Glad Would He Have Been To Know Its Fate (RK 5.vi.844)

So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dunedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will. 

(RK 5.vi.844)

We all know how Éowyn fulfilled Glorfindel's prophecy that 'not by the hand of man will [the Witch-king] fall' (RK App. A 1051), a prophecy uttered again in slightly different form by the Witch-king himself even in the hour of his reckoning: 'No living man may hinder me' (RK 5.vi.841). 

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my friend, +Paul Mitchener (distinguished Maths Lecturer at Sheffield and illustrious writer of RPGs), about Merry's experience on the Barrow-downs, and the sword mentioned in the quote above came up. Paul called it 'the final revenge of Arnor.' That was when it hit me. You see, it's obvious that Éowyn fulfills the prophecy by not being a man. Slightly less obviously, so does Merry, who is no man in a different sense (cf. RK App A 1070). Thus we can already see Tolkien playing with the word 'man' in two different ways. But with the addition of 'living' comes yet another layer of meaning, especially given the great emphasis he places on the timeless sword and its history, both here and when Bombadil gave it to Merry back on the Barrow-downs (FR 1.viii.145-46; cf. RK 5.i.756). Only now the weight is on living where before it was on different meanings of man. The smith who wrought this sword is no living man. Yet across the centuries and from out of the grave -- a grave that lies open now because the Witch-king himself once sent an evil spirit to inhabit it (RK App. A 1041) -- that smith has hindered the greatest of the servants of Sauron. 

That's a very cold revenge indeed, and very sharp play on meanings of words.

No irony in Tolkien? 

"We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West." (RK 5.iv.825)

In my recent Abraham, Wilfred, and John at The Pyre of Denethor (RK 6.vii.850-57) we saw how Tolkien and Owen each used Genesis 22 to inform his own art.  One striking aspect of Tolkien's text that received only scant attention was the two uses of 'heathen.' This word occurs nowhere else in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, or in the fiction and poetry contained in The History of Middle-Earth, with one exception which we will consider presently. 

Now 'heathen', according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'is applied to persons or races whose religion is neither Christian, Jewish, nor Mohammedan; pagan; Gentile. In earlier times applied also to Mohammedans, but in modern usage, for the most part, restricted to those holding polytheistic beliefs, esp. when uncivilized or uncultured.'¹ So within The Lord of the Rings it clearly requires explanation.

Here are the two passages in which the word occurs:

Messengers came again to the chamber in the White Tower, and Pippin let them enter, for they were urgent. Denethor turned his head slowly from Faramir's face, and looked at them silently. 

'The first circle of the City is burning, lord,' they said. 'What are your commands? You are still the Lord and Steward. Not all will follow Mithrandir. Men are flying from the walls and leaving them unmanned.' 

'Why? Why do the fools fly?' said Denethor. 'Better to burn sooner than late, for burn we must. Go back to your bonfire! And I? I will go now to my pyre. To my pyre! No tomb for Denethor and Faramir. No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West. The West has failed. Go back and burn!'  

The messengers without bow or answer turned and fled. 

(RK 5.iv.825)

And:

'Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death,' answered Gandalf. 'And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.'

(RK 5.vii.853)

Tolkien here uses 'heathen' to distinguish between the men of Middle-earth before and after year 600 of the Second age when the Dúnedain first returned from Númenor. And in the only other passage where we find the word -- not surprisingly, in The Notion Club Papers -- the link between heathendom and Sauron (here called Zigur) is reinforced:

Then he, King (Tarcalion) landed on the shores of middle-earth, and at once he sent his messengers to (Zigur), commanding him to come in haste to do homage to the king; and he (Zigur) dissembling humbled himself and came, but was filled with secret malice, purposing treachery against the people of the Westfarers..... Thus he led astray wellnigh all the (Numenore)ans with signs and wonders.... and they built a great temple in the midst of the town (of Arminaleth) on the high hill which before was undefiled but now became a heathen fane, and they there sacrificed unspeakable offerings on an unholy altar.... Thus came death-shade into the land of the Westfarers and God's children fell under the shadow.

(HoME IX.258, emphasis added)

So, by falling under the domination of Sauron, the Númenoreans, till then 'God's children', became heathens. And, to see the meaning even more clearly, we need only recognize that the words 'a heathen fane' are the character Rashbold's translation from an Old English original of the words 'haethenum herge' (HoMe IX.257), literally a 'temple for the heathens.'² The point here is not to criticize Tolkien's translation, but to emphasize what the translation may not fully reveal to the modern ear, namely, that 'heathen' in 'a heathen fane' is a religious reference to a group of people who are not or are no longer God's children; it is not merely a disparaging synonym for 'barbaric' or 'uncivilized,' as it has become for most moderns. It is also perhaps noteworthy that the other four uses of heathen in The Notion Club Papers refer to pagan Vikings (IX 269, 270 twice, 272). That is, they refer to people, proper heathens, who are rightly so called.

Thus, for Denethor to liken himself and his son to 'heathen kings,' and for Gandalf to agree with this characterization, apparently without any knowledge of Denethor's statement, indicates that this word and the act which Denethor has in mind share a meaningful context, at least for those like Gandalf and Denethor whose knowledge of the history of Men in Middle-earth is deep. Equally obviously the word here has nothing to do with Christianity, but rather with the few slim references we find to 'worship' in Tolkien's legendarium.

The most immediate to spring to mind here would be the Men of the Mountains who betrayed Isildur during the War of the Last Alliance, 'for they had worshipped Sauron in the Dark Years' (RK 5.ii.782). Then, too, there is the Mouth of Sauron, of the race of the Black Númenoreans who, 'during the years of Sauron's domination' had 'worshipped' him (RK 5.x.888). With the next we leave The Lord of the Rings and turn to Akallabêth, which brings us once again into close contact with the passage from The Notion Club Papers which we saw above:

Then Ar-Pharazôn the King turned back to the worship of the Dark, and of Melkor the Lord thereof, at first in secret, but ere long openly and in the face of his people; and they for the most part followed him. 

(Silm. 272)

Turned back?

Now since the worship of any but Eru had been previously unknown in Númenor, and since the remarks of Denethor and Gandalf clearly are not referring to the Númenoreans as 'heathens', but rather as those who rescued the men of Middle-earth from both the domination of Sauron and heathen practices,³  these words -- 'turned back' -- can only refer to a much earlier period, one rarely mentioned and one few men apparently knew much about, though it loomed behind them like a cloud:

But when [Finrod] questioned him concerning the arising of Men and their journeys, Bëor would say little; and indeed he knew little, for the fathers of his people had told few tales of their past and a silence had fallen upon their memory. 'A darkness lies behind us,' Bëor said; 'and we have turned our backs upon it, and we do not desire to return thither even in thought. Westwards our hearts have been turned, and we believe that there we shall find Light.'  

But it was said afterwards among the Eldar that when Men awoke in Hildórien at the rising of the Sun the spies of Morgoth were watchful, and tidings were soon brought to him; and this seemed to him so great a matter that secretly under shadow he himself departed from Angband, and went forth into Middle-earth, leaving to Sauron the command of the War. Of his dealings with Men the Eldar indeed knew nothing, at that time, and learnt but little afterwards; but that a darkness lay upon the hearts of Men (as the shadow of the Kinslaying and the Doom of Mandos lay upon the Noldor) they perceived clearly even in the people of the Elf-friends whom they first knew. 

(Silm. 141)

That darkness upon the hearts of Men was the result of a Fall, in which hasty humans chose to follow Melkor, who promised them much and soon, rather than the Voice they heard, who counselled them that it was better for them to discover things slowly on their own. Too late they learned they had chosen wrong. For so says Adanel, wise woman of the Edain in the First Age, who told the tale to her kinswoman of Andreth:

The first Voice we never heard again, save once. In the stillness of the night It spoke, saying: 'Ye have abjured Me, but ye remain Mine. I gave you life. Now it shall be shortened, and each of you in a little while shall come to Me, to learn who is your Lord: the one ye worship, or I who made him.'      

(Morgoth 347)

This Tale of Adanel is 'given explicitly as a Númenórean tradition' (Morgoth 344), which brings it into close contact with Akallabêth, written by Elendil himself (UT 224), and allows us an understanding of 'turned back' not otherwise possible. Whether Ar-Pharazôn himself knew this tradition about the worship of Melkor himself and thus knowingly turned back is unclear, but Elendil did and saw the Fall happening all over again. Little wonder he called his account 'The Downfallen.'⁴ 

 ________________

¹ OED s.v. 'heathen'. 'Mohammedan,' while outdated and offensive today, was common usage at the time the OED was first published.

² Rashbold is pun, being a literal translation of the name 'Tolkien' from its German roots.

³ We need to distinguish between the worship of Sauron and the worship of Melkor. Clearly different groups practiced each of them. As has been pointed out many times, Sauron could hardly have credibly proposed to Ar-Pharazôn, his seeming conqueror, that the king should worship him as a god as he was worshipped in Middle-earth. Thus he turned him back to Melkor, cynically or sincerely, but expediently all the same. On this, see Morgoth 398:

Sauron was not a 'sincere' atheist, but he preached atheism, because it weakened resistance to himself (and he had ceased to fear God's action in Arda).  As was seen in the case of Ar-Pharazôn. But there was seen the effect of Melkor upon Sauron: he spoke of Melkor in Melkor's own terms: as a god, or even as God. This may have been the residue of  a state which was in a sense a shadow of good: the ability once in Sauron at least to admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself. Melkor, and still more Sauron himself afterwards, both profited by this darkened shadow of good and the services of 'worshippers'.  But it may be doubted whether even such a shadow of good was still sincerely operative in Sauron by that time. His cunning motive is probably best expressed thus. To wean one of the God-fearing from their allegiance it is best to propound another unseen object of allegiance and another hope of benefits; propound to him a Lord who will sanction what he desires and not forbid it. Sauron, apparently a defeated rival for world-power, now a mere hostage, can hardly propound himself; but as the former servant and disciple of Melkor, the worship of Melkor will raise him from hostage to high priest. But though Sauron's whole true motive was the destruction of the Númenóreans, this was a particular matter of revenge upon Ar-Pharazôn, for humiliation. Sauron (unlike Morgoth) would have been content for the Númenóreans to exist, as his own subjects, and indeed he used a great many  of  them  that he corrupted to his allegiance.    

⁴ I believe there is also a link here between King Sheave and the idea of the ships sailing in from the West and 'converting' the heathens to whom Gandalf and Denethor refer, but that is for another day. 

Tulkas and 'Sir Gawain' revisited, ever so briefly

Not long ago, my Mythgard fellow, Luke Baugher, posted an intriguing essay here on Tulkas and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which he argued that a connection may well exist between the word tulkes in Gawain and the Vala Tulkas in The Silmarillion.  Though as Luke pointed out there was no way to prove that Tulkas' name originates in this way, the suggestion makes a great deal of sense.

Now one thing everybody loves about Tulkas is Tolkien's comment that he is 'of no avail as a counsellor' (Silm. 29), which does not fit particularly well with túlkr, the Old Norse word meaning 'interpreter' or 'spokesman' that is the source of tulkes. Yet, as Tolkien's comment above and his behavior elsewhere plainly show, he is by no means above a joke. 

Nor, I would suggest, is he above two jokes here, the first being the obvious one at Tulkas' expense, the second, the more ironic, philological joke of deriving the name of Tulkas, ultimately, from a word that suggests he should be a useful counsellor when he is in fact precisely the opposite.

Ah, Tollers! A philologist's work is never done.

War of the Ghosts -- A Guest Post By Simon Cook

War of the Ghosts

F. C. Bartlett

At the March 1920 meeting of the Folk-Lore Society, all three papers were delivered by Cambridge men. A.C. Haddon gave the presidential address, W.H.R. Rivers discussed the conception of ‘soul-substance’ in New Guinea and Melanesia, and F.C. Bartlett reported on ‘Some Experiments in the Reproduction of Folk-Stories’.

Does this have anything to do with Tolkien? 

It depends how you look at things; which is really what I want to talk about in this post. Tolkien studies are full of ‘influences’ – as highlighted in the recent flurry of discussion over the state of Tolkien scholarship. Personally, I don’t get ‘influence’, a seemingly occultist notion of action at a distance. No doubt the confusion is subjective.

Another perspective draws upon notions like context and conversation. These are my preferred terms of art, reflecting my training as an intellectual historian. I’ll illustrate how they work by first discussing Bartlett and his 1920 paper, and then pointing to its possible significance for how we think about Tolkien.

Anthropology at Cambridge was established in the wake of a university expedition to Torres Straits in 1898. Returning from the expedition, Haddon and Rivers joined forces with more traditional scholars, notably the classical archaeologist William Ridgeway and the Anglo-Saxonist H.M. Chadwick, to establish a new faculty of anthropology. Ridgeway and Chadwick were working on a novel approach to early European history, which combined archaeology with the study of old literature, such as the Iliad and Beowulf. Haddon and Rivers introduced to this approach the folktales of contemporary ‘primitives’. Bartlett’s 1920 paper was a contribution to an emerging account of the relationship between story and society in history.

Bartlett was a psychologist. His paper on the reproduction of Folk Stories discussed an experiment in which members of his university read a Chinook folk tale, ‘The War of the Ghosts’, and, after varying intervals of time, reproduced it. Reproduction, Bartlett showed, was actually reconstruction: over successive retellings familiar elements were substituted for unfamiliar and the plot structure changed to remove (seemingly) inexplicable connections. As such, Bartlett’s paper contributed to the study of cultural diffusion by way of a psychological experiment on memory.

So what does this tell us? If we approach Bartlett’s paper in terms of influence, pretty much nothing. Tolkien may possibly have read the paper, but probably did not; and even if he did, any direct connection we might establish would probably sit all too easily between the trivial and the vacuous.

Approaching Bartlett’s paper in terms of context is another matter. To begin with, we see immediately that disciplinary divisions were not then what they are now. Under the broad umbrella of ‘anthropology’ we find a sustained interaction between students of Classical and Old English literature, archaeologists, experimental psychologists, and practitioners of a new participant-observer method of ethnological fieldwork. This was not an exercise in what today is called ‘inter-disciplinary studies’; rather, it reflects the fact that before the 1930s the borders between scholarly disciplines had not yet ossified.

Subsequent closing of the borders between academic disciplines has fostered a distorted image of the recent intellectual past. If you search for Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ on the internet you will find many accounts by modern psychologists of a celebrated chapter in the history of their discipline. Unless you open up the original report of the experiment in Folk-Lore, however, you would never guess that this psychological experiment was designed to illuminate the processes of cultural diffusion.

Something similar has happened to Tolkien, whose intellectual context is very largely missing from modern Tolkien studies. Verlyn Flieger is better than most, and has correctly identified the discussions of the Folk-Lore Society as important background to Tolkien’s 1939 lecture on ‘Fairy Stories’. Yet even Flieger presents these discussions as focused simply on explaining the unpalatable elements of ancient stories. This is to project the concerns of a modern discipline (English) onto a past in which such narrow and restricted focus would have seemed an inexplicable voluntary myopia. The Folk-Lore Society brought to the table a wide range of interconnected contemporary debates, ranging over issues of comparative religion, racial ethnology, social history, and much else besides.

The context of intellectual debate was different back then. Disciplinary divisions counted for less, and the scholarly mind roamed over a much larger intellectual terrain. Scholars from a wide variety of specialized fields were engaged in the same or similar conversations.

Reading Bartlett can tell us something about the nature of these conversations, which form a vital (yet passed over) context of Tolkien’s thought. Of course, Tolkien was not part of this Cambridge project, nor were his methods, interests, or conclusions aligned with theirs. Yet his were responses to similar questions, and it is easy to locate ground shared by Cambridge psychologist and Oxford philologist.

Consider the ‘Origins’ section in ‘On Fairy Stories’, where Tolkien introduces his notion of individual sub-creation, alludes to the debate over diffusion, and then introduces his metaphor of the Cauldron of Story. The Cauldron presents an image of diffusion at work, with invented elements of fantasy blending with elements of stories significant parts of which have been forgotten. It is the fact that we forget elements of the old stories that allows invented elements of fantasy to be blended into them to make fairy stories.

Whether or not Tolkien was ‘influenced’ by Bartlett is largely irrelevant. The point is that the two men were both participants in a wide-ranging and ongoing conversation. Their work, or at least parts of it, emerged from a shared intellectual context. Bartlett was particularly arrested by the distortions introduced by memory, Tolkien was concerned especially with forgetting. But reading their texts together reveals a wider scholarly community grappling with the relationship of memory and story in history.

One could go further (much further), had we but world enough and time. Suffice it here to point out that while Bartlett’s most famous book was entitled Remembering (1932), Tolkien’s Elves, with their immortal memories and seemingly perfect recall, can be viewed (in addition to many other things) as an intensive and prolonged thought-experiment on what human memory might aspire to, yet palpably is not.

Again, I suggest no influence of Bartlett’s psychology of memory upon Tolkien’s Elves. What I do suggest is that reading Tolkien in context reveals much about the kind of questions that stand behind his writing, just as Tolkien’s highly idiosyncratic answers illuminate the intellectual and cultural concerns of the twentieth century far more than is usually suspected.

Whatever the present state of Tolkien studies might be, it leaves much to be desired from the point of view of the intellectual historian. I submit that, alongside established methods, the cultivation of a contextualist reading of the history of ideas has the potential to transform our understanding of what Tolkien was about.

Some bibliographical references

On the recent ‘state of Tolkien studies’ debates, my favourite contribution, which contains links to others, is ‘Tolkien Criticism Unbound’.

Bartlett’s 1920 paper (as also those of Haddon and Rivers) can be accessed here, via the (wonderful) archive.org (make sure to turn to the second half of the volume).

Flieger has written about the Folk-Lore Society in several places. See for example the first chapter of her Interrupted Music (Kent State University Press, 2005).

You can no doubt access Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy Stories’ without need of biographical reference from me.

Those who wish to read more on Bartlett and Cambridge anthropology in the first decades of the twentieth century can soon turn to two papers available on my Academia.edu page: ‘The Tragedy of Cambridge Anthropology’, forthcoming in History of European Ideas, and (with Tiziana Foresti) ‘War of the Ghosts: Marshall, Veblen, and Bartlett’, forthcoming in History of Political Economy.

__________________________

Another excellent piece of work by Simon Cook that I would recommend to readers is the monograph, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology, Thank you for agreeing to publish your post here first, Simon. 

The Saga of Wigend's Chicken Run -- Guest Post by Joe Hoffman

The Saga of Wigend’s Chicken Run


BY JOE

ON FEBRUARY 1, 2016

IN MYTHGARD ACADEMY


During last fall’s fundraiser for Signum University, Dr. Prof. President Olsen committed to running from the Shire to Minas Tirith in the form of a chicken. In Lord of the Rings Online, that is. The Great Mythgard Chicken Run took place on January 30th. I watched it on TV. Despite (or possibly because of) its absurdity, it was an interesting introduction for me to the LotRO world.


Of course, a chicken doesn’t stand a chance alone in the Wild. He had companions, so the quest should not fail. As the crowd of Mythgardians, elves, dwarves, hobbits, men, and other chickens, swarmed through a square in Edoras, temporarily quadrupling its population, I was provoked to tweet, “I would like to hear the minstrels of Rohan sing of the gang of weirdos who ran through their lands with a flock of chickens.” Be careful what you wish for on the Internet.


Tom Hillman started it, and deserves at least half the blame. The narrative lines are mine; the funny lines are his.


From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning

with hen and hatchling strode Hampshire’s son.

‘Gainst foes and foxes, fighters protecting him,

to Minas Tirith the tourist came.

With Foghorn Leghorn, long enduring:

son, I say, son, strong in scorning.

For no lectures would he linger in Lamedon or Lebennin.

His clumsy coursing carried him forward.

Even women long-skirted outran wingéd Wigend

Politely pausing until his approach.

From Rammas Echor to the door of Rath Dinen

Into every breach he stuck his beak.

‘Til his goal achieved, glory gaining

He gracefully tumbled from the Tower of Guard.

In red day dawning crew he loudly.

Eleven herbs and spices seasoned breast and drumstick,

Biscuits in bucket, slaw on the side.

Sweet was the feasting, so the songs tell us.





____________






My thanks to Joe for assembling the fragments of our verse into an at times nearly coherent whole.