“Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,” said Jane Studdock to herself, “for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.” She had not been to church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married, and the words of the service had stuck in her mind.
Through the open door she could see the tiny kitchen of the flat and hear the loud, ungentle tick tick of the clock. She had just left the kitchen and knew how tidy it was. The breakfast things were washed up, the tea towels were hanging above the stove, and the floor was mopped. The beds were made and the rooms “done.” She had just returned from the only shopping she need do that day, and it was still a minute before eleven. Except for getting her own lunch and tea[. T]here was nothing that had to be done till six o’clock, even supposing that Mark was really coming home for dinner. But there was a College Meeting today. Almost certainly Mark would ring up about teatime to say that the meeting was taking longer than he had expected and that he would have to dine in College. The hours before her were as empty as the flat. The sun shone and the clock ticked.“Mutual society, help, and comfort,” said Jane bitterly. In reality marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement. For some years before their marriage she had never seen so little of Mark as she had done in the last six months. Even when he was at home he hardly ever talked. He was always either sleepy or intellectually preoccupied. While they had been friends, and later when they were lovers, life itself had seemed too short for all they had to say to each other. But now . . . why had he married her? Was he still in love? If so, “being in love” must mean totally different things to men and women. Was it the crude truth that all the endless talks which had seemed to her, before they were married, the very medium of love itself, had never been to him more than a preliminary?“Here I am, starting to waste another morning, mooning,” said Jane to herself sharply. “I must do some work.” By work she meant her doctorate thesis on Donne. She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married: that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time yet. Jane was not perhaps a very original thinker and her plan had been to lay great stress on Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body.” She still believed that if she got out all her notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, she could force herself back into her lost enthusiasm for the subject. But before she did so— perhaps in order to put off the moment of beginning— she turned over a newspaper which was lying on the table and glanced at a picture on the back page.The moment she saw the picture, she remembered her dream[;] She remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after she had crept out of bed and sat waiting for the first hint of morning, afraid to put on the light for fear Mark should wake up and fuss, yet feeling offended by the sound of his regular breathing. He was an excellent sleeper. Only one thing ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
All literature enchants and delights us, recovers us from the 10,000 things that distract us. The unenchanted life is not worth living.
15 August 2025
C. S. Lewis's Tortured Planet.
16 February 2025
"a path of ascent however hard" -- Tolkien to Lewis on the mysteries and opportunities of pain (Letters² #113)
In January 1948 Tolkien said something to C. S. Lewis that hurt him. In Letter #113 Tolkien continues what appears to be a longer conversation about the incident. This is the only letter we have from the correspondence and we don't know what Tolkien said or about what he said it. I encourage the reader to go look at this letter because it makes clear that Tolkien is truly unhappy that he has wounded his friend, who is also truly unhappy, and because the words from the letter I quote below, when read out of context, don't seem particularly contrite or apologetic.
Lewis's engagement with the Aeneid was deep and lifelong, from his school days onward, so much so that he labored on and off for decades on his own translation, and Tolkien had heard him read parts of it aloud at meetings of the Inklings. A. T. Reyes provides a good discussion of this in the introduction to his book, C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid. Tolkien, too, was steeped in Vergil from his own school days, as was entirely normal at that time. We even have a page from the 1920s on which Tolkien transliterated phrases from the Aeneid into one of his early Elvish alphabets (Parma Eldalamberon 16, 38-39).
What am I talking about already? Here's the quote:
I daresay under grace that [pain which you are feeling] will do good rather than harm, but that is between you and God. It is one of the mysteries of pain that it is, for the sufferer, an opportunity for good, a path of ascent however hard. But it remains an ‘evil’, and it must dismay any conscience to have caused it carelessly, or in excess, let alone wilfully.
Letters² #113 p. 180
The words I've emphasized recall some of the most famous lines in Vergil's Aeneid. In Book 6 of this work, Aeneas must journey to the underworld, but first he receives instructions about the way and its perils:
Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.Trojan son of Anchises, easy is the descent to hell:
Night and day the doors of dark Dis lie open;But to retrace your steps, and escape to the upper world,this is the task, this the labor.
(Aen. 6.127-130)
Notice that Tolkien isn't trying to cheer Lewis up here, or to comfort him with platitudes about how they'll get through this. Had Tolkien been trying to do that, and had he been clumsier and more obvious (like me), he would have alluded to another famous passage of Vergil, where Aeneas is trying to encourage his followers after yet another disaster has befallen them.
“O socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum—
O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis
accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa
experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem
mittite: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."
"O my Comrades -- by now we know all about evils
-- You've seen worse! God will let these end, too.
You, you've come near rabid Scylla's baying cliffs;
You've seen the giant stonework of the Cyclops's home.
Take up your courage again, let go dejection and fear:
Perhaps one day it will please us to recall these evils, too."
(Aen. 1.198-203)
Rather than pat Lewis on the back, Tolkien allows that Lewis is in pain, that he (Tolkien) has done him wrong, however unintentionally, and that the way back from this will involve hard work. He knows that when we are hurt even forgiving the offender often doesn't make the pain go away. There are times when we are downhearted because the world is just giving us a hard time; there are times when someone in particular whom we care about hurts us; and there are times when we feel the pain of hurting someone we love and losing them. Encouragement like that given by Aeneas to his followers can help in the first of these scenarios. At least it can encourage us to pull ourselves together and go on. The second and third scenarios are much harder, darker and more hellish. "This is the task, this the labor."
17 December 2024
25 July 2023
C. S. Lewis and William Shakespeare on Vergil
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https://www.worldhistory.org/image/5836/portrait-of-virgil/ |
Several years back I published a post on echoes of Vergil in Shakespeare and Tolkien. I noted that I had always associated Sonnet 130's line -- "I grant I never saw a goddess go" -- with Aeneid 1.405 -- "et vera incessu patuit dea." The Latin may be seviceably rendered as "And by her gait was revealed a true goddess."
Today I was doing some work involving Aeneid book 1, and it occurred to me to check a book I've had for several years but had barely cracked it open: C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile. As the title suggests, Lewis worked on a translation, though he never came near finishing it. I thought, "I bet Lewis heard Vergil in that Shakespeare, too."
Sure enough, Lewis translates the line: "... and all / The goddess in her going was revealed."
Being fond of Lewis for various reasons, I was pleased to find that we had the same take on Vergil and Shakespeare here. Of course, he does more than notice. Lewis turns the echo back again, so that now Vergil echoes Shakespeare.
08 June 2023
Boethius and the Unman in Perelandra
I have been spending a fair bit of time with Boethius and Saint Augustine lately. No, really that's okay. My next book will begin with quite a lengthy analysis of "The Music of the Ainur" from Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales. Having walked carefully through the text and studied, among other things, how it shows Melko's descent into evil, I am now looking into Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, and Augustine's The City of God and On Free Will. The connections of these authors and works to evil as portrayed in Tolkien has long been discussed by scholars, but those discussion have focussed largely on evil in The Lord of the Rings.
"The Music of the Ainur" and The Lord of the Rings, however, are two very different kinds of text. The one is creation myth, told by Rúmil, the elf, to Eriol, the man, and based upon an account which Manwë, the Vala, gave to Rúmil's ancestors (LT I 52). The other, as the text itself claims, is the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo and what hobbits did in the War of the Ring (RK 6.ix.1027). From its own perspective then, The Lord of the Rings is a work of history, not mythology. So what these two works have to say about evil will be said differently.
Not only that. When he wrote The Book of Lost Tales Tolkien was a young man trying to use fairy-stories to make sense of how he felt about the fair and foul of the Great War, a task he began while the war was still going on. When he wrote The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was a middle-aged man with sons of his own facing the evils of their own great war. Indeed, citing his own experience, he told his son, Christopher, in 1944 that maybe he should also try writing as a way to understand his own experience (Letters no. 66 p. 78). We can't assume that the younger Tolkien thought exactly the same thing as the older Tolkien. Anyone who has gone from youth to middle age without changing his opinions any number of times has not been paying attention.
Be that as it may, I have also been re-reading Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, just because it's been too long. While there are many passages in Lewis's works which jump up and down and shout "Boethius" at me, I ran across one this morning that not only shouted, but pointed quite obviously to a specific passage in The Consolation of Philosophy. First, here's the passage from Book Four, chapter Two of Boethius in the original and my translation. The italics in the translation are mine:
Nam uti cadaver hominem mortuum dixeris, simpliciter vero hominem appellare non possis, ita vitiosos malos quidem esse concesserim, sed esse absolute nequeam confiteri. Est enim, quod ordinem retinet servatque naturam; quod vero ab hac deficit, esse etiam, quod in sua natura situm est, derelinquit.
For just as you might say that a corpse is a dead man, but you could not simply call it a man, so I would grant that the wicked are evil indeed, but I could not allow that they are in absolute terms. For a thing which does not let go of its place and preserves its nature is. But a thing which forsakes its nature has also abandoned the being which depends on its nature.
4.2.33-36.
hoc igitur modo quicquid a bono deficit esse desistit. quo fit ut mali desinant esse quod fuerant. sed fuisse homines adhuc ipsa humani corporis reliqua species ostentat: quare uersi in malitiam humanam quoque amisere naturam.
Therefore anything which abandons the good in this manner ceases to be. Because of which it comes about that the evil cease to be what they had been – but their appearance, their human body, still remains and shows that they had been humans – and so when they turned to wickedness they also let go of their human nature.
4.3.15
Now here's what Lewis writes in chapter 9 of Perelandra:
Ransom kept his eyes fixed upon the enemy, but it took no notice of him. Its eyes moved like the eyes of a living man but it was hard to be sure what it was looking at, or whether it really used the eyes as organs of vision at all. One got the impression of a force that cleverly kept the pupils of those eyes fixed in a suitable direction while the mouth talked but which, for its own purpose, used wholly different modes of perception. The thing sat down close to the Lady’s head on the far side of her from Ransom. If you could call it sitting down. The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely nonhuman. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with— the managed corpse, the bogey, the Unman.
Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 9, pp. 104-05
Now the analogy is by no means perfect, but its imperfection makes it that much more illustrative, as the following quote from the same chapter of Perelandra shows. Here the corpse of Weston (Ransom's human enemy) has been possessed and reanimated by a demon, but the descent from Weston to Unman is summed up eloquently in that last sentence. Weston 'did not defy goodness,' he 'ignored it to the point of annihilation.' His own. He has ceased to be what he was and has become the Unman. What Weston's possession and reanimation by the demon allows us to see more clearly is how both Weston and the demon have become non-existent in the way Boethius described.
[Ransom] saw a man who was certainly not ill .... He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. [His] face ... had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” It was this that kept Ransom speechless. What could you say— what appeal or threat could have any meaning— to that? And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in Perelandra by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone.
It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken— Ransom himself had often spoken— of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.
Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 9, p. 95
I would be surprised if no one else had noticed this Boethian moment in Perelandra, but I wanted to share it. It makes such perfect sense that Lewis would have found the animation of Boethius' image of the dead man, which you could no longer call simply a man, to be just what he needed to convey what is at stake at this moment as the Unman tempts the Green Lady to defy the good.
20 November 2022
Hobbits and the Shire: The strength of the hills is theirs also.
Yesterday, a friend sent me something he was working on about The Lord of the Rings, and what he had to say about Hobbits and the Shire in it immediately made me think of the passage I have quoted below. I couldn't remember where I had read these comments before, though. I was pretty sure it wasn't in anything Tolkien wrote, and I thought it was in Lewis. As it turned out, I was right. It just took me a while to track it down. So to prevent me from forgetting the location of the comments again, I am sharing it with all of you.
The allusion to the 95th psalm in the penultimate sentence just makes me think of Tom Bombadil himself as well as old Tom's assessment of Farmer Maggot: ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open' (FR 1.vii.132). Remember, too, that the Shire has a power of its own (FR 2.i.222) and it was in the Shire (faced with the redoubtable Gaffer and Farmer Maggot) that 'the hunters before whom all have fled or fallen' faltered (FR 2.ii.260. And am I the only one who hears an echo of T. S. Eliot in 'We are synthetic men, uprooted'?
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood-they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours. My pen has run away with me on this subject.
C. S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greaves, 22 June 1930
05 August 2022
Of Kubla Khan in Greek, Tolkien in his Cups, and a Boat of Melted Butter.
In Tolkien's youth it was nothing unusual for Latin and Greek students to be told to translate a piece of English verse into verse in Latin or Greek. This is even more daunting than it sounds since Greek and Latin prosody has very different rules. When Tolkien says to W. H. Auden that his 'chief contacts with [English] poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin' (Letters, no. 163, p. 213), this is what he is talking about, as Auden likely knew from his own experience. Some people were actually quite good at this, and kept it up long after they had finished school themselves. In Oxford and Cambridge of Tolkien's day it was something of a college industry.
I remember one day when I was an undergraduate studying Greek one of my more terrifying professors showed us a version of Coleridge's Kubla Khan translated into Greek by an Oxford don named Maurice Bowra. It was really quite good and a lot of fun, too. Aside from the Greek being neatly turned and the versification skillfully handled, Bowra had also rendered the cultural references into something a Greek 2,500 years ago would have understood. The names 'Kubla Khan' and 'Xanadu' would have meant nothing to Sophocles, for example, but Minos and Knossos would have conveyed just the necessary air of power both mythic and exotic. So 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan' became 'In Knossos did King Minos' (ἐν Κνωσῷ βασιλεὺς Μίνως).(1) As mere American undergraduates of a decidedly less heroic age, my classmates and I were as awed to read this as we were grateful that no one was going to ask us to do anything similar.
Tolkien and Bowra knew each other. In the preface (p. viii) to the 1938 Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, edited by Bowra and T. F. Higham, Tolkien receives thanks for his 'valuable help' with the seventy-four page essay Higham wrote on Greek Poetry in Translation.(2) What help Tolkien gave seems unknown, however. Both Tolkien (1945-1955) and Bowra (1951-?) were later members of the Oxford Dante Society, and it is perhaps at the meetings of this society, which seem to have always included a dinner, that the rest of our story begins.
For C. S. Lewis' brother, Warnie, ran into Tolkien one summer evening in 1966 at gathering in Wadham College of those who had known C. S. Lewis. Warnie's diary entry for 22 July 1966 tells an intriguing tale:
'in company with Tollers, who struck me as having had as much sherry as was good for him, and he told me some fantastic story about how he had once emptied a sauce boat of melted butter over [Maurice] Bowra's head.'(3)
We do not know why Tolkien did this to Bowra, though the reputation of Bowra's sharp tongue lives on even today. But again, I emphasize, we do not know. We also cannot say when it happened. It is tempting, however, to suspect a link between the buttering of Bowra and the meeting of the Oxford Dante Society on 15 February 1955 at which Tolkien's resignation was 'accepted with regret'.(4) That Warnie didn't already know the tale suggests that Tolkien didn't talk about it, at least not without a tongue-loosening amount of sherry in him. It's also true that he had run into Warnie at a gathering in Wadham College, of which Bowra had long been the warden (head). So he may well have been there, and seeing him would certainly have called that previous meeting to mind, whenever it may have happened.
Such memories might also have inspired Bowra five years later to write a letter attacking Tolkien's qualifications for government honors for which both he and Tolkien were then under consideration. Bowra disparaged Tolkien's academic output and dismissed the idea that someone who wrote 'only children's tales' merited recognition as a Companion of Honour.(5) (Tolkien in the end received the lesser distinction of Commander of the Order of the British Empire.)
It's worth noting that Tolkien had already felt the sting of such criticism long before. In letter 211, dated to 14 October 1958, Tolkien writes (p. 278):
I have only just returned from a year’s leave, one object of which was to enable me to complete some of the ‘learned’ works neglected during my preoccupation with unprofessional trifles (such as The Lord of the Rings): I record the tone of many of my colleagues.
And in letter 182 from sometime in 1956, he says (p. 238):
Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’. So the screw is on for many things of a more professional kind long overdue.
The similarity of these criticisms voiced at Oxford following the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring on 29 July 1954 and The Two Towers on 11 November 1954, to the comments in Bowra's 1971 letter invite us once again to wonder if a connection might exist between the butter boat incident and Tolkien's resignation from the Oxford Dante Society on 15 February 1955. Perhaps at table that evening Bowra unleashed his caustic wit at Tolkien, who was already sore from the criticism of his colleagues, but was not to be intimidated either. Perhaps not. We may never know, but it's a fine and fantastic image to cherish for a moment.
ADDENDUM:
Lee Smith has suggested to me the perfect instance of provocation for the butter boat incident. Bowra makes some suitably witty and acid remark about there not being enough butter to scrape over their bread as he asks Tolkien to pass the butter. Which Tolkien does.
I dedicate this post to my good friend, Shawn Marchese, who is leaving the Prancing Pony Podcast, but not (probably) because he has poured a sauce boat of melted butter over Alan's head.
_____________________________________
(1) For Kubla Khan, see S. T. Coleridge, C. M. Bowra, et al. in Greece & Rome 3 (1934) 178-82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/641030.
(2) I owe my discovery of the acknowledgement of Tolkien in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation to Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195).
(3) Warnie's diary entry is quoted in Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195) and in Chronology (2017:703). They draw the quote from Warnie's papers at the Marion E. Wade Center, at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Charles E. Noad in Maurice Bowra and the Inklings, Amon Hen 227 (2011: 12-17) notes Warnie's story, but does not speculate (as I do) about the story behind it.
(4) Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (2017: 47).
(5) Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195-96) and Chronology (2017: 789-90, 863)
04 September 2021
'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.
03 December 2017
C. S. Lewis, the Little People, and the Wrong Shoe
I never told you a curious thing - I have meant to include it in several letters - wh[ich] provides a new instance of the malignity of the Little People. I was going into town one day and had got as far as the gate when I realised that I had odd shoes on, and one of them clean and the other dirty. There was no time to go back. As it was impossible to clean the dirty one, I decided that the only way of making myself look less ridiculous was to dirty the clean one. Now w[oul]d you have believed that this is an impossible operation? You can of course get some mud on it - but it remains obviously a clean shoe that has had an accident and won’t look in the least like a shoe that you have been for a walk in. One discovers new catches and snags in life every day.
25 November 2017
Further Remarkable Daughters

Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-1948) was the fourth of the remarkable daughters of Lord Redesdale.

The mother of this hobbit -- of Bilbo Baggins, that is -- was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took.
There's no denying that the Mitford sisters were indeed noteworthy, some of them even notorious; and the world brims with remarkable daughters. So Hooper's phrasing may be a matter of chance. But it would also be no surprise if Hooper consciously echoed a work Lewis esteemed so highly.
21 November 2017
Quickened to Full Life by War (OFS ¶ 56) -- Living the Iliad
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Julian Grenfell |
How often Christ's cry upon the cross re-echoes through one's aching soul; that most desolate and piercing cry the saddest ever uttered in this sad world.... We do not know how God answered it; but we believe that, in spite of cruelty and sin and death, the answer is peace. I think the answer to you comes through the testimony, the living proof, of those most glorious boys, who never looked back, and went to death like Bridegrooms, like Phoebus Apollo running his course; Phoebus, who sent his shafts to Julian in his last moments on earth, and was answered by the flicker of his eyes; that gleam from Julian which will speak to you, in the long hours of waiting and darkness, of the immortality of the soul and the deathlessness of love.
(Vandiver 204-205)
In a cultural situation in which the elder generation chose to phrase its condolence letters and its exhortations in such terms, it is small wonder that poets who were themselves soldiers employed a similar amalgamation of Christian and pagan imagery and concepts, in which the idea of the soldiers as new Christ, who lays down his life for his friends and his country, is inextricably intertwined with classical exempla. Some poets invoked not just classical allusions but the Olympians by name, and in a tone that would imply utter sincerity did we not know that the soldiers of 1914 were nominally, and often much more than nominally, Christians, and their poetry is permeated with invocations of Jehovah and Christ. Yet, although of course no British poet (soldier or civilian) writing in 1914-18 would have claimed to 'believe in' the Olympian gods in the sense of assuming those gods' objective reality, pagan imagery of the Olympians and the heroes is inextricably interwoven with Christian imagery. The Christian soldier must fight for justice and the protection of the weak; it is his Christian duty -- and Zeus and the heroes of Troy will spur him on to do so.(Vandiver 206)
In that book, moreover, I came across a poem I am not sure I'd seen before. However that may be, the poem now struck me in a new way:
Deaf to the music, once a boy
His Homer, crib in hand, had read;
Now near the windy plains of Troy,
He lives an Iliad instead.
Far from saying that the actual experience of real war shows the boy how insufficient literature in general and Homer in particular are, Shillito's poem implies instead that the actual experience of war shows the boy precisely how real Homer is. The contrast is not between reading the Iliad and experiencing actual war but between reading the Iliad and experiencing the Iliad. Thus the Iliad is assumed to occupy both realms -- active and contemplative -- simultaneously.
(246, italics original)
Poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse. A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.
(OFS ¶ 56)
In May 1944 in a letter to his son, Christopher, then in the RAF, Tolkien recommended writing as a means of expressing what he was feeling in the service:
I think also that you are suffering from suppressed 'writing'. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.
(Letters, no. 66)
12 November 2017
Legolas at Night -- C.S. Lewis and the Dreams of the Elves
Except at the making of Eve Adam slept
Not at all (as men now sleep) before the Fall;
Sin yet unborn, he was free from that dominion
04 Of the blind brother of death who occults the mind.
Instead, when stars and twilight had him to bed
And the dutiful owl, whirring over Eden, had hooted
A warning to the other beasts to be hushed till morning
08 And curbed their plays that the Man should be undisturbed,
He would lie, relaxed, enormous, under a sky
Starry as never since; he would set ajar
The door of his mind. Into him thoughts would pour
12 Other than day's. He rejoined Earth, his mother.
He melted into her nature. Gradually he felt
As though through his own flesh the elusive growth,
The hardening and spreading of roots in the deep garden;
16 In his veins, the wells filling with silver rains,
And, thrusting down far under his rock-crust,
Finger-like, rays from the heavens that probed, bringing
To bloom the gold and diamond in his dark womb.
20 The seething, central fires moved with his breathing.
He guided his globe smoothly in the heaven, riding
At one with his planetary peers around the Sun;
Courteously he saluted the hard virtue of Mars
24 And Venus' liquid glory as he spun between them.
Over Man and his mate the Hours like waters ran
Till darkness thinned in the east. The treble lark,
Carolling, awoke the common people of Paradise
28 To yawn and scratch, to bleat and whinny, in the dawn.
Collected now in themselves, human and erect,
Lord and Lady walked on the dabbled sward,
As if two trees should arise dreadfully gifted
32 With speech and motion. The Earth's strength was in each.
The first three quatrains (lines 1-12) called at once to my mind Tolkien's characterization of the dreams of Elves:
With that [Aragorn] fell asleep. Legolas already lay motionless, his fair hands folded upon his breast, his eyes unclosed, blending living night and deep dream, as is the way with Elves.(TT 3.ii.442)
and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world.
(TT 3.ii.429)
Finally in this lovely web of influences we should not forget that Tolkien modeled the way Treebeard spoke 'on the booming voice of C. S. Lewis' (Carpenter, 1977, 194), just as Lewis drew on Tolkien to shape his hero, Ransom, the philologist and hero of his Space Trilogy.
20 August 2017
It Wants To Be Found
Every kindly thing that is
Hath a kindly stede ther he
May best in hit conserved be;
Unto which place every thing
Through his kindly enclyning
Moveth for to come to.
(Chaucer, Hous of Fame, II, 730 sq.)
Tolkien's way of presenting this philosophical duality was through the Ring. It seems in several ways inconsistent. For one thing it is notoriously elastic, and not entirely passive. It 'betrayed' Isildur to the arrows of the orcs; it 'abandoned' Gollum, says Gandalf, in response to the 'dark thought from Mirkwood of its Master'; it all but betrays Frodo in The Prancing Pony when it slips onto his finger and proves his invisibility to the spies for the Nazgûl then present. 'Perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room', thinks Frodo, and he is clearly right. For all that it remains an object which cannot move itself or save itself from destruction. It has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters.... These two possible views of the Ring are kept up throughout the three volumes, sentient creature or psychic amplifier.
(142)
But the Ring is not a natural thing, someone might object, unlike the stone Pippin which drops in the well in Moria. True enough. But surely even our benighted age does not yet require a demonstration that any object will fall if let go, regardless of whether it is a work of nature or craft? That palantír plummets rather nicely (TT 3.x.583-84); Frodo drops his sword at Weathertop (FR 1.xi.196); Gollum his fish at the forbidden pool (TT 4.vi.689); and, as everyone knows, 'not idly do the leaves of Lórien fall' (TT 3.ii.424).