"Unfey, fearless, and his fate kept him" -- Túrin and Beowulf

The Lay of the Children of Húrin exists in two versions, neither of which tells the whole story its title promises. The second version is much more detailed than the first as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. Both versions, however, describe Túrin's earliest days in battle defending the realm of Doriath. The first version offers the following account:

Ere manhood’s measure   he met and slew
the Orcs of Angband   and evil things
that roamed and ravened   on the realm’s borders.
There hard his life,     and hurts he got him,              385
the wounds of shaft     and warfain sword,
and his prowess was proven     and his praise renowned, 

and beyond his years     he was yielded honour;

(Lays p. 16, lines 382-88)

The second version is very much the same as the first for the first four and a half lines, but then it rapidly diverges, inserting four and a half entirely new lines before returning to the same conclusion the first version offers: 

Ere manhood’s measure    he met and he slew

Orcs of Angband    and evil things                              745
that roamed and ravened    on the realm’s borders.
There hard his life,    and hurts he lacked not,
the wounds of shaft   and the wavering sheen
of the sickle scimitars,   the swords of Hell,
the bloodfain blades   on black anvils                      750
in Angband smithied,   yet ever he smote
unfey, fearless,    and his fate kept him.
Thus his prowess was proven    and his praise was noised
and beyond his years     he was yielded honour... 

            (Lays p. 116-17, lines 744-54) 

When studying Túrin, it's always a good idea to pay attention to any references to fate. So line 752-- "unfey, fearless, and his fate kept him"-- stuck out, with its two references to fate. "Fey," meaning "doomed to die," is not a word you see every day. "Unfey," meaning "not doomed to die," you see even less. The word has no entry in the OED, and though Google Ngram says it has been used it links to no books in which it is used. According to Google Ngram the word's usage peaked in 1896 -- peaked I say -- at a frequency of 0.0000000216% of all the words in all the books scanned by Google. That's 2.16 times out of every 10,000,000,000 words. For most purposes not requiring a supercollider, this is vanishingly small, quite literally. You need the Webb Telescope to find this thing.

Unless you're reading Tolkien, and you just happen to have been thinking about a line in Beowulf, where Beowulf talks about fighting sea monsters when he was young.

Ac on mergenne, mecum |wunde,                              565
be yðlafe uppe lægon,
sweordum aswefede, þæt syðþan na
ymb brontne ford brimliðende
lade ne letton. Leoht eastan com,
beorht beacen Godes, brimu swaþredon,                   570
þæt ic sænæssas geseon mihte
windige weallas. Wyrd oft nereð
unfægne eorl, þonne his ellen deah.

But in the morning [the sea monsters] lay dead
on the beach, wounded by my blade, 
slain by my sword,  so never again
did they hinder the voyages
of seamen on the deep sea.
Light had come in the east, God's bright beacon,
The sea had grown still, so I could see
the headlands and their windy walls. 
Fate often keeps an unfey man safe
when his courage avails.

The word unfægne is the masculine accusative singular of unfæge ("unfey"), an adjective which is modifying eorl ("man"), the direct object of the verb nereð ("keeps...safe"). Obviously unfæge derives from fæge ("fey"). Another, related word from elsewhere in Beowulf that should ring a bell is deaðfæge, "doomed to die/death," as in "Nine for mortal men doomed to die." It's important to recognize when reading this line from the Ring-verse that all mortal men are fated to die. That's the whole point, redundant though it may be, of the word "mortal." It is part of their nature. This is true whether we are thinking of fæge, unfæge, or deaðfæge; and this is what makes the escape from death those nine rings seem to promise "the chief bait of Sauron. It leads the small to a Gollum, and the great to a Ringwraith" (Letters #212).

So how can Beowulf speak of a man as unfæge when all men are fæge? As Beowulf himself says when explaining how he survived his fight with Grendel's mother: "Næs ic fæge ða gyt" -- "I was not doomed to die just yet" (line 2146). So fate (wyrd) and courage (ellen) can keep a man safe from dying at the wrong time. On the one hand this tells us that fate is not immutable, and on the other it does not necessarily mean that every man has a specific time to die. A man could be fated to do something he has not done just yet. It's also true that fate and courage do not save always, but merely often.

I find Tolkien's adaptation of Beowulf's words to describe Túrin here particularly interesting because I have been studying the workings of fate in the different versions of The Tale of the Children of Húrin. As I usually do, I am trying to understand this from the ground up, so to speak, looking at how it works in the story and what is said about it, rather than starting with a theory of how fate (doom, destiny, weird, etc) works and applying it to the text. 

In Tolkien's prose translation of Beowulf  he renders the phrase "Fate oft saveth a man not doomed to die, when his valour fails not" (Beowulf T&C 29). In his commentary on the lines he remarks (Beowulf T&C 256):

To go to the kernel of the matter at once: emotionally and in thought (so far as that was ever clear) this is basically an assertion not only of the worth in itself of the human will (and courage), but also of its practical effect as a possibility, that is, actually a denial of absolute Fate.

Tolkien also composed a translation in alliterative verse of the first 594 lines of Beowulf, which obviously would include lines 572-73. I would be very interested to see how closely it resembles "Unfey, fearless,   and his fate kept him" in The Lay of the Children of Húrin.

Was Tolkien riffing on Genesis A 36-38 at RK 5.vi.841? From the houses of lamentation to the House of Mirth.

While reading the Old English poem Genesis A this Monday evening (as one does) I came across the word helleheafas in the following passage (lines 36-38):

                                 sceop þam werlogan 

            wræclicne ham    weorce to leane,

            helleheafas,   hearde niðas

        [God] appointed for the faithbreakers
a miserable home    in repayment for their deed,
the lamentations of hell,      hard troubles.

The context here is the war in heaven imagined to have taken place before creation began, that is, before Genesis1. So, despite the title of the poem, it begins before the beginning, which for the early medieval English was an even better place to start. (It wasn't much of a war either. God swatted them into Hell without the least ado.)

Now, while I recognized 'hell' in the first half of the word, I didn't immediately scan the second part as 'lamentation, mourning, wailing'. Checking the Dictionary of Old English the word helleheaf seems to occur only here in extant Old English. There isn't even an entry for it in the older Bosworth-Toller Old English Dictionary. When a word appears only once, scholars have a term for that, and like all 'proper' scholarly terms originating before the 20th Century, that term comes from Latin or in this case Greek: hapax legomenon (ἅπαξ λεγόμενον). It means 'said once.' A. N. Doane, the editor of my text of Genesis A, points out that there are some odd marks in the manuscript which make helleheafas hard to make out at first. It looks like it says helleheaftas, the second part of which -- heaftas -- doesn't seem to exist in Old English. 

This is precisely the sort of thing that would have made an old-school bold philologist like Tolkien cock an eyebrow. Hold that thought a moment.

Two things resonated in my head as a I read these lines. First, given the association of 'misery' and 'home' in the phrase wrætlicne ham in line 37, the retribution for the angels' rebellion in weorce to leane ('in repayment for their deed'), and the 'lamentations of hell' of helleheafas, I was reminded of RK 5.vi.841, where the Witch-king threatens Éowyn with ghastly payback for trying to hinder him:

‘Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.’

Second, the juxtaposition of the vowels in helleheafas made me think of a simliar juxtaposition in line 101 of Beowulf, which calls Grendel a feond in helle, 'a devil in hell.' Now some scholars have argued from time to time since the 1880s that, since Grendel is quite alive at this moment in the poem and thus is clearly not in hell, we should emend the words feond in helle to feond in healle. In this case Grendel is not 'a devil in hell', but a 'devil in the hall,' that is, in Heorot, Hrothgar's hall in Beowulf. Tolkien certainly knew of this suggested emendation, but appears to have discounted it. In his translation and commentary he uses 'devil in hell,' though he signals his awareness that Grendel's place in hell is at least metaphorical to start with (Beowulf T&C 158-59).

What I am wondering in view of all of this, is if Tolkien might have looked at helleheafas, 'lamentations of hell' and thought healleheafas, 'hall of lamentations' or 'halls of lamentation'? Not as a proposed emendation to the text of Genesis A, but simply as a word that might have existed and been an apt description of the house of misery where retribution is meted out. 

Consider also that the Witch-king immediately afterwards calls Éowyn a fool because 'no living man can hinder' him' and she laughs at him because she is 'no living man,' and the text underlines her laughter by noting that to Merry it seemed 'of all the sounds in that hour the strangest.' So we have a reference to 'the houses of lamentation' and someone laughing and being called a fool. This brings to mind Ecclesiastes 7:4 (KJV): 'The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

In Tolkien's day this verse would have been quite well known, a popularity made even greater by the widespread fame of Edith Wharton's splendid and successful 1905 novel, The House of Mirth. Whether Tolkien read Wharton's novel is anybody's guess -- don't count him out -- but the title would have been familiar to him and its allusion would at any rate have been entirely clear. The Old English word heaf, which we find in helleheaf, may also be translated as 'mourning.' So the houses of lamentation to which the Witch-king refers are also the houses of mourning. And, as we all know, it is he who is really the fool here, not Éowyn. For him the house of mirth and the house of lamentation are one. So Tolkien is not simply retasking Macbeth in this particular scene, but also Ecclesiastes, maybe Edith Wharton, and just perhaps, with truly magnificent philological obscurity, Genesis A as well. 

__________________________

I'd like to thank my good friend, Simon Cook, for quoting a bit of Beowulf which reminded me of a bit of Genesis A, which sent me down a delightful rabbit-hole at 2 AM. ;-)

'To Rule the Fate of Many: Truth, Lies, Pity, and the Ring of Power' -- Perhaps a part of an Introduction

Introduction:

‘the burden of a large story’

 

‘They wanted a sequel. But I wanted heroic legends and high romance. The result was The Lord of the Rings. ....

‘The magic ring was the one obvious thing in The Hobbit that could be connected with my mythology. To be the burden of a large story it had to be of supreme importance.’

Letters no. 257, p. 346

‘Tolkien was his own best critic’, writes Anna Vaninskaya (2020: 156). Not only did revising his works release a torrent of new ideas, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, but reading and thinking about them revealed depths he had not fathomed before.[1] We can see this in his letters as well as in every phase of the creation of his legendarium, so masterfully laid out by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth. An essential part of being his own best critic was being his own best reader. To call the Ring ‘the burden of a large story’ is to perceive that it is as much the burden the story has to bear as it is the burden Frodo has to bear. It is at once supremely important in and to the story. Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings he saw the blending of the Elvish perspective found in the ‘high Legends of the beginning’ and the ‘human point of view’ which first arose in The Hobbit (Letters no. 131, p. 145). At the same time he knew, more abstractly, that the tales of his mythology ‘must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error)’ (Letters no. 131, p. 144). What is reflected is seen indirectly, if not darkly; what is in solution is seen barely, if at all.  

The Lord of the Rings embodies the synthesis of each of these three theses – the burden of the story and the burden of Frodo, the perspectives of Elves and Men, the reflection and solution in a secondary world of truths fundamental to the primary world – not just individually but into a greater whole, which, presented mythically and realized artistically, creates and shares the significance of these truths, perspectives, and burdens metaphorically. ‘Tolkien is thinking in story,’ Simon Cook tells us in The Apprenticeship of J. R. R. Tolkien (2018) in which he argues forcefully that the ‘allegory of the tower’ which Tolkien told as a means to understanding Beowulf is also of vital importance for understanding Tolkien’s own writing. In employing this allegory Tolkien ‘is exploring a metaphor and making meaning, yet we remain on the surface and have not the key to his intentions.’

A work ‘so multifarious and so true’ (Lewis, Letters, 4 December 1953) as The Lord of the Rings will contain many essential elements besides those introduced above. Some of these Tolkien employed consciously, but there were others the extent of whose presence he recognized only subsequently. He knew well that there is far more to be found in a work, even by its author, than any author intends, as the candor and open-mindedness of these responses to his readers in 1956 and 1958 make clear.  

Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for domination)…. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story. It provides the theme of a War, about something dark and threatening enough to seem at that time of supreme importance, but that is mainly ‘a setting’ for characters to show themselves. 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 no. 186, p. 246, italics original)

As for 'message': I have none really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth specially revealed to me! I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one's own taste, ideas, and beliefs get taken up. Though it is only in reading the work myself (with criticisms in mind) that I become aware of the dominance of the theme of Death.

(Letters no. 208, p. 267)

In his essay Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics Tolkien talks about the Beowulf poet writing his poem without full awareness or understanding of the theme he had set himself, and this, Tolkien avers, was a good thing: ‘Had the matter been so explicit to him, his poem would certainly have been worse’ (BMC 18). This remark follows from his earlier comment that myth ‘is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and  geography, as our poet has done’ (BMC 16). Whether the Beowulf poet ever looked back and saw more clearly what he had ‘felt’ when composing the poem, no one can say. But Tolkien did. By far the greater part of his fascinating, insightful, and expansive commentary upon The Lord of the Rings comes from the letters he wrote in the years after he had finished it. To be sure, his published letters are only a selection, but the principle of that selection was to make available the material that would be of the greatest interest to readers of The Lord of the Rings and his other published works (Letters, 1).[2] It is reasonable then to see the letters we get before and after Tolkien declared the work finished as representative of his chief concerns in each period.

Letter 131, the ever cited ‘Waldman letter’ of late 1951 (Letters, 167), marks a terminus before which Tolkien’s comments to his correspondents almost invariably addressed the practical challenges of finishing the work, and after which theological, philosophical, and thematic reflections, often in response to questions or criticisms of readers and critics alike, became increasingly common. Wishing to see The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion published together, a desire which Allen and Unwin seemed reluctant to gratify, Tolkien set out to persuade Milton Waldman of Collins to take on both works. To accomplish this end Tolkien had to step back and think through his legendarium as a whole just as he had done with Beowulf in his 1936 lecture and as he had done with Faërie in On Fairy-stories in 1939.[3] So many of the larger questions he weighs in his later correspondence find their first expression here.

Clearly The Lord of the Rings reflects its author’s mind and meditations from beginning to end. Such themes as Death and Immortality, Power realized in Art versus Power realized in domination, the role small hands play while the eyes of the great are elsewhere, and the essential relationship between high and low, great and small, which gives meaning to the lives and efforts of both, are present throughout, but in telling his story the elements of the metaphor remained largely in solution. With the Waldman letter he begins to precipitate those long meditated elements out of solution.

Indeed important texts he composed in the 1950s, such as Laws and Customs among the Eldar and the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth may well owe their existence to the shift away from narrative to philosophical and theological concerns that we first see in Letter 131. The much lamented failure to complete the tale Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin at all or The Silmarillion to his satisfaction probably finds some of its explanation here, alongside the profound disappointment inflicted by Collins’s unwillingness to publish The Silmarillion, which was so severe that for some time he stopped working on it entirely (S&H C 405-06). Much as Lewis might have predicted, Tolkien explored so many thoughts in the process of reviewing his entire legendarium that it led him to produce new works and to reexamine and reformulate the metaphysical foundations of his world more directly.

One important element we do not find reflected upon in Letter 131, or anywhere before Letter 153 of 1954 in fact, is pity. A part of Gandalf’s exchange with Frodo on pity is present from the very first draft of The Lord of the Rings. Crucially, however, the effect of Bilbo’s pity is solely to save him from becoming another Gollum, or worse: ‘he would not have had the ring, the ring would have had him at once. He might have become a wraith on the spot’ (Shadow 81). There is not the least hint that ‘the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many’ (FR 1.ii.59) as in the published text, or, as in Letter 153, that ‘it is the Pity of Bilbo and later Frodo that ultimately allows the Quest to be achieved’ (Letters, 191). Consider, too, Letter 181 of 1956 in which Tolkien states that ‘the “salvation” of the world and Frodo’s own “salvation” is achieved by his previous pity and forgiveness of injury’ (Letters, 234, italics original). Letters 191 and 192, both of 1956, also emphasize the importance of pity, mercy, and forgiveness in this context (Letters, 251-53); and in letter 246 of 1963 Tolkien again calls out ‘that strange element in the World that we call Pity and Mercy’ (326).[4]

Parallel with the limited scope of pity in the first draft of The Lord of the Rings is the limited conception of the power of the Ring. It is not yet the One Ruling Ring. Until Bilbo’s magic ring becomes the ‘one Ring to rule them all’, Bilbo’s pity cannot play the role Gandalf suggests it may well play in the fate of the world. Indeed it has no need to do so. Once the conception of the Ring changes, the two are woven together, with each other as well as with the themes of Death and Immortality. For the Power of the Ring encourages mortals to think they can cheat death, and immortals that they can preserve the world from the fading which is a part of its nature, and their own. Mortals with Rings of Power like the Nazgûl end up undead; immortals like the Elves ‘embalm’ what they would save.[5] Against the Ring pity offers the only real defense, but in the end the pity of this world cannot withstand the enticements of such power. Frodo will fail.

Pity thus plays an essential and paradoxical role in the lives of the characters and in the fate of all Middle-earth, and is a key to understanding The Lord of the Rings and seeing more deeply into Tolkien’s legendarium as a whole. If pity does not rule the fate of many, the Ring of Power will. For that is what Sauron made it to do. In this book I shall trace the long arc of pity and the Ring from the moment Bilbo stood poised in the darkness behind Gollum until Frodo, hurt beyond healing by the burden of the Ring, gazed upon Saruman’s corpse in the morning of the Shire and watched his fallen spirit scattered on the wind, the both of them unable to return home.

 

‘The Ring left him.’

(FR 1.ii.55, italics original)

If the ‘real theme’ of The Lord of the Rings is Death and Immortality, and if the Power of the Ring seems to offer Men and Elves the means to challenge these ‘dooms’ of their nature in addition to attaining more worldly ends, we must also question the nature of the Ring itself. The answer will affect our understanding both of the ‘temptations’ offered by the power of the Ring, and of the interplay of pity and the Ring. Does the Ring then possesses a consciousness and agency of its own? Scholars and fans alike commonly speak as if it does. Gandalf does so himself when he tells Frodo that the Ring left Gollum, a statement which gives by far the strongest evidence for consciousness and agency, but only if Gandalf means it to be taken literally. That Frodo mocks Gandalf’s assertion, I would argue, leaves room for us to doubt this, especially since Gandalf does not reply with a reaffirmation that the Ring made a conscious decision to leave Gollum and acted upon it, a point not to be neglected or passed over if true, but hammered home. Who would need to understand this more than Frodo?

Yet Gandalf does pass over it, and moves immediately on to another point which he considers more important and which he admits he cannot state ‘more plainly’, that Bilbo was ‘meant to have the Ring and not by its maker’ (FR 1.ii.55, italics original). Gandalf, moreover, has used metaphor earlier in this conversation to describe the Ring devouring its possessor (FR 1.ii.47, 55, 57). He has even employed outright deception, withholding as long as he can the truth that the hobbit Sméagol is in fact the creature Gollum, because he believes it to be of the utmost importance to the world that Frodo, who is also ‘meant to have the Ring’, pity Gollum as Bilbo had done.

This combination of reticence, deception, and metaphor warns against making any easy judgement about the Ring and its effect on its possessor. While Frodo reasonably and (I believe) rightly scoffs at Gandalf’s assertions about the Ring’s consciousness and agency, he is nevertheless rarely sure whether the urge to put on the Ring comes from the Ring, from within himself, or from elsewhere. This makes the distinction between the possibilities integral to the power of the Ring and the desires of those who possess or might possess the Ring inherently difficult to maintain, increasingly so as the Ring comes closer to its source. This is challenging for the reader as well as for the Ringbearer owing to the psychological, moral, and spiritual complexity of the struggle between ‘the Ring is my burden’ and ‘the Ring is mine’.

---

[1] Thus Lewis in Tolkien’s obituary in The Times (3 September 1973): ‘His standard of self-criticism was high, and the mere suggestion of publication usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old work they actually got the first draft of a new one.’ The Tolkien Society reprinted the obituary in full in Mallorn 8 (1974) 40-43. Lewis’s comment appears unsourced in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien (1977: 138).

[2] Larger thematic concerns do not of course go unmentioned beforehand. Gollum’s near repentance touches upon pity: Letters, no. 96, p. 110. Letter no. 66, p. 78 addresses power: ‘For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side.’ For more on Power and the Machine: no. 75, p. 87; no 109, p. 121.

[3] On the Beowulf lecture, see S. Cook (2018), and Tolkien and M. Drout (2011). For On Fairy-stories, see V. Flieger and D. Anderson (2014).

[4] To the distinction between pity and Pity we shall return below.

[5] For Elves’ attempts to preserve the world from ‘fading’ as ‘embalming’, see Letters, no. 131, p. 151, and no. 154, p. 196. 

Review: 'The Apprenticeship of J. R. R. Tolkien' by Simon J. Cook

 

Simon Cook is one of the most thoughtful and perceptive Tolkien scholars of this generation. His insights into Tolkien's relationship with his text, with Beowulf, and with the Beowulf poet inform his understanding of what Tolkien was doing when he set out to write what he at first called 'the new Hobbit', but which we know as The Lord of the Rings. Like most books worth actually reading once, The Apprenticeship of J. R. R. Tolkien is worth reading twice. I thought it terrific when I first read it three years ago. Now after three years spent reading, thinking, and writing about Tolkien myself, I have reread it and am now even more convinced of this work's value than I was then.

Waiting for Aeschere's Head -- Beowulf 1419b-1423

I've been re-reading Beowulf lately, my second time through the poem in Old English. It brings joy and laughter to my geeky soul, not least because somehow it got easier between the first and second readings. Of the many things that have delighted me, I wanted to mention lines 1419b-1423. Not only are they a great example of the things you can do with word order in an inflected language, but what they do here in particular is funny. 

Just a bit of background first. Beowulf has killed Grendel and Grendel's mother has come looking for revenge. She breaks into Heorot in the middle of the night and carries off Ӕschere, one of king Hrothgar's most trusted advisers. The next morning a posse of Danes (Hrothgar's folk) and Geats (Beowulf's) sets out for the lair of Grendel and his mother.

                                Denum eallum wæs,
winum Scyldinga,   weorce on mode
to geþolianne,   ðegne monegum,
oncyð eorla gehwæm,   syðþan Æscheres
on þam holmclife   hafelan metton.

                               For all the Danes it was,
for the friends of the Scyldings*, a pain in their hearts
to endure, for many a thane,
a grief for every warrior, once they
found Ӕschere's head on the sea-cliff. 

Richard Rohlin was just talking the other day over at Blog on the Barrow-Downs about ways in which the Beowulf poet builds tension in a story that most of his audience would have known. It's an excellent post which I encourage you to read for its discussion of shifting perspectives within the story. Here and now, we're on a much smaller scale, an elegant and balanced little sentence that withholds the crucial piece of information until the very end, poor Ӕschere's head, the twenty-first of twenty-two words.

Here's what you might call an exploded view, which aims to make clear how nice a sentence this is:

For all the Danes

it was

for the friends of the Scyldings

a pain in their hearts to endure

for many a thane

a grief

for every warrior

once they found Ӕschere's head on the sea-cliff.

All of the phrases beginning 'for' are interlaced with the verbal structure of the sentence, while 'grief' is in apposition with 'a pain...endure.' 

It's like a walk down a long dark hallway in a horror movie. You know something bad is coming, just around the next corner, and somehow it still takes you by surprise when you finally get there. Richard Rohlin and I also both got a laugh out of the fact that in the Old English Ӕschere is quite literally separated from his head. 

And if this kind of humor appeals to you, you should take a long look at Tom Shippey's Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings.

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*The Scyldings were the dynasty that ruled the Danes in Beowulf. 'Friends of the Scyldings' is synonymous with Danes.

'Not Unlike the Verse of the English' -- From Rohan to the Havens of Sirion

Alan Lee © 2007 

Many of us no doubt first encountered alliterative verse in Tolkien, in the scene where Aragorn first chants in the language of the Mark, and then translates the words of 'a forgotten poet long ago':

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

(TT 3.vi.508)

Or later in the stirring lines as the host of Rohan sets forth to war:

From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning
With thain and captain rode Thengel's son

(RK 5.iii.803)

Soon we learned, if The Lord of the Rings had truly fired our imaginations, that the people and culture of Rohan owed much to Tolkien's love of Old English and the people who spoke it. Beowulf, the epic so central to his scholarly and imaginative lives, and the study of which he had so great an effect on precisely because of his scholarly and imaginative lives -- Beowulf was composed in alliterative verse, as was The Wanderer, which provided the model for the lines Aragorn chanted (92-93):

Hwær com mearh? Hwær com magu? Hwær com maðumgiefa?
Hwær com symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?  

Where is the horse? Where is the warrior? Where the giver of treasures?
Where are the seats at the banquet? Where the joys of the mead-hall?

Elsewhere Faramir speaks to Frodo of the men of Rohan, saying that they have not become like the men of Gondor. For they 'hold by the ways of their own fathers and to their own memories, and they speak among themselves their own north tongue.' Of the ways and history of Gondor they have learned only what was necessary for them to learn.

they remind us of the youth of Men, as they were in the Elder Days. Indeed it is said by our lore-masters that they have from of old this affinity with us that they are come from those same Three Houses of Men as were the Númenóreans in their beginning; not from Hador the Goldenhaired, the Elf-friend, maybe, yet from such of his sons and people as went not over Sea into the West, refusing the call.

(TT 4.v.678)

That Faramir, whose heart is of downfallen Númenor and waning Gondor, should link the Rohirrim to those of the Edain who did not go into the West, citing 'our lore-masters' to back up the general impression of the Men of Rohan, is intriguing enough in itself  -- for they escaped the fall that Númenor suffered -- but for now it is enough to note that his words point to the persistence of their traditional ways. Which is not to say that their ways have been unchanged for thousands of years, or that he regards them as faultless (he does not), but that their ways and their language are old, more in touch perhaps with what Men were on their own. This may well include their mode of poetry. And the fact that Aragorn's poem about Eorl the Young, who died five centuries earlier, was also in alliterative meter points in the same direction. Indeed the song and the form have persisted long after the poet himself has been forgotten.

From about six hundred years before that comes another example of alliterative verse, and from a source we might not at first expect, given the strong association of this type of verse with Rohan:

'Thus spoke Malbeth the Seer, in the days of Arvedui, last king at Fornost,' said Aragorn: 

Over the land there lies a long shadow,
westward reaching wings of darkness.
The Tower trembles; to the tombs of kings
doom approaches. The Dead awaken;
for the hour is come for the oathbreakers;
at the Stone of Erech they shall stand again
and hear there a horn in the hills ringing.
Whose shall the horn be? Who shall call them
from the grey twilight, the forgotten people?
The heir of him to whom the oath they swore.
From the North shall he come, need shall drive him:
he shall pass the Door to the Paths of the Dead.

(RK 5.ii.781)

Now as Corey Olsen pointed out in discussing these verses in his Signum University course of Tolkien's Poetry, the Anglo-Saxons were not the only people in Medieval Europe to compose alliterative verse. We have many examples of it in Old Norse, Old High German, and Old Saxon. So we should not be surprised to find alliterative verse elsewhere in Middle-earth. But since different races within Middle-earth tend to compose in different meters -- Hobbits in iambic tetrameter, Elves in iambic heptameter, Tom Bombadil in trochaic heptameter -- may we not wonder if Tolkien means alliterative verse to represent a distinctly mannish verse form?

Relevant to this are some notes of Tolkien's, first referred to in Unfinished Tales (146) and later published in The War of the Jewels (311-315), which allow us to make a leap backward into the poetry of the First Age, to the oldest piece of mannish verse we know of, the Tale of the Children of Húrin. The speaker is Ælfwine:

But here I will tell as I may a Tale of Men that Dírhaval of the Havens made in the days of Eärendel long ago. Narn i Chîn Húrin he called it, the Tale of the Children of Húrin, which is the longest of all the lays that are now remembered in Eressëa, though it was made by a man.

For such was Dírhaval. He came of the House of Hador, it is said, and the glory and sorrow of that House was nearest to his heart. Dwelling at the Havens of Sirion, he gathered there all the tidings and lore that he could; for in the last days of Beleriand there came thither remnants out of all the countries, both Men and Elves: from Hithlum and Dorlómin, from Nargothrond and Doriath, from Gondolin and the realms of the Sons of Fëanor in the east. This lay was all that Dírhaval ever made, but it was prized by the Eldar, for Dírhaval used the Grey-elven tongue, in which he had great skill. He used that mode of Elvish verse which is called [minlamad thent/estent] which was of old proper to the narn; but though this verse mode is not unlike the verse of the English, I have rendered it in prose, judging my skill too small to be at once scop [i.e., poet] and walhstod [i.e., interpreter/translator]. 

(Jewels 312-13)

According to Patrick Wynne and Carl Hostetter (2000, 121-22), the elvish name of this verse form strongly suggests alliterative verse, and we know also of course that Tolkien wrote a long, but incomplete alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin in the 1920s (Lays 3-130).  Should we then see some connection between this and the poem that Ælfwine translated? Christopher Tolkien admits that it's tempting to do so, but suggests that 'this may be delusory' (Jewels 314).  However that may be, we need no such link to see that Tolkien imagined alliterative verse as something composed by Men all the way back into the First Age. The connection to the House of Hador shared by Dírhaval and the Rohirrim is both striking and sad, since he neither crossed the sea to Númenor nor refused the call. For he was slain in the Third Kinslaying at the Havens of Sirion.

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Works Consulted

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Wonder Invoked -- On the Uses of Enchantment

Trying to find my room on day one of Mythmoot

The theme of the most recent Mythmoot --  held just this past weekend in the Khazad-dûm-like corridors of the nevertheless comfortable and welcoming National Conference Center, where the fish entrees were always, fittingly, tasty --  was 'invoking wonder.' To be honest, my eye is a bit jaundiced when it comes to themes, which inspire me to think of (un-)motivational posters about the unstoppable power of one's dreams. But I am too much of a romantic to be anything but an easy prey to cynicism.

And yet I knew exactly where the fair folk of Mythmoot were coming from when they spoke of the importance of wonder and the first moments in their lives that they could recall experiencing it. For me that moment came in or just after September 1966, when I heard the words "Space, the final frontier...." for the first time.  There was something about the music and the way William Shatner said these words that moved me, that opened vistas of space and time for me the way the words "Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast" did for Tolkien, and "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead" did for C. S. Lewis.

Many years later, in an interview after Kirk died in Star Trek: Generations, William Shatner said of the moment of Kirk's death on screen that Kirk "faced death as he had faced all those aliens, which was a mixture of awe and wonderment...." Shatner also said that it did not come through on the screen. It did for me. It was perfectly clear to me, just as the sense of awe and wonder with which Kirk approached "all those aliens" always had been. There were quite a few such moments over the years. There was "second star on the right and straight on till morning at the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country; there was Kirk's "young, I feel young" at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

But for me perhaps the most evocative is that sine qua non of Shatner imitations, that speech both famous and infamous, as beloved as belittled, from the episode Return to Tomorrow:

For me, and for my memory, wonder began here. But it's come in a thousand different forms since then, in experiences as well as in books.

• That beautiful late summer afternoon over two decades ago, as our boat approached the harbor. The was setting sun before us, and the land's violet shadow reaching out towards us. It was drowsy and balmy and I was standing by the transom to enjoy the breeze. My eyes were unfocused but looking over the side at the swells we were soaring through. Then something else moved that wasn't the water. Beside us a humpback whale crested the surface to take a breath. I gasped. Somewhere in my mind the crew of The Pequod were shouting "she breaches", but all I could do was gape. By the time I was able to say anything to the others on board, who were all in the cabin, the whale was gone. 
• "And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last." (If you don't recognize these words, you're surely reading the wrong blog.)
• Five years have past; five summers, with the length
  Of five long winters! and again I hear
  These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
  With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
  Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
  That on a wild secluded scene impress
  Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
  The landscape with the quiet of the sky. (Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)
• Every night in a chill Vermont winter, with the snow crunching beneath our feet as Argos and I walked past the dark wood, as the trees popped in the frigid air, and the luminous green curtain of the Northern Lights swayed and shimmered around us.
• The day I saw an eagle lazily pivot 360 degrees on a wingtip, as if he were doing it just because he could.
• "It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself" (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell).
• Whenever I discover the joy of silence, sitting by my window with a book, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the leaves of the oak trees.
• That day underwater in Bonaire, as I looked down at my buddy 30 feet below me, and watched his bubbles rise towards me; and when they came within a couple of feet, I realized I could see my reflection in their surface.
• The description of the history of the dragon's hoard in Beowulf.
• The adagio of BWV 1060, especially this version. 
• How even now, eleven years after she died, I can still feel the softness and warmth of my mother's hand in mine.
• The still, small voice that comes after the earthquake, the fire, and the whirlwind.
• The morning star.
• The Sea, 
• And the Sea,
• And the Sea.

I could easily keep going with this list, since the things on it, and a hundred other things like them, and still others of a joy or sorrow too private to tell, are the things that help me keep going. That's what wonder does. It beckons me onward and bids me hope. Following isn't always an easy thing for me. My eyes tend to look back and rest on the things that went wrong. By all rights I should have turned into a pillar of salt long ago. Yet maybe there's a place where wonder can help to balance past and future. It's a hope like this that has always made me so fond of one particular poem in The Lord of the Rings. Even as a child reading this book for the first time, and knowing nothing of what it's talking about, this poem about wonder moved me. Whether that makes my soul old or prophetic, I don't know. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been; 

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see. 

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know. 

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

Dreams of Beowulf

Sometimes I have the coolest dreams.

The other night I fell asleep at my desk (as one does) leaning on my hands, trying to hold my head up and stay awake, so I could finish my daily reading in Beowulf.  First I entered that strange state where I am just awake enough to know that my eyes are closed, but I am unable to open them, no matter how I try. 

Often, even when flat on my back reading in bed I can stay in this state for a while, and have dreams while still holding up my book and aware that I am doing so. Sometimes I will wake up again and read a little while longer, until my eyes close once more.

But this night I dreamt that my head sank, slowly and irresistibly, until my face was resting on my notebook where I write out the text and vocabulary. Still in the dream, I awoke to find that the lines of the poem were now written on my face. Somehow I was now standing looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, tracing the lines of black ink with my fingers. Somehow I knew they wouldn't wash off.

I don't much like tattoos, but this one I was okay with, especially since that day's lines touched on Beowulf's fight with the dragon.

Aglæca

 Grendel © John Howe

There was just something about the word aglæca -- 'awesome opponent, ferocious fighter' as the DOE defines it -- that seemed familiar.  From the first time I encountered it in Beowulf, it rang a bell. There the poet most frequently uses it to describe Grendel or the Dragon as, according to the gloss in Klaeber, 'one inspiring awe or misery, formidable one, afflicter, assailant, adversary, combatant' (italics original):

ac se æglæca    ehtende wæs,
deorc deaþscua    duguþe ond geogoþe
seomade ond syrede; 

but the æglæca   was after them,
a dark death shadow,    warriors old and young
he lay for and ambushed; 

(Beowulf 159-61)

Elsewhere we find it used of Satan or sundry devils, in a way that combines their characteristic wretchedness and hostility:

Satan seolua ran    ond on susle gefeol,
earm æglece. 

Satan himself ran    and fell into Hell,
wretched æglæca.

(Christ and Satan 711-12)

And:

                                    Blace hworfon
scinnan forscepene,    sceaðan hwearfedon,
earme æglecan,    geond þæt atole scref
for ðam anmedlan    þe hy ær drugon.

                                    They turned black,
spirits transformed,     the devils wandered,**
the wretched aglæca,   through that horrid pit
because of the pride    they had formerly shown. 

(Christ and Satan, 71-73)

Beowulf and the Dragon ©John Howe

Even when the word is used, for example, of Beowulf himself, it stresses ferocity and hostility, as when the poet describes both Beowulf and the Dragon with it:

                              Næs ða long to ðon
þæt ða aglæcean    hy eft gemetton.

                                 It was not so long
before the æglæca    met each other again.

(Beowulf 2591-92)

So, clearly, the word describes a fierce opponent who inspires awe and is sometimes also seen as wretched. This would all certainly apply to Grendel, Satan, and the devils, if not to Beowulf and the Dragon. Now, as I said, there was always something about this word that seemed familiar, but it wasn't until the other night that I made the connection and realized of whom it made me think.  Both because of the harsh, guttural sound of the word and the qualities of those it describes, aglæca reminds me of Uglúk, leader of the Uruk-Hai in The Two Towers. 

I am quite well aware that this suggestion is entirely circumstantial. It may well be completely wrong. I haven't been able to find any direct evidence, but it seemed an intriguing possibility that I thought worth mentioning. I would welcome any evidence, for or against, as well as notice of any scholarly treatment I may have missed. 

**Here is one case in which all those who wander are indeed lost.

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Works Consulted

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Barrow-wights, Ringwraiths, and William Morris (FR 2.ii.248)

"Under the Spell of the Barrow-wight" © Ted Nasmith

"Strider" I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. 

(FR 2.ii.248)

While the identity of these foes has never been clear, that was hardly the point. Strider was speaking about the effect such foes would have on the North were it not for the Dúnedain, whose unknown efforts get repaid with scorn. Still I have from time to time wondered who or what he's talking about. If an author creates the illusion of depth, that very act invites us to embrace the perspective and inquire.  Of course that doesn't mean we'll find an answer, or even that there is one. Tolkien himself, for example, could only speculate about what happened to the Entwives (Letters, nos. 144 and 338), a question which far more people would like answered.

But a clue nearby in the text and a passage in the first draft are suggestive about who were the 'foes that would freeze [Butterbur's] heart.'  Just a moment earlier Strider had said: 'when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us.' The use of the definite article before 'houseless hills' and its absence before 'sunless woods' suggests he has specific 'houseless hills' in mind. The phrase is in itself evocative, both raising and rejecting the idea that the hills are inhabited.  It also rather nicely suits the Barrow-downs, which are inhabited and not by creatures that are alive and not, and which are easily within a day's journey of Bree. This immediately invites us to ask whether barrow-wights can leave their barrows.

The answer to this, in Tolkien's thought if not in his published text, would seem to be that they can. For in his first attempt at 'the New Hobbit', as he originally called The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien portrayed barrow-wights as pursuing Tom Bombadil and the hobbits after he has rescued them (Shadow 112, 118-120).  Years before that in the poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Tom comes home to find one lying in wait for him (stanzas 17-19). Tolkien, moreover, had also spoken of barrow-wights in his commentary on the word 'orcneas' in Beowulf (112):

The O.E. word occurs only here, orc is found glossing Latin Orcus [Hell, Death]. neas seems certainly to be né-as, plural of the old (poetic) word né 'dead body'.... 

'Necromancy' will suggest something of the horrible association of this word. I think that what is here meant is that terrible northern imagination to which I have ventured to give the name 'barrow-wights'. The 'undead'. Those dreadful creatures that inhabit tombs and mounds, They are not living: they have left humanity, but they are 'undead'. With superhuman strength and malice they can strangle men and rend them. Glámr in the story of Grettir the Strong is a well known example. 

(Beowulf 163-64)

Tolkien's phrasing at the end is intriguing since he does not call the tale 'Grettis saga' or even 'the saga of Grettir the Strong', but 'the story of of Grettir the Strong', which is precisely what William Morris and Eiríkir Magnússon entitled their translation of it.  Tolkien owned this translation as well as many other works by Morris, which he admitted were an influence on him and which he sometimes read to his children (Hammond and Scull [2006] 2.599-601). More than that he also at times dealt with them on a professional level (Hammond and Scull [2006] 2.603-04).  Morris, moreover, uses the very odd and unusual word 'wraithlings' to describe a creature such as Glámr has become (chapter 33). This word, which translates ON smávofur, literally 'little ghost' -- in the saga it is used contemptuously by a character who presently learns the error of false pride -- is unknown to the first edition of the OED and Google Ngram finds no trace of it between 1500 and 2000.  Since it is so very rare, possibly even hapax legomenon, we may well wonder if it is the source from which Tolkien derived the notion he briefly entertained that the Ringwraiths were barrow-wights on horseback (Shadow 75, 118-120).

However much it may look like Tolkien still had the barrow-wights in mind when he wrote the words with which we began this inquiry, it remains difficult to say if this is so. We must be cautious in the way we treat details that come from texts written before or after the published text. Tolkien was always rethinking what he wrote, and that should give us pause. This is especially the case with things written later, like the shifting conceptions of Galadriel, who did not exist before the tale reached Lothlórien, but whose history emerged and evolved in the two decades The Lord of the Rings's appearance and Tolkien's death. Yet we should not be too quick to dismiss what he had written, especially in a draft, and regard possible links to it as something that Tolkien forgot to delete. Surely some of what appears in the drafts, but was not included in the final text, may help to create the illusion of depth for which Tolkien is so justly famous.

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Works Consulted

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Nienna's Room With a View -- Silmarillion, 28

Taken from the International Space Station in September 2010

[Nienna's] halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad. She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.

(Silmarillion, 28)

Recently on the Prancing Pony podcast (which I recommend) the hosts, Alan Sisto and Sean Marchese, were discussing a question sent in by a listener about the Valaquenta, specifically on the meaning of the last sentence quoted above. Is Nienna looking out across Ekkaia, the vast sea that encircles the world, to a physical horizon, or is she somehow looking beyond the world itself to the Void and the Timeless Halls of Ilúvatar? 

The question seems vexed. Over the decades Tolkien wrote of the Walls of the World, the Walls of Night, or even the Wall of Things; nor is it quite clear whether in every case he meant the same walls, or, if he did, whether he conceived of them in precisely the same way, or, if they were different, how they differed. It is also difficult to say if we should make something of the lack of capitalization of the phrase in The Silmarillion, though it is very tempting to do so. In Morgoth's Ring Christopher Tolkien examines these phrases, but does not feel that the matter can be completely sorted out (26-29, 62-64). At this point I can't disagree with him. 

But it got me thinking.  I have, quite literally, just been reading a book that furnishes an interesting context in which to begin thinking about Tolkien's description of the halls of Nienna. In his The Sea and Medieval English Literature Sebastian Sobecki discusses (72-99) how from antiquity onward England was seen as the end of the earth, the farthest shore bounded by the great, all encompassing, infinite Ocean. The Old English word for this shoreless sea that lay beyond England (Ireland notwithstanding -- pay no attention to that far green country behind the grey rain curtain) is garsecg, and while its etymology is in dispute one intriguing possibility is gares secg, literally 'promontory's edge', that is, 'the end of the world' (Anderson, 272; Smith, 16). What makes this attractive is the note of harmony it strikes with what we later find in Middle English (a citation for which I am indebted to Sobecki, 84). In the MED s.v. 'occean' 1a, 'the circumferential sea surrounding the world' we find two instances of the phrase 'clif of occean' defined as 'the end of the world.'

If we look earlier we will see that both the Beowulf poet and the translator into Old English of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, moreover, use garsecg to suggest the liminality of this natural boundary and to hint at what might lay beyond. In Beowulf Scyld comes from and returns to the western sea, and 'no man, not the counsellors in the hall, not warriors under heaven, could say in truth who received' the ship bearing Scyld back into the west (50-52). And as Sharon M. Rowley points out in The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica (71-72), the use of garsecg there, like that of oceanus in the original Latin Bede, not only places the island of Britain on the border of the world, but is part of the strategy of the translator to recast Bede's account of the salvation history of Britain. In both cases this outer sea is the edge of the world, but like an icon directs our attention beyond itself.  For beyond that sea might be found the Earthly Paradise, denied to men since the Fall. Seeing the western sea in this way was quite common in the Middle Ages, as Sobecki shows in his discussion cited above. Indeed, the tradition that the outer ocean was a path to another world was as old as Homer (Odyssey x.520-xi.25, transl. Fagles. See also here.)*

In Tolkien this notion of the sea does a kind of double duty. First there is Belegaer, The Great Sea, that lies between Middle-earth and the Undying Lands, which became inaccessible to all but Elves at the end of the Second Age when Ilúvatar removed Aman from the Circles of the World (another term only indifferently clear). But, in the second place, still the Halls of Nienna remain, and still presumably look outward across the Encircling Sea. There are, moreover, two other factors we cannot ignore here.  First,

it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen. 

(Silmarillion, 19) 

Second, Nienna is in and of the world, as all the Ainur became once they entered it, but her face is turned towards what is beyond. Her halls are near the Halls of Mandos, from which the Elves return to life in Aman, and from which Men depart Ëa entirely.  Let us turn back to the passage with which we began, but expand out focus somewhat:

So great was [Nienna's] sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope. Her halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad. She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world. 

(Silmarillion, 28)

Given the echo of the Music in the Sea, and given the weaving of Nienna's sorrow into that Music, it is hard to see how the Encircling Ocean, by sight and by sound, could not evoke the thought of what lies beyond the Walls of the World. The Sea does so in and of itself, even if those who hear the Music in its waters do not understand what they hear. And, without the reincarnation within Ëa that is natural to the Elves, the hope, strength, and wisdom Nienna brings to the souls of Men in Mandos can look nowhere but beyond Ëa.

The answer, I fear, can only be a bit Elvish. Do the windows of Nienna's halls look out from the edge of Creation? Physically, no; metaphysically, yes.

photograph by Rick Battle

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Works Consulted

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Anderson, Earl R., Folk Taxonomies in Early English, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (2003), 272, cited in Rowley, 71 n. 5.

Rowley, Sharon M., The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Anglo-Saxon Studies, Boydell and Brewer (2011) 71-98.  

Smith, Roger, Garsecg in Early English Poetry, English Language Notes 24.3 (1987), 16, cited in Rowley 71 n. 5.

Sobecki, Sebastian, The Sea and Medieval English Literature, Boydell and Brewer (2008).

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*For a good example of Tolkien's awareness and use of this idea of the Sea, see The Notion Club Papers (Part Two) in Sauron Defeated 257-273, passim, especially the included poem, The Death of Saint Brendan, and its revised (later separately published) version on 296-99:

 IMRAM

 At last out of the deep sea he passed,
 and mist rolled on the shore;
 under clouded moon the waves were loud,
 as the laden ship him bore                                        4
 to Ireland, back to wood and mire
 and the tower tall and grey,
 where the knell of Cluain-ferta's bell
 tolled in green Galway.                                             8
 Where Shannon down to Lough Derg ran
 under a rain-clad sky
 Saint Brendan came to his journey's end
 to find the grace to die.                                             12

 'O tell me, father, for I loved you well,
 if still you have words for me,
 of things strange in the remembering
 in the long and lonely sea,                                         16
 of islands by deep spells beguiled
 where dwell the Elvenkind:
 in seven long years the road to Heaven
 or the Living Land did you find?'                              20

 'The things I have seen, the many things,
 have long now faded far;
 only three come clear now back to me:
 a Cloud, a Tree, a Star.                                               24

 'We sailed for a year and a day and hailed
 no field nor coast of men;
 no boat nor bird saw we ever afloat
 for forty days and ten.                                                 28
 Then a drumming we heard as of thunder coming,
 and a Cloud above us spread;
 we saw no sun at set or dawn,
 yet ever the west was red.                                           32

 'Upreared from sea to cloud then sheer
 a shoreless mountain stood;
 its sides were black from the sullen tide
 up to its smoking hood,                                               36
 but its spire was lit with a living fire
 that ever rose and fell:
 tall as a column in High Heaven's hall,
 its roots were deep as Hell;                                         40
 grounded in chasms the waters drowned
 and swallowed long ago
 it stands, I guess, on the foundered land
 where the kings of kings lie low.                                 44

 'We sailed then on till all winds failed,
 and we toiled then with the oar;
 we burned with thirst and in hunger yearned,
 and we sang our psalms no more.                                48
 At last beyond the Cloud we passed
 and came to a starlit strand;
 the waves were sighing in pillared caves,
 grinding gems to sand.                                                 52
 And here they would grind our bones we feared
 until the end of time;
 for steep those shores went upward leaping
 to cliffs no man could climb.                                       56
 But round by west a firth we found
 that clove the mountain-wall;
 there lay a water shadow-grey
 between the mountains tall.                                         60
 Through gates of stone we rowed in haste,
 and passed, and left the sea;
 and silence like dew fell in that isle,
 and holy it seemed to be.                                             64


 'To a dale we came like a silver grail
 with carven hills for rim.
 In that hidden land we saw there stand
 under a moonlight dim                                                68
 a Tree more fair than ever I deemed
 in Paradise might grow:
 its foot was like a great tower's root,
 its height no man could know;                                    72
 and white as winter to my sight
 the leaves of that Tree were;
 they grew more close than swan-wing plumes,
 long and soft and fair.                                                  76

 'It seemed to us then as in a dream
 that time had passed away,
 and our journey ended; for no return
 we hoped, but there to stay.                                         80
 In the silence of that hollow isle
 half sadly then we sang:
 softly we thought, but the sound aloft
 like sudden trumpets rang.                                           84
 The Tree then shook, and flying free
 from its limbs the leaves in air
 as white birds rose in wheeling flight,
 and the lifting boughs were bare.                                 88
 On high we heard in the starlit sky
 a song, but not of bird:
 neither noise of man nor angel's voice,
 but maybe there is a third                                             92
 fair kindred in the world yet lingers
 beyond the foundered land.
 But steep are the seas and the waters deep
 beyond the White-tree Strand! '                                    96

 '0 stay now, father! There is more to say.
 But two things you have told:
 the Tree, the Cloud; but you spoke of three.
 The Star in mind do you hold?'                                    100

 'The Star? Why, I saw it high and far
 at the parting of the ways,
 a light on the edge of the Outer Night
 beyond the Door of Days,                                             104
 where the round world plunges steeply down,
 but on the old road goes,
 as an unseen bridge that on arches runs
 to coasts that no man knows.'                                        108

 'But men say, father, that ere the end
 you went where none have been.
 I would hear you tell me, father dear,
 of the last land you have seen.'                                      112

 'In my mind the Star I still can find,
 and the parting of the seas,
 and the breath as sweet and keen as death
 that was borne upon the breeze.                                    116
 But where they bloom, those flowers fair,
 in what air or land they grow,
 what words beyond this world I heard,
 if you would seek to know,                                            120
 in a boat then, brother, far afloat
 you must labour in the sea,
 and find for yourself things out of mind:
 you will learn no more of me.'                                       124

 In Ireland over wood and mire
 in the tower tall and grey
 the knell of Cluain-ferta's bell
 was tolling in green Galway.                                         128
 Saint Brendan had come to his life's end
 under a rain-clad sky,
 journeying whence no ship returns;
 and his bones in Ireland lie.                                           132