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

THE ROAD TO

MIDDLE-EARTH

Revised and expanded edition

TOM SHIPPEY

Dedicated to the memory of

John Ernest Kjelgaard

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

Contents

Cover

Title Page

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

CHAPTER 1: ‘LIT. AND LANG.’

CHAPTER 2: PHILOLOGICAL INQUIRIES

CHAPTER 3: THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR

CHAPTER 4: A CARTOGRAPHIC PLOT

CHAPTER 5: INTERLACEMENTS AND THE RING

CHAPTER 6: ‘WHEN ALL OUR FATHERS WORSHIPPED STOCKS AND STONES’

CHAPTER 7: VISIONS AND REVISIONS

CHAPTER 8: ‘ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE’

CHAPTER 9: ‘THE COURSE OF ACTUAL COMPOSITION’

AFTERWORD

APPENDIX A: TOLKIEN’S SOURCES: THE TRUE TRADITION

APPENDIX B: FOUR ‘ASTERISK’ POEMS

APPENDIX C: PETER JACKSON’S FILM VERSIONS

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Books published by Tom Shippey

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 1 ‘LIT. AND LANG.’

Old Antipathies

‘This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.’ With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgement of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.1 It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of course very few adults (or children) read anything right through more than once, still less anything as long as The Lord of the Rings. However it could not have been more wrong. This did not stop critics continuing to say the same thing. Six years later, after the three separate volumes had gone through eight or nine hardback impressions each, Philip Toynbee in the Observer (6 August 1961) voiced delight at the way sales, he thought, were dropping. Most of Professor Tolkien’s more ardent supporters, he declared, were beginning to ‘sell out their shares’ in him, so that ‘today these books have passed into a merciful oblivion’. Five years afterwards the authorised American paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was moving rapidly past its first million copies, starting a wave which never receded even to the more-than-respectable levels of 1961; and which has been revived in the 21st century to levels Toynbee could not have dreamed of.

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

it is well to remember the mysteriousness of the states with which we respond to the stimulus of works of literature and the primarily suggestive character of the language in which these works are written, on any occasion when we may be tempted to characterise as ‘nonsense’ ‘balderdash’ or ‘gibberish’ some new and outlandish-looking piece of writing to which we do not happen to respond. If other persons say they do respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.2

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

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

Doubtless there is such a thing as the sheer number of pages the reader has had to turn that can add poignancy to the story – one almost feels this is the case as we come to the great close of Malory’s epic. But not with Tolkien’s book, for we have never been very much involved anyway.3

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

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

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

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

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

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

No compromise is possible between what one might call ‘the Gandalph mentality’ and Tolkien’s. Perhaps this is why The Lord of the Rings (and to a lesser extent Tolkien’s other writings as well) makes so many literary critics avert their eyes, get names wrong, write about things that aren’t there and miss the most obvious points of success.4 Tolkien thought this instinctive antipathy was an ancient one: people who couldn’t stand his books hadn’t been able to bear Beowulf, or Pearl, or Chaucer, or Sir Gawain, or Sir Orfeo either. For millennia they had been trying to impose their views on a recalcitrant succession of authors, who had fortunately taken no notice. In the rather steely ‘Preface’ to their edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which the word ‘criticism’ is conspicuously shunned), Tolkien and his colleague E. V. Gordon declared that they wanted to help people read the poem ‘with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’ (p. v). Doing the same job for Tolkien ought to be easier, since he is so much more our contemporary than the Gawain-poet; on the other hand Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile. However nothing is to be gained by applying to it the criteria of ‘correct and sober taste’ of the great but one-sided traditions of later English literature, of those ‘higher literary aspirations’ so haughtily opposed by Anthony Burgess to ‘allegories with animals or fairies’ (Observer, 26 November 1978). These lead only to the conclusion that there is nothing to be said and no phenomenon to consider. Still, something made Tolkien different, gave him the power so markedly to provoke these twin reactions of popular appeal and critical rage.

The Nature of Philology

Whatever it was, it almost self-evidently had something to do with his job. For most of his active life Tolkien taught Old English, Middle English, the history of the English language; in doing so he was competing with teachers of English literature for time, funds and students, on the whole a thankless task since for all that Tolkien could do the current was setting firmly away from him and from his subjects. Tolkien was by all accounts as capable of keeping up a grudge as the next man, and his minor writings often show it. The anthology of Songs for the Philologists which he and E. V. Gordon compiled, later to be privately printed in 1936, contains at least two poems by Tolkien attacking teachers of ‘Lit.’; one of them, titled variously ‘Two Little Schemes’ and ‘Lit. and Lang.’ the worst he ever wrote; so bad indeed that it makes me think (or hope) that something must have gone wrong with it en route between poet and printer. Meanwhile he was from the start of his learned career barely able to use the word ‘literature’ at all without putting inverted commas round it to show he couldn’t take it seriously, which suggests that Ms Shulevitz’s ‘death to literature’ remark would not have disturbed him. Thus his famous article on ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’,* published in 1929, opens with the remark that: ‘The Ancrene Wisse has already developed a “literature”, and it is very possible that nothing I can say about it will be either new or illuminating to the industrious or leisured that have kept up with it. I have not’ (‘AW’, p. 104). There are variants on the same innuendo at the start of the Beowulf lecture of 1936 and in the Sir Gawain ‘Preface’ of 1925. Of course there is a reason (of characteristic deviousness) for this repeated Tolkienian joke, and one which can easily be extracted from the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which Tolkien had himself worked in youth. There one can find that the meaning which Tolkien foisted on to ‘literature’ is indeed recognised, under heading 3b: ‘The body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject’. But why should Tolkien insist on using that one when heading 3a is less narrow and much more generally pertinent: ‘Literature’ meaning ‘literary productions as a whole … Now also, in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’? The sting for Tolkien lay in the illustrative quotations which form the backbone of the definition, of which the sixth reads ‘The full glory of the new literature broke in England with Edmund Spenser’ i.e. in 1579. The true mordancy of that opinion may not appear till later. It is enough to note that if you took the OED seriously you could argue (a) that the valueless accumulation of books about Beowulf and the Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain were all ‘literature’ under heading 3b, but (b) the original and creative works themselves, all very much pre-1579, were not, under 3a. Naturally no one would be stupid enough to put forward such a proposition seriously and in so many words. Still, Tolkien did not think these semantic tangles entirely fortuitous; the OED might not mirror truth but it did represent orthodox learned opinion. It was typical of him to note the confusion and the slur it implied, to use the one to avenge the other – ‘literature’ was ‘books about books’ the dead Latin ‘letter’ opposed to the ancient English spirit.