Oswin Errol justifies to his son Alboin, Tolkien´s alter ego, the selection of his fictional name in the following terms:

“Why am I called Alboin?… Well, I might have called you Ælfwine, of course; that is the Old English form of it…. But I gave you a latinised form. I think that is best. The old days of the North are gone beyond recall, except in so far as they have been worked into the shape of things as we know it…. So I took Alboin, for it is not Latin and not Northern, and that is the way of most names of the West, and also of the men that bear them. I might have chosen Albinus, for that is what they sometimes turned the name into.… But it is too Latin, and means something in Latin” (Road 37-38).118

It is difficult to find a more direct and explicit avowal of the terms on which Tolkien seemed to regard himself later in his life: a man placed in the intersection between the Northern and the Classical, from whose fusion an entirely unique, novel identity is created that is both and neither. This is a good description for The Lord of the Rings in general, and for Boromir in particular, a figure that merged together most of the professional and private interests of its creator: Homer (Ajax), Christianity (Judas), heroic lays (Roland, Beorhtnoth), Middle-English literature (Sir Gawain) and Beowulf (Scyld Scefing).

Notes

1 Abbreviations used: Il.: Homer´s The Iliad; Od.: Homer´s The Odyssey; Soph. Ai.: Sophocles´ Ajax; Ov. Met.: Ovid´s Metamorphoses. I would like to thank the editors of Tolkien Studies for their tireless help, and the anonymous readers of this paper for their helpful suggestions and criticisms. The Greek font used is ALPHABETUM Unicode, developed by Juan-José Marcos (http://guindo.cnice.mecd.es/~jmag0042/alphaspa.html.

2 See recently, in general terms, Martinez (319-27, 334-51), although some of his parallels are questionable. More specific examples in Nagy (96 nn. 1-3).

3 The story of Ajax’ madness and death was of singular interest to Greek and Latin writers. An overview of all ancient sources can be found in Jebb (ix-xxiii, xlvi-xlix), Ganz (629-35).

4 Although Tolkien would be hostile to such biographic approaches (e.g. Letters 257, 288), the importance of his own relationship with his sons in the creation of his stories can hardly be exaggerated.

5 “The thread was to be the occurrence time and time again in human families … of a father and son called by names that could be interpreted as Bliss-friend and Elf-friend … Edwin and Elwin of the present … Eädwine and Ælfwine of ca. AD 913, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend … to come at last to Amandil and Elendil” (Letters 347).

6 Soph. Teucer fr. 577 R. ὡς ἄρ᾿, ὦ τέκνον, κενὴν / ἐτερπόμην σοῦ τέρψιν εὐλογουμένου (so the delight was empty which I felt, my son, when I heard you praised). Compare: “he loved him greatly; too much perhaps” (RK V, i, 25).

7 Il. 7.211-3 τοῖος ἄρ᾿ Αἴας ὦρτο πελώριος, ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν, / μειδιόων βλοσυροῖσι προσώπασι· νέρθε δὲ ποσσὶν / ἤϊε μακρὰ βιβάς, κραδάων δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος (such was Aias as he strode gigantic, the wall of the Achaians, smiling under his threatening brows, with his feet beneath him taking huge strides forward, and shaking the spear far-shadowing; Lattimore tr). Compare: “we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end … so even was my brother, Boromir” (TT, IV, v, 287); Soph. Ai. 212 θούριος Αἴας (impetuous Ajax; Garvie tr), 364-5 τὸν θρασύν, τὸν εὐκάρδιον, / τὸν ἐν δαΐοις ἄτρετον μάχαις (the bold man, the stout-hearted man, the one who was fearless in battle among the foe). Compare: “proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory” (TT, IV, v, 280) “ reckless and eager” (RK, V, i, 39).

8 Il. 3.226-7 τίς τ᾿ ἄρ ᾿ ὅδ᾿ ἄλλος Ἀχαιός ἀνὴρ ἠΰς τε μέγας τε, / ἔξοχος Ἀργείων κεφαλήν τε καὶ εὐρέας ὤμους (who then is this other Achaian of power and stature, towering above the Argives by head and broad shoulders?), Soph. Ai. 205-6 ὁ δεινὸς μέγας ὠμοκρατὴς / Αἴας (the terrible great Ajax, so fierce in his might). Compare: “little less in height… broader and heavier in build” (FR, II, iii, 305) (cf. “Boromir was the tallest of the party … and broad-shouldered as well”; Shadow 426); “Pippin marvelled at his strength, seeing the passage that he had already forced with no other tool than his great limbs” (FR, II, iii, 306); Il. 17.279 Αἴας, ὃς περὶ μὲν εἶδος, περὶ δ᾿ ἔργα τέτυκτο (by Aias, who for his beauty and the work of his hands surpassed all other Danaans). Compare “a tall man with a fair and noble face” (FR, II, ii, 253); “his head so proud, his face so fair” (TT, III, i, 20).

9 Il. 3.229 οὗτος δ᾿ Αἴας ἐστὶ πελώριος, ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν (this is the huge Ajax, the bulwark of the Achaeans), Od. 11.556 τοῖος γὰρ σφιν πύργος ἀπώλεο (such a tower of strength was lost to them in you). Compare: “thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West” (FR, II, ii, 258); “If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower…” (FR, II, ii, 261).

10 Il. 7.219 Αἴας δ᾿ ἐγγύθεν ἦλθε φέρων σάκος ἠΰτε πύργον (now Aias came near him, carrying like a wall his shield), Soph. Ai. 19 Αἴαντι τῷ σακεσφόρῳ (Ajax the bearer of the shield), Ov. Met. 13.2. Compare: “Aragorn had Andúril but no other weapon … Boromir had a long sword and he bore also a shield and his war-horn” (FR, II, iii, 292).

11 This is shown, e.g., in Ajax´desperate, hopeless and solitary stand in defence of the ships of the Achaeans (Il. 15.674-746), his determined defence of Patroclos’ corpse against the entire Trojan host (Il. 17.281-316, 626-67) and his recovery of Achilles’ body. It need not be stressed here that this is the principle on which the emotional power of TT, III, i, 15-16 is based.

12 Il. 11.546-57, 13.321-2 ἀνδρὶ δέ κ᾿ οὐκ εἴξειε μέγας Τελαμώνιος Αἴας, / ὃς θνητός τ᾿ εἴη (nor would huge Telamonian Aias give way to any man, one who was mortal). Compare: “it must have irked Boromir to run from Orcs… or even from the fell thing you name, the Balrog … even though he was the last to leave” (TT, IV, v, 285).

13 l. 2.768 ἀνδρῶν αὖ μέγ᾿ ἄριστος ἔην Τελαμώνιος Αἴας / ὄφρ᾿ Ἀχιλεὺς μήνιεν (among the men far the best was Telamonian Aias, while Achilleus stayed angry). Compare: “and very valiant indeed he was: no heir of Minas Tirith has for long years been so hardy in toil, so onward into battle, or blown a mightier note on the Great Horn” (TT, IV, v, 287).

14 Soph. Ai. 1407-15 μία δ᾿ ἐκ κλισίας ἀνδρῶν ἴλη / τὸν ὑπασπίδιον κόσμον φέρετω. / παῖ, σὺ δὲ πατρός γ᾿, ὅσον ἰσχύεις, / φιλότητι θιγὼν πλευρὰς σὺν ἐμοὶ / τάσδ᾿ ἐπικούφιζ᾿ · ... / ... / ... σούσθω, βάτω, / τῷδ᾿ ἀνδρὶ πονῶν τῷ πάντ᾿ ἀγαθῷ (let one company of men bring from the hut the armour which he wore under his shield. Boy, with all the strength you have, touch your father lovingly and help me to raise this frame … hurry, go, labouring for this man who was good in all respects); Quintus of Smyrna 5.614-5, 650-1 καὶ ἑ, μέγαν περ ἐόντα, θοὰς ποτὶ νῆας ἔνεικαν / πολλοὶ ἀείραντες / ... / τοῖος ἄρ᾿ ἐν πυρὶ κεῖτο λελασμένος ἰωχμοῖο / Αἴας σὺν τεύχεσσι (and they raised him among many, large though he was, and carried him to the swift ships … such was Ajax as he lay on the pyre with his arms, forgetful of battle). Compare: “upon this rough bier they carried the body of their companion to the shore, together with such trophies of his last battle as they chose to send forth with him. It was only a short way, yet they found it no easy task, for Boromir was a man both tall and strong” (TT, III, i, 18). The practical difficulties of lifting a great man´s corpse appear also in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth II (TL 131-2, 136-7).

15 Boromir should have been buried in a cairn or under a mound, but he was given to the River (TT, III, i, 17). Similarly, Ajax should have been cremated, according to custom, but ended up interred in a coffin (Little Iliad fr. 2 West).

16 Soph. Ai. 577 τὰ δ᾿ ἄλλα τεύχη κοίν᾿ ἐμοὶ τεθάψεται (the rest of my armour shall be buried along with me), 1047-8. Compare: “His helm they set beside him, and across his lap they laid the cloven horn and the hilts and shards of his sword” (TT, III, i, 19).

17 Euripides, Helen 104, Dictys 5.15. Compare: “‘Many indeed,’ said Faramir, ‘and treachery not the least’” (TT, IV, v, 273); “It is scarcely wise when bringing the news of the death of his heir to a mighty lord to speak much of the coming of one who will … claim the kingship” (RK, V, i, 26).

18 Od. 11.548-9, Soph. Ai. 963 θανόντ᾿ ἄν οἰμώξειαν ἐν χρείᾳ δορός (they may lament his death when they turn out to need his spear), 1211-3. Compare: “great harm is this death to Minas Tirith, and to us all. That was a worthy man!” (TT, III, ii, 38); “my Boromir! Now we have need of you” (RK, V, i, 27).

19 Soph. Ai. 966-8 ἐμοὶ πικρὸς τέθνηκεν ... / αὑτῷ δὲ τερπνός. ὧν γὰρ ἠράσθε τυχεῖν / ἐκτήσασθ᾿ ἁυτῷ, θάνατον ὅνπερ ἤθελεν (his death is as painful to me as it is ... sweet for him; for he got himself what he longed to obtain, the death which he wanted). Compare: “for it is a bitter thought that Boromir died within sight of the land of his home … whether he erred or no, of this I am sure: he died well, achieving some good thing. His face was even more beautiful than in life.” (TT, IV, v, 275-78). Cf. Bowra “their deaths are somehow an occasion for pride and satisfaction. We feel not only that their lives are not given in vain … but that by choosing this kind of death he sets a logical and proper goal for himself” (75).

20 Il. 7.288-9 Αἴαν, ἐπεὶ τοι δῶκε θεὸς μέγεθός τε βίην τε / καὶ πινυτήν (Ajax, seeing that God has given you strength, stature and wisdom), Soph. Ai. 119-20. Compare: “Boromir has more than strength and valour” (Shadow 408); “thank goodness for plain strength and good sense” of Boromir (Shadow 427). Compare also Boromir´s interventions throughout FR, II, ii with Ajax´ forceful and effective speech to Achilles in Il. 9.624-42 (Jebb xi).

21 Antisthenes fr. 14.8 ἀπορίαν ἔργων πολλοὶ καὶ μακροὶ λόγοι λέγονται οὐδ᾿ ἀντιλέγειν πρὸς τοὺς πολεμίους, ἀλλ᾿ ἢ μαχομένους κρατεῖν ἢ δουλεύειν σιωπῇ (when it is not possible to decide the issue through deeds many long words are used. But you cannot face the enemy with speeches: it is either vanquish them in fight, or be a slave in silence), Ov. Met. 13.120 denique (quod verbis opus est?) spectemur agendo! (finally, what need of words? Let us be seen in action!, tr. Miller-Goold). Compare: “those who shelter behind us give us praise—much praise but little help” (FR, II, ii, 259); “where heads are at a loss bodies must serve” (FR, II, iii, 305), an attitude ingrained in the men of Gondor, as Faramir reveals: “we boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt” (TT, IV, v, 289). On Boromir’s mistrust of words and reliance on actions compare “indeed we have heard of Fangorn in Minas Tirith, but what I have heard seems to me for the most part old wives’ tales” with Celeborn’s response: “do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know” (FR, II, vi, 390).

22 Ov. Met. 13.210 quid facis interea, qui nil nisi proelia nosti? (what were you doing in the meantime, you whose only knowledge is of battles?). Compare: “fearless and strong, but caring little for lore, save the tales of old battles” (RK, Appendix A, 337); “do you not know, Boromir, or do you choose to forget the North Stair … in the days of the great kings?” (FR, II, ix, 406).

23 Antisthenes fr. 14.5 ὅ μὲν γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ὅ τι ἂν δράσειε φανερῶς, ἐγὼ δὲ οὐδέν ἂν λάθρᾳ τολμήσαιμι πρᾶξαι (there is nothing he would do openly, while there is nothing I would dare to do in secret), Ov. Met. 13.16 quae sine teste gerit, quorum nox conscia sola est (let Ulysses tell of his, done without witness, done with the night alone to see them). Compare: “I will not go forth like a thief in the night” (FR, II, iii, 292).

24 Ov. Met. 13.103-4 quo tamen haec in Ithaco, qui clam, qui semper inermis / rem gerit et furtis incautum decipit hostem? (but why give them to the Ithacan, who always does things stealthily, always unarmed, relying upon tricks to catch the enemy off his guard?). Compare: “I am a true man, neither thief or tracker” (FR, II, x, 415).

25 Soph. Ai. 103 τοὐπίτριπτον κίναδος (the villainous fox), Quintus of Smyrna 5.358 δολόεντ᾿ Ὀδυσῆα (deceitful Odysseus). Compare: “miserable trickster!” (FR, II, x, 415).

26 Philostratus, Heroicus 35.2 πελώριος γὰρ τις ἦν καὶ ὑπὲρ τὴν στρατὶαν πᾶσαν καὶ φρόνημα αἴρων εὐήνιον τε καὶ σώφρον (for he was someone mighty even beyond the entire army, but bore a tractable and prudent spirit). Compare: “admiring the great man’s lordly but kindly manner” (RK, V, iv, 83-84). Jebb (xxxiii) calls Ajax’ affection “a stern tenderness.”

27 Il. 8.266-72 Τεῦκρος δ᾿ εἴνατος ἦλθε, παλίντονα τόξα τιταίνων, / στῆ δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ὑπ᾿ Αἴαντος σάκεϊ Τελανωνιάδαο. / ἔνθ᾿ Αἴας μὲν ὑπεξέφερεν σάκος· αὐτὰρ ὅ γ᾿ ἥρως / παπτήνας, ἐπεὶ ἄρ τιν᾿ ὀϊστεύσας ἐν ὁμίλῳ / βεβλήκοι ... / αὐτὰρ ὁ αὖτις ἰὼν πάϊς ὣς ὑπὸ μητέρα δύσκεν / εἰς Αἴανθ᾿· ὁ δὲ μιν σάκεϊ κρύπτασκε φαεινῷ (and ninth came Teukros, bending into position the curved bow, and took his place in the shelter of Telamonian Aias´ shield, as Aias lifted the shield to take him. The hero would watch, whenever in the throng he had struck some man with an arrow … the archer would run back again, like a child to the arms of his mother, to Aias, who would hide him in the glittering shield’s protection). Compare: “Between the brothers there was great love, and had been since childhood, when Boromir was the helper and protector of Faramir” (RK, Appendix A, 337). Ajax’ presence and words are “calm and calming” for Teucer (Janko 279). Ajax usually addresses his brother as Τεῦκρε πέπον, ‘tender Teucer’ (Il. 15.437, 472), an adjective Janko terms “rare” (277) in this context, and all the more moving for that.

28 Pacuvius, The Award of the Arms fr. 33 W. si non est ingratum reapse quod feci bene (if the service I have rendered is not in very fact a thankless one, tr. Warmington). Compare: “Then shall I turn to my home alone if my help has not earned the reward of any companionship” (FR, II, ix, 406).

29 Cf. Soph. Ai. 193-4 ἀλλ᾿ ἄνα ἐξ ἑδράνων, ὅπου μακραίωνι / στηρίζει (but rise up from the seat where you have been too long firmly set in this lengthy retirement), 614-5 νῦν δ᾿ αὖ φρενὸς οἰοβώ- / τας (now as he feeds his lonely thoughts), Ov. Met. 13.238 denique de Danais quis te laudatve petisve? (finally, who of the Greeks praises you or seeks your company?). Compare: “seated a little apart…”, (FR, II, ii, 253); “sitting silent on the outside of the circle” (FR, II, x, 419).

30 Cf. Il. 11.8-9, Soph. Ai. 4 ἔνθα τάξιν ἔσχατην ἔχει (where he holds the post at the end of the line). Compare: “Aragorn leading, Boromir at the rear” (FR, II, v, 345); “even though he was the last to leave” (TT, IV, v, 285).

31 Soph. Ai. 668-70 ἄρχοντες εἰσιν, ὥσθ᾿ ὑπεικτέον τιμήν, / καὶ γὰρ τὰ δεινὰ καρτερώτατα / τιμαῖς ὑπείκει (they are the rulers, so one ought to yield- for even things that are terrible and very strong yield to what is held in honour). Compare: “Boromir looked at them doubtfully, but he bowed his head: ‘so be it… then in Gondor we must trust to such weapons as we have’” (FR, II, ii, 281); “Yet always he treated Aragorn with honour”…“if he were satisfied of Aragorn´s claim ... he would greatly reverence him” (TT, IV, v, 278).

32 Soph. Ai. 434-40, 462-72. As is well known, Boromir’s behavior during the Council of Elrond (FR, II, ii) closely replicates his father’s moral stance, as later events bear out (RK, I, iv; RK, I, vi). On the weight of father-mirroring in heroic decisions gone awry, cf. The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth III, “Ofermod”: “why did Beorhtnoth do this? Owing to a defect of character, no doubt; but a character ... not only formed by nature, but moulded also by ‘aristocratic tradition’ ... magnificent, perhaps, but certainly wrong” (TL 146).

33 Cf. Soph. Ai. 773-5 τότ᾿ ἀντιφωνεῖ δεινὸν ἄρρητον τ᾿ ἔπος· / “ἄνασσα, τοῖς ἄλλοισιν Ἀργείων πέλας / ἵστω, καθ᾿ ἡμᾶς δ᾿ οὔποτ᾿ ἐισρήξει μάχη” (he then replied with a terrible word, one that should never have been spoken: “my lady Athena, stand near the rest of the Argives, but where I am stationed the battle will never break in”). Compare: “I do not seek allies in war … I was not sent to beg any boon” (FR, II, ii, 260); “for though I do not ask for aid, we need it.” (FR, II, ii, 280). It is interesting to note that Denethor´s cautious acceptance of help (when given on his own terms, that is) finds an echo in Telamon´s advice to his son Ajax as well: Soph. Ai 764-5 ὁ μὲν γὰρ αὐτὸν ἐννέπει, “τέκνον, δορὶ / βούλου κρατεῖν μέν, σὺν θεῷ δ᾿ ἀεὶ κρατεῖν” (for his father addressed him: “my son, you must wish to win the victory with your spear, but always to win it with the help of god”). Compare: “pride would be folly that disdained help and counsel at need” (RK, V, i, 30).

34 Soph. Ai. 767-9 ὁ δ᾿ ὑψικόμπως κἀφρόνως ἠμείψατο· / “πάτερ, θεοῖς μὲν κἂν ὁ μηδὲν ὤν ὁμοῦ / κράτος κατακτήσαιτ᾿· ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ δίχα κείνων πέποιθα τοῦτ᾿ ἐπισπάσειν κλέος” (he boastfully and thoughtlessly replied, “Father, together with the gods even the nonentity could achieve victory: but I trust that even without them I shall win this glory”). Compare: “These elves and half-elves and wizards … often I doubt if they are wise and not merely timid…we do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause” (FR, II, x, 414).

35 The term acquired popular currency thanks to Dodds (1-45) (Regius professor of Greek at Oxford) and Lesky’s 1960 monograph, although it had been used in the analysis of tragic motivation at least since Jebb´s 1900 commentary of Sophocles´Antigone (119-20). It is similar, but not identical, to the Celtic concept of “fey” or “fairy-struck.” Tolkien himself came close to formulating this principle: “the domination of the Ring was much too strong for the mean soul of Sméagol. But he would have never had to endure, if he had not become a mean sort of thief before it crossed his path” (Letters 234-35). “Double motivation” as displayed there is entirely different from the Christian attitude underlying the supplication “lead us not into temptation” (Letters 251-52).

36 The most famous formulations of this principle are Aeschylus fr. 154a, 15-6 R. θεὸς μὲν αἰτίαν φύει βροτοῖς / ὅταν κακῶσαι δῶμα παμπήδην θέληι (god plants in mortal men the cause of sin whenever he wills utterly to destroy a house), Soph. Antigone 622-4 τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾿ ἐσθλὸν / τωῖδ᾿ ἔμμεν ὅτωι φρένας / θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄτας (bad often looks good to those whom god is leading to destruction). Cf. “What have I said? What have I done? A madness took me, but it has passed” (FR, II, x, 416).

37 Soph. Ai. 332 ἡμῖν τὸν ἄνδρα διαπεφοιβάσθαι κακοῖς (terrible ... are the misfortunes which have driven the man frantic). Cf. Jebb (60) “by διαπεφοιβάσθαι the Chorus mean that a malign power has taken permanent possession of his mind.”

38 That Galadriel´s intervention could be called “temptation” in some light was made clearer in previous drafts: “I suppose it was just a test... it felt almost like temptation”; “tempting us, really, offering what she had not the power to give. I refused to listen, since the gift was not offered to all alike” (Treason 248, 258, 263 n.14). That is also the presupposition behind her words to Frodo on his offering her the One Ring: “Gently are you revenged for my testing of your heart at our first meeting.… I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer” (FR, II, vii, 381).

39 Cf. the rejected wording of Frodo´s testing: “whether it had been a temptation, or a revealing to himself of the way of escape from his task, he could not tell. But now that the thought had been made plain, he could not forget it” (Treason 266 n.32).

40 Cf. Athena´s words in Soph. Ai. 51-2 δυσφόρους ἐπ᾿ ὄμμασι / γνώμας βαλοῦσα τῆς ἀνηκέστου χάρας (I cast grievous imaginations on his eyes and kept him from this incurable joy).

41 “Now I loved him dearly, and would gladly avenge his death, yet I knew him well” (TT, IV, v, 277). Cf. The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth III, “Ofermod”: “they are lines of severe criticism, though not incompatible with loyalty, and even love” (TL 147).

42 Teucer blamed Athena also: Soph. Ai. 953-4 τοιόνδε ... Πάλλας φυτεύει πῆμ᾿ (such is the pain that Pallas … plants). Cf. Athena herself in Soph. Ai. 59-60 ἐγὼ δὲ φοιτῶν τ᾿ ἄνδρα μανιάσιν νόσοις / ὤτρυνον, εἰσέβαλλον εἰς ἕρκη κακὰ (I urged the man on in his frenzied movement with attacks of madness, and threw him into evil hunting-nets).

43 Cf. besides “Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial” (TT, IV, v, 289), a sentiment echoed by Gandalf: “Poor Boromir! I could not see what happened to him.… It was a sore trial for such a man, a warrior and a lord of men” (TT III v, 99).

44 Cf. Letter 131 (written in 1951) “this frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others—speedily and according to the benefactor´s own plans” (Letters 146). Compare this with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth III, “Ofermod”: “Beorhtnoth was wrong, and he died for his folly. But it was a noble error, or the error of a noble” (TL 148), and with Heath (174) and Garvie (11 “Ajax falls not because he is wicked, but because he is a great man, or rather because of the qualities which made him a great man,” 14, 136).

45 “We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a common cause.… The Ring would give me the power of command. How would I drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!” (FR, II, x, 414). On the compelling, all-erasing nature of the desire, compare Accius, The Award of the Arms frs. 96-7 W. sed ita Achilli armis inclutis vesci studet / et cuncta opima levia iam prae illis putet (but such is his eagerness to feast upon Achilles´famous arms, he now believes all spoils of honour trifling things compared to those, tr. Warmington). For Tolkien, Boromir was a mixture of evil and good (Letters 197).

46 “Why do you speak ever of hiding and destroying? … Valour needs strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon…. Take it and go forth to victory!” (FR, II, ii, 281).

47 Soph. Ai. 442-6 εἰ ζῶν Ἀχιλλεὺν τῶν ὅπλων τῶν ὧν πέρι / κρίνειν ἔμελλε κράτος ἀριστείας τινί, / οὐκ ἄν τις αὔτ᾿ ἔμαρψεν ἄλλος ἀντ᾿ ἐμοῦ. / νῦν δ᾿ αὔτ᾿ Ἀτρεῖδαι φωτὶ παντουργῷ φρένας / ἔπραξαν ἀνδρὸς τοῦδ᾿ ἀπώσαντες κράτη (if Achilles had been alive and was to assign to anyone the victory for excellence in the matter of his own arms, no one would have seized them instead of me. But now the sons of Atreus have procured them for a man who is at heart a villain, and have thrust aside my triumphs), 615-7 τὰ πρὶν δ᾿ ἔργα χεροῖν / μεγίστας ἀρετᾶς / ἄφιλα παρ᾿ ἄφιλοις ἔπεσ᾿ ἔπεσε ... (the former works of his hands, marked by the highest excellence, have fallen, fallen away friendless), 1261-73. Compare: “If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the Men of Númenor, and not a Halfling. It is not yours save by an unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should have been mine. Give it to me!” (FR, II, x, 415).

48 “Had he been among us to consult concerning the hard words of our dream, he could have made them clear to us without need of messenger. Yet, maybe, he would not have done so, and the journey of Boromir was doomed” (TT, IV, v, 279). Boromir had a true dream, sent probably by Ilúvatar himself through Irmo, the Vala of true dreaming and prophecy (S 21). That means that he was fated to go to Rivendell, and that even the last one of his actions was necessary in the grand scheme of things: “it was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir´s sake. But that is not the only part they have to play. They were brought to Fangorn, and their coming was like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains” (TT, III, v, 99).

49 “Galadriel told me that he was in peril. But he escaped in the end. It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir’s sake” (TT, III, v, 99). There is a very close parallel in Herodotus 6.135.3: “The Parians, when it came to their knowledge that Timo, the under-priestess of the goddess, had adviced Miltiades what he should do, intended to punish her for her crime…. But the Pythia forbade them and said: ‘Timo was not at fault; it was decreed that Miltiades should come to an unhappy end; and she was sent to lure him to his destruction.’” Sophocles did not censure Athena´s intervention in Ajax’ madness, either (Knox 130-2).

50 Shippey (142) “It (sc. the Ring) has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters … these two possible views of the Ring are kept up throughout the three volumes: sentient creature or psychic amplifier. They correspond respectively to the ‘heroic’ view of evil as something external to be resisted and the Boethian opinion that evil is essentially internal, psychological, negative.” I would like to point out that precisely the Greek heroic concept of double motivation provides an adequate answer to this conundrum.

51 Soph. Ai. 909-12 ὤμοι ἐμᾶς ἄτας, οἷος ἄρ᾿ αἱμάχθης, / ἄφαρκτος φίλων. / ἐγὼ δ᾿ ὁ πάντα κωφός, ὁ πάντ᾿ ἄϊδρις, / κατημέλησα (alas for my delusion! Alone your blood was shed, unprotected by your friends! And I, deaf to everything, ignorant in everything, paid no heed). Compare: “Poor Boromir! I could not see what happened to him” (TT, III, v, 99).

52 Sack of Ilion fr. 2 West ὅς ῥα καὶ Αἴαντος πρῶτος μάθε χωομένοιο / ὄμματα τ᾿ ἀστράπτοντα βαρυνόμενόν τε νόημα (he it was who first recognized the raging Ajax´s flashing eyes and burdened spirit, tr. West). Compare: “He caught the strange gleam in Boromir’s eyes … a raging fire was in his eyes” (FR, II, x, 415). Cf. Pacuvius, The Award of the Arms frs. 43-4 W. feroci ingenio, torvus, praegrandi gradu; / cum recordor eis ferocem et torvam confidentiam (in temper grim, fierce, with a big stride, when I recall to my mind his grim and fierce arrogance). Compare: “Terror and grief shook him, seeing in his thought the mad fierce face of Boromir, and his burning eyes” (FR, II, x, 416).

53 Soph. Ai. 301-2 τέλος ὁ ἀπᾴξας διὰ θυρῶν σκιᾷ τινι / λόγους ἀνέσπα (in the end he rushed off through the doors, and talked to some shadows painfully dragging out his words). Compare: “At length he spoke again, softly, as if he was debating with himself … he paused suddenly, as if he had become aware that he was speaking his thoughts aloud” (FR, II, viii, 385); “Boromir strode up and down speaking ever more loudly. Almost he seemed to have forgotten Frodo, while his talk dwelt on walls and weapons” (FR, II, x, 414).

54 See especially Soph. Ai. 47 νύκτωρ ἐφ᾿ ὑμᾶς δόλιος ὁρμᾶται μόνος (he set out alone against you, by night and stealthily), 216-7.

55 Treason (346 n.10). Cf. “A strange feeling came to him that something was behind him, that unfriendly eyes were on him … but all he saw to his surprise was Boromir, and his face was smiling and kind” (FR, II, x, 413).

56 Soph. Ai. 216-7 μανίᾳ γὰρ ἁλοὺς ἡμὶν ὁ κλεινὸς / νύκτερος Αἴας ἀπελωβήθη (seized by madness our famous Ajax fell into disgrace in the night).

57 Soph. Ai. 55-65, 303-4 συντιθεὶς γέλων πολύν, / ὅσην κατ᾿ αὐτῶν ὕβριν ἐκτείσαιτ᾿ ἰὼν (he laughed loudly at all the violence he had gone and inflicted on them by way of vengeance). Compare: “You can lay the blame on me, if you will. You can say that I was too strong and took it by force. For I am too strong for you, halfling” (FR, II, x, 415).

58 Soph. Ai. 306-17 ἔμφρων μόλις πως ξὺν χρόνῳ καθίσταται· / καὶ πλῆρες ἄτης ὡς διοπτεύει στέγος, / παίσας κάρα ᾿θώϋξεν· ἐν δ᾿ ἐρειπίοις / νεκρῶν ἐρειφθεὶς ἕζετ᾿ ἀρνείου φόνου, / κόμην ἀπρίξ ὄνυξι συλλαβὼν χερί. / καὶ τὸν μὲν ἧστο πλεῖστον ἄφθογγος χρόνον /... / κἀνήρετ᾿ ἐν τῷ πράγματος κυροῖ ποτε. / ... / ὁ δ᾿ εὐθὺς ἐξῴμωξεν οἰμωγὰς λυγρὰς (with some difficulty he eventually returned to sanity; and when he saw the house so full of carnage he struck his head and cried aloud; he fell a wreck in the wreckage of the dead sheep´s corpses and he sat there, his nails gripping his hair tightly with his hand. He sat there voiceless for most of the time ... and he asked me about the situation in which he found himself ... and he immediately broke into painful laments). Compare: “For a while he was as still as if his own curse had struck him down; and he suddenly wept. Then he rose and passed his hand over his eyes, dashing away the tears. ‘What have I said?’, he cried, ‘What have I done?” (FR, II, x, 416).

59 Soph. Ai. 394-9 σκότος, ἐμὸν φάος /.../ ἕλεσθ᾿ ἕλεσθέ μ᾿ οἰκήτορα, / ἕλεσθέ μ᾿· οὔτε γὰρ θεῶν γένος / οὔθ᾿ ἁμερίων ἔτ᾿ ἄξιος / βλέπειν τίν᾿ εἰς ὄνασιν ἀνθρώπων (oh darkness, my light ... take me, take me to live with you: for I no longer deserve to look for any help to the race of gods or of men who live but for a day). Compare: “‘I tried to take the Ring from Frodo. I am sorry. I have paid.’ His glance strayed to his fallen enemies” (TT, III, i, 16). This is clearer in the draft version: “I tried to take the Ring. I am sorry. I have made what amends I could” (Treason 378). Boromir´s decision to seek death is but a natural progression of the attitude to honour displayed in his words to Frodo, “we shall fall in battle valiantly. Yet there is still hope that they will not fail ”(FR, II, x, 413), and in Denethor´s despairing orders “let all who fight the enemy… keep hope while they may, and after hope still the hardihood to die free” (RK, V, iv, 87).

60 “‘No’, said Boromir, lying with a half-truth” (Treason 375). “Boromir isn’t lying, that’s not his way; but he hasn’t told us everything” (FR, II, x, 421). This veiling of the truth beneath ambiguous words lies behind the magnificent “deception-speech” of Ajax in Soph. Ai. 646-92, one of the most famous and admired passages in Greek Tragedy (Heath 185-90, Garvie 184-6, Hesk 74-95).

61 Soph. Ai. 465-8 ἄλλὰ δῆτ᾿ ἰὼν / πρὸς ἔρυμα Τρώων, ξυμπεσῶν μόνος μόνοις / καὶ δρῶν τι χρηστόν, εἶτα λοῖσθιον θάνω; (am I to go to the Trojans´wall, engage with them in duels, and perform some useful service before I finally die?). Compare: “Aragorn saw that he was pierced with many black-feathered arrows ... many orcs lay slain, piled all about him and at his feet” (TT, III, i, 15-16).

62 Soph. Ai. 859-63 ὦ γῆς ἱερὸν οἰκείας πέδον / Σαλαμῖνος, ὦ πατρῷον ἑστίας βάθρον / ... / χαίρετ᾿, ὦ τροφῆς ἐμοί (oh holy soil of my native Salamis, oh foundation of my father´s hearth ... farewell, my nurses). Compare: “Go to Minas Tirith and save my people. I have failed” (TT, III, i, 16).

63 Soph. Ai. 864-5 τοῦθ᾿ ὑμὶν Αἴας τοὔπος ὕστατον θροεῖ· / τὰ δ᾿ ἄλλ᾿ ἐν Ἅιδου τοῖς κάτω μυθήσομαι (this is the last word that Ajax speaks to you: the rest I shall say in the house of Hades to those below). Compare: “But Boromir did not speak again” (TT, III, i, 16). In this as in other matters, Boromir models himself after his father: “he said little” (RK Appendix A, 337).

64 Soph. Ai. 691-2 καὶ τάχ᾿ ἂν μ᾿ ἴσως / πύθοισθε, κεἰ νῦν δυστυχῶ, σεσωσμένον (and perhaps you will soon learn that, even if I am unhappy now, I have been saved). Compare: “You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory” (TT, III, i, 16) “Galadriel told me that he was in peril, but he escaped in the end … it was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir´s sake” (TT, III, v, 99).

65 The South Wind sings during the Lament for Boromir of “so many bones” that “lie / on the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky.” The distinction between “white shores” and “dark shores” might hint at a reference to “and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country” (RK, VI, ix, 310), Frodo´s first glimpse of the Undying Lands.

66 Soph. Ai. 1008-18 ἦ πού με Τελαμών, σὸς πατὴρ ἐμός θ᾿ ἅμα, / δέξαιτ᾿ ἂν εὐπρόσωπος ἵλεως τ᾿ ἴσως / χωροῦντ᾿ ἀνεὺ σοῦ. πῶς γὰρ οὔχ; ὅτῳ πάρα / μηδ᾿ εὐτυχοῦντι μηδὲν ἥδιον γελᾶν / ... ποῖον οὐκ ἐρεῖ κακὸν /.../ τὸν δειλίᾳ προδόντα καὶ κακανδρίᾳ / σε, φίλτατ᾿ Αἴας, ἢ δόλοισιν, ὡς τὰ σὰ / κράτη θανόντος καὶ δόμους νέμοιμι σούς. / τοιαῦτ᾿ ἀνὴρ δύσοργος, ἐν γηρᾷ βαρύς, / ἐρεῖ, πρὸς οὐδὲν εἰς ἔριν θυμούμενος (Telamon no doubt, your father and mine, would receive me cheerfully and graciously when he sees me coming without you. Of course he will: he who even in good fortune finds it just as impossible to laugh with pleasure... what kind of insult will he not utter against ... the man who betrayed you, dearest Ajax, by cowardice and unmanliness, or by deceit, so that I might administer your power and house when you are dead! This is the kind of thing he will say, a bad-tempered man, stern in his old age, one who gets angry at nothing for the sake of a quarrel). Compare: “Do you ask for my judgement on all your deeds?” to which Faramir replies: “I wish I had known your counsel before the burden of so weighty a judgement was thrust on me” (RK, V, iv, 86). Compare Letter 244, written ca. 1963: “(Faramir) was daunted by his father, not only in the ordinary way of a family with a stern proud father of great force of character, but as a Númenórean before the chief of the one surviving Númenórean state” (Letters 323).

67 Soph. Ai. 1273-81. Compare: “No jealousy or rivalry had arisen between them since, for their father´s favour or for the praise of men. It did not seem possible to Faramir that anyone in Gondor could rival Boromir” (RK, Appendix A, 337).

68 The “gentle Teucer” (Il. 15.437 Τεῦκρε πέπον) shows his mettle in the hopeless battle for the ships (Il. 15.437-75) and the fearless, nearly suicidal defence of his dead brother against the chief authorities of the Achaeans (Soph. Ai. 1310-1). Compare: “Wise and learned in the scrolls of lore and song … and yet … less reckless and eager than Boromir, but no less resolute” (RK, Appendix A, 337); “he was gentle in bearing …it did not seem possible to Faramir that any one in Gondor could rival Boromir … yet it proved otherwise at the test” (RK, Appendix A, 337).

69 Il. 13.313-4 Τεῦκρος θ᾿, ὃς ἄριστος Ἀχαιῶν / τοξοσύνῃ, ἀγαθὸς δὲ καὶ ἐν σταδίῃ ὑσμίνῃ (Teukros, best of all the Achaians in archery, and a good man in the close of standing combat). Compare: “Two had spears in their hands .... two had great bows, almost of their own height, and great quivers of long green-feathered arrows” (TT, IV, iv, 265).

70 This is the substance of Menelaus´ taunts in Soph. Ai. 1120-1 ὁ τοξότης ἔοικεν οὐ σμικρὸν φρονεῖν / ... / μέγ᾿ ἄν τι κομπάσειας, ἀσπιδ᾿ εἰ λάβοις (the archer apparently has no small pride ... big would be your boast, if you were to get a shield; i.e. ‘if you were to fight like a proper man’, Garvie 227), against the praise of Teucer´s courage in Il. 13.313-4, Aristophanes, Frogs 1041 Τεύκρων θυμολεόντων (Teucer the lion-heart). Compare: “He is bold, more bold than many deem … a man of hardihood and swift judgement in the field” (RK, V, i, 39); “his courage was judged less than his brother’s. But it was not so, except that he did not seek glory in danger without a purpose” (RK, Appendix A, 337).

71 Il. 8.266-72, 13.170-94, 15.442-4. Unlike the rest of Homeric warriors, Ajax and Teucer act in tandem out of a previously agreed-upon and private battle plan (Il. 15.467-8). Boromir and Faramir are presented as having joint command in the battle of Osgiliath (UT 244).

72 A remnant of an older epic substratum (Janko 48-9): Il. 7.164, 13.46, 177-8. Boromir and Faramir share the Quenya root MÍRE (‘jewel’; cf. Road 353, 373), traditionally reserved to Númenórean royalty (compare Vardamir, Atanamir, Míriel, Artamir, Faramir I, Castamir). Tolkien fans affectionately call them “Brothers Mir,” as every fan of the Dom-Land Caribou will have reason to attest.

73 Horace, Carm. 1.7.27 nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice (’tis Teucer leads, ’tis Teucer breathes the wind; no more despair; Conington tr). Compare: “He was a captain that men would follow… even under the shadow of the black wings” (RK, V, iv, 84). The extremely famous ending of Horace’s poem may have inspired an authorial comment on the mixture of private anxiety and outward self-command for the sake of his men that forms the backbone of Faramir’s courage (Carm. 1.7.25-32): quo nos cumque feret melior fortuna parente / ibimus- o socii comitesque, / … / o fortes peioraque passi / mecum saepe viri, nunc vino pellite curas, / cras ingens iterabimus aequor (where Fortune bears us, than my sire more kind, there let us go, my own, my gallant crew … hearts, that have borne with me worse buffets! drown today in wine your care; to-morrow we recross the wide, wide sea). Compare: “It was the face of one who has been assaulted by a great fear or anguish, but has mastered it and now is quiet. Proud and grave he stood for a moment as he spoke to the guard” (RK, V, iv, 83).

74 While Ajax is inept at verbal warfare, Teucer excels at delivering devastating blows in verbal parry (Heath 298, Hesk 57-8, 116-8, 121). Compare with Faramir´s terrible riposte to his guilt-ridden father “I would ask you, my father, to remember why it was that I, not he, was in Ithilien. On one occasion at least your counsel has prevailed, not long ago.” (RK, V, iv, 86). Only pity stopped Faramir’s ability to read hearts from becoming an instrument of scorn (RK, Appendix A, 337).

75 Soph. Ai. 506-7, Pausanias 1.35.3 ἐπὶ τούτου καθήμενον Τελαμῶνα ὁρᾶν λέγουσιν ἐς τὴν ναῦν ἀποπλέοντων οἱ τῶν παίδων (a stone … on which they say that Telamon sat when he gazed at the ship in which his children were sailing away). Compare: “they will look for him from the White Tower ... but he will not return from mountain or from sea” (TT, III, i, 19).

76 Pacuvius, Teucer fr. 376 W. quamquam annisque et aetate hoc corpus putret (though my body rots with years and age). Compare: “my son, your father is old but not yet dotard” (RK, V, iv, 86).

77 Accius, Eurysaces fr. 346 exulare sinitis, sistis pelli, pulsum patimini! (to be an exile you allowed him, yes, allowed him to be thrust without, outthrust you suffer him to stay so). Compare: “They give him no rest, some murmured, the Lord drives his son too hard” (RK, V, iv, 89).

78 Soph. Ai. 977-8 ὦ φίλτατ᾿ Αἴας, ὦ ξύναιμον ὄμμ᾿ ἐμοὶ, / ἆρ᾿ ἠμπόληκας ὥσπερ ἡ φάτις κρατεῖ; (oh dearest Ajax, oh beloved face of my brother, have you fared as the prevailing rumour suggests?). Compare: “Tidings of death have many wings … I knew his gear, his sword, his beloved face … Boromir! I cried. Where is thy horn? Whither goest thou? O Boromir!” (TT, IV, v, 275).

79 Soph. Ai. 392-3, Pacuvius, Teucer frs. 345-7 W. segregare abs te ausis aut sine illo Salamina ingredi, / neque paternum aspectum es veritus; quom aetate exacta indigem / liberum lacerasti orbasti exstinxti (so you dared to separate Ajax from you, or without him set foot on Salamis, and shrank not from your father´s mien, when you shattered him, stripped him, crushed him thus far spent in years and bereft of his son), fr. 369 W profusus gemitu murmuro “occisti!” antruans (sprawled on my face, murmuring in rejoinder “you have killed me!”), fr. inc. fab. 16 W. qui stirpem occidit meum (you who cut off my stock). Compare: “‘So be it!’ cried Denethor ‘But not with your death only, Lord Faramir: with the death also of your father, and of all your people, whom it is your part to protect now that Boromir is gone’” (RK, V, iv, 86). The thrust of Denethor’s argument here is that had Boromir, not Faramir, been at Henneth Annûn, he would have brought his father “a mighty gift” that would have led the struggling Gondor to victory in the war against Mordor. It was Faramir’s presence, and decisions, in Henneth Annûn that doomed Gondor and all its people, in Denethor’s view: “‘Do you wish, then, that our places had been exchanged?’ … ‘Yes, I wish that indeed.… For Boromir … would have remembered his father’s need, and would not have squandered what fortune gave.’ … ‘I would ask you, my father, to remember why it was I, not he, was in Ithilien’” (RK, V, iv, 86).

80 Euripides, Helen 94-104 Αἴας μ᾿ ἀδελφὸς ὤλεσ᾿ ἐν Τροίᾳ θανῶν / ... / ὁθούνεκ᾿ αὐτῷ γ᾿ οὐ ξυνωλόμην ὁμοῦ (Ajax my brother ruined me with his death at Troy... because I did not die together with him). “Those accursed words came to trouble our counsel and drew away my son on the wild errand to his death.… Faramir should have gone in his stead” (RK, V, i, 27); ‘Do you wish then’, said Faramir, ‘that our places had been exchanged?’” (RK, V, iv, 86).

81 Soph. Ai. 1008-16, Pacuvius, Teucer fr. 342 W. te repudio nec recipio; naturam abdico; facesse! (I spurn you and receive you not, your birth I renounce. Go away!). Compare: “with the death also of your father, and of all your people, whom it is your part to protect now that Boromir is gone” (RK, V, iv, 86); “Nay, nay, whatever may now betide in war, my line too is ending, even the House of the Stewards has failed” (RK, V, iv, 97).

82 See e.g. Aeschylus, Choephoroe 289-96.

83 Soph. Ai. 1019 τέλος δ᾿ ἀπωστὸς γῆς ἀπορριφθήσομαι (and in the end I shall be driven from the land and banished), Euripides, Helen 87-104, Servius, in Verg. Aen. 1.619. Compare: “‘Much must be risked in war’, said Denethor... ‘I will not yield the River and the Pelennor unfought—not if there is a captain here who still has the courage to do his lord’s will.’” To which Faramir answers: “I do not oppose your will, sire. Since you are robbed of Boromir, I will go and do what I can in his stead.… But if I should return, think better of me” (RK, V, iv, 90). (Cf. Soph. Ai. 470-2 πεῖρά τις ζητητέα / τοιάδ᾿, ἀφ᾿ ἧς γέροντι δηλώσω πατρὶ / μὴ τοι φύσιν γ᾿ ἄσπλαγχνος ἐκ κείνου γεγώς [I must seek some such enterprise that from it I shall show my aged father that I, his son, am not naturally a coward]). Gandalf saw clearly the lethal intent of both Denethor’s and Faramir’s words: “do not throw your life away rashly or in bitterness” (RK, V, iv, 90). Denethor himself acknowledged that he had willingly sent his son to his doom: “I sent my son forth, unthanked, unblessed, out into needless peril” (RK, V, iv, 97).

84 Soph. Ai. 1021-3 τοιαῦτα μὲν κατ᾿ οἶκον, ἐν Τροίᾳ δέ μοι / πολλοὶ μὲν ἔχθροί, παῦρα δ᾿ ὠφελήσιμα / καὶ ταῦτα πάντα σοῦ θανόντος ἡυρόμην (so much at home; at Troy I have many enemies, and few advantages, and these I have found to disappear now that you are dead).

85 Horace, Carm. 1.7.27-9, Strabo 14.5.10.5, Tzetzes, Scholium in Lycophronem 450. Compare: RK, VI, v; Letters (323-24).

86 Tolkien wavered between two etymologies for the name of Elboron: either a Doriathrin form from the root BOR-, from which the name “Boromir” was derived, or from the root BARATH, the same element lately found in “Elbereth.” The names “Elboron” and “Elbereth” were initially conceived of as stemming from different roots (BOR- and BAR-) and assigned first to Eldûn and Elrûn, and afterwards to the first incarnations of Elladan and Elrohir. A displacement in meaning in the name “Elbereth,” from BAR- to BARATH, from male elven anthroponym to epithet of Varda herself, provoked a similar semantic displacement in its companion-name, “Elboron” (Lost Road 353). Regardless, given that the Etymologies were written ca. 1937-1938 and were subjected to numerous revisions and corrections (Lost Road 341-5), and that Faramir’s son Elboron did not appear until ca. 1958 (Peoples 189, 220), and considering furthermore the radical change of function in the name “Elbereth” and its dissociation from its companion ‘Elboron,” it would be mythologically more fitting to see in the name “Elboron” (from EL-BORON, “star-faithful”) a reflection of Boromir (BOR[O]-MÎR, “faithful jewel”), rather than of the greatest of the Valier, Elbereth.

87 Tolkien would be well aware of Greek naming custom if only thanks to the chapter entitled “The Shard of Amenartas” in H. Rider Haggard´s She, a novel he admired and quoted (Lost Tales II 335; Peoples 320).

88 See Allan (188-9) on Elven and Númenórean naming practice. Teucer had two children, Asteria (the elder) and Ajax. Elboron seems to be an only child.

89 “On Fairy-Stories” (MC 126). See for instance the multicultural ingredients that helped give birth to Túrin Turambar: “derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo” (Letters 150).

90 The disregard of the Greek angle would leave unexplained such astounding similarities of thought and expression as Soph. Ai. 473-80 αἰσχρὸν γὰρ ἄνδρα τοῦ μακροῦ χρήζειν βίου / κακοῖσιν ὅστις μηδὲν ἐξαλλάσσεται. / ... / οὐκ ἄν πριαίμην οὐδενὸς λόγου βροτόν, / ὅστις κεναῖσιν ἔλπισιν θερμαίνεται. / ἀλλ᾿ ἤ καλῶς ζῆν ἤ καλῶς τεθνηκέναι / τὸν εὐγενὴ χρή. πάντ᾿ ἀκήκοας λόγον (it is shameful for a man to wish for his life to be long, if he experiences no alternation in his misfortunes… I would not buy at any valuation the mortal who warms himself on empty hopes. The noble man should either live well or die well. You have heard my whole account) and “Why should we wish to live longer? … for thy hope is but ignorance … it is time for all to depart who would not be slaves,” spoken by Denethor (RK, V, vii, 129).

91 After Frodo’s disappearance subsequent to Boromir’s treacherous assault, the Fellowship was disintegrated. Boromir returned with Aragorn to Minas Tirith. The Lord of the City and King of Ond was slain and Aragorn was chosen to rule after him. Boromir, affronted and jealous, deserted and joined Saruman in exchange for the possession of Minas Tirith. Boromir would have been probably slain by Aragorn in the end (Treason 207-12). On Denethor´s first incarnation, see Treason (375-6).

92 It should be born in mind that up to one year passed between Balin’s tomb (1939-1940) and the scenes set in Lórien and by Anduin (1940-1941); cf. Shadow 461, LoTR, “Foreword to the Second Edition (1966),” xv. A lot of time for Tolkien to give the backstory of Minas Tirith a new and unexpected twist. On a similar note, Michael Drout has convincingly explained the nature of the successive revisions and modifications of Éowyn’s story and the development of Denethor’s madness in the drafts of The Return of the King as narrative changes triggered by the introduction of thematic and verbal parallels from King Lear (139-47).

93 Certainly later than Letter 66, sent to his son Christopher on 6 May, 1944 (Letters 78-79).

94 Writing halted between 1940 (the Fellowship in Moria) and 1941, and again between 1944 (“Minas Tirith”) and 1946 (War 234; Carpenter 198-202). By 1947 he was still revising and altering book II of The Lord of the Rings (Letters 124).

95 Bowra went on to write a book on the genre of Euroasiatic epic poetry that is still standard reference for epic studies, Heroic Poetry (London 1952), in addition to his earlier Tradition and Design in the Iliad (Oxford 1930).

96 Just as it happened with the short-lived Idis, Théoden’s daughter, who was made redundant by Éowyn (Treason 447).

97 “The aimless wanderings of Merry and Pippin along the Entwash that brought them to Treebard’s domain were transformed into the forced march of captives to Isengard … thus entered also the death of Boromir” (Treason 216 n.11).

98 In Letter 257, written in 1964, Tolkien notes: “I found my real interest was only in the … Akallabêth or Atalantie ... So I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Númenor” (344-49). It must be pointed out, however, that Christopher Tolkien was persuaded that his father made a mistake here, in that there was never a time when the matter of Númenor was unrelated to Tolkien’s main mythology (Lost Road 8).

99 Cf. The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth III, “Ofermod”: “it is the heroism of obedience and love, not of pride or wilfulness, that is the most heroic and the most moving” (TL 148). This analysis stems from the distinction drawn by Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories” (MC 153) between the eucatastrophic ending of fairy-tale and the ‘cacocatastrophic’ ending of the ‘highest function of Drama,’ Tragedy, the genre to which Túrin and Boromir belong.

100 Cf. also The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth III, “Ofermod”: “yet this element of pride, in the form of the desire for honour and glory, in life and after death, tends to grow, to become a chief motive, driving a man beyond the bleak heroic necessity to excess—to chivalry” (TL 144); “There is an assumption that, since the hero subjects his human gifts to the utmost strain, he will in the end encounter something beyond him, and then it is right for him to be so defeated” (Bowra 76).

103 The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth III, “Ofermod”: “It was indeed plainly intended as a recitation for two persons, two shapes in ‘dim shadows’, with the help of a few gleams of light and appropriate noises and a chant at the end. It has, of course, never been performed” (TL 143).

104 This is actually the expected emotional reaction alluded to by the usually misunderstood Aristotelian concept of tragic katharsis (Aristotle, Poetics 1449b27-8 δι᾿ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν, carrying through completion, through a course of events involving pity and fear, purgation of these and similar emotions).

105 See e.g. West (259-63) on Beren and Lúthien as prefiguration of Aragorn and Arwen.

105 Letter 181 “Gollum was pitiable, but he ended in persistent wickedness, and the fact that this worked good was no credit to him” (Letters 234).

106 See Letter 181, written in 1956, and especially Letter 246, written in 1963: “For me the most tragic moment in the Tale comes … when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum’s tone and aspect … his repentance is blighted and all Frodo’s pity is (in a sense) wasted. Shelob’s lair becomes inevitable” (Letters 330).

106 The bibliography on this aspect of the Tragic in Sophocles is enormous. See e.g. Knox’ 1964 monograph and Lasso de la Vega’s 1970 study.

107 “He read the hearts of men as shrewdly as his father, but what he read moved him sooner to pity than to scorn” (RK, Appendix A, 337).

108 See e.g. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (MC 6); Letter 25, written in 1938 (Letters 30-32); Letter 131, written in 1951 (Letters 150).

109 For instance, he rather perversely downplayed the influence of Anglo-Saxon culture in the creation of the Rohirrim by calling them “‘Homeric’ horsemen” in Letter 131, written in 1951 (159). On the rather more spectacular cases of Wagner and Macbeth see Shippey (182-4, 343-4).

110 “On Fairy-Stories”: “By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by ‘desire to see the bones’ its source or material” (MC 120).

111 “On Fairy-Stories”: “it is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count. Shakespeare’s King Lear is not the same as Laymont’s story in his Brut” (MC 119-20).

112 I owe this reference to Andreas Moehn.

113 Tolkien was still making abstruse puns in Greek in the title of his poem “Fastitocalon” in Letter 255, written in 1964 (Letters 343).

114 Cf. Letter 142, written in 1953: “I was brought up in the Classics, and just discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer” (Letters 172); see also Letter 163, written in 1955 (Letters 213).

115 See “On Fairy-Stories” “(sc. English) poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse” (MC 135). Youths aged eighteen were expected to read in the original book five of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (Letters 356-57), a feat that is currently beyond the skills of many contemporary Classics undergraduates.

116 “When English and its kindred became my job” (sc. in 1925, when he received his professorship at Oxford), “I turned to other tongues, even to Latin and Greek.” From his Valedictory Speech, given in 1959 (MC 231). See also Letter 163, written in 1955 (Letters 213).

117 Tolkien probably called this his “Latin and Greek moods”: “or get a Latin and Greek Mood!”… “I do. I have had one for a week, and I have it now; a Latin luckily, and Virgil in particular” (cf. Lost Road 41-43); Letter 163, written in 1955: “linguistic taste changes like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. Latin and the British type of Celtic have it now, with Anglo Saxon near at hand and further off the Old Norse with …. Finnish” (Letters 213).

118 Alboin is the name used by Paul the Deacon’s Historia gentis Langobardorum. Consistently with the idea that underlies this paragraph, Tolkien chose two characters to represent himself in the abandoned The Notion Club Papers, a tale that dealt also with the voyage of Eärendil and the Drowning of Númenor: Michael George Ramer, professor of Finno-Ugric, and John Jethro Rashbold, undergraduate, classical scholar, apprentice poet, who later became professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke (Sauron 150-1).

Works Cited

Allan, Jim, ed. An Introduction to Elvish. Hayes, Middlesex: Bran’s Head 1978.

Bowra, C. M. Heroic Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1952.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: An Authorized Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Dawe, R. D. “Some Reflections on ATÊ and HAMARTIA.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72 (1968): 89-123.

Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Drout, Michael D. C. “Tolkien’s Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects.” Tolkien Studies 1.1 (2004): 137-163.

Ganz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth. A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Garvie, A. F., ed. Sophocles. Ajax, edited with introduction, translation and commentary. Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris and Philips, 1998.

Gill, Christopher. “The Character-Personality Distinction.” In Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, edited by Christopher Pelling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990: 1-31.

Heath, Malcolm. The Poetics of Greek Tragedy. London: Duckworth, 1987.

Hesk, Jon. Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy: Sophocles, Ajax. London: Duckworth, 2003.

Janko, Richard. The Iliad. A Commentary IV: Books 14-16, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Jebb, R.C. Sophocles. The Plays and Fragments VII: Ajax, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896.

——. Sophocles. The Plays and Fragments III: Antigone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900.

Knox, Bernard M. W. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.

——. Word and Action. Essays on the Ancient Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Lasso de la Vega, José S. De Sófocles a Brecht. Barcelona: Planeta, 1970.

Lesky, Albin. Göttliche und menschliche Motivation im homerischen Epos. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1961.

Martinez, Michael. Understanding Middle-earth. Poughkeepsie, NY: Vivisphere Publishing, 2003.

Matthews, Elaine. “Greek Personal Names,” Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: 1022-3.

Nagy, Gergely. “Saving the Myths: the Recreation of Mythology in Plato and Tolkien.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2004: 81-100.

Padel, Ruth. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Ribbeck, Otto. Die römische Tragödie im Zeitalter der Republik. Leipzig: Teubner, 1875.

Shippey, Tom. The Road To Middle-earth, rev. and exp. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Stevens, Jen. “From Catastrophe to Eucatastrophe. J. R. R. Tolkien´s Transformation of Ovid´s Mythic Pyramus and Thisbe into Beren and Lúthien.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2004: 119-32.

Taplin, Oliver. “Agamemnon´s Role in the Iliad.” In Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, edited by Christopher Pelling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990: 60-82.

West, Richard C. “Real World Myth in a Secondary World: Mythological Aspects in the Story of Beren and Lúthien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance. London: Routledge, 2003: 259-267.

Winnington-Ingram, R.P. Sophocles: An Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire

Judy Ann Ford

Pippin gazed in growing wonder at the great stone city, vaster and more splendid than anything that he had dreamed of; greater and stronger than Isengard, and far more beautiful. Yet it was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there. In every street they passed some great house or court over whose door and arched gates were carved many fair letters of strange and ancient shapes: names Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footsteps rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window. (RK, V, i, 24)

In this passage, Pippin marvels at Minas Tirith, the capital city of the kingdom of Gondor. He sees great age, the remnants and signs of the decline of a once great civilization. This splendid, though decayed, city of the south strikes Pippin as quite different not only from his native Shire but also from anything else he encountered in Middle-earth.

For The Lord of the Rings, as for the Silmarillion, one of Tolkien’s declared intentions was to create a mythology for England; The Lord of the Rings was intended to be an epic such as the Anglo-Saxons and other northern-European Germanic peoples might have composed.1 Of course, The Lord of the Rings is a twentieth-century novel which draws on a variety of historical cultures and literatures, not excluding the Europe of Tolkien’s youth. Nevertheless, in a multitude of ways explored by scholars, The Lord of the Rings is grounded in the language, literature, and culture of the early Germanic North. Yet the Anglo-Saxons and their Germanic and Celtic neighbors did not build cities in stone; the only culture within their historical memory that had made places like Minas Tirith was the Roman Empire.

The Germanic peoples shared a lengthy history with the Romans. Rome was an exceedingly long-lived political state: it emerged as a tiny independent republic in the late sixth century B.C., its republican institutions gave way to a form of government dominated by an emperor at the turn of the millennium, and it fell in the late fifth century A.D. When the Germanic tribes encountered Rome in the first century A.D. it was the largest empire that western civilization had known. Settling into agricultural villages on the empire’s north-eastern boarders, the Germanic peoples admired and imitated their wealthy, successful neighbor. As historian Richard Fletcher notes, they followed a familiar pattern in which peripheral outsiders model themselves upon the hegemonic power on whose boarders they are situated (Fletcher 71). The Germanic peoples interacted with the Romans for centuries, peacefully through trade and travel, and violently through boarder skirmishes. Although the Germanic tribes were peripheral to Rome, both geographically and culturally, Rome became a central focus of Germanic attention. Their elites learned Latin; they copied Rome’s coinage and its law codes. When the western half of the empire began to collapse from internal weaknesses in the late fourth century, the Germanic peoples pushed into its territory. In 410 the Visigoths sacked the city of Rome, and during the remainder of the fifth century the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Angles, Saxons, and other tribes carved out kingdoms on territories once ruled by a Roman emperor. A glance at a map of western Europe in the year A.D. 500 shows nearly all the lands that were once Roman in Germanic hands. Rather than seeing themselves as Rome’s enemies, the Germanic peoples saw themselves becoming part of the empire. “When the defenses of the Roman empire gave way the Germanic barbarians entered upon an inheritance for which they had long been preparing themselves. They came not to wreck but to join” (Fletcher 71). But the Germanic peoples found that they could not easily step into this inheritance. The Romans could not save their own empire; the Germanic kingdoms, possessing far fewer of the necessary tools for operating a successful, centralized bureaucratic government, could not revive it. The ancient world gave way to the medieval. Yet for centuries the restoration of the Roman empire remained an ideal, an unattainable goal which grounded medieval ideas of peace and political order.

One facet of the rich historical foundation of The Lord of the Rings is a reflection of the longing for the restoration of Rome expressed by the Germanic peoples of late-ancient Europe and their later medieval descendants. The narrative thread of the return of the king to Gondor echoes the lingering hope of medieval Europeans that the Roman Empire could be restored, a hope expressed as a myth of the revival of a once great state. The account of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings may be read as the story of the fall of Rome with a happy ending: a decaying western empire which did not quite fall, which somehow withstood the onslaught of armies from the east, and which was restored to glory.

Myths can contain reflections of historical events, as the Iliad dramatizes the fall of the historic city of Troy. Such myths are perhaps best understood not as a testimony of past events but as a cultural memory. Like memory, historical myths can be colored by desire, the desire to remember things as they should have been or as they might have been rather than as they were. The mythologized communal memories of traumatic encounters between peoples, of the foundation of states, of wars, revolutions, conquests, and enslavements, are peculiarly subject to displacement and idealization. Serge Gruzinski discusses such displacement and idealization in a telling study of the Otomís Indians of Mexico, whose 17th century account of the 16th century Spanish conquest of the area, the Relación anónima, creatively re-imagines their ancestors in the role of the victors. In the early 1500s the Otomís initially fled from Spanish invaders to the semi-desert regions of the north of Mexico, then finally cooperated with them as soldiers, spies, and scouts against other tribes in the Chichimeca War, after which they settled in villages in Spanish territories.

But the Relación projects this set of data and memories into a more distant past which, for us, corresponds to the pre-Hispanic period. Furthermore, there is a fictitious geopolitical framework to go with the fictitious time frame. The Otomí Indians enjoy a privileged position: their twofold status as conquerors and Catholics allows them certain immutable rights and obliges them to bow to the higher authorities of the king and the viceroy alone. Furthermore, they participate actively and directly in the evangelization of their Chichimeca adversaries, preaching to them “what Christianity is.” On the other hand, of course, no detail is given of the precarious conditions under which these expeditions were carried out, no mention made of the real reasons for their emigration, not to say flight from Jilotepec province, and, above all, no word said of their utter subjection to the Spanish invaders and of the abuse and mistreatment suffered at their hands. Instead of this, Otomí memory constructs an idealized image of the past in which, both materially and spiritually, the Tula Otomí cast themselves in the mold of their conquerors almost to the point of confusing the latter’s identity with their own, subsuming themselves under the broad category of “Catholics.” (Gruzinski 218-19)

By remembering their ancestors as “conquerors and Catholics” rather than as vanquished people who were gradually assimilated into Spanish colonial culture, the Otomí could write a history of a glorious past.

There is an example of a similar work written by a Germanic historian about seventy-five years after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. This history, known as the Getica, mirrors the Relación in its creative reimaginging of an historical relationship, in this case, the relationship between the Germanic peoples and the Romans. The three-volume Getica was written in approximately A.D. 551 by a Goth named Jordanes who worked in Constantinople, the capitol of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire. The first two books, known collectively as the Romana, relate the history of the world from its presumed origins to the year A.D. 550/1; the point of demarcation between the two books is the reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor (Goffart 21). The third book, entitled On the Descent and Exploits of the Getae or the Getica, is a chronicle of Gothic history based on a lost work by Cassiodorus, an Italo-Roman senator who worked in Ravenna. According to Walter Goffart, the Getica is only loosely based on Cassiodorus’s work (Goffart 20-27). Although the Getica is ostensibly about only one Germanic people, the Goths, Goffart argues that for Jordanes the Goths had “...a generic or symbolic character. They stood for all northern barbarians as well as for the Goths of the sixth-century kingdoms in Italy and Spain” (Goffart 84).

Just as the Relación consigns the first encounters between the Otomí Indians and the Spanish to a distant, historically unmarked past, in the Romana, a fictive political allegiance by the Germanic peoples to Rome is assigned to an unmarked but ancient past. Jordanes writes that “The Germans, Gauls, Britons, Iberians, Asturians, and Cantabrians lived beneath the western sky and, after long subjection, had fallen away. Augustus went personally against them, forcing them to serve again and live by Roman laws” (Jordanes ¶ 249).2 Tolkien employs the same strategy, setting the events of Middle-earth in a mythic past, undateable, but certainly prior to the time of the historical encounter between the Germanic peoples and the Romans.

Jordanes’s work provides the Germanic people with a significant role in history: they are the equals of the Romans, partners with them, and possessed of an equally glorious past. The Getica’s Goths are not a peripheral, barbarian people ignored by Rome unless they take up arms. Just as Virgil grafts the Romans on to the mythology of the more ancient Greeks in the Aneid, Jordanes has the Goths fighting at Troy and marrying the Amazons: they are full participants in a mythic Greco-Roman past. In Jordanes’s version of political history, Julius Caesar, “the first of all the Romans to assume imperial power and to subdue almost the whole world...made tributary to the Romans those that knew not the Roman name even by hearsay, and yet was unable to prevail against the Goths, despite his frequent attempts” (Mierow 70). The Getica’s Goths are scholars: during the first century A.D., they learn philosophy, physics, logic, and astronomy. Jordanes instructs his readers: “Think, I pray you, what pleasure it was for these brave men, when for a little space they had leisure from warfare, to be instructed in the teachings of philosophy! You might have seen one scanning the position of the heavens and another investigating the nature of plants and bushes” (Mierow 70-71). The Getica’s fictionalized classical history of the Goths helped to shape early-medieval Germanic identity and was incorporated into later histories, such as Freculph of Lisieux’s ninth century world chronicle (Innes 233). As Matthew Innes argues: “The German kingdom was not seen as the heir of the ‘Germanic peoples’—which we might expect if ‘Germanic’ identity related to the Germanic vernacular and informed by Germanic legend existed. Rather, the various groups which made up high medieval Germany were said to have allied with Julius Caesar and won him the title of Roman emperor, a title which they had, in turn, inherited...” (249).

The history of the Goths in the classical past, according to Jordanes, gives them a pivotal responsibility in the present: it is their mission to find a way to restore Rome to its earlier glory. Typical of writers of his day, Jordanes sees Rome as eternal with the world. In Christian terms, Rome’s continuation held off the dreaded event of the Antichrist and the end of the world (47-48). Even so, the Roman Empire in its latter days had declined from earlier glory. In Goffart’s words: “The Empire, in Jordanes’s conception, had experienced the fate of a hero in the grip of Fortune. Once borne to an almost paradisal condition, it reached its acme long ago and fell, like Adam, to a merely mortal state” (Goffart 53). Jordanes ends his history of the Goths in such a way as to fulfill that mission: he provides a way for the Goths to initiate the renewal of Rome, expanded to include the Germanic peoples. The Getica ends with a marriage between a Roman patrician family related to the Byzantine Emperor, the Ancian family, and the royal house of the conquered Goths, the house of Amal. This couple bore a son named Germanus, of whom Jordanes wrote: “This union of the race of the Anicii with the stock of the Amali gives hopeful promise, under the Lord’s favor, to both peoples” (Mierow 141). According to Goffart, Jordanes:

...provided a marriage, however brief, between (in effect) a prince and a princess, each symbolic of his people; a child was born to them, uniting noble genera and promising hope to both...Lines like these, far from straightforwardly aligning facts, are what Henry James ironically described as “a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.” There is no mistaking the dramatic import of Jordanes’s closing words: he is supplying a happy ending to his story (72).3

This ending was not historically accurate, and Jordanes knew it. It bore “a paradoxical relationship to external events...in the season of Germanus’ birth, the Ostrogoths were farther than ever from union with the Romans, and the birth changed nothing. Neither as fact nor as symbol does the ending of the Getica reflect real life in 551” (Goffart 72-73). At the conclusion of the Getica Jordanes departs from his role as an historian recording the past and enters into that of a Goth experiencing the collapse of the West and projecting into an uncertain future a hope for that most unlikely event: the rebirth of the Roman Empire.

The story of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, like Jordanes’s Getica and the Otomí Relación, sets the memory of a calamitous collision of peoples in a distant past and alters the historical function of the ancestors of those who created the story. Since Tolkien intended his novel to be a mythology for England, the mythology’s fictive creators would be the Anglo-Saxons, represented in the novel by the Hobbits and, more broadly, the Germanic peoples of northern Europe, represented by the men of Rohan. In both the Relación and the Getica, the mythologized memory provides a more equal status and a more glorious role to the ancestors of those creating the myth than history would allow. Of course, there is an historical basis for a story of the Roman Empire being aided by the Germanic peoples: just as the historical Otomí had helped the Spanish, there had been periods of military allegiance between the Germanic peoples and the Empire. But Tolkien’s novel is much closer to the early-medieval Getica than the early-modern Relación: not only do the Hobbits and the men of Rohan cooperate with the Gondorians, who represent the Romans, on equal terms, but they prevent the fall of Gondor. Imbedded in The Lord of the Rings, in the story of the cavalry of Rohan coming to the defense of Minas Tirith as it teeters toward defeat at the hands of Sauron’s army and its ruler throws himself in despair on a pyre, is a constructed memory of Rome saved by the Germanic peoples from a final collapse from internal weakness and an attack from the east.4 On an even larger scale, The Lord of the Rings is a story of western civilization saved by a central character from the north-western periphery of Middle Earth, Frodo of the Shire, without whose aid the great kingdom of the south would have fallen; one reading of this story is Anglo-Saxon wish-fulfillment.

The Lord of the Rings mirrors Jordanes’s work in many ways. The history and function of Gondor in the novel follows the same path as Jordanes’s Rome. It is clear in the Lord of the Rings that the restoration of Gondor to power and the subsequent acknowledgement of its sovereignty by the Shire represented not a new political settlement but rather a long-desired restoration of an ancient alliance. According to Appendix A, the Shire was once under the rule of Arnor, a northern sister-kingdom to Gondor. In a conflict with Angmar during the years of the final kings to rule Gondor prior to the reign of the stewards, Arnor fell. “Afterwards in the peace that followed the Shire-folk ruled themselves and prospered. They chose a Thain to take the place of the King, and were content; though for a long time many still looked for the return of the King. But at last that hope was forgotten, and remained only in the saying When the King comes back, used of some good that could not be achieved, or of some evil that could not be amended” (RK, Appendix A, 323). In the period in which the events of the War of the Ring are set, the cities of Gondor show unmistakable signs of long decay: its people had achieved the pinnacle of their culture long ago while living in Númenor, on a paradisiacal island which was destroyed for their sin of pride (RK, Appendix A, 317). In spite of Gondor’s decay, throughout The Lord of the Rings are expressions of a desire that the kingdom would somehow survive through hope and memory. This idea is expressed, for example, by Beregond, to Pippin: “‘Nay, though all things must come utterly to an end in time, Gondor shall not perish yet. Not though the walls be taken by a reckless foe that will build a hill of carrion before them. There are still other fastnesses, and secret ways of escape into the mountains. Hope and memory shall live still in some hidden valley where the grass is green’” (RK, V, i, 39).

The most important similarity between Jordanes’s treatment of the history of Rome and the fictive history of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings is the happy ending, the hope for cultural and political revival grounded in a kingship and a marriage. Although most people would agree that the ending of the novel The Lord of the Rings is profoundly sad, the ending of the narrative thread of the return of the king to Gondor, is, in contrast, triumphant. It is made clear throughout the novel that Aragorn’s destiny was not merely to help defeat Sauron or to rule a great kingdom but to serve as the agent of Gondor’s renewal. This purpose is inherent in his name: Aragorn, having entered Minas Tirith, tells Imrahil and Èomer: “‘Verily, for in the high tongue of old I am Elessar, the Elfstone, and Envinyatar, the Renewer’...” (RK, V, viii, 193). Aragorn embodies in his person the return of the glory of the ancient Gondorian kings. As soon as he is crowned as king, “all that beheld him gazed in silence, for it seemed to them that he was revealed to them now for the first time. Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near; ancient of days he seemed and yet in the flower of manhood...” (RK, VI, v, 246). Finally, the restoration of Gondor features a marriage between Faramir, Prince of Ithilien and the heir to the most important house in Gondor after that of the king, to Éowyn, a princess of Rohan, the kingdom that broadly symbolizes the Germanic peoples of northern Europe. The symbolic union of the two kingdoms represented by the marriage is expressed by Éomer, the new king of Rohan: “‘Thus,’ said Éomer, ‘is the friendship of the Mark and of Gondor bound with a new bond, and the more do I rejoice’” (RK, VI, vi, 255). This marriage, like that of Jordanes’s Roman/Gothic marriage, serves to prefigure an incorporation of the Germanic peoples into a revived Roman state.

There are a great many indications throughout The Lord of the Rings that Gondor represents the Roman Empire as viewed through late-ancient, early-medieval, northern European eyes. The most obvious ways are physical. Gondor is in the south, bearing the same geographic relationship to the Shire as the fifth-century Roman Empire bore to Anglo-Saxon England. Like Rome, Gondor built cities in stone, as shown by Pippin’s experience in Minas Tirith. The nature of Minas Tirith as an ancient city built in stone is emphasized by repetition. Riding through the Pelennor, Pippin saw “the Guarded City, with its seven walls of stone so strong and old that it seemed to have been not builded but carven by giants out of the bones of the earth” (RK, V, i, 23). Once inside Minas Tirith, Pippin and Gandalf were taken to their chamber: “...across the Court of the Fountain into a lane between tall buildings of stone” (RK, V, i, 31). When Pippin arrived at the Tower of Ecthelion: “...he found himself at the doors of the great hall beneath the gleaming tower; and behind the wizard he passed the tall silent door-wardens and entered the cool echoing shadows of the house of stone” (RK, V, i, 25). Pippin discovered that even the streets are paved, a feature not found in the early Middle Ages in any but old Roman cities: “He came at last by arched streets and many fair alleys and pavements...he found the Old Guesthouse, a large building of grey weathered stone...” (RK, V, i, 41).

Minas Tirith was the capital city of Gondor during the present of The Lord of the Rings, but Gondor had a more ancient capital city, Osgiliath, from which the government withdrew when its defense proved more than its armies could manage. The existence of both an older and a nearby newer capitol may also reflect fifth-century conditions. The government of Rome relocated the capitol from the city of Rome to Ravenna in northern Italy in A.D. 402, and for the same reasons that Gondor moved its government to Minas Tirith (Brown 126). Even after the emperors left the city, Rome continued to be the target of enemy attack: it was sacked by the Visigoths in A.D. 410, nearly sacked by the Huns in A.D. 451, and sacked by the Vandals in A.D. 455 (Sinnigen and Boak 454-56). Osgiliath suffered the same vicissitudes. As Beregond explained to Pippin: “‘It was a city,’ said Beregond, ‘the chief city of Gondor, of which this city was only a fortress. For that is the ruin of Osgiliath on either side of Anduin, which our enemies took and burned long ago. Yet we won it back in the days of the youth of Denethor: not to dwell in, but to hold as an outpost, and to rebuild the bridge for the passage of our arms. And then came the Fell Riders out of Minas Morgul’” (RK, V, i, 36-37).

The identification of Minas Tirith with Ravenna is also implied architecturally, in Pippin’s account of Denethor’s great hall within the tower of Ecthelion: “It was lit by deep windows in the wide aisles at either side, beyond the rows of tall pillars that upheld the roof. Monoliths of black marble, they rose to great capitals carved in many strange figures of beasts and leaves; and far above in the shadows the wide vaulting gleamed with dull gold, inset with flowing traceries of many colours. No hangings nor storied webs, nor any things of woven stuff or of wood, were to be seen in that long solemn hall; but between the pillars there stood a silent company of tall images graven in stone” (RK, V, i, 26). The hall is described as though it were a church typical of the Byzantine-influenced architecture of Ravenna in the fifth and sixth centuries, with domed ceilings decorated with mosaic tiling. The best example of this style in Ravenna, the church of S. Vitale, built in the early to mid sixth century, echoes the description of Denethor’s great hall in a number of ways. Compared to other churches in Italy, “S. Vitale is both larger in scale and very much richer in its spatial effect; below the clerestory, the nave wall turns into a series of semicircular niches that penetrate into the aisle...[which] has been given a second story....A new economy in the construction of the vaulting permits large windows on every level, which flood the interior with light.” In addition, its upper walls and roof are covered with gold-work mosaics, and its marble columns topped with highly decorated capitols (Janson 206).5

Not only does the architecture of Denethor’s great hall and the withdrawal of Gondor’s government from its historic capitol indicate that the Gondor of The Lord of the Rings is an echo of the fifth or sixth century Roman Empire, but that historical moment is also suggested by the unfamiliarity of the characters in the Fellowship with the style of the city. Denethor’s hall is described through Pippin’s eyes as though it were viewed by someone who did not have the proper vocabulary to name what he saw. Pippin does not use the terms “column” or “mosaic,” rather the reader must supply the terminology from descriptions of “pillars”or “monoliths” with “capitals,” and “insets” of “many colors.” The hall’s unfamiliarity is underscored by Pippin’s mental comparison between it and Germanic-style great halls, constructed with wood and decorated with tapestries. The distinctive nature of Gondorian building is also implicit in the comment by Aragorn that he should be considered “‘...a captain of the Rangers, who are unused to cities and houses of stone’” (RK, V, viii, 137). The capital of Rome in an earlier period might have astonished visitors by its size, but those whom the Romans considered civilized would have been familiar with the “stone cities” of Rome’s provinces; only in the late-imperial period when Rome’s borders had shrunk could well-born visitors from the north—as the Rangers and Pippin both were—be quite so unfamiliar with the terms of Roman urban architecture. There are also more direct indications that Minas Tirith symbolizes the fallen grandeur of Rome’s imperial capitol as it was in the fifth or sixth century. The city’s decline from an earlier period of greatness is noted from the first description provided by characters viewing it. As Gandalf and Pippin approach the city in The Return of the King and see the wall of the Pelennor, the Rammas Echor, the description reads: “...in the mist loomed a wall of stone. Partly ruinous it seemed...” (RK, V, i, 20). A later section of dialogue between Legolas and Gimli reinforces the idea that Minas Tirith is the capitol of an empire past its prime. After Legolas and Gimli speak with Prince Imrahil, they comment on the fallen condition of Gondor: “‘That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,’ said Legolas. ‘If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.’ ‘And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,’ said Gimli” (RK, V, ix, 149).

Not only does the kingdom of Gondor in the present of the novel mirror Rome of the fifth and sixth centuries, but its past also parallels that of the Roman state in many ways. There are a number of elements of Gondor’s history that do not fit comfortably into an allegorical reading, and which, moreover, contribute to other interpretations of the text. Yet the parallels to Rome are too strong to ignore. The section “Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion” in Appendix A offers many details of the history of Gondor that echo those of the Roman state during both its republican period and its imperial period. Gondor is described as a wealthy and powerful expansionist state located in the south of Middle-earth, which had been in existence for about a thousand years by the time of the War of the Ring, and which had first begun to experience social deterioration during the height of its military and economic prosperity: “Though war never ceased on their borders, for more than a thousand years the Dúnedain of the South grew in wealth and power by land and sea, until the reign of Atanatar II, who was called Alcarin, the Glorious. Yet the signs of decay had then already appeared; for the high men of the South married late, and their children were few” (RK, Appendix A, 324). The geographic location, the military and material success, as well as the length of time the state survived, all match that of the Roman state. Although the origins of the city of Rome are prehistoric, Roman historians dated the foundation of their state to 509 B.C., to the overthrow of the Etruscan kings and the establishment of the Roman Republic. Although much of the early “history” of Roman written by its own historians is more the product of the fashioning of national identity than it is the recording of actual events, as are the origin stories of most peoples, it seems that the revolt happened and the ascribed date is approximately correct (Sinnigen and Boak 36, 41). So by the time of the forced abdication of the last ancient Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in A.D. 476, in favor of the Germanic warlord Odovacar, the Roman state had been in existence in the west for approximately a thousand years (Sinnigen and Boak 459-60).

The sign of decay specified in the quote above, that “the high men of the South married late, and their children were few,” was one believed quite seriously about themselves by the Romans. At the fall of the Republic and the start of the Principate, or early empire, the first emperor, Augustus (r. 27 B.C.-A.D. 14), was so concerned at the tendency towards late marriage and childlessness among the Senatorial class that he enacted laws restricting the civil and political freedoms of those who were unmarried or childless, and giving preference to fathers among candidates for public office (Sinnigen and Boak 266). In an additional measure to promote marriage, Augustus made adultery a public crime bearing severe penalties (Nagle 334-35). Another mark of the seeds of the decay of Gondor which appeared as early as Atanatar’s reign was the rulers’ love of comfort: “...men said precious stones are pebbles in Gondor for children to play with. But Atanatar loved ease and did nothing to maintain the power that he had inherited, and his two sons were of like temper. The waning of Gondor had already begun before he died, and was doubtless observed by its enemies” (RK, Appendix A, 325). Augustus appears to have been as concerned about excessive luxury among the ruling classes as he was about their childlessness: as an example to others, Augustus wore homespun togas; he also enacted sumptuary laws (Nagle 333, 335). In spite of his example, the dissipation of his two imperial successors, Tiberius (r. A.D. 14-37) and Gaius Caligula (r. A.D. 37-41), is so notorious that it does not need to be recounted here.

The sequence in which Gondor encountered and interacted with foreign powers also mirrors the history of Rome. The first major conflict occurred early, prior to Gondor’s expansionist phase under the Ship-kings: “Gondor was first attacked by wild men out of the East” who were defeated and driven out, then reappeared in “fresh hordes,” and were ultimately driven out again (RK, Appendix A, 324). Rome’s first foreign invaders after the creation of the Republic were Celtic tribesmen, specifically the Gauls, who were being forced out of their settlements in the upper Danube region of eastern Europe by an influx of Germanic peoples. The Romans thought of the Celts as barbarian. The Celts sacked the city of Rome in 390 B.C., accepted a ransom and marched home, only to return to raid Roman territory again in 360 B.C., and again in 349 B.C., when they were finally defeated by the Romans (Sinnigen and Boak 48-9). Gondor’s first enemy after it entered into its expansionist phase under the Ship-kings was a great harbor to the south, called Umbar. After a lengthy conflict, Gondor defeated the men of Harad for control of Umbar (RK, Appendix A, 324-25). When Rome began to expand beyond Italy, the first great enemy it faced was Carthage in north Africa, which was a harbor across the water almost directly to the south of Italy. Carthage occupies the same geographic relationship to Italy as Umbar does to Gondor. Rome eventually defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars (264-201 B.C.). Perhaps the best-remembered aspect of the Punic Wars is the use of elephants by the Carthaginian general Hannibal (Sinnigen and Boak 109). Although Appendix A does not associate the Men of Harad with elephants, that association is found elsewhere: the troops of Harad ambushed by Faramir’s men in The Two Towers have “Oliphaunts” (TT, IV, iv, 269-70). After the defeat of Harad, Gondor reached its peak of prosperity and power, as Rome did following the Punic Wars. According to Sinnigen and Boak, the “destruction of the Carthaginian empire left Rome mistress of the Western Mediterranean and by far the greatest power of the time” (114). For Gondor, after King Hyarmendacil defeated the Men of Harad, Appendix A explains that “the might of Hyarmendacil no enemy dared to contest during the remainder of his long reign...In his day Gondor reached the summit of its power” (RK, Appendix A, 325).

The next significant event in the history of Gondor was its contact with the Northmen, a group whose similarities to the Germanic peoples in the history of Rome are readily apparent. The Regent of Gondor gave the Northmen “wide lands beyond the Anduin south of Greenwood the Great, to be a defense against the men of the East. For in the past the attacks of the Easterlings had come mostly over the plain between the Inland Sea and the Ash Mountains” (RK, Appendix A, 326). The Northmen entered the military of Gondor, achieved high rank and eventually assimilated into the empire and took office. This development was indicated by the kingship of Eldacar, son of the Gondorian Valacar and the Northwoman Vidumavi. During his kingship there was a steady movement of Northmen into Gondorian territories (RK, Appendix A, 326-27). Rome and the Germanic peoples followed a parallel history. Germanic peoples had appeared on the eastern borders of Roman territory by the first century A.D. The Romans recruited them into the military, beginning under the first emperors, increasing notably in the second century, and reaching the point of inundation in the third (Sinnigen and Boak 389). In A.D. 376 the Romans allowed one of the Germanic tribes, the Visigoths, to settle in vacant land south of the Danube, that is, between the Balkan Mountains and the Aegean Sea, as a defense against the Huns pressing in from the east. The action was unsuccessful in stopping the movement of the Germanic peoples, who continued to pour into imperial territory. Many were granted the status of foederati, that is, allied or confederate peoples, and were given land for settlement in exchange for military service. For the next century, Germanic leaders played increasingly important roles in imperial political and military affairs, although there were “anti-barbarian” factions in the imperial court and “anti-imperial” factions among the Germans (Sinnigen and Boak 452-58; Nagle 389-90). Following upon the entry of great numbers of Northmen “a deadly plague came with dark winds out of the East.” Like the Roman great plague of the second century A.D., this Gondorian plague weakened the state and contributed to its downfall: “The King and all his children died, and great numbers of the people of Gondor, especially those that lived in Osgiliath. Then for weariness and fewness of men the watch on the borders of Mordor ceased and the fortresses that guarded the passes were unmanned” (RK, Appendix A, 328). A virulent plague, possibly smallpox, was introduced into the Roman Empire in the 160s by troops returning from the east; according to Brendan Nagle, it “ravaged the Empire” (344; Sinnigen and Boak 319).6

The last evil to strike Gondor in the history outlined in Appendix A was the invasion of the Wainriders:

...which sapped the waning strength of Gondor in wars that lasted for almost a hundred years. The Wainriders were a people, or a confederacy of many peoples, that came from the East; but they were stronger and better armed than any that had appeared before. They journeyed in great wains, and their chieftains fought in chariots. Stirred up, as was afterwards seen, by the emissaries of Sauron, they made a sudden assault upon Gondor... (RK, Appendix A, 329).

The Wainriders are an echo of the Huns, or more accurately, the Huns as remembered by the descendants of the Germanic peoples. Compare Tolkien’s description of the Wainriders to the description of the Huns provided by Saxo Grammaticus:

After this the king asked Erik whether the army of the Huns was as large as the forces of Olmar, and Erik answered in the following song:

“By Hercules, I came on a countless throng, a throng that neither earth nor wave could hold. Thick flared all their camp-fires, and the whole wood blazed up; the flame betokened a numberless array. The earth sankunder the fraying of the horse-hoofs; creaking wagons rattled swiftly. The wheels rumbled, the driver rode upon the winds, so that the chariots sounded like thunder. The earth hardly bore the throngs of men-at-arms, speeding on confusedly; they trod it, but it could not bear their weight. I thought that the air crashed and the earth was shaken, so mighty was the motion of the stranger army...” 7

The many separate tribes of Huns united under Attila in A.D. 444, who, although friendly to Rome at first, eventually went to war against the empire. In A.D. 451, the Romans joined with the kings of the Visigoths and the Franks to fend off the invading Huns, whose unity collapsed upon the death of Attila in A.D. 453. At the loss of their unity, the Huns’ power to successfully invade faded away (Sinnigen and Boak 458-59).

The end of the rule of Roman emperors in the west occurred a generation after the invasion of the Huns. For much the intervening phase, the western empire was ruled by Ricimer (r. A.D. 456-472), who was head of the army and appointed puppet-emperors at will. After Ricimer’s death, another head of the army, Orestes, appointed his son, Romulus Augustulus, to be emperor (Sinnigen and Boak 459). There was no emperor in the west between the forced abdication of Romulus Augustulus in C. E. 476 until the coronation of the Frankish King Charlemagne as emperor on 25 December, 800. A similar fate befell the line of kings ruling in Gondor after the invasion of the Wainraiders. The reigning king and his two sons fell in battle against the invaders. Eärnil, Captain of the Southern Army, became king and was followed in rule by his son Eärnur. The line of kings ended when Eärnur failed to return from an ill-advised attempt to fight King of Minas Morgul in single combat: “None of that riding were ever heard of again. It was believed in Gondor that the faithless enemy had trapped the king, and that he had died in torment in Minas Morgul; but since there were no witnesses of his death, Mardil the Good Steward ruled Gondor in his name for many years” (RK, Appendix A, 332). From that point until the coronation of Aragorn, no king ruled Gondor; it was governed by stewards. The rule of the stewards extended many centuries.

Unlike Rome, Gondor had a second line of kings: Isildur’s descendants from the North-kingdom of Arnor, whose claim to the throne of Gondor was rejected by the Council of Gondor in the aftermath of the Wainrider invasion (RK, Appendix A, 329-30). Aragorn’s resumption of kingship and the consequent return of Gondor to glory in The Lord of the Rings are the happy ending which the actual history of Rome did not provide.

Aragorn’s restored Gondor was more a Germanic ideal than a Roman one because his kingdom incorporated the other peoples of the west, appropriate to both the point of view of Anglo-Saxon myth-makers and to a medieval perspective. The Gondorian stewards tended to think of their state as a purely Gondorian nation which was the pinnacle of historical development, just as the Romans in the latter days of the Empire assumed that their native culture was the final stage of western civilization. As Peter Brown explains:

No group of Romans ever idealized Rome as enthusiastically as did the senatorial poets and speechmakers of the later fourth and early fifth centuries. The myth of Rome that was to haunt medieval and Renaissance men—Roma aeterna, Rome conceived of as the natural climax of civilization, destined to continue for ever—was not created by the men of the classical Roman empire: it was a direct legacy of the heady patriotism of the late fourth-century Latin world. (120)

The leaders of Gondor tended to identify the continuance of Gondor with the continuance of any civilization in the west. It is a sentiment expressed repeatedly. At one of their earliest meetings in Book V of The Lord of the Rings, Denethor, steward of Gondor, declares to Gandalf that “...there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor...” (RK, V, i, 30). Later Denethor, in his despair at what he believes to be the defeat of Minas Tirith, cries that: “‘...The West has failed. It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended. Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!’” (RK, V, vii, 128). Yet Gandalf criticizes Denethor for this identification, indicating that he did not share this Gondorian belief: “‘You think, as is your wont, my lord, of Gondor only,’ said Gandalf. ‘Yet there are other men and other lives, and time still to be....’” (RK, V, iv, 87).

Gandalf’s view outward towards other peoples points to a version of Gondor as a unifying empire rather than a national group. Tolkien endowed Gondor with the unifying cultural characteristics for which Rome was most famous in the Middle Ages, and he underscored the inclusivity of these characteristics by having them expressed by one of the least civilized human groups on Middle-earth, the Wild Men of the Woods, who are aboriginal hunters and gatherers. Just as Latin became the common language in late-ancient Europe and was spoken throughout the Middle Ages as the universal language of education and the church as well as serving as the root of many European vernacular languages, the common tongue that was spoken throughout Middle-earth was the language of Gondor. That language originated in a fort or haven of the Númenorians called Pelargir and was adopted by the survivors of the destruction of Númenor who founded Gondor who used it “in their dealing with other folk and in the government of their wide realms...” (RK, Appendix F, 407). Ghân-buri-Ghân, the leader of the Wild Men of the Woods, “...spoke the Common Speech, though in a halting fashion, and uncouth words were mingled with it” (RK, V, v, 106). The Gondorians were also remembered for being great road builders before their decline. The Gondorian skill at road construction was introduced by Ghân-buri-Ghân, who said to Éomer: “Many paths were made when the Stonehouse-folk were stronger. They carved hills as hunters carve beast-flesh. Wild Men think they ate stone for food. They went through Drúadan to Rimmon with great wains. They go no longer. Road is forgotten, but not by Wild Men” (RK, V, v, 106). The Romans began a determined policy of road construction in the second century A.D.; by the time of the collapse of the government in the west they had made approximately fifty-thousand miles of high quality roads (Nagle 301-2, 350). Roman roads were used by many Germanic kingdoms, including the Anglo Saxons, for centuries after Rome’s fall.

There are indications in The Lord of the Rings that this more expansive definition of a western empire that included other states and peoples was active after the return of Aragorn to kingship. As an army composed of not only Gondorians but also Rohirrim, the Elven sons of Elrond, and other peoples marched on Mordor, the heralds announced Aragorn’s kingship: “Ever and anon Gandalf let blow the trumpets, and the heralds would cry: ‘The Lords of Gondor are come! Let all leave this land or yield them up!’ But Imrahil said: ‘Say not The Lords of Gondor. Say The King Elessar. For that is true, even though he has not yet sat upon the throne; and it will give the Enemy more thought, if the heralds use that name.’ And thereafter thrice a day the heralds proclaimed the coming of King Elessar” (RK, V, x, 161). In the next paragraph, the leaders of this composite army are called the “Captains of the West” in the narration (RK, V, x, 162). The myth of the revival of Rome in The Lord of the Rings is presented by Tolkien as an Anglo-Saxon hope and more broadly a northern European Germanic hope, in which the idea of a revived Roman Empire, or a Western Empire, had been expanded to include not only the Romans but also themselves.

This practice of early-medieval northern and western European peoples of projecting themselves into the Roman Empire was so compelling that medieval ideas of progress remained backwards-looking: reform almost always meant the recovery by men of the present of an earlier golden age, whether the time of the apostles in religious thought or the time of the Roman Empire in legal and political thought. The political thought of the early Middle Ages and, to a lesser degree, the entirety of the Middle Ages, focused on one aspiration: the renewal of the Empire by the Germanic peoples. The history of medieval Europe reveals the futility of the desire for a revival of Rome: the political unit that emerged from feudal decentralization was the nation state, not the empire. Yet the historical hindsight of the twenty-first century is applied to the early Middle Ages only anachronistically; for the people who lived then, the possibility that a political state modeled on the Roman Empire but encompassing the Germanic peoples seemed not only desirable but reasonable.

Rome had been officially Christian from A.D. 395; during and after the collapse of the Roman government, the Christian Church served as the most important conduit between Roman ideas and Germanic practice. The earliest form of the Christian liturgy included prayers for the emperor and invoked the protection of God for Rome (Folz 5). The notion of Rome as an eternal city gradually became incorporated into the religious ideology associated with the papacy, an assimilation which may well have resonated with Tolkien, who once described The Lord of the Rings as a fundamentally religious and Catholic work (Letters 172).8

Yet unlike the ecclesiological associations that grew around the medieval city of Rome, and unlike the humanistic assumptions of Renaissance Italy which sought to revive the language, art, and philosophy of the ancient world, medieval hopes for the rebirth of Rome were primarily political. Germanic kings of the sixth and seventh centuries consciously modeled the emerging governments on Roman precedents. Barbarian law codes, the edicts of King Theodoric of the Ostrogoths, the Salic law of the Franks, the Burgundian and Visigothic codes, and the edicts of the Lombard kings, were modeled on the example of imperial legislation (Arragon 38). Such political hopes were focused on the idea of a king or emperor whose centralized authority would guarantee peace and a return to the splendor of ancient civilization.

These hopes came closest to realization in the reign of the Frankish king Carlos the Great, better known to modern readers as Charlemagne. In one of the best known historical moments of the early Middle Ages, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III on December 25th in the year 800. The imperial seal, which must have had Charlemagne’s approval even if it had other designers, dramatically expressed the hope that Charlemagne’s reign would prove to be the foundation of the rebirth of Rome. On one side the seal bore an abbreviated form the formula “Our Lord Charles, pious, everlasting and august Emperor,” taken from the old titles of the Caesars; on the other was pictured the gate of a city inscribed with the name “Roma” and the inscription “Renovatio Romani Imperii” (Folz 22-23).

These hopes proved unfounded: Charlemagne’s empire was divided among his three grandsons, and Frankish territory became the exemplar of the decentralized system of rule historians have labeled feudalism. It is quite obvious to modern observers that the early medieval northern Europeans had almost none of the necessary conditions to support a centralized government on the model of Rome, and therefore it is no surprise that neither the Carolingians, nor the earlier Ostrogothic kings, nor even the Ottonians of the eleventh century, found any appreciable success in their efforts. What is surprising, even remarkable, is the tenacity of their efforts. That tenacity is testament to the depth and intensity of the hope for a rebirth of Rome.

This hope is brilliantly embodied by Tolkien in the narrative of Aragorn’s return to Gondor in The Lord of the Rings. Long after the ruling dynasty of Gondor failed, its people clung to the hope of a restoration: “Yet many in Gondor still believed that a king would indeed return in some time to come; and some remembered the ancient line of the North, which it was rumored still lived on in the shadows” (RK, Appendix A, 333). The healer Ioreth gives specific voice to such a hope during the attack on Minas Tirith: “Would that there were kings in Gondor, as there were once upon a time, they say!” (RK, V, viii, 136). Unlike the successive disappointments of Germanic kings who sought to restore Rome, Aragorn’s rule fulfills Gondorian hopes. During his reign as king, Gondor is restored to its earlier grandeur:

In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets were paved with white marble; and the Folk of the Mountain laboured in it, and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and glory of the years that were gone. (RK, VI, v, 246)

The renewed Gondor was clearly the more inclusive concept of the kingdom as embodiment of the West that emerged during the later stages of the war, reflecting the Germanic hope for a revived Rome in which they would be incorporated. Elves and dwarves, according to the passage just quoted, were part of Gondor’s revival. Even more significantly, it was the hobbit Frodo, a representative of the Anglo-Saxons, who actually carried the crown from Faramir, the last of the stewards, to Gandalf, who crowned Aragorn king.

The historical Anglo-Saxons witnessed no such renewal. A poem which survives in only a fragmentary state, “The Ruin,” offers a description of a decayed Roman city, possibly Bath:

“Wondrous is this wall stone; things broke it up; city buildings burst apart; the work of giants decays. Roofs are in ruins, towers have crumbled releasing their barred gates; hoarfrost is on the mortar, gables are gaping, rent, collapsed, under-gnawed with age...This ruin fell to the ground in broken heaps where earlier many a man, glad of heart and bright with gold, decked in splendor, proud and wine-gay, shone in battle dress; he looked upon treasure, upon silver, upon curious gems, upon wealth, upon jewels, upon this bright city of a bright kingdom....” (Rebsamen 130-31)

The narrative of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings is a story of the renewal of a bright city and a bright kingdom, such as might have been heartening to the men and women whose culture produced the poem “The Ruin.”

The Lord of the Rings is a complex work. The story of Aragorn and Gondor is only one narrative thread, and certainly not the central thread. Even within the context of Aragorn’s return to the kingship of Gondor, there are many layers of meaning not explored here: the narrative has Arthurian echoes, for example, as well as implied Christological references. The story of Aragorn’s Númenorian ancestory echoes the Atlantis myth rather than that of the fall of Rome (Flieger 75-76). Nevertheless, it seems that there is considerable evidence to support the supposition that one layer of meaning is an expression of a late-ancient, early-medieval, northern European hope that the Roman Empire could be reborn, and that its reincarnated form would embrace the Germanic peoples and provide them with glory and peace.

Notes

1 Tolkien expressed this intention in a letter to Milton Waldman (Letters 143-46). The literature on this aspect of Tolkien is considerable. Some examples are: Chance, Lobdell, Petty, and Purtill.

2 Quoted in Goffart (53).

3 The quotation on Henry James is from Kermode (22).

4 The King of Rhovanion was the most powerful prince of the Northmen; the kings of Rohan claimed descent from the kings of Rhovanion (RK, Appendix A, 328, 344-45).

5 See also the photograph of the interior of S. Vitale (Jansen 205), and the photograph of a mosaic from S. Vitale (Jansen 206, color-plate 24).

6 This was not, of course, the only serious plague in late ancient and early medieval Europe.

7 The text of the electronic edition from which this quotation is taken was based on that published as The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans. Oliver Elton. The electronic edition was edited, proofed, and prepared by Douglas B. Killings (DeTroyes@EnterAct.COM), April 1997, and may be found at http://www.northvegr.org.

8 The reference is in a letter to Robert Murray, S.J., 1953.

Works Cited

Arragon, R. F. The Transition from the Ancient to the Medieval World. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936.

Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.

Chance, Jane. Tolkien’s Art: A ‘Mythology for England.’ New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979.

Fletcher, Richard. The Barbarian Conversion from Paganism to Christianity. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.

Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997.

Folz, Robert. The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie. New York and Evanston: J&J Harper Editions, Harper and Row, 1969.

Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550-800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Gruzinski, Serge. “Mutilated Memory: Reconstruction of the Past and the Mechanisms of Memory among Seventeenth-Century Otomís,” 214-220 in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Leslie Bethell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Innes, Matthew. “Teutons or Trojans: The Carolingians and the Germanic Past.” In The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Vitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 227-249.

Janson, H.W. History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982.

Kermode, Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Lobdell, Jared. England and Always: Tolkien’s World of the Rings. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1981.

Mierow, Charles Christopher, trans. The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version with an Introduction and a Commentary. Cambridge: Speculum Historiale; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960.

Nagle, D. Brendan. The Ancient World: A Social and Cultural History, 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979.

Petty, Anne C. One Ring to Bind Them All: Tolkien’s Mythology. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979.

Purtill, Richard L. J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984.

Rebsamen, Frederick R., ed. and trans., Beowulf is my Name and Selected Translations of Other Old English Poems. San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1971.

Saxo Grammaticus. The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans. Oliver Elton. New York : Norroena Society, 1905. Electronic edition by Douglas B. Killings at http://www.northvegr.org.

Sinnigen William G., and Arthur E. R. Boak. A History of Rome to A.D. 565, 6th ed. New York: Macmillan Publishing; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977.

World Creation as Colonization: British Imperialism in “Aldarion and Erendis”

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem

In an article in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, Sandra Ballif Straubhaar calls attention to the celebration of cultural diversity and interracial marriage in The Lord of the Rings and expresses her surprise that academics in the media so often make accusations to the contrary. Pointing to David Tjeder’s articles in Stockholm’s evening paper, which locate signs of gender essentialism and fear of miscegenation in The Lord of the Rings that he associates with Nazism and European imperialism, she argues for Tolkien’s ironic distance from his characters’ more racist opinions and compares Tolkien’s treatment of race favorably with his near contemporaries, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard (Straubhaar 101-117).

Her argument takes part in a larger, polarized disagreement in Tolkien studies: Does The Lord of the Rings express Tolkien’s “interest in cross-culturalization among peoples as a resource for social harmony”(Chance xiii-xiv)? Or does it encourage racism and fascism with its ethnocentric moral compass of west/good, east/evil, its confused borrowing from various non-Anglo-European cultures to produce the cultures of Sauron’s armies, and its impractical economy, which omits class conflict?

The distance between critics like Straubhaar and Tjeder is partly aggravated by their different specialties. While Strabhaar draws on source and language work (a strong area in Tolkien criticism) accusations of racism, including Tjeder’s, can be well supported by postcolonial theory. Although postcolonial commentary on Tolkien (outside the pop-culture versions published in news articles) is nearly non-existent, such critics instead draw their ideas from a rich supply of criticism on books written about the same literary tradition: boys adventure novels and the imperial romance.1 What Straubhaar actually attacks is not the isolated opinion of one scholar, but those of a well-established body of theory.2 In this case, Tjeder sounds like a simplified version of Laura Chrisman, who, in Rereading the Imperial Romance, identifies the joining of “compulsory universal modernization” with “mysticism” and “chivalry” (Parry 230-1) in the late nineteenth-century romance as the forerunner to “the conjunction of rationality with mythic forms of consciousness that Adorno and Horkheimer ascribe to fascist modernity” (5-6).3 Since Straubhaar chooses a thorough, text-and-source-based defense of Tolkien, her insistence upon a multicultural, anti-miscegenist message in The Lord of the Rings does not fully address the theories that cause such disparaging views—most importantly, in her case, the possibility of reading interracial marriage as the appropriation of feminized native lands and cultures by the masculinize colonizer.4

While I find some truth in the accusations of racism and ethnocentrism leveled at Tolkien’s work, such analysis as yet ignores the complexity of his writing, which offers sophisticated criticism of British imperialism even as it makes use of the colonial rhetoric that saturated the literature of its time. To address this gap, I offer a reading of Tolkien’s “Aldarion and Erendis” that combines close textual work with a more rigorous theoretical approach than can be accommodated in media debates. I will trace Tolkien’s argument against colonization in “Aldarion and Erendis,” first identifying the moral arguments offered against it, and secondly what human qualities Tolkien assigns to characters most likely to fall prey to empire’s attractions. Throughout his Middle-earth history tales, Tolkien’s colonizers are people possessed by a creative vision and an irrational burning to see that vision materialized regardless of cost to personal relationships or the natural world. Tolkien’s inquiry into the character of the colonizer as tortured visionary is therefore also an investigation of his own artistic process and suggests connections between fantasy writing and colonization as projects deliberately aimed at mythological and world creation. The link he establishes between artist and colonizer makes Tolkien sympathetic to the imperialist mindset, and his critique of colonization is finally compromised by his exaltation of artist as subcreator.

In order to differentiate my own use of postcolonial theory from those who use it to dismiss Tolkien, I will briefly clarify where his work falls historically. “Aldarion and Erendis” underscores Tolkien’s troubled relationship to the adventure novel genre, most obviously because it is a domestic story about a failed marriage with adventure elements on the side. Grouping Tolkien with predecessors like H. Rider Haggard is imprecise, since Tolkien is not, as they were, primarily concerned with inventing mystery and mysticism in colonial locales to counter westernization. Instead, as Jed Esty suggests in A Shrinking Island, Tolkien fits more comfortably into late modernism, with its interest in “uncover[ing] the roots of contemporary life in the native English soil”(41).5 Tolkien’s historical mythology is part of a larger Smeagoling craze, when anthropologists and folklorists turned energies formerly directed at the colonies towards studying England’s culture and populace, and there was a renewed interest in Anglo-Saxon languages, medieval heraldry, and the preservation of local historical landmarks. Combining romance and realism, English intellectuals across the political spectrum searched for ways to solidify English identity without resorting to fascism. Relocated in the correct historical period, my claim that Tolkien’s writing expresses overt anti-imperialist sentiments seems more plausible, and Tolkien’s break with the adventure tradition in favor of a domestic tale is entirely in keeping with England’s inward-seeking gaze.

Although “Aldarion and Erendis” was left unfinished at Tolkien’s death and published posthumously, the story feels nearly complete and can be read straight through.6 The tale includes one of Tolkien’s most direct critiques of British imperialism, its clarity aided by the geographic correlation between Britain and Númenor. The story relates how the Island nation of Númenor [Yôzâyan, Westernesse, the Land of Gift],7 established in the second age, first became involved in the affairs of mainland Middle-earth through the exploratory voyages of Aldarion, the male protagonist and heir to the Númenórean throne. A pattern of pride and desire for conquest is established in the actions of Aldarion that will lead to Númenor’s downfall thousands of years later. Tolkien chooses to merely outline Aldarion’s Middle-earth adventures, instead focusing on his courtship, marriage, and separation from his wife, Erendis, as an indicator of the nation’s moral direction. Although Númenórean abuses of native Middle-earth peoples are briefly mentioned, the main objection to colonization (within this particular tale) is its moral corruption of the colonizer. Unlike the familiar Heart of Darkness degeneration motif, corruption is refreshingly unconnected to contact with colonial Other. Decline directly results from a cultural shift in how we assign value to things. In Tolkien’s tales, colonization inevitably commodifies personal and natural resources and justifies questionable actions in pursuit of the dream of progress.

It is helpful to begin by establishing why Aldarion goes on his sea voyages in order to clarify that he is not just a mariner, but, indeed, a colonizer. The text presents his sea-longing as a kind of sickness that oppresses him until he simply must leave Númenor. A speech by Erendis’s mother makes explicit the colonial flavor of Aldarion’s sea voyages:

“Ships he may love, my daughter, for those are made by men’s minds and hands; but I think it is not the winds or the great waters that so burn his heart, nor yet the sight of strange lands, but some heat in his mind, or some dream that pursues him.” And it may be that she struck near the truth; for Aldarion was a man long-sighted, and he looked forward to days when the people would need more room and greater wealth; and whether he himself knew this clearly or no, he dreamed of the glory of Númenor and the power of its kings, and he sought for footholds whence they could step to wider dominion. (UT 199-200)

Aldarion explores because of a “dream” or “heat in his mind” rather than for any specific, physical goal. He dreams of the future, when his land will be wealthy and powerful because of his exploration and colonization. His immaterial desire manifests itself materially, in collecting gold and jewels, in building ships and towns, but this only calls attention to how much more he must do to reconcile his dream with reality. His material endeavors are attempts to quantify his dream, to make it physical so that it can be met, but his ambitions expand one step ahead of his actions and leave him unsatisfied. Aldarion’s desire to stray from home is both a temporal and spatial yearning as he rejects both the present moment in which he lives and his homeland Númenor for an imagined future and distant lands.

Preferring to live firmly in the present, Erendis sees her love for their mutual homeland in a different light from Aldarion. By taking opposing positions towards imperialism, they present a debate in the form of a lover’s quarrel. Directly preceding their engagement, Erendis challenges Aldarion’s explorations and land annexations as a morally sound expression of patriotism:

“Do you not love the Yôzâyan [Númenor]? she said.

“I love it indeed,” he answered, “though I think that you doubt it. For I think also of what it may be in time to come, and the hope and splendour of its people; and I believe that a gift should not lie idle in hoard.”

“But Erendis denied his words, saying: “Such gifts as come from the Valar, and through them from the One [Ilúvatar], are to be loved for themselves now, and in all nows. They are not given for barter, for more or for better. The Edain remain mortal Men, Aldarion, great though they be: and we cannot dwell in the time that is to come, lest we lose our now for a phantom of our own design.” Then taking suddenly the jewel from her throat she asked him: “Would you have me trade this to buy me other goods that I desire?”

“No!” said he. “But you do not lock it in hoard. Yet I think you set it too high; for it is dimmed by the light of your eyes.” Then he kissed her on the eyes. (UT 192-93)

Because Aldarion is long-sighted, he has a radically different perception of value from Erendis—and it is a definite character flaw. He sees objects for their potential as trade commodities, whereas Erendis believes things should be valued for themselves, not for their commercial potential. The diamond at her throat was an engagement gift Aldarion brought back for her from a Middle-earth voyage. It is obvious to him that the diamond has worth beyond its price, as he objects to the idea of her selling it, yet Aldarion fails to see the applicability of Erendis’s example to his life. He shows his persistent miscomprehension by comparing the diamond to her eyes and kissing them. Even at the moment of their engagement, he confuses his love for her with his love for glory and material objects.

Aldarion’s impulse to commodify is not avarice, but dissatisfaction with his “now,” as Erendis calls it, which he desires to exchange for a better future. He constantly wants to improve, to transform, to expand. He shows his love for Númenor by desiring to make it larger, richer, and better than ever before. By calling Númenor “Yôzâyan,” meaning “the land of gift,” Erendis reminds Aldarion that the isle of Númenor was a gift from the One as a refuge away from war, and in her opinion, that gift conditions a geographical limit to Númenórean power. Land is not a jewel to trade “for more or for better.” In calling attention to the portion of an object’s value that is personal and symbolic, Erendis’s position rejects a purely capitalist market in which anything can be exchanged based on a system of assigned monetary value.

Erendis’s use of her engagement gift as an example parallel to God’s gift of the world resembles Augustine, who makes the same analogy to illustrate idolatry:

Let us not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. . . . A man might say: “The things that are in the world are what God has made. . . . Why should I not love what God has made?” Let God’s Spirit indeed be in you to show you that all these things are good; but beware of loving things created and forsaking their Creator. You find them fair; but how much fairer is he that formed them! Think, my friends: you may learn by a parable, lest Satan get advantage of you. . . . Suppose, my brethren, a man should make for his betrothed a ring, and she should prefer the ring given her to the betrothed who made it for her, would not her heart be convicted of infidelity in respect of the very gift of her betrothed, though what she loved were what he gave. Certainly let her love his gift; but if she should say “The ring is enough, I do not want to see his face again,” what should we say of her? Should we not all abhor such frivolity, and charge her with the mind of an adulteress? “Gold is more to you than a husband, a ring more than your betrothed: if it is in you to transfer your love from your betrothed to the ring and not to want the sight of him, he will have given you a pledge not for security but for divorce.” Yet surely the pledge is given by the betrothed, just that in his pledge he himself may be loved. Even so, God has given you all these things: therefore, love him who made them. There is more that he would give you, even himself, their Maker. Though God has made these things, if you love them and are careless of their Creator—if you love the world, must not your love be set down for adulterous? 8

It would be horrible, says Augustine, if a woman treated her engagement ring as merely another adornment or as part of her wealth, because it is not just a piece of jewelry but a representation of her covenant with her husband. Similarly, the material world gifted to mankind is a sign of the covenant with God, which, along with Christ as a sacrificial gift, places mankind in a subordinate position. Humans have an unremitting debt that demands submissive gratitude. Idolatry, the love of this world for itself rather than as a symbol of the Creator, implies a refusal to recognize one’s debt to God and is therefore a form of pride.9

Tolkien’s argument is similar to Augustine’s reasoning, identifying colonial desire as idolatry—hence Erendis’s warning: “The Edain remain mortal men.” Thus what ultimately destroys Aldarion’s royal line is a pattern of idolatrous sins: posing as gods to native Middle-earth people, worshipping false gods, and attempting to usurp the Valar’s rule of Arda. By replacing dreams of the afterlife with visions of his nation’s future, Aldarion sets himself the impossible task of making Arda his heavenly kingdom. His successors follow his example, destroying their natural desire to pass into the next world. They eventually build elaborate tombs, become obsessed with death, and envy the elves their immortality, all of which violate Augustine’s injunction (which he quotes from I John 2:15): “love not the world, nor the things that are in the world.” Aldarion’s mission for improving Arda, which finds its counterpart in the evangelical and civilizing missions the British used to justify colonial expansion, thus proves futile, environmentally irresponsible, and morally dangerous. One of the strengths of Erendis’s position is that her love for Númenor exists in the present moment, enabling her to give up the gift when it comes time to meet the giver.

The lovers’ debate also shows that Tolkien’s reservations about colonization are part of his larger distaste for certain aspects of modern, industrial-capitalist culture. Aldarion dislikes arrangements that create mutual covenant obligation, and favors a modern system of capitalist exchange, which denies the responsibilities between economic parties inherent in feudalism. Aldarion even defends his position by rattling on about the merits of circulating wealth (“I believe a gift should not lie idle in hoard”), as if he keeps Adam Smith on his bedside table.10 It is this denial of the interdependence of king and subject, God and man, husband and wife, in favor of isolated individualism that links the personality of the colonizer with the personality of the artist.

Aldarion is not the only colonizer to appear in Tolkien’s history tales. He forms part of a discernable pattern of like-minded beings, including among them the infamous Fëanor and Melkor. Consistently, colonizers are male whose extraordinary artistic abilities are a catalyst for pride and downfall. The colonizers/artisst attempt to seize God-like dominion over other land, other people, and women, in an effort to force them to assimilate into the mold of their creative vision. The cause of conflict for these men is the vast difference between their “vision” and the material world they have to work with. Interdependence is replaced with a desire for complete dominance over other wills which may object to their impositions. Marriage, for Tolkien, offers a possible mediatory force, supplying female influence to off-set the male dominance complex. But the interdependence necessary for a successful relationship is often impossible for these artist/colonizers. (Not surprisingly, these men have trouble keeping their wives, and, indeed, Aldarion is no exception.)

This marriage pattern, favoring interdependence over independent males, can be observed throughout Tolkien’s writing. His adventure tales usually revolve around the actions of a central, racially mixed, male-female couple whose success depends upon their partnership: Eärendil and Elwing, Beren and Lúthien, Thingol and Melian, Tuor and Idril. In contrast, many of the people who fall prey to the desire for domination are not only lacking a partner, but have tension with the opposite sex: Fëanor is estranged from his wife, Melkor was rejected by Varda, Maeglin is obsessed with a woman who marries another man, and Turin lives in all-male company and later unknowingly marries his sister. Male and female are seen as two halves of a whole, so that a person is literally incomplete until marriage. Arda is an essentialist world which follows Levi-Strauss’s observation that, “the sexual division of labor is nothing else than a device to institute a reciprocal state of dependency between the sexes” (Lévi-Strauss 276).11 In “Aldarion and Erendis,” the lovers are frequently reminded of their need for one another and heterosexual companionship in general. King Meneldur argues with Aldarion, criticizing his son for the amount of time he spends with his exclusively male mariner friends, called the “lovers of Uinen.” Erendis becomes likewise isolated, eventually confining herself to her inland house with an entirely female staff.

When Aldarion and Erendis finally decide to live apart, it directly affects national politics, so that isolation enables colonization. King Meneldur reads a letter from the elven King, Gil-galad, which is a request for military support on grounds of alliance through his son, Aldarion. Gil-galad warns that the evil he fights will one day reach Númenor across the sea. Overcome with the difficulty of such a decision, Meneldur abdicates in favor of his son, Aldarion. “Yet that also is a choice,” he says to himself, “for I know well which road he will take. Unless Erendis . . .” Tolkien’s ellipses imply that Erendis is supposed to advise Aldarion with this momentous decision, but the two have just separated. In her absence, Aldarion chooses to give aid to Gil-galad. On the bow of his ship, Aldarion replaces the traditional branch of oiolairë [bow of return] with an eagle, saying, “This sign shall lead us to our aim” (UT 215). Aldarion has traded domesticity for war, traded his “now” for a “phantom” of his own design. In his choice is mirrored generations of British soldiers who volunteer their lives for the abstract idea of national glory. The first war of the Númenóreans is a world-conflict begun as a direct result of Aldarion’s explorations in Middle-earth and his lack of female influence.12

The result of Aldarion’s refusal to recognize the gift exchange system results in isolation, which is a favorable condition for the artist wishing to materially realize his vision. (Women are distractions and obstacles according to Aldarion.) But without a woman, the artist cannot sexually reproduce, which for Aldarion is very important because he must produce an heir. Instead, his creations become almost child-like, a substitution that enables denial of his dependence upon a women. Just as Fëanor is possessive towards the Silmarils or Melkor has a paternal dominance over his orcs, Aldarion substitutes seacraft for family life.13 Colonization not only replaces, but seems mutually exclusive with domesticity. Aldarion is the first Númenórean king not to produce a male heir. Also, his wife complains that he neglects sex (another neglected covenant “debt”), saying, “Too long and often of late is my bed cold” (UT 201). When they quarrel, Erendis counts on Aldarion’s need for an heir to force him to return and apologize. Instead, he changes the law so his daughter can inherit, depriving Erendis of the one leverage-point she held over him.14 Reflecting upon their daughter, Aldarion notes that she appears to be the sole issue of his own body, bearing no resemblance to his wife.15 All of these actions show a desire to reproduce asexually (by ignoring his need for Erendis or substituting artistic creation) rather than acknowledge the responsibilities acquired in any mutual exchange. Remember that Tolkien’s heroes come in pairs, creating unity through the coming together of difference: man and woman, elf and human, whereas the dominance complex of colonizer/artist attempts to impose unity through a quarantined separation that hides its dependence on difference.

By championing interdependence, “Aldarion and Erendis” turns away from the literature of high imperialism, which coincided with a gendered split in readership between domestic and adventure novels. Graham Dawson gives an account of this literary and social divide, inherited from the nineteenth century, which “Aldarion and Erendis” dramatizes: “With the domestic sphere now marked out as ‘woman’s place’, the difficulty for men of integrating domestic and public identities became acute, the pressure of the divide rendering them competing alternatives in uneasy tension” (Dawson 75). This gendered split necessitated plot structures that occluded the system’s contradictions by ejecting or subordinating the domestic in adventure novels. “Aldarion and Erendis,” however, reconsiders the place of adventure novels during a time when England’s empire was being dismantled and explores the possibility of reintegrating domestic and public male identities into a unified whole, even as England itself was forced to redefine and solidify its identity independent of its margin.

Robert Young connects hybridity, the coming together of opposites into a single, organic whole, to the construct of British identity as unified. He suggests that the fiction of a unified center requires a “desire for the Other” to relocate difference along an Occident–Orient dichotomy and suppress the existence of variety within the center (Young 2-6).16 In Tolkien’s writing, the Other is provided by England’s own past. Tolkien himself was aware that England had diverse historical influences and for this reason did not have a mythology strictly its own. Applying philology to ideas of race and culture, he created a proto-mythology for England.17 By borrowing from a variety of Nordic myths, Tolkien’s writings suggest that culture, like language, can be traced back until unity is reached. A fictional unity in the past allows for a unity-myth in the present that masks a diverse reality.

In order for England to inherit the legends of Middle-earth history, Tolkien’s stories must include an elaborate breeding project. If you examine Tolkien’s genealogies, you see that all the important family lines of men and elves are traced into Arwen and Aragorn (Aldarion and Erendis do not make the cut).18 Their marriage heralds a new age of cultured man, a breed that unites the spirit of elf and the body of man, creating the modern English artist. The reason why racial intermarriage and gender interdependence are privileged in Tolkien, contrary to the fear of miscegenation prevalent in colonial discourse, is that Tolkien depicts the fictional unified center from the opposite end of history. He is not trying to prevent racial decay, but to trace the ascension of a race long ago. Interracial marriage between elf and man is far from threatening, as it is always the woman who is an elf. Through patrilinear inheritance, the superior elven race is harnessed within modern man: the fertile spirit, colonized and tamed by male order in the name of progress. Tolkien begins with diversity, but ends with dominance. Although Tolkien wants to differentiate his own fantasy creation from the idolatrous activities of Aldarion, his mythopoeic project accidentally puts him squarely in Aldarion’s camp. As William Blake might say, Tolkien is of Fëanor’s party without knowing it.19

The link established between artist and colonizer in Tolkien’s work posits interesting questions about how the writer’s creative process can be used to understand the creation of socially constructed realities and provides insight into criticism on postcolonialism and textuality. David Spurr, connecting the narcissism that Derrida finds implicit in writing and imagining (as the assertion of being against nonbeing, life against death), explains, “The writer is the original and ultimate colonizer, conquering the space of consciousness with the exclusionary and divisive structures of representation” (Spurr 93). As suggested by my reading of “Aldarion and Erendis,” the artist and colonizer are potentially the same personality, subject to the same temptations because they do something of the same thing. Both seek to produce from blueprint visions a self-affirming, self-empowering “reality.”

Imperialism produces a fictional reality as it creates borders by drawing maps, creates countries by assigning names, creates identities with descriptive travel accounts. The same scientific methods and theories applied to flora and fauna are used to create race as a supposed inviolate category. As Spurr notes, this ordering power is also the method of writers. It is, however, especially characteristic of the fantasy writer, who creates entire worlds by drawing maps and making up languages. Tolkien calls this power subcreation:

[The sub-creator] makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. (MC 132)

There is an interesting parallel relationship between Tolkien’s idea of subcreation and the colonizing method. Both confront a space of endless variety—the world of Faërie in Tolkien’s case—and set about categorizing, naming, drawing borders. As a philologist, Tolkien is famous for creating his world through nomenclature, just as a European explorer or naturalist approached Africa or the Americas. His imagination, becoming synonymous with Faërie, is substituted for colonial lands or native population, becoming the displaced site of scientific ordering. It is not surprising that this creative process should adopt the rhetoric of empire and gender. The imagination becomes a fertile, feminine, dangerous, boundless location subdued by the male artist: Fëanor with his Silmarils, Tolkien desiring Faërie.20 This feminization of Faërie and the implied restriction of artistic power to men works against Tolkien’s critique of Aldarion because it appropriates the female reproduction system into the male mind. Tolkien’s subcreation method celebrates male asexual reproduction born of imaginative manipulation: Aldarion’s “heat of the mind” that drives his colonial desire. And in light of Tolkien’s key participation in the exclusively male Inklings and his preference for male friendships, his stories are incredibly self-incriminating.21

Embedded in Tolkien’s description of subcreation is an account of how imposition of colonial myth works to deceive. British culture pictured colonial space in certain fictitious forms: as sexual, radically different, violent, empty, uncivilized, etc. This myth is imposed upon the reality of the lands and people encountered (who are not necessarily more or less violent, sexual, civilized, or radically different from the British) and accepted in place of what is actually there. The myth seems truer than reality because it is the dominant narrative. We are on the “inside” of the story. As Alan Sinfield explains, “The way stories work may be observed at the boundaries of plausibility—the point at which the dominant withholds even a willing suspension of disbelief” (Sinfield 25). Believability is created by a series of cultural referents repeated through time until they appear natural. Novels form a “Secondary World” where the laws of believability change, within reason.

In both literature and the world, belief is challenged by inconsistency, by calling attention to a narrative’s fictionality, allowing the reader to stand “outside” the story from a position of critique. “Colonial stereotypes,” says Sinfield, “are insecure, finally, because they fit poorly with the evidence. The settler must seek confirmation continually, because every time he or she looks at a native . . . there is a risk of seeing not the stereotype but another human being” (Sinfield 119). The presence of the native is a constant threat to mythology, which is exactly why fantasy makes for a fascinating look at colonial rhetoric in its most ideal, unchallenged form. The elves are unlikely to protest their depiction as sexualized Other or hobbits their child-like simplicity. The margin cannot write back. One could argue, why should we care whether elves are sexualized if they do not exist? The problem is that elves do not exist any more than any colonial myth exists. Elves are a referent to the colonial subject, just as any colonial fiction is a referent to a real person. Fantasy is fully capable of perpetuating colonial rhetoric because it refers to the fictions we make to screen reality.

If colonization serves as a model for Tolkien’s creative process, which imposes the order of world creation on the chaotic inner space of human mind, then the reverse observation can also be made about colonization: It exists in the mind, as a dream vision looking to deposit itself onto a material reality in order to validate its truth. In this way, Tolkien’s readers also become implicated by exhibiting the imperialist desire to make Tolkien’s artistic vision material. They dress up like hobbits, learn to speak Elvish, visit New Zealand for an “authentic” Middle-earth experience, or coin phrases like “the Frodo economy.” Of course, as with Aldarion, what material creations they manage, whether films, art, or elf ears, are a poor fit to the mind’s vision. Idolatrous insistence upon material authenticity prompts well-intentioned friends and family to echo Erendis’s warning against losing “our now for a phantom of our own design.”

notes

1 Even critics defensive of Tolkien place him in the adventure novel tradition (see Lobdell). Although obviously Tolkien could as easily be placed in other categories, I think this particular strain explains where accusations of racism and fascism draw much of their critical weight. Martin Green, for example, describes adventure novels as “the generic counterpart in literature to empire in politics” (37).

2 Straubhaar is one of many Tolkien critics responding to theorists who express their views in the popular media instead of formal academic articles. In each case, I observe the same pattern, where defense is based on superior close work with Tolkien’s texts and sources, but the defender is reluctant to take the battle to the other critic’s theoretical home ground. See Rosebury (2, 160-7, 178-82) for similar defense against Marxist critics.

3 Chrisman quotes Benita Parry (230-1) which she combines with Adorno and Horkheimer.

4 Nicholas Daly (66-70) argues that the marriage plot of Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass, while unusual in an adventure novel, derives from a tendency in Anglo-Irish literature to use marriage to imagine a natural connection between Britain and Ireland, where marital consent symbolizes the consent of Ireland to colonial rule; David Lloyd (150-5) argues that instead of promoting multiculturalism, marriage plots in novels work to silence Bakhtin’s heteroglossia; Straubhaar’s observation that blond hair, for Tolkien, is associated with more “primitive” or Edenic cultures (107) makes her analysis of the inter-cultural marriage between Éowyn and Faramir (101-7, 110-1) possibly support Anne McClintock’s work (22-36) which demonstrates how exploration of so-called new and virgin lands by the ordering forces of “civilization” was imagined as male penetration; What Straubhaar describes as “the attitudes of imperial culture toward fringe culture” in The Lord of the Rings and Roman texts, attitudes which sound “patronizing and, on the other hand, grudgingly admiring” (104), indicate an appropriative approach to other cultures that mirrors economic exploitation. The fine line between multiculturalism and appropriation raises concern for Spivak (among others), who explains (263-4) how the act of recovering and examining texts from “the Third World,” intended as a corrective to Eurocentrism, instead “reproduces the axioms of imperialism” by treating other cultures like literary mineshafts.

5 Throughout this paragraph, I draw from Esty (36-46). Esty discusses Tolkien more specifically in his third chapter on Eliot. His analysis is brief and biographical, but has the advantage of placing Tolkien in a historical context alongside other authors with whom he is not usually associated. For a background on historical projects similar to Tolkien’s in the nineteenth century, see Hunter.

6 Christopher Tolkien warns that “Aldarion and Erendis,” which Tolkien calls “The Mariner’s Wife,” required heavy editing in order to make Tolkien’s chronological outline, used at the tale’s beginning, blend with the more narrative style of the second half (UT 8-9). For the purposes of this essay, I concerned myself with the text as it appears in UT (173-238).

7 Alternative names and name translations are offered in brackets. In quotations from Tolkien’s work, the more standard name or translation is offered after the name Tolkien used if the original choice has textual significance (as it often does). Otherwise the name is replaced. For help with nomenclature translations I used Noel.

8 Augustine (sections 11-14); I am in debt to Katharine Eisaman Maus for explaining Augustine’s ideas on idolatry and gift giving and calling attention to this passage in a lecture, which is forthcoming in print in English Literary Renaissance.

9 One cannot help but notice that Augustine is concerned with rings, a favorite Tolkien subject. It is difficult to say how this passage may have informed some of the philosophy and symbolism of Sauron’s rings, but I will venture a possibility: In Tolkien’s mythology, both Sauron and Melkor desire to be god-like, but only manage a poor, twisted imitation of Ilúvatar. The gift of the rings can be seen as a perverted, worldly gift, one that enslaves the will instead of freeing it and gives eternal life but only by turning men into wraiths. Augustine stresses the danger of forgetting the connection between the gift of the world and the Creator who made it, and a similar danger exists for those who accept the rings and ignore how this may bind them to the one who forged them. In Middle-earth, accepting Sauron’s rings would be a satanic opposite to accepting Ilúvatar’s gifts to the race of men. Temptation is enabled by a convenient idolatry, the ability to ignore the ring’s treacherous maker.

10 I admittedly replace, here, Tolkien’s theologically-constructed argument with a Marxist one, but such readings have long been applied to work by authors who critique modern times by juxtaposing it with feudalism, going back to Carlyle and Ruskin. I am also attempting to move from a strict, source examination of Tolkien’s intent to a theoretical examination of its implications, in which authorial intent or personal beliefs become increasingly superfluous. In many ways, this same movement, separated between critics, accounts for the some of the disparity in opinions about whether Tolkien’s work is racist and fascist.

11 For a feminist response to Levi-Strauss, see Rubin (27-62); for essentialism in Tolkien’s mythology, see Crowe (272-77).

12 I realize that I am using colonization and war somewhat interchangeably, here. Although different, they are always linked in Tolkien, one leading inevitably to the next. When Fëanor decides to settle Middle-earth, he immediately starts the first elven war in order to get ships. In the isolationist Shire, on the other hand, one hobbit has never killed another, and they only fight defensive wars. One could argue that Aldarion’s war is itself defensive, as Sauron would one day reach Númenor and destroy it, and shows an admirable willingness to work with other races. The branch of oiolairë, however, marks Aldarion’s motives as highly questionable: The bow of return withers more with each of Aldarion’s voyages, until it dies entirely for the first time in memory on his last peaceful journey. The seas also become increasingly rough with each of his voyages, showing that the Valar are withdrawing their protection in response to rebellion. These details make an action that could be laudable in other circumstances read within the story’s context as a premonition of Númenor’s decline and an echo of Fëanor’s crossing.

13 Both Fëanor and Melkor are artists who exhibit the same colonial ambitions as Aldarion: “Fiercest burned the new flame of desire for freedom and wider realms in the eager heart of Fëanor” (S 68). The fire imagery of Aldarion’s “heat in his mind” appears again when Fëanor convinces the elves to rebel: “the greater part of the Noldor there assembled he set aflame with the desire of new things and strange countries” (S 84). The correlation throughout Tolkien’s mythology between the desire to rule foreign lands and rebellion against Ilúvatar supports the argument that Tolkien’s writing includes anti-imperialist messages. Melkor’s excuses for his imperial ambitions are especially interesting because they resemble the white man’s burden philosophy (S 18).

14 Many readers seem to view the change in Númenórean law specifying succession to the first born child, whether male or female, as progressive. The details of “Aldarion and Erendis,” however, show that it was originally a ploy to make a man less dependent on his wife for an heir.

15 When Aldarion sees his daughter for the first time in five years he thinks of her as his: “He saw there a child of his own, rather than of Erendis, for all her schooling” (UT 207).

16 Although Young’s theories tend to address British identity as a whole, and Tolkien is concerned more exclusively with English identity, the dramatic increase in the diversity of England’s population during Tolkien’s lifetime makes the same hybridity concepts applicable to both England and Britain. There is also some enlargement in Tolkien’s mythopoeic project for this particular tale, as Númenor addresses the part of English identity concerned with the British Empire.

17 The idea of applying the same principles to language and race is not unique to Tolkien. Edward Said argues that the systems of language roots and divisions was symbiotically informed by the study of races, cultures, and their roots. In a kind of circular reasoning, classifications which were actually ethnocentric constructs seemed all the more natural because they were made to correspond one with the other (Said 149-51); Tolkien’s system of races and languages, in which elves are the most spiritually enlightened and speak the most beautiful language, repeated a project already in place in his own world. In “The Lost Road,” an English boy named Alboin (meaning elf-friend, but also similar to Albion, meaning England), outlines Tolkien’s own mythopoeic project in a discussion with his father:

“But races, and cultures, are different from languages.” [said his father]

“Yes,” said Alboin; “but very mixed up, all three together. And after all, language goes back by a continuous tradition into the past, just as much as the other two. . . . Anyway I like to go back—and not with race only, or culture only, or language; but with all three. I wish I could go back with the three that are mixed in us, father . . . . I wonder what one would see” (Lost Road 43-44).

18 There is a detailed genealogy of the early generations of the Númenórean kings at the end of “Aldarion and Erendis” (UT 221), as well as a table of kings (UT 228-38). For more narrative information of the Númenórean downfall, see Lost Road (11-38). I used the elven genealogies included in S (305-8).

19 I don’t mean to imply that Tolkien himself purposely supported imperialism, or that he intended his theories about writing to build upon racist ideas. The ambivalence that enters his texts comes from his efforts to extract Romanticism from its link with British Imperialism, and to the extent that he succeeds (which I think he only partially does), he offers a critique of empire. Furthermore, my assertion that Tolkien is an anti-imperialist whose writing borrows from the rhetoric of imperialism is a pretty standard observation made about most of his contemporary writers, intended to historically locate their work, understand the social forces that influenced it, and find areas of resistance for modern readers. Far from condemning such literature, these examinations often secure its canonization, since any text that doesn’t lend itself to such confusions and self-contradictions would be in danger of historical obscurity for being so unaccommodating. The strict polarization of Tolkien criticism (defending and denouncing with little compromise) is an anomaly—one I believe prevents Tolkien’s work from being considered, by some, complex enough for observation.

20 When Tolkien talks about the land of Faërie he seems determined to make it through the checklist of colonial tropes. He feminizes it; he speaks of it as fertile and desirable, as filled with strange plants and animals, as interesting only in regards to our travels there, as occupied by deceptive natives. “Such lands were pre-eminently desirable,” says Tolkien. “Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire” (MC 135).

21 See Fredrick (1-7, 10-13, 45-53). “Aldarion and Erendis” is a highly autobiographical story. Tolkien kept his intellectual and marriage life separate, creating tension with his wife, Edith, who was kept firmly in the domestic sphere and forced to compete for his time and attention. The notion that as a seaman, Aldarion’s work is mutually exclusive with his marriage life, seems taken from personal experience.

Works Cited

Augustine. Second Homily on I John 2:12-17. In Augustine: Later Works, selected and trans. by John Burnaby. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1955.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Chance, Jane, ed. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Crowe, Edith L. “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses.” Mythlore, 33, no. 2 (Winter 1995-96): 272-77.

Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Fredrick, Candice and Sam McBride. Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.

Hunter, John. “The Reanimation of Antiquity and the Resistance to History: Macpherson—Scott—Tolkien.” In Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance and Alfred Siewers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2005.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Family.” In Man, Culture, and Society, edited by Harry L. Shapiro. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Lobdell, Jared. “Defining The Lord of the Rings: An Adventure Story in the Edwardian Mode.” In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.

Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Movement. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993.

Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “Idol and Gift in Volpone.” English Literary Renaissance, forthcoming.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

Noel, Ruth S. The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980.

Parry, Benita. “Narrating Imperialism: Nostromo’s Dystopia.” In Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997.

Rosebury, Brian. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. London & Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1997.

Spivak, Gayatri C. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” In ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, edited by H. L. Gates, Jr. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986.

Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993.

Straubhaar, Sandra Ballif. “Myth, Late Roman History, and Multiculturalism in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

“Tricksy Lights”: Literary and Folkloric Elements in Tolkien’s Passage of the Dead Marshes

Margaret Sinex

In his chapter “The Passage of the Marshes” in book four of The Two Towers, Tolkien creates a memorable landscape, one that has received significant critical attention to date. Recent scholarship has probed the biographical inspiration for the Dead Marshes, that is, the rich parallels they share with the topography of northern France in World War I where Tolkien himself served for some months in 1916. Yet, with its focus on battlefield memories (recollections whose role Tolkien himself acknowledged) scholarly discussion has not highlighted its preternatural elements—its many paradoxes. The terrible topography of the Somme cannot fully account for these crucial features. The Mere of Dead Faces is a unique liminal zone marked by cryptic ambiguities (e.g. the living dead, fire in water) and located between the living lands nourished by the Anduin and the lifeless desolation before the Black Gate. In addition, few (Tom Shippey excepted) have explored in any detail the scene’s function in the work as a whole. The Hobbits’ passage of the Marshes presents them with a particular spiritual trial and their successful passage transfigures them in such a way as to render their perseverance on the quest the more poignant and laudable.

The nightmare core of this treacherous landscape poses not only an obvious mortal peril (accidental drowning) but also a very particular spiritual temptation for the hero at this moment in his quest. As Shippey has noted in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, that temptation is despair. In his view, Frodo and Sam’s passage of the Dead Marshes is an episode that “lean[s] towards despair” (216).

Tolkien synthesized his memories of the Somme together with elements drawn from medieval literature and European folklore to create this landscape and especially the profoundly unnatural objects—corpses holding candles—lying at the heart of an otherwise apparently natural landscape. Literature and folklore best account for the Mere’s central paradox, the candles held in the hands of combatants who died long ago, tapers that ignite inexplicably at nightfall, that burn under water, and that exert a potent malign influence upon the three intruders. Tolkien fashioned his unique mesmerizing corpse lights in the Marshes to symbolize the temptation of suicide for the Ringbearer, especially in the form of recklessly brave acts committed in the hope of bringing a swift death and of shortening personal suffering (since the submerged long dead corpses hold candles whose flames possess lethal alluring properties). With both a hypnotic and partially paralyzing power, these lights disorient the living, and above all, exercise a compulsion over them, luring them to an apparently restful, watery death. To drown here is to sleep, an equation the text repeatedly stresses. With a horrific and repellant immediacy, the Marshes and the corpses they conceal reify the danger of turning aside from the quest, of falling off the path to rest at last.

In creating what Gollum calls “‘The tricksy lights’” Tolkien combined several traditions (TT, IV, ii, 234). He drew on medieval Icelandic literature (Bárðar Saga and Eyrbyggja Saga) as well as on European folk motifs (the Hand of Glory and Will o’ the Wisp). We can identify the deadly properties of Tolkien’s “wicked lights” in these prior texts (TT, IV, ii, 236). Of course, he has not imported (so to speak) these elements and their functions unaltered. Tolkien has in fact reversed the function of the candlelight in his creation since in Bárðar Saga the candlelight protects the living from the dead. There, penetrating the realm of the dead, the hero Gestr holds the magic candle aloft and finds that its flame paralyzes five hundred men poised to assault him. In addition, an especially rich source, the Hand of Glory motif, also combines the elements of the corpse and the candle as well as sleep since the taper is usually created from the hand of a hanged murderer. Its light lulls those who see it to sleep while the bearer remains immune to its effect.

Tolkien himself acknowledges two other influences upon this landscape as well. In a letter written on 31 December 1960 to L. W. Forster, he confirms the indebtedness of the Dead Marshes to his own experiences in the Great War and especially its topography: “Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme” (Letters 303).1

Somewhat frustratingly, in his published works Tolkien does not offer many details of his months at the Front.2 To gain a sense of Northern France as he experienced it we must rely instead on the novels, memoirs and verse of other World War I writers as does Barton Friedman in “Tolkien and David Jones: The Great War and the War of the Ring” (115-36).

In the early summer of 1916, the newly married Tolkien found himself a member of “the New Army” marshaled for “The Big Push” of that season.3 He held the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Thirteenth Lancashire Fusiliers and subsequently in the Eleventh. Having opted to specialize in signaling, Tolkien was made battalion signaling officer (78). For his analysis of Tolkien’s and Jones’s literary treatments of warfare, Friedman selects passages from Siegfried Sassoon, Max Plowman (whose pseudonym was Mark VII), John Masefield, and Wilfred Owen. Friedman cites two passages especially that evoke a particular grotesque discovery on the battlefield, one described in so many different accounts that he calls it “a recurrent horror” (115) and argues plausibly enough that Tolkien too must have encountered it at the Somme in 1916. Significantly, these passages depict the heads of corpses floating on the surface of the water that filled the innumerable trenches and shell holes of the battlefield.

Friedman abbreviates Sassoon’s nightmare vision from his autobiographical Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “Floating on the surface of the flooded trench . . . the mask of a human face . . . detached . . . from the skull” (115) For his part, Max Plowman’s narrator in his A Subaltern on the Somme dreads the possibility that a head will bob up from each watery hole: “and as I look upon these evil pools I half expect to see a head appearing from each one” (quoted in Friedman 116). Friedman is justified in believing that these suspended corpses inspired Tolkien’s Mere of Dead Faces at least in part. But then again in his Mere, the Dead are not altogether dead and the topographical zone the Marshes constitute contains bizarre unnatural forces and poses unique perils for those who intrude upon it.

Even before he penetrates the Marshes themselves, Frodo establishes the theme by voicing his wish for the release from toil a swift death appears to offer. Standing on the heights of the Emyn Muil gazing across at the distant line of the Mountains of Shadows, he “mutter[s] “‘Mordor! . . . If I must go there, I wish I could come there quickly and make an end! ’” (TT, IV, ii, 210). And significantly, it is here before they enter the Marshes that the hobbits acknowledge explicitly to each other for the first time that their own deaths are assured whether they succeed or fail in the quest. Frodo asks: “‘To do the job as you put it—what hope is there that we ever shall? And if we do, who knows what will come of that? If the One goes into the Fire, and we are at hand? I ask you, Sam, are we ever likely to need bread again?’” (TT, IV, ii, 231). To lie down, to sleep with The Dead sooner rather than later presents a particularly beguiling temptation on a quest now openly admitted to require the sacrifice of their own lives.

Proposals for rash, self- destructive acts of courage that would bring them to rest quite soon both precede and follow their passage of the Marshes. Consider Sam’s first impulsive attempt to descend the Emyn Muil:

Before Frodo could stop him, he sat down, swung his legs over the brink, and twisted round, scrabbling with his toes for a foothold. It is doubtful if he ever did anything braver in cold blood, or more unwise.

‘No, no! Sam, you old ass!’ said Frodo. ‘You’ll kill yourself for certain, going over like that without even a look to see what to make for. Come back!’ (TT, IV, ii, 213)

The text also offers numerous examples following their successful transit of the Marshes. Confronted by the entrance to Mordor itself: “The two hobbits gazed at the towers and the wall in despair”( TT, IV, ii, 244). It is significant that the word despair is used here. This is a crucial moment because the hobbits view the entrance to the Dark Lord’s stronghold with their own eyes, not at one remove. Here, Frodo is not relying on the report of Aragorn, nor on an abstract representation such as a map in Rivendell. Sam voices the certainty of imminent disaster both for themselves personally and for the quest: “‘Well, here we are!’ said Sam. ‘Here’s the Gate, and it looks to me as if that’s about as far as we are ever going to get’” (TT, IV, ii, 245). Yet, Frodo soon announces his determination to attempt “Cirith Gorgor, the Haunted Pass” (TT, IV, ii, 244): “His face was grim and set, but resolute. . . . . ‘I said so, because I purpose to enter Mordor, and I know no other way. Therefore I shall go this way. I do not ask anyone to go with me’” (TT, IV, ii, 245).

Again, Sam expresses a preference for a quick death attempting the Morannon rather than for the punishing journey of some thirty leagues south to another entrance through the Valley of the Wraiths. Arguing with Gollum about this alternative route guarded by the Silent Watchers, he says: “‘And so we are to walk up and knock at their gate and ask if we are on the right road for Mordor? Or are they too silent to answer? It’s not sense. We might as well do it here, and save ourselves a long tramp’” (TT, IV, ii, 251). For Frodo, even the interior mental and emotional effort of choosing between the Haunted Pass and the Valley of the Wraiths seems insupportable: “This was an evil choice. Which way should he choose? And if both led to terror and death, what good lay in choice?” (TT, IV, ii, 254).

Frodo’s question articulates the core of their dilemma—to perceive a “good” apart from preserving their own lives and sparing themselves Mordor’s terrors. Choosing the time and manner of their own deaths—by a suicidal plunge below the Marshes’ surface or by an equally suicidal rush upon the Morannon—would perhaps be the final expression of their individuality. Other characters come to mind when we ponder the seductiveness of a suicidal plunge or rush: Denethor, Faramir and Éowyn. For the present, we might recall that Gandalf explicitly warns Faramir against a rash act of self sacrifice in defense of his city—“‘Do not throw your life away rashly’”—or as a response to his father’s hard rejection—“‘or in bitterness’” (RK, V, iv, 90).4 It is this episode, the passage of the Marshes, that first highlights the lure of self destruction for the hobbits with a terrible clarity.

Like the battlefields Tolkien himself knew, his Mere of Dead Faces possesses a hideous doubleness—it is both a marsh and a cemetery. Memoirs of the Great War abound with descriptions of the battlefields upon which men fought and through which they tunneled that were riddled with corpses sometimes encountered at a surprising depth. Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme offers a representative description: “There are men buried here four or five deep, their bodies often lying as they fell, with limbs stretched in all directions. We dig among the bodies, and the difficulties that ensue when they lie deep, stretched transversely across the gap, must be imagined, for they will not be described” (105).

Tolkien’s debt to the fields of northern France is clear enough; it is the preternatural dimension of this landscape that requires further exploration. Unlike the fields packed with the newly dead, his Marshes are themselves literally a gravesite containing the bodies of those who fell on the Battle Plain, on Dagorlad at the close of the Second Age when Sauron was brought down and Isildur seized the One Ring. The age and appearance of these bodies present an impossibility. Accordingly, when Gollum shares this history with the hobbits Sam objects that the bodies of the fallen cannot possibly have survived: “‘But that is an age or more ago’”(TT, IV, ii, 235). Gollum suggests that the bodies may be wholly illusory: “‘Shapes to see, perhaps, not to touch’” (235).5

In addition Frodo reports that “‘A fell light is in them’” (TT, IV, ii, 235), a light which, as Shippey suggests, implies the presence of Sauron’s perverting power (117). Indeed, the paradoxical aberrant nature of the Marshes and the bodies they conceal recalls another unnatural landscape known to have been poisoned by the Dark Lord: “Minas Ithil [of] long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills” (TT, IV, viii, 312). There, the waters of the Morgulduin flow beneath a bridge, giving off a visible steam. This “vapour . . . curl[s] and twist[s]” suggesting the waters are intensely hot, as if flowing from a hidden hot spring. Yet, paradoxically they touch the hobbits with a lethal chill. Further, the water’s movement should be audible, but it is altogether “silent”: “The water flowing beneath [the bridge] was silent, and it steamed, but the vapour that rose from it, curling and twisting about the bridge, was deadly cold” (TT, IV, viii, 313). Paradoxes defying nature abound in both the Morgul Vale and in the Dead Marshes.

Indeed Sauron has corrupted the very moonlight that once glowed through the Tower’s marble walls. And most interestingly for our purposes, Tolkien employs the diction of the cemetery to depict the motions of the now diseased moonlight, further strengthening the link between the two locations. This light recalls the lights of the Dead Marshes by evoking the stench of putrefaction, corpses, and significantly, lights robbed of their ability to illuminate the darkness: “Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing” (312). Such light is robbed of its simple natural function.6 Sam’s suspicion that the submerged corpses with their candles were created by “some devilry hatched in the Dark Land” is well founded (235). And Tolkien’s diction encourages readers to agree.

The Marshes may be the resting place of Isildur’s long dead warriors but it is a troubled gravesite. Water has crept in to disturb the rest of the fallen, jumbling together the bodies of enemies: “Men and Elves, and Orcs beside them” (235). The confused mingling of adversaries under water might have aroused particular horror among Elves, Dwarves, and Men since these races are at pains to honor their dead in space set aside for this purpose.7 The revered dead of Minas Tirith sleep in stone houses in the city’s sixth circle, a space firmly demarcated from the world of the living. The gate to Rath Dínen or the Silent Street is strictly guarded; only the Lord of the City and those who look after the tombs themselves may use it. The men of Minas Tirith watch over the resting place of the dead loyally and with great care. Rohan’s King Théoden is also interred in stone, but his stone chamber is then buried beneath a grassy mound planted with “white evermind” (RK, V, vi, 254).

Théoden takes his place in land especially set apart for the Lords of the Mark. With its eight barrows on the east and nine on the west, the Barrowfield lies undisturbed under the open sky, safeguarded by the Rohirrim. Indeed even in the tumult of battle, the Riders of the Mark strive to separate their fallen from their enemies. Although forced by circumstances to leave the seven knights of Théoden’s household where they lay on the Pelennor Fields, they fence them in with a wall of spears: “so they laid them apart from their foes and the fell beast” (RK, V, vi, 120). The “beast” here is the winged mount of the Lord of the Nazgûl. Its resting place is unmarked by men but its profound evil is signaled in a sense by nature, for the patch of ground on which the carcass burned never recovers its fertility: “ever black and bare was the ground” (RK, V, vi, 120). Its counterpart, Théoden’s horse Snowmane, receives a hero’s burial with a proper grave for his body and a stone memorial bearing an epithet carved not in one but in two languages (RK, V, vi, 120). Nature celebrates his sacrifice with lush growth: “green and long grew the grass on Snowmane’s Howe” (RK, V, vi, 120). 8

The violation of the ritual separation of comrade from enemy and the dead from the living we have observed elsewhere surely intensifies the horror of the Marshes. Further, the symbolism of these jumbled bodies does not suggest an encouraging fate for the fallen Men and Elves in the afterlife since the physical disposition of the body reflects the culture’s expectations for the afterlife, as we see, for example, among the Rohirrim. As he lies dying, Théoden expresses his pride in his achievements and his certainty that he is about to join his forbearers: “‘ I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not be ashamed’” (RK, V, vi, 117–118). Under his barrow, Théoden lies with the grave goods (his arms and other valuable possessions) appropriate for a king about to enter the company of revered heroes. Accordingly, the chaos of sunken bodies exuding a “fell light” suggests that perhaps Isildur’s forces and Sauron’s slaves come to rest in the same “place” in the afterlife just as their bodies have in Middle-earth.9 The suggestion is not encouraging.

Further, just as the Marshes are a liminal zone between the living lands and the desolation before the Black Gate, these bodies are in an anomalous intermediate state. Suspended between preservation and dissolution, the bodies of Men and Elves retain some of their beauty in life but also exhibit partial corruption. Frodo sees: “‘Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead’” (TT, IV, ii, 235). The work of corruption touches them all, whatever their moral qualities while living.

These corpses also lie suspended between life and death because they appear subtly revived at night, holding their lighted candles. In fact they share with the Marshes concealing them this obscure paradoxical life-in-death state. The text repeatedly emphasizes this paradoxical state throughout the episode. An eerie unexplained life force pervades the landscape: “Dry reeds hissed and rattled though they could feel no wind” (TT, IV, ii, 232). And again, “there was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel” (TT, IV, ii, 234). At the edge of the Marshes an absence of expected animal life troubles Sam especially. Yet this apparent lifelessness above the surface of the water contrasts with the (as yet) hidden profusion below. Licking his teeth, Gollum lists those invisible riches: “‘No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things’” (TT, IV, ii, 234).

This life-in-death state, together with two other elements—the hero’s visit to the gravesite and the magic candle’s paralyzing effect—suggest a literary inspiration for Tolkien’s creation. An episode in Bárðar Saga composed in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century is most likely. In this Saga, at the request of Ólafr Tryggvason King of Norway, the hero Gestr accepts a formidable quest—he must recover the grave goods buried with King Raknar. A formidable homicidal maniac in life (Raknar had himself buried alive with eight hundred men) he had both patricide and matricide to his credit.10 Consequently, we can consider him Un-dead; in fact he is a revenant since his startling appearance at King Ólafr’s Christmas feast and the challenge he issues there catalyze this particular episode.

King Ólafr bestows useful gifts upon the hero at his departure; the crucial one for our purposes is the magic candle. He assures Gestr: “it would light by itself if it were held up ‘for it will be dark in Raknar’s grave, but do not stay longer than the candle lasts, then all will go well’” (Skaptason and Pulsiano 99). As promised, the candle ignites as Gestr touches the floor of the barrow after having been lowered on a rope by his companions above. Its light reveals a massive ship (the Slóðinn) outfitted with a crew of five hundred strong. As he enters the vessel, the five hundred begin to arise to meet him. Yet, once they are illuminated by the candlelight, they freeze in place. Paralyzed, they merely “rolled their eyes and snorted out their noses” (107). Gestr cuts down all five hundred of them, strips the ship of its valuables and has the loot hauled up and out of the barrow by rope.

Encouraged by this first success, Gestr explores the barrow and discovers Raknar himself. Interestingly, Raknar responds to Gestr’s courteous greeting in silence, merely bowing. He then exhibits a curious passivity, as he remains seated, quietly allowing Gestr to relieve him of costly armaments (his helmet, his byrnie) and ornaments (a gold arm ring). At this crucial juncture (of course) the candle abruptly expires. Freed from its paralytic effects, Raknar is quiescent no longer; he leaps from his seat attacking Gestr vigorously. Worse, the five hundred men he had just beheaded begin to revive. The hero escapes only by making a quick promise to convert to Christianity should he be spared; in response King Ólafr himself appears at his side in the barrow and together they overcome Raknar. They then follow the approved method of coping with a troublesome revenant by beheading him and laying the severed head by his rump (109 n. 3).

Gestr’s successful raid on Raknar’s mound follows a narrative pattern found elsewhere in the Sagas. Davidson cites Bárðar Saga, Harðar Saga, and Hrómunðar Saga Greipssonar as the “three most elaborate accounts” (192). Yet, the precious magic candle given to Gestr is unique to Bárðar Saga. While we often find supernatural light illuminating a barrow, it is not produced by a candle such as Gestr’s. In Grettis Saga for example, supernatural flames mark the location of Kar the Old’s burial mound drawing the hero to investigate. They are visible some distance away; Grettr “saw a great fire shoot up on the headland below Andun’s place” (Hight 44). Lights illuminate another barrow from within in Njáls Saga. There, in a peaceful scene, the dead Gunnar rests, gazing upwards at the night sky and reciting poetry. Those standing outside in the moonlight thought they saw “four lights burning inside the mound, illuminating the whole chamber. They could see Gunnar was happy; his face was exultant” (Magnusson and Pálsson 173). Gestr’s candle then is an unusual variant in the narrative pattern, its glow protecting the intruder and its sudden extinction endangering him.

The corpses hidden in the Dead Marshes are not revenants—strictly speaking—like Raknar or Thorolf Twist-Foot in Eyrbyggja Saga, both of whom exhibit a robust solid physicality and roam great distances among the living. The Dead below the water’s surface are still. Gestr’s candle ignites suddenly as the blackness of the barrow engulfs him; the candles held by the Dead glow without explanation at night: “it grew altogether dark: the air itself seemed black and heavy to breathe” (TT, IV, ii, 234). While the function of the candle’s light is reversed, its paralytic effects on the victims are very similar. In Bárðar Saga the candle’s illumination protects the hero and enhances his chances of succeeding in his quest; whereas in Tolkien it threatens the hero and imperils his chances of success.

Indeed, of the three companions, the Ring-Bearer proves especially vulnerable to the lights’ lethal allure. Once they have caught his gaze, Frodo’s progress is arrested: “Sam looked back and found that Frodo had lagged again ” (TT, IV, ii, 234; my emphasis). And further, a peculiar rigidity afflicts his limbs: “his hands hung stiff at his sides; water and slime were dripping from them” (TT, IV, ii, 235). It is unclear whether Frodo is wet and dripping because he has tripped, like Sam, or because he has tried to touch, like Gollum on his previous visits. If Frodo, lingering behind, did attempt to touch the bodies, it is an impulse Sam and Gollum do not share now, and as Max Plowman recounts, it is an impulse at odds with the inclinations of soldiers struggling amidst the mud and the dead in the first World War—soldiers do not wish to touch the fallen:

We move on, but fearfully slowly, slipping and sliding about, circumventing shell-holes and troubled most of all by dead bodies that look as if they have been thrown out of the communication-trench. They lie about, singly or in groups, stretched in every conceivable attitude. The living men have an innate respect for the dead and avoid touching a corpse, or even walking over it if possible. (158-159)

Whatever Frodo’s motivation, it is undeniable that the corpses and candles fascinate him most intensely. Further, he does not seem to share the extreme horror gripping Sam. Ominously, the power of the candles seems most potent for the Ringbearer.

Indeed, Frodo appears to have entered an altered state of consciousness while his companions have not. And significantly, the text repeatedly characterizes that altered state as a dream. Responding to Sam’s urging Frodo says: “‘All right,’ . . . as if returning out of a dream. ‘I’m coming’”. Moments later in answer to Sam’s horrified questions “‘Who are they? What are they?’” Frodo speaks “ in a dreamlike voice” (TT, IV, ii, 235). To dream one must sleep in some sense. These underwater candles induce a strange torpor as well as this physical paralysis. Candles with such powers are well attested in European folklore.

Physician and Victorian folklorist Frank Baker collected numerous accounts of such tapers, called individually a “Hand of Glory.” Significantly, as we will see in a sample of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century variants, the light the Hand of Glory gives off transfers those key characteristics of the Dead we have traced—immobilization and stupefaction—to the Living. In this period, the criminal element prized the Hand of Glory as a useful tool because it was believed to induce sleep in intended victims or to insure that those already asleep stayed that way while the crime proceeded. Baker explains: “the function of the Hand of Glory was to stupefy and immobilize those to whom one presents it, in such a way that they can no more totter (or weave) than if they were dead” (Baker 55).11 Here Baker cites an eighteenth-century French text, Secrets du Petit Albert, that he believed was an authoritative edition of an older medieval work, an anthology of magic, dating from the thirteenth century and written in Latin.

While it is doubtful that what Baker calls “the hideous superstition known in the middle ages as the ‘hand of glory’” actually dates from the late 1200s, he believed this to be the case. The Secrets du Petit Albert cited by Baker is especially valuable because it contains step-by-step instructions for making one. The sorcerer must obtain fat derived from the right or left hand of a corpse hung on a public highway. He or she then combines this fat, pure wax, and Laplandish sesame to mould the taper. Sometimes the sorcerer then fits the candle into the grasp of a second dead hand (56).

On occasion, after proper preparation, the thief lights the fingers of the Dead Hand so that the digits themselves function as candles. One nineteenth-century variant from Northumberland explains that each burning digit represented one sleeping member of the household. So here, the burning hand was used to keep the victims asleep while the crime was committed:

In this, however, the magicians—there were two—lighted the fingers of the hand itself after anointing them. The thumb they could not light, as one of the family was not asleep. Attempts to awaken the master of the house failed until the servant blew out the burning hand. (58)

Such candles could also be made from the hands of dead children which seem to possess the same supernatural power as did the hands of the hanged. Jacob Grimm records that witches frequented churchyards “[to] steal the corpses of young children and cut their fingers off, from the fat of these children they prepare an ointment. This seems the main reason they hunt for children” (897).12 In a footnote to this passage, he further explains: “with the fingers of unborn children conjuring can be done; set fire, they give a flame which keeps the entire household asleep; the thumb cut from a hanged thief has a similar effect” (Grimm 897 n. 1).13

To the Hand of Glory’s ability to induce and maintain sleep, we can add the curious resistance of its flames to being extinguished as well as its power to shield thieves from detection. From Germany we have the following nineteenth-century account:

If thieves burn light [made of] human fat during their deed, they cannot be caught. The power attributed to such lights is such that they do not let sleepers wake up and those awake are keen to fall into deep sleep. They cannot be put out by either draught or by people; only with milk is one able to extinguish them. (Frischbier 111)14

Sometimes, sadly, the thieves’ trust in the efficacy of their Hand of Glory appears to have been misplaced: “in 1881 thieves entered a house in Loughcrew, Ireland, armed with such a contrivance, evidently believing that the inmates would not awaken. They were mistaken in this, however, as the family were alarmed, and the robbers fled, leaving their horrible charm behind them” (Baker 57).

Of course, the Ringbearer and his companions do not penetrate the Mere of Dead Faces armed with a sleep-inducing candle to plunder the lingering corpses. And again, as we saw with our earlier episode from Bárðar Saga, the function of the light is reversed, although its effects are very similar to those of the Hand of Glory. I believe Tolkien’s ghastly marshes owe a great deal to these sources, more perhaps than to the familiar motif of the Will o’ the Wisp.

We can, however, perceive traces of Will’s influence (again as Shippey notes in passing) especially in the lights’ unstable intermittent glow. Some wink and fade only to be replaced by others: “Sam first saw one with the corner of his left eye, a wisp of pale sheen that faded away” (TT, IV, ii, 234; my emphasis). Traditionally in many examples, the Will o’ the Wisp leads his victims astray (thus its relevance here). Yet, while leading his victims away from their intended paths, the Will o’ the Wisp does not necessarily lure them to their deaths but often simply to unintended destinations. Thus a man pursuing his ordinary path home after a late night out suddenly “comes to” and discovers himself ten miles from his doorstep.15 But as Gollum warns explicitly, should the hobbits succumb to the corpse candles’ hypnotic draw, they will become corpses themselves: “‘Very carefully! Or Hobbits go down to join the Dead Ones and light little candles. Follow Sméagol! Don’t look at the lights!’” (TT, IV, ii, 236).

Frodo and Sam resist the fascination of the candles and the temptation to sleep with the Dead. And yet, just as this particular temptation hovers near them from this point on, something of the Marshes clings to them in another sense as well, for Tolkien’s language suggests that they are not unaltered by their passage. In fact, his images consistently stress that the Dead Marshes have “sucked the life” out of the two hobbits or very nearly so. Having emerged on the other side of this liminal landscape into No-man land, they are—the imagery insists—closer now to the Dead than to the Living.

Their successful transit transfigures them, and the text compares them to progressively diminished life forms and finally (in Gollum’s case) to a corpse. To manage the Marshes at all, they must shed some of their hobbithood, becoming more like animals (and more like Gollum for that matter.) “They rested, squatting like little hunted animals” (TT, IV, ii, 234) and “[Gollum] crawled away to the right, seeking for a path round the mere. They came close behind, stooping, often using their hands even as he did” (TT, IV, ii, 236). While they are “animals” in the Dead Marshes, they shrink to insects once they enter the desiccated pitted waste of Noman-land. “Gollum huddled himself together like a cornered spider” as the Nazgûl flies high above them some distance away (TT, IV, ii, 253). And again, “Gollum rose slowly and crawled insect-like to the lip of the hollow” to investigate the approach of the Dark Lord’s southern allies (TT, IV, ii, 254).

Having arrived before the Black Gate, the hobbits are explicitly likened to the life forms of the grave: “while the grey light lasted, they cowered under a black stone like worms, shrinking” (TT, IV, ii, 238). The palette of colors dwindles here to sepulchral gray and black contrasting with “the Mere of Dead Faces [to which] some haggard phantom of green spring would come” (TT, IV, ii, 239). They have become life forms that now feed on death itself.

Soon, in yet a further reduction, they are imagined as the corpses that sustain such minute forms of life. Gollum is described as a skeleton stripped of its soft tissue and exposed in the desolation. In addition, the narrative point of view shifts suddenly to that of an eagle roaming high up in the sky: “For a moment he might have paused to consider Gollum, a tiny figure sprawling on the ground: there perhaps lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin: no flesh worth a peck” (TT, IV, ii, 253). Here, in an unusual reversal of roles, Gollum becomes the potential prey in a text that consistently stresses his predatory prowess as a hunter of fish, birds, and (as Sam fears throughout) hobbits. And further, the noble phrase “some child of Man” resonates ironically in several ways. Hobbits (which Gollum once was) are often compared to human children in size at least. Further, Gollum is hardly young even for his kind since like Bilbo, he is “‘stretched’” by his long possession of the Ring (FR, I, i, 41). And finally of course, this scene foreshadows the eagle Gwaihir’s rescue of Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom. This glimpse of Gollum—the hunter hunted—as a starved corpse which is yet living perpetuates the life-in-death motif begun with the corpses sunk below the Dead Marshes.

Further, this shift in narrative perspective to that of a circling eagle who speculates about Gollum’s minute form is significant because it parallels (or enacts perhaps) the radical reconceptualization of Gollum and his companions that the text demands of its readers. And if Tolkien’s imagery consistently demands that we imagine its hobbit heroes as small animals, insects, worms and finally ghosts, the text also insists that we grasp the meaning of this transfiguration for the work as a whole.

Threading their way through No-man land, the three walk as the living dead and finally as shades. As we noted earlier, the hobbits now share Gollum’s allergy to the open sunlight: “unfriendly it seemed, revealing them in their helplessness—little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the Dark Lord” (TT, IV, ii, 239). Their aversion to the sunlight, and indeed the notion that the sun’s rays are actively hostile, owes something to battlefield memories of enemy flares it would seem. In his A Subaltern on the Somme, Plowman describes the paralytic terror immobilizing men when they are suddenly illuminated by the German’s Verey lights:

With automatic regularity they keep firing Verey lights that rise like roman candles and reveal our silhouetted forms to one another so clearly it seems impossible at first to believe the enemy cannot see us. When the light is strong we stand stock still. At first these moments are terrifying; then, as time goes on, one gains confidence in the darkness that covers our own trenches. (89)

It would be well to remember too that this new aversion is a potentially ominous sign for Frodo and Sam. After all, Gollum’s fear of “the Yellow Face” is a significant marker of his twisted, perverted nature. In a straightforward sense, sunlight presents the danger of exposure to the searching, sleepless Eye. It may also signify a subtle distortion of their own natures now that the text urges us to conceive of them as ghosts. And, as Tolkien’s diction insists, they have become especially puny hapless shades.

Their spectral nature suits the funereal landscape they encounter. The three have entered another perverted landscape covered with mounds which “stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows” (239). Further, this landscape choked with rows of conical mounds reprises (with a difference) Frodo’s far off experience on the barrow-downs, just as the Dead Marshes themselves reprise the remote (and in retrospect positively bucolic) Midgewater. Then, with Tom Bombadil’s aid, Frodo eluded the predatory Wight while his companions were briefly transformed into living corpses—chill, white, and scarcely breathing.16

Frodo’s imagination seems tinged by the landscape and his own transfiguration. A shade himself, he imagines ghosts. And again, Max Plowman’s memoir suggests that those in the trenches often entertained this morbid concept. Threading his way amidst the water clogged shell holes he envisions himself a shade joining those in Dante’s Inferno: “The sense of desolation these innumerable, silent, circular pools produce is horrible. So vividly do they remind me of a certain illustration by Doré to Dante’s Inferno, that I begin to wonder whether I have not stepped out of life and entered one of the circles of the damned” (143).

Suddenly alerted to the presence of troops on the plain and hearing horns sound from the Morannon, Frodo briefly hopes that the ghosts of the men of Gondor slain long ago have risen from their graves to avenge themselves upon Sauron:

Then he knew that the hope that had for one wild moment stirred in his heart was vain. The trumpets had not rung in challenge but in greeting. This was no assault upon the Dark Lord by the men of Gondor, risen like avenging ghosts from the graves of valour long passed away. These were Men of other race, out of the wide Eastlands, gathering to the summons of their Overlord. . . . (TT, IV, iii, 247-248)

The ghostly warriors Frodo briefly imagines are valiant and noble; perhaps he is recalling the fallen Men and Elves swallowed by the Marshes. Frodo’s imagined specters contrast most painfully with the diminished “little squeaking ghosts” he and his companions have become. The puniness and the ineffectualness the phrase implies also contrast (again painfully) in readers’ minds with the utterly overwhelming power of the other army of “avenging ghosts”—The Army of the Dead Aragorn actually does lead to battle. Unlike the feckless “little squeaking ghosts,” Aragorn’s Shadow Host “needed no longer any weapon but fear” (RK, V, ix, 152).

Analysis of Tolkien’s diction throughout this section reveals a deliberate relentless reduction—from animal to insect, from worm to corpse and finally to shade.

As suggested earlier, the heroes’ diminution implies that their crossing of the Marshes has drained some measure of life from them, rendering them closer to the dead than to the living. Consequently, as “little squeaking ghosts,” they appear much less likely to succeed in their quest. Thus this imagery of reduction offers another imaginative means of highlighting their impressive and poignant struggle against despair.

Since the hobbits themselves have taken on some of the characteristics of the Restless Dead as a result of passing through this liminal zone, we might pause to acknowledge the extent to which the whole of Middle-earth itself is riddled with concentrations of the Restless Dead. We have touched upon the dead buried beneath the barrow-downs, a topographical feature that like the Mere of Dead Faces remains troubled by the combatants of a long ago battle—the Men of Westernesse and the forces of the King of Carn Dûm. So fresh, so present are their memories and passions that, when in the Wight’s power, Merry speaks as if he is one of those Men who resisted the Witch-king of Angmar (FR, I, viii, 154). And again, another army—this one disgraced and accursed—congregates beneath “the black Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain” awaiting Aragorn’s summons (RK, V, ii, 59).17 Under mounds, under mountains and (as we have explored in detail) under marsh the unquiet dead await the living.18 Consequently, we should acknowledge the influence of those murderous, meaty revenants of Old Norse literature so familiar to Tolkien.

While partially drained of life by their experience, the hobbits continue to resist the allure of suicidal acts that would allow them to “sleep” at last. And as we have seen, other characters—Faramir and Éowyn—almost succumb to this particular temptation. Following their trial in the Marshes, Frodo and Sam talk less frequently about the prospects for success or failure in their quest and the conflict between hope and despair becomes localized within Sam’s own consciousness. Some have suggested that one remarkable aspect of Sam’s particular form of courage is his ability “to do the right thing” without hope. Croft writes: “They can be cheerful without hope, sad but not unhappy, and above all determined to ‘see it through’—an attitude common enough among first-hand accounts of soldiers in the trenches” (8).

And yet, several passages attest to Sam’s extraordinary victory in maintaining hope.19 Further, the manner in which the text presents this victory, foregrounding the role of the will, may owe something to Catholic teaching on the nature of hope and despair. In theological terms, the act of hope is understood to emanate from the will. Faith “is of the intellect or mind, whereas hope is a perfection of the will” (New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 7).20 Despair on the other hand “is a failure on the part of the will” (New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 4).21 The following passage dramatizes the battle between hope and despair for Sam’s will as an interior debate. Sleepless on the plain of Gorgoroth he hears the “voice” of despair:

“There you are!” came the answer. “It’s all quite useless. He said so himself. You are the fool, going on hoping and toiling. You could have lain down and gone to sleep together days ago, if you hadn’t been so dogged. But you’ll die just the same, or worse. You might as well lie down now and give it up. You’ll never get to the top anyway.” (RK, VI, iii, 216)

The voice of despair depicts death as soothing delicious sleep, as lying down companionably, and recalls the dreamy hypnotic allure of the candles.

That said, unlike the Christian, Sam as an inhabitant of Middle-earth does not hope to gain eternal life since the Christian dispensation is not available to him.22 The Christian God is not the object of his hope; rather, that object is a simple and characteristically modest one—a return to Living Lands, a chance to journey home. His object could be understood in theological terms as “the natural and material good of earthly life” (New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 7). Considered together, these passages offer an analysis of Sam’s internal triumph: “But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue” (RK, VI, iii, 211; my emphasis). Interestingly, the text also suggests here that an individual’s act of sustaining hope may not always be apparent to others.

The final fixed resistance to despair that Sam achieves at the foot of Orodruin is explicitly described as a conscious act of will: “no more debates disturbed his mind. He knew all the arguments of despair and would not listen to them. His will was set, and only death would break it” (RK, VI, iii, 217). His stupendous act of will is magnificently heroic. Yet, in the simplicity and modesty of his hope, Sam also demonstrates an admirable acceptance (a flexibility we might say) that differentiates him from another character memorably tempted by despair—the Steward of Gondor. As Denethor makes clear, only one future will satisfy him—his past: “‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life . . . and in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil’” (RK, V, vii, 130). 23 Denethor’s descriptive vision of the only “future” he would accept conveys both his rigidity and his arrogance. By contrast, Sam does not presume to set the terms of his future in Middle-earth and he succeeds where Denethor fails in withstanding the temptation of despair through a heroic act of will.

Notes

1 Intriguingly, Tolkien goes on to suggest that the Dead Marshes and the devastation before the Morannon “owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains” (303). Janet Brennan Croft also notes Morris’s influence in her study of the impact of the Great War on Tolkien (6). For the most recent examination of the War’s impact, see John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War.

2 A reticence Croft also observes (6) as does Hugh Brogan (352-353). The following remarks are representative. In this letter, Tolkien mentions his own war experience as a way of comforting his son Christopher’s anguish. He urges Christopher to begin to write even while on active duty as a way of deriving emotional and psychological relief. Referring to composing “Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes” Tolkien recalls: “Lots of the early parts of which . . . were done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire. It did not make for efficiency and present-mindedness, of course, and I was not a good officer” (Letters 78).

3 Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), 80. For an account of Tolkien’s war service, see pages 77 –86.

4 When she rides from Dunharrow in the guise of Dernhelm, Éowyn appears to Merry as one bereft of hope and actively seeking death (RK, V, vi, 116).

5 Shippey appears to agree with this assessment (217).

6 Croft notes that “Sauron does not just destroy nature but uses and perverts it”; she goes on to examine the Morgul Vale as “a parody of the pastoral” (10).

7 As Shippey recalls, many readers of Tolkien have been reminded of the confusion of corpses in northern France, many of which waited years for burial (217).

8 Nature also seems to mark Balin’s tomb as the morning light shines directly on the white stone surface while the mourning Fellowship gathers around it (FR, II, iv, 333). We again see the careful separation of adversaries following the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Two mounds are created “in the field before the Hornberg”: one for the slain Riders from the East Dale, the other for those from the Westfold. The heap of orc carcasses is piled near the forest’s edge. Háma, Captain of the King’s guard, has his own grave directly before the Hornburg; Théoden is the first to scatter earth upon it (TT, III, viii, 150 –151).

9 See Shippey’s analysis of the “several unvoiced implications”—all of them ominous (217). He suggests for example that somehow Sauron has managed to exact revenge upon the dead.

10 A man possessed of steady nerves, “he is said to walk alive into his howe . . .” (Davidson 56).

11 “l’usage de la main de gloire étoit de stupéfier & rendre immobiles ceux á qui on la présentoit, en sorte qu’ils ne pouvoient non plus branler que s’ils etoient morts . . . ” (Baker 55). Translations from the French are my own.

12 “auf kirchhöfen graben sie die leichen junger kinder aus und schneiden ihnen finger ab), von dem fett dieser kinder sollen sie ihre salbe bereiten. Das scheint der hauptgrund weshalb sie kindern nachstellen (Grimm 897). I am indebted to Ms. Shelagh Northey for her translation of this and all other passages in German.

13 “mit fingern ungeborner kinder kann gezaubert werden, angezündet geben sie eine flamme, welche alle leute des hauses im schlaf erhält:ähnlichen vortheil schaft der daume, welcher einem aufgehängten dieb abgeschnitten wurde” (Grimm 897 n. 1).

14 “Wenn Diebe bei ihrer That ein Licht von Menschenfett brennen, so sönnen sie nicht ertrappt werden. Solchen Lichten ichreibt man die Kraft zu, das sie Schlafende aufwachen lassen und Wachende in tiefen Schlaf versessen. Sie sönnen weder durch Zugwind noch von Menschen ausgeblasen werden; nur mit Milk vermag man sie auszuloschen (Frischbier 111). The county of Hereford offers us a variant that is also of interest. A witch is said to have fashioned a Hand of Glory not for the purpose of robbery but for the purpose of revenge: “[she] made a hand of glory, or “dead man’s candle,” from the hand of a corpse on the gibbet at Crasswall, in order to put a spell on some people who had ducked her in a horsepond” (Leather 55).

15 See, for example, Kittredge’s classification of the Will o’ the Wisp as “a misleading sprite” (215).

16 See Shippey’s speculation about the nature and the fate of the dead, both the fallen in the Dead Marshes and the Wight and those buried on the barrow-downs (217). The Hand of Glory motif may also have made a subtle contribution to the memorable scene beneath the barrow. There, Frodo confronts an arm and hand that possess unnerving unnatural powers. The hand exhibits distressing powers of locomotion since the arm is said to walk on its fingers (FR, I, viii, 152). And suggestively, the very moment Frodo severs the hand at the wrist , the “pale greenish light” within the chamber vanishes instantly (FR, I, viii, 153).

17 We might note as well a parallel transfiguration. Just as the hobbits are conceived as ghosts once they have emerged into No-man land, Aragorn is acclaimed as a ghostly king when he leads the Grey Company to the Stone of Erech (RK, V, ii, 62).

18 We might also include in this list the most paradoxical beings of all—the Ringwraiths. See Shippey’s etymological exploration of ‘wraith’ and its implications for their profoundly ambiguous nature (121-128).

19 Hope is said to wax and wane in Sam over the course of his long ordeal as in this passage that follows their escape from the orc troop in Mordor: “never for long had hope died in his staunch heart, and always until now he had taken some thought for their return. But the bitter truth came home to him at last; at best their provision would take them to their goal” (RK, VI, iii, 210).

20 “The proper and specific act of this virtue is to hope to attain eternal life by the help of God’s grace. It is an act elicited from the will . . .” (New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 7).

21 “Theologically, despair is sometimes used in a negative sense, and signifies the culpable failure to make an act of the virtue of hope in circumstances which call for its actual exercise” (New Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 4).

22 See Shippey’s speculation about those characters who may possess some notion of life after death (178).

23 As Shippey says, Denethor is the “arch-‘conservative’”; see his analysis of Denethor and the themes of despair and suicide (171- 174).

Works Cited

Baker, Frank. “Anthropological Notes on the Human Hand.” The American Anthropologist 1 (January 1888): 51 – 75.

Brogan, Hugh. “Tolkien’s Great War” Children and Their Books, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, 351 – 367.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977.

Croft, Janet Brennan. “The Great War and Tolkien’s Memory: An Examination of World War I Themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 23, no. 4 (2002): 4 – 21.

Davidson, H. R. E. The Road to Hel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1943.

Friedman, Barton. “Tolkien and David Jones: The Great War and the War of the Ring.” Clio 11, no. 2 (1982): 115 – 136.

Frischbier, Hermann. Hexanspruch und Zauberbann. Berlin: Adolf Enslin, 1870.

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

Grimm, Jacob. Deutsche Mythologie. 4th ed. Vol. 2 Basel: Benno Schwabe and Co., 1953.

Hight, G. A. trans. The Saga of Grettir the Strong. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1965.

Kittredge, George Lyman. Witchcraft in Old and New England. Cambridge: Harvard UP., 1929.

Leather, Ella May. The Folklore of Herefordshire. Menston, Yorkshire: Scholar Press, Ltd., 1970.

Magnusson, Magnus and Hermann Pálsson, trans. Njal’s Saga. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1960.

Plowman, Max [Mark Seven, pseud.]. A Subaltern on the Somme in 1916. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons LTD., 1927.

Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London and New York: HarperCollins Pub., 2000.

Skaptason, Jón and Phillip Pulsiano, eds. and trans. Bárðar Saga. Vol. 8 Ser. A. Garland Library of Medieval Literature. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1984.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.4 New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.7 New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967.

Tolkien and Modernism

Patchen Mortimer

Perhaps no author of the past century has inspired such a contentious debate as the one surrounding J. R. R. Tolkien. Countless readers consider The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion—not to mention the creation of the attendant languages, histories, maps, artwork, and apocrypha—the greatest creative accomplishment of a modern author. His many critics dismiss his work as childish, irrelevant, and worse. If his defenders and detractors have common ground, it is in their shared tendency to consider Tolkien’s works escapist and romantic, the work of a man removed from his own time. In doing so, however, they make an appalling oversight. Tolkien’s project was as grand and avant-garde as those of Wagner or the Futurists, and his works are as suffused with the spirit of the age as any by Eliot, Joyce, or Hemingway. Thus, it is vital that Tolkien’s work be placed in conversation with his contemporaries—that it be regarded not as isolated or anachronistic, but as part of the literary current. By turns a soldier, linguist, and mythographer, Tolkien was a writer fully in touch with his era, and his work reveals modernist attributes—and even ambitions of modernist scope—that deserve to be explored.

Defining modernism is a fraught endeavor, as it was not only a movement in and of itself but also a collection of movements, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Most strict definitions of modernism fall apart upon close examination, and even pinning the movement down chronologically is difficult—when we speak of modernism in theatre we cast as far back as Ibsen, while in painting we might point as late as the Cubists.

Still, some rough generalizations can be made. Modernism largely arose in Europe at the turn of the century, as a vivacious and invigorating movement that took in all aspects of art, from literature to music to sculpture to dance and beyond. Scorning the shackling dictates of art in the service of God, Reason, or a social movement,1 modernism championed the proverbial ‘art for art’s sake,’ and tended to celebrate the primacy of the individual and the canonization of the artist. Modernists deliberately distanced themselves from traditional forms of art and thought in wildly diverse ways, for equally diverse reasons—some out of a bold desire to clear new ground, others as a savage attack on a society and old modes of expression they deemed to have failed them (Williams 43, 5). As Peter Nicholls points out, the relationship of modernism to its era was often a contentious one—the Italian Futurists especially, embraced it, while those others—such as Pound, Lewis, Eliot, and Joyce, whom Nicholls labels the “Men of 1914”—often decried or even attacked it (166, 251). Whether individual artists were enraptured or appalled by the age, their themes—of reinventing art, of creating new modes of thought and language, of speed, of technological advance, of urban- and suburbanization, of isolation and dislocation (especially ironic within the teeming multitudes of the cities), and of change and transience—remain constant throughout modernism (Williams 78). And though transformed, as was all of Western culture, by the Great War and its aftershocks, the tenets of modernism determined the course of art for much of the twentieth century.

It is naïve, then, to assert that Tolkien, born in 1892 and educated in the first decade of the twentieth century, would have emerged in some kind of aesthetic vacuum. Yet his work is constantly critiqued and cataloged in a fashion that divorces him from his contemporaries. T. A. Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth, offers a survey, the crown jewel of which comes from Edmund Wilson: “[C]ertain people—especially, perhaps, in Britain—have a life-long appetite for juvenile trash” (1). Sadly, Tolkien’s fans often do him little more credit; they merely echo the critics’ charges in a positive tone, rather than engage with them. The foreword by Peter S. Beagle found in most editions of The Lord of the Rings, for instance, encourages only shallow investigation of Tolkien’s project. Instead, he favors flight: “In terms of passwords, the Sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot” (Beagle 3, his emphasis).

Even his more cogent defenders often fail to consider Tolkien as a part of the literary current, rather than as an alternative to it. For instance, Verlyn Flieger, comparing the bourgeois hobbits to Schönberg’s twelve-tone scale and Cocteau’s surrealism, describes them as “a response to a response, and thus a continuation of the dialog. They are a regressive innovation whose very invention acknowledges what it tries to reject” (13). An insightful point, but one that jumps the gun; it labels hobbits an antithesis to modernism before examining whether they fit—or at least share sympathies with—the thesis. It is just such an examination we as scholars must now undertake.

* * *

One of the major tenets of modernism was a conviction of the power of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Before the Great War—and even afterwards—metropolitan modern society had produced a community that took art seriously, so seriously that in 1913 riots broke out at the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Art was something people did not just passively absorb; they lived it, breathed it, and fought about it. The direction of art was seen as symptomatic of and a harbinger for the future of society as a whole. Art had power (Eksteins 10-16).

In literature, this belief was played out in experimentation with words. The Symbolists, for instance, explored synesthesia and almost violent use of metaphor, while Dada explored the musical possibilities inherent in freeing syllables from words and their meanings altogether (Williams 67). Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness narratives created a new vehicle for exploring time and recollection. Despite these diverse manifestations, though, always there was in the various strains of modernism a sense that words had the power to unlock new realities, or alter our understanding of this one—and with that came a sense of the power and primacy of the artist. This effort takes place on the page as well. For instance, in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson claims he has had incest with his sister in a desperate attempt to efface the fact that she has had sex out of wedlock—in effect, trying to be the author of his reality. He fails, of course, but in his desire is an implicitly modernist hope about the power of the artist and the potentiality of authorship in refashioning the world.

In Tolkien’s Middle-earth this theme of the primacy of the artist and the word is writ large, particularly in The Silmarillion. Within the text, music creates the world, and the Ainur are artists who then fashion the world according to the blueprints of the song. But more importantly, the world actually began with the words: Tolkien repeatedly emphasizes that he created the world in order to provide a mythic habitat for the languages he was already creating. A world came into being to serve words, not the other way around. And such words—especially names—are both description and destiny to Tolkien. Feänor, as the “Spirit of Fire,” can have no fate but the one he does. Eöl the Dark Elf is a dark elf because of his deeds, yet his deeds are darkened by his name.

Moreover, art—that is, words, especially songs—become the reason for action, particularly in the face of opposition. Caught at Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings, Théoden declares: “I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap.… When Dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth.… Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song—if any be left to sing of us hereafter” (TT, III, vii, 144-45). Without hope of Elven reincarnation or the Christian afterlife, immortality through art becomes both inspiration and motivation for Tolkien’s Men, and songs recall the greatness of one’s lineage even though one’s bloodline may have thinned. The primacy of art—both the desire to create it and the desire to be worthy of or take part in it—remains an omnipresent theme throughout Tolkien’s works.

Another hallmark of modernist literature was the desire to reinvent art, to return to its very roots and rebuild music, dance, literature, sculpture, from their essential elements. Many returned to the birthplace of Western art, and, like so many generations of artists before them, investigated anew the works of Classical Greece and Rome. Thus the Odyssey and the plays of Aeschylus became fodder for a new generation of writers. As Anne C. Petty points out, “Joyce’s Ulysses, O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and Updike’s The Centaur” are just a few examples of a “canon of mythologically based modern literature” (1). Tolkien, too, initiated a similar reëxcavation. He saw in the legends of the British Isles and Scandinavia an equivalent—and perhaps more authentic—wellspring of literary and cultural heritage for English literature. But Tolkien did not just retell those myths, or use their structure as scaffolding in the manner of Joyce’s Ulysses. Instead, he tried to build new myths almost from scratch. Tolkien’s background in folklore and philology ground Middle-earth in an imagined and yet plausible English landscape, and lend realism to an entire system of vocabulary and naming, but the tales he spins are wholly new and separate constructions.

But his choosing to do so may account for some of the critical silence about, or worse, misinterpretation of his works. As Patrick Curry notes, “Tolkien’s choice of a ‘Norse’ mythology for his tale as a whole, over the usual Graeco-Roman one, situates his story… [and] bypasses the elite critical apparatus of Greek and Latin references” (32). He was drawing from a myth tradition that was outside the traditional matrix of easily recognizable Classical or Biblical allusions that so often serve to earmark “serious” literature. Rather than mining the rubble of Greece and Rome, he sought the relatively untapped myths and sagas of the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Scandinavians. But because these models are not as familiar to the average reader—or even the average critic—his works are dismissed as fancy.

Actually, Tolkien’s approach seems closer to those modernists whose attempts to rediscover the roots of art led them to exploring aboriginal or “exotic” cultures. These so-called Primitivists became fascinated with African imagery and iconography—Picasso’s first forays into Cubism were inspired by African masks, for instance. Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, mined the Noh plays of Japan for his Marxist parables (Willett 27-28). The Primitivists’ use of elements from foreign artistic traditions as building blocks for a new kind of European art seems more in line with Tolkien’s ground-up approach to myth. But just as Tolkien’s North-inspired work seems alien when placed next to the Classical tradition, it still seems too European and familiar when compared to Eastern or African-based art.

Moreover, because the trappings of Germanic literature—trolls, oaths, kings with flashing blades—immediately call to mind medieval imagery, Tolkien is thus lumped by association with a hodgepodge of Romantic and gothic novels, boys’ adventure stories, and other escapist literature which his work resembles only on a superficial level. The result is a classic “medium vs. message” argument; his detractors are typically so incensed by the appearance of an elf that they fail to read the words coming from said elf’s mouth. Never mind that the quandaries Tolkien’s elves, hobbits, and men wrestle with are as poignant as any afflicting Stephen Dedalus.2

Not all of Tolkien’s inspiration came from antiquity. Tolkien acknowledged Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt as a potential touchstone for the word “hobbit” (Carpenter 168). The term itself already existed in glossaries of Faërie lore (and Shippey notes a possible derivation from the—admittedly hypothetical—Old English “*hol-bytla,” or “hole dweller”) (52). However, there is little in “hobbit” itself to distinguish it from the leprechauns of Tolkien’s early “Goblin Feet.” Instead, it may be Babbitt—neatly glossed by Shippey as “the story of the near-disgrace and abortive self discovery of a complacent American businessman”—from where the sense of the word, in its manifestation in a waistcoat-wearing, middle-class Halfling, may have sprung forth (52). This is not to claim that Lewis’s title character provided a direct source for Bilbo, of course, but merely that there is a resonance between the names, and the novels, that is tangible. And for Tolkien to acknowledge any kind of influence from the modern era—besides his own fertile imagination and experiences—is meaningful, for it signals an openness and an awareness of contemporary literature that he is not often credited with. In citing Babbitt, Tolkien is explicitly placing his work in conversation within the literary and critical mainstream, rather than outside it—and in the process uniquely bridges the Old English of his scholarship with a canonical work of American modernist fiction.

One may also find modernist aspirations at the overall structure of the legendarium as a whole, with a special eye towards The Silmarillion. In a letter to Milton Waldman in 1951 Tolkien writes: “Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy story…which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.… Absurd” (Letters 144-45). It is not only Tolkien’s crest that has fallen, but also Europe’s. After two devastating World Wars, in which the labor of two and a half centuries of culture, science, and industry had given birth to mechanical, nuclear, and genocidal horrors the likes of which Sauron would have envied, Tolkien’s dream does seems a silly one—in 1951.

But had these words been written in 1913, the year of Stravinsky’s tumultuous The Rite of Spring debut (and only a scant four years before The Silmarillion first began to emerge), one might not have laughed. For this scheme of Tolkien’s—not just The Silmarillion itself, but the wealth of sub-creation that went into it: years of histories, myths, and especially the elvish languages—is quintessentially modernist in ambition. After all, this was coming on the heels of Wagner and das Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. It was the ambition of many artists at that time to create some kind of perfect, all-encompassing art form. Wagner saw this possibility in opera, as writers became librettists, painters became set and costume designers, and actors, singers, and dancers peopled the stage, creating one work of art that the viewer would be absorbed into—even dominated by—as much as possible. Wagner’s ideal was to have art fashion the audience’s world (Eksteins 25).

How closely, then, Tolkien’s words echo Wagner’s vision: “I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama” (Letters 144-45). Granted, this quote was likely directly inspired by the enthusiastic treatment of the Kalevala in the hands of the Finns. Yet it also resonates with what was happening in artistic centers like Paris and Berlin. Tolkien’s words would just as easily apply to Parade, the collaborative work that combined Diaghilev’s dance troupe, Picasso’s set designs and costuming and Satie’s music—minds and hands, wielding paint and instruments and pens, working together to create one significant and rich whole. Tolkien ended up toiling alone, but his initial scheme was far grander.

Finally, Middle-earth arose out of Tolkien’s quest for identity. This trait, too, is very modernist. Even before the war modernism was sometimes associated with national identity—for instance, despite Wagner’s claims of universality, many would argue that there is something intrinsically German in his vision for Bayreuth, and the disparate characters of the two Futurisms, Italian and Russian, were explicitly tied to nationality. Moreover, the notion of the nation-state itself, though birthed in the nineteenth century, is a modernist concept in execution: it bases itself around commonalties of language and a claim of universal heritage that always falls apart under close examination. What makes one truly part of a nation—be it German, French, English, etc.—is the act of claiming that nation as one’s own, a willful identification with a tacitly agreed-upon set of myths, values, and common heritage (Michaels 2-3).

On the subject of Tolkien’s popularity, Shippey cites C. N. Manlove, as “think[ing] that the whole thing might be mere national aberration, though he [Manlove] prefers to blame the United States and ‘the perennial American longing for roots’” (2, Shippey’s emphasis). Although Manlove means the remark to be pejorative, it is nonetheless potentially revelatory. While Tolkien was composing the first drafts of what would become The Silmarillion and settling down to write The Hobbit, American society was engaged in a period of intense self-exploration. As Walter Benn Michaels notes in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, the novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and others are explorations of what it is to be American—particularly a white American. To a myth-centered mindset, most Americans are a people without a land, an occupying nation of usurpers and slaves from many nations. So any definition of America tied to the land or race is doomed to fall apart. This is a viewpoint with which Tolkien would have had obvious sympathies. For he saw the English too, as people without a set of myths of their own, as a people who did not speak the language of the land they inhabited. In the Waldman letter, Tolkien writes:

Also—and here I hope I shall not sound absurd—I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.

(Letters 144-45)

In American literature, as Michaels notes, such a quest for identity plays itself out in racialized, sexualized, and gendered terms. Since Americans have no set of myths, they look to the trappings of the privileged white social aristocracy, but this culture has porous barriers from which tensions naturally arise. These porous barriers account for the anti-Semitism in The Sun Also Rises and the obsession with heritage, money, and “nice” women—all code words for good breeding—in The Great Gatsby. Meanwhile, in the gothic South of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, incest is preferable to miscegenation. When such strategies for purity fail, as they inevitably must, the tragedies that result become the backbone for the literature of this time (Michaels 141).

Rather than retreat into a flimsy pseudo-myth of race and cultural identity, Tolkien instead creates a myth. He distills the English countryside he loves into a land of oceans and forests and mountains, he peoples it with elves, dwarves, and monsters that have sources in Northern folklore, but are uniquely his own creations, and he conjures up dynasties and legends for his people to draw from. He has attempted to give the English a home with his words. A very different road than the one Faulkner’s degenerate Sutpens take when they choose incest as a way to keep their bloodline pure—but the original impulse is the same: a desire to map out an identity and a sacred geography for a people who have none.

* * *

The advent of the First World War irrevocably altered almost everything in European society, and the world of art was no exception. Authors, poets, and artists of all stripes tried to make sense of the human condition in the wake of conflict that had been utterly dehumanizing. Indeed, it was at this time that modernism burst into full flower. For instance, Dada was born at this time, and the Anglo-American modernists—Nicholls’s melancholy “Men of 1914”—rose to prominence. As Paul Fussell notes, whole genres of literature—pastoral odes and romances in particular—withered beneath the fog of war (21). Modernism, with its individualism, iconoclasm, and rejection of formal constraints, became all the more necessary and attractive a mode of expression

“Songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely,” as Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin (TT, III,viv, 90). To push the metaphor, modernism’s fruitful flowering was contingent on roots fed from poisoned streams. The experience of the Great War soured the movement’s vigor and enthusiasm, replacing these themes with themes of alienation, loss, and futility.3 Whereas before the war modernists rejected old norms out of a desire to clear new ground, after the war they rejected old norms as the relics of a failed society. The machines they once celebrated became symbols of death. They celebrated the primacy of the artist not as an aesthetic choice but as a survival method: who else could make sense of what the continent had just experienced? Or at the very least, document the lack of sense, and humanity, of which the war was symptomatic?

Again Tolkien’s experience echoes the modernists’. He grapples with war, industrialization, pollution, and the rise of dictators in his novels. That his works did so in a consciously high and fantastical style should not and does not detract from the gritty reality depicted. As Flieger argues:

Though on the surface Tolkien’s fiction appears to reject the present in favor of an apparently romanticized past, at a deeper level it is very much informed by our present time. His work could not have spoken so powerfully to his own century if he had completely succeeded in escaping it. The fact is that he could not escape and was in actuality both responding to and using the most typical aspects of his own age as essential elements of his fantasy. (6)

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien faces the horrors of his age, especially the ravages of war, head on. He examines the modern condition as effectively as any laconic Hemingway protagonist. His use of fantasy is not escapist, but a strategy for articulating the awful and inexplicable.

However, this is not to argue that Tolkien’s development was a straight one. Rather, it took him many years to develop the authorial manner and means with which he would face these concerns. For instance, in The Hobbit the real horror of war is only hinted at. In fact, the Great War is present mostly as a system of absences. As early as the opening sentences, the narrator notes: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort” (H, i, 1). So carefully constructed a description is indicative of an author intimately aware of just how dismal a foxhole could be. This description is thus significant in the detail in which it describes what something is not; it presents a negative of the actual, charming hobbit hole.

Such reversals are prevalent in The Hobbit: “It was a terrible battle. The most dreadful of all Bilbo’s experiences, and the one which at the time he hated most—which is to say it was the one he was most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards, though he was quite unimportant in it” (H, xvii, 341). Though the experience for many of the characters is horrible, the reader is denied the witnessing of much of it, as is Bilbo, who is knocked out mercifully quickly. Though there are a few grisly images—“the rocks stained black with goblin blood”—it is after all a children’s book, and such imagery pales in comparison to Tolkien’s battles in the longer works (H, xvii, 341).

Even the most direct reference to horror, in the goblin warrens, is a supposition—a description, again, not of what is, but in this case what might be: “It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions have always delighted them…” (H, iv, 109).

The horror of war exists, but is held at bay; it becomes notable in its absence and peeks through in moments of speculation. Gradually, an impression arises of an author gingerly handling the pen, compelled to document epic battles, without revealing all the attendant terrible things that he knows a real war brings.

War is more prevalent in The Silmarillion, but in many senses, it is not “real” war, as it is in The Lord of the Rings. For one thing, the battles described mostly involve elves, who, as immortal beings have a very different kind of stake in the conflict with Morgoth when compared, for instance, to the Men of Rohan or Minas Tirith against the forces of Sauron. Moreover, the wars with Morgoth are framed almost exclusively in the language and tradition of the English or Norse sagas. These are not “real” battles for territory, land, and power; they are mythological conflicts of light versus dark, driven by hasty oaths and meted dooms.

Nevertheless, the specter of the Great War creeps in. Perhaps the most surprising and significant hint of this fact lies in the attitudes toward dawn and dusk displayed in The Silmarillion. Given that Tolkien’s work displays an almost Gnostic attitude toward light and dark (though he would likely deny so), the love of evening and antipathy for dawn apparent in the work seem during a close reading to be at odds with the rest of the mythology. Yet, as Tolkien notes in the Waldman letter: “(A marked difference here between these legends and most others is that the Sun is not a divine symbol, but a second-best thing, and the ‘light of the Sun’ (the world under the sun) become terms for a fallen world, and a dislocated imperfect vision)” (Letters 148). This design is borne out in the text, as repeatedly day and sunlight receive only muted attention and admiration, even as the Valar and the elves struggle against the powers of darkness. The elves for instance, are born at evening; “Great light shall be for their waning,” Mandos declares (S 48).

Much of this antipathy can be ascribed to Tolkien’s Catholic sensibilities: the sun shines on a world tainted by a corrupter figure and where the redemption of Christ is not (yet?) known. But such a reversal takes on a second meaning when placed in context with the Great War. As Fussell notes, in the trenches the coming of evening meant the cessation of shelling and gunfire, a chance for rare rest and relaxation. Dawn, on the other hand, parted the shadow of night to reveal mangled bodies, carrion birds, and thickets of barbed wire (Fussell 57). The ravages of World War I ended in practically one stroke a longstanding English tradition of dawn-focussed poetry; “Dawn has never recovered,” Fussell claims, “from what the Great War did to it” (63). Like the poems of T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden, Tolkien’s writings reflect the attitudes of an entire generation for whom dawn lost its beauty and meaning (Fussell 62-63).

In a letter to his son Christopher in 1944, Tolkien writes:

I think if you could begin to write…you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains…the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes. Lots of the early parts of which (and the languages)—discarded or absorbed—were done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.

(Letters 78)

Thus we can see that from the beginning Tolkien’s legendarium was bound up in the real world’s wars. Yet, as noted above, only tentative glimpses of the experience creep into the early texts. Not so in The Lord of the Rings, which features explosions, liquid flame, the “No Man’s Land” of the Dead Marshes, and the forced collectivization of the Shire, to name just a few modern developments. After twenty years of lurking in the background, the Great War—not to mention World War II, the industrialization of England, and the modern condition as a whole—comes bursting onto the page like an invading army.

What changed? Two major factors suggest themselves. The first is his invention of the Hobbits, and the tale’s demand that he write the War of the Ring from their perspective. Hobbits are a kind of Men, though long sundered from them, and thus their very human natures—marked by frailty, courage, and most importantly, free will—entail a radically different set of concerns from the immortal and doom-driven Elves. The second factor was that of the advent of the Second World War itself. A detailed examination of the connections between the Second World War and the composition of The Lord of the Rings lies outside of the scope of this paper. But it is inconceivable—after his own experience fighting in the trenches, losing friends, and succumbing to trench fever—that Tolkien would not have been greatly disheartened to see his and his countrymen’s efforts come to nothing, as England was again wracked with war against an enemy supposedly vanquished less than twenty years previously (and certainly his numerous letters from this time period bear witness to just such sentiments.) Only in the Forties, it was now Tolkien’s sons doing the fighting. No wonder Sam observes that Frodo and he are “in the same tale still” (TT, IV, viii, 321). The Lord of the Rings, then, may be read as Tolkien’s way of writing and coming to terms with the modern era and the wars that had enveloped two generations of Tolkien men.

Tolkien himself would have bristled at this claim. After World War II, rightly anxious to avoid allegorical interpretations, he downplayed the effect of biography or history on his work:

The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding.

(Letters 303)

Yet he is belied by textual evidence. Even the most cursory reading reveals that the opening Book of The Lord of the Rings is vastly more like The Hobbit in language and tone than the following five Books. The battles and attendant anxiety, fear, horror, and loss, and triumphs show a level of realism and reflection not found in other works of “fantasy” in its time, or even today. The language of Saruman and the Mouth of Sauron immediately brings to mind Vichy and Stalinist analogues (Shippey 116). And the ravages of Mordor all too readily reek of the trenches of Great War. Even Tolkien, immediately after writing the above passage, cannot help but amend himself: “Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme” (Letters 303).

However, let it be again emphasized that none of this evidence should be taken to support allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings. Nor are there one-to-one connections between events in either of the World Wars and events in the novel. Inspiration is not equivalent to transplantation. Tolkien writes liquid flame because he knows the horror of it, but Tolkien’s Orcs are not armed with flame-throwers. Saruman and the Mouth of Sauron speak the universal language of coercers, usurpers, and occupying nations, but they are not actually Stalinists. To use Tolkien’s own words, his tales demonstrate “applicability to the thought and the experience of the readers,” but are very consciously not allegorical (FR, Foreword, 7). His work deals with the modern condition in that he writes the sense of a thing, rather than the thing itself.

Tolkien is actually at his most modernist not in his descriptions of the war, but in his descriptions of its aftermath. In this, too, he resembles the modernist writers. While many of the actual “war novels” that arose out of the Great War or World War II are now considered lesser achievements, the works that are arguably the greatest are those that deal not with the war directly, but with the lives of those trying to make sense of what comes after—Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the Nick Adams stories, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, to name a few.4 To this roster Tolkien’s name must be added. The majority of the final Book of The Lord of the Rings, a full six chapters (not even including appendices), is devoted to the War of the Ring’s long dénouement. In another novel, this would certainly be a structural flaw. But in The Lord of the Rings, it is actually a vital element. For the subject of the novel, the true concern, is emphatically not the defeat of Sauron, but rather the passing of Middle-earth’s Third Age. The latter event is contingent on the former, but the distinction between the two is a crucial one.

It is for just these reasons that so much energy is spent lamenting the passing of time. Like World War I, victory in the War for the Ring, while a happy event, has costs. Indeed, the characters know this from the outset. As Haldir of Lothlórien observes:

Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime. For the Elves, I fear, it will prove at best a truce.... (FR, II, vi, 363)5

Similarly, Sam is left with a Shire that will never quite be the same. And though he works to repair it, some changes are irrevocable. Bag End may boast the only mallorn west of the Mountains, but only in place of the Party Tree. In the real world, Tolkien, lacking Galadriel’s gifts, grouses, “It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb” (Letters 65).

Critics might label such statements reactionary. But Tolkien undercuts such readings, for while he mourns the past he consciously attempts to signal that dwelling there or forestalling progress is futile, even lethal. The Elves, he notes in his letters, are “embalmers,” and despite their power and beauty must eventually pass into the West (Letters 197). Indeed, not being willing to let go costs many Elves the joy of Valinor itself in The Silmarillion. In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor’s desire to forestall change leads in part to his suicide and the near murder of his son. In doing so, Denethor echoes Gatsby, whose refusal to relinquish Daisy Buchanan costs lives, including his own. Gatsby and Denethor are both aristocratic but not true aristocrats, both noble but flawed, both men of single-minded vision whose visions doom them.

The losses suffered by Tolkien’s characters range from the social and political to the intensely personal. Frodo has saved the world, but his injuries and the loss of his precious Ring make that small consolation: “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?” (RK, VI, vii, 268). Still later he cries, “It is gone forever… and now all is dark and empty,” and “I am wounded… wounded; it will never really heal” (RK, VI, ix, 304, 305). His words recall the many veterans of the Great War who found themselves unable to reacclimatize to England following their return, and his enervating wound recalls the cripplings and impotence in Lady Chatterly’s Lover and The Sun Also Rises. And, as Flieger points out, like these veterans Frodo has no means of communicating his experience to his fellow Shirefolk (219). In this, too, he stands for Tolkien and his contemporaries: “This wholly private and uncommunicable experience was shared in isolation by a whole generation of writers who wrote it again and again, each in his own particular way, trying over and over to speak the unspeakable, to exorcise the dream” (Flieger 224-225). Frodo at least has the possibility of going to the Havens and beyond, and—perhaps—of finding healing. For Tolkien, as with the modernists, literature became both convalescence and cure.

In the final analysis, one might say that Tolkien is engaged in a delicate balancing act—mourning the past while facing the future, and transcribing the modern age with tools of the past. Shippey claims that, unlike Robert Graves, Tolkien “never said ‘Goodbye to All That.’” (217). But this is not quite true; rather he never stopped saying goodbye. The Lord of the Rings is in many ways a long farewell, an examination of the passing of an age and a meditation on triumph, grief, and progress. Like sap crystallizing into amber around an insect, Tolkien is at his best when he captures the moments of vital realization, where hopes, dreams, and illusions are banished in the cold realization of a new future that demands acknowledgement.

‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’

‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.’ (RK, VI, ix, 309).

Ernest Hemingway used a very similar sentiment to close his novel, The Sun Also Rises:

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “We could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes.” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (247)

Such epiphanies are quintessentially modernist, and never without sorrow. But Tolkien knew this, too. “I will not say: do not weep,” Gandalf says, “for not all tears are an evil” (RK, VI, ix, 310).

* * *

Tolkien himself might have taken umbrage at being labeled an author in the modernist tradition. After all, he takes aim at critics and authors alike in his foreword to The Lord of the Rings: “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 they evidently prefer (FR, Foreword, 6).

But to be a modernist one does not have to embrace modern era or belong to any specific school. One simply has to faithfully document the modern condition, while operating under certain aesthetic assumptions about the primacy of the artist and the role of language in shaping life. At the very least, Tolkien was, as Flieger terms him, a “reluctant modernist,” but this only means he had the foresight to understand that with every innovation comes change, and with every success a sacrifice of some sort (16). The presence of myth makes Tolkien’s works no less avant-garde than Joyce’s sprawling Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and the lack of guns and automobiles in his novels makes him no less a war chronicler than Hemingway. The Lord of the Rings, and indeed the whole of Tolkien’s legendarium, are best understood in context. Tolkien’s masterwork did not reject a tradition, but transformed it into something so new that the act of its forging obscured the materials used. Tolkien’s legendarium speaks eloquently of his century to our own, and his meditations on triumph and loss are only made more, not less, applicable by their mythic sheen.

Notes

1 This is not to say that modernists were not involved with social movements, but they largely sought to be the engine that drove them, rather than to be put to the service of them, as Marxism or socialism tended to demand. Indeed, many modernists—the Italian Futurists especially—sought to transform or energize society according to their tenets. Other modernist movements sought to comment on or expose society—especially the burgeoning bourgeoisie—while still others mocked it, and others sought to escape or somehow transcend it.

2 For a similar debate in contemporary culture, one need only look to the comic book industry, where serious artists (such as Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus) struggle to achieve critical recognition in a field dominated from within and without by the superhero stereotype.

3 Again, these are necessarily rough generalizations; as a reader pointed out, many individual artists, such as Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, might be cited as exceptions to these overall trends.

4 Admittedly, The Lord of the Rings is a later production than these works, but that still puts Tolkien in the company of stylists like Graham Greene and early Nabokov. And the novels that today might be considered examples of early post-modernism—Slaughterhouse Five or Gravity’s Rainbow, for example—had yet to appear on the scene…though they approach war just as obliquely, being also concerned with aftermaths.

5 Note again the references to the faded light of the Sun.

Works Cited

Beagle, Peter S. [Untitled] (dated 14 July 1973), p. [iii] of 1973 and subsequent editions of The Fellowship of the Ring published by Ballantine Books.

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1997.

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1997.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.

Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Petty, Anne C. One Ring to Bind Them All: Tolkien’s Mythology. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1979.

Shippey, T. A. The Road to Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983.

Willett, John. Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. New York: Verso,1989.

Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius: Platonist Views of Evil in The Lord Of The Rings

John Wm. Houghton and Neal K. Keesee

“‘Good and ill have not changed...nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among men.’ ...This is the basis of the whole Tolkienian world.”

As this passage from C. S. Lewis's 1955 review essay (Zimbardo and Isaacs 12) demonstrates, Tolkien criticism has been concerned from the beginning with the question of good and evil in the novel. From an almost equally early point, critics have recognized Tolkien’s view on this great issue as part of a larger philosophical tradition. Rose Zimbardo wrote in 1969: “As in St. Augustine’s, so in Tolkien's vision, nothing is created evil. Evil is good that has been perverted” (Zimbardo and Isaacs 73).1 In contrast to Zimbardo’s position, T. A. Shippey has argued in both of his ground-breaking studies of the novel that Tolkien creatively combines in The Lord of the Rings two contradictory views of evil, one rooted in a Boethian understanding of evil as non-existent (and therefore internal and psychological), the other based in the semi-Manichean heroic perception that evil is an external, active force which must therefore be actively resisted (Road 140-46; Author128-142). More recently, Colin Gunton reasserts the Augustinian association, identifying as one of the parallels between LotR and Christian theology the idea that “evil is the corruption of good, monstrous in power and yet essentially parasitic.” He observes in a note that “It will be seen from these remarks that I find somewhat more consistent a theology of evil in The Lord of the Rings than does Shippey, who seems to me to make the mistake of drawing too absolute a distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘objective’ evil….” (Pearce 133, 140). Similarly, Scott A. Davison, writing for a popular audience in The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All, reasserts Tolkien's Augustinianism:

Tolkien accepts this Augustinian view of evil. In a letter, he writes, “In my story I do not deal with Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero” (L, p. 243).... So St. Augustine and Tolkien agree that nothing is completely and utterly evil, because such a thing could not even exist, since existence itself is good. And they both believe that whereas goodness is primary and independent, evil is secondary and dependent on goodness. (Bassham and Bronson 102-103)

We would argue that Tolkien adopts a consistently Augustinian theory of evil, and that what Shippey sees as two views of evil held in ambiguous tension is, rather, one self-consciously paradoxical understanding. Following along the lines of Zimbardo, Gunton and Davison, we wish, as historical theologians, to give a somewhat more thorough account of this Augustinian tradition within which Tolkien works, considering both its antique originals and King Alfred the Great’s medieval translation; to review the application of the tradition to several elements of LotR , and particularly the Ring itself; and then to look in some detail at the account that tradition would give of one of the novel's key moments, the scene of Frodo claiming the Ring for himself in the Sammath Naur.

I. Shippey’s Reading

In his interpretations of Tolkien’s theory of evil in LotR, Shippey uses terms such as inconsistent, contradiction, uncertainty and ambiguity.2 In neither of his two major works does Shippey see these as strong negatives; indeed, he acknowledges that without its ambiguity, its “double vision,” LotR would not have the explanatory power it has in interpreting evil.3 In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey quite cogently argues that Tolkien must be seen as a twentieth-century author in his treatment of evil, alongside such others as Golding, Vonnegut, T. H. White and LeGuin (xxx-xxxi, 115-117, 119-121, 158-160). These writers have in common that they react to “the distinctively twentieth-century experience of industrial war and impersonal, industrialized massacre” by rejecting the inadequate “moralities of earlier ages” (120). Shippey cites, among other examples, Rosewater’s rejection of Dostoyevsky in Slaughterhouse-Five (121). On Shippey’s reading, Tolkien’s “original, individual” (121) place amongst these contemporaries comes from his strategy of accepting the Augustinian tradition (endorsed as orthodox by Tolkien’s church) but holding it in ambiguous and even contradictory tension with the semi-Manichean variant of that tradition exemplified by Alfred the Great.

Shippey focuses on Boethius as the source for the Augustinian side of the contradiction he sees in the view of evil in LotR. Quoting Lady Philosophy’s line “all fortune is certainly good”4 from The Consolation of Philosophy, Shippey takes the Boethian view of evil to be that evil is “only the absence of good” (130-131). On Shippey’s reading of the Consolation, the claim that evil does not exist invites the conclusion that it is merely “internal, psychological, and negative” (Road 142),5 a perception rather than a positively existing, external force. Thus those who identify events or people as evil do so out of ignorance of the providence that will make even apparent evil turn out well in the final fulfillment of the divine plan; all evil will be annulled or brought to good.6

Shippey objects that this view of evil “is both counterintuitive, and in many circumstances extremely dangerous.” Dangerous because one might conclude from it that the appropriate response to evil would be to “refuse to resist what appears to be evil on the ground that this is just a misapprehension” (133). If providence will ultimately annul evil, then evil is more harmful to the malefactor than to the victim and “those who do it (or appear to do it) are more to be pitied than feared or fought” (133, emphasis added). Shippey believes that Tolkien, as a very orthodox Christian, could not simply set Boethius’ view aside, but he also argues that conscientious objection or surrender held no viability for him in the 1930s and 1940s, when to be a philosophically consistent Boethian would have meant consenting to others being subjected to the horrors of the Fascist dictatorships. During that time, Boethius “was especially hard to believe,” and for Tolkien “surrender to his country’s enemies would have meant handing over not only himself but many others to the whole apparatus of concentration camps, gas-chambers, and mass murder” (Road 142; Author 133-134). This tension (between the idea of non-resistance and the reality of the need to combat horrific evil) led Tolkien to set up the “deep-seated” contradiction in LotR between the Boethian view of evil as nothing and internal and the other view of evil as an active, external force which requires resistance (Author 134-135; cf. Road 142).

Shippey believes that Tolkien may have found this second view in King Alfred’s personal translation of Boethius’ Consolation (Road 141). Alfred, who, in a parallel with Tolkien’s experiences, was faced with the brutal reality of invading Vikings, found it “impossible to go with Boethius all the way” (Author 133). His translation of the Consolation added some of his own views, and Shippey implies that the changes are ones that reflect the experiences of a man who had by necessity a different view of evil: a semi-Manichaean, “heroic” view that requires resistance to evil (Road 142). This heroic view of evil is unofficial, generated spontaneously from common experience rather than from ancient authority, yet it holds great power: evil in this view “does exist, and it is not merely an absence; and what is more, it has to be resisted and fought . . . and what is even more, not doing so, in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills, is a dereliction of duty” (Author 134; cf. Road 141). So evil exists as an external force that must be resisted.

While we acknowledge with Shippey the explanatory power of Tolkien’s vision of evil, we would suggest (at the risk of making a somewhat Scholastic distinction) that its cogency lies in Tolkien’s use of a single tradition that is in itself paradoxical, rather than in his original linking of two ambiguous or contradictory traditions. A proper reading of that single tradition reveals the paradox that evil—something without true being—can nonetheless be both internal temptation and real external threat, leaving the evildoer both dead and alive, corrupted to the point of intangibility and yet truly dangerous, something to be both pitied for what it has lost and fought for what it is.

II. The Tradition Re-examined

The position which we have called Augustinian and others Boethian is in fact older than both Augustine and Boethius, and might more generally be called Platonist or Neo-Platonist. Found in both Augustine’s Confessions, c. 398, among other of his works,7 and Boethius' Consolation (4P7.2-3), c. 524, the teaching that Evil is nothing, that it has no real existence, can be traced back to the Gorgias of Plato, c. 375 BCE.

In the Gorgias (466b-481b), Plato depicts Socrates as arguing that evildoers are wretched (and thus properly the objects of pity), particularly when they go unpunished. The discussion has its roots in an argument about the power of the rhetor. Socrates claims that even if rhetoric leads to a place in the state which allows one to do whatever seems best, such freedom is not supreme power (466 b-c). Power is the ability to do what one wishes, and that is not the same as the ability to do what seems best—the distinction being that one’s sense of what seems best may not accurately identify what one wishes (467 b-c). In fact, when a tyrant acts unjustly, he has made precisely such an error. All things, Socrates says, are either good, neutral or evil: but no one ever wishes for the neutral or the evil in themselves; rather, one wishes for the good, and, perhaps, chooses the neutral or the evil as a means to the end (468c). Thus, if a tyrant (or a rhetor) chooses evil as a means to the good and in fact ends up with evil, he has chosen what seems best but has not actually chosen what he wishes. But a person who chooses to act unjustly does end up with evil, for “the greatest of evils is the doing of injustice”(469 b; Allen 254).8 Moreover, the person who acts unjustly and goes unpunished is in a worse state than the one who undergoes punishment, since just punishment improves the unjust soul as medicine improves the unhealthy body (472 e—479 e). For our purposes, it is significant that Socrates here neither affirms nor denies the existence of Evil, itself, though his argument for the wretchedness of the unjust explicitly assumes that there are evil things (468 e).9 Note, too, that while Plato's analysis has an element of interior misunderstanding, that subjective misunderstanding is in the mind of the evildoer: that the person has chosen evil is an objective fact, not a misapprehension in the mind of the observer.

Augustine does argue for the non-existence of Evil, in contrast to Plato in the Gorgias, though his argument is certainly Neo-Platonic.10 He phrases his version of the argument in Confessions 7.12-13 in terms of corruption and incorruptibility. Clearly, for a substance to be incapable of corruption is better than to be corruptible, and equally clearly, to be corrupted is to be deprived of some good. As corruption proceeds, then, the substance which is corrupted progressively looses goodness, and, unless the thing was infinitely good in the first place, eventually its goodness is exhausted. At that point, either the thing continues to exist, but cannot be corrupted further—in which case it has by the last step of corruption paradoxically been promoted to incorruptibility—or else it ceases to exist altogether. The first alternative is intolerable; but the consequence of the second is that whatever substance does exist is good in some degree, however small. This in turn implies that Evil (as a Platonic idea, not individual evil things) is not an existing substance: for if it were, it would be good.

Boethius’ Lady Philosophy combines elements from the Gorgias (which she cites at 4P2.140) and Augustine. In 3P12, having moved Boethius to a Platonic recollection that the world is governed by God, she goes on to argue that God, who is the Good himself, rules the universe according to his own goodness, and all things by their nature seek him; anything which, acting contrary to its nature, attempted to struggle against him would be helpless in the face of the omnipotence of the highest Good (lines 1-65). Finally, she argues that if it is agreed both (1) that God is omnipotent and (2) that God cannot do evil, then the conclusion must be (3) that evil is nothing, since God who can do anything cannot do this (lines 80-82).11 This is Augustine’s conclusion from the Confessions, phrased in terms of divine action rather than being: that which God does not do is that which has no existence.

Philosophy then begins Book IV in Platonic vein, arguing that the good are powerful and the evil weak, for the good obtain what they wish, the highest good, by the naturally appropriate function, that is, virtue, whereas the evil are not only mistaken about what they wish but also pursue it by inappropriate means, their mere desire (4P2.1-70). She then considers several ways in which the evil may be mistaken: they do not know what the good is, in which case their weakness is blindness; they know the good, but desire diverts them from pursuing it, in which case they are too weak to exercise self-control; or (a step beyond Plato) they willingly and knowingly desert the good in favor of the vice. “But,” she says,

in this case they cease not merely to be powerful, but simply to be: for those who leave aside the common end of all things that are, at the same time also leave off being.

And this indeed may seem strange to some, that we should say of evil men, who are the majority of mankind, that they do not exist: but that is how things are. For of those who are evil I do not deny that they are evil; but that they are, purely and simply, I do deny. For as you would say that a corpse was a dead man, but not simply a man, so I concede of the vicious that they are indeed evil, but I cannot admit that they are, absolutely.12

This position represents a return to more Augustinian language, and Philosophy in fact concludes, “If, as we concluded just now [i.e. in 3P12], evil is nothing, since they can do only evil, it is obvious that the wicked can do nothing.”13 More than the Gorgias, this view combines misunderstanding on the part of the evildoer and on that of the observer. The evildoer is mistaken about the nature of the Good; the observer would (without Philsosphy's help) be mistaken about the absolute ontological status of the evildoers. It is objectively true that the evildoers are evil, as it is that a corpse is a dead person; it would be a subjective error to think that the evil are, absolutely, or that a corpse is simply a person.

As we noted in the introduction, Gunton characterizes this view of evil as “more consistent” than Shippey would understand it to be. From Plato on, those who defend the position that Evil is nothing make consciously paradoxical, openly counter-intuitive, statements: Polus declares at one point that, whatever his arguments, Socrates would not actually refuse absolute power (468 e),14 and Augustine in the Enchiridion, having concluded that “nothing can be evil except something which is good,” goes on to say “And although this, when stated, seems to be a contradiction, yet the strictness of reasoning leaves us no escape from the conclusion”(NPNF 3 241).15 Similarly, Boethius replies to a summary of Philosophy’s teaching by saying “When I consider your arguments, I think nothing is more truly stated, but if I were to turn again to the judgements of men, is there anyone to whom they would not seem unworthy not merely of belief but even of a hearing?”16 The heart of that paradox is that evil people do, in the common or garden sense, exist: they can be encountered in the world and can, for example, have one locked up in prison. Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius: she notably does not prevent Theodoric from having his skull crushed.

For the philosophers in this tradition the non-existence of evil does not mean that evil is merely internal and psychological (for the evildoer or for the observer): nor does the insight that evildoers are pitiable mean that they should not be resisted. Both Plato and Boethius argue that the one who commits a crime is more wretched than the one who suffers it, but neither concludes from this that the criminal ought to be given a free hand. Indeed, to argue that the criminal who goes unpunished is more wretched than the one who suffers what justice demands is to assume that criminals can and will be punished (whether by the hand of mortal or of God). Thus, a fortiori, they ought to be resisted and so prevented from falling into worse evil in the first place.17

III. Alfred as Interpreter

While Alfred the Great might not usually merit separate consideration in a history of the Neo-Platonist tradition, Shippey’s opposition of Boethius to King Alfred serves as warrant for a more detailed review of the king's philosophy. Such a review takes up a topic most notably examined by F. Anne Payne in her King Alfred and Boethius. Payne’s overarching concern in the book is to show that the king’s many changes from the text he is translating reflect considered philosophical positions (rather than, say, a failure to grasp the subtleties of Boethius’s argument). In her second chapter, “Alfred’s Idea of Freedom,” she concludes a discussion of the same proses we have just been considering with the following comparison:

In their understanding of the sentence “Evil is nothing,” Alfred and Boethius depart on their separate ways…. Boethius found his solution in the belief that there is an order regulating and permitting all seeming injustices as a part of a great master plan, and in his belief that man’s suffering is mitigated by his deliberate effort to analyze such parts of the plan as his consciousness can grasp. Alfred … found his solution in the belief that the evil and chaos of human life are created by free men who have not the wisdom to estimate the vital consequences of their acts, and in his belief that suffering is lessened by the deliberate effort of man to make the world a better place. (77)

Clearly, this is the sort of distinction Shippey would like to draw. The passages Payne examines in leading up to this conclusion, however, do not support a Boethian / quasi-Manichean opposition.

Alfred translates 3P12 in his chapter XXXV, section v-vi; chapter XXXVI gives his translation of the meters and proses of Boethius’ Book 4, through the end of 4P2. As Payne suggests, Alfred does (in XXXV.v) reproduce the key sentiment that “Evil is nothing” (“Hit is nauht” [Alfred 100]), and does so on the basis of the argument that omnipotent God cannot do evil. Indeed, in his version of 4P2.129 et seq., Alfred inserts the phrase where Boethius has not used it: “Then he said, Yet evil men can still do evil. Then I said, Would that they could not! Then he said, it is clear that they can do evil, and they cannot do good. That is because evil is nothing.”18 Alfred similarly reproduces the other passages we have considered.

The distinction Payne makes between the king and the consul comes from additions and omissions that, she believes, change the sense of the key phrase. One such comes in the passage from 4P1 immediately following the one just quoted. Having followed Boethius’s citation from the Gorgias about the wicked not being able to achieve their desires, Alfred inserts a comment that while the good, too, sometimes fail of their intentions, they are judged according to their will and “therefore they never fail of rewards here, or there, or both.”19 In 4P3, Alfred omits a pair of statements that “whatever is, is good,” and that “whatever falls from goodness ceases to be.”20 In 4P4, where Boethius says that the evil who go unpunished receive more evil thereby, Alfred specifies that that evil is, ultimately, judgment after death, and adds a discussion of how a just God might refrain from executing justice in order to give the evil time to repent. These and similar changes, Payne says, reinterpret “evil is nothing” in terms of God’s final judgment for the good (even, indeed, the mere will of the good) and against evil, rather than in the original terms of Platonic ontology (76-77).

Shippey suggests that Alfred’s modifications to Boethius amount to “statements about the nature of evil which would go past Boethius but stop short of Manichaeus” in claiming that evil is real and must be resisted (Road 141). But even if we accept Payne’s detailed reading of the modifications, i.e., that they substitute the concrete judgment against evil for the abstract non-existence of evil, the king still sees the resulting situation (God will condemn evil, but for the moment allows it to exist) as paradoxical. For example, Alfred’s addition to 4P4 about God reserving judgment begins with the speaker saying “I am very much troubled by this discourse, and wonder why so righteous a judge should bestow an unjust gift.”21 Alfred may have a less startling sense of how “evil is nothing” than Boethius does, but the two would agree on the everyday confrontation with evil which makes that statement startling in the first place.

IV. Evil Deceived

The Neo-Platonic tradition, then, would teach us to see evil synoptically, if paradoxically—to see it singly as at once nothing (and thus to be pitied) and something (and thus to be resisted). Such a consistent vision accounts for many elements of LotR more effectively than does seeing those elements as ambiguously illustrative of two contradictory views of evil. Moreover, several of these elements reflect familiar claims from the Neo-Platonic discussion: in particular, Tolkien regularly depicts the Ringwraiths, Saruman and Sauron as deceived or mistaken (as, in the Ainulindalë, Morgoth himself is mistaken, about the purposes of Iluvatar and about the place of the Flame of Anor).22

Shippey discusses both the Ringwraiths and Saruman at length in Author, citing them as examples of the interior, psychological process by which “people make themselves into wraiths” (125). Granting that one could be made a wraith by external force (e.g. the Morgul-knife), Shippey sees (and sees as a familiar twentieth century situation) people as more commonly beginning with “some purpose they identify as good” (emphasis added) and continuing with increased devotion to some self-justifying ‘cause,’ until they are “‘eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction.” The Ring (he observes later), as psychic amplifier, wakes “an echo [of evil] in the hearts of the good” (142). The tradition sees the person moving closer and closer to nothingness by a series of mistaken choices about the good (just as the emphasized words in the first quotation would suggest): but it allows for the possibility that those mistakes may result from deceit rather than from misunderstanding or from an internal potential for evil—from external, rather than purely subjective internal, forces, albeit ones less material than the knife. Examples from LotR in fact frequently include this external, objective, element. The Ringwraiths are first mentioned, and first so named, when Gandalf tells Frodo about the “shadow of the past”: “Nine he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so ensnared them. Long ago they fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants” (FR, I, ii, 60). The key words of these two sentences could almost serve as a summary of the Neo-Platonist tradition. Men whose pride distorts their judgment are ensnared by evil, and so diminish from greatness to being mere shadows: not even shadows of the first rank, but wraiths in service to the Ring and its Master, mere servants of the great Shadow, and yet terrible.23 Like Gyges in the Republic (359d-360b), they can walk invisible to work their will: but as was true for the rhetors in Gorgias, having one’s will is not a good. Rather, it exposes them to further deceit, and moves them nearer to the nothingness in which they will become the terrible agents of shadow.

Having been deceived and reduced to “wraiths,” the Nine are “physical” and yet “intangible” (Author 124), both real and shadow at the same time. When Frodo, wearing the Ring, faces the Nazgûl on Amon Sul, he sees them with “terrible clarity” and the Witch-King inflicts an undeniably real wound in Frodo’s left shoulder (FR I, xi, 208); but we get a simultaneous account of this event from a different point of view on the following page:

At length [Frodo] gathered from Sam that they had seen nothing but the vague shadowy shapes coming towards them. Suddenly to his horror Sam found that his master had vanished; and at that moment a black shadow rushed past him, and he fell. (FR I, xii, 209)

So the Lord of the Nazgûl is not merely a shadow, ambiguously present and absent; rather, he is at one and the same time a shadow, evil as nonexistent, and the wielder of the Morgul-blade, evil as a force that must be resisted. Though the Witch-king commands numberless armies—real external forces, his chief weapon (as the narrator observes, RK, V, iv, 96-97) is terror, striking intangible despair into the hearts of his enemies.24 But while despair is, in and of itself, an internal and psychological state, the very fact that the Nazgûl cause it in their victims means that, for those victims, it is not properly theirs, but rather something imposed by an external force (and, often, by deceit). Even at their most psychological, the Nazgûl are both nothing and something.

Saruman presents a particularly dense set of references to evil as misunderstanding or deception. The narrator explicitly applies such terms in the initial description of Saruman’s Isengard and Orthanc:

…long it had been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, … and wise men that watched the stars. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived—for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of…Barad-dur. (TT, III, viii,160-1, emphases added)

Isengard in this description has become a standing indictment of its master, Saruman the Wise: he who was once wise (as a “wizard” ought etymologically to be) has forsaken wisdom and is now fond, childish, deceived. He cannot make, and the beautiful he means to improve he only mars.

Like the Nazgûl, Saruman combines evil as subjective misapprehension, evil simply as external force and evil as the external source of an internal state. As Shippey notes, “Saruman,” the Anglo-Saxon-for-Rohirric calque of “Curunír”, has as its root Mercian saru-, West Saxon searu-, meaning not only “art, skill, cleverness” but also “device, trick, snare, ambuscade, plot, treachery” (Clark Hall 300, cf. Road 128): Nan Curunír, the Wizard’s Vale, is, the narrator shows us, the valley of the deceiver, now himself deceived. Isengard is “naught,” an “Irontown” (Road 171) become “vain” or “nothing at all.” And yet this nugatory assessment of Saruman’s fortress comes almost at the end of six paragraphs of retrospective description of Isengard “while Saruman was at his height” (TT, III, viii, 159), in the midst of a chapter devoted to the aftermath of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and while we are waiting to see the result of the Ents’ song:

To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;

Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,

We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door…. (TT, III, iv, 88).

Isengard is naught, but it is not simply a misapprehension in the minds of the Rohirrim and the Ents. The immediate and larger contexts insist that that “naught” has nonetheless had to be resisted by force, heroically and at great cost, both in the extension of its power to Rohan and at its center in the Wizard’s Vale.

When Gandalf and the rest of the party come to speak with Saruman, they encounter his full rhetorical power—his ability to cause internal evil in others. Repeatedly, the narrator refers to the effect of Saruman’s voice, with only brief mentions of what Saruman looks like to his audience. But then, after Gandalf’s final appeal, the narrator gives a description focused instead on the visual—even though it is the visual as a metaphoric window to the soul:

A shadow passed over Saruman’s face; then it went deathly white. Before he could conceal it, they saw through the mask the anguish of a mind in doubt, loathing to stay and dreading to leave its refuge. For a second he hesitated, and no one breathed. Then he spoke, and his voice was shrill and cold. Pride and hate were conquering him. (TT, III, x,187)

Saruman is unquestionably evil, and unquestionably powerful: yet even so—precisely so, the Neo-Platonist tradition would say—he is pitiable, torn by anguish and dread. Evil such as this must be fought, but fought with pity always in mind. “The Scouring of the Shire” shows us Frodo presiding over precisely such a “just war,” with Saruman's final reduction to a pitiable “wraith” at its climax. Moments before Saruman’s death, when Frodo orders that he be spared, the wizard replies, “You are wise and cruel. You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness, in debt to your mercy. I hate it and you!” (RK, VI, viii, 299) And when the wizard does lie dead, Frodo's pity is explicitly linked to his long process of corruption: “Frodo looked at the body with pity and horror, for as he looked it seemed that long years of death were suddenly revealed in it” (RK, VI, viii, 300).

Sauron illustrates these same ideas on an even larger scale. He served as the external force behind the corruption of Númenor and, as the “Lord of Gifts,” deceived the elven-smiths, the dwarf-lords and the kings of men: through the palantír, he deceives Denethor and drives him to despair. Yet even he is also subject to deceit: by Melkor at the beginning of time, by Aragorn with the palantír, and most of all by Gandalf.

Théoden, commenting on Saruman’s loss of the palantír, remarks: “Strange powers have our enemies, and strange weaknesses! But it has long been said: oft evil will shall evil mar” (TT, III, xi, 200)—an observation with which Gandalf only partly agrees in this case. The maxim encapsulates, however, the basis of Gandalf’s whole strategy in dealing with Sauron and the One Ring. In two extended speeches, he explains that he intends to use Sauron’s own evil world-view against him.25 In Imladris, he replies to Elrond’s chief councillor Erestor:

“Despair or folly?” said Gandalf…. “Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse this, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it.” (FR, II, ii, 282-3)

Similarly, after his return as Gandalf the White, he says to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli:

[The Enemy] supposes that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he himself would have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power.…Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded…. (TT, III, v, 100)

Even Sauron’s malice is not a desire for Evil in itself: it is, rather, a disordered desire for a particular good (that is to say, power), and simply as such it is also a weakness, a source of fear, and the root of folly.26 This is clearly the Boethian position: but in neither of these passages is there any pretense that Sauron has not obtained at least some of the power he desired, nor a suggestion that because his evil is only a perversion of the good and he himself only a shadow he is only a misapprehension that need not be resisted. Not only do the speeches themselves specifically discuss means of resistance, each of them comes in a larger context of resistance, even when such terms as “shadow” and “night” are involved. Thus Glorfindel at the Council of Elrond opines that if Bombadil were asked to guard the Ring he would at last succumb to “Night,” and Galdor, responding, asks whether the Elf-lords have the “strength to withstand” the coming of Sauron. Elrond answers: “I have not the strength … neither have they” (FR, II, ii, 279). So also, Gandalf’s remarks to the three hunters come immediately after his account of Frodo’s crisis on Amon Hen: “Very nearly [the Ring] was revealed to the Enemy, but it escaped. I had some part in that: for I sat in a high place, and I strove with the Dark Tower; and the Shadow passed. Then I was weary, very weary; and I walked long in dark thought” (TT, II, iii, 99). On the one hand, Sauron is the Shadow—the Lidless Eye whose pupil is “a window into nothing” (FR, II, vii, 379); on the other, one can and must strive against him, and be wearied in the process.

V. The Ring

The first fact to note about the Ring is its origin: the Ring is the chief artifact of Sauron, the ultimate artifice by which he seeks domination. It belongs, says Elrond, “to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil” (FR, II, ii, 281). As Gandalf explains to Frodo in “The Shadow of the Past,” Sauron made the One Ring himself; it is his and “he let a great part of his own former power pass into it” (FR, I, ii, 61). Possessing in this way the power of its master, it manifests evil in the same way. While peering into Galadriel’s mirror, his neck dragged down by the ring, Frodo sees the Eye, and sees what we have just noted: Sauron in his heart is nothingness. Yet the Eye is rimmed with fire, it is a nothingness that seeks—and threatens—him (FR, I, vii, 379). So too the Ring.27 In the dealings of various characters with the Ring, a remarkably consistent Neo-Platonic picture emerges of its nature, and of the nature of evil.

The Ring has no immediate power without the wearer. Instead, lacking any real existence of its own, it must use its wearers, perverting and corrupting their hearts through temptation until it reduces them to nothingness as well, and moves on. This internal temptation is at heart empty deceit; the Ring tempts with a power to dominate that it cannot give to any but those who already have great power. But to those with a power of their own, the power the Ring offers is ultimately the same illusion of existence that makes Sauron the Shadow. The Ring corrupts them, so that their desire for goodness becomes instead the desire for domination, and therefore ultimately emptiness. As we have noted above, this progressive corruption is Shippey's “wraithing process” (Author 125): but rather than see the Ring as a “psychic amplifier” (reflecting evil as internal) ambigously combined with a “sentient creature” (reflecting evil as external) (Author 136), we would see the Ring as an external force deceiving the individual and thus producing an interior evil. This understanding seems to be implicit in the word “corruption” itself. Elrond declares to the Council called to decide what to do with the Ring, “we cannot use the Ruling Ring. . . . Its strength . . . is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who already have a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart” (FR, II, ii, 281, emphasis added). In the Waldman letter, Tolkien explains that a recurrent issue in his work is how evil—including that of Sauron—arises from good motive:

The Enemy in successive ways is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines; but the problem: that this frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others—speedily and according to the benefactor’s own plans—is a recurrent motive. (Letters 146)

This much could describe “self-wraithing,” so to speak. Later in the letter, however, he goes on to mention corruption specifically in reference to the Rings of Power:

The chief power (of all the rings alike) was the prevention or slowing of decay (i.e. ‘change’ viewed as a regrettable thing), the preservation of what is desired or loved, or its semblance—this is more or less an Elvish motive. But also they enhanced the natural powers of a possessor—thus approaching ‘magic’, a motive easily corruptible into evil, a lust for domination. (152)

The “natural powers” of the possessor may be corruptible, but the tradition would not (and Tolkien here does not seem to) see them as internal echoes of evil; rather, they are internal goods which evil may corrupt (as Sauron does in his deceitful role as Annatar).

A more effective symbol of evil understood Neo-Platonically than the Ring is hard to conceive. Davison remarks “Another way to look at evil is to see it as essentially parasitical on goodness” (102), and the Ring itself exists as a kind of parasite. Having no power over events in the world without a wearer, it can, in itself, do naught. The Ring demonstrates its Neo-Platonic unreality further in its reduction of those who use it to nothingness by deceiving them into desiring domination instead of goodness.28 But precisely out of this condition of nothingness, the Ring is actively evil. For its unreality holds two kinds of peril: the Ring threatens with corruption, and at times with the physical danger of betrayal and capture, those who use it. In addition those who use it also do real evil to others (as Frodo says in response to Boromir’s entreaties to use the Ring, “what is done with it turns to evil” [FR, II, x, 414]). In the case of almost any character that interacts with the Ring, we can see this pattern of temptation and deception that results in nothingness, and the corresponding threat of real evil to the user as well as to others.

Consider Gandalf. Offered the Ring by a frightened Frodo, Gandalf reacts dramatically. He clearly understands the temptation of the Ring, and the evil it holds for him and others if he were to accept it:

“No!” cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. “With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.” His eyes flashed and his face was lit by a fire within. “Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.” (FR, I, ii,70-71)

Though only a potential bearer of the Ring, Gandalf sees that the Ring, to make use of him, would tempt his sense of pity, would deceive him into believing that with it he could right the wrongs of the world. What would begin as a desire to do good would be corrupted into a desire for dominating power, and ultimately, into the nothingness of evil: Gandalf would become like Sauron, evil, empty, devoured, yet possessed of a power to become a new Dark Lord and inflict torment on others.

Gollum’s torment by the Ring similarly illustrates how clearly the Ring reflects Neo-Platonism. Here we have the Ring’s need for a victim, its temptation and deception of that victim into nothingness, and the real evil it brings to the victim as well as to others. Ring in hand, Gollum is tempted to discover the secrets under the mountains, and presumably the power that knowledge will bring. That turns out to be sheer deception: “All the ‘great secrets’ under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering” (FR, I, ii, 64). Gollum’s mind is devoured by the Ring; hating it but loving it, become a murderer for the Ring’s sake, he is trapped in the darkness under the mountains. Having all but destroyed Gollum, the Ring then leaves him:

A Ring of power looks after itself . . . The Ring left him. . . . The Ring was trying to get back to its master. It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Déagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean. (FR, I, ii,65)

Deceived by the Ring, deceived about the “small and mean” goods of his little world, Smeagol loses even his identity to the Ring: and the attempt to reclaim what has become Precious to him leads to his destruction.

Frodo, whose relationship with the Ring receives the greatest scrutiny in LotR, also experiences this pattern of temptation, deception, and real evil. Frodo’s recorded experience with the Ring begins in fear when Gandalf reveals that the Dark Lord ‘is seeking it, seeking it, and all his thought is bent on it” (FR, I, ii, 61). As Frodo flees the Shire with the Ringwraiths close on his trail, the Ring accordingly tempts him with safety, though later, as he falls more and more under its sway, the Ring also tempts Frodo with power.29 In his encounters with the Ringwraiths, confronting the danger of their discovery of him, Frodo experiences strong temptation to put on the Ring: “he felt that he had only to slip it on, and then he would be safe” (FR, I, iii, 84). The Ring seeks to persuade or even command Frodo (or, at least, to channel the commands of his enemies) that he should put it on, that somehow doing so will make things better, despite all the warnings of Gandalf never to use it. The desire to do this is so strong that it overpowers even his terror at Weathertop, dissolving any concerns, even for escape, in the compulsion to put on the Ring. Yet as with the other characters, the Ring’s temptations of Frodo are empty deceit. Regaining consciousness after the attack at Weathertop, Frodo sees this and regrets his decision to put on the Ring: “he bitterly regretted his foolishness and reproached himself for weakness of will; for he now perceived that in putting on the Ring he obeyed not his own desire but the commanding wish of his enemies” (FR, I, xii, 211). Under the Ring’s influence, what he most desires—what he thinks he wants—is in fact a deception; it is what his enemies want for him, an evil.

This deception would, if successful, result in the certain evil of capture, and ultimately of Frodo’s being mastered by the Ringwraiths and transformed into a wraith under their command. At the Prancing Pony, the temptation and deception of the Ring prompt him into revealing his true identity and mission to the spies of the Ringwraiths. At Weathertop it is even more successful; the Witch-King wounds Frodo with the Morgul-knife, beginning his descent into the shadow world. And at Minas Morgul, Frodo confronts the gaping nothingness of the haunted city30 and, pushed on by the Ring, only avoids betraying himself because of Sam and Gollum:

Then suddenly, as if some force were at work other than his own will, he began to hurry, tottering forward, his groping hands held out, his head lolling from side to side. Both Sam and Gollum ran after him. Sam caught his master in his arms, as he stumbled and almost fell, right on the threshold of the bridge. . . . [Frodo] fought the desire that was on him to run up the gleaming road towards its gate. At last with an effort he turned back, and as he did so, he felt the Ring resisting him, dragging at the chain about his neck . . . . (TT, IV, viii, 313, emphasis added)

Similarly, when the Witch-King passes at the head of his army, Frodo is caught up in a visible struggle with the temptation to put on the Ring. Even though he knows the temptation is a sham, that the Ring would betray him, he is only saved, and narrowly, when his hand, groping for something besides the Ring, brushes against the phial of Galadriel (TT, IV, viii, 316). This evil with which the Ring threatens is not merely internal and psychological, but is real, physical, and, as is clear from Frodo’s struggles and self-reproach, to be resisted. Yet its origin is nothing other than the Ring’s own corruptive nothingness.

Danger to Frodo himself is not the only evil the Ring brings about. Just as the corruptive power of the Ring would make Gandalf a despot, and does make Gollum a murderer, it introduces a mean-spirited and destructive distrust into Frodo’s otherwise gentle relations with his friends. This includes relatively mild instances, such as Frodo’s hesitation to hand the Ring to Gandalf to perform the test of its identity, and his annoyance with Tom Bombadil’s jocular treatment of the Ring, which prompts Frodo to put the Ring on as a test in Tom’s house. But it also includes more disturbing, even heartrending, cases. One is the moment at Rivendell when Bilbo asks to see the Ring again, and is transformed in Frodo’s eyes:

Bilbo put out his hand. But Frodo quickly drew back the Ring. To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a strange little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him. (FR, II, ii, 244, emphasis added)

True, no lasting harm is done, but the shadow of Evil literally comes between them, disrupting their customary close bond. Another notable example of this occurs in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, when Frodo learns that Sam has saved the Ring from capture. His gratitude quickly turns to fear and hatred, and his words and actions wound his servant and friend who has done so much to help him succeed:

“No, no!” cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam’s hands. “No you won’t, you thief!” He panted, staring at Sam with his eyes wide with fear and enmity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist, he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes, and he passed a hand over his aching brow. The hideous vision had seemed so real to him, half bemused as he was still with wound and fear. Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth. But now the vision had passed. There was Sam kneeling before him, his face wrung with pain, as if he had been stabbed in the heart; tears welled from his eyes. (RK, VI, i, 188; see also VI, iii, 214)

While this is not death or capture, it is still—and particularly between such close friends—a real evil that Frodo manifests because of the Ring. This is an evil that comes directly from the Ring’s deceit, temptation, and corruption, all of which reflect the Neo-Platonic notion that Evil is ultimately a corruption of good, having no true existence of its own.

VII. Conclusion: Sammath Naur

Shippey concludes his discussion of evil in both Road and Author with an analysis of the Sammath Naur scene, understood, following Tolkien's lead, as an interpretation of The Lord’s Prayer. On Shippey's analysis, the scene showcases the contradiction between evil as internal temptation (and so “Boethian”) and evil as external force (and so “Manichaean”). Though temptation necessarily involves a tempter, Shippey understands the tempter to be merely activating a flaw in the individual, so that the true struggle, and the true evil, are internal; if the external power met no internal echo, or needed none, the situation “would be Manichean. It would deny that men are responsible for their actions, make evil into a positive force” (Road 144). In this context, he reports, from a 1955 letter to Douglas Masson, Tolkien’s connection of Frodo at the Sammath Naur with the sixth and seventh petitions of the Lord’s Prayer (Road 145; Author 141). In Road, having paraphrased “succumbing to temptation is our business … but delivering us from evil is God’s,”31 he goes on to remark that how much responsibility for sin lies with the sinner and how much with the tempter, “How much temptation human beings can ‘reasonably’ be expected to stand,” is not for humans to know (145). In the passage from Author already cited, conceding that the petitions might merely reinforce each other, he proposes that they are more likely to frame a contrast, “the first asking God to keep us safe from ourselves (the Boethian source of sin), the second asking for protection from outside (the source of evil in a Manichaean universe)” (141). But would Tolkien have understood temptation in quite this way, or had precisely this contrast in mind? Neo-Platonist philosophers as such rarely discuss the Lord’s Prayer: but Neo-Platonist theologians of the sort we might think Tolkien likely to have followed put forward other interpretations.

Augustine, for example, discusses these two petitions in several places, while Aquinas (though he is not usually a [Neo-] Platonist) follows Augustine when he discusses the Lord’s Prayer in the Summa.32 These doctors do not see temptation as interiorized, for on their understanding temptation can come from God or from Satan: if the interior conflict were all that counted, there would be no point in insisting on the distinction between the exterior elements.33 In Sermon 57, Augustine tells those who are about to be baptized that even after they have been baptized, they will face an internal struggle, a battle against their own lusts; if those lusts are conquered, the Tempter will find no opportunity for his evil work. Thus far, Augustine supports interiorization; but he sandwiches this statement between two comments that the individual capacity to resist depends upon God’s aid, and that without that exterior support, Satan “finds in [the individual] no resistance against his power, but forthwith presents himself to him as his possessor” (57.9, NPNF 6 283).34 Thus without God’s support the individual seems to be in the “Manichean” situation, one where the active force of evil needs no internal echo in order to overpower the person. This idea of being abandoned by God is not merely hypothetical. Following St. Paul's assertion in I Cor. 10:13 that God does allow us to be tempted,35 Augustine and Aquinas insist that “lead us not into temptation” does not mean merely “do not tempt us,” but rather “do not allow us to meet with temptations we cannot bear,” “do not abandon us to temptation” (de Sermone 2.9.30, NPNF 6 43; compare Sermon 57.9), interpretations which assume that God could abandon us. How much temptation we can reasonably be expected to stand is not for us to know, but God knows, and can be reasonably be entreated to act on the knowledge. Even if God chooses to abandon us, however, there is no question of Manicheanism, since Satan remains a creature of God: Augustine writes, “Temptations, therefore, take place by means of Satan not by his power, but by the Lord’s permission”(de Sermone 2.9.34, NPNF 6 45).36 Nor do Augustine and Thomas take the second of these petitions as a request to be protected from something that might happen to us in the future (as in, “From the fury of the Northmen good Lord deliver us”): not to be abandoned to temptation already constitutes that sort of protection (de Sermone 2.10.35, NPNF 6 45). Rather, the petition is a plea to be set free (“libera nos”) from the evil in which human beings already find themselves, as a consequence of previous sin (whether their own or that of the first parents).37 Rather than a complementary division between God’s interior (in saving us from our own weaknesses) and exterior (in defending us from evil forces) work, Augustine and Aquinas see instead the contrast between God’s not abandoning us in the future to evil forces and his liberating us now from the results of the past.

Tolkien, in fact, uses a juxtaposition of I Corinthians and the Lord's Prayer in discussing Frodo's failure. In a draft letter from 1956, he writes:

Corinthians I.x.12-13 may not at first sight seem to fit—unless 'bearing temptation' is taken to mean resisting it while still a free agent in normal command of the will. I think rather of the mysterious last petitions of the Lord's Prayer: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. A petition against something that cannot happen is unmeaning. There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one's power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person....We can at least judge [people who have been 'brainwashed'] by the will and intention with which they entered the Sammath Naur; and not demand impossible feats of will, which could only happen in stories unconcerned with real moral and mental probability.... One must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good’; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us. (Letters 252)38

Frodo, at the Sammath Naur, is in fact at precisely the position Augustine and Aquinas describe: tempted to the very point of abandonment, and surrounded by present evil. From that position he is, as Shippey notes, saved (while paying a sort of penalty in the loss of his finger) by the consequences of the pity Bilbo first showed Gollum so many years before (Road 144), but also by the consequences of his own pity, e.g. in bidding Faramir spare Gollum. We may note that in his letter to Masson Tolkien—discussing the role of Mercy in the novel—does not simply say that the Sammath Naur scene is meant to exemplify the sixth petition, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” but rather begins his quotation with the previous petition: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us” (Road 145; Author 141). (Augustine similarly treats these clauses together, taking the fifth petition to refer to past sins, the sixth to present and future ones, and the seventh to the consequences of sin around us [Sermon 56.18, NPNF 6 280].) But Bilbo’s pity for Gollum is tied up with his being “meant” to find the Ring and Frodo’s being “meant” to have it (FR, I, ii, 65)—the intention of the Valar, or the Will of Eru himself, has been at work throughout, and Frodo, forgiven as he has himself forgiven, “judged by the will and intention with which he entered the Sammath Naur,” is finally not abandoned to the power of Sauron nor left in the midst of Mordor. On this reading, the Sammath Naur episode fits squarely within the Neo-Platonic tradition of biblical exegesis.39

Part of Shippey’s conclusion about Sammath Naur is that the ambiguity present in this central scene of LotR reflects not only a departure from Boethius but, as such, is a source of strength for the novel. Tolkien’s view of evil is certainly part of what makes LotR compelling; he offers a complex and nuanced assessment of the nature of evil. But this view is not a departure from Boethius; it is consistently paradoxical rather than ambiguous or contradictory. Rooted firmly in the Neo-Platonic tradition, Tolkien in LotR perceives evil’s true nature: nothing, yet paradoxically powerful.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was given as part of the Tolkien the Medievalist sessions at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May, 2003. The helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer for Tolkien Studies and the research assistance of Daniel McMains, Villanova University, are gratefully acknowledged.

1 Other early critics expressed similar ideas: for example, Clyde Kilby, speaking on January 21, 1970: “In the same connection we can mention the inability of evil to create anything but only to mock...Philosophers and theologians have often noted the inessentiality of evil” (Montgomery 138).

2 See, for instance, Road (140, 141, 144); Author (130, 134-135, 136).

3 For Shippey’s positive assessment of the final efficacy of Tolkien’s view of evil, see Road (145-146), and Author (141-142 and 157-159).

4 “Omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam” (Book IV, prose vii, lines 2-3 [= 4P7.2-3], Stewart 375-6).

5 In the original context of these terms, Shippey is discussing the role of the Ring as “psychic amplifier,” and thus has in mind the interiority of evil on the part of the evildoer, rather than the misapprehension of evil on the part of the observer. It seems to us, however, that he regularly uses similar language to describe both phenomena.

6 Shippey’s sketch of the Boethian view of evil is succinct in both basic sources: see Road (140-141); Author (130-134). For some of the examples Shippey cites in LotR , see FR, II, ii, 281; TT, III, iv, 89; TT, IV, x, 348-350; and RK, VI, i, 190.

7 Cf. Augustine, Confessions 7.12.18—16.22 (to be discussed below); Enchiridion 10-16; On Free Will (de libero arbitrio) 3.13.36, On the Nature of the Good (de natura boni) 4.9.12-19.

8 “hôs megiston tôn kakôn tunchanei on to adikein” < http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plat.+Gorg.+469b, 26 April 2004>.

9 However, in a passage of the Theaetetus roughly parallel to this argument from Gorgias, Socrates says “But it is impossible that evils should be done away with, Theodorus, for there must always be something opposed to the good; and they cannot have their place among the gods, but must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this earth” (176a, Fowler 127), “all ‘out’ apolesthai ta kaka dunaton, ô Theodôre— hupenantion gar ti tôi agathôi aei einai anankê—out' en theois auta hidrusthai, tên de thnêtên phusin kai tonde ton topon peripolei ex anankês” < http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plat.+Theaet.+176a , 26 April 2004 >.

10 In 7.12 and 13, Augustine is still explaining the effect that reading translations of the Platonists had on him, cf. 7.9. Compare, for example, Enneads 1.8, where Plotinus argues that Absolute Evil exists as Matter, as that which is in some sense itself non-being, utterly formless and void, the last production of Good.

11 “‘Malum igitur,’ inquit, ‘nihil est, cum id facere ille non possit, qui nihil non potest’” (Stewart 304).

12 “Sed hoc modo non solum potentes esse sed omnino esse desinunt. Nam qui communem omnium quae sunt finem relinquunt, pariter quoque esse desistunt. Quod quidem cuipiam mirum forte videatur, ut malos, qui plures hominum sunt, eosdem non esse dicamus; sed ita sese res habet. Nam qui mali sunt eos malos esse non abnuo; sed eosdem esse pure atque simplicter nego. Nam uti cadaver hominem mortuum dixeris, simpliciter vero hominem appellare non possis, ita vitiosos malos quidem esse concesserim, sed esse absolute nequeam confiteri” (4P2.99-110, Stewart 325-327).

13 “Nam si, uti paulo ante collegimus, malum nihil est, cum mala tantummodo possint, nihil posse improbos liquet” (4P2.118-121, Stewart 326).

14 Polus’s ad hominem remark is parallel to Glaucon’s argument in the Republic (359 c, just before the story of the Ring of Gyges) that, given liberty, the just man would act as badly as the unjust.

15 “Non igitur potest esse malum nisi aliquid bonum. Quod cum dici uideatur absurde, connexio tamen ratiocinationis huius uelut ineuitabiliter nos compellit hoc dicere” (CCSL 46 55).

16 “Cum tuas,” inquam, “rationes considero, nihil dici verius puto. At si hominum iudicia revertar, quis ille est cui haec non credenda modo sed saltem audienda videantur?” (4P4.91-94, Stewart 346-7) .

17 In fact, Tolkien himself uses a version of this argument (though with a significant proviso) in a draft letter to Rhona Beare, written in 1958: “A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift,’ if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing…” (Letters 286)

18 “Ða cwaeð he: Hwaet yfele men magon ðeah yfel don. Ða cwaeð ic: Eala, ðær hi ne meahton. Ða cwaeð he: Hit is sweotol ð[aet] hi magon don yfel, 7 ne magon nan good; ð[aet] is forþæmðe ð[aet] yfel nis nauht” (110).

19 “Forþæm he naefre ne forlist ðæm leanum oððe her oððe ðær oððe ægðer” (111).

20 “omne quod sit id etiam bonum esse videatur…quidquid a bono deficit esse desistit” (Stewart 334-335).

21 “Ða cwaeð ic: Ic eom swiðe gedrefed mid ðisse spræce, 7 wundrie forhwy swa rihtwis dema aenige unrihte gife wille forgifan” (119).

22 “He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness. Yet he found not the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar” (S 16).

23 “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” in S (285-304) expands on this and other accounts from LotR to much the same effect.

24 Cf. Author (124-125).

25 As W. H. Auden observed (Zimbardo and Isaacs 47) and Shippey notes (Road 174, Author 147).

26 We use “power” here in a general sense, as a better English term for potentia than “potency.” As he points out in his oft-quoted letter to Milton Waldman, however, Tolkien himself ordinarily uses the word “power” only in a bad sense: the object of Elven magic, he says, “is Art, not Power, subcreation not domination and tyrannous reformation of creation”; “ ‘power’ is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods” (Letters 146, 152).

27 In fact, Tolkien’s design for the dust jacket of FR shows the Eye encircled by the Ring rather than by fire: cf. Hammond and Scull 179.

28 Cf. Zimbardo, “The wearer of the Ring becomes invisible, and the more often he chooses to use the power, the more the power wears away his substance” (106).

29 Evidence of Frodo’s growing temptation to claim the Ring for his own use may be found in several places late in the novel. Struggling with the temptation to use the Ring in the presence of the Lord of the Nazgûl at Minas Morgul, Frodo perceives that he does not “have the power to face the Morgul-King, not yet” (TT, IV, viii, 316, emphasis added). On the road to Mount Doom, Frodo says to Sam, “I am almost in its power now. I could not give it up, and if you tried to take it I should go mad” (RK, VI, iii, 214). On our reading, at Sammath Naur, Frodo succumbs and claims the Ring rather than destroy it—as, indeed, Tolkien insists in letters 191 and 192 (Letters 252-253).

30 Note Tolkien’s description of the city: “it was lit with light. . . . wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and tower windows showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness” (TT, IV, ix, 312).

31 This does not strike us as, in the long run, a helpful formula—if the prayer really meant that “succumbing to temptation is our business,” there would be no reason to ask God to do something about it. Author phrases the idea more clearly in discussing God saving people from themselves.

32 For Augustine, see both his commentary On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (2.4.15-11.39; NPNF 6 38-47, CCSL 35 105-130) and his various sermons to catechumens in their immediate preparation for baptism, such as Sermons 57.9-12, 58.9-12, and 59.8; see also Sermons 56. 18 and 57.10, where Augustine does take the two petitions to be (in Shippey’s terms) “variants of each other” rather than complementary (N.b. Schaff numbers these sermons 6-9, with the standard numeration in parentheses, NPNF 6 274-289; Verbraken, “Sermon 57” 411-424, “Sermon LVIII,” “Sermons”; Poque 186-198).

For Thomas, see ST 2a-2ae. q. 83. a. 9, Resp.: “There are three obstacles which hinder us from reaching eternal happiness. First, there is sin which directly excludes a man from the kingdom, as is said, Neither fornicators nor idolaters shall possess the kingdom of God, and to this refer the words, Forgive us our trespasses. Secondly, there is temptation which hinders us from observing the divine will, and to this we refer when we say, And lead us not into temptation, not asking to be removed from temptation but rather that we will not be conquered by it. Thirdly, there is the present condition of hardship which is an obstacle to a full life, and to this we refer in the words, Deliver us from evil.” (“Tria autem sunt quae nos a beatitudine prohibent: primo quidem peccatum, quod directe excludit a regno, secundum illud, Neque fornicarii, neque idolis servientes, etc., regnum Dei possidebunt; et ad hoc pertinet quod dicitur, Et ne nos inducas in tentationem; per quod non petimus ut non tentemur, sed ut a tentatione non vincamur, quod est in tentationem induci. Tertio poenalitas praesens, quae impedit sufficientiam vitae; et quantum ad hoc dicitur, Libera nos a malo” [72-73]).

33 For Augustine, see: Sermon 57.9, NPNF 6, 282 (Verbraken, “Sermon 57” 420-421); de Sermone 2.9.31, NPNF 6, 43 (CCSL 35 120). For Thomas, see ST 1a. q. 114.a. 2, Resp. “Properly speaking, to tempt is to put someone to the test. Now we put someone to the test so as to find out something about him…. Men are said to tempt sometimes just for the sake of knowing, and because of this it is deemed to be a sin to tempt God since then man would be presuming to test God’s power as though he were uncertain about it. Sometimes also men tempt in order to give help, sometimes to do harm. The devil, however, always tempts so as to do harm, by causing men to fall into sin. Thus tempting is said to be his special job, for even if men occasionally tempt in this way, they do so in so far as they are agents of the devil. God, however, is said to tempt to know, in the sense that the one who makes others know is himself said to know. So it is said, [Deut. 13,3] The Lord your God tempts you so that it may be clear whether you love him.” (“Dicendum quod tentare est proprie experimentum sumere de aliquo. Experimentum autem sumitur de aliquo, ut sciatur aliquid circa ipsum….Homo enim tentare dicitur quandoque quidem ut sciat tantum; et propter hoc tentare Deum dicitur esse peccatum, quia homo quasi incertus experiri præsumit Dei virtutem. Quandoque vero tentat ut juvet; quandoque vero, ut noceat. Diabolus autem semper tentat ut noceat, in peccatum præcipitando. Et secundum hoc dicitur proprium officium ejus tentare; nam etsi homo aliquando sic tentet, ho agit inquantum est minister diaboli. Deus autem tentare dicitur ut sciat, eo modo loquendi quo dicitur scire quod facit alios scire. Unde dicitur Deut., Tentat vos Dominus Deus vester, ut palam fiat atrum diligatis eum” [76-77] ).

Gandalf twice calls Frodo’s offer of the Ring a temptation, and Galadriel, on refusing it, says that she has passed the test (FR, I, ii, 71; II, vii, 381). While Gandalf may be speaking figuratively (“don’t do to me what someone who was tempting me would do”), Galadriel has passed a real test; inasmuch as the reward for her success is the reversal of the sentence of the Valar, it seems unlikely that she sees the test as posed by Sauron.

34 “Non enim inuenit aduersus se luctatorem, sed continuo illi se exhibet possessorem, si deserat deus” (Verbraken, “Sermon 57” 420).

35 In the Douai-Rheims translation, “And God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able: but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it” (Vulgate, “fidelis autem Deus qui non patietur vos temptari super id quod potestis sed faciet cum temptatione etiam proventum ut possitis sustinere”).

36 “Fiunt igitur tentationes per satanam non potestate eius sed permissu” (CCSL 35 124).

37 Cf. Sermon 58.11, NPNF 6 287, Verbraken, “Sermon LVIII” 130; de Sermone 2.9.35, NPNF 6 43-45, CCSL 35 125-126.

38 Note the resemblance here between Tolkien’s position and Alfred’s addition to Consolation 4P1, that people will be judged on their intentions and the will to the good.

39 Boethius, admittedly, avoids discussing any point of specifically Christian thought in the Consolation, but that is not because his philosophy is inadequate to the task: witness the theological tractates.

Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae 15, The World Order (1a. 110-19), ed. and trans. M. J. Charlesworth. New York: Blackfriars and McGraw-Hill, 1970.

–––. Summa Theologiae 39, Religion and Worship (2a2ae. 80-91), ed. and trans. Kevin D. O’Rourke, O.P. New York: Blackfriars and McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Alfred, King of Wessex. King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Walter John Sedgefield. Oxford: Clarendon, 1899.

Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero” [olim “At the End of the Quest, Victory”]. In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, eds. Boston/New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Augustine. Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

–––. de Sermone Domini in Monte Libros Duos, ed. Almut Mutzenbecher. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 35. Turnhout: Brepols, 1967. (CCSL 35).

–––. The Enchiridion, trans. J. F. Shaw. St. Augustin: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, III, ed. Philip Schaff. Reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980. (NPNF 3).

–––. Enchiridion ad Laurentium de Fide et Spe et Caritate, ed. E. Evans. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 46. Turnhout: Brepols, 1969. (CCSL 46).

–––. Homilies on the Gospels, trans. R. G. MacMullin. St. Augustin: Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies on the Gospels, Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, VI. Philip Schaff, ed. Reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980. (NPNF 6).

–––. On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993.

–––. [On the Nature of the Good.] The De Natura Boni of Saint Augustine: A Translation with an Introduction and Commentary, trans. A. Anthony Moon. Patristic Studies 88. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1955.

–––. Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, trans. William Findlay. St. Augustin: Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies on the Gospels, Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, VI. Philip Schaff, ed. Reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980. (NPNF 6).

–––. Sermons pour la Pâque, ed. Suzanne Poque. Sources Chrétiennes 116. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1966. (Poque)

Bassham, Gregory and Eric Bronson, eds. The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All. Popular Culture and Philosophy Series, 5. William Irwin, ed. Chicago: Open Court, 2003.

Boethius. The Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, trans. Loeb Classical Library 74. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1973.

Davison, Scott A. “Tolkien and the Nature of Evil.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, eds. Popular Culture and Philosophy Series, 5. William Irwin, ed. Chicago: Open Court, 2003.

Clark Hall, John Richard. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4th Reprint Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Gunton, Colin. “A Far-off Gleam of the Gospel”: Salvation in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.” In Tolkien: A Celebration, ed. Joseph Pearce. London: HarperCollins, 1999; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001.

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Lewis, C. S. “The Dethronement of Power.” In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

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A Definitive Identification of Tolkien’s “Borgil”: An Astronomical and Literary Approach

Kristine Larsen

As the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring passes, it is especially appropriate that academics and fans alike reflect on the singular richness of the mythology encompassed in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. In his role of “sub-creator,” Tolkien crafted a “Secondary World which your mind can enter.” While immersed in this other place, the reader believes in the truth of it “while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed” (MC 132). Tolkien’s unsurpassed ability to invent such a self-contained universe was a reflection of his own widely varied interests. Science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp noted that Tolkien was “one of those people who has literally read everything, and can converse intelligently on just about any subject” (Carter 25).

Among the subjects which interested Tolkien, and thus helped shaped Middle-earth, was astronomy. His daughter, Priscilla, verified that her father “had a general interest in” astronomy (Quiñonez and Raggett 5). Several authors1 have summarized the remarkable breadth of astronomical allusions contained in Tolkien’s work, but a sufficient taste may be found in Tolkien’s published letters. For example, in a 24 April 1944 letter to his son, Christopher, Tolkien recounted how he “struggled with recalcitrant passage in ‘The Ring.’ At this point I require to know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a rabbit!” (Letters 74). In another letter to Christopher dated 14 May 1944, he further explained that his writing was being “hindered by… trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons in the crucial days between Frodo’s flight and the present situation (arrival at Minas Morghul) were doing impossible things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in another” (Letters 80). In a letter to Naomi Mitchison dated 25 September 1954, Tolkien explained the Númenorean story of the rounding of the world by the fact that “So deep was the impression made by ‘astronomy’ on me that I do not think I could deal with or imaginatively conceive a flat world….” (Letters 197).

It is in the context of these and numerous other examples from Tolkien’s own notes and letters that the following passage from the chapter “Three’s Company” in The Fellowship of the Ring should be understood:

The night grew on, and the lights in the valley went out. Pippin fell asleep, pillowed on a green hillock.

Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil, and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt. (FR, I, iii, 91)

Tolkien’s own description of the history of Middle-earth as “a period of the actual Old World of this planet” (Letters 220), coupled with the importance of “real” astronomy in his process of sub-creation lead one to at least seriously consider the possibility that the tableau described was meant to mirror the real night sky. In addition, the chronology originally laid out in The Return of the Shadow and published in Appendix B of The Return of the King specifies that the hobbits’ night with Gildor and the other elves occurred on 24 September (Shadow 160). This allows one to specify with relative certainty the identity of Remmirath, Borgil, and Menelvagor. This paper will briefly summarize the evidence for the undisputed identifications of the first and the third of these, then concentrate on the much-disputed identity of Borgil, utilizing both literary and astronomical analysis to reach a definitive identification.

Appendix E of The Return of the King explains the etymology of Remmirath as from the Quenya “rem ‘mesh’, Q. rembe, + mîr ‘jewel’,” (RK, Appendix E, 393 n. 1) consistent with its nickname of “Netted Stars” found in the quoted passage. There is an apparently universal interpretation of this as the open cluster M 45, commonly known as the “Seven Sisters” or the Pleiades.2 This identification is even cited in the seminal encyclopedia of observational astronomy, Burnham’s Celestial Handbook (III 1868). Tolkien’s description of these stars as having a netted appearance is consistent with another description found in the pre-1937 form of the poem “Kortirion among the Trees”:

They know the season of the brilliant night,
When naked elms entwine in cloudy lace
The Pleiades, and long-armed populars bar the light
Of golden-rondured moons with glorious face.
(Lost Tales I 35)

This is similar to the description in Sadi’s “Rose-Garden,” a thirteenth-century Persian poem: “The ground was as if strewn with colored enamel, and necklaces of Pleiades seemed to hang upon the branches of the trees….” (Burnham III 1864). Likewise, the seventh-century Arab poet Amr al Kais wrote in the Mu allakāt, “It was the hour when the Pleiades appeared in the firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems” (Allen 394). Tolkien’s description may have been influenced by the poetic Arab references, or more likely by European folklore, as the “Finns and Lithuanians likened them to a Sieve with holes in it; and some of the French peasantry to a Mosquito Net….” (Allen 397).

The identity of Menelvagor is likewise undisputed as the constellation Orion. In Appendix E of The Return of the King, Tolkien identifies Telumehtar as Orion, but in a footnote explains that the constellation is “Usually called in Sindarin Menelvagor, Q. Menelmacar” (RK, Appendix E, 391 n. 1). Orion appears in far too many places in the History of Middle-earth volumes and elsewhere to fully recount its mythological significance in Middle-earth in this paper, but one classic example is found in The Silmarillion, where among the stars created by Varda to herald the awakening of the elves was “Menelmacar with his shining belt, that forebodes the Last Battle that shall be at the end of days” (48). Burnham’s Celestial Handbook humorously explains, “that foremost authority on Hobbit-lore, J. R. R. Tolkien, tells us that the constellation was known in the Third Age of Middle-earth as Menelvagor, ‘The Swordsman of the Sky’” (II 1281). The identification of Orion as a swordsman with a jeweled belt cuts across many cultures and it is thus no surprise that Tolkien adopted the common mythological interpretation.

The overall passage accurately reflects the night sky of late September as seen from Oxford, and Tolkien himself may have witnessed such an alignment of the sky on more than one occasion. Jim Manning notes that Orion and the Pleiades “rise a little before midnight (Standard Time) at that time of year—at least in modern day. (Given that the scene is set in a remote age, we must forgive Tolkien the lack of any precessional effect)” (Manning 15). The entire passage is reminiscent of Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”:

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion, sloping slowly to the west.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
(Brunham III 1281)

There now remains one final astronomical item to identify—the red star Borgil, which has been the source of serious disagreement. Given the region of the sky described in the passage, coupled with the color of the object, there are only three candidate objects given serious consideration: two stars—Aldabaran in Taurus and Betelgeuse in Orion—and the planet Mars, which spends some time in the constellation Taurus. Various authors have argued for their particular favorite correspondence, supplying a wide range of evidence in support of their points of view. The remainder of this paper will analyze these arguments from an astronomical and literary perspective, and supply additional evidence as well in an attempt to pinpoint the identity of Borgil.

The etymology of the name has been used by some authors to tie Borgil to one object or another. Jim Allan tentatively translates it as “‘Steadfast-star’???, the star Aldebaran” (73). How he ties the translation and the identification together is not explained. J.E.A. Tyler gives the meaning “red ‘War-star’” and states that it is “probably the planet Mars” (68). Although there is a natural connection between a ‘war-star’ and Mars, the translation itself is suspect. Ian Stone notes that he could not “find Tyler’s reason for translating Bor- as ‘war’. The same root appears in Boromir translated “jewel of war”—and I wonder whether Boromir’s character has any bearing on the matter” (6). Ruth S. Noel translates Borgil as “Star of the Hand,” and identifies it with “probably Aldebaran” (121). Naomi Getty agrees with the identification, and attempts to explain further that “Menelvagor might be confronting some creature concerning possession of the Netted Jewels” (1). Getty’s attempt to tie in Menelvagor with the idea of Borgil as a hand actually weakens her argument that Borgil is Aldebaran. Betelgeuse, the red star commonly seen as one of Orion’s shoulders, takes its name from the Arabic “yad al-jauzā,” “The Hand of al- yad al-jauzā” (Kunitzsch and Smart 45). However, all of the previous translations are rendered moot by the publication of Tolkien’s letters, as one clearly gives the translation “born ‘hot, red’ + gil to borñgil” later morphed to borgil (Letters 426-27). Tolkien’s definitive translation of the name unfortunately does nothing to narrow the field of contenders, since Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, and Mars are all reddish objects.

Mars can be effectively removed from the list of candidates thanks to manuscript 3/9/36 housed in the Marquette collection of Tolkien’s papers. Jorge Quiñonez and Ned Raggett explain that among a list of star names, Carnil (also spelled Karnil) was identified with Mars. This is in keeping with the translation of the root carn- as red (8). Christopher Tolkien notes in his index to Morgoth’s Ring that “Karnil was surely always Mars….” (435) It is possible that Mars had more than one name in Middle-earth (as was true of Orion and the Big Dipper, for example), but further analysis will demonstrate that Mars is far from the best candidate.

Using the erroneous translation “steadfast-star” of Allan, Stone argues that Borgil must be a star rather than a planet because the name is “not likely to refer to a wandering star (although it could conceivably refer to a planet’s steady light)” (7). In an editorial note to the same article, Michael Poxon argues for Mars as Borgil based on the same translation, stating it refers to the fact that it is “steadfast in the sense of not twinkling” (8). The idea that planets do not twinkle is a common astronomical misconception. It is true that planets are less likely to twinkle due to their much larger apparent size than a star, but under conditions of atmospheric turbulence, even planets will twinkle. The likelihood of twinkling is inversely proportional to the apparent angular diameter of the planet. Jupiter’s apparent size varies from 30.5-49.8 seconds of arc, Saturn from 14.7-20.5 seconds of arc, Mars from 3.5-25.1 seconds of arc, and Venus from 9.9-64.5 seconds of arc (Dijon, Dragesco and Néel 188). It is therefore distinctly possible for Mars to twinkle, under adverse seeing conditions when Mars is relatively distant from the Earth in its orbit and displaying a small angular diameter.

Although the reddish tinge of both Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, the two stellar candidates, cannot be disputed, it is instructional to verify that the color of both has been equitably noted. Betelgeuse has been called “The Martial Star” due its tint (Burnham II 1281), and “as if enraged at Orion’s taurine enemy, Betelgeuse glows with a somber red color. The naked-eye observer sees a warm, bright point of light tinged with a slightly roseate or coppery cast” (Motz and Nathanson 85). Aldebaran was named Subruffa in the 1603 edition of Bayer’s Uranometria “in recognition of its ‘rose-red’ tint” (Burnham III 1807). William Roscoe Thayer poetically wrote:

I saw on a minaret’s tip
Aldebaran like a ruby aflame, then leisurely slip
Into the black horizon’s bowl. (Motz and Nathanson 137)

It is therefore demonstrated that color cannot be used to differentiate between Betelgeuse and Aldebaran as candidates for Borgil.

Quiñonez and Raggett argue that “Aldebaran, while plausible, is not as intense as the comparatively brighter Betelgeuse” (7). It is true that Betelgeuse, at a listed visual magnitude of 0.50, is brighter than Aldebaran, at 0.85.3 However, the difference of 0.35 magnitudes corresponds to a difference in apparent brightness of only 38%, similar to the difference between the apparent brightness of Betelgeuse and Rigel, the brightest star in Orion. There is an additional complication in using the human eye to estimate the apparent brightness. It is a well-known fact that red light builds up on the human retina, making red stars appear brighter than other color stars. This “Purkinje effect” can be countered by using “quick glances” to study red stars (Levy 182).

In his recent work on Sindarin, David Salo equates Borgil with Betelgeuse, apparently on the basis of Tolkien’s definitive translation of the name (360). Stone also identifies Borgil as Betelgeuse “with a fair degree of certainty” (7). However, coupling this with his favored translation as ‘steadfast-star,” he notes that there is an apparent contradiction, as Betelgeuse is a variable star—a star whose apparent brightness changes with time. He justifies this identification by stating that the range of brightness is “not great,” and he doubts “the Elves were aware that Betelgeuse was variable” (7). In reality, Betelgeuse’s range of magnitude is given as 0.0-1.3, meaning Betelgeuse is over three times brighter at its maximum as compared to its minimum. By comparison, Aldebaran is also variable, with a range of magnitudes 0.75—0.95, or only a 20% difference in brightness. In terms of the likelihood of elvish eyes noting a change in brightness, mere human eyes can, with training, detect differences in star brightness of 0.1 magnitudes (Levy 174). Therefore Stone’s chain of logic concerning Betelgeuse as a successful candidate for Borgil does not hold up to astronomical scrutiny.

Further evidence which may convincingly decide between Aldebaran and Betelgeuse as Borgil can be found from a careful analysis of the order of events in the quoted passage. From highest in the sky to lowest (i.e. the order of rising into the sky), are Remmirath (the Pleiades), Borgil, and Menelvagor (Orion). Quiñonez and Raggett use this to argue for Betelgeuse, because it is “the first bright star of Orion to appear, ‘hauling’ the rest of the constellation after it” (8). Stone concurs, with the caveat that “Bellatrix rises first, admittedly; but Betelgeuse is brighter and more distinctive. I would therefore identify Borgil as Betelgeuse….” (7). Bellatrix is Orion’s westernmost shoulder, as opposed to Betelgeuse, the easternmost one. At 1.64, it is, indeed, dimmer than Betelgeuse by 1.14 magnitudes, or shining at only 1/3 the brightness. However, Bellatrix is hardly indistinctive. The Arab name of this star, Al Murzim al Najīd, translates as “the Roaring Conqueror, or, according to Hyde, the Conquering Lion heralding his presence by his roar, as if this star were announcing the immediate rising of the more brilliant Rigel, or of the whole constellation” (Allen 313). Therefore Bellatrix best fits Quiñonez and Raggett’s description, but as it is not a red star, it can be immediately disqualified.

A more careful astronomical analysis of Quiñonez and Raggett’s claim can be derived by using the computer planetarium software The Sky to model the actual motions of the stars in question as seen from Oxford.4 Generally speaking, the naked-eye stars of Orion rise in the following morphological order: shield, upraised club, head, Bellatrix, Betelgeuse, belt, Rigel (western foot), sword, and Saiph (eastern foot). The stars which mark his head (the brightest of which is Meissa, magnitude 3.39) rise 7-9 minutes before Bellatrix, which in turn rises 25 minutes before Betelgeuse. Therefore Quiñonez and Raggett’s claim that Betelgeuse “hauls” up Orion is clearly unfounded, as a significant portion of the constellation rises before it.

Quiñonez and Raggett also cite evidence from Stone which they believe disqualifies Aldebaran as Borgil, based on their reading of the passage and the appearance of the mist. Stone states that “Borgil would not need to rise very high to appear above the mist. But Aldebaran is already halfway up the sky by the time Orion rises. It would be well above the mist.” (7). Utilizing The Sky software, it can be shown that this statement is flatly false. At the time Betelgeuse rises, the Pleiades are at an altitude above the horizon of approximately 32.5 degrees, or one-third up in the sky from the horizon. Aldebaran is at a much lower 19.25 degrees at that time. As Manning succinctly states, Borgil “was a red star clearly rising ahead of Orion; Aldebaran is the obvious choice” (19). In other words, Borgil must be separate from the main figure of Orion, as Tolkien describes it as rising before the recognizable shape of the constellation. In light of the evidence provided thus far in this paper, Aldebaran is the only remaining choice.

Although Aldebaran clearly fits the astronomical evidence, further literary analysis may be utilized to bolster the case from another angle. The name of the star derives from the Arabic “al-dabarān, possibly meaning ‘the Follower’… thought to refer to this star’s following the Pleiades across the sky….” (Kunitzsch and Smart 54). Likewise, its “Persian name Paha and the Sogdian title Bahuru both seem to mean ‘The Follower’” (Burnham III 1807). These are clearly in keeping with Aldebaran as Tolkien’s Borgil, following Remmirath into the sky. In addition, although Betelgeuse is perhaps better known among modern readers (not the least reason being the Michael Keaton film Beetlejuice), Aldebaran was certainly famous among classic writers with which Tolkien would have been familiar. For example, Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” (Book 1, Canto 3) contains the following verse:

Now when Aldeboran was mounted hie
Aboue the shynie Cassiopeias chaire,
And all in deadly sleepe did drowned lie,
One knocked at the dore, and in would fare.
(Spencer 35)

Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great” (Part II, Act IV, Scene III) also mentions the star by name:

If Jove, esteeming me too good for earth,
Raise me, to match the fair Aldeboran,
Above the threefold astracism of heaven,
Before I conquer all the triple world.
(Marlowe 171)

More tantalizing still is a reference by Geoffrey Chaucer in “A Treatise on the Astrolabe” (c.1391), Part 1, section 21:

And understond also that alle the sterres sitting within the zodiak of thin Astrelabie ben clepid sterres of the north, for thei arise by northe the est lyne. And all the remenaunt fixed oute of the zodiak ben clepid sterres of the south. But I seie not that thei arisen alle by southe the est lyne; witnesse on Aldeberan and Algomeysa. (Chaucer 667)

It is therefore not surprising that Tolkien would have included Aldebaran among his named stars of Middle-earth, and specifically pointed out its presence in the sky between the Pleiades and Orion.

The case has been successfully made that Aldebaran is the sole astronomical object which truly fits the etymological, astronomical, and literary evidence. However, in the end, one can never know with absolute certainty whether Tolkien meant for Aldebaran to be Borgil (as astronomical inaccuracies do infrequently appear in his work),5 unless further manuscripts are discovered which shed light on his thinking in this matter. This paper, has, however, followed Tolkien’s own suggestion in matters of such mysteries:

I feel it is better not to state everything (and indeed it is more realistic, since in chronicles and accounts of ‘real’ history, many facts that some enquirer would like to know are omitted, and the truth has to be discovered or guessed from such evidence as there is). (Letters 354)

Notes

1 See, for example, Quiñonez and Raggett, Larsen (http://www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/astronomy_of_middle.htm), and Manning.

2 See, for example, Stone, and Quiñonez and Raggett.

3 For historical reasons, the astronomical magnitude scale is such that the lower the number, the brighter the star. The relationship between difference in magnitude and difference in apparent brightness is (2.512)m, where m is the difference in magnitudes.

4 The author wishes to thank Marty Connors for providing The Sky data.

5 An example can be found in “Akallabêth: The Downfall of Númenor,” where Venus (Eärendil) appears in the west at sunrise as a beacon to Elros and his Edain companions (S 260).

Works Cited

Allan, Jim, ed. An Introduction to Elvish. Glenfinnan, Scotland: Bran’s Head Books, 1978.

Allen, Richard H. Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. New York: Dover, 1963.

Burnham, Jr., Robert. Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. New York: Dover, 1978.

Carter, Lin. Tolkien: A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings.” New York: Ballantine Books, 1969.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. A Treatise on the Astrolabe. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Dijon, J., J. Dragesco, and R. Néel. “Planetary Surfaces.” In The Observer’s Guide to Astronomy. Vol. 1, ed. Patrick Martinez, 187-254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Getty, Naomi. “Stargazing in Middle-earth: Stars and Constellations in the Work of Tolkien.” Beyond Bree, April 1984, 1-3.

Kunitzsch, Paul and Tim Smart. Short Guide to Modern Star Names and Their Derivations. Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986.

Larsen, Kristine. “The Astronomy of Middle-earth.” Talk presented at RingCon, November 23, 2002, <http://www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/astronomy_of_middle.htm>.

Levy, David H. The Sky: A User’s Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Manning, Jim. “Elvish Star Lore.” Planetarian, December 2003, 14-22.

Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, ed. John D. Jump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

Motz, Lloyd and Carol Nathanson. The Constellations. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Noel, Ruth S. The Languages of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Quiñonez, Jorge and Ned Raggett. “Nólë i Meneldilo: Lore of the Astronomer.” Vinyar Tengwar 12, July 1990, 5-15.

Salo, David. A Gateway to Sindarin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queen, Book 1, Canto 3. The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stone, Ian J. T. “Will the Real Carnil Go Supernova, Please?” Quettar 21, n.d., 5-8.

Tyler, J.E.A. The Tolkien Companion. New York: Random House, 2000.

Love: “The Gift of Death”

Linda Greenwood

John Caputo explains the function of deconstruction in this manner: “Deconstruction gives old texts new readings, old traditions new twists. It urges that regularizing structures and normalizing institutions—everything from literature to democracy—function more freely, more open-endedly” (18). In the same way, J. R. R. Tolkien gives reality a “new twist” by writing in the form of myth. His mythology deconstructs the world around him, turns it upside down, and presents it in an entirely new light. It becomes a world in which faith without faith becomes faith, hope without hope becomes hope, and myth becomes more real than reality. The catalyst for this freeplay of words and meanings, the element that allows things to turn around and reverse themselves, is love. Love defines the ultimate use of deconstruction, and love allows myth to invade the reality of this world and become fact. In Tolkien’s work, love motivates faith to reach beyond the boundaries of the known, to rekindle hope in the midst of the uncertain. Love turns death into a gift and transforms defeat into victory. This force of love permeates The Lord of the Rings and deconstructs the very world that it surrounds.

C. S. Lewis tackles the nebulous definition of love in The Four Loves, explaining that there are three elements of love: “Need-love,” “Gift-love,” and “Appreciative love.” All of these characteristics interact in the four different types of love. Three of the loves are natural and include Affection, Friendship, and Eros, while the fourth contains traces of the divine and comes from something outside of the natural order. Lewis uses the more archaic definition of Charity to define this transcendental love, or “Divine Gift-love.” In order for Charity to be effective, it must cease to be transcendent and work within the natural order of love. Lewis explains; “the natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were” (133). It is when Charity is allowed to transform the natural loves that the impossible becomes possible and the limited becomes limitless. Death to the finite inclination of natural love allows love to become infinite and its possibilities to become endless.

Jacques Derrida also speaks of love as the fuel for deconstruction. In an interview called “The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable” he explains that the work of deconstruction is performed in two phases. First, it dismantles the structure of a work by overturning the hierarchy that the work supports, thus allowing the work to affirm the opposite. Second, deconstruction reverses the polarities that have been set in place over time. Instead of leaving this reversal alone, however, where the newly constructed hierarchy would repeat the same traditional scheme, deconstruction forms an entirely new concept, which incorporates both the trace of the old and the pattern of the new. Derrida points out that this process “never proceeds without love” (Points 83). It is a love that transforms from within rather than being imposed from without by a set of rules and regulations. “The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim except by inhabiting those structures” (Grammatology 24).

Derrida continues to explore this idea of love in his book The Gift of Death. In his discourse, Derrida looks at “infinite love (the Good as goodness that infinitely forgets itself), sin and salvation, repentance and sacrifice” and the Christian themes that revolve around the gift of death that infinite love (Charity) is able to give. He explains that what saves this discourse from being ideologically charged is that there is no need of “the event of a revelation or the revelation of an event,” but all that is needed is the possibility of such an event occurring, as he says, “the possibility of religion without religion” (49; my emphasis). In other words, the possibility of myth, whether it is Christian or pagan.

Tolkien employs both types of myths. In doing so, he takes elements of ancient Northern literature and pictures of the Christian myth and interweaves them to create something relevant to modern reality. In his essay on “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” T. S. Eliot uses the term “mythic method” as one which in using myth “manipulates a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Selected Prose 177). Tolkien uses this method to employ elements of both Norse and Biblical myth in order that he might show their relevance in a society that Eliot goes on to say is “an immense panorama of futility and anarchy.” The catalyst for Tolkien’s mythic method in The Lord of the Rings is the type of love that motivates deconstruction (in other words, Charity working within the natural order of love). Love allows for the permeable boundaries between master and servant, hero and villain, betrayal and salvation. It overturns the value that is placed on death and immortality. The doom of death becomes the gift of death that brings about life.

Tolkien believed in the human right to create, and explores the implications of this in “On Fairy-Stories.” “Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of the Maker” (MC 145). The art of mythmaking is a gift from God. This gift, like a mirror, reflects its image back on the One who bestows it. Tolkien explains this process in his poem “Mythopoeia,” which he wrote in response to a comment made by C.S. Lewis: “To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’” (TL 97).

man, subcreator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with elves and goblins, though we dared to build

gods and their houses out of dark and light

and sowed the seed of dragons – ’twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed:

We make still by the law in which we’re made. (TL 98–99)

As Tolkien continues on in his poem he compares the invention of speech with that of myth. Humphrey Carpenter paraphrases Tolkien’s argument in his description of a late-night talk Tolkien had with C.S. Lewis. “By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth” (Biography 151). For Tolkien, the human creation of myths imitates the Christian myth. As a result, his own mythology must be influenced by the same love: a love that embraces paradox and ambiguity. His characters are not all black and white and his ending does not embrace a solution that resolves all the conflicts of the story. The conclusion is cloaked in a sadness and uncertainty that reverberates throughout the whole book.

The only absolute in his great epic is hope. Tolkien describes this in his letters as a “Hope without guarantees” (Letters 237). This, in turn, is motivated by a faith that is uncertain about the possibility of a successful outcome. Love is the only element that keeps the two alive. The person of God is not specifically alluded to; only the quality of God (God being love) comes through in the story. In one of his letters Tolkien states his feelings that myth should not explicitly allude to the Christian religion. “For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world” (Letters 144-145). Tolkien’s myth, therefore, is a form of deconstruction due to its open-endedness. It embraces the love that motivates both Christianity and deconstruction, but like deconstruction it is not teaching a specific dogma. Christianity is inspired by a love that is deconstructive, while Tolkien’s myth is an actual deconstruction of the world around him. This is why the end of his book remains ambiguous. It points to something that requires faith, and by not explicitly defining God Tolkien makes the possibility of a belief in the possibility of a God open to everybody. This is the purpose of deconstruction. Jacques Derrida calls this a faith in the tout autre, or the wholly other. This wholly other remains indefinable; it is unable to be truly known, but the quest to know it keeps alive the passion for the impossible. The fact that this wholly other is unable to be pinned down keeps faith active and ideas forever open and ready to be changed.

Tolkien’s interest in myth started out with a love for words, for the way they looked and sounded. His desire to create a mythology for England rose out of his realization that his languages needed a history. Carpenter writes in his biography that: “The idea had its origins in his taste for inventing languages. He had discovered that to carry out such inventions to any degree of complexity he must create for the languages a ‘history’ in which they could develop” (97). Derrida’s work in deconstruction reflects a similar interest. M. Keith Booker says that to Derrida the “sounds of words can be as important as their meanings and style can be as important as their content” (60). Derrida also “believes that meaning is reflected in language” (57). Both men feel that language is needed before meaning or history can be established. In fact, the oft-quoted statement by Derrida in his book Grammatology, “there is nothing outside of the text” (158), can also be applied to the fantasy of Tolkien.

In “Myth, History, & Time,” Lionel Basney explains that Middle-earth “exists only in words, in the chosen details of Tolkien’s narrative, to which nothing can be added” (Isaacs and Zimbardo 1981 17). The essential ingredient, which keeps the reader inside the writer’s imagination, is art. Tolkien describes it as an essential link between the artist’s imagination and his work. This is the element that is able to create a world that cannot be viewed outside of the text, but must take its meaning from within. In order for the Secondary World to work, in order for reality to be successfully deconstructed, the author must be a successful sub-creator. The reader must not be obliged to come to a “willing suspension of disbelief,” but must truly believe all that is related in the actual text, without looking to meaning outside of it. According to Tolkien, the author “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of the world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed” (MC 132).

In order to create a believable world, one that maintains an “inner consistency of reality,” Tolkien deconstructs the reality of this world and creates something fresh. Fantasy carries with it traces of the actual. Myth encompasses reason that has been transformed by imagination. The paradox of good mythology is that reason and imagination must both be present in order to create successful fantasy. Tolkien addresses this need. “Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make” (MC 144).

Derrida also speaks of the power of the imagination to transform. He states that it “has a value whose ambiguity is often recognized. If it is able to corrupt us, it is first because it opens the possibility of progress. It broaches history.” Derrida goes on to say that without it,

pity would neither awaken nor exercise itself within the human order. It activates and excites a potential power. Imagination inaugurates liberty and perfectibility because sensibility, as well as the intellectual reason, filled and satiated by the presence of the perceived, is exhausted by a fixist concept. (Grammatology 182-183)

Imagination breaches the fixed concept of reason, the immoveable truth of a reality which is seen, and opens up its boundaries. Imagination excites pity, it allows love to flow freely and ignite passion and change. The freeplay between imagination and reason allows fantasy to be born. Tolkien explains in “A Secret Vice” that the two together create something potent. “You may say green sun or dead life and set the imagination leaping.” It is this ability to play with words that gives birth to fantasy. “Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it. Who shall say whether the free adjective has created images bizarre and beautiful, or the adjective been freed by strange and beautiful pictures in the mind?” (MC 219).

Words that are excited by the imagination create fantasy. In “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien expresses the fact that fantasy embraces both the “Sub-creative Art in itself, and a quality of strangeness and wonder” that characterizes that which has been created (MC 139). The expression of “strangeness and wonder” found in myth is fueled by the elements of Recovery, Escape and Consolation. All three are created by the imagination and activated by the power of love. Through these three elements reality is deconstructed and looked at anew, the gift of death is explored and seen to bring life, and the end of hope and faith becomes a beginning.

Tolkien defines recovery as a “re-gaining” or restoration of sight that is not clouded by a rigid perception of things. This recovery is a re-focusing of vision that causes the reader to look at himself, the world surrounding him, and religion in a different way. Recovery is a tool by which something that was lost is regained. It allows the reader to see something as if for the very first time. It displaces apathy and incites passion. It awakens what has long been asleep. As Lewis observes, this method has been used in The Lord of the Rings to considerable effect:

The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the ‘veil of familiarity’…If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in the mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. (On Stories 90)

Tolkien dips things in myth by overturning their traditional meanings. The hierarchies that normally apply are dismantled and rebuilt. This is the function of Tolkien’s Recovery, a function that sounds very similar to the description Caputo gives of deconstruction. “The point of deconstruction is to loosen and unlock structures, to let the shock of alterity set them in motion, to allow them to function more freely and inventively, and to produce new forms” (18).

Within Tolkien’s mythic structure there lies a world of paradox and ambiguity. His world is not divided into simple black and white. Good and evil are not always sharply distinguished. Though he does employ the figure of the traditional hero in Aragorn, he disguises his glory and covers him in a cloak of humility. He also creates the characters of Frodo and Gollum, who interchange the roles of traitor and hero. Instead of figures that embody totally good or totally evil traits, he develops the characters of Saruman, Boromir, and Denethor. Even the apparently pure evil figure Sauron was first made without evil. The idyllic landscape of Lothlórien also does not escape untouched; for Galadriel must decide between two very difficult choices, both of which will bring eventual doom upon her land.

The character of Aragorn retains the trace of his noble line, but he is cloaked in the simple clothing of a Ranger, not the costly raiment of a king. The first hints that the humbleness of his disguise contains something much greater are found in Gandalf’s letter to Frodo, which he leaves with the landlord Butterbur.

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king. (FR, I, x, 182)

Aragorn’s actions also belie his kingly role. He does not first enter Minas Tirith as its proud leader and new ruler, but as a healer who ministers to the needs of others. It is an act of charity that motivates the upsetting of Aragorn’s role. He is willing to sacrifice his role as king because of his love for the people. Love allows Aragorn to exchange his position of one who is served to that of one who serves. A true king is a servant to his people.

In Aragorn, Tolkien reverses the role of the noble and humbles the exalted. In Frodo, he exalts the humble. Tolkien interweaves this reversal throughout The Silmarillion in the story of Beren and Lúthien the Elfmaiden. Among the Hobbits it becomes a dominant theme, most poignantly illustrated by Frodo. Tolkien discusses it in one of his letters: “Here we meet, among other things, the first example of motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak” (Letters 149). Elrond speaks these same words when he talks of the nature of the quest and those who may walk it. “‘ This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’” (FR, II, ii, 283). Upon hearing these words of Elrond, Frodo feels compelled to carry the ring and take it to its destruction. With the exception of Bilbo, who is gently refused, and out of all the more typically heroic figures in the room, Frodo alone volunteers. He, who tells Gandalf in the beginning that he does not want to be the one to destroy it: “I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?” (FR, I, ii, 70).

When Frodo does agree to go on this journey he still questions, but accepts, his doom. The words of the weakest in fact become those of the strongest. “‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way’” (FR, II, ii, 284). In Elrond’s answer to him it also becomes apparent that the weak have become strong and the Wise confounded. “‘If I understand aright all that I have heard,’ he said, ‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will. This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they rise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great. Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?’” (FR, II, ii, 284) Thus begins Frodo’s journey. The quest, in truth, is of a physical nature, but as Frodo’s journey unfolds it becomes more spiritual. Tolkien describes it as “primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble” (Letters 237).

This quote applies even more movingly to the character of Gollum. The life of Gollum is inextricably intertwined with that of Frodo. Tolkien’s development of Gollum shows that good and evil are realities each person must confront and come to terms with. Gollum is the physical manifestation of the internal conflict going on within Frodo’s mind. Within the first few pages of their meeting, Sam himself witnesses this connection: “For a moment it appeared to Sam that his master had grown and Gollum had shrunk: a tall stern shadow, a mighty lord who hid his brightness in a grey cloud, and at his feet a little whining dog. Yet the two were in some way akin and not alien” (TT, IV, i, 225). They are different and yet the same. Sam’s haunting question, “I wonder if he thinks he’s the hero or the villain?” (TT, IV, viii, 322), does not apply to Gollum alone. Tolkien triumphs in this psychological portrait. Within the realm of myth he creates a situation that touches the heart of man in this present age where the struggle to do the right thing becomes harder and less clear-cut day by day. The fight within and between Frodo and Gollum is something that today’s reader is familiar with, as it is a struggle common to all mankind. Verlyn Flieger comments on this identification:

Today’s reader of modern narrative, however medieval its spirit, may be reluctant to accept a truly medieval monster—a dragon or a fiend—but he is accustomed to accepting internal conflict, man warring within himself, for that is much of what modern fiction deals with. Frodo monster-queller might not be credible. But Frodo tortured by growing evil in his own nature, fighting his great battle not against darkness without but against darkness within, is believable and compelling. In fighting those dark elements within himself, which Gollum externalizes, Frodo fights the most insidious and powerful monster of all—and loses. (Isaacs and Zimbardo 1981 59)

In his loss, however, Frodo is saved, and Gollum in his triumph is lost.

The pity that Frodo shows Gollum is what brings mercy to himself. In his first meeting with Gollum, Frodo reverses his own desire to kill Gollum because of the fear he feels, a fear he reveals when he first speaks with Gandalf about the Ring. “O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!” (FR, I, ii, 68). The compassion that is first shown by Bilbo, however, becomes the vehicle of Frodo’s salvation. At his first encounter with Gollum, pity overturns Frodo’s initial wish for justice. As Frodo poises his sword at Gollum’s neck to prevent him from doing any more harm, his conversation with Gandalf so many days past comes wafting back to his mind. The prophetic words of Gandalf are the catalyst that stays Frodo’s hand: “Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends” [italics in original](TT, IV, i, 221).

As these remembered words internally ring forth, Frodo lays down his sword. His desire for justice dies and he spares Gollum’s life. What is his motive? It seems to be a pure act of pity. His act is motivated by compassion. He acts with a mercy that demands and expects nothing in return, with the “Divine Gift-love”, which Lewis explains, enables a man “to love what is not naturally lovable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior, and the sneering”(Four Loves 128). Frodo does not kill Gollum even though he realizes Gollum will try to harm them the first chance he gets. Frodo does not intend to take him all the way to Mount Doom; Sam and Frodo take him as a guide solely to keep an eye on him. Tolkien confirms this lack of calculated motive in one of his letters: “Of course, he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for that it may prove useful later—it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence” (Letters 253).

Derrida writes of this same type of giving; a giving that is responsible for forgiving and goes beyond any type of duty. He talks of deconstruction as “pure morality.”

A gesture remains a-moral (it falls short of affirmation of an unlimited, incalculable or uncalculating giving, without any possible reappropriation, by which one must measure the ethnicity or morality of ethics), if it was accomplished out of duty in the sense of ‘duty of restitution,’ out of duty which would come down to the discharge of a debt…Pure morality must exceed all calculation. (qtd. in Caputo 221)

Derrida speaks of a responsibility without duty, in a sense a duty without duty, which goes beyond the ethical duty. He speaks of a morality without morality, one that goes beyond what is expected of morality. This type of action can only occur through love, a love that takes into account the singular at the expense of the multiple.

Frodo’s extraordinary charity to one of his enemies gives him in the end what he cannot give to himself: the success of the quest in spite of his failure. Tolkien explains it this way: “But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents” (Letters 253). Frodo’s mercy to his counterpart, the enemy inside and outside himself whom he must embrace, redeems his failure.

One of the most beautiful and sorrowful aspects about Lord of the Rings is that the love and compassion that Frodo shows for Gollum are gradually reciprocated. As Frodo must increasingly war against the evil that rises up inside of him, Gollum fights against the good that tries to bring back his old Sméagol personality. The turning point for Gollum comes when he reaches out to Frodo with what seems to be a glimmer of love while Frodo and Sam are sleeping.

Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee—but almost the touch was a caress. (TT, IV, viii, 324)

But alas! Sam wakes up, and out of love and concern for his master rebukes Gollum for sneaking around. In response, Gollum retreats back into himself and his plots to regain the Ring. The fleeting moment is past, and we see that Sam’s love for Frodo is then ironically the catalyst for Gollum’s betrayal of them at Cirith Ungol and later at Mount Doom. These betrayals, however, in a paradoxical twist lead to the possible destruction of the Ring. Betrayal becomes victory and victory becomes betrayal.

The only difference in the interplay of meanings between serving and betraying is a lack of imagination. This lack is what allows evil to get the better hand. W.H. Auden argues that Sauron’s “primary weakness is a lack of imagination, for, while Good can imagine what it would be like to be Evil, Evil cannot imagine what it would be like to be Good” (Isaacs and Zimbardo 1976 57). Sauron fails because he is unable to conceive that anyone would refuse to use the power of the Ring. As Gandalf says, “But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning” ( FR, II, ii, 282–83). Saruman fails because he unknowingly allows himself to be manipulated by Sauron and thus is lured into the idea of having absolute power himself by trying to capture the Ring first. As he says to Gandalf, “The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see” ( FR, II, ii, 272). He cannot see past this vision, he can comprehend no other solution than to defeat Sauron by becoming like him. This lack of vision leads to his downfall. The characters who cannot conceive of a different way, who cannot reach for the impossible and have hope in its possibilities, end up losing the battle within themselves. Without the power of love fueling their imagination they remain stuck in a world with limits. The freeplay of meanings that love allows, the possibilities of delimiting the boundaries and turning betrayal into something positive, is not open to them.

Boromir is a touching example of this fact. He, unlike Frodo, is a traditional heroic figure. But he is the hero who is not a hero, the only one of the fellowship who cannot see past his own interests. He has a passion for the probable and not the impossible quest. His sight is restricted to the boundaries of what his father has set for him, to be a great warrior and leader of men. Unlike Aragorn, he is unable to humble himself and become a servant for the good of the people who serve his father in Minas Tirith. Boromir feels the Ring should come to him in order that, with its power, he might protect and save Gondor against Sauron. He chafes under the leadership of Aragorn and is unable to see that only through service is true mastery (over oneself) achieved. Humility, not pride, achieves victory. In his desire to take the Ring and master it for the good, his thoughts and inclinations become evil. “It is by our own folly that the Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate Fool! Running willfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring it is the men of Númenor, and not Halflings” (FR, II, x, 415).

At this point the stronger shows himself to be the weaker and the weaker stronger. The hero becomes the villain and the little man the hero. The “fool” is seen to be the wiser one, and the more worldly wise is the foolish. Caputo explains that the “merit” of deconstruction “is to put us on the alert to the way things can pass into their opposite, the way they can turn around and reverse themselves, by a secret operation, so that they produce effects diametrically opposed to what they intend” (220). Boromir is incapable of crossing the boundaries of the words “fool” and “weak” and seeing truths in their opposites. This lack of insight can only end in his death, for it is only by his death that he is saved. After his outburst against Frodo, Boromir realizes that he has acted in madness, but the harm is done. Tolkien, however, allows him to redeem his actions by dying valiantly in the act of defending Merry and Pippin from the Orcs. The hero who is not a hero becomes a hero before his death—a gift of death to the very people (the Halflings) he had threatened moments before.

The ending of his father Denethor, however, is not so redemptive. The same pride that he instills in his son, Boromir, blinds his own vision. Ironically, this blindness is caused by his ability to see. He, like Saruman, uses the palantír to see what is happening outside of Minas Tirith. However, the knowledge that he obtains through his sight is made up of things the enemy allows him to see—and thus, because of his despair at the darkness of what he deems to be the future, Denethor walks to his own destruction. His despair has been brought on by his inability to see the possible future and his inability to hold onto hope even when it looks as if there is no hope. Unlike Boromir, he does not redeem his past failures in an unselfish act of sacrifice; instead he tries to take the life of his son Faramir and thus feeds the pride and despair that have been growing in him. Denethor stands in the houses of the dead and defiantly guards the body of the feverish Faramir, who is too ill to know that he lies on a funeral pyre, about to be sacrificed. He tells Gandalf that there is no reason to live and that battle is in vain. He believes that the West has failed and that Gandalf’s “hope is but ignorance” (RK, V, vii, 129). Denethor would rather take his life and that of his son (who has already been badly wounded by the enemy) with an act of his own authority than become a slave to the Enemy. The natural love he has for his son is fettered by a “Need-love” that remains inwardly focused and refuses to die in order that the unselfish vision of charity might seize hold.

The evil in him cannot imagine how the good in him can triumph, and so without vision, without imagination that sees the reversibility of the irreversible, Denethor perishes. The irony of this situation is that the black sails, which Denethor sees in the palantír, the sails that drive him to do this desperate deed, bring about their victory. The colors of the enemy have been captured and used by Aragorn to bring reinforcements to the allies in the battle raging around Minas Tirith. Aragorn has turned a symbol of evil into that of blessing, but it is a blessing that brings a curse upon the life of Denethor.

Those who continue to fight, who continue to press on even when they have no more faith in their success, reap the benefits of their passion and vision. Derrida speaks of this as a faith that “must never be a certainty but passion, the highest passion that, locked as it is in the secret of non-knowledge, still has the heart to push ahead” (qtd. in Caputo 59). Caputo expounds on this definition and describes deconstruction as a “passion for the impossible, for the incoming of something surprising. Deconstruction is trying to inflame the passion of faith, to incite a riot, to drive us mad with passion” (59). This passion, this imagination, this deconstructive ability to see the impossible as possible, is fueled by a love that exceeds all bounds!

In The Return of the King, this passion to push on even when all hope is lost is shown in Aragorn’s march to Mordor. In his words, they have “come now to the very brink, where hope and despair are akin” (RK, VI, ix,156). In this sense, they have come to the same place to which Frodo ultimately comes on his journey to Mount Doom. Tolkien explains this paradox as “defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged” (MC 18). They give with no thought of getting in return; they do their duty with no expectation of any reward. They give a gift that has no recompense; they give the gift of their own deaths. As Gandalf says to Aragorn and the other lords in council with them:

“We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dûr be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless—as we surely shall, if we sit here—and know as we die that no new age shall be.” (TT, VI, ix, 156)

The men who fight do so knowing that the fight is not the true fight. Their purpose for going is to distract Sauron so that his Eye might be drawn away from his true peril. These men go beyond their duty by accepting a task that seems to be without hope. Because of this hopeless and yet hopeful position, Aragorn allows each man to choose for himself what his course of action will be. “Nonetheless I do not yet claim to command any man. Let others choose as they will” (RK, VI, ix, 156). The men who choose this course of action go beyond what is their traditional responsibility in order to achieve what seems to be an irresponsible choice. They place all their lives in jeopardy in order to protect one hobbit, Frodo. It is here that Tolkien reveals his strong affinity for Norse mythology. He reintroduces “the theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early Northern literature” (MC 20), from his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In Norse mythology, men fought alongside the gods against the monsters and outer darkness. It was a fight on the side of the good, however, that they were always doomed to lose. Tolkien describes it as “a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage” (MC 26), a hope without hope.

Even the seemingly perfect world of Lothlórien is presented with the possibility of corruption and defilement and the same inevitable defeat. Evil comes in the form of the Ring, and it brings its temptation of power. As Tolkien has stated, the Elves are not “wholly good or in the right.” They refuse the summons from the Eldar to come home to the Blessed Realm and choose to stay in Middle-earth: “to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it, and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be ‘artists’” (Letters 197).

Frodo presents Galadriel with the temptation of the Ring. She realizes that as things stand her land will be destroyed. If Frodo fails, Lothlórien will be revealed to the enemy, and if he succeeds, the change they have fought against so long will come upon Lothlórien: the power of the Elves will diminish and the land itself will fade. Frodo offers her a third choice: to take the Ring of Power and use it to defeat Sauron. In this moment, Galadriel faces the same choice Saruman has already made. She has an opportunity to accept or reject the chance of absolute power.

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” (FR, II, vii, 381)

As Galadriel contemplates the implications of taking the Ring, her imagination enables her to see how an initially positive motive could turn into its opposite; her imagination allows her to look beyond this deconstructive overturning and accept the fate of her land. “‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel’” (FR, II, vii, 381). Goodness, which is motivated by love, is the ability to step outside oneself, to have a vision of what will benefit the world to come, and to seek after it without any thought of the self. The Elves, who have the most to lose in the outcome of this war, reject the temptation to change the course of events in order to elevate themselves. They embrace the unknown with a faith without faith, a hope without hope, and allow themselves to diminish without any future in the age to come.

In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey addresses the overwhelming pessimism that seems to pervade this epic tale: “The whole history of Middle-earth seems to show that good is attained only at vast expense while evil recuperates almost at will” (148). Shippey brings up the fact that Tolkien wanted to remind the world of the “theory of courage,” a theory that “asks more of people than Christianity does, for it offers them no heaven, no salvation, no reward for virtue except the sombre satisfaction of having done right” (150). In his recovery process, Tolkien brings in elements of Northern courage and Christian charity, in order that the world might see these things anew. The reader must interact with the characters and, in doing so, is able to get a glimpse of the virtue of a love that fuels the imagination, of courage without hope.

Tolkien concludes his theory of fairy-stories by considering the elements of Escape and Consolation. These functions are closely connected. For Tolkien, Escape involves a refusal to accept things the way they are. In fact, his theory of Escape underlies his whole deconstructive technique. For Tolkien, fantasy and reality are reversed. He refuses to accept the popular view that the materialism of the Primary World should be any more real than the imagined reality of his secondary world. “The notion that motor-cars are more ‘alive’ than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more ‘real’ than, say, horses is pathetically absurd” (MC 149).

For Tolkien, fantasy is a flight to, rather than from, reality. Fantasy is a response to the new longings that are stirred and awakened through the Recovery process that allows the reader to see things more clearly. Lewis notes that for the reader of fantasy, “It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment), with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth” (On Stories 38). Derrida speaks of this longing in an interview entitled “There Is No One Narcissism,” as a type of mourning, a desire for something that has been lost due to a failure of memory. Writing is a way of keeping memory, of remembering truth. Derrida later goes on to say that the experience of forgetting, the experience that is forgotten and mourned, is similar to a cinder, an illustration of what he means to convey with the word trace, “namely, something that remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without a remainder.” He claims that the experience of the trace, the experience of these cinders, “is also the possibility of the relation to the other, of the gift, of affirmation, of benediction, of prayer…” (Points 208-209)

Tolkien feels that fantasy speaks to this mourning; that it contains traces of a God who meant His people to be in eternal union with Him. This longing for immortality that was originally bestowed upon humanity is seen in the desire to escape from death. Tolkien believes that fantasy satisfies the “oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape; the Escape from Death” (MC 153). Tolkien overturns this desire by presenting death as a gift for which the Elves would give their immortality in exchange. Throughout both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings he interweaves the two themes of death and immortality, constantly causing the meaning of each to overflow across the boundaries of the other. Death is a gift that relieves the burden of immortality. Tolkien explains this in a letter: “The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete” (Letters 246).

In his myth the “gift of death” is given to Men. Their rejection of this “divine gift,” their desire to escape from death, ensnares them in the power of Sauron. In The Lord of the Rings, the effect of that power can be seen in the Ringwraiths, whose lives Sauron prolongs at the cost of their physical bodies and souls. They are controlled by the nine rings, which Sauron made to entrap men in their pride and lust for immortality. The Ring has also caused Gollum to live far beyond his years, and through these years the evil of the Ring has taken over his mind until he cannot live without it. Even Bilbo is affected by the power of the Ring. He continues to get older but does not age physically; instead his spirit becomes tired and worn, as if stretched out beyond its years: “Why I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread” (FR, I, i, 41). Gifts that belong to immortal beings cannot be given to men without cost to the soul.

The Elves are endowed with the “gift” of immortality, which they themselves see as a type of curse. Tolkien discusses their doom as such:

The doom of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when ‘slain’, but returning—and yet, when the Followers come, to teach them, and make way for them, to ‘fade’ as the Followers grow and absorb the life from which both proceed. The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world …. a grief and envy to the immortal Elves. (Letters 147)

The rise of man leads to the diminishment of the Elves. As the Fourth Age, the Age of Men, begins, the Elves gradually leave Middle-earth to go back West, over the sea, from whence they came. Humans, though mortal, gain the world of Middle-earth. Elves, though immortal, must leave the land they love, while still alive.

The issue of death becomes more complicated when a marriage occurs between Elves and Men. This union takes place three times in the history of Tolkien’s mythology. The first occurs between Beren and Lúthien and is the focal point of Tolkien’s work The Silmarillion. Lúthien is an Elf with whom Beren falls in love. Her father Thingol tells him that the hand of Lúthien cannot be his until he brings back a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth (the original master of Sauron). The quest, although successful, leads to the death of Beren. Lúthien goes to the halls of Mandos where Beren’s spirit dwells and she begs for his life. Mandos gives her a choice between her immortality and the sacrifice of this immortality to win back the life of the mortal Beren. “But the other choice was this: that she might return to Middle-earth, and take with her Beren, there to dwell again, but without certitude of life or joy. Then she would become mortal, and subject to a second death, even as he.…This doom she chose…” (S 187). In a sense, the “doom” of mortality becomes the “gift” of death in her marriage pact with her husband, Beren. The curse reverses itself into blessing.

The second union occurs between Tuor and Idril Celebrindal. Tuor, alone of all mortal men, is allowed to live with his wife in immortality among the elder race in the West across the sea. They leave behind their son, Eärendil, who marries the granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, Elwing. To Eärendil and Elwing are born Elrond and Elros, and from the two brothers both blessing and sorrow flow into the race of man. The brothers are given the choice to become mortal or immortal, man or elf. Elrond chooses to be immortal, and his brother chooses to accept the gift of death.

The third marriage of Elves and men occurs in the union of Aragorn and Arwen. Tolkien considers this union as essential to his story and speaks of its importance in his letters: “Here I am only concerned with Death as a part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees. That is why I regard the tale of Arwen and Aragorn as the most important of the Appendices” (Letters 237). In their story Tolkien explains his mythical portrayal of the gift of death, and the dual feelings of joy and sorrow that accompany this “gift.” It involves an element of sacrifice, a sacrifice that does not belong solely to the lives of Aragorn and Arwen, but also to those who give their lives as a gift for the salvation of others. Tolkien’s deconstruction of reality, in the form of myth, is a call to love one another enough to be willing to give the gift of death without thought of return.

Only love can have enough imagination to give of itself unconditionally. Evil is unable to comprehend this action, because evil is too bent on its own desires. In his recent book, The Gift of Death, Derrida speaks of love’s ability to give this gift:

Only infinite love can renounce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other. This gift of infinite love comes from someone and is addressed to someone; responsibility demands irreplaceable singularity. Yet only death or rather the apprehension of death can give this irreplaceability and it is only on the basis of it that one can speak of a responsible subject, of the soul as conscience of self, of myself, etc. (51)

Only as one approaches death, or the possibility of death, does one come to a true understanding of who he is and of what makes him irreplaceable. At that moment of understanding, the willingness to give up life for the sake of someone else becomes truly selfless. At this point a person has a true understanding of what he is sacrificing. Death is given as life for another, and death occurs at the point when the person is most alive.

Boromir is able to give this gift of death because of his experience with Frodo. The sacrifice that Arwen makes for Aragorn, however, is even more poignant because she must give up her life while still living. Infinite love becomes finite for the love of another. She must live with the knowledge that she has given up immortality for the unknown and that she has forever sundered herself from her family and kin. Tolkien describes her losses thus: “But Arwen became as a mortal woman and yet it was not her lot to die until all that she had gained was lost” (RK, Appendix A, 343).

Her story illustrates the stark condition in Luke 14:26: “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and his wife and children and brothers and sister, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” This is one of the spiritual issues of death that Tolkien writes about in his earlier letter. Arwen’s love for Aragorn mirrors the love one must have for God. This love must transcend man’s duty to those he loves here on earth for his absolute duty toward God. Derrida explains this type of love in his exploration of the story of Abraham and Isaac.

If I put to death or grant death to what I hate it is not a sacrifice. I must sacrifice what I love. I must come to hate what I love, in the same moment, at the instant of granting death. I must hate and betray my own, that is to say offer them the gift of death by means of sacrifice, not insofar as I hate them, that would be too easy, but insofar as I love them. I must hate them insofar as I love them. Hate wouldn’t be hate if it only hated the hateful, that would be too easy. It must hate and betray what is most lovable. Hate cannot be hate, it can only be the sacrifice of love to love. It is not a matter of hating, betraying by one’s breach of trust, or offering the gift of death to what one doesn’t love. (Gift of Death 64)

True sacrifice occurs when one is willing to put to death what one loves. In this sense “hate” becomes an extension of a greater understanding of what love involves.

Tolkien overturns the biblical mandate that calls men to a greater love for God by hating their mother and father, in order to make the story more poignant. He deconstructs this image so that it can be seen anew. Instead of giving up mortality for immortality, Arwen does the exact opposite. As with Lúthien, Arwen surrenders immortality and takes on mortality as a gift to Aragorn. In this case, however, the blessing given in love to Aragorn becomes a curse to Arwen. Hence her great sorrow in the end. She speaks at the deathbed of Aragorn and shares her new knowledge about mortal men: “As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive” (RK, Appendix A, 344). Aragorn, however, gladly receives his “gift,” choosing to die early and in peace, at the height of his reign: “and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift. Now, therefore, I will sleep” (343). For Aragorn death has become a gift instead of the doom his line had perceived it as in the past. For Arwen, the mortality that her line had viewed as a blessing to man becomes a curse: “She was not yet weary of her days, and thus she tasted the bitterness of the mortality that she had taken upon her” (343). Arwen dies alone in the land of Lórien, from which her relatives had long since passed away. There she dies faded and forgotten, unlike Aragorn who dies in grace and peace with the beauty and “valour of his manhood” still upon him (343). The roles of Elf and Man, in a sense, become reversed, and the story of the deaths of Arwen and Aragorn is one of both sorrow and joy.

Sorrow and joy are both a necessary part of what Tolkien calls the Consolation of the Happy Ending or the Eucatastrophe. This is the last function of fairy-tales of which Tolkien speaks in his essay:

In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy… (MC 153)

Tolkien states before this explanation that “the eucatastrophic tale” is the “highest function” of the fairy-tale. He uses myth to deconstruct the reality of the Christian myth and show it in a new light. Tolkien believed that the gospel story was myth and fact, a paradox that invaded the real world: “But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history” (MC 156). Lewis speaks of this idea in “Myth Became Fact”: “Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history” (Dock 66). Love is the power behind the Incarnation; love is the reason God took on flesh and became both God and man, both creator and servant, who became sin in the midst of his perfection and holiness. Love is able to embrace these apparent opposites, and love is the vehicle Tolkien uses to give fleeting glimpses of joy that go beyond the boundaries of this world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the outcome of Frodo’s quest.

Frodo’s success lies not in his ability to give up the Ring in the heart of Mount Doom, but in his capacity to show love and mercy, and in his perseverance in carrying out his quest even when he has no hope. Initially, he takes the responsibility of the journey while doubting its possible success, but he takes it nonetheless. He then continues to go on even when his faith in his journey’s outcome has gone. “‘Look here, Sam dear lad,’ said Frodo: ‘I am tired, weary, I haven’t a hope left. But I have to go on trying to get to the Mountain, as long as I can move’” (RK, VI, ii, 195). This faith without faith is in a sense, faith. It is the strength to push on even when the Valley of the Shadow of Death is at its darkest. “‘I am naked in the dark Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades’” (RK, VI, iii, 215). Caputo talks about this type of faith:

Faith without faith is precisely such an impossible, a translation of the impossible and impassible, forced to make its way in the midst of an aporia; faith without faith is precisely – faith. Otherwise it is not a battle, not through a glass darkly, but a high road assured of success. (63)

Frodo’s road is anything but a “high road of success,” and he is traveling a path that is doomed to fail. Frodo’s only hope is to move onward toward inevitable failure. Tolkien himself refers to the assurance of this failure: “The Quest, therefore, was bound to fail as a piece of world-plan, and also was bound to end in disaster as the story of Frodo’s development to the ‘noble’, his sanctification. Fail it would and did as far as Frodo considered alone was concerned” (Letters 234).

In fact, the only way Frodo is able to move forward to Mount Doom is through the endurance of Sam. “‘All right Sam,’ said Frodo. ‘Lead me! As long as you’ve got any hope left. Mine is gone’” (RK VI ii 206). Patrick Grant points out the importance of Sam’s love for Frodo. “The love of Sam for Frodo is the most consistent, and the most heroic, of all such relationships in the trilogy, and in it the ancillary theme that love subsumes faith and hope becomes plain” (Isaacs and Zimbardo 1981103). As they continue onward, Frodo’s strength gradually fails and Sam must carry him on his back. Once again, roles become reversed. The servant becomes the master, and Frodo is forced to submit to the strength of Sam in order to press on.

Jane Chance writes: “Sam exemplifies the ideal Christian servant to his master.” He provides not only for Frodo’s physical needs, but also for his spiritual hopelessness: “But spiritually Sam serves Frodo through the moral character that reveals him to be, as the most insignificant Hobbit and character in the epic, the most heroic” (Art 179-180). Not only does his love carry Frodo to the end of the quest, it also stays his hand in pity for the detestable Gollum. His “failure” to protect his master out of empathy allows for the “victory” at the end of this scene. It also overturns the harm he did while “protecting” his master in the middle of their journey when he finds Gollum caressing Frodo. Love is able to embrace a multitude of meanings.

At the end of this section, it is hard to keep any of the characters in a rigid role. The boundaries of the term master, servant, hero, and enemy become permeable with an interchange of meanings among all of them. Frodo becomes the enemy when he succumbs to the power of the Ring and fails in his task. “‘I have come’, he said, ‘but I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’” (RK, VI, iii, 924). The enraged Gollum attacks Frodo and bites off his invisible finger. The villain becomes the hero as he gloats over his victory and then falls to his demise. Chance writes of the irony of this interplay of roles:

When Frodo betrays himself enough to keep the Ring at the last moment, Gollum bites off both Ring and finger only to fall into the furnace of Mount Doom, the most ignominious “servant” finally achieving the coveted role of “Lord of the Rings.” The least dangerous adversary finally fells the most dangerous—Sauron. (Art 180)

The paradox, which Gandalf suggests earlier in the book—“a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend” (RK, V, iv, 89)—is revealed to be prophetic. Love and mercy have been the ultimate victors, and in them Frodo and Sam have proven themselves to be triumphant. Frodo expresses forgiveness for Gollum even as he holds his maimed and bleeding hand, awaiting certain destruction from the volcanic belching of Mount Doom. “But do you remember Gandalf’s words: Even Gollum may have something yet to do? But, for him Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring. The Quest would have been vain, even at the bitter end. So let us forgive him!” (RK, VI, iii, 225). The evil, which causes Frodo to fail, which causes Sméagol to fall to his evil counterpart Gollum, inadvertently causes itself to be destroyed. Evil in the end must fall by the very structure by which it is built. Sauron is destroyed with the very power that he places in the Ring. This is the hope that Tolkien infuses into his story; love has the power to overturn all structures and to bring good out of all situations.

The end, however, is not the end. After the Ring is destroyed, Frodo returns to visibility: “‘Well this is the end, Sam Gamgee,’ said a voice by his side. And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain, nor madness, nor any fear” (RK, VI, iii, 224). Frodo has come to the end of himself, his spiritual battle is over and he can begin life anew. Their salvation is at hand in the form of Gwaihir and the other eagles, and a new beginning—in fact, a new age—is on the horizon.

Tolkien, however, does not allow the story to end here. His epic tale does not end in victory, nor does it end in the assumption of kingship by Aragorn. Tolkien embraces the complex and paradoxical reality of this world by ending on a mood of sadness, loss and uncertainty. Gandalf commissions Aragorn with the task of bringing about the new age. “The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what may be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away; and the power of the Three Rings also is ended” (RK, VI, v, 249). The time of the Elves is coming to a close and the rule of Men must now take precedence. The Doom of Galadriel will soon be fulfilled.

This, however, is not the only sadness revealed in the conclusion. There is the bitter parting of Arwen from her father Elrond: “None saw her last meeting with Elrond her father, for they went up into the hills and spoke long together, and bitter was their parting that should endure beyond the ends of the world” (RK, VI, vi, 256). The most stirring element to Tolkien’s ending, however, and the most relevant point that pertains to the reality of this world, is the presence of evil. The victory over Sauron does not eradicate evil. The Hobbits do not have long to wait for a re-introduction of evil. At The Prancing Pony, Butterbur tells them that it is not safe to go outside alone at night, and that business has not been good because no one seems to be traveling. After they leave the inn Gandalf hints to them that they will find trouble in the Shire.

Even more disturbing is the loss that Frodo experiences. The wound in his shoulder continues to haunt him on the anniversary of his injury, and the memory brings darkness and despair. “Alas! There are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,” said Gandalf. “I fear it may be so with mine,” said Frodo. “There is no real going back” ( RK, VI, vii, 268). The hero who has suffered the most loss and the most pain is unable to find peace even in his homeland. While the other members of the company reap the benefits of gratitude and acclaim, Frodo is all but forgotten: “Frodo dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country. Few people knew or wanted to know about his deeds and adventures…” (RK, VI, ix, 305). His hero role is once again overturned.

As part of her sacrifice, as part of her choice of the gift of death, Arwen gives Frodo the passage into the West that she has forsaken for mortality on Middle-earth. Tolkien explains this journey in one of his letters. “Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over the Sea to heal him – if that could be done, before he died. He would eventually have to ‘pass away’: no mortal could, or can, abide forever on the earth, or within Time” (Letters 328). Tolkien leaves his conclusion without true closure. Frodo goes off to a kind of Otherworld where dwell the immortal. He is not, however, going to his true resting place. His future is still cloaked in mystery, and although he has hope, it is a hope deferred. The land he sets out for is a place he cannot truly belong to or rest in; a place he cannot truly go to. Derrida speaks of the same journey: “It is only when you give yourself to, surrender to, and set out for the wholly other, for the impossible, only when you go where you cannot go that you are really on the move” (qtd. in Caputo 50). The search for the “wholly other,” for God, can never be fully realized here on earth. That is the point of faith. It is a faith in the hope of glory, a glory that gives glimpses but can only give them in passing, a glory that can be seen not yet face to face but only in a mirror darkly. This faith does not stay in one place, but keeps moving and growing, spurred on by the power of love, a love that realizes that perfection cannot be realized here on earth, but resides in a dimension not discernible to the human eye.

Tolkien believes that “there is no true end to any fairy tale,” and so he ends his myth in the backyard of the real world. The last lines of the book are given to Sam: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said” (RK, VI, ix, 311). The far-off glimpse of heaven ends in a glimpse of the earth. What Tolkien has done, however, is to give a hint of perfection, a glimpse of the ultimate myth. Tolkien deconstructs reality in order to reveal the myth. Love allows myth and reality to stand side by side in harmony.

Love defines the ultimate passion of deconstruction and is the ultimate source of the Christian myth. The highest form of love is Divine Gift-love, and Tolkien uses the structure of myth to show the deconstructive qualities of this love that puts to death a more natural love that seeks to set limits. Tolkien is able to take the real and transform it into something that produces the glory and awe of the spiritual. It is a gift that started in his love for language and flowered into a history through which his languages could be nourished and grow. His parable Leaf by Niggle illustrates how myth should work when motivated by love. Niggle is an artist who begins painting just a leaf because he has a talent for creating leaves. He spends all of his time on earth trying to finish a tree full of the leaves for which he had such a talent. He is unable, however, to finish the painting to his liking before he dies. In the afterlife, he comes upon his tree finished and transformed into the very thing he had imagined in his mind. The reality of his dream on earth is deconstructed by the love of the Creator and made into something even more beautiful that goes beyond what was ever imagined. His death becomes a gift by which he receives abundant life and his ultimate dream.

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt and guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.

‘It’s a gift!’ he said. (TL 88)

Works Cited

Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” In Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. 40-61.

Basney, Lionel. “Myth, History, & Time.” In Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A Zimbardo. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. 8-18.

Booker, M. Keith. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. New York: Longman, 1996.

Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Chance, Jane. Tolkien’s Art. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

–––. “The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable.” Points…, ed. Elizabeth Weber. California: Stanford University Press, 1995. 78-88.

–––. “There is No One Narcissism.” Points… , ed. Elizabeth Weber. California: Stanford University Press, 1995. 196-215.

–––. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 175-178

Flieger, Verlyn. “Frodo & Aragorn.” In Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Neil D Isaacs and Rose A Zimbardo. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. 40-61.

Grant, Patrick. “Archetype & Word.” In Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Neil D. Isaacs & Rose A Zimbardo. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1981. 87-105.

Lewis, C.S. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970. 63-67.

–––. On Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982.

–––. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Inc. 1988.

Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth

Michael J. Brisbois

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given its own inside affairs for endless years.” (TT, III, iv, 66)

This is how Pippin would try to describe his first impression of Treebeard’s eyes, long after the War of the Ring ended. To many readers, Tolkien’s novel creates a sense of an “enormous well” at work beneath the text. This effect is related to two elements of the novel: Tolkien’s use of medieval myth and legend and the natural world of Middle-earth. Many scholars have examined the medieval sources of Tolkien’s work, and this aspect of the novel has been thoroughly discussed since the publication of the novel. However, the natural world of Middle-earth has not. Nature in The Lord of the Rings serves as the basic element of the imaginary world the reader perceives. The representation of nature in The Lord of the Rings is at once comforting in its familiarity and Fantastic in its personifications.

In order to begin an analysis of Middle-earth’s natural world, we will draw a deliberate and arbitrary distinction between nature and the constructs of culture. This is a very difficult distinction to make in Middle-earth. One cannot simply refer to the cultural constructs of Men,1 because of the presence of Dwarves, Elves, Ents and Orcs, nor merely bipedal species, since the Great Eagles of Misty Mountain possess culture. The complex relationship between Elves and forests or Dwarves and mountains makes defining nature even more complex. Sam knowingly comments about the Elves of Lothlórien: “they seem to belong here, more even than Hobbits do in the Shire. Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say, if you take my meaning” (FR, II, vii, 376). The subtle magic that infuses the elves is intertwined with the land they live in, suggesting they do not make clear distinctions between culture and nature. In order to come to terms with nature in Middle-earth, we must understand it as a third space, an artificial creation of imagination and not a direct mimesis of our real or constructed nature. As readers explore the world of Middle-earth through the journey of the four hobbits, they move steadily from the real to the imaginary, a transition critical to the function of fantasy and imaginary nature.

The fundamental (and obvious) problem with the nature of Middle-earth is that it is not real. Furthermore, we are only able to draw examples from a limited range of material. In humanity’s normal relationship with nature, we at least are able to rely on a level of tactile response and phenomenological study. We can sense and interact with nature. We can perceive cause and effect. According to Ernest Gellner, in our standard relationship with nature we can understand that it is apart from culture in one of five ways: “1) The complexity of human-social material; 2) the fact that meaning enters into human conduct in the way in which it is absent in nature…; 3) the feedback character of social processes; 4) the fact that in culture, unlike nature, acquired characteristics are transmitted; and 5) the Joker card of free will and, if it obtains, inherent unpredictability” (Gellner 14-15).

Through this relationship with real nature, we develop a sense of what is human and what is not. However, Middle-earth is not a world in the same way as ours. It is a fabrication of the mind and can only be accessed through the use of imagination. The maps drawn for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are similar to those of Europe, but the landscapes and details are not entirely consistent with the actual continent. Middle-earth is a small section of what is presumably an entire world, similar to ours in size. This is certainly suggested by Tolkien’s cryptic references to the South and the East, home of the Easterlings, Haradrim, Southrons, and Wainriders (TT, VI, iv, 269; TT, VI, v, 287; RK Appendix A, 329).

Middle-earth is enough like our world that it is easily understood. It has a sun and a moon; gravity appears to work in the same manner; if one is cut, one bleeds; and a cedar tree looks like a cedar tree. Tolkien himself said in an interview: “If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the Earth as it is, particularly the natural earth” (Fonstad ix). One student of C. S. Lewis recalled that Tolkien had a thorough and impressive knowledge of natural history and gardening lore (Sayer 1–4). The author’s love of nature informs the descriptions of Middle-earth. These details create a complex relationship between the reader and the imaginary world. While we can perceive nature as being distinct in the real world because of our ability to draw distinction from it, Middle-earth is a more complex world. What occurs is a development of understanding in the reader. In order to maintain verisimilitude, the illusion of reality that allows for Primary Belief, Middle-earth is based upon a realistic depiction of nature. This realistic base allows for the reader’s transition from the real to the imaginary.

By way of demonstrating the essential familiarity of nature, let us examine two descriptions of landscape, first: “In the Weald, autumn approached, breaking up the green monotony of summer, touching the parks with the gray bloom of mist, the beech trees with russet, the oak trees with gold. Upon the heights, battalions of black pines witnessed the change, themselves unchangeable. Either country was spanned by a cloudless sky…” (Forster 148). And secondly: “…in the fine weather he forgot his troubles for a while. The Shire had seldom seen so fair a summer, or so rich an autumn: the trees were laden with apples, honey was dripping in the combs and the corn was tall and full” (FR, I, iii, 76).

Both passages deal with the changing of summer to autumn. The first quote if from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Removed from its context, there is little to distinguish it from the second quotation, from The Lord of the Rings. It is certainly intentional that a hobbit would focus upon crops of food, as they are more concerned with feasting and living off the land than the sophisticated Europeans of Forster’s work, but if we replaced “Weald” with “Shire” or vice versa, there would be no way for the reader to judge if either description is realistic or fantastic. There is an important difference though. Forester’s nature serves only an aesthetic purpose in his novel. For Tolkien’s novel, nature has a considerable use value. It is what the Shire’s pastoral culture is based on. The farms and pastures of Middle-earth are described with a keen eye to how they are used in the support of culture.

Tolkien was a clever scholar who understood the nature of onomastics. He constructed the cultural name landscape in such a way that it creates a cohesive terminology and reference point for the reader. Middle-earth is the result of decades of work. Tolkien began work on the first tales of Middle-earth in 1917—thirty-seven years before the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien’s use of onomastics is integral to the reader’s interpretation of the text. Earlier fantastic worlds, such as Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland or Frank L. Baum’s Oz, were steps towards the kind of complexity Middle-earth possesses, but their landscapes and maps are too disconnected, too symbolic to be comparable to modern maps and geography. Middle-earth contains some 400 place-names in non-English languages, usually Sindarin. These names sound distant, unfamiliar, but are applied to geographic features that we immediately can recognize: “rivers, springs, waterfalls, mountains, caverns, lakes, seas, forests, plains, fields, areas, kingdoms, cities, towers, fortresses, and other geographical features, both natural and constructed” (Algeo 81–82). As we are interested in the natural features of Middle-earth, a brief example is in order.

The word “amon” is equivalent to the English term “mount,” used as a short form of “mountain” to title the related geographic features. The three most prominent “amon” names in The Lord of the Rings are “Amon Sûl,” “Amon Hen,” and “Amon Amarth” (Algeo 84). Amon Sûl is the hill known as Weathertop where the Witch-King of Angmar stabs Frodo. Amon Hen is one of the twin hills that frame the falls of Rauros and is topped by an ancient ruined chair that allows the viewer (in the story Frodo) to see for leagues all around. Lastly, Amon Amarth is known as “Mount Doom,” the place of the One Ring’s forging.

The connection between nature and culture seen in The Lord of the Rings is part of its success and why readers perceive an ecological meaning in it. This correlation between the ecologically damaged Middle-earth and our own real world is echoed in the imaginary soil. Throughout the trilogy, the heroes’ movement through landscape is created with close attention to detail. The journey from the pastoral Shire through the increasingly desolate Middle-earth to the wasteland of Mordor is rendered in clear, obvious detail. In addition to the emptiness of the landscape, Saruman’s involvement in the story is a cautionary tale for the reader. Saruman’s corruption by the Shadow and his development of industry and militarism are intertwined in such a manner that the message becomes clear. Treebeard denounces Saruman’s new way of thinking:

‘I used to talk to him. There was a time when he was always walking about my woods…his face, as I remember it…became like windows in a stone wall: windows with shutters inside. I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far that they serve him for the moment. Now it is clear he is a black traitor…He and his folk are making havoc now…felling trees—good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot—orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc. There is always smoke rising from Isengard these days.’ (TT, III, iv, 76)

The theme of environmental concern prevalent in Tolkien’s work and life is not only echoed in the novel, but in the real world as well.

At this point in the argument, nature in Middle-earth is both real and fantastic. The above discussion has sought to explicate the way realism helps to define the imaginary world of Middle-earth. Below we will examine the topology of its nature. However, the bridge between real nature and the imaginary world must be defined in more detail. Randel Helms argues in his 1974 work Tolkien’s World that: “we will misjudge The Lord of the Rings unless we grant that the aesthetic principles governing a fantasy world are different from both the laws of our own realm of common-sense reality and from those governing ‘realistic’ literature” (76).

Helms is correct in his observation. Middle-earth is based on the verisimilitude of realism, but it is a construct of the author’s and the reader’s imaginations. Therefore it is possible to perceive laws of natural order that do not necessarily apply to the real world. The creator of the imaginary world can construct the underlying characteristics of the world with deliberate authority. Fantastic landscapes are not necessarily mimetic but can be powerfully symbolic.2 In the case of Middle-earth, these laws are of a moral nature and based upon traditional Christian, indeed, Roman Catholic religious values.

All of Tolkien’s work, academic or artistic, is informed by his faith. In a letter to his friend the priest, Robert Murray, Tolkien states:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically any references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed in the story and the symbolism. (Letters 172, my emphasis)

The last sentence in this passage is critical to understanding nature in Middle-earth. The aesthetic laws Helms spoke of are infused with Catholic belief, and so is the natural world of The Lord of the Rings. This aspect of Tolkien’s representation allows the reader and critic to draw meaning out of the natural world of Middle-earth and contributes to the sense of that “enormous well” lying beneath the novel’s narrative. The symbolism inherent in nature is a key to understanding the transmission of divine providence and the millennial effect of the narrative.

On page 79 of his book, Helms defines five “internal laws” of Middle-earth.

1. “The cosmos is providentially controlled.” That is, the hand of God can be perceived in the events of the story. Helms cites Gandalf’s words as an example of this law: “I can put it no plainer than saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case, you also were meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought” (Helms 80; FR, I, ii, 65). By extension, the entirety of Middle-earth’s nature is an expression of divine will.

2. “Intention structures results.” That is, Middle-earth’s moral structure works according to a kind of “‘truth table’…a good action with good intent will have a good result; an evil action with an evil intent will also ultimately have a good result.” Gollum’s final act, to attack Frodo in an attempt to seize the Ring—an attack that results in the Ring’s destruction—is a prime example of this law. Likewise, Saruman’s evil intentions turn against him and awaken the Huorns, which aid the heroes in the siege of Helm’s Deep.

3. “Moral and magical law have the force of physical law.” This is the basic structure of moral nature. Helms goes on to argue that when creating an imaginary world, one has to deal with the implications of a change to the natural world. The One Ring’s power to confer invisibility is an excellent example of this: one has to consider the implications of a magical power and how that alters the cultures at hand and the morality associated with such power (80–81). Tolkien’s version of magic is limited enough that it does not entail sweeping changes to the culture and therefore is not a major factor, but there are clear distinctions between the magic of the good and the sorcery of the evil. The simple fact that there is a terminological difference is a symbolic divider between good and evil.

4. “Will and states of mind, both evil and good, can have objective reality and physical energy.” That is, the exertion of will can have real effect, such as Saruman’s magical voice, or the Nazgûl’s terrifying presence: “At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war; but only of crawling, and of death” (RK, V, iv, 97). On the side of good, Sam’s willpower takes on physical energy as he rushes to aid Frodo at Cirith Ungol, defeating Shelob and terrifying the Orcs guarding the citadel.

5. “All experience results in the realization of proverbial truth.” Helms expands this: “In other words, the archetypal patterns of events that are realized in fantasy as conventions of romantic literature (heroes fighting monsters) are the way things have always happened from the perspective of Middle-earth’s inhabitants, and their proverbs often describe those events. Théoden, for example, moralizes that ‘oft evil will shall evil mar’” (Helms 81; TT, III, ii, 200). Of course, evil turning upon itself is a major element of the novel later on, as seen in Gollum’s destruction of the ring.

These laws are necessary for understanding the way morality informs the events of Tolkien’s epic tale and for the world it takes place in. They define the way in which the underlying cosmology of Christianity affects the events and offers us a gateway into a greater understanding of The Lord of the Rings. The entirety of nature can be understood as a system of symbolic representation of religious expression.

Furthermore, the nature of Middle-earth is based upon medieval theology. While the medieval understanding of nature varied based upon region and stage in social development, the notion of nature as the result of providential design and control was an essential tenet. Nature was an expression of God’s laws and was therefore inherently moral. To act against nature was therefore amoral or immoral. Sin was often defined as operating against the natural order. This understanding produced many of the less enlightened medieval positions against women and homosexuals, but it does influence the framework of Middle-earth (White 9–47).

Another important medieval debate concerning nature was whether people held dominion over nature or were to be stewards of the land instead. Tolkien advocates stewardship over dominion in The Lord of the Rings. The treeherd Ents, the Elves, and the Hobbits all live in a relationship of stewardship with nature; however, this relationship is not one of blissful harmony. Elves and Ents seem to co-exist with nature and are not viewed as the ideal in Tolkien’s work. Humans often cannot understand these entities and express fear of them. It takes a sincere effort for humans to understand these beings (as Aragorn indicates). The Hobbits likewise must engage in conflict with the wild forces of the Old Forest.

Stewardship implies husbandry, and nature that is not contained by civilization is viewed as dangerous by the characters and is a source of risk. Old Man Willow nearly kills the hobbits. The “ill-will” of the mountain Caradhras defeats the Fellowship of the Ring as they attempt to cross the Misty Mountains. The safe spaces of Middle-earth, the sanctuaries of the Shire, Rivendell and Lothlórien, are those where the hands of farmers and gardeners have cared for nature. By advocating stewardship rather than dominion, Tolkien puts his villains on the other side of the coin. Saruman and Sauron are not caretakers; they are destroyers. They wish to smash nature and the world into submission. This is an offense to the moral fabric of Middle-earth, for to desire the domination of nature implies the desire to dominate the will of God. When one includes The Silmarillion in the discussion, Sauron’s desires are to explicitly dominate the will of Eru (God) through the rulership of Middle-earth and the defeat of the Valar (angels). This is what Treebeard means when he comments that Saruman “is plotting to become a Power” (TT, III, iv, 76).

We can now see that Tolkien’s imaginary nature is a complex and manifold creation. It is not simply a backdrop to a story of cultural conflict, but a significant series of signs, symbols, and indexes. Nature is both familiar and alien to the reader, at once realistic and Fantastic. Nature is also intrinsically tied to the will of Ilúvatar, the Elven name for Tolkien’s creator figure (i.e. God). Furthermore, the nature of Middle-earth is classifiable into a binary opposition: Passive/Active. However, this binary soon splinters into sub-categories of relation. Therefore, we should consider the following model as a guide to the nature of Middle-earth: the first relationship is between Passive and Active nature. These categories relate the basic role of nature. This basic binary opposition can then be used as the basis to form four distinctive perspectives of Essential, Ambient, Independent and Wrathful nature. As a heuristic model, it is useful to view these are distinct categories, but one should remember that the basis of Middle-earth is a single, united nature.

At best, these terms are contestable. The first basic definition required is the binary opposition of Passive versus Active nature. Passive is meant to indicate the kinds of nature that are the least involved in the direct action of The Lord of the Rings. We must remember to develop our understanding of the world based upon what has been written, and resist too much inference into the workings of Middle-earth that are not manifestly available in Tolkien’s writing. “Passive” is not meant to indicate inert or stagnant. Instead, Passive nature includes the realist elements of Middle-earth as well as moral symbolism. It is not aggressive, nor does it affect the events of the War of the Ring. It is true that ecology and the environment cannot be considered inactive, but within the framework of Tolkien’s story it is a less manifest force than what would be considered Active nature.

The other side of the binary opposition, Active nature, is a more fantastic form. It includes the great eagles that fly high among the mountains, as well as those elements of nature that have direct effect on the story: Caradhras, the Balrog, the Ents, and so forth. Active nature has a level of intelligence, if not outright sentience, in its processes. Occasionally, certain elements of Tolkien’s fantasy world might appear to break out of these categories, but, as we will see, they can all be firmly established to return to the categories.

With our binary established as a starting point, let us examine the Passive nature of Middle-earth. Passive nature breaks down into two main categories: Essential and Ambient nature. These two categories are tied to our initial discussion of the reader and nature. Essential nature is the result of the realistic element of Tolkien’s constructed world and Ambient nature is the result of the expression of morality and divine influence.

What is the Essential nature of Middle-earth? We turn to Karen Wynn Fonstad’s authorized Atlas of Middle-earth for detailed information. The history of Middle-earth is divided into three “ages.” Each age corresponds with major cultural events and/or geographic changes. The narratives found in The Silmarillion cover the First Age. They contain the Elven creation story and detail the earliest periods of Middle-earth’s history. They also detail the fall of Melkor/Morgoth, a Lucifer/Satan figure, and his plans to subjugate the creation of Ilúvatar. One critical bone of contention that remains is whether the world of the Middle-earth is consistently flat or round. Fonstad points out that when the human kingdom of Númenor fell and “Valinor was removed from Arda [Middle-earth]; then ‘the world was made round’…” (184). She is quoting from The Silmarillion and eventually concludes that Middle-earth was flat until the Second Age, when it became round and recognizable. The world of the First and Second Age changes drastically, so much that a reader familiar with a map of the Third Age will have difficulty recognizing any landmarks from the earlier ages. Most of Beleriand, the main area of The Silmarillion, is submerged by the cataclysmic transformations brought about in the Fall of Númenor.

As we are focused upon the Third Age of Middle-earth, we will not waste time performing too detailed an analysis of the Essential nature of Beleriand. The Third Age is the backdrop to The Lord of the Rings, and it is a fallen age: Númenor has fallen and Valinor has been separated from the world. The great forests are destroyed, as Treebeard laments in The Two Towers: “Those were the broad days! Time was when I could walk and sing all day and hear no more than the echo of my own voice in the hollow hills. The woods were like the woods of Lothlórien, only thicker, stronger, younger” (TT, III, iv, 72).

In terms of geographic themes, forests are important to The Lord of the Rings. They are primarily broadleaf or broadleaf/coniferous forests, scattered throughout Middle-earth. There are few coniferous forests, but they are found in the regions that best make sense for them: higher regions like Rivendell, or southern Mirkwood (Fonstad 184). A few areas of Middle-earth have been made barren, perhaps by “some devilry hatched in the Dark Land” like the Dead Marshes (TT IV ii 235), or by the corrosive pollution of Mordor, such as the barren Emyn Muil or the arid zone surrounding the Black Gate, both of which have been damaged by the vile storms of Sauron’s lands. It is important for Essential nature not to contradict the phenomenology of our world too sharply. In this way the reader can more actively interact with the signs of the real and the fantastic. These two elements in juxtaposition create the verisimilitude of Middle-earth. If the setting were too fantastic, too unnatural, it would not be believable. Therefore, elements of the setting must begin realistically, and build to the hyperreal in order to progress through to the fantastic.

An excellent example of the hyper-real is the Oliphaunt, or Mûmak. This terrible beasts of war appears in Book Four, as Sam and Frodo are captured by Faramir’s men:

Amidst it Sam heard a shrill bellowing or trumpeting. And then a great thudding and bumping, like huge rams dinning on the ground…Sam saw a vast shape crash out of the trees and come careering down the slope. Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to him, a grey-clad moving hill. Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit’s eyes, but the Mûmak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the likes of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in later days are but memories of his girth and majesty…passing only a few yards away, rocking the ground beneath their feet: his great legs like trees, enormous sail-like ears spread out, long snout upraised like a huge serpent…his small eyes raging. His upturned hornlike tusks were bound with bands of gold and dripping with blood. (TT, IV, iv, 269)

Here we have a description of the Haradrim’s greatest weapon—gigantic elephants. The Mûmak is a vast hyperbolic version of what we easily recognize in the real world. Tolkien has carefully constructed the way Essential nature exists. In fact, it is perfectly plausible that the symbolic construction of nature in Middle-earth allows us to perceive meaning in the way nature functions, even if there is no direct effect on the narrative.

If we recall the laws of Middle-earth described by Helms, Ambient nature becomes easy to describe. Helms’s first and third laws are of most interest here. The first, that the world is providentially controlled, suggests there is always an influence or meaning behind events. The third, that moral law has real force, implies that the expression of morality can be found in nature. For example, while hunting the Uruk-hai that have captured Merry and Pippin, Legolas witnesses the rising of a red sun: “‘Awake! Awake!’ he cried. ‘It is a red dawn. Strange things await us by the eaves of the forest. Good or evil, I do not know; but we are called. Awake!’” (TT, III, ii, 30). Legolas has not spoken to the sun, only seen the red color. From this circumstance, he draws the knowledge that something is imminent and it is near the woods they saw the day before. The natural world is warning the Three Hunters about the battle that occurred while they rested—Éomer and his Rohirrim slaughtering the Uruk-hai at the foot of Fangorn forest. What is most important here is that Legolas is not interacting with folk superstition, instead the rising of a red sun literally means what Legolas says; there are strange things (clues) waiting for them at the foot of the forest, and some danger awaits.

This example demonstrates the function of Ambient nature. It is a way for the author to create feeling and mood, but it is also a very real element of Middle-earth. It functions in a completely symbolic manner—that is, through the construction of a signifier and signified. Therefore, the signifier in the above is the red sunrise, and the signified is the night’s events. Ultimately, the reader engages with The Lord of the Rings through a network of signs that constitute the imaginary world and construct a model reader for the text.

This relationship allows us to perceive the hidden meanings behind the natural images and events of the novel, for example, the Mallorn tree, a species of beech tree but with larger leaves. The name “malinornelion” used by Treebeard to name Lórien is translated into “gold beech tree” (Fonstad 184). Left alone, beech trees often create natural cathedrals, “with the boles forming smooth gray pillars above a carpet of grass” (184). By extension, Lothlórien becomes a cathedral, a holy sanctuary. The symbolism of the trees forming cathedrals implies a religious element. In fact, Tolkien accepted Father Robert Murray’s comparison of Galadriel to the Virgin Mary (Letters 172). Nor did he reject a reader’s assertion that Gimli’s love for Galadriel is “clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary” (Letters 288), and not based on attraction and reproductive urge. This leads one to believe that in Lórien, we see elements of a prelapsarian world. W. H. Auden caught a glimmer of this symbolism in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring, describing Elves as “creatures of an unfallen world.” (Auden 59). His assertion seems very plausible if we consider the following description of Lothlórien:

It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at one clear cut, if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of the eyes…In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain. (FR, II, vi, 365)

This is a glimpse of the holy, as expressed through the natural perfection of Lórien.

In the quotation above, there is reference to winter. The story of the One Ring moves through the seasons of Middle-earth. In his review of a possible movie script, Tolkien complained that the writer had missed the point of seasons in Middle-earth: “They are pictorial, and should be, and easily could be, made the main means by which the artists indicate time-passage [the film was to be animated]. The main action begins in autumn and passes through winter to a brilliant spring: this is basic to the purport and tone of the tale” (Letters 271–72). What is of importance here is the seasonal shift. The movement from autumn (the last days of the world) to winter (the season of death) and through to spring (renewal, rebirth) is a conscious decision of the author. It is meant to demonstrate the renewal of Middle-earth. This natural change symbolizes the spiritual victory over Sauron and the forces of Mordor.

We can see an example of this Ambient expression of nature in the demise of the Witch-King’s steed:

Suddenly the great beast beat its hideous wings, and the wind of them was foul…Still she did not blench: Maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair yet terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like stone. Backward she sprang as the huge shape crashed to ruin, vast wings outspread, crumpled to the earth; and with its fall the shadow passed away. A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise. (RK, V, vi, 117)

Accepting the deliberate use of natural symbolism in the narrative, we can see the transition from foul to fair take place. In the presence of the great beast the environment is fouled and is described as such. When Éowyn strikes down the beast, the air is cleansed, the darkness is lifted and the image we are left with is a resplendent one. It is a short-lived moment of transition, as Éowyn and Merry must still face the Chief of the Nazgûl, but it is a subtle reward for this Maiden of the Rohirrim, as if the divine spirit of Middle-earth was reaching out to praise her.

Essential and Ambient nature are intrinsic to understanding how Tolkien’s creation of an imaginary world succeeds. The complex pseudo-realism of Essential nature creates a foundation that readers can understand and respond to. The Ambient nature is infused with symbolism, a subtle magic that permeates the events of The Lord of the Rings. It aspires to move the Essential nature to a more imaginary realm, where the entire world of Middle-earth is infused with divine meaning. It makes Passive nature more complex than simply replicating our world as a foundation. Instead Passive nature has a voice, a role that can be determined by understanding the symbols at work.

Active nature has an even more direct voice. It affects the story in one of two ways: either as Independent of or Wrathful towards the denizens of Middle-earth. It is more obviously imaginary but is also more directly involved with the War of the Ring. In basic terms, Independent nature is nature that lives apart from culture, but is nonetheless intelligent, while Wrathful nature is aggressive and takes an often-violent role in The Lord of the Rings.

As we consider Independent nature, it is important to remember that these elements generally have limited effect upon or meaning in the narrative. They exist to create a more complex work, but are used with limitations. The best examples of Independent nature are Tom Bombadil and the Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains.

Tom Bombadil appears in the first book of the novel and is only briefly mentioned in passing during The Council of Elrond and later (again, in passing) by Gandalf in the final chapters of The Return of the King. From what little we can see of Tom and his wife, Goldberry, they exist in a sort of steward-like or perhaps harmonic relationship (in the musical sense of harmony, where Tom Bombadil is Essential nature, but an octave higher). He is not stealthy like elves, which seem gentler with nature, instead:

There appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink. He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was as red as an apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. (FR, I, vi, 130–31)

Here we meet Tom Bombadil in all his garish glory. He is by far the most joyful character, full of mirth and song. The reader might consider Tom to be an aspect of civilization rather than nature, and the fact that his home is well tended and made of stone would support this. But Bombadil is much more complex than he seems.

Tolkien was repeatedly asked about Tom Bombadil, for he appears to be a sort of Green Man, a pagan representation of nature to readers. Tolkien responded to one such letter by describing Bombadil as “an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science” (Letters 192). Tom is an intentional enigma (Letters 174). However, early in the novel’s development, Tolkien described Bombadil as the “spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” (Letters 26). From this statement, we can make a connection between Tom Bombadil and the natural world of Middle-earth. We should view him as a personification of Passive nature. Just as Ambient nature moves Essential nature to a more fantastic realm, Bombadil moves the Ambient further along to become Active nature.

Tom’s connection with Essential nature is represented by the fact that he does not attempt to reform Old Man Willow; he merely admonishes him (suggesting that there is nothing wrong with Old Man Willow’s feelings, only with the way he acts). Bombadil can be seen as an aspect of Independent nature because he seems unaffected by the One Ring. Gandalf warns that “the ring has no power over him…if he were given the Ring, he would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away” (FR, II, ii, 279). Tom is immune to the draw of the Ring because he is disassociated from culture and any need for social power; he is nature, Active and fantastic, but still just the image of the earth in motion. He has no real desire to affect the War of the Ring because he simply cannot comprehend the mechanics of culture. This is why Tom Bombadil remains a part of the novel. Even after countless revisions, Tolkien kept the mention of him because:

I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’…he represents something that I feel important…I would not, however, have left him in if he did not have some kind of function…The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship…[but if you take] your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself…It is a natural pacifist view…Ultimately, only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. (Letters 179).

The world of Sauron, as we have seen in the mention of its corrosive effects, is one of death and environmental degradation. If Sauron’s rule came about, Tom’s role as a personification of nature would die alongside the trees, grasses and waterways of Middle-earth. He is an aspect of nature that functions with sentience but is ultimately powerless to affect the War of the Ring.

The other most apparent form of Independent nature is not so unwilling to be involved—The Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains. Although they appear only three times in the novel, their effect is felt throughout. Their first appearance involves the rescue of Gandalf atop Saruman’s tower, Orthnac. Gandalf says that the Great Eagles were already going far and wide, noticing the gathering of Sauron’s armies, and it was only by chance that Gwaihir the Windlord flew by to bear Gandalf away.3 This evidence suggests that the Eagles have a defined social order which includes organized military intelligence missions. Gwaihir says he “was sent to bear tidings not burdens,” and informs Gandalf of recent political events involving Rohan and Isengard (FR, II, ii, 275).

The next meeting of Gandalf and Gwaihir follows the wizard’s return from death atop the mountain Celebdil, when the Eagle heeds a command from Galadriel to fetch the wizard. Gwaihir once again displays intelligence, commenting that “The Sun shines through you,” referring to Gandalf’s immortal angelic form (TT, III, v, 106). The Eagles carry a bit of Ambient nature with them, as they seem to arrive in dire times, often connected with the Istari, who are divine servants themselves.

The last scene involving the Eagles is the longest and it is certainly the most fantastic, as the Great Eagles descend en masse upon the armies of Mordor, challenging the Nazgûl for air supremacy. Again Gwaihir bears Gandalf aloft, this time to find Sam and Frodo in the fallen realm of Sauron. Each time Gandalf is borne by Gwaihir, it is a mission of mercy, further connecting the Eagles with Christian morals. These fantastic Eagles, vast and strong, are an aspect of nature that functions alongside the world of Men and Elves. They fight in the war, and act as messengers, but are so rarely used that they seem more of a minor point or a deus ex machina.

The rarity of the Great Eagles is intentional on the part of the author. To use them too often reduces their exoticism and, as Tolkien complained about Zimmerman’s animated film script: “The Eagles are a dangerous ‘machine.’ I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness” (Letters 271). Tolkien took special offence at the use of the Great Eagles as a ferrying service for the Fellowship, likening it to using helicopters to go to the top of Everest in a movie about climbing it (Letters 273–74). The Eagles are kept to a minimum in the narrative because of how the reader has to interact with a fantastic world. If giant eagles are commonly used as transport, then the entire culture must reflect this (recall Helms’ third law) which would be rather radical from Tolkien’s point-of-view of what Middle-earth should be, that is, tied to the heroic past (Letters 274).

Independent nature plays a small role in The Lord of the Rings, but it does play a part. Because it is not aggressive in action, it is a less direct element than the next category, Wrathful nature. However, it is another step for the reader; it is another level of fantasy building upon the realism of the landscape.

Wrathful nature is the pinnacle of the movement from a realist nature to a fantastic nature. Here Active nature becomes directly involved in the events of the novel. It threatens heroes and villains alike, reaffirming that nature is an active force in Middle-earth. It plays an active role in The Lord of the Rings, although that role can take many shapes. Among the most obvious forms Wrathful nature takes in the narrative are Old Man Willow, Caradhras, the Balrog, the Ents and the Huorns.

Old Man Willow is the first aggressive foe the hobbits face in the Fellowship of the Ring; the Nazgûl are hinted at, but not yet revealed (Flieger148). In fact, the whole of the Old Forest might be considered the first real hurdle the young travelers must contend with. The winding paths mislead them, and Old Man Willow draws them close and lulls them to sleep with his siren-like effect. He then attempts to devour Merry and Pippin and it is only the intervention of Tom Bombadil that saves the hobbits.

There is no doubt that Old Man Willow is malevolent, and perhaps actually evil. Tom tells the hobbits that in the Willow’s youth “his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning” (FR, I, vii, 141). But the Great Willow did not turn to eating travelers without some cause. The Old Forest is old and scarred. It holds “a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers” (FR, I, vii, 141). In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, Tolkien says, “The Old Forest was hostile to two-legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries” (Letters 419).

Old Man Willow is not evil in the same way as Sauron. He is not corrupted with a desire for power. He is instead wrathful. He is filled with anger at the environmental destruction he has witnessed. He is one element of the environmental concern expressed in the novel. One can see a cause and effect relationship between environmental damage and Wrathful nature. Tolkien is not anti-culture, or even anti-technology (after all, everyone in the narrative, even Tom Bombadil, lives in a house of some kind and the cities of Gondor are not portrayed as evil), but he is anti-destruction. In the same letter to the Telegraph, he declares that nothing is as horrible as “the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing” (Letters 420).

Wrathful nature is a cautionary symbol in Middle-earth. It endangers the good as well as the bad, because it is not a culture on its own but rather a manifestation of the natural world. Caradhras, the great peak of the Misty Mountains, is such a force. He is repeatedly personified by the Fellowship: Gimli laments, “Caradhras has not forgiven us” (FR, II, iii, 305) for the mining of the mountains. Later the dwarf comments, “It is the ill will of Caradhras. He does not love Elves and Dwarves, and that [snow]drift was laid to cut off our escape’” (306). The mountain seems to be alive with anger, and while not deliberately aiding Sauron, he resents the presence of the Fellowship, forcing them from the Redhorn Gate.

The Balrog is another example of Wrathful nature.4 Although the Balrog is a demon and tied to the mythology of The Silmarillion, it can be taken out of a strict Christian reading through the use of Helms’ laws. If we assert the providential control of the first law, the Balrog can be seen as a force through which the divine morality of Middle-earth is brought to bear. From this position, we can argue that the dwarves of Moria were punished for their greed and its consequent environmental damage. At its height, Moria was a splendid realm, in balance with the mountains:a place where dwarves mined their precious ores—gold, iron and mithril. But the dwarves were too greedy and dug too deep, awakening the Balrog. While they did not intend for this to happen, it destroyed their proud realm. The entire area surrounding Moria is polluted. The river Sirannon, once beautiful, is now “gloomy” and “unwholesome” and inhabited by the terrible Watcher in the Water.

The Balrog is presented in very elemental terms. It is “like a great shadow [filled with flame and wielding a] blade like a stabbing tongue of fire” (FR, II, v, 344). It rises above Gandalf who is described as “a wizened tree before the onset of a storm.” The Balrog is composed of a strange absence of nature, along with shadow and the most destructive of the four classical elements, fire. It is eerily silent, issuing no sound, a deliberate characterization by Tolkien (Letters 274). This creates a very protean figure, full of power and ominous force. When we combine this description with the idea of a wrathful, divine nature expressing displeasure with environmental damage, we can see how the Balrog is a tool of punishment for those who tread Moria’s disastrous hallways.

Just as the dwarves’ punishment lingers on to threaten the Fellowship, Wrathful nature punishes the villains as well. The Ents and Huorns are the two instruments by which Saruman is punished for his transgressions against nature. Ents are not trees per se, but they are quite tree-like:

At least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms…were not wrinkled, but covered in a smooth brown skin. The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. (TT, III, iv, 66)

These “tree-herds” are caretakers of forests, and they act to smash Isengard after a (relatively) brief Entmoot. The Ents are very aware of the destruction of sections of Fangorn Forest and act accordingly, first assaulting the fortress of Orthanc, and then unleashing the dammed River Isen, which rushes out, flooding Saruman’s diabolical engines and furnaces. As in Moria, nature acts to strike down those who would abuse it.

The Huorns are the trees of Fangorn Forest that are fully conscious. They are like Old Man Willow in the fact that they are full of anger—the axes of Orcs have killed many of their kind—but they are more more magical than he because they can move. They enact their wrath by appearing at the close of the Battle of Helm’s Deep: “The land had changed. Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed. Great trees, bare and silent, stood, rank on rank, with tangled bough and hoary head; their twisted roots were buried in the long green grass. Darkness was under them” (TT, III, vii, 146).5 The Huorns act to trap the Orcs of Saruman between themselves and Gandalf’s charge. The Orcs that flee into the woods are never seen again: “Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again” (TT, III, 147). Later, Legolas feels “a great wrath” while passing through the forest (TT, III, vii, 151).

Nature becomes a prominent force in the War of the Ring. It acts to hinder both the West and the East alike. Ultimately, the divine providence of Middle-earth’s nature means the hindrances to the West work out for the best (The Old Forest toughens the hobbits, and the Balrog is a tool through which Gandalf is elevated in power). The wrath that is brought to bear on the forces of the East is much less kind, matching the moral force of Middle-earth.

There is one final significant problem remaining: the thinking fox. This singular event of an animal’s thoughts being related by the narrator is an obvious anomaly to this reading. It cannot be Wrathful nature, because it enacts no violence. It is not Ambient, for it is a direct utterance: “‘Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this’” (FR, I, iii, 81). In my schema of nature, there are two remaining categories—Essential and Independent. I would hesitate to place Tolkien’s articulate fox under Independent nature, because it makes the fox much more fantastic and important than it is.

Therefore, let us place the “thinking” fox under Essential nature. Why? Because the fox is not so much an active force as it is representative of human relations with nature. We attempt to anthropomorphize animals constantly. There is a desire in our psyche to believe that animals think as we do, that when we pass a moose, or look at our family pets, they have the same sort of considerations that we do. In this way, the thinking fox is more of a passageway for the imagination. It is an aspect of our relationship with real nature that is used to prepare us for the more magical nature we will witness in only a few chapters (Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil).

Nature in Middle-earth is a complex web of symbols that allows the reader to participate in the story. At the most basic level it is a clever construction of real and imaginary nature that allows the reader to make the leap from the ordinary to the fantastic. In a more complex reading we can perceive how an author can intentionally create a plausible nature that follows fantastic rules (Helms’ five laws of Middle-earth). From these basic laws, we can further categorize the imaginary world into Passive and Active elements, which further divide into the subsections discussedabove. If we use these categories to understand the imaginary world, and then define it, we can begin to undertake the next logical step, which is to justify a larger reading of the ecological concern found in the author, the text and the social reception of The Lord of the Rings. This step permits us to perceive a greater meaning in fantasy literature, beyond a mere melodrama of good versus evil.

Notes

1 The term Men follows its use in Tolkien’s writing and is not intended to exclude women.

2 While it is not part of our primary discussion, the reader may wish to explore the Taoist nature of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, the animist shamanism of J. Gregory Keyes’ Chosen of the Changeling, or Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Land as other metaphoric landscapes. Of course, some fantasy landscapes are purely mundane. Readers may wish to compare the above authors’ worlds with the Four Lands of Terry Brooks and the setting of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. These landscapes are much less, if at all, symbolic.

3 This event is very different in the film. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf speaks to a luna moth, who then leads Gwaihir to Orthanc. The butterfly motif is repeated in the films, always heralding the Windlord. This creates an almost providential sense to the butterfly and the eagles, making them more divine agents. Ultimately, the differences in the events do not cause the Eagles to move out of Independent nature, but does add a fitting level of Ambient nature to their actions (especially the butterfly motif).

4 If we view the natural world of Middle-earth as an extension of divine will, then the action of a divine character is an expression of that will (such as Satan is told in Paradise Lost). The Balrog, a rather primal representation of power, is very elemental in description and can be read as an expression of divine will and therefore part of the natural world.

5 Tolkien commented on this event in a letter W. H. Auden in 1955: “Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill’: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war” (Letters 212). Tolkien is referring to the events of act 4, scene 1, in which the prophecy of the third apparition, “a child crowned, with tree in his hand” that “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him” (4.1.92-94). There are perhaps further interesting parallels between Saruman, who craves power and intends to be a usurper, and Macbeth himself, but this is mere speculation (with Tolkien’s stated dislike of Shakespeare further confusing matters).

Works Cited

Algeo, John. “The Toponymy of Middle-earth.” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 33.1-2 (March-June, 1985): 80-95.

Auden, W. H. “A World Imaginary, but Real” Encounter. Vol. 3 (November 1954): 59-62.

Flieger, Verlyn. “Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-conflict in Middle Earth.” J. R. R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances: Views of Middle Earth. Ed. George Clark and Daniel Timmons. London: Greenwood Press, 2000: 147-58.

Fonstad, Karen Wynn. The Atlas of Middle-earth. rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Forster, E. M. A Room with a View. London: Hodden & Stoughton, 1977.

Gellner, Ernest. “Knowledge of Nature and Society.” Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. Mikulás Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 9-17.

Helms, Randel. Tolkien’s World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Sayer, George. “Recollections of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Tolkien: A Celebration., ed. Joseph Pearce. Great Britain: Fount, 1999: 1-16.

White, Hugh. Nature, Sex and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Obituary

Humphrey Carpenter (1946-2005)

Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter died of heart failure at his home in Oxford on 4 January 2005. A prolific and versatile writer, broadcaster and musician, he was only 58 years old.

Born on 29 April 1946 in Oxford, he was the only child of the Right Reverend Harry Carpenter, the Warden of Keble College (who was appointed the Bishop of Oxford in 1955, and who, in November of the following year, refused to sanction a church marriage between C. S. Lewis and the American divorcee, Joy Davidman), and Urith Monica Trevelyan, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford. He was educated at the Dragon School in North Oxford, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and at Keble College, Oxford, where he read English. He worked full-time as a radio producer and broadcaster for the BBC from 1968-74, after which time he worked free-lance, both as a broadcaster and as a writer. He married Mari Prichard, the daughter of the Welsh writer Caradog Prichard, in 1973. His first book, A Thames Companion (1975), was co-authored with his wife. From then on he published a large number of books, ranging from children’s stories (including the dozen-plus volumes of the very successful Mr. Majeika series about a kindly wizard schoolteacher) and reference books like The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984), also co-authored with his wife, on to, most significantly, a series of biographies, including J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977); The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (1978) which won the Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors; and W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981), which was nominated for the Whitbread Award for biography. In 1984 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (1988) was honored with the Duff Cooper Prize. Later biographies aroused some controversy with their various revelations, including Benjamin Britten: A Biography (1992), which garnered a Royal Philharmonic Society Award; Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop (1996); and Dennis Potter: A Biography (1999). His Spike Milligan: The Biography (2003) was especially successful, and the history of the publishing house John Murray that he was working on at the time of his death was reported to be in the final stages of revision. In his early fifties he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and his health worsened progressively. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Carpenter’s involvement with Tolkien is a long and complex story, one of shifting views over a period of many years. He quietly withdrew from Tolkien scholarship soon after his edition of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien was published in 1981, and by the mid-1980s he had begun distancing himself from the Tolkien field with often contentious public remarks. With his passing it is time to begin to assess his changing perspectives on Tolkien and on his own Tolkien-related work, as evidenced by comments in his lectures, interviews and published writings.

Carpenter first read The Lord of the Rings around the age of ten, a few years after it had been published, checking out all three volumes together from the library and reading them in four days. Around 1964, when he was eighteen, he reread it, considering this to be “his first real reading of the book” (Noad 13).

His personal connection with Tolkien began in the spring of 1967 when, through his parents, he called on Tolkien and obtained his permission to script an authorized stage-version of The Hobbit to be performed by the preparatory school boys at New College School in Oxford. His friend Paul Drayton wrote the musical settings to Tolkien’s verses. His recollections of this meeting with Tolkien comprise the first section of his Tolkien biography. Several months later, in December, Tolkien attended the final performance of the stage-play. According to Drayton, Tolkien “seemed reasonably content with what he saw and heard” (Drayton and Carpenter 16), while according to Carpenter, who was playing double bass in the orchestra and closely watching Tolkien, who was sitting near the front, “he had a broad smile on his face whenever the narration and dialogue stuck to his own words, which was replaced by a frown the moment there was the slightest departure from the book” (Carpenter 2001).

Carpenter had no further contact with Tolkien until four years later, when, as a radio producer, he tried to get Tolkien to do a radio interview. The two had dinners and exchanged letters, but never managed to do the interview. Then Tolkien died in September 1973, and in the following year Carpenter produced for BBC Radio Oxford a program on Tolkien’s life, “The Road Goes Ever On,” put together by Ann Bonsor, who recorded a number of interviews with Tolkien’s friends and family members. This program sparked Carpenter’s interest in doing a biography of Tolkien. According to Charles E. Noad, Carpenter “wrote to Allen & Unwin with the suggestion that he write Tolkien’s life. He felt that he had the right background—he had a degree in English, and he had known Tolkien. He had expected a ‘No’, but to his surprise, Rayner Unwin replied that if the Tolkien family were agreeable, he could go ahead” (Noad 14). As Carpenter recounted years later, “with the Tolkien family, I went to them one by one and said, ‘Look, I don’t know much about writing biography, but I did know your father a little, and I know Oxford, I know the milieu in which he operated, and I think if you don’t get somebody who has those advantages, you’ll probably find a worse biographer coming along’” (Carpenter 1995 271).

He began to work on the book in January 1975, and he spent the next several months reading through all of Tolkien’s papers, sorting them and making abundant notes. When he described this work in an after-dinner speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Tolkien Society in London, held on 22 February 1976, he had already completed the first draft of the biography: “It’s been a totally absorbing project. Physically absorbing because I have been able to devote my entire working time to it; which has meant, on the whole, 8 to 10 hours a day, 5 or 6 or even occasionally 7 days a week” (Anon. 1977 39-40). He continued: “I realized when I embarked on the project that I would have to sift through literally thousands of letters. I mean thousands. A number of very closely-written diaries, and a pile of manuscripts, which took up so much space that it requires more than 100 box-files to store it” (Anon. 1977 41).

Carpenter’s notes for the book were prodigious—large files of transcriptions, clippings, summaries and evaluations of Tolkien’s manuscripts, together with a huge chronology of Tolkien’s life typed on large index cards. He later recalled the slow process of learning to do research economically: “When I did the Tolkien book my notes were enormous. I copied down endless extracts from letters, discovering eventually that ninety percent of these extracts would never be of any use to me anyway . . . By the time I came to do Auden, I’d learned to recognize what seemed to me the kind of quotation I would want to use eventually. . . . One learns to know what one is looking for” (Ross 1984 101).

When it came to the actual writing of the book, which Carpenter began only after finishing his research, he started with the feeling that Tolkien had been

this rather comic Oxford academic—the stereotype absent-minded professor—who would be lecturing on Beowulf with a parcel of fish from the fishmongers sticking out of his pocket. And the first draft of the book was written very much in that mode, treating him as slightly slapstick. At least it began that way. But as the book went on, I realized he wasn’t like this at all. He had had a very strange childhood. His mother had died early (his father was already dead) and he was brought up by a Roman Catholic priest—an unlikely parent-figure. Consequently he acquired certain uptight Pauline moral values. And my caricature of the Oxford academic clashed with his [sic, for “this”?], and I never resolved it properly. The first draft of that life was a long and sprawling thing, and was deemed unacceptable by the Tolkien family . . . I went away and rewrote it, and it was then deemed acceptable. What I’d actually done was castrated the book, cut out everything which was likely to be contentious. I’ve therefore always been displeased with it ever since. (Carpenter 1995 270)

Some years earlier he had given a more general account:

The Tolkien life was an authorized biography. In a sense it’s marvelous: you have a free run of the papers, and everyone feels they ought to help you. On the other hand, you incur obligations, as I’ve already said. You really have to toe the party line. Not that there’s anything in the Tolkien book which was censored by the family, but I think I could have been more detached, and perhaps more objective, if I hadn’t felt under some obligation to his family. (Ross 1985 106)

J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography was published in May 1977. Carpenter’s extensive research produced an excellent book that has stood well the test of time, remaining both readable and unusually accurate more than a quarter of a century after it was written, despite many advances in Tolkien scholarship, as well as the publication of many primary Tolkien texts previously unknown to the public. Carpenter’s careful consideration of all of these texts may have been subsumed within his biographical account, but his informed knowledge made for a lasting and dependable biography.

After publication, Rayner Unwin, then Carpenter’s publisher, suggested that he write a book on the Inklings. Carpenter found this perfectly agreeable—he had in one sense already done all of the research, and it was in another sense a chance to be paid twice for the same work. He wrote The Inklings in three weeks, typing it two-fingered, as he did with astonishing speed, on his favored IBM Selectric. The Inklings was published in October 1978, by which time he was ready to move away from Tolkien. But, soon afterwards, when the opportunity came up to edit a volume of Tolkien’s letters, he took the job. He made the initial selection for the book from the huge mass of letters, after which Christopher Tolkien provided comments. The initial compilation proved too large from the publishing point of view, and cuts were made for reasons of length.

Carpenter would later muse upon his involvement with writing biographies, claiming that “the biographies, for me, have always been an exercise in self-education” (Carpenter 1995 277). He also felt that “there’s got to be some sort of personal relevance. With Tolkien, the personal agenda was my own childhood. I’d lived in the same culture as him, in an Oxford academic family. I wanted to portray that milieu, about which I had very mixed feelings” (Carpenter 1995 278).

His personal agenda in writing The Inklings was, by his own account, rather different:

I became an atheist at 21, when I started to experience the world, but later, when I was happily married, I felt there ought to be an afterlife, because life was good and should go on. And just then I was writing about C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, in The Inklings, and I found their theology very persuasive, so that book is about almost regaining my faith. But I hadn’t become quite sure. And then by chance I was asked to write a Past Masters book on Jesus—not really a biography, but a study of the texts. So I spent six months reading New Testament theology, and came out of it a complete unbeliever—though with certain questions in my mind which I couldn’t resolve. (Carpenter 1995 278-9).

His approach to biography was also somewhat more imaginative than that of more traditional biographers:

I’m one of those biographers (and there are many of them) who, I think, are very close to novelists in their approach to the material. I try not to let my imagination as such run riot, but I do write imaginatively. I do that consciously, and I have sometimes gone away from the area of strict fact when it seemed to me worthwhile doing so. In my Tolkien biography, and then in The Inklings, I included two chapters of imaginary happenings: an imaginary day in Tolkien’s company and, in The Inklings, an imaginary conversation. I thought that actually expressed the general truths about these men much more succinctly than chapter after chapter of all sorts of lists of what they did in one week or another, and where they spent Christmas and so on. (Ross 1984 101).

Carpenter also found that working so closely with a subject could produce its own difficulties: “In my experience one has to be careful not to become irritated with one’s subject, having to live with him (so to speak) for so many months. I admit to having turned against Tolkien and Lewis at various stages in the books” (Ross 1985 106).

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, co-edited by Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, appeared in August 1981. Carpenter had always viewed his involvement with Tolkien as a stepping-stone towards doing other things, and as he withdrew from the field his attitudes changed dramatically. His brief account of Tolkien in the epilogue to Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1985) shows a loss of sympathy with Tolkien. To an interviewer he once admitted that when he was finished with a subject “my interest in the whole thing deflates to about a sixteenth of what it was. I mean, I feel I’ve done my job, and that’s it, and this is my last word on X” (Anon. 2000 286). With this loss of interest there came also, as evidenced in Secret Gardens, a forgetfulness of the details of Tolkien’s life and his writings, and an unfortunate tendency to look at Tolkien via armchair psychology. The Lord of the Rings, in Carpenter’s interpretation, had become Tolkien’s attempt to create an alternative religion.

In October 1987 he gave a lecture at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature entitled “Tolkien Reconsidered.” He read aloud his account of Tolkien from Secret Gardens, extending it even further, adding a Freudian slant to his criticism of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, while also making snide remarks about the (supposed) pathetic and lonely members of the “Tolkien cult” who read no books other than The Lord of the Rings. Over the next few years he made similar disparaging remarks.

Carpenter’s disillusionment with Tolkien reached its nadir in January 1992 with the BBC Radio 4 dramatization of his radio play, “In a Hole in the Ground, There Lived a Tolkien.” The broadcast was done supposedly to honor of the centenary of Tolkien’s birth, but the radio play itself was entirely without honor. Tolkien was portrayed with unceasing absurdity, as an irredeemably absent-minded professor who wanders around Leeds randomly shouting out strange terms like “smakkabagms.” As a teacher surrounded by dull stodgy students, he was presented as an extremely ridiculous slapstick figure that occasionally vocalized asinine thoughts (“I must stop this day-dreaming. I must look after my wife and children and do my job. I am a grown man teaching English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds in the year of Our Lord 1924. I must stop behaving like a child!”). However intelligently Carpenter had written about Tolkien fifteen years earlier, he had by this time forgotten virtually everything about Tolkien he had ever known, save for a few representative phrases and some facts that could be woven together into a caricature. In fact, his view of Tolkien seems to have reverted to the original simple-minded caricature that, while writing the biography, Carpenter had discovered to be wrong. One detects in the radio play an almost willful blindness—if not an impish glee—behind it all.

Carpenter spurned the Tolkien Centenary Conference, held at Keble College in August of 1992. In fact, prior to the Conference, he donated the letters that Tolkien had written to him to the charity Oxfam, who (from their point of view, quite sensibly) displayed them in the window of their Oxford bookshop that month so that conference attendees would not only be certain to observe them, but also they would thereby have the chance to bid upon them. Many conference attendees felt insulted. Afterwards, Carpenter’s animosity seems to have been held in check, for he commented some years later about the difficulties he had encountered when “you may want to make statements about your subject later on, which may be less enthusiastic than the biography—I mean with Tolkien, I had to keep sort of a neutral tone with the biography, but by the time I’d finished it I had (in a sense) grown out of his writings, and this did pose problems in that I tended to make public statements which were critical of him, which upset his family, understandably. I’ve generally speaking not made them since . . . You can get into a quite awkward position if you’ve been given privileged access, and you’ve done your book, and then you go off as a sort of loose cannon and start saying other things” (Anon. 2000 286).

He stayed mostly silent about Tolkien for several years. Yet with the tremendous publicity surrounding the imminent release of the first of Peter Jackson’s three films of The Lord of the Rings, Carpenter recycled his memories of meeting Tolkien for a short article in The Sunday Times Magazine of 25 November 2001. A couple of years later, in what I believe is his last article pertaining to Tolkien—a review of John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War published in The Sunday Times for 23 November 2003—he re-assessed his Tolkien biography as “an apprentice work,” saying that it portrayed Tolkien “very much as he saw himself, and leaving out several difficult issues (Margaret Drabble, reviewing it, rightly castigated it as ‘polite’).” Polite the book may be, yet it still holds pride of place on the small shelf of books that are essential to every Tolkien scholar.

On a personal note, I met Humphrey Carpenter when I attended a summer program in Oxford in 1978, and we became friends. He was then beginning work on his Auden biography, and needed a research assistant based in the U.S. The work I did for him over the next few years was my first real taste of literary research, and once bitten, the desire to do similar work has never left me. Along with the Auden biography, I helped him with The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, particularly with the headnotes to the letters and the annotations. Humphrey and I were in very close contact for several years, until our interests diverged—rather, until his interest in Tolkien diminished, while mine grew—and our correspondence trailed off. He was without exception kind, helpful, generous, and gracious to me, even to the point—long after leaving Tolkienian things behind—of encouraging and assisting with the 1996 re-issue of The Marvellous Land of Snergs by E. A. Wyke-Smith, Tolkien’s “source-book” for hobbits. He had a self-effacing sense of humor, a relish for gossip, and a special zeal for ferreting out the peculiarities of the human spirit in relation to artistic creation. As a friend and mentor who nurtured and encouraged my own growing literary interests, my debt to him is large. It pleases me that I was able to express some of my gratitude to him, some years ago, in one of our last exchanges of letters.

Douglas A. Anderson

Works Cited

[Anon.]. “Interview with Humphrey Carpenter.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1999, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Detroit: Gale Group, 2000): 279-288.

[Anon.]. “Table Talk: A Transcript of the After-dinner Speeches at the 1976 Annual General Meeting of the Tolkien Society,” Mallorn no.10 (1977): 34-43.

Carpenter, Humphrey, in conversation with Lyndall Gordon, “Learning about Ourselves: Biography as Autobiography.” In The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995): 267-279.

Carpenter, Humphrey. “Our Brief Encounter,” The Sunday Times Magazine, 25 November 2001.

——. “Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth.” The Sunday Times, 23 November 2003.

Drayton, Paul, and Humphrey Carpenter, “A Preparatory School Approach.” In Music Drama in School, ed. Malcolm John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971): 1-19.

Noad, Charles E. “‘Tolkien Reconsidered’: A Talk by Humphrey Carpenter Given at the Cheltenham Literary Festival,” Amon Hen, no. 91 (May 1988): 12-14.

Ross, Jean W., “CA Interview.” Contemporary Authors, New Revisions Series, Volume 13 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984): 100-102.

——. “An Interview with Humphrey Carpenter.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1984, ed. Jean W. Ross (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985): 103-108.

Notes and Documents

The Birthplace of J. R. R. Tolkien

Beth Russell

J R. R. Tolkien was not born in South Africa. That nation did not exist in 1892. The town of his birth, Bloemfontein, was the capital of an independent country, the Republic of the Orange Free State. A number of biographical studies, including the The Tolkien Family Album, do not make the distinction. This is misleading because it ignores the historical and social background of his earliest home. His parents’ presence in Bloemfontein was part of an epic as grand as any in Middle-earth. The story of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is a tale of expansionism and rivalry by the British and German imperial powers, greed for the wealth of newly-discovered diamonds and gold, and stubborn resistance by pioneers determined to preserve their own way of life. These potent factors led to armed skirmishes that erupted into war. The Tolkien family came to Bloemfontein during a period of great tension, midway through the twenty-year interval between the first Boer War in 1880-81 and the second Boer War that began in 1899.

The Union of South Africa came into existence only in 1910, formed from four previously separate entities. Two of these, the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, had been self-governing British colonies. The other two, the Transvaal Republic and the Republic of the Orange Free State, had been independent countries, commonly called the “Boer Republics” because they were founded and inhabited by the original European group in southern Africa. These people were the descendants of Dutch and Huguenot settlers who came to the Cape in the 1600’s. They were farmers (“Boers”) and during nearly two hundred years of isolation their language became distinct from its European roots. They called themselves Afrikaners and their language Afrikaans.

The Boer’s isolation ended in the early 1800s, when the British took over the Cape as part of their global strategy after the Napoleonic wars. Within a few years there was a mass emigration of Boers who hated the new British laws. About 12,000 people set out walking northward in family groups, hauling their goods in ox-wagons and herding their livestock. These “Voortrekkers” settled north of the Orange and Vaal Rivers and by mid-century the British government in the Cape recognized their new Republics. But the new countries were not allowed to develop in peace. The German Empire claimed South West Africa, including a long extension that reached eastward towards the Transvaal. The British established a new colony, Rhodesia, adjourning the northern border of the Transvaal. Diamonds were discovered in the 1870s and gold in the 1880s. Many foreigners (mainly British) were drawn by the prospect of wealth and entered the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. They were not welcome. As “uitlanders” they were subject to high tax rates and naturalization was very difficult.

The Tolkien family were “uitlanders” in Bloemfontein and their circumstances were determined by the turbulence of the times. Bloemfontein was a frontier settlement. Its population was only about 2,000 in 1890, but it was the closest political center to the diamond diggings at Kimberley and it was the most important town on the rail line that linked Cape Town to the gold fields at Johannesburg.1 Arthur Tolkien’s employer, The Bank of Africa, was a British company that came to Bloemfontein as a competitor to the locally founded National Bank of the Orange Free State. Native Free Staters would have seen Arthur as an agent for the expansion of the British Empire, a “finger of the claw of Mordor” (TT, III, x, 185). The last year of Arthur’s life was a time of great friction between the Boer Republics and the “uitlanders.” Cecil Rhodes, who was Prime Minister of the Cape Province, and Jameson, who was the administrator of Rhodesia, plotted with Englishmen in the gold fields to overthrow the Transvaal Republic. No wonder it was impossible for Arthur to leave his bank for a long overseas visit.

Mabel Tolkien would have found Bloemfontein utterly alien to her home in Birmingham. Worse than drought, dusty streets, and constant wind, she was socially isolated from most of the women in the small town by her language and education. Afrikaans-speaking men learned English in order to do business, but few of the women spoke English. For Mabel, friendships would be possible only within the small “uitlander” community. The strength of character she showed in adapting to Bloemfontein must have helped her later to endure isolation from her family after she became a Roman Catholic.

J. R. R. Tolkien was too young to remember much about South Africa. Carpenter mentions his recollections of heat and long grass, and his brief picture of Arthur painting the Tolkien name on the trunk for his family’s visit to England. However, more important than the child’s memory of incidents would have been his early absorption of his parents’ values: to press on with a job under difficult circumstances; to make a home among strangers in an uncongenial place; to respect people of different races and languages; to uphold a conventional way of life in a rough-hewn environment.2

Arthur and Mabel Tolkien helped build the British Empire. In their day that was a noble lifework. It cannot be a surprise that their son’s great saga ends with Aragorn as king of a reunited Kingdom.

Tale of Years

1652 The Dutch establish a colony at the Cape of Good Hope.

1806 The British take possession of the Cape Colony.

1835-43 About 12,000 Boers leave the Cape to escape from British rule. These Voortrekkers perceive themselves as God’s children in the wilderness. They settle north of the Orange and Vaal rivers.

1846 Bloemfontein is founded.

1850 Bloemfontein has 26 home-owners.

1852 The British recognize the independence of the Transvaal Republic.

1854 The British recognize the independence of the Orange Free State.

1862 The Bloemfontein Bank is founded, and later becomes the National Bank of the Orange River Colony.

1871 Diamond mines open up at Kimberley in the northern Cape Colony.

1879 The Bank of Africa is founded, incorporating several earlier banks from British parts of the Cape Province.

1880-1881 The First Boer War breaks out when British forces try to claim the Transvaal. The President of the Orange Free State mediates the end of the war.

1884 Germany acquires South West Africa as a colony (now Namibia).

1886 Discovery of the Witwatersrand gold fields in the Transvaal.

1888 The British plant a new colony on the northern border of the Transvaal, naming it Rhodesia in honor of Cecil Rhodes.

1890 The Railway to Blomfontein from Cape Town is completed. The white population of Bloemfontein is 2,077.

1891, April Mabel and Arthur Tolkien marry in the Cape Town Cathedral and travel to Bloemfontein by railway.

1892, January JRRT is born at the Bank House on Maitland St. in Bloemfontein and is christened at the Bloemfontein Cathedral.

1894, February Hilary is born in Bloemfontein.

1895, April Mabel and the boys sail to England.

1895 Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Province, and Lysander Starr Jameson, Administrator of Rhodesia, plot with British “Uitlanders” in the Transvaal gold fields to overthrow the Transvaal government. This results in Jameson’s Raid, an armed incursion from Rhodesia. The Transvaalers defeat the Raid. The Emperor of Germany sends a congratulatory telegram to the President of the Transvaal.

1896, January Arthur dies in Bloemfontein and is buried there.

1899 The Second Boer War breaks out over British claims to the Transvaal and concern for the lack of civil rights for the Uitlanders. The Orange Free State enters the war as ally of the Transvaal. The Afrikaners are very successful guerilla fighters and are well-armed. Krupp of Germany supplies their heavy artillery.

1910 The Union of South Africa is constituted as an independent country that is part of the British Empire.

Notes

1 I once learned the opinion of a Free State Boer about the coming of the railway. I worked in South Africa for 15 years as a botanist. One day a colleague, a descendant of the Voortrekkers, translated for me a letter in the newspaper that wrapped a very old plant specimen. A farmer in the Orange Free State wrote to the Bloemfontein paper in the late 1880s when the railway was being built. He deplored its bad effects. The trains would set the veld on fire, and their terrible noise would cause the cows to give no milk and the hens to stop laying. Furthermore, the railroad was unnecessary because in the Free State there was enough for everybody, and nothing was needed from outside. This sounds faintly comical today, as though written by Ham Gamgee, but to an agricultural community in an arid region the loss of rangelands and produce was a disaster. The man showed his seriousness of purpose in the language of the letter. It was painstakingly written in the High Dutch of the Bible, not in the Afrikaans of everyday use.

2 The most readable accounts of the times are fictional. Stuart Cloete’s Turning Wheels takes one on the Great Trek with the Voortrekkers. James Michener’s The Covenant gives a sympathetic view of all the peoples of southern Africa, and shows the mingled tragedy and good-will of their interactions.

Works Cited

Barclays. http://www.barclays.com/africa/barclays_in.htm (downloaded 30 October 2004).

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition. 1910.

Tolkien, John and Priscilla Tolkien. The Tolkien Family Album. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

WorldTravelGate. 2000-2004. http://www.africatravelling.net/south_africa/bloemfontein/bloemfontein_history.htm (downloaded 30 October 2004).

J. R. R. Tolkien and W. Rhys Roberts’s “Gerald of Wales on the Survival of Welsh”

Douglas A. Anderson

The recent discovery of a new bit of J. R. R. Tolkien’s scholarship, published early in his professional career, deserves some attention and description. It consists of a translation into a twelfth-century Middle English dialect of a portion of a paragraph from a contemporaneous Latin text. The translation, made at the request of a colleague, provides us with another example of Tolkien’s close thinking with regard to language and of the range of his expertise in Middle English and its texts.

Tolkien taught at the University of Leeds from 1920 through 1925, and during the first few years that he was at Leeds one of his colleagues was W[illiam] Rhys Roberts (1858-1929), the Professor of Classics at Leeds from 1904 until his retirement in 1923. Roberts’s chief work was on Greek rhetorical writers—he edited and translated, among other things, Longinus’s On the Sublime (1899) [Longinus, De Sublimitate], Demetrius on Style (1902) [Demetrius, De Elocutione], Aristotle’s Rhetorica (1908), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Literary Composition (1910) [Dionysius, De Compositione Verborum].

Shortly before his retirement Roberts read a paper at Leeds that contains the small piece of Tolkien’s scholarship. An unsuccessful attempt was made to have Roberts present this same paper in London during the 1923-24 session of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, but in the end it appeared in their transactions without having been read to the society. The Cymmrodorion was a society whose aims (as stated in the masthead of its publications) included “the promotion of intellectual culture by the encouragement of Literature, Science, and Art, as connected with Wales.”

Roberts’s paper concerns a portion of the twelfth century Latin text of “The Description of Wales” [Descriptio Kambriae], written by the churchman called Giraldus Cambrensis, now generally known by the English form of his name, Gerald of Wales. Gerald (c. 1145-1223) was three quarters Norman and one quarter Welsh. He wrote some seventeen books, all of them in Latin. His most well-known is probably “The Journey through Wales” [Itinerarium Kambriae], which records a mission through Wales taken in 1188 by Gerald as a companion of Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury. “The Journey through Wales” was apparently written in 1191, and Gerald wrote “The Description of Wales” immediately afterwards as a kind of social study of the Welsh people and of Wales itself.

The closing chapters of “The Description of Wales” give Gerald’s view of how the Welsh might be conquered and thereafter governed, while the final part consists of a rebuttal on “How the Welsh can best fight back and keep up their resistance.” I quote this section at length from the modern English translation by Lewis Thorpe in order to show the context of the concluding prophecy:

I have set out the case for the English with considerable care and in some detail. I myself am descended from both peoples, and it seems only fair that I should now put the opposite point of view. I therefore turn to the Welsh in this final chapter of my book, and I propose to give them some brief, but I hope effective, instruction in the art of resistance.

If the Welsh would only adopt the French way of arming themselves, if they would fight in ordered ranks instead of leaping about all over the place, if their princes could come to an agreement and unite to defend their country—or, better still, if they had only one prince and he a good one—living as they do in a country so inaccessible and so well protected, I cannot see how so powerful a people could ever be completely conquered. If they were united, no one could ever beat them. They have three great advantages: their country is fortified by nature; they are accustomed to live on very little, and this satisfies them; and the entire nation, both leaders and the common people, are trained in the use of arms.

The English are striving for power, the Welsh for freedom; the English are fighting for material gain, the Welsh to avoid a disaster; the English soldiers are hired mercenaries, the Welsh are defending their homeland. The English, I say, want to drive the Welsh out of the island and to capture it all for themselves. The Welsh, who for so long ruled over the whole kingdom, want only to find refuge together in the least attractive corner of it, the woods, the mountains and the marshes, to which they have been banished for their sins, so that there for a given time they may in want and poverty do penance for the excesses which they committed when they were prosperous.

The memory which they will never lose of their former greatness may well kindle a spark of hatred in the Welsh and encourage them to rebel from time to time; for they cannot forget their Trojan blood and the majesty of their kings who once ruled over Britain, a realm which was so great and a dynasty which lasted so long. During the military expedition which Henry II, King of the English, led against them in South Wales in our own lifetime [i.e., in 1163], an old man living in Pencader (which means the Head of the Chair), who had joined the King’s forces against his own people, because of their evil way of life, was asked what he thought of the royal army, whether it could withstand the rebel troops and what the outcome of war would be. “My Lord King,” he replied, “this nation may now be harassed, weakened and decimated by your soldiery, as it has often been by others in former times; but it will never be totally destroyed by the wrath of man, unless at the same time it is punished by the wrath of God. Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.” (Gerald of Wales, translated by Lewis Thorpe 273-4)

The Latin of the “prophecy” itself, as given by Roberts, is:

Unde et Anglorum rege Henrico secundo in australem Walliam apud Pencadeyr, quod Caput cathedrae sonat, nostris diebus in hanc gentem expeditionem agente, consultus ab eo senior quidam populi ejusdem, qui contra alios tamen vitio gentis eidem adhaeserat, super exercitu regio, populoque rebelli si resistere posset, quid ei videretur, bellicique eventus suam ut ei declararet opinionem, respondit: “Gravari quidem, plurimaque ex parte destrui et debilitari vestris, rex, aliorumque viribus, nunc ut olim et pluries, meritorum exigentia, gens ista valebit. Ad plenum autem, propter hominis iram, nisi et ira Dei concurrerit, non delebitur. Nec alia, ut arbitror, gens quam haec Kambrica, aliave lingua, in die distracti examinis coram Judice supremo, quicquid de ampliori contingat, pro hoc terrarum angulo respondebit.” (46-47)

I follow this with Roberts’s own translation into modern English, about which Roberts noted “there are many doubtful points in this translation” (48):

And so also [this concluding story is apposite]. When in our own times Henry the Second, King of the English, was conducting an expedition into South Wales against this [the Welsh] nation, he was stationed at Pencader, which means Chair-head. Here he consulted a certain elderly person of the same [the Welsh] people, a man who, through the national vice [of disunion], had—Welshman though he was (tamen)—joined himself to the king [and was ranged] against other Welshman. The king asked him what he thought of the royal army and of the power of the rebel people to withstand it, and urged him to make clear to him his opinion about the outcome of the war. The Welshman answered thus: “That nation, O king, may now, as many a time in the past, its sins requiring it, be harassed and in great part broken down and crippled by your armed might and that of others. Utterly blotted out, however, it will not be because of the wrath of man unless the wrath of God also go therewith. Nor, whatever may happen in regard to the larger realm, do I think that any other nation than this of Wales, or any other tongue, shall in the day of strict account before the Most High Judge answer for this corner of the earth.” (47-48)

Roberts further noted that “through the kindness of former colleagues at Leeds and Bangor, I am able to offer the following attempts to reproduce in the English, French and Welsh of his day, Gerald’s Latin prophecy as construed in the modern English version given above.” (58)

The version in twelfth-century French was contributed by Paul Barbier (1873-1947), the Professor of French at the University of Leeds from 1903-1938, and the version in twelfth-century Welsh by Sir John Morris-Jones (1864-1929), the Welsh grammarian, poet, and Professor of Welsh at University College of North Wales in Bangor from 1895 until his death. Tolkien’s contribution was the version in late twelfth-century English of the South-West Midlands:

þis uolc nu ase monie siðes ear, efter þe eskunge of his iwurhte, mei beon iderued swiðe, an turh þine mihte, king, an turh þe mihte of oðren bi þe measte deale beon uorbroken an uordon; ac fulliche adilied uor monnes wreaððe nule hit beo, but 3if Goddes wreaððe geað þermide; and me is ec awene þet nan oðer uolc þonne þis welsche uolc, ne nan oðer tunge, schal answerie uor þisse middeleardes hurne, hwetse iwurðen mei bi þe widre (londe), iþen deie þes rihtwise domes biuoren þen heste Deme. (58-59)

Roberts added a footnote to Tolkien’s version as follows:

Professor Tolkien suggests that “senior quidam” may be the Welsh henddyn, the typical wise old man; and, following Morris-Jones’s Welsh Grammar, § 155 iii (2), p. 261, he would identify with henddyn the Hending who is represented as the author of a collection of traditional proverbial wisdom in South-West Midland Middle English, each proverb ending with “quoth Hending.” (59, note 20)

The proverbs of Hending (or “Hendyng”) survive in three main versions, found in one thirteenth and two fourteenth century manuscripts, though they were probably first written in the mid-thirteenth century. Hending’s proverbs are notably more worldly and bitter than those in other Middle English collections. As “The Proverbs of Hendyng” they were first printed in volume one of Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell’s Reliquiæ Antiquæ: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, Illustrating Chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language (1841). Versions also appeared subsequently in John M. Kemble’s The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus (1848), Richard Morris’s Specimens of Early English (1867), and K[arl] Böddeker’s Altenglische Dictungen des Ms. Harl. 2253 (1878). A translation into modern English by Jessie L. Weston appeared in her anthology The Chief Middle English Poets: Selected Poems (1914).

Works Cited

Gerald of Wales. The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin Books, 1978).

Morris-Jones, J[ohn]. A Welsh Grammar: Historical and Comparative. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913)

Roberts, W[illiam]. Rhys. “Gerald of Wales on the Survival of Welsh.” In The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion: Session 1923-1924 (London: Issued by the Society, 1925): 46-60.

Gilraen’s Linnod: Function, Genre, Prototypes

Sandra Ballif Straubhaar

Hidden away in Appendix A, I, v of The Return of the King can be found all that we know of Gilraen, a Númenorean-descended woman of the Dúnedain, the mother of Aragorn Elessar. If we combine this information with selected chronological data from Appendix B, The Tale of Years, The Third Age, a bleak picture emerges of the shape of Gilraen’s life. She is married at twenty-two to a man of fifty-six; loses her father-in-law one year later (to hill-trolls); bears a son (Aragorn) one year later; and loses her husband two years after that (to orcs). She spends the next fifty-odd years in Rivendell in exile with her son. After he is grown, she returns to the wilds of Eriador, where the Dúnedain remain,1 and where she spends the next twenty-odd years receiving occasional visits from him (when he is not a-questing). In TA 3006 they have a poignant farewell conversation. She dies in despair in the year following, aged approximately one hundred. Twelve years later, Aragorn ascends to the thrones of Gondor and Arnor (RK, Appendix A, 337-42; Appendix B, 370-71).

Their farewell exchange is certainly unusual when compared with the conventions of conversation in mainstream twentieth-century novels. It runs as follows:

“This is our last parting, Estel,2 my son. I am aged by care, even as one of lesser Men; and now that it draws near I cannot face the darkness of our time that gathers upon Middle-earth. I shall leave it soon.”. . .

“Yet there may be a light beyond the darkness; and if so, I would have you see it and be glad.”

But she answered only with this linnod:

Ónen i-Estel Edain, ú-chebin estel anim.

[I gave Hope to the Dúnedain, I have kept no hope for myself.] (RK, Appendix A, 342).3

Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers have found this scene affecting, even though it does not fit common contemporary patterns of discourse in fiction, nor does it resemble natural speech. After all, people do not communicate in poetry or song in everyday life in the world we know.4 But we contemporary readers can certainly sense the dramatic irony in Gilraen’s and Aragorn’s last conversation, especially when we consider the greater story of which it forms only a small part. And even if we (as readers) do not know why Gilraen suddenly breaks into poetry, we can still observe the heightened dramatic tension when Tolkien has her at last abandon ordinary speech for high speech, for formalized patterns, for what Icelanders even today call bundidh mál, “bound language.”5

In the paragraphs to follow I intend to explore some of the reasons why we can sense that ironic tension. Principal among those reasons, I would argue, is that effective prototypes and precedents for the use of poetry in conversation can be found in human narratives out of the past. Tolkien had read many of these narratives, and he adopted and adapted their storytelling conventions to produce dramatic results we can experience even today whether we are acquainted with the prototypes or not.

Before the publication of the Lord of the Rings in the nineteen-fifties, few mainstream published fiction narratives in the twentieth-century Western world consisted of both prose and poetry, appearing together on the page throughout the book, intended and constructed to flow complementarily as an integrated whole.6 The verse in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is more than simply occasional. It is an indispensable part of the narrative itself, and not mere flavoring, or wallpaper, in the manner of (say) Miles Hendon singing the ballad of “Eggs and Marrowbone” in Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper.7 Sometimes the poetry and songs in Lord of the Rings provide backstory, as in the case of Aragorn’s Lay of Lúthien or Bilbo’s song of Eärendil; but equally often, it seems, they advance the plot, or at least add nuance to it 8—as is certainly true of Sam’s spontaneous prayer to Elbereth in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, as it also is of the fragment that motivated this essay, namely, Gilraen’s poignant farewell to Aragorn (see above).

It is manifestly evident, in any case, that the text of The Lord of the Rings incorporates poetry and song in ways not generally found in English novels appearing within its decade of publication. Nor is it surprising that near matches to Tolkien’s polygeneric narrative mode can be found in medieval literature—most copiously, I would argue, in Old Norse literature, with which, as countless articles and biographies have established, Tolkien was well acquainted. It can be observed, for instance, that the Elder Edda incorporates both poetry and prose, although in opposite proportions to the Lord of the Rings narrative, consisting of units of poetry linked by occasional prose bridges.9 The reverse, of course, is true of both of the most commonly-known saga genres, namely, the Icelandic family-saga (such as Njáls saga, Egils saga or Laxdæla saga) and the legendary saga (such as Völsunga saga or Hervarar saga or Hrólfs saga kraka, all of particular interest to Tolkien),10 both of which consist of blocks of prose narrative interrupted by, and ornamented with, occasional poetry. These verse passages perform functions quite analogous to those achieved by the interspersed poetry in the Lord of the Rings.11 In other words, poetry could be employed within a saga narrative in any of the ways Tolkien employs it: as story, riddle, prophecy, incantation, exhortation, invocation, lament or lyric.

The gift of poetry, in the world of the Old Norse sagas,12 lay inherent in any speaking character. It may be difficult for us to conceive of the production of poetry exclusively as a spontaneous oral act, since “writing poetry” is the formula with which we are familiar; but so it seems to have been, and so it still remains on occasion even today in hyper-literate Iceland. One of the more common ways, in fact, to introduce a scrap of poetry in a saga is with this formula: Vardh henni [honum] ljódh á munni, “There came a poem into her [his] mouth,” which locution suggests that high speech, perhaps even inspired by an outside, supernatural source, will follow.

Old Norse poetry comes in a number of different classifiable forms. What Tolkien called “mode” with reference to Elvish verse types would seem to cover both meter and genre; but I will separate these two classification templates here, beginning with the metrical.

Alliteration was present in every type of Old Norse meter, ideally in sets of three distributed among two lines, but sometimes in sets of two.13 Internal rhyme and end-rhyme could also be present. Strict syllable count could also be required in some meters, such as in the skaldic meter dróttkvætt, in which each stanza consisted of eight units of six syllables each. As I will show later, the metrical features of Gilraen’s linnod match up nicely with most of these Old Norse metrical features.

Genre classifications within Old Norse poetry refer to the context and occasion of the poem’s delivery. Within each of the following genres, almost any of the above metrical features may have been used. The long poems in the Elder Edda are designated in the Codex Regius manuscript by such terms as mál (“speech”), ljódh (“song”) or kvidha (“speech” again). A poem by a known skald in praise of a liege lord may be designated as a flokkr; or, if it includes a repeated refrain, a drápa. Loose single stanzas are called just that, lausavísur. Shorter epigrams, typically uttered under some emotional pressure, are called kvidhlingar (“speechlets,” or perhaps even “blurts”); it is these, I believe, that constitute the generic (as differentiated from the metrical) prototype for Gilraen’s linnod.

So what do kvidhlingar look like?

After searching the very handy “Fornrit” (Old Writings) database at snerpa.is,14 I found, to my surprise, that there are no kvidhlingar designated as such in the three legendary sagas I have listed above. However, there are a total of ten of them, so named,15 in the corpus of Icelandic family sagas stored at the same site. For instance the famed Icelandic outlaw Grettir ásmundarson, in the saga named for him, is known for expressing himself by means of kvidhlingar. This is hardly surprising considering Grettir’s career of many years as a despised outcast and outlaw, often in the kind of situation that calls for a protagonist to blurt out something shocking. Among other examples I found were the three below, culled from the best known kvidhlingar from the family sagas.

First, the Freyja-lampoon from Njáls saga ch. 102, spoken in the middle of the religious debates (between Christianity and the old religion of the Æsir and Vanir) that are said to have occurred in Iceland in the years 999-1000:

Hjalti Skeggjason kvadh kvidhling thenna:
Vil ek eigi godh geyja,
grey thykkjumk Freyja.
Æ mun annat tveggja
Ódhinn grey edha Freyja.

[Hjalti Skeggjason recited this kvidhlingr:
At the gods I dare not bark:
but a bitch is what Freyja is.
Or have I got it backwards,
and a bitch is what Odin is?]16

The second example is Thórhildr the Poetess’s rebuke to her husband, whom she catches trading long looks with a young girl, Thorgerdhr, the daughter of the bride at a wedding, in Njáls saga ch. 34:

Thetta sér kona hans, Thórhildr. Hún reidhisk og
kvedhr til hans kvidhling:
Esa gapriplar gódhir,
gægr es thér í augum.

[His wife, Thórhildr, sees this. She grows angry
and speaks a kvidhlingr at him:
Gaping isn’t good to do;
it’s a goggle-eyed starer you are.]

The third example is Audhr-in-Breeches’ remark when the news is brought to her that her husband has divorced her in favor of another woman, from Laxdæla saga, ch. 34:

En er Audhr spyrr thessi tídhindi thá mælti hún:
Vel es ek veit that,
vas’k ein of latin.

[But when Audhr hears this news, she recited the
following:
Well to be ware of it
When one’s been cast off.]

Generically, these are clearly all kvidhlingar—epigrammatic utterances performed spontaneously in response to an emotionally tense situation. It is worth noting, in connection with Gilraen’s linnod, that two out of three of them are spoken by women in volatile moods who perceive that they are being deserted by the men in their life. Metrically, each kvidhlingr displays three (or six, in Hjalti’s case—a double set of three) alliterating staves. One of them (Hjalti’s) displays end-rhyme. Another one (Audhr’s) displays a consistent syllable count.

Patrick Wynne and Carl Hostetter have observed with regard to the metrical structure of Gilraen’s linnod that it contains two units of seven syllables, as might be implicit in the term linn-od itself, which they identify as Sindarin for “song-seven” (Wynne and Hostetter 131). In this structural respect it echoes Audhr’s two units of five. They also note that the linnod alliterates—in fact, by Old Norse standards, it over-alliterates—since every word in it begins with a vowel:

Ónen i-Estel Edain, ú-chebin estel anim.

Their conclusion with regard to this feature is worth noting, as well as making us smile: “Lacking another example of a linnod, it remains uncertain whether the alliteration in Gilraen’s linnod represents a characteristic feature of the mode, or whether it arose coincidentally in this particular example from the available vocabulary” (Wynne and Hostetter 132).

For my part I am inclined to believe the alliteration in Gilraen’s linnod completely intentional, for several reasons. First, because it echoes the vocalic alliteration of the Quenya invocation Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima (or of Cynewulf’s Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast for that matter), a favored pattern already observable in Tolkien’s poetic aesthetic. Secondly, because Tolkien certainly had the ability, had he so wished, to alter his own invented vocabulary to make alliteration happen. (Even if he wished to retain existing root vocabulary that did not alliterate, there was nothing impeding him from creating a new, synonymous root-word that did.) In this, Tolkien certainly had the advantage over the fifth-century metalsmith, maker of one of the Gallehus horns, about whose possible poetic gifts we must remain ignorant. The runes on the horn are transcribed as follows:

ekhlewagastiR:holtijaR:horna:tawido

[I, Hlegestr of Holt, made the horn.]

Many have called this one of the earliest examples of Germanic alliterative verse: it contains three alliterating staves. But is it in fact poetry? The object was inarguably a horn. The smith’s name was Hlegest; he was from Holt. How else could he have labeled it?

Unlike some Old Norse poetry, Gilraen’s linnod seems to contain no rhyme, unless the slant-rhymed vowels and the two nasal consonants of Edain and anim count. (And perhaps they do; the sounds are related, and in some poetic traditions can be considered close enough to match each other.)

I would argue, in conclusion, that Gilraen’s Sindarin linnod exhibits both metrical and generic features that reveal its descent from the Old Norse kvidhlingr. It exhibits strict syllable count, an occasional feature of Old Norse poetry; it exhibits alliteration, a required feature of Old Norse poetry; it may exhibit slant rhyme, sometimes a feature of Old Norse poetry. Finally, it is an emotionally charged outburst spoken by a woman to a kinsman who is, in her view of things, deserting her; these are features found often in the Old Norse kvidhlingar.

Tolkien knew the sagas well. It is only natural that he might draw verse prototypes from them to use in his own compositions, just as he used English ballad and folk song prototypes in such poems and songs as “Gil-galad was an Elven-king” or “Troll sat alone on his seat of stone;” or Old English prototypes in the “Lament of the Rohirrim” or “Song of the Mounds of Mundburg.” I would argue, in conclusion, that Tolkien’s use of prototypes—as here in the case of the kvidhlingr and the linnod—is not only an element, but the most fundamental element in his poetry. And with regard to Tolkien’s use of Old Norse literary prototypes specifically, it is also worth revisiting the idea, at this point, that it occurs in the Lord of the Rings not only on a small scale (kvidhlingr / linnod) but also on the greater scale: one polygeneric narrative (prose with interspersed poetry) mimicking another.

Notes

1 This makes it extremely unlikely that her final resting place is at Rivendell, as it is in the extended version of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring film.

2 Sindarin for “Hope;” Aragorn’s name in his youth in Rivendell (RK, Appendix A, 338).

3 I follow the suggestion of Douglas Anderson in restoring the original long vowel in the first syllable of Ónen: (Wynne and Hostetter 139).

4 They may do so at the emotional high points of a Broadway musical, which may or may not strike us as natural.

5 Careful viewers of Peter Jackson’s films may have noted the use of Gilraen’s linnod in two places, on both occasions out of context and in non-canonical scenes, thus unlikely to have occurred to Tolkien: first, carved on Gilraen’s tomb (in Rivendell!), where Aragorn has occasion to see and reflect on it before setting out with the Fellowship; and second, quoted (first half) by Elrond (standing in for Elladan and Elrohir presumably, who are not present since they do not exist in the films) and (second half) by Aragorn, before the sequence involving the Paths of the Dead. Even out of place, the little verse carries considerable poignancy, as the scriptwriters (who otherwise did not see fit to include much poetry) seem to have recognized.

6 I can think of only two other authors of our current era that have done this on a large scale, both after Tolkien, and both within the genre of realistic historical fiction. Not unlike Tolkien, both have exhibited an at least partially nationalistic motivation (Scotland, Spain). Unlike Tolkien, though, the poetry and songs used by both authors have been largely drawn from existing texts of the time depicted (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), with some creative adaptations. I am referring to the Lymond Chronicles (1961-1975) of Dorothy Dunnett; and Las aventuras del capitán Alatriste (1996-) of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The speech of Dunnett’s character Francis Crawford of Lymond is so interlarded with more or less apropos poetic citations (carefully drawn from pre-1540’s sources) as to cause another character to remark, “I wish to God. . .that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people” (362). In Pérez-Reverte’s Alatriste novels, the historical poet Francisco de Quevedo is featured as a character and a good friend of the fictional protagonist; both real and adapted Quevedescan verse dots the pages. Thus in both cases the reader’s consciousness of the verbal elegance of the past is raised; and presumably also the reader’s pride in that past, connected with a sense of past glory tragically and irrevocably lost. Needless to say, such interrelated agendas are hardly alien to Tolkien.

Where Tolkien differs from these authors is in his use of the poetry of the past not as direct citations, but as prototypes, as I have indicated above. (I would argue that the post-Tolkienian, Tolkien-imitative habit of many fantasy authors of interspersing verse in their texts is in almost every case less successful than Tolkien precisely because there is no prototypical pattern out of the past behind it.)

7 Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper, ch. 13, “The Disappearance of the King.” http://www.mastertexts.com/Twain_Mark/The_Prince_and_the_Pauper/Chapter00013.htm.

The song is only sung in fragments, but it is easily identifiable as #Q2 in the ballad-index of folklorist G. Malcolm Laws.

8 By my reckoning, the poetry (loosely defined, including prayers and incantations in poetic form) found within the body of the Lord of the Rings text can be divided by function as follows: Retold narratives, 13%; Lore (including riddles, prophecy, incantations), 19%; Exhortations, 11%; Prayers and hymns, 8%; Laments for the dead, 8%; High-hearted Ditties (Bilbo and Tom Bombadil), 24%; and Lyrics (including laments, praise, Fernweh and Heimweh, nostalgia), 17%. (Gilraen’s linnod is not included in the above, since it appears in the Appendices; but I would put it under the last category, as a spontaneous lyric.)

9 Within the Poetic Edda, see especially För Skírnis, Völundarkvidha, and Grímnismál for instances of prose and poetry used serially, and Frá daudha Sinfjötla and Dráp Niflunga for longer prose passages used to create a narrative link between two poems. The Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn edition is perhaps best.

10 Völsunga saga is the mostly-prose retelling of the story told in the Eddic poems of the Sigurd cycle, justifiably identifiable as the prototypical cursed-ring story. Hervarar saga, a dynastic- and tribal-warfare narrative perhaps similarly identifiable as the prototypical cursed-sword story, was edited by Christopher Tolkien and is one of the two Old Norse texts (the other is the Eddic poem Atlakvidha) where “Mirkwood” features as the near-impassable boundary between the Goths and the Huns, or in other words, between Us and Our Tribal Enemies. Hrólfs saga kraka contains a series of tales involving the encounters of heroic Danish kings with Swedes of varying benignity; these include a clear analogue to the Beowulf story.

11 There are, of course, other premodern European narrative genres in which a story is told by means of alternating poetry and prose; for instance, the “chante-fable,” such as the French medieval tale of Aucassin et Nicolette, or the folk tale of “Jack Rowland” in English, in which ballad stanzas alternate with prose; but the Old Norse sagas are more copious and probably more well known.

12 That “world” must remain a necessarily loose concept, considering that many of the stories retold in Iceland in the late Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth century) in the legendary sagas certainly date back to the Migration Age in Europe (fourth to sixth centuries); and that the adventures of the settlers of Iceland and their ancestors in the Viking Age (roughly 793-1066), retold in the Icelandic family sagas, were not written down by their descendants until two to three hundred years later. It is best to think of most of these narratives as taking place in the same kind of unspecified Back Then milieu as that inhabited by King Arthur, governed by similar literary conventions—which are not generally those of the chroniclers.

13 These sets can be printed on a page as one line with a caesura, or as two separate lines; the former is favored by many Continental editors, while the latter is favored by Icelanders. It is worth remembering that those who composed the poetry had no sense of “lines” as we think of them, or of how the poetry would look on a page; and that the medieval scribes who first wrote the poetry down followed neither of the modern conventions, being more concerned with the conservation of parchment.

14 http://www.snerpa.is/net/fornrit.htm.

15 There are almost certainly more than these in the corpus. I searched for the word kvidhlingr in all of its grammatical cases, as in: He/she spoke the following kvidhlingr. However, the term need not be present for a kvidhlingr to have been spoken; see the Audhr-in-Breeches example below.

16 Translations are mine. Inconsistencies of tense are present in the originals.

Works Cited

Dunnett, Dorothy. The Game of Kings. The Lymond Chronicles, vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1997.

Laws, G. Malcolm. Native American Balladry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

Neckel, Gustav, and Hans Kuhn, eds. Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1962.

“Netútgáfan: Íslendingasögur.” Snerpa.is. http://www.snerpa.is/net/fornrit.htm (downloaded 22 December 2004).

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo. El capitán Alatriste. Las aventuras del capitán Alatriste, vol. 1. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996.

Tolkien, Christopher, ed. and trans. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1960.

Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper, ch. 13, “The Disappearance of the King.” .http://www.mastertexts.com/Twain_Mark/The_Prince_and_the_Pauper/Chapter00013.htm (downloaded 22 December 2004).

Wynne, Patrick and Carl F. Hostetter. “Three Elvish Verse Modes.”In Tolkien’s Legendarium. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. 113-139.

Little Nell and Frodo the Halfling

Dale Nelson

Dickens an influence on Tolkien? This may seem unlikely. That medieval literature contributed lavishly to the formation of Tolkien’s imagination is accepted by everyone; that he was influenced by fantasists such as Rider Haggard is also accepted. But Dickens?

Before getting down to cases, we may consider a little literary history. The novels of Dickens have been part of the mental furniture of Anglophones for a century and a half, but it seems that, today, it’s often the novels from the second half (1852-1870) of Dickens’s career, such as Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, and Bleak House, that are read, while earlier works have fallen out of favor. Dickens truly was a popular author well into the twentieth century, but now he is a “classic,” and the custodians of the classics—the professors and high-school teachers—seem to favor the books mentioned above. (It may be that the very early Oliver Twist is also widely read as a “college prep” book, since it is a relatively short Dickens novel with a strong narrative pull.)

It seems likely that The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, and the subject of this note, The Old Curiosity Shop, are not much read any more in North America or the United Kingdom; but these (and Oliver Twist) were prominent in the “popular Dickens” of former days: Dickens was famous for his melodramatic plots and loved for his characters, and most of the Dickensian characters who were famous—who were people who could be mentioned in conversation or articles without requiring explanation, such as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, Wackford Squeers (the brutal headmaster of Dotheboys Hall), the hypocritical Pecknsiff and the hilarious, grotesque Mrs. Gamp—were from these early books, including Oliver Twist (Fagin, Sykes and Nancy).1 In the decades when Dickens’ novels were read for enjoyment rather than as set books for schools, these early books—plus David Copperfield—seem to have been the popular favorites. Except for Copperfield (1849-50), they were published from 1836-1844.

We do not have the record of Tolkien’s reading that scholars could wish. However, it is possible that Tolkien’s conception of the weary Frodo, “bound” to a whining, undependable, addicted and dangerous Gollum, making his way across the blighted landscape of Mordor whilst being pursued by an implacable enemy, sustained only by water and meager portions of Elvish lembas, owes something to the principal character and action of The Old Curiosity Shop.

When the hideous dwarf Quilp seizes orphan Nell’s bankrupt grandfather’s shop, the child and her elderly relative set out as furtive pilgrims hoping to find a new home somewhere far from London. Nell, who is in early adolescence and whose vulnerability is emphasized, wishes to escape Quilp, who has unwholesome designs on her. She is bound (by blood and affection) to make an appalling journey with an unlovable person who brings her into dangerous situations because of his obsessive passion for what is not his (namely, the money he longs to win by gambling). Similarly, Frodo, hungry, weakened by his Nazgûl-knife wound and his inner struggle against the Ring he bears, must travel cross-country into unknown, ever-worsening locales, while eluding the Black Riders, the screeching Nazgûl, and other agents of Sauron, and is forced by circumstances to retain Gollum’s company despite Gollum’s spitefulness, unreliability, lust for the Ring, and capacity for betrayal. (There is no counterpart in Dickens’s novel to Samwise, Frodo’s faithful companion.) Toiling through devastated regions, Frodo and Nell can only dream of trees and green fields.

After having suffered much from hunger and exposure, Nell and her grandfather, in rags, arrive at an unnamed industrial town—Birmingham or Manchester. They are destitute, afraid, and forced to double back on their tracks. The language below, from chapters 44 and 45, recalls Tolkien’s descriptions of Frodo and Sam making their way through Sauron’s accursed realm—and, incidentally, Saruman’s heavy industry at Orthanc.

…the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour, which hung in a dense, ill-favoured cloud above the house-tops and filled the air with gloom.… (xliii, 306)

Shivering with the cold and damp, ill in body, and sick to death at heart, the child needed her utmost firmness and resolution even to creep along…. (xliv, 307)

… they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside. … mounds of ashes by the wayside. (xlv, 316)

Then, came more of the wrathful monsters [machines], whose like they seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again [like the airborne Nazgûl]; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day.… (xlv, 316)

… night-time in this dreadful spot!—night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirted [sic] up its flame; and places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shown red-hot, with fingers moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to one another with hoarse cries—night, when the noise of every machine was aggravated by the darkness…. And yet she lay down, with nothing between her and the sky; and, with no fear for herself, for she was past it now.… So very weak and spent she felt, so very calm and unresisting, that she had no thought of any wants of her own…. A penny loaf was all they had had that day. (xlv, 316-17)2

Morning came. Much weaker, diminished powers even of sight and hearing, and yet the child made no complaint …. Their way led through the same scenes as yesterday, with no variety or improvement. There was the same thick air, difficult to breathe; the same blighted ground; the same hopeless prospect; the same misery and distress. … With less and less of hope or strength, as they went on.… (xlv, 319)

It has often been suggested that Tolkien’s accounts of Orthanc and Mordor convey his horror of the industrial spoliation of the English countryside. Indeed; and one may suspect that Dickens’s early presentation thereof left a lasting impression upon Tolkien’s imagination, whenever he may have read The Old Curiosity Shop. Given that Tolkien, as a boy, attended King Edward’s School in Birmingham itself, the novel’s possible depiction of that city might be of unusual interest for him.3

Notes

1 Two of the later novels give us the fairly well-known pair of the soul-desiccating teacher Gradgrind and Madame Defarge sinisterly knitting—but people such as Jo the crossing-sweeper (from Bleak House) are little known to people who haven’t actually read the books in which they appear—books not much read now, outside of academe, one suspects.

2 Compare the lembas that keeps Frodo and Sam alive.

3 Whatever else Tolkien read by Dickens, he must have read at least the first chapter of The Pickwick Papers. The reader is invited to place, side by side, Tolkien’s account of Bilbo’s often-interrupted speechifying at his “Long-Expected [birthday] Party” and Dickens’s record of Mr. Pickwick’s similarly-received “oration” at the end of the first chapter of Pickwick. And did Tolkien read Dickens’s Hard Times? In Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle,” Councillor Tompkins sounds like kin of Tom Gradgrind; where Gradgrind’s best pupils learn that a horse is a “Quadruped. Gramnivorous,” etc., Tompkins snorts, in response to Niggle’s having said flowers were pretty, “What, digestive and genital organs of plants?” The materialistic reductivism is the same. It seems that memories of Dickens’s tale might have contributed to Tolkien’s own tale of purgatorial “hard times.”

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. The Works of Charles Dickens, Cleartype Edition, vol. 8. With Edwin Drood. New York: Books, Inc. [n. d.]

Book Reviews

The Alphabet of Rúmil & Early Noldorin Fragments, by J. R. R. Tolkien; including The Alphabet of Rúmil, edited by Arden R. Smith; and Early Noldorin Fragments, edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Welden, Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne. Cupertino, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 2001. 166 pp. $25.00 (oversize paperback) [no ISBN]. Parma Eldalamberon XIII.

Early Qenya & Valmaric, by J. R. R. Tolkien; including Early Qenya Fragments, edited by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson; Early Qenya Grammar, edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Bill Welden; and The Valmaric Script, edited by Arden R. Smith. Cupertino, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 2003. 136 pp. $25.00 (oversize paperback) [no ISBN]. Parma Eldalamberon XIV.

For Tolkien, the word came before the world. Yet his claim that he created Middle-earth to house his invented languages has served mainly to raise skeptical eyebrows. The on-going publication of his writings on the languages and scripts of his sub-created world must remedy this. Parma Eldalamberon, originally a linguistic fanzine, has become the chief vehicle for this more-or-less chronological project (allied to the smaller and more frequent Vinyar Tengwar, edited by Carl F. Hostetter, which tends to carry substantial items of linguistic interest from later in Tolkien’s life). This material was deemed too complex for inclusion in Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth.

The first two installments of this project presented vocabularies of the two principal interrelated languages as Tolkien originally conceived them: a Gnomish lexicon begun by 1917, and its Qenya counterpart begun in 1915 (Tolkien 1995 and 1998). From these he developed the mythos of the Lost Tales; the stories in turn found their reflection in the lexicons. In the two issues under consideration here, we see how Tolkien developed these languages during the 1920s, while he was turning the original “Book of Lost Tales” into the long “Lays of Beleriand” and the synoptic “Silmarillion.”

The work Tolkien produced on each language was dictated by the different ways in which he refined them during these years. Tolkien’s Qenya papers reflect his desire to develop a large, elegant system of inflections after the manner of Finnish, the original inspiration for the language. His new grammars complement his earlier Qenya lexicon, and were not replaced until the 1930s. However, in Gnomish or Noldorin (the language he later called Sindarin), Tolkien effected a phonological revolution. He made the consonantal system susceptible to lenition, the “softening” or voicing of sounds; and the vowel system susceptible to umlaut, that is, mutation under the influence of vowels in ensuing syllables (that often later disappeared, as in amon “hill,” pl. emyn). It meant that much of the vocabulary he had laid down in the Gnomish lexicon required updating.

The effect of such “niggling,” as Tolkien characterized it, was much the same in his linguistic creations as it was in his fiction or poetry. None of the items in these journals can be considered finished. Grammars begin confidently with phonology but stop abruptly somewhere en route to syntax; it is fortunate indeed that the early Qenya grammar in manuscript reaches the conjugation of verbs (XIV 56-9). Vocabularies begin as updated collations of earlier vocabularies, but peter out as the alphabet proceeds. To compound the problem, some new phonological innovation would transfix Tolkien part-way through, making redundant many of the forms he had just recorded and prompting him to start afresh with a new word-list: thus we see the arrival of the historical sound-change that yielded p from kw, a phenomenon borrowed from Welsh that swept aside, among others, cweth “word” in favor of peth (XIII 152). Or Tolkien would begin recording cognate words from a new-coined tongue: Old Noldorin and Ilkorin emerge in this way.

The effect is less like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis than a (rather beautiful) snake shedding its skin over and over again. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s triumph was to give the illusion of a complete world that, even in a thousand pages, we barely glimpse. On one hand we now see what a vast energy brooded over the hidden details of that world, and the truth behind his Times obituarist’s judgment that he had “a Johnsonian horror of going to bed.” But on the other hand Tolkien himself only glimpsed a limited portion of his world; and because he was its creator, what he did not glimpse does not exist. In these fragmentary and protean linguistic writings, there is no sense of perfected completeness.

Words now first appear in forms that would ultimately become familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion: aside from the aforementioned amon, we see ost, nen, aglareb, angren/engrin, amarth, ennyn, narog. But they are rocks deposited by the torrent. A great many of the words here would find no place in Tolkien’s stories, verse, maps and chronologies, where trees, stars and swords loom large but there is little scope for the terminology of dairy-products or sex. (The latter is surprisingly graphic, although Tolkien did restrict his glosses for genitals and coitus to Latin or Old English (XIII 147). Does it simply reflect a scientific detachment acquired while working on the taboo-busting Oxford English Dictionary, or are we to understand that the Elves enjoyed a prelapsarian degree of freedom from sexual shame?) Other words are unfamiliar but beautiful, or (far less often) unfamiliar and ugly, such as the transient awfulness of tlub (XIII 154) that briefly displaced celeb “silver.” (Galadriel and Tluborn, anyone?) We now see that the Kalevala-inspired number word leminkainen meant variously 23 and 50 at different stages, while kainen meant 18, 14 and now 10. In vain does one scrutinize the Elvish poems of Tolkien’s 1931 paper on language invention, “A Secret Vice,” hoping they will accord closely with these Qenya grammars: they do not. Nor do the Noldorin and Qenya papers tally closely: at this stage Tolkien appears to have carried out bursts of work on one language or the other, but not on both side by side.

We are also presented with the corpus of two writing systems, Rúmilian and Valmaric, used from 1919 and 1922 respectively until the mid-1920s. They represent part of the sub-creative fiction, being the script in which the Lost Tales were supposed to have been preserved in the Golden Book by Eriol or his son. The first, ascribed to Rúmil, the gnome who appeared to Eriol in the Cottage of Lost Play prattling of his prowess in the speech of birds (Lost Tales I 47), is reminiscent of the Devanagari alphabet which Tolkien would have seen used for Sanskrit; Valmaric is superficially similar to Tolkien’s later, more famous tengwar. One fragment (XIII 88-9), however, reveals how Tolkien not only based some of the tengwar on Rúmilian, but characteristically made this influence part of the fictional history of Middle-earth.

Thus there is fascination aplenty in this stream of change. It is possible to trace the metamorphosis of an idea over decades. During the First World War, Tolkien glossed the Qenya Kalimban as “Germany,” relating it to kalimbo “a savage, uncivilized man.—giant, monster, troll,” with clear nationalistic intent (Garth 128). Now, references to Germany have vanished, and Kalimbo is an alternative name for Gothmog, lord of Balrogs (XIV 12). We see lingering traces of his initial inclination to write himself, his brother Hilary and his wife Edith into the mythology; and early instances of his calendar-craft and heraldry. Tolkien charts a hierarchy of sentient beings in which the natural world is haunted everywhere by fays; the tendency that gave rise to the Ents is even written into his invented grammars, where “in Qenya living things as trees etc. are never regarded as neuter” (XIV 44).

It is tantalizing to witness the emergence of doriath, ivrin and orthanc, each with a significance entirely different to the ones Tolkien later more famously gave them. Gulum, too, hints at things to come: but here in an early name list it is the Gnomish name of the demiurge of the sea, Ulmo (XIII 101). Bearing in mind Sméagol’s origins in Tolkien’s poem “Glip,” who sings a “gurgling song” in his sea-cliff cave (Anderson 112), we can see that the onomatopoeia of water slapping in a spout-hole may underlie both Gulum and Gollum. As with his narratives, in which the rider who terrified the hobbits in the Shire turned out, in the first draft, to have been Gandalf rather than a Ringwraith (Shadow 47-8), here Tolkien established the shape before he discovered its enduring significance. We also see him experimenting with the shapes of Rúmilian letters or Noldorin words while making no attempt to assign sounds or meanings to them: a pure exploration of formal possibilities.

Here, as in his cosmogonic myth, the Ainulindalë, Tolkien seems to have taken to heart the advice of an old friend. Christopher Wiseman had once told him, “The completed work is vanity; the process of the working is everlasting.... Just as the fugue is nothing on the page; it is only vital as it works its way out...” (Garth 122, 254). A cynic might say that taking it to heart was the only way to allay a sense of guilt about so vast a quantity of unfinished work. But these records of ever-shifting taste and technique in language and script invention testify to a belief in creativity as process. Such a belief underpins the “Silmarillion,” the story of what happens when the arch-sub-creator, Fëanor, attempts perfection. That Tolkien saw this as folly is clear from the fact that Fëanor names his most arrogant and cruel son Cranthir: it means “perfect” (XIII 161).

In Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Arden R. Smith (who focuses on Tolkien’s writing systems), Bill Welden and Patrick Wynne, we are fortunate to have an editorial team whose diligence and attention to detail match Tolkien’s own. This material presents difficulties not only of subject-matter, but also of presentation, but the team has handled the diverse collection of fragments and palimpsests both thoroughly and deftly. Occasionally the air of scholarship sits ill with the subject matter: on deciphering some Noldorin marginalia as a reference to the Byzantine emperor drinking excessively and then eating six houses, it was hardly necessary to add that “if that is the correct interpretation it must have been intended humorously” (XIII 128). But everywhere this intractable material is well marshaled for our better understanding. Tolkien’s many corrections are noted, and often explained, in footnotes. Wordlists are extensively cross-referenced, internally and also against other wordlists; the net is sometimes cast very wide. Etymological interpretations are usually astute, though the limited and shifting corpus makes for hazardous guesswork at times. Judicious explanations are given for a few linguistic terms (epenthesis, proparoxyton). The principal achievement of the editors is to reveal the continuities underlying apparent flux, the pattern behind particular changes. Morphological and phonological rules underlie everything: changes in word shape or sense that at first seem arbitrary usually reflect a refinement of those rules.

Who will read these journals, and their sibling Vinyar Tengwar? There will be those who find clues here to the workings of Tolkien’s creative mind, and those who enjoy his linguistic inventions for aesthetic or technical reasons. They are, indeed, essential to a full view of the growth of the legendarium and greatly enrich an understanding of a phenomenal imagination. In the massive project of excavating and illuminating Tolkien’s work on the languages and scripts of Middle-earth, there is scope for years of analysis and delight.

John Garth
London, England

Works Cited

[anon] “Obituary: Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, Creator of Hobbits and Inventor of a New Mythology,” The Times (London). September 3, 1973, 15.

Anderson, Douglas A., ed. The Annotated Hobbit: Revised and Expanded Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2002.

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins, 2003.

Tolkien, J. R. R. I·Lam na·Ngoldathon: The Grammar and Lexicon of The Gnomish Tongue, ed. Christopher Gilson, Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith and Carl F. Hostetter. Walnut Creek, California: Parma Eldalamberon, 1995. Parma Eldalamberon XI.

Tolkien, J. R. R. Qenyaqetsa: The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon: together with The Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa, ed. Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Patrick Wynne and Arden R. Smith. Cupertino, California: Parma Eldalamberon, 1998. Parma Eldalamberon XII.

Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in “The Lord of the Rings,” by Matthew T. Dickerson. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press [a division of Baker Book House], 2003. 234 pp. $14.99 (trade paperback) ISBN 1587430851.

I have mixed feelings about the content of Dickerson’s book, and I believe most of its scholarly readers will. Let me begin with what is truly excellent: the first three chapters are dedicated to a discussion of Tolkien’s views of war as presented in The Lord of the Rings. Dickerson says that Tolkien has been dismissed as one who glorifies war (called a “phantom criticism,” presumably meaning it has been made orally but not in written criticism, on page 17; attributed, as an example, to a colleague of Dickerson on page 20). Dickerson also shows how the Peter Jackson films emphasize war—which may influence some people’s view of Tolkien’s work (19-21).

Having set up this critique, Dickerson sets out to answer it. Whether or not this criticism of Tolkien’s work has been widespread, the answer is nicely done. Dickerson studies several of the battles, including that of the five armies in The Hobbit, finding Tolkien did not, except for a special purpose, describe the details of the fighting, that he usually focused on a minor character in the war, and that his adjectives do not glorify the warfare. In the battle on the Pelennor Fields, specifically in Éowyn and Merry against the Lord of the Nazgûl, Dickerson finds a dismissal of the Anglo-Saxon glorification of the warrior.

In the second chapter, Dickerson lists those upon Middle-earth considered wise (as suggested by the narrator’s words): Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir, Elrond, Galadriel, and Frodo. Dickerson asks what Gandalf, Faramir, and Frodo say about war, again finding no glorification of it. (Elrond and Galadriel are used in the chapter’s conclusion in a contrast to Peter Jackson’s films.) In the third chapter, Dickerson supports the thesis that, in Tolkien’s fiction, moral victories are more important than military victories.

These chapters are well developed and say something (so far as I am aware) that is new. But Dickerson has seven chapters to go. He still writes well; he still uses good support from the text (and sometimes from Tolkien’s letters); he still has, sometimes, some fresh points to make. But he goes on to consider the moral and religious themes of The Lord of the Rings, and in doing so sounds to me to be largely repetitious of what other critics have said before. This brings up the matter of his citation of earlier critics: his main references are to Carpenter’s biography, Clyde Kilby’s Tolkien and “The Silmarillion” (1976), Richard Purtill’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion (1984), and T. A. Shippey’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). I am not at all discounting these, for various purposes, but they certainly are not all the works on the moral and religious themes. Paul H. Kocher, in his Master of Middle-earth (1972), had his third chapter titled “Cosmic Order”; Randel Helms, in Tolkien’s World (1974), listed five “internal laws of Middle-earth” (79), of which the first was “The cosmos is providentially controlled.” I deliberately cite books published before the collection of Tolkien’s letters and before The Silmarillion to suggest how wide spread is the acknowledgement of Tolkien’s religious worldview in his fiction. Judith A. Johnson, in J. R. R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism (1986), listed “The Christian themes in Tolkien’s works” as one of twelve representative issues “hotly debated” by his critics (234)—and that was nearly twenty years ago.

I do not say that Dickerson needed to write a scholarly book of the sort that cites a forerunner for each statement he makes, but it would have been very appropriate to have a footnote at the end of some chapters or sections of chapters, mentioning the others who have written on the topics in interesting ways—for example, the sections “The Presence of Authority” and “The Purpose of Authority” (in Chapter 9) touch on the matter of Providence (called, obviously, Authority).

This said, Dickerson’s actual approach may be discussed. In his introduction, he says that his basic theme is “the reality and importance of human free will” (12). Later, he speaks of “the central themes of this book: free will, objective morality, and the importance of moral victory over military victory” (137). After these three are established, he has more religious applications. Despite saying at the first of the eighth chapter, “Themes of Salvation,” that religious discussions of Tolkien’s fiction are dangerous because Tolkien thought explicit reference to existing religions was inappropriate in myth and fantasy, Dickerson nevertheless makes the distinction between physical and spiritual planes and applies it—for example, in Boromir’s statement of his failure (physical plane) and Aragorn’s statement of Boromir’s victory (spiritual plane) (147-151), Dickerson referring to the latter as Boromir’s salvation. Later in the chapter he speaks of Sméagol’s near-salvation and of Denethor’s damnation, both of the characters (for the former, now read Gollum) ending in fire.

Dickerson draws back from the strongly Christian reading in his last chapter when he asks, “Do The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings comprise a Christian mythology?” and answers firmly “yes and no” (204). He cites Tolkien on both sides of the issue. Also on the no side are the influence of Germanic myth on the fictions, the lack of Christ in them, their sadness (not in The Hobbit so much as the other two), and their likeness to the Old Testament (in Dickerson’s Christian reading) without the New. On the yes side are the various readings of Christian themes this book has offered, although Dickerson ends by saying the books present “a Christian understanding of a pre-Christian time” (225). Included in this approach is discussion of “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” from Morgoth’s Ring.

Let me say again that Dickerson has some interesting comments that are not tied to moral and religious interests. For example, at the first of the ninth chapter, he discusses the change in tone in The Hobbit, making a good case that it shifts when Elrond appears, partly by analyzing the tone of some poems before and after Elrond’s presence (166-174).

Over all, this is a valuable book. I think it is especially valuable for its close reading of the text to show Tolkien’s attitude toward warfare. The moral and religious material is often freshly said, but most of the points have been made before. I appreciate Dickerson’s tendency to support his points throughout with specific citations.

No index. Occasional minor errata—e.g., no third footnote on page 15 to match the footnote number in the text; a one-time use of “trilogy” to refer to The Lord of the Rings (46); a naming of the dragon that Beowulf fights “Beowulf” (170 n2); Paul (the Apostle) instead of Peter (209).

Joe R. Christopher
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, Texas

The Real Middle-earth: Exploring the Magic and Mystery of the Middle Ages, J. R. R. Tolkien, and “The Lord of the Rings,” by Brian Bates. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. viii, 292 pp. $24.95 (hardcover) ISBN 1403963193. [Previously published in the UK as The Real Middle-earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002. £18.99 (hardcover) ISBN 0283073535.]

There have been many books, both popular and scholarly, that have appeared (or proliferated) because of the recent popularity of The Lord of the Rings movies. Some of them are quite good, others are okay, and most don’t deserve comment. Bates’s book is perhaps one of the better ones, given that he attempts to provide sound explanations for much of Tolkien’s inspiration and medieval sources for his novel. For those who are well versed in medieval history, religion, life, and culture, this book may almost seem like a “dummies” guide to Tolkien and the Middle Ages (yes, there is one of those that has come out recently as well), and yet the presentation by this author is much more scholarly, understandable, and historical than other books that I have recently perused on the topic. Being a medievalist myself, and a long-time admirer of Tolkien’s works, I find Bates’s book a step up from the “Dummies” guide currently available on this topic, and closer to a simplified, historical explanation of what many people commonly refer to as the “Dark Ages” in Britain.

The author has divided the book into seven major sections. Section 1, “Rediscovering the real Middle-earth,” is comprised of four chapters discussing what the “real” Middle-earth was, the people that inhabited that world, how they lived, and the power associated with trees and the woods during the Dark Ages. Section 2, “The Doom of Dragons,” has three chapters discussing the Roman occupation of Britain, the concept of dragons and the hoarding of gold, different types of dragons, and the story of Beowulf. Section 3, “The Enchanted Earth,” contains Chapters 8-11 and deals with the various types of plants and other items that were believed to contain magical and mystical powers. In Section 4, “Magical Beasts,” Bates explains some of the history of the Northumbrian royal conversion to Christianity while describing beasts such as ravens and crows as omen-bearers, as well as the concept of wyrd and destiny in Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon life. Section 5, “Wizards of Wyrd,” contains two chapters describing Norse mythology and the role of seeresses, women diviners, and trances. Section 6, “Dwarves, Giants and Monsters,” discusses some of the medieval inspirations for Ents, the dwarves, the use of spells, and large spiders/monsters. Section 7, “Voyage to the Otherworld,” is an extended description and explanation of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, specifically related to King Redwald’s burial in seventh-century East Anglia.

There are extensive footnotes provided for each chapter, which indicate a more scholarly approach for this author’s statements. There are also some very helpful historical maps of Dark Age Britain and the European continent given near the beginning of the book, and an extensive index at the back of the book. There is also an extended illustration/photo section in the middle of the book that shows some of the treasures found at Sutton Hoo.

Overall, this book provides a fairly simplified overview of the “Dark Ages” inspiration behind some of Tolkien’s concepts and characters in his works. The author maintains a fairly laid-back presentation style throughout the book, often giving information in the first person and referring to his current location as he writes certain sections of the book (i.e., on page 245 at the start of chapter 21 where he says “I am sitting on top of King Redwald’s burial mound”). The organization of the book is chaotic at times, moving from one subject to another fairly quickly, with no real attempt to link ideas and concepts for the reader. In the Acknowledgements section, the author indicates some rather unconventional inspirations for the book related to Zen, Tao, shamanic consciousness, and Oneida tribal magic, among others. While none of these inspirations is in itself strange, the author never really states within the book what exactly he is professor of at the University of Brighton. While the book is presented as a semi-scholarly work, I found it interesting that most of the people listed in the Acknowledgements section had more to do with new age religion and spirituality than with academic historians and scholars. In fact, I read the author’s novel The Way of the Wyrd some years ago, and was fascinated with the storyline and presentation. In any event, this book fits between fan-based publications related to the recent movies, and the more scholarly-based publications by established Tolkien scholars related to Tolkien’s overall influences and background. Certainly, readers without any background in the historical influences on Tolkien’s writings would find this book much more enjoyable and understandable than some of the “heavier” Tolkien scholarship currently available.

Brad Eden
University of Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada

The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition, by Tom Shippey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. xviii, 398 pp. $13.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 0618257608.

New editions of important books, often revised or expanded, have recently started to be issued in Tolkien studies as in other academic fields. Such important new editions include Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light, Jane Chance’s two books on Tolkien, and A Tolkien Compass, a significant early collection edited by Jared Lobdell. While it makes texts available again, this practice also offers authors (or editors like Lobdell) opportunity to reconsider, elaborate, and bring up to date their arguments; considering the number of posthumously published Tolkien texts, this is frequently a fruitful rethinking. Tom Shippey also used the occasion of the republication of The Road to Middle-earth to present a book that is essentially the same, and yet different. This is the good old Road (which, as we know, goes ever on and on), but also a new and even more usable one.

Neither Tom Shippey nor The Road to Middle-earth needs to be introduced to any Tolkien scholar on this planet. Since its first publication in 1982, Road has become emblematic of one of the ways serious critical consideration of Tolkien (often called the “source-study” approach, although perhaps “comparative study” would be more appropriate) was imagined to be, and supplied a thorough introduction to numerous Tolkien scholars and readers. It has been called “the single best thing written on Tolkien.” Despite the number of works written on Tolkien (including articles and another book by Shippey himself), the status of Road as the seminal monograph is not likely to be shaken.

This review will deal with the book’s themes and arguments only very briefly; it aims at pointing out what is new in this “revised and expanded edition.” Shippey rewrote sections in the book, and added some others that make the argument fuller and more up-to-date. The structure changed only in minor details; these generally derive from the integration of separately published material into the argument of Road, which considerably enlarges its horizon. As in Shippey’s 2001 book, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (to which there are several explicit links inserted), Tolkien is here too considered as a post-war writer, the emphasis on the contemporary relevance complementing the overwhelming stress on the “diachronic” aspect of studying Tolkien, and this “synchronic” addition makes Road a book of wider scope.

It nevertheless remains a deeply historical work, the best explanation of how Tolkien’s medievalist occupation determines and comments on his literary achievement. The history and conceptual tools of comparative philology ground this interpretation, and Shippey’s cogent and concise analyses, started from linguistic-philological cruces that supplied the sparks for Tolkien’s creativity, pieced together and argued with great logical rigor, are as convincing as twenty years ago. The main themes remain the method of reconstruction, Tolkienian “depth,” and the philologist’s fascination with words, meanings, and histories, shooting out imaginative side-branches into “asterisk-reality.” In the treatment of The Silmarillion (now with a useful and succinct introductory section on how “the Silmarillion” tradition developed) and the “History of Middle-earth” the parallel between Tolkien’s many versions and the textual corpora of philological work is shown up as a logical consequence of this creative method. Attention to the variants of the corpus complements the argument at a number of points, expanding discussions of the “cartographic plot” of The Lord of the Rings or of the Beren story. But I believe Shippey’s interpretation of some of the “History of Middle-earth” as “ox-bones” (290) does not assign full importance to this corpus; when Tolkien (in “On Fairy-Stories”) says that the “soup” is the “story as it is served up by its author or teller,” it is not necessarily “stories in their final forms, as ‘served up’ or published” (290) that he means. The comment can refer to any individual version in which the story appears, and thus the very complex of (even the unfinished) versions becomes meaningful, not a soup but a menu. Shippey seems to allude to this in speaking about “The Silmarillion” as a “complex of stories, repeatedly told and retold” (223).

Shippey’s interpretation of The Lord of the Rings (perhaps the center of the book, otherwise engaging with basically all of Tolkien’s work) comes with his familiar presentation of the ambiguities of evil (between the Boethian, “insubstantialist” and a Manichean, “substantialist” view). This now contains, in separate sub-chapters, more detailed treatment of the “Conceptions of evil” (especially valuable is the explication of “wraithing,” now integrated here) and of “The opposing forces” (luck and chance). Imaginative solutions of philological cruxes, “lyric cores” around which stories and meanings can be clustered: these introduce the reader (conceivably not a medievalist: Road is aimed not necessarily at a professional audience, as the scarce but functional and concise notes and references indicate) to a sizeable set of medieval texts Tolkien worked with. To non-Tolkienist or medievalist readers Road is still the best introduction, not only to The Lord of the Rings, but also to the other texts.

Another double context of the Road appears in the expanded Preface (subsuming the shorter preface of the second edition). Here Shippey talks not only about how the book evolved from a script commented on by Tolkien, through editions of Road, Author (and a few other, now integrated pieces), but also thematises the duality of the critical frameworks, the complementary aspects of synchronicity and diachronicity. The critical relationship to Tolkien, Shippey contends, has changed somewhat, since posthumous publications now make it possible to read (or at least consider) texts in the order of their composition.

In the last chapter, Road also offers an overview of some of these critical relations. Shippey, surveying Tolkien criticism, in a new section comments on Leonard Jackson’s psychoanalytic reading of The Lord of the Rings (such readings of fantasy, sometimes touching on Tolkien, usually only to disregard him, have been current since the 1980s: see T.E. Apter’s Fantasy Literature, taking its definition of “fantasy” from what the term means in psychoanalysis, or Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, discounting Tolkien as not “subversive” enough). Shippey’s evaluation of this approach is distanced (“since the process, if it exists at all, is unconscious, one naturally cannot say,” (325) is a good summary of his stance); but this shows well how the new Road pays perhaps more attention to issues of motifs treated in a more contemporary frame. The same is seen in the taking up of a section on the Sonnenkinder into the Afterword, which again deals with Tolkien’s reception. The elitist community of critics whose opposition, “elevated to a human norm,” has worked against Tolkien’s canonical status is a shadowy theoretical monster going against Tolkien’s Beowulf. Even if Shippey’s argument helps wrench off one arm, in this (together with the refutations of detractors) it only opens up the way toward a fuller theoretical treatment of Tolkien’s work. It is curious, though, how both Shippey (writing that Tolkien “may be a peripheral writer for the theory of fiction,” (332) and Flieger (who in the second edition of Splintered Light, (22), changed “theory of fiction” to “of fantasy” in the discussion of “On Fairy-Stories”) seem to stop short of making claims about Tolkien’s theoretical importance. In fact, Road shows exactly how Tolkien is central in this aspect, using “anachronistic” methods, concepts, and meanings in his fiction, thereby bringing them into play in the way his texts work. Definitions and functions of literature, the uses of meaning, and the uses of fiction are at the heart of Tolkien’s work.

The convincing and explanatory power of Road, as well as its readable style, have not changed at all. The text is enjoyably and lucidly written, and Shippey’s style is an excellent medium for his witty (sometimes delightfully ironic) and valid refutations of many detractors of Tolkien. There is a gentle humor in Road, and this helps this fundamentally interpretive book to succeed in its arguments. Shippey’s noted lack of ideological bias, the fair treatment he accords not only to Tolkien but to his critics too, also contributes to the easy avoidance of overgeneralizations and exaggerated claims. This is complemented by a nice layout, few typographical errors (“encatastrophe” on page 85 might be confusing, as could the two spellings of Greek euangelion, “evangelion” on page 51), and a very usable, enlarged index. The three Songs for the Philologists poems remain in the back, and the updated bibliographical and source material in the Appendix and Notes offers a wider view for the interested scholar, with much new and recent scholarship integrated.

What the new Road can thus offer is a more refined and wider-scope treatment of Shippey’s trademark historical and philological approach; but it also has now more indications of the synchronic complement to this reading. Road was never one-sided, but in the revision, it has become even less so, and certainly sets the standard high for any Tolkien critic. It is not only as a seminal work in the field that we look at this book; it is also, in a way, as a model of concise writing, subtle and sensible interpretation, and a wide scholarly horizon. So it remains in the expansion.

Gergely Nagy
University of Szeged
Hungary

Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy, edited by Douglas A. Anderson. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. [x], 436 pp. $27.95 (hardcover) ISBN 0345458540; $14.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 0345458559.

The main purpose of this volume is to provide a representative selection of early modern fantasy in the period preceding J. R. R. Tolkien’s birth and in so doing to show the initial movement towards the self-definition of that genre and its differentiation from other related ones—such as, for example, the early science fiction of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It may be difficult formally to define this genre, but we know it when we see it, and this volume helps to show how it came to be known as such to begin with.

Following an introduction by Anderson, each story is preceded by a note on its background and initial publication. The book ends with a useful section of “Author Notes and Recommended Reading,” including authors who aren’t represented in the book but belong in the same tradition.

Many of the stories contained in this volume were read by, and stayed in the memory of, the young Tolkien. We know about them because he mentions them in his letters or elsewhere, such as in “On Fairy-stories,” although one not mentioned by him, E. Nesbit’s “The Dragon Tamers,” was published as part of a series which, on the basis of biographical evidence, almost certainly was read by him. To the extent that they made an impression, or were otherwise memorable to him, then we may take it that they “influenced” him when he came to compose his own fictional narratives—or at least aspects of them resurfaced in his narrative-making imagination. Sometimes, however, as in stories he perhaps didn’t read, such as John Buchan’s “The Far Islands,” with its hero’s visions of a land in the West, or A. Merritt’s “The Woman of the Wood,” with its trees that attempt to defend themselves, one still finds echoes of themes he later used, but such echoes are maybe inevitable given the general themes to be found in fairy-stories or fantasy.

Apart from the stories in this book serving to indicate how the modern genre of fantasy began to define itself, they have the slightly different function of simply making available to interested readers a good many of the tales to which Tolkien variously refers. Reading this book was for this reviewer and long-time Tolkien-fan the first time he has actually read MacDonald’s “The Golden Key” or Knatchbull-Hugessen’s “Puss-cat Mew”—although I should have liked to see, perhaps, the Brothers Grimm’s tale “The Juniper Tree” in place of, say, Austin Tappan Wright’s “The Story of Alwina,” an extract from the mostly unpublished background materials to his pseudo-history lslandia (published as a novel in 1942), and belonging, I think, to a slightly different genre from fantasy.

And finally this book is a fascinating and enjoyable collection in and of itself. One or two of the tales, such as “Puss-cat Mew,” are fairly violent and gruesome—hardly the kind of thing which would be passed today for an intended audience of children, and not a few might come into the category of “politically incorrect,” but the audience for which the book is presently intended should just about be able to cope with them. In all, highly recommended and suitable for the shelves of any Tolkienist.

Charles E. Noad
London, England

Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, by Brian Rosebury. Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. x, 246 pp. $59.95 (hardcover) ISBN 1403915970; $19.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1403912637.

The refusal of some contemporary critics and scholars to confirm the popular assessment of Tolkien as a major modern writer has consistently annoyed Tolkien readers in America and Great Britain over the past twenty-five years. Subsequently, following Tom Shippey’s lead in papers and lectures since 1992 and in his J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century (2000), Brian Rosebury attempts to persuade these nay-sayers of Tolkien’s writerly eminence once more in Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, an expanded version of his earlier book Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (1992).

In this revised edition, Rosebury’s basic argument is not new: he adds to the four shorter chapters of the original (167-page) version of Tolkien: A Critical Assessment two new chapters, along with a brief critical contextualization on Shippey’s assessment of Tolkien as a writer. The first four chapters center (here as in the 1992 version) on the style (chapter 1) and form (chapter 2) of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s other fiction and poetry (chapter 3), and his biography and his place within the literary pantheon of the twentieth century (chapter 4). Nearly identical to the chapters in the prior edition, these four contain a few added references in the notes to recent publications by Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and a few other critics. The two new chapters center on Tolkien’s range as a thinker (chapter 5) and the reception of The Lord of the Rings (chapter 6), including its filmic adaptations. At the end, Rosebury also supplies a brief recommended reading intended for the general or new reader of the epic.

Rosebury’s use of Shippey at the beginning of his book is strategic. Although Rosebury praises Shippey’s understanding of Tolkien’s philological ingenuity, he also acknowledges Shippey’s limitation: that such ingenuity “does not in itself demonstrate that the works produced are of high quality” (7). Through this clever deployment of Shippey himself as a red herring, Rosebury then proceeds in the remainder of his book to look at The Lord of the Rings aesthetically, as he previously has looked at modern fiction in Art and Desire: A Study in the Aesthetics of Fiction (1988). However, because The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth are posthumously published works—unfinished and often containing immature work—according to Rosebury they simply do not maintain the high quality of style and form found in the major work, as attested by the paucity of reviews and, of those, unfavorable ones (3).

The difference between Shippey’s and Rosebury’s comparison of Tolkien and his peers is that, while Shippey leans toward fantasy as the predominant twentieth-century mode of Tolkien and other writers (particularly George Orwell, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, T. H. White, and C. S. Lewis), Rosebury turns instead to the modernists to find aesthetic parallels. Even though Rosebury notes that Tolkien is younger than the modernist principals—for example, James Joyce—Tolkien is older than George Orwell and therefore, Rosebury concludes, in the spirit of anti-modernist social realism, Tolkien seems to belong to the dead war poets or the war survivors Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.

Rosebury’s analysis of Tolkien’s style, form, and narrative in the best Leavisite fashion—and with comparison to writers such as Proust, Joyce, and Eliot—reaffirms that The Lord of the Rings is a major work. He argues that Tolkien has evolved as an artist from a “derivative archaicism” to a formal narrative design and style accessible to modern readers (147). This archaicism is rooted not so much in medieval literature proper as in a “nineteenth-century romantic antiquarianism” (147). The modernity of Tolkien’s epic romance, especially, is witnessed in its parallels with the novel, its realism, and its non-archaic diction and syntax (147). Rosebury elaborates by example of Tolkien’s “derivative archaism” in his earliest poems and fiction (in chapter 3) and through his stylistic and formal accessibility in The Lord of the Rings (in chapters 1 and 2). In fact, Rosebury’s most trenchant statement of thesis comes in chapter 4, on Tolkien’s position in the twentieth-century canon.

What is of greatest interest and new to the Tolkien scholars most likely to read Rosebury’s book are the two chapters on “Tolkien in the History of Ideas” (chapter 5) and “The Cultural Phenomenon: Relatedness, Assimilation, Imitation, and Adaptation” (chapter 6). In chapter 5, Rosebury explains Tolkien’s modernism as his assimilation of experiences in the twentieth century rather than direct incorporation of history; Rosebury selects Tolkien’s by now much-discussed doctrine of “applicability” from the foreword to The Lord of the Rings to clarify the difference between “influence” and “representation.” That is, there are no intended allegorical parallels in the epic romance between Sauron and Hitler or Stalin, or post-War Labor government. In chapter 6, Rosebury examines the reception of Tolkien, in particular, in adaptations—mainly, the BBC audio adaptation and the film adaptations of Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson—after he has discussed other forms of reception, for example, playing cards (“relabeling”), new categories such as Dungeons and Dragons (“assimilation”), and fantasy and science fiction (“imitation”).

Both of these are valuable chapters, for different reasons, but with specific limitations. In chapter 5 Rosebury sees clearly how the political aspects of Tolkien assimilate his religious views as a Catholic and his aesthetic principles as an artist (166-67). That is, Tolkien might well be considered a “theological anarch[ist]” (182). Rosebury ends this chapter with a not altogether convincing comparison of Tolkien’s “Music of the Ainur” in the Silmarillion and the concept of power in chapter 31 of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) (183). Along the way to Hobbes, Rosebury discusses the relevance of contemporary treatments of Tolkien by Joseph Pearce (Catholicism and religion; Tolkien: Man and Myth, 1999), Christopher Garbowski (Homeland and the psychology of the concentration camp survivor; Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker, 2000), and Patrick Curry (the “green” movement and ecological proactivism; Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, 1997). It is helpful to see how Tolkien’s applicability invites certain approaches, although one wonders why an extended critique of these three in particular is either necessary or appropriate in a book-length study of Tolkien. Presumably Rosebury admires them and highlights them as exemplary of the modern and modernistic in Tolkien.

In chapter 6, Rosebury’s examination of contemporary reception for the first time in Tolkien criticism lays out and classifies different formats of popular culture, most importantly, the films of Bakshi and Jackson. Rosebury also laments the unfortunately necessary omission of the “physical and cultural presence of Middle-earth” in the thirteen-hour BBC radio production of The Lord of the Rings (2001) (206). Missing in the radio production and both films are the Tom Bombadil and barrow-wight episodes—apparently a universally acceptable deletion for those who do not understand Tolkien’s need to develop the heroic resources of his Hobbit protagonist Frodo. Rosebury’s somewhat impressionistic points about Jackson’s film are a little stale and have been articulated elsewhere by others (he might have read some of the published criticism on the film to prevent this embarrassment).

Indeed, overall, in this revision, if delineation of Tolkien’s stylistic accessibility as a modern author is Rosebury’s major contribution as a critic, his major weakness is a regrettable inability to read and assimilate into his arguments criticism on Tolkien from the north American side of the Atlantic, particularly articles published in excellent journals like Seven and in collections. Like so much other British criticism, his tends to laud his compatriots and ignore American scholars and critics who have written a myriad of books and articles since the seventies, which, even if mentioned, appear only glancingly in passing. This is a leitmotiv throughout, with the British critics Pearce and Curry and the Polish-Canadian Garbowski discussed in chapter 5 and highlighted in the epilogic bibliography. My complaint here is not just that this expanded version of his 1992 book repeats the basic footnotes from the first edition, with a few additions from Shippey and Flieger’s recent works, but that he has not entirely assimilated into his argument even those books he either cites or recommends. Exemplary of his critical laziness is his bibliographic recommendation of Paul Kocher’s Master of Middle-earth (1972) as “a clear and painstaking introduction to the whole range of the work published in Tolkien’s lifetime” (223), but his failure to cite anywhere Randel Helms’s excellent Tolkien’s World (1974). It is difficult to trust recommendations that appear to be added as an afterthought and a scholarly methodology that is incomplete and not altogether informed, no matter how telling the argument.

Jane Chance
Rice University
Houston, Texas

Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship by Colin Duriez. Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003. xii, 244 pp. $16.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 1587680262. [Published subsequently in the UK as J. R .R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Story of Their Friendship. Stroud: Sutton, 2003. £20.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0750935413.]

This readable but redundant study of the synergy between Tolkien and Lewis claims to be the first book on Tolkien and Lewis’ “literary as well as personal association” (ix). In fact, readers familiar with the story of the Tolkien-Lewis friendship will find little they didn’t already know. Readers unfamiliar with it will get a superficial biographical gloss.

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis relies on already-published accounts, tends to wide-sweeping generalizations, and embellishes the story with make-believe incidents. Lacking photographs or maps, it makes weight by fattening 185 pages of text with 59 of notes, including a reiterative seven-page appendix on the popularity of the authors that seems recycled from a prior presentation. Drawing heavily on previous sources, this book also skimps on quotations. Its plot summaries are unnecessary for experienced scholars and too revealing for beginners, who will discover, for instance, what happens at the end of the Narnia chronicles. The prose style, generally clear, occasionally lurches awkwardly: “He [Lewis], like his brother, wallows in the physicality of the world” (53).

Duriez’ imagined vignettes in the lives of these authors begin ten of the book’s twelve chapters. Forgiving readers may enjoy these present-tense fabrications. Others will wince, finding such tableaux off-putting. The first, set in summer 1901, depicts nine-year-old John Ronald crouching on a Birmingham railway embankment with his brother Hilary, waiting for a Welsh coal train to pass by. The last describes Lewis’ funeral procession passing from church to churchyard in November 1963. Other scripted scenes include conversations between the two, Inklings sessions at the Eagle and Child, life at the Kilns, and telepathic passages like this: “He looks out the bus window, putting his cigarette to his lips and drawing its smoke into his lungs, apparently gazing over Headington Hill Park. The man is C.S. Lewis, and he is starting to grapple with a momentous decision, evoking the whole question of human freedom” (47)

To Duriez and some readers, the playlet chronicling an Inklings pub meeting in 1937 may ring true to the diction and the ideas of these men. Other readers may not be convinced. Would Tolkien really have said “O lor’” (68)? But the staged episodes are less annoying than the glib generality. Duriez hoists himself time and again on the gallows he cobbled when he wrote in his introduction: “I have been astonished at some of the misleading statements that have been made authoritatively, statements that should not go unchallenged” (xi).

The declaration that “all of Lewis’ fiction, after the two met at Oxford University in 1926, bears the mark of Tolkien’s influence” (x) is worth challenging. Beyond the tenuous fact that both Till We Have Faces and Tolkien’s legendarium are set in a pre-Christian past, Duriez discloses little influence on that book. His statement that Charles Williams The Place of the Lion “enraptured Lewis, Tolkien, and others in 1936” (74) is contradicted by Tolkien’s notably unenraptured 1964 letter: “I am a man of limited sympathies…Williams lies almost completely outside them...I actively disliked his Arthurian-Byzantine mythology; and still think it spoiled the trilogy of C. S. L. (a very impressionable, too impressionable man) in the last part.” (Letters, 349). Duriez tends to glide over the complexity of the Lewis-Tolkien relationship which that letter suggests.

He likewise begs the complicated question of Mrs. Janie Moore, describing Lewis “quasi-adopting her as his mother while having deeper feelings for her. Whether the relationship went further into sexual intimacy no one really knows” (22). Less perfunctory and hagiographic research could have provided the better answer found in the transcript of Lyle Dorsett’s interview with George Sayer in Wheaton (Illinois) College’s Wade Center, where Duriez researched this book.

Not unsurprisingly, inasmuch as the HiddenSpring imprint of Paulist Press published it, the book focuses on the Christian aspect of the Tolkien-Lewis relationship. While Christianity was truly one crucial part of the friendship, it was not the only one. The deep religious differences between the convert Catholic and the Ulster Protestant get a two-paragraph dismissal: “In his darkest moments, Tolkien too brooded on what he called his friend’s ‘Ulsterior motive’…that might have slipped out when Lewis got carried away in the pub, or another drink-heavy occasion, but which he was careful to avoid in his writings” (157). Such speculative oversimplification comes too often in this book, Duriez’ fourth on these two writers. Completist scholars who collect every book produced on Tolkien or/and Lewis will want this biography. Others need not apply.

Mike Foster
Illinois Central College
East Peoria, Illinois

Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle-earth, by John Garth. London: HarperCollins, 2003. xviii, 398 pp. £20.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0007119526. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. xviii, 398 pp. $26.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0618331298.

Of the various arguments aimed at discrediting Tolkien’s work a priori, one of the hardest to refute runs something like this. “Tolkien imagined himself to be creating a comprehensive body of myth and legend, fashioning the mythology that England lacked. But such an enterprise can only lead to inauthentic results. All genuine myths and legends are the slowly-evolving product of a primitive community, emerging from its contest with nature, its terrors of the unknown and unexplained, its gradual growth in self-consciousness. They cannot be created, in the manner of the modern novel, by a solitary, highly-educated individual scribbling away in an attic or study. And Tolkien, himself a scholar of ancient writings, really should have known this better than most of us.”

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of responding to this indictment. One response is to give some ground to it: to admit that individuals cannot literally create new myths, and to insist that Tolkien’s narratives should be read as if they were indeed modern novels: that is, expressions through fiction of a personal, if in some ways representative, twentieth-century sensibility. Their “mythological” and “primitive” elements are, on this view, just part of the expressive symbolism, the objective correlative of emotion: what streetlamps were to T. S. Eliot, one might say, Silmarils were to Tolkien. As John Garth remarks in his recent biographical study, by drawing for artistic inspiration on the exotic language and remote legends of Finland, Tolkien was conforming to “the contemporary vogue for primitivism that attracted Picasso to African masks” (60). And Garth uses a further analogy from modern art to explain the aesthetic power of Tolkien’s invented languages: “Tolkien tried to match sound and sense much as an expressionist painter might use colour, form and shade to evoke a mood. Derivation aside, only taste dictated that… eressea means ‘lonely’ or morwen ‘daughter of the dark’” (62). Tolkien, on this theory, falls into place alongside his sophisticated contemporaries of the modern movement.

The second response attacks the critique head-on, denying, or at least minimizing, the alleged distance between Tolkien’s creativity and the “genuine” myths and legends of pre-modern peoples. It points out that our received versions of the latter owe far more to their learned reconstructors (Lönnrot and the Grimms, or for that matter Virgil and the Beowulf-poet) than the general reader imagines, while Tolkien’s own inventions can often be explained as reconstructions of pre-modern myths-that-might-have-been, or as the product of a kind of hermeneutic dialogue between the moral, aesthetic and semantic norms of twentieth-century discourse and those of the remote past. Though The Silmarillion can never have the status of national epic for England that the Aeneid had for Rome, Tolkien does, in this view, take his place in a long series of patriotic artists who, preserving “the ancient pietas towards the past,” and “using the materials … preserved from a day already changing and passing” (MC 33), create a redemptive vision for the present—the main difference between Tolkien and the Beowulf-poet being the far less “plentiful” (or at least, more remote and dispersed) materials at Tolkien’s disposal.

One of the strengths of Garth’s book is that, by examining in close focus the formative years of Tolkien’s great literary project, he reinforces and clarifies this second defense, without (as we have seen) entirely neglecting the first. From the acquisition of Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary at the age of eleven to the completion of “The Book of Lost Tales” in 1920, Garth follows Tolkien’s creative development, interweaving it, and suggesting its connections, with his wartime experiences. The course of Tolkien’s long philological-creative meditation on Cynewulf’s enigmatic Earendel line—the most telling piece of evidence for the second defense—has never been more patiently and illuminatingly charted; while Garth’s explanation (60-63) of the derivation of narrative from linguistic invention, of how legendary “history” could be precipitated by the construction of a desired language, evolving through historical time according to principles of phonological and semantic change adapted from those governing actual languages, is the clearest I have seen.

Garth is especially successful in showing the scope and limits of the “Englishness” of Tolkien’s vision. He draws attention to Tolkien’s lifelong anti-imperialism (extending to support for “Home Rule” for Ireland) and his dismay at the thought of the impending world dominance of the English language. The “England” Tolkien sought in his youth to recover and celebrate was, Garth shows, “bound up with physical rather than political geography” (230), intuited through revered places and their linguistic history, and imagined as if the cultural changes consequent on the Norman Conquest and the industrial revolution had never occurred. It was, in effect, a lost “little England,” an England overwritten by the later expansionism and cosmopolitanism of “Britain” even more completely than Lönnrot’s Finnish culture had been by the political and linguistic dominance of Swedish. Tolkien’s philological knowledge made it impossible for him fundamentally to disjoin this ideal England from the societies of other Germanic peoples, and for that reason, his conservative nationalism never transformed itself into anti-German belligerence during either of the world wars. As Garth suggests in his “Postscript” (307), Tolkien gradually loosened the links between his legendary cycle and “the genesis of England,” only to rediscover a model of Englishness in the more modest, and more nearly contemporary and autobiographical, form of the Hobbits of the Shire.

Garth synthesizes the insights of the best of Tolkien’s biographers and critics, Carpenter and Shippey, and much of what he has to say is familiar to their readers; some of it, too, could be extracted from Christopher Tolkien’s editorial commentaries. The outlines of Tolkien’s wartime experiences, and his friendships with the three other members of the “TCBS,” two of whom were killed, are there in Carpenter, who uses the most moving of their letters. But Garth has drawn on service records, war diaries and other archive material for a much richer narrative, which brings out in Tolkien’s war not only its moments of horror and grief, but its tempo, its physical feel and atmosphere, its workaday elements of routine and officer responsibility, its boredoms and rivalries. Gilson, Smith and Wiseman all emerge as rounded and sympathetic figures—and in Smith’s case, as a more disciplined poet than Tolkien. Garth gives due weight to the often incisive criticisms his friends ventured of Tolkien’s juvenilia, and of his romantic medievalism. Indeed Tolkien himself is seen all the more fully and poignantly because he is not allowed to monopolize the narrative: the conflicts of ideas, and personal tensions, among “the immortal four” are presented with a kind of intimate dispassionateness. One ends by admiring Tolkien a little less, but empathizing more deeply with both his virtues and his weaknesses.

Garth makes clear how un-eccentric was Tolkien’s recourse to fantasy in conceptualizing warfare, since fairies and the supernatural pervaded contemporary popular imagery, and were even to some extent conscripted into the war effort: reproductions of Eleanor Canziani’s The Piper of Dreams sold widely to British troops, while a Navy Book of Fairy Tales was issued to raise money for those orphaned by the war at sea (77-78). Tolkien stands out, on Garth’s account, not only through the originality, grandeur and seriousness he was bringing to his own fantasy, but by his ability to use fantasy to realize the larger picture presented by the War. Garth plausibly sees in the slaughterhouse battlefields of the Great War “a war of manpower against machines, of the old world against the new” (190-91), the Second World War being fought, in reaction against this intolerable carnage, with machines against other machines, or against distant civilian populations. Tolkien’s myth of the inevitable final defeat of the Noldoli by the fiery metal “dragons” of Melko dramatizes this moment of historical change, when the machine-gun and especially the tank rendered human strength and courage helpless. Garth is not the first to make this connection, but he drives it home with an intertextual tour de force, citing contemporary sources from Max Ernst to The Times (“suddenly tongues of flame licked out of the armoured shine of the iron caterpillar”) to show that the convergence of fairy-tale and technological imagery at this time was far from unique to Tolkien (221). Garth is less sure-footed with his suggestion that in Melko, “with his dreams of world domination, his spies, his vast armies, his industrial slaves… [Tolkien] anticipated the totalitarianism that lay just round the corner” (223). He is right to see, as Shippey does, that fantasy can envisage moral and political extremes that elude the representations of literary “realism,” but the claim that “a spiritual kinship exists between the unhappy Meglin and Winston Smith, drinking his Victory gin under the eyes of Big Brother” (223) stretches the notion of “anticipation” too far. (Cf. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), xxix-xxxi, 119-121, et passim.) We need an explanation of how Tolkien in 1917 could understand the possibility of a modern state demanding complete psychological, as well as practical, subservience from its people. The answer may lie partly in his experience of the militarisation of his entire generation, partly in a Christian’s awareness that false as well as true gods may demand unconditional obedience (of mind as well as body), and partly in some, as yet untraced, debt to those nineteenth-century writers, notably Ruskin and Arnold, who saw in “machinery” a coercive and reductive belief-system, not merely a set of technical resources. But more work is still needed on the origins of Tolkien’s ideas.

Tolkien and the Great War deserves its commercial success. Its lucid and decorous style is just right for its often melancholy subject-matter, and it adds significantly to our understanding of Tolkien’s creative processes, and of his personality.

Brian Rosebury
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, England

The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader, edited by Turgon (David E. Smith). Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004. 400 pp. $14.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1593600119. Foreword by Verlyn Flieger.

Finally, someone has had the excellent sense to put together a collection of the medieval literary works most important to J. R. R. Tolkien, both as scholar and as fantasy writer, written in the translations of his day that he most likely knew. The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader was astutely collected by Turgon (David E. Smith) of TheOneRing.net, responsible for book reviews and interviews in the Green Books section and a co-author of The People’s Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien (2003). This useful anthology presents mainly prose selections from Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Celtic (Welsh), and Finnish works in a variety of medieval genres—epic, lyric, chronicle, romance, dream vision, fabliau, beast fable, Breton lay, and saga. These works are a must-read for the educated reader of Tolkien, the university student, and the scholar who wants quick access to what Tolkien taught and spent his career researching. To have them—all out of print—available in one convenient paperback is a great boon.

Although I do not have the space here to analyze why and how the selections in each section are appropriate to the study and understanding of Tolkien, I can single out the Old and Middle English as especially significant, and suggestive of Turgon’s approach in the other sections. The Old English section begins with the all-important Beowulf, about which Tolkien wrote a seminal and groundbreaking essay that changed the study of Anglo-Saxon and coincided with Tolkien’s writing of The Hobbit. As epic it surely helped charge Tolkien’s own version in The Lord of the Rings. The translation is by John Clark Hall (1911), as is the unfinished Finnsburg Fragment that follows; Tolkien wrote a foreword to Clark Hall’s translation that praises it for being literally accurate rather than figurative, and, therefore, more faithful to the original Anglo-Saxon and the intent of the poet. “The Wanderer” (whose “ubi sunt” passage is paraphrased by Aragorn when the fellowship reaches Anglo-Saxon-shaped Rohan) and “The Seafarer” (a figure that repeatedly appears in the Silmarillion mythology in characters such as Aelfwine and Earendil) have been translated by Nora Kershaw (1922)—the Old Norse scholar Nora K. Chadwick, who also translated the Saga of King Heidrek the Wise later in the volume. “The Battle of Maldon” appears, too, for which Tolkien wrote the verse-drama sequel, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” (1953).

Middle English begins, equally appropriately for Tolkien, with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Jessie L. Weston (1898). Weston’s book on the origins of the Grail Quest, From Ritual to Romance (1920), was indebted to the ideas of Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough. The romance of Sir Gawain Tolkien himself coedited, with E.V. Gordon, in a critical edition (1925) that remains standard today. Tolkien also translated both it and the dream vision poem Pearl (1975) (here, translated by Charles G. Osgood, Jr.) and delivered a lecture about the former in Scotland (1953). Of the Chaucerian Canterbury Tales selected, the Reeve’s Tale is important because of Tolkien’s influential philological essay on the northern and southern dialects of Middle English used by the two country-bumpkin clerks and the wily miller (1934), which most likely helped shape Tolkien’s treatment of rustics in his own fairy-tales. So also the Breton lay Franklin’s Tale, with its emphasis on courtly love in marriage, influenced Tolkien’s “Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” (1945).

In the remainder of the volume, two Old Norse sagas appear, from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, translated by famed Beowulf scholar Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), and a “saga of ancient times” with a riddle-match reminiscent of Bilbo’s with Gollum, again, by Chadwick (1921); five tales from the Welsh Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1849); and the extremely important Finnish tale of the hapless hero Kullervo from the epic Kalevala, translated by W. F. Kirby (1907) in a version known to Tolkien. Kullervo was the model for the equally doomed Túrin Turambar in the Silmarillion, but until one experiences the poetry as Tolkien must have, the parallels are simply not possible to see.

Turgon introduces each of the five sections with a headnote about the period, information about Tolkien’s scholarly familiarity with the works, and bibliographic resources available, including other translations. There is a brief bibliography of translation sources and relevant Tolkien publications at the end.

Overall, this anthology has been carefully thought out, compiled, and researched in terms of Tolkien’s reading of specific books and his knowledge of medieval literature, translations contemporary with him, and current Tolkien scholarship. Although the anthology might be considered dated by a medievalist interested solely in the Middle Ages, because of the historicity of the translations it is perfectly appropriate for the reader of Tolkien or his contemporaries, a gift to the medievalist who also happens to teach Tolkien and despairs of finding resources easily, and an acknowledgment of Tolkien’s medievalism as part and parcel of his fantasy.

Jane Chance
Rice University
Houston, Texas

Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit, by Anne C. Petty. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2003. 328 pp. $16.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1892975998.

Anne C. Petty’s study Tolkien in the Land of Heroes is a collection of related essays that explore the themes of power, loss, and heroism, as they appear in J. R. R. Tolkien’s finished works set in Middle-earth: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Petty’s study is explicitly aimed at a non-academic audience. Both its value and its weaknesses seem to stem from this approach. As a general reader’s introduction to Tolkien studies, Petty’s work is valuable not only because of its own insights, but also because of its abundance of annotated resources, which include scholarly studies of Tolkien, as well as religious, philosophical, and sociological texts pertaining to the themes under discussion. Unfortunately, despite its potential, the book suffers from pervasive flaws of documentation, style, and analysis.

Parts I and II of the book, “The Myth of the Fall” and “The Consequences of Power,” form the strongest part of Petty’s study. They contain rigorous, clearly-structured, well-illustrated analysis that reveals a number of interesting insights about the texts. In Part I, “The Myth of the Fall,” Petty examines Melkor’s fall from grace and the ways in which that fall manifests itself in the careers of other figures of evil. She traces compelling parallels between Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman, parallels that demonstrate the thematic continuity between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, a feature that Petty highlights throughout her study. In Part II, “The Consequences of Power,” Petty discusses secondary agents of evil in the three books. She applies a variety of models to Tolkien’s characters. Petty draws these models from sources relevant to Tolkien’s intellectual background—the Bible, the Icelandic sagas, the Faust legend, European folktales—and even as she measures the characters against them, she points out the limitations of such models and categories. The discussion is summarized in a table of agents of evil (109) that provides an overview of both her theoretical categories and of the data that these models describe.

Part III, “Loss and Longing,” explores the themes of “impermanence, mortality, loss and longing” (179) that pervade Tolkien’s work. In Chapter 5, which focuses on death and loss, Petty provides a detailed overview of Tolkien’s techniques for dramatizing the age of his invented world: the inset narratives of history and legend, the presence of characters whose long lives encompass both the present of the story and the mythical past, the ubiquity of ruins and ancient statuary from lost or decaying civilizations throughout the landscape of Middle-earth. As well, this chapter contains an analysis sophisticated in its conclusions and delightfully novel in its method: like an archaeologist, Petty examines the various burial sites and practices of the races of Middle-earth. She highlights the cultural or racial attitudes towards life and death reflected by funeral customs, as well as the thematic significance of certain individual graves.

Chapter 6, “In Defense of Nature,” analyzes the impact of both the evil and the good inhabitants of Middle-earth upon the natural world. Exploring the effect of evil on nature, Petty convincingly establishes another aspect of the thematic continuity between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Nor is Petty’s exploration reductive: she points out what Drout and Wynne call “the complex interplay between wilderness and cultivation, and between nature and civilization, that Tolkien does not resolve unequivocally in favor of nature” (Drout and Wynne 114-15). However, less paraphrasing of Tolkien’s descriptions and more analysis would make this chapter a more useful resource. For example, concerning the Dead Marshes and the land outside the Black Gate, Petty writes:

The sense of reality created in the detailed descriptions of these passages lets you know that Tolkien has seen these places as well as Frodo. The only green to be found here is pond slime. The imagery used throughout these sections of the narrative creates an overwhelming sense of rot and decay where all the senses are assailed by stench and clammy cold and pale half-light.… (230)

The claim that Tolkien has “seen these places” is either vague metaphor or unsubstantiated biography. More helpful to the reader than any of these would be an explanation of how Tolkien, figuratively speaking, makes the reader see these places as well as Frodo. Even to a non-scholarly reader, a piece of stylistic analysis would convey more novel information than a lengthy and poorly written paraphrase of Tolkien’s own writing.

The subject of Part IV, “Of Heroes and Hope,” is neatly encapsulated in its title. Petty’s exploration of heroic characters relies on a number of typologies—one drawn from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, another from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, and another from Petty’s own overview of superhero-centred comics, cyberpunk, and anime. Petty’s exploration of certain modern pop culture genres—superhero comics, cyberpunk, and anime—traces a number of parallels between these modern genres and Tolkien’s fiction, but reveals almost nothing about Tolkien that Petty herself has not stated already (20, 22). More successful are her approaches to Tolkien using a number of typologies of heroic characters: Aristotle’s view of the tragic hero, Joseph Campbell’s analysis of mythical narrative and its heroes, and Frye’s categories of literary heroes as explicated in his Anatomy of Criticism. Using these models, Petty explores the wide range of heroic types in Tolkien’s fiction, demonstrating how the analysis of more complex characters, such as Frodo, profits from an intersection of several theoretical models. This chapter might be particularly helpful for the general readers whom the book targets. At the same time that it uses literary theory to shed light on Tolkien, it illustrates and explicates the theoretical models through a wealth of easily comprehensible examples from Tolkien’s fiction.

In the final chapter, Petty identifies motifs and narrative situations through which hope becomes manifest in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. She briefly explores the relationship between hope, grace, and loss, and once again highlights the continuity in theme and imagery between the three works. In particular, Petty draws attention to Tolkien’s use of eagles as messengers of grace, illustrating the motif with exhaustive examples from all three books.

While Petty’s thematic overview of Tolkien’s fiction contains useful insights and resources, unfortunately a number of pervasive flaws mar the book. The first and smallest is a dearth of page or even chapter references to Tolkien’s own writings (references to his letters sometimes lack page numbers, while references to his fiction almost always do). Though Petty mentions plot details and attributes opinions to Tolkien throughout her study, she does not always provide the readers with the means of following up and perhaps reinterpreting these events or opinions themselves. In the case of certain general claims, Petty fails to provide the references that would have considerably bolstered her credibility.

A second and more serious defect is the uneven quality of the writing. Throughout her text, Petty resorts to colloquial diction and grammar, presumably as a means of drawing the reader into her argument. At best, the result is an easy, conversational tone, appropriate to a study that is explicitly aimed at a non-academic audience. Often, however, the colloquial tone betrays her into vagueness, awkwardness, or mixed metaphor, while at other times it clashes with the more formal and elevated discourse that she adopts when she paraphrases Tolkien.

Similarly unhelpful is the fact that the discussion (possibly as a concession to a non-scholarly audience) eschews rigorous analysis, especially in the last three chapters of the book. Sometimes this lack of rigor makes itself felt in imprecise phrasing. The major varieties of Christian doctrine do not hold, as Petty puts it, that “all humankind is damned before birth” (192). Roman Catholic doctrine, whose adherent Tolkien was, holds that human beings are tainted from birth with original sin, but are freed from that sin through baptism in Christ—a very different situation (Catechism II, 1, 1). The use of more “technical” theological language in the place of colloquial speech might have prevented such a faux pas.

As well, especially in the last three chapters, Petty tends to restrict her analysis to fairly general claims. She illustrates these by retelling incidents or paraphrasing descriptions from Tolkien’s fiction, which she then analyzes only in minimal ways. While the purpose of this might be to simplify the analysis for a general reader’s benefit, it often has the opposite effect: the amount of detail included in her retellings or paraphrases makes her examples difficult to follow, while the slight analysis makes the examples seem redundant. Her exploration of Tolkien’s use of the eagles and light as images of hope is a representative instance. “Eagles,” Petty notes, “are an omnipresent symbol of winged hope in Middle-earth and come to the rescue nearly a dozen times in The Silmarillion, twice in The Hobbit, and at least three times in The Lord of the Rings” (292). She supports this claim by retelling five instances of it from The Silmarillion and one from The Lord of the Rings. One instance in particular demonstrates the difficulties involved:

In an example that combines the imagery of both eagles and light, Thorondor and his host cruising high over the site of Beren’s fight with Carcharoth dive down to carry Beren and Lúthien away to a place of safety, thus preventing Beren’s death in the jaws of a creature of darkness that had swallowed the light of heaven, the Silmaril. (292)

The level of detail involved in this brief retelling makes it hard for the reader to parse the sequence of events, while Petty’s critical commentary is too slight to exploit the wealth of detail she has just described.

Altogether, it is this reviewer’s impression that, although Tolkien in the Land of Heroes is a learned, perceptive, and often useful resource for the general reader, Anne C. Petty might have done more justice to her own insight and to her target audience if she had trusted her readers with conceptually complex arguments throughout the book.

Alexandra Bolintineanu
University of Toronto

Works Cited

Catechism of the Catholic Church [online]. 2003. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993. Available on line at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM#fonte. Concerning baptism and original sin, see especially Section II, Chapter 1, Article 1, “The Sacrament of Baptism,” “In Brief”.

Drout, Michael D. C., and Hilary Wynne. “Tom Shippey’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982” Envoi 9.2 (2000) 101-34. Available on line http://members.aol.com/ENVOIjrnl; here 114-115, citing Verlyn Flieger, “J. R.R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain” (147–58 and 158n1).

Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. xv, 295 pp. $114.95 (hardcover) ISBN 04152829440.

Tolkien the Medievalist is the first of a “trilogy,” three volumes of critical essays that have been prepared under the editorship of Jane Chance of Rice University (the other volumes are Tolkien and the Invention of Myth and Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages). The present volume contains fifteen essays and an introduction (1-12), extensive bibliography (268-84), and, rare in a collection of this kind, a comprehensive index (285-95). While five of the essays were prepared between 1995-1998, ten of them are revisions of papers presented at the 36th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2001. That year Jane Chance initiated the first sessions of “Tolkien at Kalamazoo,” a venue which has since developed into a major forum for the presentation of contemporary research on Tolkien’s work.

The essays in this volume are gathered together under four headings. The first, “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Medieval Scholar: Modern Contexts” (13-92), contains five essays, or one third of the collection. It opens with a very important essay by Douglas Anderson on the intellectual relationship between Tolkien and his colleague at Leeds University, E. V. Gordon. Most people are aware of at least one of the fruits of that collaboration, the standard edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (1925), but as Anderson demonstrates their collaboration during the 1920’s was much more extensive than this. Nevertheless it was Gordon who had the ability to get things done, and when Tolkien moved to Oxford in 1925, away from Gordon’s immediate influence, the collaborative ventures they had initiated together never come to fruition. It was left to others, in particular Gordon’s widow, Ida, to complete such projects as the editions of “The Seafarer” and “Pearl.” Anderson also analyses the influence of Gordon’s work on Tolkien’s thinking, and concludes that no matter how important their working together may have been to each other, Gordon was no more successful than anybody else in getting Tolkien to finish material on time or at all. The third essay in this section by Andrew Lazo on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’ mutual influences is an interesting counter-point to Anderson’s essay on the role that Gordon played on Tolkien’s work.

Verlyn Flieger contributes two essays to the collection. The first places Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” in the context of folk-lore theory as it existed at the time, and in particular Tolkien’s rejection of the positions taken by such nineteenth-century scholars as George Dasent, Max Müller and Andrew Lang. Flieger’s second essay which begins section two looks at the figure of “the Wild man of the Woods” and its manifestation in the Legendarium. It is unfortunate that she chose to rely solely on Richard Bernheimer’s 1952 study, classic though it is, for a consideration of more up-to-date studies such as those by Bartra and Williams would have made her analyses of figures such as Túrin Turambar and Gollum that much more effective.

Mary Faraci argues for Tolkien’s use of the “middle voice” in his 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” to identify the “I” of the essay with the voice of the Beowulf poet in contrast to the “active voice” employed by the scholars whose work is being critiqued. She argues that the essay too should be regarded as an elegant and subtle work of a master prose stylist. The enduring popularity of Tolkien’s essay confirms her insight that the work continues to be read not only for its critical insights, important as they still continue to be, but also for the elegant presentation of the argument.

The first section concludes with an essay by Christine Chism on Tolkien’s appropriation of aspects of Germanic myth in his Legendarium, and the misappropriation of similar material by the ideologues of National Socialism, in particular Alfred Rosenberg. This is an important topic, because the accusation continues to be raised from time to time that because of this interest in Northern mythology, Tolkien’s work is “fascistic” (most recently, for example, by Guido Schwarz—see my review in “Tolkien Worldwide”). Chism does an excellent job of clearly distinguishing Tolkien’s use of Germantum from that of Rosenberg and others, but they are in fact different responses to a similar impulse whose roots are deep in the eighteenth century, namely the desire to create a “northern” identity that could be counterpoised to the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. In England this sentiment finds one of its first expressions in the 1762 Letters on Chivalry and Romance by Richard Hurd (1720-1808), subsequently Bishop of Winchester, and Tolkien’s desire to create a “mythology for England” is very much in the spirit of Hurd’s enterprise. The directions these impulses took in England have been documented by Andrew Wawn, while the study by Klaus von See covers the very different history in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries paying particular attention to Rosenberg and Richard Wagner (an important study on Wagner’s indebtedness to Old Norse materials by Árni Björnsson has just become available in English). In both countries these impulses were renewed in the carnage of World War I, but Tolkien’s creative turn to constructing this “mythology for England” in the shadow of the trenches (now ably documented by John Garth) is a polar opposite to the fantasies of blood, land and race concocted by German writers in the decade following the Armistice. Klaus Theweleit has expertly analyzed a large body of this work by writers associated with the Freikorps and Schwarz, for example, unconvincingly appeals to Theweleit’s study in his attempt to argue for what he sees as Tolkien’s fascistic tendencies. The National Socialists used Nordic mythology to glory war and the sacrifice of the individual, whereas Tolkien used the same material to remind us that war solves nothing, leading to just more war, and that the struggle to do good is up to the individual not the State. It would seem that this should be self-evident to any reader of Tolkien’s work, and Chism’s carefully argued and well documented essay should put the matter to rest for once and all. But I am afraid that we have not heard the end of attempts to belittle Tolkien’s accomplishments by associating them with nationalist and racist appropriations of Germanic mythology and heroic narrative.

The essays in the second section, “J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Medieval Literary and Mythological Texts/Contexts” (93-168), are source studies and have the strengths and weaknesses of the genre: the connections to distant sources are often too tenuous, and the links with familiar pieces often too general. Nonetheless, when well done, as in these instances, such essays are always interesting reading. Leslie Donovan is concerned with foregrounding the principal female characters in The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn and Arwen, in response to those critics who charge Tolkien with misogyny and sexism. In order to support her thesis that these characters are as empowered as their male counterparts in myth as well as in the context of the novel, she makes the claim that each of them to a greater or lesser degree is a reflex of the Nordic valkyrie tradition. This approach was pioneered by Helen Damico in her ground-breaking study of the women in Beowulf. In order to make the approach work for Tolkien, Donovan faces a number of difficulties. First, the women in The Lord of the Rings are by no means the peripheral characters they appear to be at first sight in Beowulf. Secondly, the Nordic valkyrie tradition itself is by no means a unified and coherent body of texts. Several disparate traditions have come together and it is not so much that the tradition makes an easy distinction between benevolent and malevolent valkyries, but that one never knows when encountering a valkyrie, even the same one at different times, whether the result will be beneficial or a disaster. And as Michael Enright has demonstrated, the ritual of the “lady with the mead cup” has its roots deep in Germanic society, so that this attribute instead of being an identifying feature of the valkyrie is just as likely to be the transference of secular rituals into the mythic sphere. Given these limitations, it seems to me that Donovan can only make a convincing case for Galadriel, for only she has the mythic qualities that resonate with the valkyrie figures of the elder Edda. Éowyn is a “shield-maiden,” and, as Jenny Jochens points out in a study quoted by Donovan, there is some justification for making a distinction between a valkyrie, a mythological figure, and a shield-maiden, a figure belonging to the heroic world even though the terms are used interchangeably. Éowyn, despite her military prowess, seems to have more in common with the strong women of the Icelandic sagas such as Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir of Laxdæla saga or Hallgerður Höskuldssdóttir from Njálssaga. Rohan is not a happy place for Éowyn, especially under the sinister watch of Gríma Wormstongue, as Gandalf makes clear to Éomer in the Houses of Healing. Exercising military prowess is the only way for her to be able to exercise a degree of independence. She is a shield maiden because she has to be one. And after the battles are all over for the time being, she expresses no interest in returning permanently to Rohan. She will give up the sword and live as the Lady of Ithilien, a healer and the wife of Faramir. Some have seen this move as a sign of Tolkien’s sexism, but it seems to me rather that when given the choice of returning to the patriarchal society of Rohan or choosing a career for herself in the more egalitarian society of Ithilien she does not hesitate to choose the latter.

So far as Arwen or Shelob, the other major female characters, are concerned, it is very hard to see either one of then as embodying a valkyrie reflex, although Donovan makes a valiant effort to convince us that such is the case. Arwen is almost as anonymous for most of the narrative as are the women responsible for the exquisite embroidery and needlework on Gawain’s “vrysoun,” (the silk band on his helmet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 608-14), and she only becomes a presence in the novel towards the end (and in Appendix A: I.v). She owes much more to the female figures of the Romances than those of the earlier heroic literature. As for Shelob, Donovan has the most difficulty with her even when arguing that she represents an anti-valkyrie reflex. Shelob has, as Donovan recognizes, much closer affinities to beings such as Grendel’s mother.

Miranda Wilcox looks for echoes of the Old English Poem, “The Seafarer”, in The Lord of the Rings, and echoes there are to be sure, but they are very faint. “The Seafarer” has not left its mark on the novel as has its companion poem, “The Wanderer,” where the ubi sunt passage toward the conclusion of that poem is reworked in the verse that Aragorn chants as they pass the barrows of the dead Kings of Rohan on their first visit to Edoras. Nevertheless, Wilcox’s article is thoroughly researched and cogently argued.

Margaret Sinex finds a parallel between the chapter on “The Passing of the Grey Company” and the description of a ghostly army known as Hellequin’s Hunt and described in detail by the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman monk, Orderic Vitalis, in the eighth book of his Historia ecclesiastica. This band of ghostly riders, generically known as the “Wild Hunt” (there is an earlier description in the Peterborough Chronicle text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1127 during the reign of Henry I), is a band that appears in times of stress or as an omen of disaster, and the phenomenon has a long history from the early middle ages to modern times. In The Lord of the Rings, the Oathbreakers are a body of men who have been condemned to exist as the undead until given the opportunity to fulfill their oath after which time they will bother the world no more. They are similar to those who are under a geis or obligation of the kind that Reinhard describes briefly in chapter 22 of his study of the survival of geis in Medieval Romance.

The four essays of section three, “J. R. R. Tolkien: The Texts/Contexts of Medieval Patristics, Theology, and Interpretation” (167-236), deal with reflections of the Christian and classical traditions in the Legendarium. John William Houghton demonstrates how St. Augustine might have found aspects of the Ainulindalë consistent with the Christian account of Creation, and Bradford Lee Eden connects the Music of the Ainur with the concept of musica mundana (“music belonging to the universe”), known to the Middle Ages through Boethius’ fifth-century treatise, De institutione musica (“Concerning the principals of music”). Michael W. Maher attempts to link aspects of the medieval iconology of Mary with the depiction of Galadriel, but it seems to me that despite the efforts that Maher and others have made to pursue this line of argument, the differences between the two figures far outweigh any accidental similarities.

Jonathan Evans contributes a long and densely argued essay on what he calls the “anthropology of Arda,” that is the study of human beings in Arda as opposed to the other races existing there. However, I think that Tolkien’s concept of “man,” that is “human being,” was more broadly conceived than Evans gives him credit for, being more closely related to the Old Norse concept of maður (“human being,” plural menn). In the Old Norse world view, menn were either mennskir (human human beings) or they were not. When Grettir’s uncle, Jökull Bárðarson, warns Grettir not to have anything to do with Glámur, the former shepherd who now walks after death and terrorizes his district, he does it in these terms: “er ok miklu betra at fást við mennska menn en við óvættir slíkar” (“It is also much better to fight against human human beings than against such un-beings,” Grettis saga, Chapter 34). Thus “man” in the Legendarium can encompass all the races of Middle-earth, men, elves, hobbits, dwarves, maiar, orcs and even ents. Nevertheless, Evans has a useful contribution to make by specifically considering the anthropology of human kind in the Legendarium, because as he points out, human beings were the one race of Middle-earth that was not there to be invented (although elves and dwarves existed before Tolkien, and hobbits, the quintessential Tolkienian invention, are to be counted under human kind). For Tolkien, human beings, even with their first appearance in Middle-earth, are Fallen, like their counterparts in the Primary World. Evans follows up on Tom Shippey’s observation in The Road to Middle-earth (235-36) that the Silmarillion is a calque on the Book of Genesis and a response to Milton’s Biblical epics, by investigating how Tolkien and Milton deal with parallel problems in effectively presenting their narratives. Like Milton, Tolkien also faced the paradox that as a fallen human being, he too is himself implicated in The Fall, which itself is only accessible via myth. And how then can a work by a fallen human being ever leave the world better than before? Some of the answers, Evan’s argues (as have others), can be found in the poem “Mythopoeia,” the first version of which dates from 1931. Here myth is presented as something that can help hold off despair (that most grievous of sins which consumes Denethor). And it is with this in mind that the essay concludes with a look at Tolkien’s later work such as “Leaf by Niggle” and “Smith of Wootton Manor” for clues as to how Tolkien himself may have assessed his own achievement.

The final section, “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion Mythology: Medievalized Retextualization and Theory” (237-67) presents two essays on the Great Tales of the First Age. Gergely Nagy looks at the nature of the “depth” of the surviving versions of the story “Of Túrin Turambar” and the parallels between the way this depth is achieved in the secondary creation as well as in the primary world. In particular he examines the relationship of the surviving tales to the “lost” (and probably non-existent) version of the story supposedly composed by a certain Dírhavel, one of the Edain who perished when the sons of Fëanor attacked the Havens of Sirion towards the end of the First Age. But Nagy’s point is that even if we had the “Narn” of Dírhavel, we still would not have the “original” myth, for myth exists only in its telling and behind each version of a tale another one must be supposed to exist on which the new version is based. Therefore as important as the individual retellings are, equally significant is the process by which they come into being, making all versions of equal value. We can only appreciate this by constructing what Nagy calls a “Great Chain of Reading,” and in passing it is just as well to once again pay tribute to Christopher Tolkien, who through his labors in editing the volumes that make up the Legendarium, has made it possible for us to do just that.

The volume concludes on a high note with a spirited reading of the tale “Of Beren and Lúthien” by Richard West which touches on the parallels in that story to incidents and motifs from real world myth and fairy tale as well as reminding us of the importance Tolkien himself placed on this narrative. This is a fitting conclusion to a volume in which every one of the essays is challenging and informative whether or not one is ultimately convinced by all of the arguments presented. The production and presentation of the volume are handsomely executed so that everyone associated with this it can feel pleased with the final result and those would-be purchasers who might at first be hesitant to purchase this volume because of its fairly steep price can be well assured that they will be getting their money’s worth.

Shaun F. D. Hughes
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN

Works Cited

Árni Björnsson. Wagner og Völsungar: Niflungahringurinn og íslenskar fornbókmenntir. Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 2000; Wagner and the Volsungs: Icelandic Sources of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Rev. ed. Trans. Anna Yates and Anthony Faulkes. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2003.

Bartra, Roger. Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness, trans. Carl T. Berrisford. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Bernheimer, Richard. Wild Men of the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. Rpt. New York: Octagon, 1970.

Chance, Jane, ed. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. A Reader. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

——- and Alfred Siewers, eds. Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages. New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Damico, Helen. Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Enright, Michael J. The Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophecy and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tène to the Viking Age. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996.

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Hughes, Shaun F. D. “Tolkien Worldwide.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.4 (2004): 980-1014.

Jochens, Jenny. Old Norse Images of Women. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Reinhard, John Revell. The Survival of Geis in Medieval Romance. Halle: Niemeyer, 1933.

Schwarz, Guido. Jungfrauen im Nachthemd — Blonde Krieger aus dem Western: Eine Motivpsychologisch-kritische Analyse von J. R. R. Tolkiens Mythologie und Weltbild. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003.

Shippey, T. A. The Road to Middle-earth. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carete and Chris Turner. 2 vols. Theory and History of Literature 22-23. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987-89. First published in German 1977-78.

von See, Klaus, and Germane Barbar, Arier: die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen. Heidelberg, Winter, 1994.

Wawn, Andrew. The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain. Cambridge: Brewer, 2000.

Williams, Davis. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996.

Tolkien through Russian Eyes, by Mark T. Hooker. Zurich and Bern, Switzerland: Walking Tree Publishers, 2003. 324 pp. $18.25 (trade paperback) ISBN 3952142476. Cormarë Series no. 5.

Mark Hooker’s book might be titled, and only partially in jest, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Tolkien’s Transformation and Reception in Russia.” Each individual reader will have to adjudge whether I should have added the cautionary coda— “but were afraid to ask”—for various Tolkienists will find much here at which they might both marvel and grouse. First the grousing. One can quibble over punctuation-peeves and oddly varied formats in the reference lists. More tellingly, Hooker’s otherwise admirable thoroughness has a flip-side to it, a dissertation-project-like quality (and I say this empathetically) in that he seems loath to leave out any of the wealth of detail he has encountered/unearthed/reeled in. Thus some expositions have a mechanical feel, plodding from one principal’s conference paper/book chapter to the next, telling us sequentially what each said (e.g., on the subject of “Tolkienism” in Russia). Herein the editors simply failed to take a good manuscript and smooth out such rough edges.

One thing not to grouse about is the sheer effort Hooker invested, indefatigable as he was in digging up many and varied Russian versions of the key Tolkien works and in guiding us through that most difficult terrain: comparing samples of these translations-cum-adaptations both to the real McCoys and to each other. That effort is yet the more impressive since many exemplars began as samizdat, illegal, oft-copied typescript versions passed around during the Soviet era. Thus for all who are students of Tolkien-as-rendered-in-other-languages there are indeed great riches here.

In my judgement, language and Russian culture are the twin “stars” of Hooker’s work, the first fittingly so given Tolkien’s own profession that the languages of Middle-earth came first in his project of subcreation, and only later the stories which provided a home in which those languages could take flesh. The core of this book concerns language, and choices in the acts and arts of translation, with over 50 pages devoted to The Hobbit and nearly 100 other pages to lovingly detailed discussions of the Russian translations for a series of 30 words (ranging from place-names to “Púkel-men”).

Yet Russian culture gets its due as well. More properly, both specific sections of this book and the background tone of Hooker’s discussions suggest something like a collision (sometimes disastrous, less often serendipitous, always interesting) between the final, preferred texts of The Hobbit and of The Lord of the Rings—as Tolkien crafted them and as later put in their best versions by Douglas Anderson and other scholars—and the counterparts produced in Russia both during and after the Soviet era. For a naif like myself, who might think translation the act of finding the best Russian words to render a simple descriptive passage, or even basic English words like “feet” (viz: 52-53) this was an ice-water immersion in another reality. The sheer level of textual bastardization, bowdlerization, and unnecessary and mind-boggling deletions and insertions is impressive (and I can’t bring myself, as Hooker does, to use the beauty-bearing term “embellishments” to describe those changes). To see those alterations for even a few selected passages shows us that many Russian translators clearly felt authorized to (a) do Tolkien better than he did himself, (b) alter him to fit with their perceptions of a Russian cultural audience, (c) remove elements that might attract the attention of censors or censurers, or (d) some combination of those elements. One representative example can be found when Hooker discusses “The Temptation of Knowledge and Power,” where he deals in interesting ways with textual-variations in matters as varied as machinery, dwarves and rings, and Saruman’s offer to share power with Gandalf. Beyond such comparatively “minor” amendments to Tolkien’s writings, we also encounter the distinctive literary turn and intellectual following known as Niennism, named after Nienna, pen-name for the author of The Black Book of Arda, wherein Melkor gives us his version of the events of the Silmarillion.

Underlying many such changes, I suspect, lies an attitude of Russian snobbery, even chauvinism, toward non-Russian cultural artifacts. Some such elements surely predate the Soviet era, but many were exacerbated during those decades, as Soviet spokespersons became notorious for claiming Russian/Soviet priority in all manner of scientific discoveries and new technologies, and more generally inflating the national ego about the place of Russia/The Soviet Union in the world. My Russia-expert colleague has confirmed, for example, that an old Second City TV skit where John Candy gloatingly inserts many other global-nation maps inside the borders of a map of the USSR, to show how puny they all are by comparison, really was typical of the era and the attitudes.

Less culturally subtle, of course, would be the reasons for not allowing Tolkien a legal translation in the first place. Under the official Stalin-era (and after) privileging of “socialist realism” in all art forms – picture revolutionaries manning the barricades and muscular workers their heavy equipment—literature of the fantastic or even the semi-mythical was hardly welcome. No expert on these matters, I can still harbor hopes that my own childhood favorites of the Russian fantastic, like the herculean hero Ilya Mourometz, and the witch Baba Yaga, with her chicken-legged house and her flying mortar, made it through the era intact. In this concerned vein, Hooker devotes a fine chapter to discussing how any unaltered “Scouring of the Shire” would surely have brought down the censors’ wrath, and another to how translators played with the employer-vs.-companion aspect of the Frodo-Sam relationship by trying to move it into a more egalitarian mold. Beyond those and other doubtful elements just waiting to become road-kill on the censor’s highway lies the least subtle one of all in The Lord of the Rings: a Dark Lord rules a totalitarian nightmare-world with an iron fist in the eastern lands of Middle-earth, and an aware westerner can “pity even his slaves.” Remember also that “The East is Red,” as one revolutionary anthem declared (okay, so the song was Chinese: it’s still a good point). Thus many of these texts were just a bit too close to home even without the socialist-realism artistic agenda.

All that being said, and of course treated by the author with far more care than I can convey here, the problematic quality of the Russians’ reception of Tolkien itself justifies Hooker’s efforts. Most of us, I trust, can quickly get past being appalled and move with his deeply informed guidance into a richer grasp of what Tolkien (perhaps “Tolkien”) has meant to several generations of Russian readers.

Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.

Addenda and Corrigenda to the 2001-2002 Tolkien Studies Bibliography 1

Conference Proceedings

Concerning Hobbits and Other Matters: Tolkien across the Disciplines. University of St. Thomas Tolkien Conference. Ed. Tim Schindler. St. Paul: Department of English, U of St. Thomas, 2001.

Articles

Croft, Janet Brennan. “The Great War and Tolkien’s Memory: An Examination of World War I Themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 23.4 (2002): 4-21.

Dailey, Sara. “Applicability and Truth in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion: Readers, Fantasy, and Canonicity.” Mythlore 23.4 (2002): 50-66

Garbowski, Christopher. “It’s a Wonderful Life as Faerian Drama.” Mythlore 23.4 (2002) 38-49.

Hammond, Wayne G. “Whose Lord of the Rings Is It, Anyway? Private Tolkien and His Audience.” The Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal (2002): 59-65.

Kelly, Tony. “Faith Seeking Fantasy: Tolkien on Fairy-Stories.” Pacifica 15 (2002): 190-208.

Lakowski, Romuald Ian. “Types of Heroism in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 23.4 (2002): 22-37.

Ryan, John S. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Formal Lecturing and Teaching at the University of Oxford, 1929-1959.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002): 45-62.

Tomkins, J. Case. “‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’: Tolkien as a Modern Anglo-Saxon.” Mythlore 23.4 (2002) 67-74.

Weidner, Bruce N. “Middle-earth: The Real World of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Mythlore 23.4 (2002): 75-85.

Sincere thanks to Janet Brennan Croft.

The Years’ Work in Tolkien Studies 2001-2002

David Bratman

Just as in The Silmarillion the year of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad is known as the Year of Lamentation, the years of 2001 and 2002 are for Tolkien studies the Years of the Movie. Or some of its years. Since 1968, in the wake of the first great Tolkien boom, hardly a year has gone by without the publication of a full-length book on Tolkien by an academic or commercial press, but except for spurts during the years immediately following the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion, and again in 1992 around the centenary of Tolkien’s birth, there had never been more than two or three a year. This changed in 2000, and has shown no signs of slowing down since. The number of academic articles has also grown.

The impetus for this increase in Tolkien-related verbiage is undoubtedly many-faceted. The posthumous History of Middle-earth series, edited by Christopher Tolkien, was completed in twelve volumes in 1996: scholars have begun to absorb its complex contents, finding new aspects of Tolkien’s writing to discuss. Gradually, ever so slowly, study of Tolkien and other popular fantasists is gaining a foothold of respectability in corners of the academic world: scholars are beginning to feel less dissuaded from writing about Tolkien, and an academic market is growing for study of his work.

But mostly, it’s the movies. The first of three annual films directed by Peter Jackson, collectively titled The Lord of the Rings, was released in December 2001 amid great publicity that had been building up for at least two years while filming had proceeded. These days a major film cannot be released without a batch of film books about its making (not covered in this article), and some of this interest has rubbed off on the book on which the films are supposedly based and on its author. Some of the interest of academic publishers in issuing books on Tolkien may have been affected by the film’s presence; the sudden vast increase in popular books explaining Tolkien to a general audience certainly has. The release of the first film was also the occasion for a burst of popular magazine and newspaper feature articles on Tolkien, some of the more interesting of which are annotated here.

The most significant books of Tolkien criticism published in 2001-2002 are two scholarly editions, Beowulf and the Critics edited by Michael D.C. Drout and the revised and expanded edition of The Annotated Hobbit edited by Douglas A. Anderson, for their extensive scholarly apparatus. A third edition, The Alphabet of Rúmil & Early Noldorin Fragments edited by members of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, is an important first publication of Tolkien’s early linguistic work. Like Anderson’s work, Splintered Light by Verlyn Flieger is not a casually revised reprint but a complete reworking of a most important critical study. The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien by Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie and Women Among the Inklings by Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride are provocative and interesting though flawed. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth by Bradley J. Birzer is a well-researched study with worthy content. Of the books on Tolkien for general readers, the most readable are Meditations on Middle-earth edited by Karen Haber, a collection of personal appreciations and observations mostly by practicing fantasy authors, and The Magical Worlds of The Lord of the Rings by David Colbert, a children’s introduction to Tolkien’s mythic sources and parallels.

Journals devoted entirely to Tolkien published many of the most valuable articles on his work during 2001-2002. These journals include Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, which published issues 38-39 in 2001 and issue 40 in 2002; Mythlore, from the Mythopoeic Society, which published issue 89 in 2001 and issue 90 in 2002, the latter devoted entirely to articles on Tolkien; and two linguistic journals published by the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. Issue 13 of Parma Eldalamberon, the ELF’s edition of The Alphabet of Rúmil & Early Noldorin Fragments, appeared in 2001. Vinyar Tengwar published issue 42 in 2001 and issues 43-44 in 2002. Special issues of The Chesterton Review, vol. 28.1-2, titled “J. R. R. Tolkien: Mythos and Modernity in Middle-earth,” and of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, Jan./Feb. 2002, titled “J. R. R. Tolkien & the Christian Imagination,” appeared in 2002. Specific contents of these journals are described individually.

Works by Tolkien

Beowulf and the Critics, edited by Michael D.C. Drout (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), is a detailed edition of two previously unpublished drafts of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture/essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The two drafts, labeled by Drout as “A” and “B,” are close in content to each other and the final version. Drout edits very closely and meticulously, providing explanatory and textual notes for numerous references and for every discernable change and correction in Tolkien’s texts. The front matter includes description of the manuscripts, a history of the essay’s composition, and a history of Beowulf scholarship placing the essay in the contexts both of the criticism to which it responded and of its own influence on Beowulf studies. The history of earlier criticism is particularly useful for Drout’s discussion of the scholars whom Tolkien mentions or refers to in the essay and his elaboration on their views and contributions. The book also includes the first publication of a slightly different text of Tolkien’s poem “Iúmmona Gold Galdre Bewunden.” Drout’s edition received the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2003.

The revised and expanded edition of The Annotated Hobbit, annotated by Douglas A. Anderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), contains almost everything that was in the original edition of 1988, but is so thoroughly expanded that it is almost a new book. The full and corrected final text of The Hobbit is accompanied by marginal annotations discussing everything from mythological sources to the contexts of Middle-earth history. These are always relevant through sometimes digressive. Many new annotations have been added, notably a newly-discovered literary parallel to Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug in Stories for My Children by E.H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, a book Tolkien owned as a child, and old annotations have been rewritten to be more precise, in particular adding specific bibliographical references. A full accounting of revisions in the published text between editions has been moved from an appendix into the annotations, enabling editorial discussion of why the changes were made. Numerous illustrations selected from domestic and foreign editions have also been added to, with new information on the artists. The front matter includes a full account of the making and publication of the book.

New textual editions of standard Tolkien works include a new edition of The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) based on the computerized text of 1995 but further corrected “to present a text,” according to a note by Douglas A. Anderson dated May 2001, “that, as closely as possible, represents Tolkien’s final intended form,” and with new jacket art by Peter Sís; and a new edition of The Lord of the Rings in three volumes (London:HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), with the Alan Lee interior illustrations, the only edition of this year with the 2002 revisions to the computerized text of 1994. Newly compiled editions of Tolkien works include A Tolkien Miscellany (New York: Science Fiction Book Club, 2002), an omnibus including Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham, Tree and Leaf, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and the posthumous translation volume, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo [not seen]; and an edition of Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 2001) including not only the poem “Mythopoeia” but also the essay/play “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” [not seen].

Linguistic work by Tolkien first published in 2001-2002 begins with The Alphabet of Rúmil & Early Noldorin Fragments (Cupertino: Parma Eldalamberon, 2001), the third volume of a chronological survey of Tolkien’s previously unpublished major linguistic texts by a team of scholars from the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. Both sections date mostly from the late 1910s and early 1920s and show Tolkien gradually enriching his sub-creation in language. “The Alphabet of Rúmil,” edited by Arden R. Smith, is the ancestor, both in Tolkien’s development and within the sub-creation, of the Tengwar. Numerous letter lists in facsimile and pronunciation guides are accompanied by extensive commentary. The Noldorin fragments, edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Welden, Carl F. Hostetter, and Patrick Wynne, include some heraldic devices but consist mostly of grammars and dictionaries. Linguistically these occupy a position between earlier Gnomish and later Sindarin. Annotations consist primarily of comparisons with earlier Gnomish and Qenya vocabularies.

Vinyar Tengwar published two significant linguistic texts by Tolkien in these years. “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor” (42: 5-31), written c. 1967-69, was excerpted in Unfinished Tales. The remainder of the essay’s text, here edited by Carl F. Hostetter with materials by Christopher Tolkien, glosses a number of Sindarin names and also discusses Eldarin numerals. “Words of Joy: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya” (43: 4-38; 44: 5-20) probably written in the 1950s, is edited by Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter. The correlation of these unusually lengthy Quenya texts with known Latin originals provides the editors with the opportunity to study Quenya vocabulary and grammar in detail in accompanying notes. The second part of this edition is accompanied by separate editions of “Ae Adar Nín: The Lord’s Prayer in Sindarin,” edited by Bill Welden (44: 21-30, 38), and “Alcar mi Tarmenel na Erun: The Gloria in Excelsis Deo in Quenya,” edited by Arden R. Smith (44: 31-37), both also with notes and analysis.

General Works and Reference

Three books of this period are intended as introductory guides to Tolkien, intended for readers who know little of his work. Each includes a short biography derived from Humphrey Carpenter’s standard work, and each has basic discussion of at least some of Tolkien’s major works. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Beginner’s Guide by Andrew Blake (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002) is the shortest of the three and the one pitched at the most elementary reading level. The literary discussion consists mostly of plot summaries and very basic point-by-point discussions of Tolkien’s themes. Blake shows more zest in detailing arguments against Tolkien than in presenting any real explanation of his principles. Bullet-point summaries and definitions of a few tough words (such as “philology” and “feudalism”) are provided.

The Master of the Rings: Inside the World of J. R. R. Tolkien by Susan Ang (Duxford: Wizard Books, 2002) is somewhat longer and more advanced, though published as a children’s book. Ang writes smoothly and covers various standard literary themes intelligently. She devotes a full chapter to a thoughtful if very incomplete survey of Tolkien’s influence on subsequent fantasy fiction. However, the text says virtually nothing about The Silmarillion or Tolkien’s other posthumous works, and an appendix titled “A Short History of Middle-earth” is actually a summarized biography of Sauron from his capture of Beren (nothing is said of Finrod) through his explusion from Dol Guldur.

I Am in Fact a Hobbit: An Introduction to the Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien by Perry C. Bramlett (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003) is by far the most advanced of these introductions. After the obligatory biography, Bramlett devotes most of his attention to individualistic descriptions of Tolkien’s major and some arbitrarily selected minor works. These minimize literary interpretations in favor of mixing plot summaries with quotes from early reviews and extremely detailed accounts of publication histories. Whether elementary readers will recognize specific points that Bramlett has borrowed unattributed from earlier scholars is another question. He also borrows the standard primary bibliography of Tolkien originally compiled by Carpenter, and includes a good secondary bibliography and discography. The advanced nature of Bramlett’s work causes numerous factual errors to stand out, notably an inaccurate discussion of the Lord of the Rings copyright controversy (63-64). Smaller errors include Bramlett’s placement of the origin of Ancrene Wisse in Hertfordshire where he means Herefordshire (125). The book’s most interesting, but most anomalous, feature is a chapter of ruminative personal reflections by Joe R. Christopher.

Also akin to an introductory guide, but very different in its coverage, is World of the Rings: The Unauthorised Guide to the World of J. R. R. Tolkien by Iain Lowson, Keith Marshall, and Daniel O’Brien (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002). The obligatory biographical chapter and a very basic essay on the meaning of Tolkien’s work, totaling about thirty pages, frame sixty pages on Tolkien and cinema. This impressively detailed central essay recounts every attempt, however abortive, to put Tolkien’s work on film, and is thorough enough to list all the other fantasy film credits of everyone even remotely involved in any of these efforts, including actors considered but rejected by Peter Jackson. An annotated bibliography describes Tolkien’s posthumous work as “confusing and overwhelming” (100) but shows considerably more willingness to tackle the complexities of Tolkien-based gaming. An earlier version of this book, under the title A Guide to Middle-earth [not seen], with the same ISBN, was not released but subsequently appeared for sale in some remainder markets.

Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle-earth by Colin Duriez (Mahwah: Hidden Spring, 2001) is a revision of his Tolkien and Middle-earth Handbook of 1992. There is little new material, and some now outdated statements are repeated, but the work, essentially an encyclopedia in format, is thoroughly reorganized. The earlier book had a single alphabetical arrangement. The revised version begins with a narrative discussion of Tolkien’s life and the general nature of his work, and follows this with separate mini-encyclopedias of 1) persons, places, and things in Middle-earth; 2) broad concepts and themes in his work; 3) people and places in his life; 4) his writings. None of these are definitive or thorough, but Duriez covers lightly in one short volume material for which fuller study would require several larger volumes.

Together with David Porter, Duriez has also produced The Inklings Handbook (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), a similar encyclopedia. The authors begin with an Inklings group history and quick outlines of the sub-creations of Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams. This is followed by a single encyclopedia of people, works, and concepts, most striking for its sketchy entries and outright omissions. Williams’s novels are summarized in great detail, but Tolkien’s and Lewis’s are discussed very briefly. There are entries for Lewis’s and Williams’s wives but not for Tolkien’s. There are entries for authors influenced by the Inklings, but only if their surnames begin with the letter A. Such value for scholarship as this book has is extremely scattered.

The History of Middle-earth Index by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2002) is a compilation by Helen Armstrong of Christopher Tolkien’s indices to the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth into a single alphabetical arrangement. There is no new material except an editorial note. Armstrong has left the entries untouched except to add volume numbers, and has not attempted to combine multiple entries for the same item into single entries. Christopher Tolkien’s prefatory notes to the individual indexes are included. This volume was created purely for the sake of convenience, which it satisfies.

Treasures from the Misty Mountains: A Collector’s Guide to Tolkien by James H. Gillam (Burlington: Collector’s Guide Pub., 2001) is a glossy catalog with many full-color reproductions, mostly of book covers and figurines. No pricing information is given, and bibliographic data is rudimentary. About half the book is devoted to readables, and the rest to collectibles in a broader sense. Inaccuracies are numerous, as are omissions, particularly in foreign-language book editions and in recordings of Tolkien-inspired music.

J. R. R. Tolkien: An Audio Portrait, written and presented by Brian Sibley (London: BBC Worldwide, 2001), uses a biographical framework for a two-hour audio presentation on the man and his work. Sibley’s narration introduces clips from interviews with Tolkien, those who knew him, scholars of his work, an ecological activist, and a couple veterans of 1960s pop culture interest in The Lord of the Rings. A few of the interviews were made for television and were intended to be seen as well as heard. Excerpts from the 1981 BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings are included to illustrate some points. The time limitation forces an extreme compression on this work, and topics are apparently selected to fit the available interviews. A good share of time is given to the process by which The Hobbit came to publication, described by Elaine Griffiths and Rayner Unwin, and to Tolkien’s love of languages. The Silmarillion is mentioned, and Tolkien’s scholarly work is alluded to by Humphrey Carpenter, but his other work is not described. Greatest attention is given to The Lord of the Rings. Tom Shippey and others describe Tolkien’s intent, but evaluation of the book’s effectiveness is mostly left to John Carey, who at some length argues that it is a children’s book that does not address adult concerns.

Two Tolkien quiz books were not seen by this reviewer. So You Think You Know The Lord of the Rings? by Clive Gifford (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2002) is a collection of “over 1200 fantastic quiz questions,” according to its cover, by an author who has compiled many similar children’s quiz books on popular culture topics. The other book is The J. R. R. Tolkien Trivia Quiz Book by William C. MacKay (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001).

Biographical

The Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien by Michael White, in the “Critical Lives” series (Indianapolis: Alpha, 2002; also published as Tolkien: A Biography, London: Little Brown, 2001, and New York: New American Library, 2003), is a full-length original biography. White’s discussion of Tolkien’s work contains no literary criticism as such, but consists of textbook psychological constructs of the “personal demons” and “inner drives” that he thinks Tolkien ought to have had (xvii). For instance, he describes Tolkien’s motivation for creating his mythology as a basic Freudian longing for his lost mother, claiming that this simplification takes nothing away from Tolkien’s achievement (85-86). The book is notable for its extraordinarily clumsy writing style and the greatest number of factual errors and misinterpretations of any work on Tolkien ever published. One example may stand for many: an unattested account of Dorothy Sayers attempting to crash an Inklings meeting at the Bird and Baby describes her as an “American wit” (135). Possibly White has confused her with Dorothy Parker.

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Man Who Created The Lord of the Rings by Michael Coren (Toronto: Stoddart, 2001) is one of several juvenile biographies of Tolkien. Like his fellow authors, Coren attempts to condense information from Carpenter and other sources into a form suitable for child readers, but an adult reader may well expect any child capable of reading The Lord of the Rings to be able to read Carpenter’s book. Coren brings to his task a chatty style written down to children, and a false sense of intimacy with his subject that leads him into numerous factual errors. The book includes 32 photographs of persons, places, and book covers.

“We Talked of Love, Death and Fairy Tales” by Bill Cater (Daily Telegraph 4 Dec. 2001) describes Cater’s interviews of Tolkien between 1966 and the author’s death. Cater recounts Tolkien telling him how he created stories out of language. Tolkien is also quoted, even after the film rights had been sold, as saying that he did not believe a film would ever be made.

“Tolkien, the Ring and I” by Peter Milward (Chesterton Review 28: 119-23) is a short memoir by a student of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis who regrets not having attended more of Tolkien’s lectures. C.L. Wrenn told Milward that Tolkien was the “one man of genius in the School of English” (119). Milward wonders if The Lord of the Rings was what Wrenn was referring to. (Probably not.) Never particularly fond of The Lord of the Rings, Milward still finds it better than the “gruesome” film (123). He much prefers Harry Potter.

Rod Jellema, author of “Auden on Tolkien: The Book That Isn’t, and the House That Brought It Down” (W.H. Auden: A Legacy, edited by David Garrett Izzo. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 2002. 39-45), was editor of the series of critical monographs for which Auden had undertaken to write a brief study of Tolkien in 1966. He recounts how Auden withdrew the book at Tolkien’s request, noting a strange temporary breach in the otherwise close friendship Tolkien had for Auden. Tolkien went so far as to claim that he and Auden did not know each other well, which was not his position at other times. While Jellema notes Tolkien’s discomfort at being written about at all, his theory is that the cause of the breach was a magazine article in which Auden was quoted as saying Tolkien’s house was hideous. Tolkien is recorded as having been very defensive about his house to subsequent visitors. Jellema does not know whether Auden had completed the book on Tolkien, but is certain that the manuscript was destroyed by the author.

Appreciations and Journalism

A large number of professional authors of fantasy have written essays on what Tolkien’s work means to them. Fifteen of these, plus an essay by scholar Douglas A. Anderson and an interview with artists Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, may be found in Meditations on Middle-earth edited by Karen Haber (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). The essays vary greatly in style and approach from the purely appreciative to the scholarly. Karen Haber in “The Beat Goes On” and Esther M. Friesner in “If You Give a Girl a Hobbit” provide purely enthusiastic appreciations. Poul Anderson in “Awakening the Elves” and Harry Turtledove in “The Ring and I” describe how Tolkien’s example enabled them to write their own different kinds of fantasy. Raymond Feist in “Our Grandfather” and Terri Windling in “On Tolkien and Fairy-Stories” consider reasons for Tolkien’s popularity. Douglas A. Anderson in “Tolkien After All These Years” discusses the problems with indiscriminate appreciation. Orson Scott Card in “How Tolkien Means” presents a strong polemic argument against symbolic analysis. One essay which qualifies as scholarship is “Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings” by Ursula K. Le Guin, an analysis of Tolkien’s use of rhythm, recurrence, and opposition to create emotional effects in a sample chapter of The Lord of the Rings, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs.” The book is interesting for its personal testimonials and particularly valuable for Le Guin’s essay.

“Middle-earth Revisited, or, Back There Again” by Darrell Schweitzer (New York Review of Science Fiction issue 165: 1, 8-13) is the fullest appreciative article of these years outside of Haber’s book. Schweitzer, a fantasy writer better known as a critic, takes a fresh and individual approach to Tolkien’s achievement in The Lord of the Rings. He compares the book with other works in the epic tradition, observing that it has more female characters than most epics and that Frodo accepts responsibility rather than engages in adolescent rebellion. Contrary to Michael Moorcock’s criticism that the book is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic, Schweitzer finds it a depiction of childlike innocence meeting with and evolving into the epic: Tolkien’s honest and realistic approach to heroism and to the necessity of free will are what drive this.

Kathryn Kramer, a novelist, reminisces in “Middle-earth Enchants a Returning Pilgrim” (New York Times 30 Dec. 2002: E1) about reading The Lord of the Rings as a child, pointing out that Tolkien’s expressive descriptive prose refutes claims that he is not a stylist. She observes that few other authors could write at such length about a woodland trek without repeating themselves.

“Tolkien – Why Is He Important Today?” (Mallorn 39: 38-40) is a symposium in which two readers of Mallorn offer views on his work. Valerie Anand in “The Tolkien Effect” writes that she has found the deeper levels of The Lord of the Rings a comfort and enriching aspect of her life. Dale Nelson in an untitled contribution lists some moral principles which he believes are mostly abandoned today but which Tolkien’s work presents clearly and accessibly.

The above authors all either like Tolkien or are at least modestly respectful. A number of other articles are by writers who at root dislike The Lord of the Rings and keep breaking into negative remarks on the book while attempting to praise it. “Three Ways of Looking at a Trilogy” by the noted fantasist Patricia A. McKillip (New York Review of Science Fiction issue 156: 1, 4-5) is one of these, an impressionistic meditation that depicts the writer as a multiple-times reader filled with wonderment at Tolkien’s authorial voice who yet turned away from the book through irritation with its lack of female characters. She concludes by honoring fond memories on the apparent condition that she never read it again.

“Reasons for Liking Tolkien” by Jenny Turner (London Review of Books 15 Nov. 2002: 15-24) is an unusually long and rambling general article of this kind. Turner begins arrestingly by pointing out the similarities of Tolkien’s literary concerns with those of canonical 20th century literary authors, but goes on to deny Tolkien’s canonicity, claiming that T.A. Shippey and other academic critics are “kidding themselves” over this (17). Otherwise the article skips from point to point, applying the writer’s belief that all serious literary study must challenge its subject’s value and that other positions are “slumming” (16). Turner appears to believe that the enchantment of fantasy literature is a gimmick that needs to be exposed, though for what reason she does not say. A lengthy response to this article, “Reasons for Not Liking Tolkien” by Caroline Galwey, was published in Mallorn 42 (Aug. 2004): 5-10.

Anthony Lane in “The Hobbit Habit: Reading The Lord of the Rings” (New Yorker 10 Dec. 2001: 98-105) claims to have been a Tolkien fan but says he found the book one to be struggled through rather than enjoyed, not seeming to realize that others feel differently. Like Turner, he is fascinated by hobbits’ hairy feet and wonders how much other bodily hair they have. However, his biographical-critical article makes some good points on the appeal of Tolkien to the counter-culture, the importance of loss in Tolkien’s life, and the hobbit-like character of common soldiery. Lane is briefly skeptical about the Jackson film’s ability to convey Tolkien’s vision.

Judith Shulevitz in “Hobbits in Hollywood” (New York Times Book Review 22 Apr. 2001: 35) finds The Lord of the Rings evocative in its use of medieval linguistic echoes but considers the book’s tone overly portentous and grandiose. She prefers The Hobbit. Like Lane, Shulevitz confines her comments on the film to a skeptical opening. She doubts that New Zealand can play Middle-earth as its “geography was explicitly modeled on the hills and forests of Tolkien’s beloved England.” This presumably includes the towering peak of Caradhras and the volcanic wastes of Mordor.

Susan Cooper, a noted children’s fantasist, has complaints with The Lord of the Rings in “There and Back Again: Tolkien Reconsidered” (Horn Book March 2002: 143-50), largely concerning the brevity of female characterization. But she also defends Tolkien’s prose against some negative critics. Cooper considers Tolkien’s personal background key to his work, and she describes her own attendance at his lectures on Beowulf.

“Tolkien Was Not a Writer” by A.N. Wilson (Daily Telegraph 24 Nov. 2001; reprinted as “Wagner for Kiddies?” in Chesterton Review 28: 271-74) praises the narrative flow and mythology of The Lord of the Rings, criticizing its prose and (in a judgment that would be disputed by all the writers in this survey’s “Religious and Devotional Studies” section) its lack of a “sense of spiritual catastrophe.” Wilson prefers The Silmarillion and says that if Tolkien was “not exactly a writer, he was a serious craftsman.”

“A Fool’s Hope” by Shanti Fader (Parabola 26.3: 48-52) is an article for general readers assimilating the humbleness of hobbits as heroes to the archetype of the Fool. Fader writes that as with stories having outright Fools as heroes, Tolkien reverses the normal expectations of heroic nature. Though illustrated with stills from the Jackson film, the article is entirely about Tolkien’s book.

“Why the Critics Must Recognise Lord of the Rings as a Classic” by Tom Shippey (Daily Telegraph 2 Jan. 2002, reprinted in Chesterton Review 28: 266-68) is a brief piece describing the book as “a fairy-tale epic told in the form of a novel” with a strong theme of magical bewilderment.

“Do Anti-Semitism Charges Against Tolkien Ring True?” by Craig Bird (N.J. Jewish News 29 Nov. 2001; reprinted in Chesterton Review 28: 284-86) cites the undercutting of race prejudice in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s personal denunciation of Nazi notions of racial purity to answer the title’s question negatively.

“Mordor, He Wrote” by Neil Spencer (Guardian 9 Dec. 2001) finds flaws in The Lord of the Rings. Spencer describes the poetry and historical references as tedious, but praises the book for its narrative power and gritty realism.

“The Fellowship of the Ring” by Erik Davis (Wired Oct. 2001:120-32) is a particularly interesting article among many describing some of the manifestations of Tolkien fandom, particularly gaming, and reactions among fans to the then-forthcoming film. Except for Elvish linguistics, Tolkien scholarship even within the fan community is largely omitted. Davis’s article is based on numerous interviews and thus depends on his informants for accuracy and fairness, which is not always achieved, particularly on the subject of linguistic scholarship.

General Literary Criticism: The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Work as a Whole

Several reprinted or revised editions of older scholarly books on Tolkien appeared in 2001 and 2002. Most heavily revised, and most notable, is Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World by Verlyn Flieger (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002). This is a massively extended rewrite of the original 1983 publication, delving into much more detail and taking thoroughly into account much that was not available earlier, especially The History of Middle-earth but also secondary literature. The older material has also been rewritten for stylistic flow and clarity as well as to update the text. The original edition was one of the first books to discuss The Silmarillion in detail. Flieger shows Tolkien applying to his mythology Owen Barfield’s principles of the deep relationship between language and the nature of reality. The title refers to Tolkien’s use of fragmented light as a metaphorical depiction of fragmented language. This is an entirely renewed edition of an important work of scholarship.

Two books by Jane Chance were reissued: Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), originally published in 1979 under the name Jane Chance Nitzsche, and The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), originally published in 1992. Tolkien’s Art in the original edition discussed the work, including some non-fiction, of Tolkien published during his lifetime, with a short conclusion on The Silmarillion. The revised edition has expanded the conclusion slightly and added some bibliographical references to later secondary literature, but the text is not otherwise significantly revised despite major changes in context and knowledge since 1979. For instance, the poem “Imram” is discussed as it was in the first edition, without any reference to The Notion Club Papers (113-16, 139-40). The other book’s reprint corrects a major factual error in the original edition and expands bibliographical references, but it is also otherwise unchanged. Both works are critical analyses with a bent towards political and Freudian interpretations which may seem to some readers alien to Tolkien’s thought.

One Ring to Bind Them All: Tolkien’s Mythology by Anne C. Petty (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002) is a reprint of a 1979 book based on the author’s doctoral dissertation. Petty uses the terminology of Vladimir Propp to perform a folklore motivic analysis of The Lord of the Rings, looking for patterns reminiscent of fairy-tales in the sequences of events. This is an interesting if somewhat complex thesis with moderate coherency. The new edition includes an updated bibliography and a new introduction discussing the place of mythological studies of Tolkien.

Hobbits, Elves, and Wizards: Exploring the Wonders and Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by Michael N. Stanton (New York: Palgrave, 2001) is based on the author’s experience teaching the book in college literature classes. Stanton implies that he wrote his work as a way of recording the answers he has given to student questions in class over the years. Accordingly, this book, though well organized and clearly written, is focused on lists and detail, especially relating to facts within the sub-creation. Stanton is diligent in finding subtle threads, connections, and loose ends within The Lord of the Rings and laying them out clearly for readers. This may deprive his readers of the pleasure of finding them for themselves. Considering the amount of detail, the level of accuracy is not high, and there are a number of doubtful generalizations and interpretations. An example is his statement that mellifluous languages are spoken by good people and harsh, guttural languages by bad people (5). Reviewers have recommended this book for beginners, but it is best read only by multiple-times readers of The Lord of the Rings.

Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams by Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001) is a deliberately provocative study of the attitudes of these three authors towards women, both in their lives and in both detailed and casual references in their fiction. Fredrick and McBride are searing, through not entirely unsympathetic, in discussing hypocrisies of all three, but seem to go out of their way to find problems with the authors’ fictional portrayal of women. A claim that Lúthien “does very little” and “only gets herself into trouble” does not square with her exceedingly active and heroic role (120). While even the most minor female characters in Lewis and Williams are discussed fully, Fredrick and McBride are much more selective in Tolkien. Though aware of his post-Silmarillion posthumous works, they entirely omit mention of such important and revealing characters as Erendis from Unfinished Tales and Andreth from Morgoth’s Ring. There is even no mention of Agatha from Farmer Giles of Ham. Nevertheless there are good insights and usefully provocative statements in this book.

The most substantive and advanced original book on Tolkien of these years is The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien: A Critical Study of Text, Context and Subtext in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien by Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie (Oswestry: Medea, 2002). The authors claim this is an integrated text, written jointly by both of them, but the occasional use of the first-person singular and the wide-ranging nature of the contents belie this. However, most of the individual chapters are cohesive. A chapter on gender roles begins with a broad history of the role of women in modern Europe and continues with detailed character studies of Éowyn and Erendis which concentrate on placing them in the context of the societies in which they live. This chapter functions as a complete rebuttal to Fredrick and McBride’s criticism of Tolkien’s female characters. Another chapter, drawing extensively on The History of Middle-earth, studies how The Lord of the Rings became drawn into close relationship with “The Silmarillion.” It is followed by an examination of the place of Tom Bombadil in Tolkien’s imagination, seeking to understand how and why Tolkien incorporated this originally separate character into his legendarium. Less cohesively than these, a chapter on the physical ecology of Middle-earth somehow becomes an esoteric argument that the plot of The Lord of the Rings is a deliberate encoding of the life of Alexander von Humboldt. In parts of the book some of the statements are questionable, but the authors show great command of detail throughout.

“‘Queer Lodgings’: Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings” by David M. Craig (Mallorn 38: 11-18) looks at the book through the lens of gender theory. Craig finds a sexual component in Galadriel’s testing of the Company and reads Shelob’s attack as a perversion of the sex act. Éowyn, of course, is read as a gender transgressor. Arwen’s and Rosie’s small roles are credited to their having been late additions to the text. Craig seems to acknowledge that the relationship of Frodo and Sam is not a sexual one, but he insists that homosexuality cannot be dissociated from male companionship and reads Sam’s hostile reaction to Gollum as a lover’s jealousy. Craig’s most interesting point is that actions or behavior associated with a particular sex take on a gendered charge: thus, when male hobbits perform domestic tasks at Crickhollow it changes the definition of hobbit masculinity, and as it would be hard to imagine Galadriel’s role performed by a male it is therefore gendered behavior.

“Hobbit Sex and Sensuality in The Lord of the Rings” by Daniel Timmons (Mythlore 89: 70-79) is a rebuttal to various critics who have found elaborate sexual metaphors in the book or criticized it for containing no sex. (There is no reference to Craig, whose article only appeared earlier in the same year.) Timmons forcefully asserts that Tolkien’s letters show that he had no fear of female sexuality, and that scenes of genuine sensuality appear in his fiction, in the form of male observers’ wonderment at the female beauty of Goldberry, Arwen, and Galadriel. These scenes, Timmons says, “exemplify the difference between sex – carnal desire – and sensuality – feminine attraction,” which critics have wrongly conflated (77). He adds that the bond between Frodo and Sam is also sensual but not sexual: there can be no rivalry for Sam between Frodo and Rosie because their love for him does not conflict. Timmons’s conclusion is that Tolkien has placed sex in its proper perspective.

In “Images of Evil in Tolkien’s World” (Mallorn 38: 21-29), John Ellison postulates that the evil characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings may be divided into characters representing aspects of humanity, not fundamentally wicked but who may fall into evil, and “static” non-human beings which, despite Tolkien’s theology, are effectively entirely evil from the beginning. Ellison shows the former group hungering more for power for its own sake in The Lord of the Rings than in The Hobbit; Gollum’s character development demonstrates the change. The latter group he sees, in The Lord of the Rings, as often hardly characters at all, lurking off-stage (as with Sauron) and often not speaking when present: this increases the terror they evoke. Orcs are described as lying uncomfortably between the two groups. The humanity of the protagonists of The Silmarillion is briefly considered.

Ellison also provides a note on “Treebeard’s Voice” (Mallorn 40: 28), referring to its comparison to “a very deep woodwind instrument.” He speculates that the instrument Tolkien had in mind was not a bassoon but more likely a bass clarinet or even a contrabass clarinet.

“From Gollum to Gandalf: The Guide Figures in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” by Charles W. Nelson (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13: 47-61) describes Gollum as an evil guide figure in contrast to the good guide figures represented by Gandalf and others who take his place. Nelson distinguishes the good guide, who leads the heroes by using wisdom and power to aid and teach them, from the evil guide, who disguises his motives and attempts to lead them astray. But, he notes, Gollum by failing in his plans gives Frodo and even Sam the opportunity to learn pity, an important lesson in their moral growth. Nelson concludes that thus evil as well as good guides can contribute to the maturing of the heroes.

“Realistic Fantasy: The Example of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” by Nikolaos Koravos (Mallorn 38: 31-35) discusses techniques of novelistic realism used by Tolkien: detailed geographical and historical descriptions, social characteristics, a variety of characters, and genuine problematic decisions facing them. Other fantasy novels do not compare with Tolkien’s achievement, he believes. Koravos refers frequently to the entry on Tolkien by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Apparently misreading that book’s credits, he incorrectly attributes the entry to David Bratman, who has no desire to take responsibility for it.

“Legendary and Historical Time in The Lord of the Rings” by Allan Turner (Mallorn 39: 3-6) contrasts the specificity of dates in the chronological Appendices with the vague depths of history spoken of by characters in the story. This is illustrated by the characters’ vague use of the term “ages,” which has a specific meaning in the chronology. Such dialogue, Turner says, increases the historical depth of the tale and facilitates the transition from legendary to historical times.

Christine Davidson in “Coming of Age, Changes of Heart: Growth and Enlightenment in The Lord of the Rings (Mallorn 39: 15-22) surveys the nine members of the Fellowship for changes in their characters leading to increased maturity. Each is found to do so in a different way: for instance, Boromir learns to be selfless rather than relying on superficial honor, and Merry matures from over-confident to battle-hardened; Frodo, of course, transforms most. Davidson is insightful on all.

Romuald Ian Lakowski in “Types of Heroism in The Lord of the Rings” (Mythlore 90: 22-35) discusses different archetypes of masculine heroism as exemplified by four characters: Sam’s dogged determination, Frodo’s sacrificial heroism, Aragorn as the King Who Returns, and Gandalf as a supernatural hero of classical myth. Lakowski finds that the book has no single leading hero: each of these figures is important.

“Binary Issues and Feminist Issues in LOTR” by David Pretorius (Mallorn 40: 32-38) begins by citing previous critics to demonstrate that the book is a quest romance rather than a modern novel. He continues by discussing various binary oppositions in the book: death vs. life, childhood vs. adulthood, nature vs. the unnatural, and Galadriel vs. Shelob as images of the female and of the goddess in particular.

Sara Upstone (name given as Sara Dailey on the journal title page) writes on “Applicability and Truth in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion: Readers, Fantasy, and Canonicity” (Mythlore 90: 50-66). Her argument is that the usual critical dismissals of Tolkien for irrelevance and escapism are countered by reader-response critical approaches based on the obvious relevance and meaning of his work to his readers. She finds his work open to multiple readings focused on the problem of evil, ecology, and other contemporary concerns. Tolkien’s spiritual and mythological truths lie at the foundation of his work, she believes, and are responsible for his widespread applicability.

Brian N. Weidner in “Middle-earth: The Real World of J. R. R. Tolkien” (Mythlore 90: 75-84) finds allegory in parallels between The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s personal concerns, regardless of Tolkien’s disavowals. Weidner explains the contradiction by describing the allegory as unconscious and present despite the author’s desire to avoid it. Identifying the “nearly uncrossable” Brandywine River (despite a bridge and a ferry) with the English Channel (77), Weidner depicts the Shire as the isolated England of Tolkien’s childhood. Comparing the alliance of Sauron and Saruman with that of Austria-Hungary and Germany, he describes the War of the Ring as a depiction of World War I. Christian morality and structure also permeate the book, he says, with Elrond as a papal figure. The Ring symbolizes corruptibility.

General Literary Criticism: Other Works

Verlyn Flieger’s title “A Cautionary Tale” (Chesterton Review 28: 97-103) refers to the tragic tone of The Silmarillion as Tolkien’s warning to his country, to which he dedicated his work (Flieger states that she accepts the uncanonical phrase “mythology for England” as representative of Tolkien’s intent) of the tragedy of disastrous war. Listing the successive battles of the War of the Jewels, she writes strikingly that “Elven history is strung on these battle-names like beads on a string” (101), though perhaps it should be the other way around. Frodo’s post-traumatic stress syndrome is also mentioned.

“Allegory Versus Bounce: Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12: 188-200) is an incisive pair of papers – a reply to an earlier work and a rebuttal to the reply – by two distinguished Tolkienists, presented at a joint conference session in 2001. The dispute is a philosophical one on literary reading for which Smith provides more the occasion than the cause. Verlyn Flieger objects to T.A. Shippey’s allegorical reading of Smith (in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century) on the grounds that the story neither encourages nor requires such a reading: it is a fairy-tale of the perils of Faërie that intends to generate wonder rather than analysis. Shippey replies that Tolkien himself had an allegorical meaning in mind when writing the story. For Shippey, finding intended symbolic explanations of non-vital elements increases rather than diminishes the appeal of the story. In short, Flieger is an elf and Shippey is a hobbit.

“‘Ainulindale’: Tolkien’s Commitment to an Aesthetic Ontology” by Robert A. Collins (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11: 257-65) discusses the philosophical principles underlying this opening work of The Silmarillion. Collins finds a Hegelian dialectic in the blending of imposed pattern and individual improvisation which enriches the work’s musical metaphor for creativity. This, he writes, is a conservative approach which syncretizes a wide variety of sources in Western tradition. Collins notes parallels with the equally cosmic ontology of Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker.

“‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’: Tolkien as a Modern Anglo-Saxon” by J. Case Tompkins (Mythlore 90: 67-74) presents Tolkien’s poem as a modern work of Anglo-Saxon literature: that is, as a poem in modern language, intelligible to modern concerns, that yet employs the characteristics of the older poetry. Tompkins discusses Tolkien’s use of Old English prosody and a heroic theme of the period combined with dialogue and stage-direction conventions of a much later time. He finds this conscious use of an older literary tradition to be key to Tolkien’s thought.

“Magic vs. Enchantment” by Patrick Curry (Mallorn 38: 5-10) was first published in The Journal of Contemporary Religion in 1999. Curry elaborates on Tolkien’s distinction in “On Fairy-Stories” between Magic, a technique of primary world power, and Enchantment, an acceptance of secondary world wonder. Finding that the willed attempt to force Enchantment usually devolves into Magic, he proposes a third category of Glamour, defined as “Enchantment in the service of Magic” or “selling the dream,” which he sees as characteristic of modernist thinking (7). Curry concludes by advocating the revival of Enchantment by techniques of evoking wonder via a revival of spiritualist thinking and especially a renewed appreciation of the natural world.

Sources and Comparative Studies

Two elementary books for general readers on Tolkien’s mythic sources are Myth & Middle-earth by Leslie Ellen Jones (Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Press, 2002) and The Magical Worlds of The Lord of the Rings by David Colbert (New York: Berkley Books, 2002). Each compares characters, themes, and events in The Lord of the Rings, with reference to other works of the legendarium, to analogues in mythology and literature. Neither author makes very many claims to be uncovering Tolkien’s sources. Colbert writes for a juvenile audience, providing clear, short discussions of such matters as the relationship of Tolkien’s Elves and Huorns with Shakespearean fairies and Birnam Wood, and the revisions to chapter 5 of The Hobbit. He has the ability to give simple, basic explanations of complex topics. Jones covers most of the same material for an adult audience with some interesting insights and useful introductions, but with less captivating prose and sometimes questionable accuracy. A biographical chapter is included.

“The Great War and Tolkien’s Memory: An Examination of World War I Themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings” by Janet Brennan Croft (Mythlore 90: 4-21) has since been revised and extended in Croft’s book War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (Westport: Praeger, 2004). Starting with the observation that “there is a Tolkien-sized hole running through” Paul Fussell’s study of World War I literature, The Great War and Modern Memory (5), Croft systematically reviews some themes Fussell finds in that literature—pastoral longing, the quest and other rituals, and a sense of national character—and shows how Tolkien applied them in his own way. She shows The Lord of the Rings as a response to the war in the same way as the realistic 1920s novels studied by Fussell, merely delayed and with a different setting. Croft concludes by exploring the question of why Tolkien framed his literary response as heroic romance, rejecting the ironic and cynical mode of almost all other writers.

Laura Marples in “The Hamletian Hobbit” (Mallorn 40: 15-21) disputes the common depiction of Frodo as Christ-like, finding his quest more akin to Hamlet’s. Like Hamlet, Frodo bears an increasingly unbearable burden, finds himself helpless at the hands of fate, and in the end sacrifices himself. Though there are Christ-like elements here, in Marples’s view Frodo and Hamlet are much more alike as whole personalities than either is like Christ. Marples’s analysis of Frodo’s character ranges beyond strict Shakespearean comparisons. She observes that his breakdown is sudden, following the attack by Shelob, rather than gradual, and that it bears resemblance in presentation to the breakdown of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Thomas A. Wendorf in “Greene, Tolkien, and the Mysterious Relations of Realism and Fantasy” (Renascence 55: 78-100) makes interesting thematic comparisons between The Lord of the Rings and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, offering Flannery O’Connor as a realistic romancer who may serve as a link between them. Wendorf argues that Greene’s novel was intended by its author to achieve a mythic pattern and does so through its protagonist who, like Frodo, accepts a self-sacrifice. Greene’s setting can be seen as a kind of mythic fantasy within the real world while Tolkien’s can be seen as realism in a fantasy world.

William H. Green in “King Thorin’s Mines: The Hobbit as Victorian Adventure Novel” (Extrapolation 42.1: 53-64) takes a similar approach to a comparison between The Hobbit and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. He finds numerous exact parallels, down to a similarity in the personal circumstances of Allan Quatermain (consistently misspelled “Quartermain”), an impecunious hunter, and Bilbo Baggins, a wealthy squire. Green also finds the books similar in both being unique. He considers the books to be uncannily alike in plot but does not mention literary style.

“Gollum, Frodo and the Catholic Novel” by Owen Dudley Edwards (Chesterton Review 28: 57-71) begins with the observation that Tolkien’s Catholicism was deep-seated enough that anything he wrote would be a Catholic work. Edwards briefly speculates on Tolkien’s familiarity with other Catholic novels of his time (including Graham Greene), but his most striking comparison is of the relationship between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and of Bilbo and Frodo as their protagonists) with the relationship between Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (both the novels and the characters). In each case the latter is more sophisticated but does not negate the former’s charms for the reader.

“Making and Unmaking in Middle-earth and Elsewhere” by Edith L. Crowe (Mythlore 89: 56-69) discusses the opposition of the creative Maker and the destructive Unmaker in Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series. She finds examples of both physical and psychological Making and Unmaking in Tolkien’s work: Morgoth and Ungoliant are purely destructive Unmakers; Saruman and Wormtongue attempt the psychological Unmaking of Théoden, and Sauron succeeds in the Unmaking of Denethor. But Crowe observes that Making can also be perilous, as the story of Fëanor shows.

Despite its broad title, “The Literary Backgrounds of The Lord of the Rings” by Janet Leslie Blumberg (Celebrating Middle-earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization. Seattle: Inklings Books, 2002. 53-81) is a survey limited to Anglo-Saxon and Middle English civilization and poetry and their likely influences on Tolkien’s fiction. His scholarly study of this literature is mentioned only incidentally.

Tom Dubois and Scott Mellor in “The Nordic Roots of Tolkien’s Middle-earth” (Scandinavian Review 90: 35-40) briefly note elements of Voluspa, Volsunga Saga, and the Kalevala in The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, discussing in somewhat more detail the resemblances in vocabulary and grammar between Quenya and Finnish.

“The Ring: An Essay on Tolkien’s Mythology” by Håkan Arvidsson (Mallorn 40: 45-52) begins as a wide-ranging survey of ring symbolism in myth that Arvidsson believes inspired Tolkien. Prometheus, alchemy, the Exeter Book, Volsunga Saga, The Red Book of Hergest, Beowulf, and the tale of the Ring of Volund are discussed with references to equivalents in Tolkien. Arvidsson follows Gene Hargrove in arguing that Tom Bombadil’s self-description proves conclusively that he is a Vala, and by process of elimination is Aulë the Smith (and that Goldberry is therefore Yavanna). Given this identification, Arvidsson discusses Tom’s “mastery” over the One Ring (49). The article concludes with a discussion of the power of the Ring and its effect on its bearers.

Edward Pettit writes on “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Use of an Old English Charm” (Mallorn 40: 39-44). The charm, from the medical collection Lacnunga, written ca. 1000 A.D., attributes a patient’s sharp stabbing pain to elfshot or some other supernatural spear or knife. Pettit finds here a striking similarity with the Morgul-knife with which Frodo is stabbed. That the knife melts or is melted echoes both the charm and a reference to a melting sword in Beowulf. Pettit also notes a linguistic echo of the charm in the Anglo-Saxon speech of Ælfwine in The Lost Road and Other Writings.

Dale Nelson discusses “The Lord of the Rings and the Four Loves” (Mallorn 40: 29-31) as described in the book The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. Nelson explains how Tolkien’s work owed its existence in part to his romantic love for his wife Edith and to his friendship with Lewis, and he shows all four loves appearing in the story: affection of Gandalf for the hobbits, the comradeship of Frodo and Sam, the romantic passion of Éowyn for Aragorn and of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, and charity in the form of Frodo’s quest. A shorter version of this article appeared earlier in Touchstone Jan./Feb. 2002: 48-50 as “Rings of Love: J. R. R. Tolkien & the Four Loves.”

“Tolkien’s ‘Essay on Man’: A Look at Mythopoeia” by Clive Tolley (Chesterton Review 28: 79-95) proposes that Tolkien’s poem is a rejoinder to Pope’s epistemological myopia in Essay on Man and Essay on Criticism in much the same way that the Huorns are a rejoinder to Shakespeare’s Birnam Wood: imagery and wording are maintained, meaning is changed. For precursors to Tolkien’s perspective, Tolley points to Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie and Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction. Tolkien is known to have read Barfield, and Tolley believes he consciously modeled his work after the others, showing that Tolkien was not completely ignorant of post-Chaucerian literature.

“Tolkien & the New Art: Visual Sources for The Lord of the Rings” by Mary Podles (Touchstone Jan./Feb. 2002: 41-47) describes some works of visual art that Podles is certain lodged in Tolkien’s mind and nurtured his imagination. These include Art Nouveau metalwork and architecture, and fairy-tale illustrations by Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, and Kay Nielsen. Several illustrations, mostly in color, are included.

Christopher Garbowski in “It’s a Wonderful Life as Faërian Drama” (Mythlore 90: 38-48) applies Tolkien’s theory of fantasy from “On Fairy-Stories” to Frank Capra’s 1946 film. Garbowski claims that despite Tolkien’s discomfort with drama, film is the human artform that most closely approaches Tolkien’s idealized Faërian Drama. He describes the fantasy sequence in It’s a Wonderful Life as the protagonist George’s trip into the perilous realm of Faërie, and George’s concluding acceptance of his established life as a form of what Tolkien calls Recovery.

Brian M. Carney in “On Moral Fiction” (Wall Street Journal European Edition 23-24 Nov. 2001; reprinted in Chesterton Review 28: 286-89) argues that The Lord of the Rings engages more deeply with moral questions than do J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Religious and Devotional

This category ranges from scholarly studies of Tolkien’s moral and religious views to homiletics inspired by his texts. Prominent among the former is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth by Bradley J. Birzer (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), a diligently researched Catholic study of The Lord of the Rings with some consideration of The Silmarillion. Birzer discusses a moral and theological context, including the roles of salvation, heroism, and evil, and devotes a chapter to the Catholic humanist applicability of the book in the modern world. All of this is placed in a context of Tolkien’s interest in myth and sub-creation. Sacramental aspects are discussed in passing. Birzer gives a very large number of citations of secondary sources for a book of this length and makes a number of references to Tolkien’s other writings as well.

Two books are collections of brief essays or sermons in the form of Christian theological and ethical homilies on texts, or more precisely themes, taken from The Lord of the Rings, arranged roughly in the order that the texts occur in the book. The lessons seek to demonstrate how Tolkien’s characters can serve as models for Christian life and ethical behavior. Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware in Finding God in The Lord of the Rings (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2001) write in a traditional sermon style. As is typical of sermons they quickly leave the text behind, moving to Biblical parallels and broader considerations which the texts inspire or exemplify. Mark Eddy Smith in Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002) sticks closer to the text and is more concerned with practical lessons than fundamental moral virtues. Both books have value for Tolkien studies in their demonstration that his characters are ethical and that ethics is thus basic to his writing.

A similar book from a different religious tradition is Frodo’s Quest: Living the Myth in The Lord of the Rings by Robert Ellwood (Wheaton: Quest Books, 2002). This is a theosophical guide through the book. Ellwood analyzes the general spiritual nature of Tolkien’s plot and characters, using them as starting points for meditation exercises in self-discovery. Again, the application does not seem entirely alien to the book. Ellwood provides numerous illustrations by artists including Bonnie Callahan and Michael Green.

The Magical World of J. R. R. Tolkien by Gareth Knight (Oceanside: Sun Chalice, 2001) is an extended version of his chapter on Tolkien from his earlier book The Magical World of the Inklings (Shaftesbury: Element, 1990). Almost uniquely among writers on Tolkien, Knight does not discuss The Lord of the Rings at all. His interest, like Ellwood’s, is in using Tolkien’s work – in this case primarily The Silmarillion – as a starting point for meditation exercises. The text of a Tolkien-inspired mystery play is included. Knight sees the goal of this meditation as a connection to a larger mystical reality. Christianity is not discussed.

“True Myth: The Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings” by Joseph Pearce (West 83-94) notes the moral dimension of critical controversy over the book. Pearce equates Melkor with Lucifer and describes a Christian interpretation of The Lord of the Rings as the only plausible one. A related article by Pearce, “Finding Frodo’s Faith” (National Catholic Register Jan. 2002) describes the Catholic roots of Tolkien’s life in somewhat more detail. This article is reprinted as “An Interview with a Tolkien Biographer” in Chesterton Review 28: 184-87.

Kerry L. Dearborn in “Theology and Morality in The Lord of the Rings” (West 95-102) describes Tolkien, like C.S. Lewis, as surreptitiously attempting to preach a specifically Christian sacramental theology to his readers through his sub-creation.

“Icons of Jesus Christ in The Lord of the Rings” by Jean Chausse (Mallorn 39: 30-32) identifies Gandalf with Christ’s labors and as head of the Church, Frodo with the Passion, and Aragorn with Christ the King. Chausse believes that all are intended as resemblances, not allegories, but finds them clear enough that there is no doubt that the book is Christian.

In “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Moral Imagination” (Mallorn 40: 7-12), Gary L. Willhite and John R.D. Bell argue that all creative work reflects the author’s moral beliefs. Despite Tolkien’s Christian beliefs, the authors believe that he was not drawn towards a specifically Christian imaginative creation. Arda as a place was more what drove him, and he developed it from his own sub-creation into an independent world whose events and meanings even he did not claim fully to understand.

“Tolkien’s Marian Vision of Middle-earth” by Donald P. Richmond (Mallorn 40: 13-14) focuses on Tolkien’s personal religious devotion to the Virgin Mary. Her relationship to the feminine principle in Tolkien’s fiction is briefly considered.

“A Catholic Poem in Time of War: The Lord of the Rings” by Ken Craven (originally published on the World Wide Web and reprinted in Chesterton Review 28: 246-66) carefully distinguishes fairy-tale from allegory and describes The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic myth for modern times. Craven discusses Tolkien’s belief in the necessity of fighting evil without hatred and concludes with broad speculations on the identity of civilization’s current enemy.

“The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization” by John G. West, Jr. (West 15-30) is not an analysis of Tolkien’s views of civilization but a polemic using Tolkien as a vehicle to present the author’s own social and political views in a more aggressive version of the manner of a religious homily. For West’s purposes, Western Civilization is defined as Biblical law, limited government, and opposition to philosophical materialism.

“The Lord of the Rings and the Meaning of Life” by Phillip Goggans (West 103-07) is a brief homily using Tolkien’s book to inveigh against existentialism and moral relativism.

Peter Kreeft in “Wartime Wisdom: Ten Uncommon Insights About Evil in The Lord of the Rings” (West 31-52) similarly writes a philosophical rather than a literary essay. Kreeft is primarily concerned with using Tolkien’s descriptions of evil to buttress his own highly Manichean views on evil in the primary world. His claims that Theoden’s virtue lies in avoiding Denethor’s sin of acquiring too much knowledge and that Gollum speaks in the plural because the singular is associated with God do not convince as statements of Tolkien’s intent. Kreeft’s article also appears as “Insights About Evil in The Lord of the Rings” in Star Jan. 2002 and Chesterton Review 28: 217-31.

“The Lord & Lady of the Rings: The Hidden Presence of Tolkien’s Catholicism in The Lord of the Rings” by Stratford Caldecott (Touchstone Jan./Feb. 2002: 51-57) addresses more specifically the images of Mary in Tolkien’s fiction. Caldecott finds her presence in the prominence of humility among Middle-earth’s virtues, in the feminine forms of Galadriel and Elbereth, in the symbolism of light, and in the use of the date of the Annunciation for the fall of Sauron. He also discusses creativity, temptation, and redemption as Catholic themes in Tolkien’s fiction. An abridged text of the article appears under the title “The Hidden Presence of Catholicism and the Virgin Mary in The Lord of the Rings” in Chesterton Review 176-81.

Another article by Stratford Caldecott, “The Horns of Hope: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Heroism of Hobbits” (Chesterton Review 28: 29-55), is less a study of heroism than a meditation on the religious symbolism of The Lord of the Rings. Caldecott believes the Ring embodies the sin of pride, and calls Tolkien “a spiritual warrior” (39). He writes that Providence is what overcomes sin and fate, and calls on readers inspired by Tolkien to become heroes fighting the drab modern world. The article concludes with a list of what are, in the author’s opinion, the most important items in Tolkien’s Letters.

Dwight Longenecker’s title “The Little Way Through Middle Earth” (Chesterton Review 28: 105-11) refers to Thérèse of Lisieux’s teaching of the “little way” of humility. Longenecker compares Thérèse’s obedience and humility to Frodo’s, calling them saintly rather than Christ-like.

“The Writer of Our Story: Divine Providence in The Lord of the Rings” by David Mills (Touchstone Jan./Feb. 2002: 22-28) distinguishes a specifically Christian Providence from a generalized good fortune that might be employed by a post-Christian writer. The distinction lies in the submission of Tolkien’s characters to moral values, doing the right thing even when it may not seem to their advantage, such as Bilbo and Frodo showing mercy to Gollum. Mills describes a number of these acts as being what allows Providence to operate.

Leon J. Podles in “The Heroes of Middle-earth: J. R. R. Tolkien & the Marks of Christian Heroism” (Touchstone Jan./Feb. 2002: 29-32) describes Tolkien’s fiction, particularly The Lord of the Rings, as specifically masculine coming-of-age stories. He finds them stories of heroes told for boys in our culture in the way that all cultures tell such stories.

“The Distant Mirror of Middle-earth: The Sacramental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien” by C.N. Sue Abromaitis (Touchstone Jan./Feb. 2002: 33-39) outlines the characteristics of fairy-stories from Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories.” She describes Tolkien as achieving secondary reality in The Lord of the Rings through psychological verisimilitude.

“Praising God in Myth” by Kevin Michael Grace ([Alberta] Report 7 Jan. 2002, reprinted in Chesterton Review 28: 237-43) uses a biographical framework to describe Tolkien’s love of myth and his dislike of the drab and destructive side of modern life.

Sean Kinsella’s brief note “Elves and Angels in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (Notes on Contemporary Literature 32.4: 10-11) observes a similarity in Sam’s reaction to Elves to Teresa of Avila’s description of angels. Kinsella notes that Elves are not angels but that they may draw on Catholic angelic tradition.

Sub-creation and Linguistics

“The Shire: Its Bounds, Food and Farming” by William A.S. Sarjeant (Mallorn 39: 33-37) describes the geography, botany, agriculture, and geology of the Shire as described by clues in Tolkien’s text and maps. Native and domesticated plants and some animals are listed.

“An Orc’s-Eye View of the History of Middle-earth” by John Ellison (Mallorn 39: 23-29) is one of this author’s parodic alternative perspectives on Tolkien’s sub-creation, humorous but having a serious point. This one is a political history by a later orc historian in a world in which Sauron won the War of the Ring, attributing that victory to the administrative ability of a series of rulers occupying the “office” of Sauron.

“Negation in Quenya” by Bill Welden (Vinyar Tengwar 42: 32-34) is a short technical article showing that the same word in Quenya at different times in Tolkien’s development meant both “yes” and “no,” thus literalizing the proverb “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes,” and showing that “the Elvish languages were continually in flux” (34) as Tolkien worked out different trial solutions to linguistic problems.

“Transitions in Translations” by Arden R. Smith is a recurring Vinyar Tengwar column on peculiarities in Tolkien translations. This installment (42: 35-38), the only one in the three issues under consideration, devotes most space to inappropriate translations and transliterations of names in the Icelandic translation of The Lord of the Rings. The translator has flattened out linguistic differences, and rendered Elvish names (which should be unaltered except for orthography) unintelligible.

Peter Gilliver (name incorrectly given as Gulliver on the article) writes “J. R. R. Tolkien and the OED” (English Today 72: 53-54), a brief summation of the author’s 1995 article “At the Wordface” in the Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference. He describes the etymological work Tolkien performed for the dictionary in 1919-20 and how the word hobbit came to appear in the Supplement. Gilliver notes that other words coined by Tolkien have appeared or will eventually appear in the Dictionary.

Despite its title, “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale” by S.C.P. Horobin (English Studies 82: 97-105) is not primarily about Tolkien’s work: the title is a reference to the 1934 Tolkien article to which it replies, “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” Tolkien had argued that Chaucer had intended Northern dialect forms in this work to be consistent, and that scribal ignorance and deliberate changes had disguised this in surviving manuscripts. Horobin presents a detailed argument that later work on manuscripts has shown that Chaucer did not intend such consistency.

“A Fancy for the Fantastic: Reflections on Names in Fantasy Literature” by John Algeo (Names 49: 248-53) is a short piece of onomastic musings mostly on Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. Algeo is reminded of French mort by both Morgoth and Mordor as well as by Rowling’s Voldemort. He claims that fantasy provides a rich source of names with significant rather than random meanings.

A Guide to Tolkien by David Day (London: Chancellor Press, 2001) has not been seen by this reviewer. It is reported to consist of articles reprinted from Day’s earlier books, including Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and A Tolkien Bestiary. These are encyclopedias of persons, places, and things in Middle-earth whose entries are extremely selective and of questionable accuracy.

Film

The release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films has generated articles (and also reviews, not covered here) comparing the films with Tolkien’s book. These are of interest to Tolkien scholars for their observations on the structure and tone of the book. Most interesting of these is “Is There a Text in This Hobbit?: Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring” by Jane Chance (Literature/Film Quarterly 30: 79-85). Chance argues that the film’s cutting and rewriting of the story have infantilized the hobbits, replaced heroism with sentimentality, inverted Tolkien’s moral points, and reduced the story to an action film.

In “A Potion Too Strong?: Challenges in Translating the Religious Significance of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to Film” (Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 1), Jeffrey Mallinson speculates that Jackson can present Tolkien’s archetypal characters as long as he does not rely too heavily on special effects and that eucatastrophe may be conveyed through an effective deus ex machina. Tolkien’s third major religiously significant achievement was to create a modern myth: Mallinson believes that as other films have become culturally iconic myths, Jackson’s can do it as well.

“Trimming Tolkien” by Graham Fuller (Sight & Sound Feb. 2002: 18-20) is essentially a review of Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring in its capacity as an adaptation of the book. Fuller notes Jackson’s cuts and exaggerations, while believing that the film conveys Tolkien’s basic theme of death and immortality.

“Will It Ring True?” by fantasy author Kim Newman (Sight & Sound Jan. 2002: 4-5) is a short speculation on the difficulty of making an adequate film of The Lord of the Rings. Newman observes that as principal photography for all three installments was done at once, at least the project is certain to be completed.

“So, Would Tolkien Have Liked the Film?” by John Ezard (Guardian 14 Dec. 2001) answers the question by speculating that Tolkien would have been irritated by the soundtrack noise level and the depiction of the hobbits as Irish clowns, but that he would have appreciated the somber tone of most of the film, the quality of the acting, and the use of dialogue in Elvish.

Salman Rushdie in “Getting Into Gang War” (Washington Post 25 Dec. 2002: A29) considers the films superior to the book. He notes the extreme moral contrasts between good and evil in Jackson’s film and compares this with the more amoral and, he believes, more realistic conflict in Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York.

The magazine Creative Screenwriting published three interviews with Jackson’s screenwriters: transcriptions of Erik Bauer’s conversation with Jackson himself (“It’s Just a Movie,” 9.1: 6-12) and Steve Ryfle’s with Philippa Boyens (“The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” 9.6: 40-42), and an article by Patricia Burkhart Smith based on her conversation with Boyens (“Ring Bearer,” 8.2: 4, 6, 8). Largely dating from before detailed criticism of the film’s adaptation, these articles show the screenwriters as explanatory rather than defensive. They discuss the methodology of deciding on exclusions, changes, and resequencing of events from the book in the script. “The Ring Cycle” by Xan Brooks (Guardian 7 Dec. 2001) is another article on the making of the films including excerpts of an interview with Jackson.

Bibliography (in English) for 2003 Compiled by Michael D.C. Drout with Melissa Smith-MacDonald

Primary Sources

Tolkien, J. R. R. Early Quenya & Valmaric: Early Quenya Fragments, edited by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson; Early Quenya Grammar, edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Bill Welden; and The Valmaric Script, edited by Arden R. Smith. Cupertino, California: [Parma Eldalamberon], 2003. Parma Eldalamberon no. 14.

[Tolkien, J. R. R.] “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies—Part One,” by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H. Wynne. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 45 (November 2003): 3-38.

Books

Baehr, Ted, and Tom Snyder. Frodo & Harry: Understanding Visual Media and Its Impact on Our Lives. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003.

Bassham, Gregory and Eric Bronson, eds. The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All. Chicago: Open Court, 2003.

Bates, Brian. The Real Middle-earth: Exploring the Magic and Mystery of the Middle Ages, J. R. R. Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Birzer, Bradley J. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003.

Bramlett, Perry C. I am in Fact a Hobbit: An Introduction to the Life and Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003.

Carter, Lin. Tolkien: A Look behind The Lord of the Rings. London: Gollancz, 2003. [Revised and updated by Adam Roberts.]

Challis, Erica, ed. The People’s Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2003.

Chance, Jane, ed. Tolkien The Medievalist. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Colebatch, Hal G. P. Return of the Heroes: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Social Conflict. Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2003. [Second Edition.]

Dalton, Russell W. Faith Journey Through Fantasy Lands: A Christian Dialogue with Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings. Minneapolis: Augsburg Books, 2003.

Dickerson, Matthew T. Following Gandalf : Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003.

Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003.

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Harvey, Greg. The Origins of Tolkien’s Middle-earth for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003.

Honegger, Thomas,ed. Tolkien in Translation. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2003.

Hooker, Mark T. Tolkien Through Russian Eyes. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2003.

Lynch, Doris. J. R. R. Tolkien: Creator of Languages and Legends. Danbury, Connecticut: Franklin Watts, 2003. [Illustrated juvenile biography.]

Martinez, Michael. Understanding Middle-earth: Essays on Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Poughkeepsie, NY: ViviSphere, 2003.

Perry, Michael W. Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings. Seattle: Inklings Books, 2003.

Petty, Anne C. Tolkien in the Land of Heroes. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press,2003.

Roberts, A. R R. R. [Adam Roberts]. The Soddit. London: Gollancz, 2003. [Parody.]

Rosebury, Brian. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Shelton, Mahmoud. Alchemy in Middle-earth: The Significance of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. N.p.: Temple of Justice Books, 2003.

Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. [Third edition.]

Simpson, Paul, Helen Rodiss, and Michaela Bushell. The Rough Guide to The Lord of the Rings. London: Rough Guides, 2003.

Wood, Ralph C. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

Articles and Book Chapters

Algeo, John. “The Buddha and Tolkien: A discussion of the Four Noble Truths in fairy stories.” English Today: The International Review of the English Language 19(3 (75)) (2003): 59-61, 64.

Anderson, Douglas A. “‘An industrious little devil’: E. V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien.” In Chance, ed. 15-25.

Agøy, Nils Ivar. “A Question of Style: On Translating The Silmarillion into Norwegian.” In Honneger, ed. 31-43.

Bassham, Gregory. “Tolkien’s Six Keys to Happiness.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 49-60.

Bayona, Sandra. “Begging your pardon, Con el perdón de usted: Some Socio-Linguistic Features in The Lord of the Rings.” In Honneger, ed. 69-90.

Beimer, Marie-Noelle. “Re-Writing the Past: The Pillars of Middle-Earth.” Trans. Andreas Gloge. Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 44-52.

Blount, Douglas K. “Überhobbits: Tolkien, Nietzsche, and the Will to Power.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 87-98.

Bronson, Eric. “‘Farewell to Lórien’: The Bounded Joy of Existentialists and Elves.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 72-84.

Chance, Jane. “Introduction.” In Chance, ed. 1-12.

Chism, Christine. “Middle-earth, the Middle Ages, and the Aryan Nation: Myth and History in World War II.” In Chance, ed. 63-92.

Croft, Janet Brennan and Jay Shorten. “Reading The Lord of the Rings: ‘The Final Attempt’: An Analysis of a Web Community.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 26-33.

Davenport, John J. “Happy Endings and Religious Hope: The Lord of the Rings as an Epic Fairy Tale.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 204-218.

Davis, Bill. “Choosing to Die: The Gist of Mortality in Middle-earth.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 123-136.

Davison, Scott A. “Tolkien and the Nature of Evil.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 99-109.

Donovan, Leslie A. “The Valkyrie Reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn, and Arwen.” In Chance, ed. 106-132.

Duriez, Colin. “Survey of Tolkien Literature.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 20 (2003): 105-114.

Eden, Bradford Lee. “The ‘music of the spheres’: Relationships between Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory.” In Chance, ed. 183-193.

Ellison, John. “From Feanor to Doctor Faustus: A Creator’s Path to Self Destruction.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 13-21.

Evans, Jonathan. “The Anthropology of Arda: Creation, Theology, and the Race of Men.” In Chance, ed. 194-224.

Faraci, Mary. “‘I wish to speak’: Tolkien’s Voice in his Beowulf essay.” In Chance, ed. 50-62.

Ferré,Vincent, Daniel Lauzon, and David Riggs. “Traduire Tolkien en français: On the Translation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Works into French and their Reception in France.” In Honneger, ed. 45-68.

Fisher, Joanna and Dorothy Smith. “The Response of the Human Imagination to the Concept of the City: The City as Literary Trope.” The Image of the City in Literature, Media, and Society. Ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2003. 340-345.

Flieger, Verlyn. “‘There would always be a fairy-tale’: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Folklore Controversy.” In Chance, ed. 26-35.

Flieger, Verlyn. “Tolkien’s Wild Men: From Medieval to Modern.” In Chance, ed. 95-105.

Fraser, Kenneth. “Coinage in Middle Earth.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 42-43.

Garbowski, Christopher. “Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and the Catholic Imagination.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 9-12.

Gelder, Ken. “Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism.” Overland 173 (2003): 21-27.

Garcia, Jorge J. E. “The Quests of Sam and Gollum for the Happy Life.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 61-71.

Hibbs, Thomas. “Providence and the Dramatic Unity of The Lord of the Rings.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 167-178.

Hooker, Mark T. “Nine Russian Translations of The Lord of the Rings.” In Honneger, ed. 119-152.

Houghton, John William. “Augustine in the Cottage of Lost Play: The Ainulindalë as Asterisk Cosmogony.” In Chance, ed. 171-182.

Katz, Eric. “The Rings of Tolkien and Plato: Lessons in Power, Choice and Morality.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 5-20.

Koravos, Nikolas. “The Common Speech and Its Speakers in The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 38-40.

Kraus, Joe. “Tolkien, Modernism, and the Importance of Tradition.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 137-149.

Lazo, Andrew. “A Kind of Mid-wife: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis—Sharing Influence.” In Chance, ed. 36-49.

Lewis, Alex. “The Lost Heart of the Little Kingdom.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 41 (2003): 3-8.

Lewis, Jonathan P. “Randy Is a Dwarf: A Note on Lord of the Rings Imagery in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 33.3 (2003): 2-4.

Light, Andrew. “Tolkien’s Green Time: Environmental Themes in The Lord of the Rings.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 150-163.

Maher, Michael W., S.J. “‘A land without stain’: Medieval Images of Mary and Their Use in the Characterization of Galadriel.” In Chance, ed. 225-236.

McMahon, Jennifer L. and B. Steve Csaki. “Talking Trees and Walking Mountains: Buddhist and Taoist Themes in The Lord of the Rings.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 179-191.

Milbank, Alison. “‘My Precious’: Tolkien’s Fetishized Ring.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 33-45.

Monta, Susannah Brietz. “Teaching Spenser As Fantasy Literature; or, How to Lure Unsuspecting Undergraduates into a Spenser Course.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 3.2 (2003): 191-196.

Nagy, Gergely. “The Great Chain of Reading: (Inter-)Textual Relations and the Technique of Mythopoesis in the Túrin story.” In Chance, ed. 239-258.

Ross, Alex. “The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs. Tolkien.” New Yorker 79.40 (2003): 22-29.

Schick, Theodore. “The Cracks of Doom: The Threat of Emerging Technologies and Tolkien’s Rings of Power.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 21-32.

Shippey, Tom. “From Page to Screen: J. R. R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma77.2 (2003): 69-72.

Sinex, Margaret A. “‘Oathbreakers, why have ye come?’: Tolkien’s ‘Passing of the Grey Company’ and the Twelfth-Century Exercitus Mortuorum.” In Chance, ed. 155-168.

Skoble, Aeon J. “Virtue and Vice in The Lord of the Rings.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 110-119.

Smith, Arden R. “The Treatment of Names in Esperanto Translations of Tolkien’s Works.” In Honneger, ed. 91-118.

Thompson, Kristin. “Fantasy, Franchise, and Frodo Baggins: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood.” Modern Light Trap 52 (2003): 45-63.

Trokhimenko, Olga V. “If You Sit on the Door-Step Long Enough, You Will Think of Something: The Functions of Proverbs in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit.” Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 20 (2003): 367-377.

Turner, Allan. “A Theoretical Model for Tolkien Translation Criticism.” In Honneger, ed. 1-30.

West, Richard C. “Real-World Myth in a Secondary World: Mythological Aspects in the Story of Beren and Lúthien.” In Chance, ed. 259-267.

Wilcox, Miranda. “Exilic Imagining in The Seafarer and The Lord of the Rings.” In Chance, ed. 133-54.

Wood, Ralph C. “Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 55.4 (2003): 314-338.

Wright, J. Lenore. “Sam and Frodo’s Excellent Adventure: Tolkien’s Journey Motif.” In Bassham and Bronson, eds. 192-203.

Notes on Contributors

Douglas A. Anderson is co-editor of Tolkien Studies.

David Bratman reviews books on Tolkien for Mythprint, the monthly bulletin of The Mythopoeic Society, for which he served as editor in 1980-1995. He has edited The Masques of Amen House by Charles Williams, compiled the authorized bibliography of Ursula K. Le Guin, and contributed articles on Tolkien to the journals Mallorn and Mythlore and the book Tolkien's Legendarium (ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter). His documentary chronology of the Inklings is in press as an appendix to The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer. He holds an M.L.S. from the University of Washington and has worked as a librarian at Stanford University and elsewhere.

Michael J. Brisbois is completing his graduate studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. His current research interests include the connections between fantasy and millenarianism, the historical development and meaning of religious symbolism, and the application of cultural studies to literature and its audience.

Judy Ann Ford is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Her area of specialization is medieval history, particularly popular religion. She has published on topics such as parish life and sacramental experience in journals including Renaissance and Reformation, Journal of Popular Culture, and Medieval Perspectives. She has also worked on modern fiction with medieval themes: she wrote the chapter on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose for the collection The Detective as Historian, ed. Ray Brown and Lawrence A. Kreiser (Popular Press, 2000). Her book, John Mirk's Festial: Orthodoxy, Lollardy and the Common People in Fourteenth-Century England, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer.

Linda Greenwood graduated summa cum laude from Grove City College in Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. She is currently pursuing graduate studies in Great Britain. Her area of interest lies in twentieth century literature, with a concentration in myth and its relevance to modern literary theory.

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem received her B.A. in English and B.F.A in Communication Design from the University at Buffalo and continued with an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently an English doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studies Victorian literature.

John William Houghton specializes in Anglo-Saxon England's appropriation of late antique culture. He holds degrees in English from Harvard and Indiana, and in systematic theology from Yale; his dissertation for Notre Dame's Medieval Institute studied the Bible commentaries of St. Bede the Venerable. In addition to Tolkien and Bede, he has written on the English coronation ritual, art history, and moral development. His novel Rough Magicke was published in January, 2005. He lives on Houghton Street in Culver, Indiana, a town his family founded in 1844.

Neal K. Keesee is Academic Dean at Christchurch School and has previously written on Friedrich Schleiermacher's 19th century concept of freedom. He holds degrees in religion from The College of William and Mary and in religion and theology from the University of Chicago. His Chicago Ph.D. dissertation studied Schleiermacher's doctrine of God. He lives at his rural boarding school in Christchurch, VA with his wife, three children, and three dogs.

Kristine Larsen is Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Director of the Honors Program, at Central Connecticut State University. She has presented talks and papers on astronomical allusions in Tolkien's work through Jefferson National Laboratory, the Society for Literature and Science, and various astronomy organizations, as well as the Ring Con convention in Germany. She has also presented workshops and papers on utilizing Tolkien's work in the teaching of science through the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and American Physical Society. Her other publications include work on the history of women in astronomy and diversity issues in science education, and her biography of physicist Stephen Hawking will be published by Greenwood Press in 2005.

Miryam Librán-Moreno´s background is in Classical languages and Arabic. She has a doctorate in Ancient Greek and a graduate degree in Classical Philology. She is currently a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Huelva (Spain) and an assistant professor at the University of Córdoba (Spain).

Patchen Mortimer graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College with a BA in English in 2000. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland in 2003. His short story, "Rules for Beach Patrons," won U.MD.'s Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and was recently published in Lynx Eye. He has been an adjunct professor at Columbia Union College and Montgomery College, and taught at McDonogh School. He is currently a copywriter in Baltimore and is working on a book.

Dale Nelson is Associate Professor of English at Mayville State University in North Dakota. He is the author of articles on writers in the field of fantasy including Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Rider Haggard, and John Meade Falkner, and has published pieces on modern composers Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. He is a frequent contributor to CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society and the Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree.

Beth Russell and her husband keep an antiquarian bookstore as their retirement project. They have about 35,000 volumes, sell on the Internet, and do specialist book searches. Beth was previously a botanist and worked for twenty years in southern Africa. She studied grasses and water plants, and the computerization of plant nomenclature, descriptions, and distributions. Her bookstore is across the bayou from her alma mater, Centenary College of Louisiana (1967). Her PhD is from the University of Georgia (1973).

Margaret A. Sinex is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Journalism at Western Illinois University where she teaches courses in medieval British literature, myths and legends, historical linguistics and horror fiction. She has published articles on the twelfth-century author Walter Map and irony. She has also contributed to Tolkien the Medievalist (2003), edited by Jane Chance.

Sandra Ballif Straubhaar (Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin) researches anything medieval and/or Nordic, as well as the modern and postmodern construction of the medieval. She has recently published on St. Birgitta of Sweden, clothing in the Icelandic sagas, the Cambridge Celticist Nora K. Chadwick, and Swedish novelist Jan Guillou.

Richard C. West's background is in medieval English, French, and Scandinavian literature, as well as in modern fantasy and science-fiction, and in librarianship. He has graduate degrees in English and in library science, but remains proud of his undergraduate degree from Boston College (A.B. cum laude, English, 1966). He is on the Board of Advisors of the Mythopoeic Society and the editorial board of Extrapolation. He is currently Senior Academic Librarian and Assistant Director for Technical Services at the Kurt F. Wendt Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.