Mani Aroman, Tolkien's Beardless Men

 

Some months back John Garth and I were discussing the phrase "Mani Aroman," which is found in The Return of the Shadow as a possible name for the people Tolkien eventually called the Rohirrim (Return 434). Tolkien indicates that "Mani Aroman" means the "Beardless Men." Tolkien being Tolkien, of course we have to wonder where these two words come from and how it is that they mean "Beardless Men."

Before we get to the speculation on these words, we should note a couple of points. First, Tolkien came up with this phrase long before he ever came near Rohan, and, as John Garth has shown, it took some time before this particular group of horsemen became the pseudo-Anglo-Saxon/Gothic horsemen we know from The Lord of the Rings. So it's no surprise if the beardless state of these riders clashes with Tolkien's later descriptions of the appearance of the Rohirrim, with our own notions of what the Germanic inhabitants of north-western Europe or early medieval England looked like, or with current notions that the beard makes the man.*

Second, elsewhere but still before the Rohirrim we know appear, Tolkien calls them "Anaxippians" and "Hippanaletians." The first of these clearly derives from Ancient Greek, and means "Horse-Lords" -- anax (ἄναξ) is a good Homeric word for king or lord, and (h)ippos (ἵππος), which we see in both words, means "horse." (Even a decade later he will refer to the Rohirrim as "heroic 'Homeric' horsemen" in Letter 131 (Letters p. 221). "Hippanaletians," aside from its first syllable, is not as easily analyzed, but my best guess so far is that it might mean "wanderers on horseback" -- coined from a combination of ἵππ(ος), ἀν(ά)/on, ἀλήτης/wanderer, hipp-an-aletes. A man who invents entire languages is not going to be shy about coining new words from old languages. "Eucatastrophe" is surely the prime example of this in Tolkien (Letters # 89 p. 142).

"Mani Aroman," however, defied our scrutiny. The words did not seem to be derived from Greek or any other likely language we could think of. Now John Garth had drawn attention to "Mani" and suggested that it might be connected to the names of various ancient Germanic tribes as handed down to us through Latin. For example, the Marcomanni, in which -manni is akin to the English "man," and -marco to "mark." This of course makes the Marcomanni the Men of the Mark, which for obvious reasons is attractive. The "Aroman" didn't fit with this, however. 

But the "Mani" stuck with me, and eventually I asked myself whether it could be Sanskrit. So I tried some googling and discovered that the Sanskrit word for "man" is "manu:"

I then searched for "Aroman" as a Sanskrit word, and found:

And this is derived from:

From this it seems to me that Tolkien might derive Mani Aroman, the Beardless Men, who later become the Rohirrim, from the Sanskrit words for "man" and "hairless." It would take real determination to view "hairless" and "beardless" as merely coincidental. But I don't know Sanskrit, and I haven't yet been able to find someone who does to consult about this. So, while this suggestion makes sense to me, that doesn't make me correct. 

_________________________________

* The present insistence in some quarters that the "manliness" of a man is predicated on his possession of a beard straight out of a Matthew Brady Civil War photograph makes me think that a parody of "The Rape of the Lock" is in order. 

Oh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize

Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!"

Tolkien between two publishers, feeling like a fool

14 April 1950

Dear Unwin,

It was odd that our letters crossed. I might have waited a day longer; but the matter is for me becoming urgent. Weeks have become precious. I want a decision yes, or no: to the proposal I made, and not to any imagined possibilities.

Letters  no. 127

________

17 April 1950

[Sir Stanley Unwin to Tolkien:]

.... As you demand an immediate "yes" or "no" the answer is "no"; but it might well have been yes given adequate time and the sight of the complete typescript.

Quoted in note on Letters 128

I've recently been working on an article in which I argue that Tolkien's famous letter 131, so often cited and quoted, actually plays a large role in shaping the subsequent course of his writings on Middle-earth. For in this letter he is attempting to persuade Milton Waldman and Collins publishing to bring out The Lord of the Rings and 'The Silmarillion' together, and in order to do so he has to step back himself and come up with an explanation of how it all fits together, from the Ainulindalë to the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel, to the tale of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom. In the Waldman letter Tolkien undertakes for his legendarium what he accomplished for Beowulf in his essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and for fantasy in On Fairy-stories. The Beowulf essay directly precedes the writing of The Lord of the Rings; On Fairy-stories was written and re-written while he wrote The Lord of the Rings; and the Waldman letter follows immediately after its completion and marks a turning point towards the more philosophically and metaphysically focused writings on the 1950s -- works such as Laws and Customs among the Eldar and the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. Together these three -- the Beowulf essay, On Fairy-stories, and the Waldman letter are indispensable for understanding the shape of The Lord of the Rings, most immediately, and the legendarium as a whole. 

But I digress. 

As I was looking through the Letters the other night and thinking about Tolkien's struggle, first with Allen and Unwin, and then with Collins, to get someone to publish his work as he thought it should be published, I spotted some details that were both very funny and very interesting. In the first place, there is the humor innate in Tolkien, whose writing process could not unfairly be called asymptotic, demanding an immediate 'yes' or 'no' answer to whether Allen and Unwin would publish both The Lord of the Rings (12 years in the writing and only just 'completed') and 'The Silmarillion' (over 30 years in the writing and not even close to finished, then or later).

What struck me as very funny, however, was the transition from his addressing Sir Stanley Unwin as 'Dear Unwin' in Letter 127 to his addressing Milton Waldman in Letter 131 far more personally as 'My dear Milton'. Tolkien had been in correspondence with Sir Stanley Unwin for more than a dozen years by this time. For at least the first four and a half years Tolkien had addressed his letters to 'Dear Mister Unwin'. Somewhere between February of 1942 (Letters no. 47) and March of 1945 (Letters no. 98), Tolkien became more familiar, dropping 'Mister' and beginning, as we saw above, with 'Dear Unwin'. By the time Tolkien wrote Letter 105 in the summer of 1946 Unwin had been knighted, and so Tolkien, as was proper, addressed him as 'Dear Sir Stanley.' Within a year, however, Sir Stanley suggested that they dispense with titles such as 'Sir' and 'Professor' altogether, to which Tolkien agreed and resumed addressing him as 'Dear Unwin' (Letters no 109).

Now many these days might find 'Dear Unwin' and 'Dear Tolkien' to be a little distant still, perhaps even frosty, but it was not so. For in Beleriand in those days using someone's first name was a privilege reserved for family and maybe very close friends. Tolkien and Lewis were for a long time extremely close, but even they did not call each other by their first names. Lewis called him Tollers or Tolkien. Tolkien called him Lewis or Jack (which was not of course Lewis's name at all). To illustrate this custom, no better or more appropriate authority can be cited than Tolkien's own letter from December 1965 to Rayner Unwin, son of Sir Stanley:

Very Best Wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Do you think you could mark the New Year by dropping the Professor? I belong to a generation which did not use Christian names outside the family, but like the dwarves kept them private, and for even their intimates used surnames (or perversions of them), or nicknames, or (occasionally) Christian names that did not belong to them. Even C. S. Lewis never called me by a Christian name (or I him). So I will be content with a surname. I wish I could be rid of the 'professor' altogether, at any rate when not writing technical matter. It gives a false impression of 'learning', especially in 'folklore' and all that. It also gives a probably truer impression of pedantry; but it is a pity to have my pedantry advertised and underlined, so that people sniff it even when it is not there.

(Letters no. 281)

So it is remarkable to see Tolkien in late 1951 addressing Waldman, whom he had met only in in the autumn of 1949, and whom he was addressing as 'Dear Waldman' in March 1950 (Letters no. 126), as 'My dear Milton'. It stands out even more when we notice that about a year and a half passed between Sir Stanley's rejection of Tolkien's ultimatum, which freed Tolkien to make a deal with Waldman and Collins, and Tolkien's 'My dear Milton,' a year and a half in which Tolkien found himself unexpectedly encountering resistance to his hopes and requests that The Lord of the Rings itself be cut. By late 1951 Tolkien's prospects for publication at Collins were fading, so much so that Waldman himself suggested that Tolkien write a letter to convince Waldman's associates at Collins that the two books must be published together. In this context, 'My dear Milton' has the ring of 'Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.'

At about the same time Tolkien was composing his 10,000+ word letter to Waldman, in late November 1951, called upon Tolkien at home in Oxford, but did not see him since Tolkien was unwell (Scull and Hammond, C&G 1.401). He followed up with a letter, in which among other things he asked Tolkien if he could see 'The Silmarillion', but Tolkien did not reply. By the time Rayner Unwin wrote again in June of 1952 Tolkien's relations with Collins had completely failed, in a manner not unlike his negotiations with Sir Stanley two years earlier, ultimatum, rejection, and all. The failure was catastrophically disheartening and embarrassing for Tolkien, and you can hear it in his response to Rayner Unwin:

When I have a moment to turn round I will collect the Silmarillion fragments in process of completion – or rather the original outline which is more or less complete, and you can read it. My difficulty is, of course, that owing to the expense of typing and the lack of time to do my own (I typed nearly all of The Lord of the Rings) I have no spare copies to let out. But what about The Lord of the Rings? Can anything be done about that, to unlock gates I slammed myself?

(Letters no. 133)

The Salutation? 

Wait for it. 

'My dear Rayner'.

And if 'My dear Milton' makes me think of Princess Leia begging for Obi Wan's help, 'My dear Rayner' reminds me of Frodo's plea to Gandalf: 'O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do?' (FR 1.ii.59).

As we know, Tolkien and Allen & Unwin were able to work out their differences, and Tolkien never finished 'The Silmarillion'. 

It may be worth noting that Tolkien's Letters preserve only two further letters addressed to Stanley Unwin. Both come more than ten years after Tolkien's return to Allen & Unwin. In the only one of the two to preserve the salutation, Tolkien reverts to the more formal 'Dear Sir Stanley' (Letters nos. 241 and 248). Rayner Unwin, however, records an amusing and entirely predictable moment, the last time his father and Tolkien ever met, in 1967, which is quoted in Scull and Hammond (C&G III 1369):

"'It was at the Garrick [Club in London]. They were both rather deaf. My father talked about the balance sheet, which Tolkien didn't understand, and he talked about The Silmarillion, which my father didn't understand. But they were full of goodwill. They knew they owed each other a lot -- but they weren't sure for what.'"

Finally, for all Sir Stanley's attention to the balance sheet, in fairness to him we should remember that when Rayner told him in the autumn of 1952 that The Lord of the Rings could lose £1,000, which was a lot of money at the time, Sir Stanley replied:

'If you believe it is a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand pounds.'

_________________

According the Scull and Hammond's Companion and Guide, the last paragraph of Tolkien's Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin was written on a page torn from September in a 1951 planner. Since Tolkien must have begun writing his massive letter to Waldman soon afterwards, I wonder if this is why Tolkien stopped writing the much loved and much longed for story of Tuor. As John Garth has rightly pointed out to me, Tolkien had a lot of other work to do in the fall of 1951 and was also not well, so the Waldman letter may not be solely to blame for Tolkien's ceasing work on Tuor. Even if the Waldman letter should be the reason, however, for Tolkien's stopping, it would not be the reason why he never resumed this marvelous regrettably unfinished tale. Unless, perhaps, we consider the disappointment he felt at the failure of the Waldman letter to secure the simultaneous publication of 'The Silmarillion' and The Lord of the Rings. That surely stung, as did the fact that his experience with Collins had played out similarly to the his experience with Allen & Unwin had done. When Tolkien did return to work on 'The Silmarillion' a couple of years later, his concerns were more philosophical and theological as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. That is, I believe, a result of the overview of his legendarium which the Waldman letter necessitated. But I will argue this in much greater detail elsewhere. 

(Kudos if you got the joke in the title of this post.)

There's a lot more that could be said here. For the moment, I'll just give you the sources. In addition to Letters, there is Scull and Hammond's Companion and Guide for the relevant dates and people, Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, and Rayner Unwin's George Allen and Unwin: A Remembrancer.

The Wheel of Fire: Between Thought and Expression

'And the Ring is so heavy, Sam. And I begin to see it in my mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire.'

(RK 6.i.919)

'I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.

(RK 6.iii.937-38)

Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.

.... Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.

(RK 6.iii.943-44)

Mentioned only three times, twice by Frodo and once by Sam, the wheel of fire remains a fascinating, perplexing image. Unlike the Eye of Sauron, the purport of which the narrative makes clear, why Frodo sees the Ring as a wheel of fire receives no discussion and has no self-evident explanation. To the readers in the Primary World, that is, to us, the wheel offers several possibilities. From Greek Mythology we may know that Ixion was bound to a flaming wheel in Tartarus as punishment for his crimes against the gods, and Tolkien was surely alive to what his readers might make of such an image. In a 1944 letter to his son, Christopher, while discussing the power legends hold he expresses his astonishment that someone would choose 'Ixion' as the name for a brand of motorcycles: 'How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually revolving wheel!' (Letters no. 75, p. 88). From Shakespeare we may know the wheel as one of the tormenting visions of Lear's madness (King Lear 4.v:43-46)

You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like moulten lead.

From history we may know of the medieval torture device sometimes called the 'Catherine wheel', or, more recently, of the wheel to which soldiers were once tied for punishment in a pose that reminded many of crucifixion. It was called Field Punishment No. 1, and, as John Garth has pointed out(1), Tolkien likely witnessed it during the Great War. From the Bible we may know of the wheels and fire appearing in the visions in Ezekiel, though these are associated with cherubim and the glory of God. We may even be familiar with the firework called a Catherine Wheel (evidently not in Gandalf's repertoire), whose swift turning and bright ring of fire creates the illusion of black emptiness rimmed with fire (curious, that). So torment, fire, and otherworldly visions are what the wheel can most readily convey to us, which accords perfectly with what we see of Frodo's experience. 

So much for us, but none of this would have the least meaning for anyone in Middle-earth, and it is for readers within the Secondary World that Frodo supposedly wrote the book. It seems too important and potent an image to think that it is simply a passing artefact of translation(2), like 'express train' in A Long-expected Party (FR 1.i.28), or 'all aboard, Sam'(3) in Three is Company (FR 1.iii.70). Rather, the cluster of associations that the wheel of fire can have for us, the reader in the Primary World, signals the importance of this image for understanding Frodo's relationship with the Ring. That Sam also sees the Ring as a wheel of fire when he looks upon Frodo 'with other vision' on the slopes of Mount Doom (RK 6.iii.943) confirms that it is more than just a vision of torment or madness or divine revelation, but a manifestation of the Ring's irresistible power. To understand this better, we must return to Lothlórien and what Frodo sees in the Mirror of Galadriel.

For the first such image appearing in Frodo's mind is not the wheel of fire, but the Eye of Sauron. After the Mirror shows him a succession of glimpses into the past and possibly the future, an image more real than realistic suddenly commandeers his vision. Catlike, cyclopean, disembodied, bound in flame, empty within and without, the Eye is looking for the Ring, and for him. Although Galadriel does not know all that was visible in the mirror, she knows he saw the Eye. So it is a manifestation of Sauron she is aware of herself, even if it is not his incarnate form, which was recognizably male and presumably Elven to judge by the words of Pippin and Aragorn, who saw Sauron in the palantír (TT 3.xi.592-93; RK 5.ii.780), and of Gollum, who saw him in person (TT 4.iii.641).  

In his next encounter with the Eye, upon Amon Hen, Frodo feels its attention rather than seeing an image of it. At the same time he perceives the 'fierce eager will' behind the Eye, of which he then says 'almost like a finger he felt it, searching for him' (FR 2.x.401). This collocation of eye, will, and finger ought to make clear the metaphorical territory into which Frodo the narrator has strayed as he tries to communicate his experience. That he soon hears a 'Voice', which no one would mistake for a real voice, and which contends with the Eye, only confirms the metaphorical nature of the bodily attributes 'eye' and 'finger'. To be sure, the Voice is Gandalf's, but it is not the voice of Gandalf sitting on a mountaintop shouting out loud.

This approach to the Eye continues in The Passage of the Marshes, where in a single paragraph the narrator all but declares how much of the language used to describe his perception of the Ring and Sauron is metaphorical. The burden of the Ring may grow, but its weight does not actually change as Sam's experience carrying Frodo proves (RK 6.iii.941). The 'Eye' is what he calls 'that horrible growing sense of a hostile will', which seeks to 'pierce all shadows' and 'veils' and 'pin you'. And the metaphor of how he can sense the location of its 'heart' is fine and apt, but it is nevertheless a metaphor. Sauron's Eye is nothing like the sun, not even an invisible sun.

In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was that more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked. The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the veils were become that still warded it off. Frodo knew just where the present habitation and heart of that will now was: as certainly as a man can tell the direction of the sun with his eyes shut. He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his brow.

(TT 4.ii.630, emphasis mine)

So powerfully has the Eye been imagined in these three scenes in Lothlórien, upon Amon Hen, and in the Dead Marshes that it comes as something of a surprise to recognize that we get very little of Frodo's perception of it from here on. Frodo the narrator presently comments that Gollum has 'probably' also been feeling 'the pressure of the Eye' (TT 4.ii.630-31), though he also points out, perhaps in belated self-reproach, that Frodo the character didn't give a thought to what Gollum might have been suffering. Twice later on while Sam is wearing the Ring he feels anything but invisible to the Eye he knows is 'searching for him' (TT 4.x.734) and he perceives 'now more strong and urgent than ever, the malice of the Eye of Mordor, searching, trying to pierce the shadows' (RK 6.i.898). Sam's perceptions, however, lack the vividness of Frodo's. As receptive as Sam is to seeing things with 'other vision' -- like the clear light he thinks he sees shining from Frodo sometimes (TT 4.iv.652; cf. FR 2.i.223), or like the, as it were, transfigurations of Frodo he views in the Emyn Muil and on Mount Doom (TT 4.i.618; RK 6.iii.944) -- he never sees the Eye as Frodo does.

At the same time direct and indirect reminders of the Eye abound in mentions of the Red Eye as the livery of Mordor (TT 3.i.416; iii.451; RK 6.i.903) or the red lights like eyes in the Towers of the Teeth and the tower at Cirith Ungol (TT 4.iv.649; x.733-34; RK 6.i.898. 908). Even the flies of Mordor are 'marked like orcs with a red eye-shaped blotch (RK 6.ii.921).(4) Yet like the rest of the eyes, including that of Sauron himself, they fail to see what they most need to see. Instead the buzzing and stinging of the flies and the 'clouds of hungry midges' serve as a grimly humorous parallel to Sam's suffering in the Midgewater Marshes, where he had quipped 'What do they live on when they can't get hobbit?' (FR 1.xi.182-83). The red-eyed orc-gear he and Frodo had been wearing to conceal their identity now seems less important than having skin as thick as an orc's.

Once the hobbits have entered Mordor, however, Frodo the character never speaks of the Eye again, though there are two moments which merit our attention. In the first moment Sam observes his master's behavior, much of which will be familiar.

Sam guessed that among all their pains [Frodo] bore the worst, the growing weight of the Ring, a burden on the body and a torment to his mind. Anxiously Sam had noted how his master’s left hand would often be raised as if to ward off a blow, or to screen his shrinking eyes from a dreadful Eye that sought to look in them. And sometimes his right hand would creep to his breast, clutching, and then slowly, as the will recovered mastery, it would be withdrawn. 

(RK 6.iii.935) 

Again, as in The Dead Marshes, we start with a reference to the burden of the Ring and its seeming change in weight, which will soon be shown to be merely a delusion of the bearer (RK 6.iii.941). So, not everything the Ringbearer experiences or describes as if it were a physical effect or object has physical existence. That's a thought we should hold on to. 

Next Sam's speculations on Frodo's left hand recall his master's perceptions of the Eye back in The Dead Marshes. Only he is actually watching from the outside in, and cautiously describing, the 'potency' of that unseen sun which 'beat upon [Frodo's] brow. This transition from Frodo's internal perceptions in The Dead Marshes to the strictly external perceptions of an excluded Sam in Mount Doom emphasizes the distance between the one experience and the other, with its 'as if' and its 'a dreadful Eye' rather than 'the dreadful Eye.' In view of the phrasing it may be worth recalling here that Sam has not seen, and never will see, the Eye, though he has felt its attention, just as he has felt the burden of the Ring.

The shift in attention then from Frodo's left hand to his right offers a counterbalance more than opposition. In the Dead Marshes we glimpse (TT 4.ii.630), through Sam's anxious eyes, Frodo trying to hide from the gaze of Sauron, but Sam is at a remove, able only to guess at what Frodo sees, and still under the false impression that the physical weight of the Ring grows along with the spiritual burden. In Mordor (RK 6.iii.935), we and Sam are still farther off, shut out entirely from the struggle between the desire that moves Frodo's hand towards the Ring and the will that forces it back again. If in his mind here Frodo sees the Eye or senses its hunting gaze, and raises his left hand to shield himself against it, what does he see or perceive in his mind when he lifts his right hand to reach for the Ring?

In the second moment, we may observe a curious turn. For by chance Frodo 'sees' the Eye when its attention is entirely elsewhere, on the battle outside the Black Gate. It is neither looking for him nor, as at Amon Hen, does it become aware of his gaze: 'but Frodo at that dreadful glimpse fell as one stricken mortally. His hand sought the chain about his neck' (RK 6.iii.942). What Frodo glimpses even for an instant is so powerful, full of such malice and terror, that the mere sight of it strikes him down and his hand reaches for the Ring. Sam has to stop it. Frodo has to beg him. 

There is no hint whatsoever here that Frodo feels any pressure to put on the Ring, as he often tells the reader elsewhere that he did. On some of those occasions the urge clearly comes from outside him, as at Weathertop or with the Black Riders in the Shire. On others it is fear and a desire to escape, as in the Barrow, or fear that Bombadil has not given him back the real Ring and a desire to prove that it is 'his Ring'. Sometimes it is merely that most Bagginsish of desires, to avoid an awkward situation. And course these motives can overlap, as when Frodo wants to disappear in The Prancing Pony, feeling embarrassed as much as compelled. 

Frodo's most recent claim that he felt such an external pressure to put on the Ring, in the Morgul Vale as the Witch-king passed by, is harder to credit. For if the Witch-king had perceived that the Ring was close by and sent out a command to its bearer to put it on, as he had done successfully at Weathertop, it's impossible to believe he would have just marched away. The desire Frodo feels there to put on the Ring is also clearly connected to his desire to defy the Witch-king, as he had done unsuccessfully at the Ford of Bruinen, but he has since grown wise enough to know he does not have the strength, 'not yet' (TT 4.viii.706). These last two words, however, not only reveal his desire to put on the Ring and issue the challenge, but also that he is gauging his and the Witch-king's strengths. 

While Sam has the Ring, he twice finds his hand reaching for it. The only external pressure he feels upon himself is the terror of his situation. In the first instance he is surprised in the pass by the arrival of the orcs, and he takes the Ring in his hand before he realizes it and puts it on without a second thought. His mind is on how its now too late for him to escape and 'save the Ring'. Likewise, once he's inside the tower looking for Frodo, he is again surprised by an orc and reaches for the Ring. Sam, however, is under no illusions about his strength. Previously, when he had the Ring on and was tempted by the fantasy of being 'Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age', he recognized at once that it was a delusion. He may feel the temptation to claim the Ring and challenge Sauron, but he knows how that would end. He knows also that there is a price in torment to be paid for rejecting the fantasy of power so alluring that he can do nothing but want it. He has watched that torment in Frodo, and even in Gollum for some time now.

What Frodo sees in his mind as his hand reaches for the Ring is the wheel of fire, which he has already told Sam he has begun to see in his 'mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire' (RK 6.i.919), and of which he will soon say: 'I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades' (RK 6.iii.938). 

The simile in his mind's eye in his first statement about the wheel becomes the much more vivid metaphor of the second. It proves in fact to be far more than metaphor. For, now that it is visible to his 'waking eyes', it is no longer a description or a comparison that aims to convey meaning by juxtaposing less and more familiar things. It is a vision or a hallucination. 

But the final report on the wheel of fire belongs to Sam, and what he sees the narrator twice calls a 'vision'. Again, keep in mind that the narrator is Frodo who must have relied on Sam to know what Sam saw. When Sam sees with 'other vision', as he does here, what he sees always touches upon Frodo's moral or spiritual state. Such a vision can be simple, as in the clear light which Sam and Gandalf saw shining through Frodo at Rivendell and which Sam and perhaps even Gollum saw again later in Ithilien. The interpretation of this even so may vary. Sam sees it as indicative of what Frodo is, but to Gandalf that light promises much, yet offers no guarantee against the darkness. Or the vision may be far more complex, as in Frodo's vision of Galadriel in Lothlórien where he saw light and darkness, beauty and terror, love and despair combined into a mixture in which the evil elements subvert the good even though the image of the good never entirely vanishes from sight.

Just so here. The white in which the figure is cloaked too easily deceives because it is so often associated with goodness, with Gandalf, with Elbereth, with the White Tree. Saruman, too was cloaked in white , was called the White, and was leader of the White Council. Yet his treachery was not new, just newly revealed, and 'long years of death' will soon be revealed in him (RK 6.viii.1020). Saruman's orcs wear the White Hand as their token. Whatever he may once have been, Saruman has become a walking, talking whited sepulcher. And when Frodo sees beneath the black robes of the undead Ringwraiths, their clothes and faces and hair are white and grey. In the same way neither the 'simple white' worn by Galadriel nor the shining beauty of 'the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the mountain' which she would have put on if she had accepted the Ring would have made her less evil in the end (FR 2.vii.366).

What Sam sees with his 'other vision' is also not described as Frodo, but as a 'figure', which becomes Frodo once again only after the vision passes. This 'figure', moreover, is 'untouchable now by pity.' Now as everybody knows, Gandalf stressed at the outset the crucial role that the pity Bilbo showed Gollum might play (FR 1.ii.59). Despite rejecting Gandalf's argument for pity, Frodo, too, finally came to pity Gollum when they met at last, a scene in which Frodo not only remembered Gandalf's words to him about pity, but in which Frodo actually continued their conversation, speaking aloud to someone he believed to be dead (TT 4.i.615). Sam, moreover, will also pity Gollum and spare his life mere moments after the 'figure' 'untouchable by pity' turns away, presumably to destroy the Ring, so Sam believes, but, as it turns out, to claim the Ring (RK 6.iii.944-47). Without these three moments of pity by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, for someone who does not deserve pity, but death, the Ring does not go into the fire. Divine Pity does not intervene. There is no eucatastrophe on Mount Doom. So, for Frodo to have 'now' become, or to be 'now' seen as, a 'figure' 'untouchable now by pity' cannot be good. 

A remark Gandalf makes to Denethor has a bearing here. Rejecting Denethor's claim that Boromir would have brought him the Ring (RK 5.iv.813), Gandalf tells him that Boromir would not have done so, but 'would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen. He would have kept it for his own, and when he returned you would not have known your son.' So, too, Frodo, 'having stretched out his hand to this thing' and having taken it, is for the moment no longer recognizable. (Remember also how Bilbo and Sam were both suddenly unrecognizable, when Frodo felt they were after his Ring?)

Finally, the 'figure' has the wheel of fire in its hand, the same hand which has repeatedly reached for the Ring, the same hand which Frodo has had increasing difficulty stopping, and the same hand which Sam sees on Frodo's breast clutching the Ring through his shirt (TT 4.viii.706; 6.iii.935, 943-44). And the voice which speaks from the wheel of fire clearly speaks as Frodo: 'You cannot betray me or slay me now' and 'Begone and trouble me no more. If you ever touch me again ....' At least in and for this moment, Frodo and the wheel of fire seem to be one, as if the wheel of fire is to Frodo as the Eye is to Sauron. In the struggle within Frodo between what I shall call the 'Ring-bearer-will' -- that is, 'the Ring is my burden' -- and the 'Ringlord-will' -- that is, 'the Ring is mine' -- the wheel represents Frodo's understanding of what he will become when his will breaks and he claims the Ring for his own, as he presently shall in Sammath Naur. Had Frodo prevailed in his challenge to Sauron -- as he could not have done -- the livery of his Dark Tower would have been the wheel of fire.

_____________________

1 John Garth, 'Frodo and the Great War', in The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edd. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Marquette 2006, p. 50 with no. 51. Garth draws on Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford 1975, pp. 118-19. 

2 Artifact of translation -- In translated works, as The Lord of the Rings claims to be, a translator will at times err in allowing an anachronism or other error to creep into the text because the words chosen to represent the original excel at communicating the idea or image in terms better suited to the reader than to the text. To say that the dragon firework at Bilbo's party passed overhead with a sound like an express train makes perfectly clear to the reader, but makes no sense regarded in context since there were no trains, express or otherwise, in Middle-earth. A perfect example is in Aubrey De Selincourt's translation of book 2, chapter 56 of Livy's History of Rome, where the consul is said to have 'stuck to his guns.' Perfectly clear to the reader, but absurd since guns did not exist in 471 B.C.E.

3 The phrase 'all aboard', like 'express train', has no place in Middle-earth, since it evokes the boarding call used to warn passengers that their boat or train was about to depart. While it fits nicely with 'express train', Tolkien may well have associated the phrase with boats. According to the OED, the phrase's link with trains is far more American than British. If so, that is intriguing since hobbits dislike boats and travel by water and the Sea is symbolic of death to them.

4 All other references to the Eye or uses of the word that invoke it, even proleptically: FR 1.i.34; vii.132-33; 2.ii.274; TT 3.i.414; iii.451, 452; v.499; ix.564; x.582; xi.589; 4.i.605; ii.625, 631, 632; iii.642, 648; iv.651; vii.702; x.733, 738; RK 5.iv.821; ix.879; x.885; 6.i.898 (twice), 903, 907-08; ii.921, 923, 924; iii.935-36, 942 (twice), 946.

Review of Holly Ordway -- "Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages"

In this well made, thoroughly researched, and clearly written book, Holly Ordway has at long last rid us of the false notion that Tolkien neither read nor liked anything written after the Middle Ages. The specific suggestions she has made that a given author influenced Tolkien in a given way will be met with approving nods as well as eyebrows cocked in disbelief. That is the way of things. There were moments I did both in quick succession, within the same paragraph. Nevertheless, Ordway has proved her overall point quite persuasively and finally. Tolkien unquestionably read modern books, enjoyed them, and was influenced by them. 

Of equal or perhaps greater importance than the many positive proofs Ordway offers of Tolkien's engagement with modern books are her investigations in the book's first and last chapters into the sources of this common misunderstanding of Tolkien: it arose from a combination of the job Humphrey Carpenter did in his biography of Tolkien and Tolkien's own ways of expressing himself. One can only hope that Ordway's reassessment will lead the Tolkien Estate to authorize a new and more scholarly biography by a writer worthy of the task, someone like John Garth, whose 'Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth' has set a high professional standard.

In the Dead Marshes We Hear No Larks at Morning

Paul Nash, We Are Making A New World, Imperial War Museum

Since at least the twelfth century larks at morning have featured in English poetry, at first not even in English, as these Latin lines from Alexander of Neckam show, playing on the similarity of 'lark' (alauda) and 'praises' (laudat) to derive a (false) etymology:

Laudat alauda diem, praenuncia laeta diei
    Laudat, et a laudis nomine nomen habet.
Quamvis moesta thorum properans Aurora Tithoni
    Linquat, surgentem laeta salutat avis. 

(De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, 2.765-68) 

The lark, day's happy herald, praises the day,
    She praises it, and from the name of 'praise' gets her name.
Though sad Aurora leaves in haste Tithonus' bed,
    The happy bird greets her as she arises.

Onward through the centuries in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Meredith, and Hopkins, the lark is jubilant, protective of its own, and soaring high and free to greet the dawn. There's nothing to wonder at in all this poetry on the lark. For long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green, every morning was full of birdsong. (In fact, it still is. Open your windows; mute your machines.)  As J. V. Baker, who knew firsthand what the poets he was writing about knew, said: 

 Any knowledge of the habits of the English lark will make it easy to see why it is always associated with rapturous and soaring flight; no bird is apparently more airy and carefree or ventures higher; yet it always has an invisible cord of attachment that pulls it back to its grassy nest concealed on the ground. My first recollection of larks is of hearing them above a wheatfield; the golden ranks of wheat, relieved here and there with blood-red poppies, stood right up to the edge of the chalk cliffs falling perpendicularly into the sea near Margate; and the blue sky was filled with the song of larks. 

(The Lark in English Poetry, p. 70)

It is thus no surprise that during World War One men raised on such poetry and such experiences would find solace in the larks that sang and soared about the fields of France at dawn. 'What the lark usually betokens' for the men at the front, writes Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (p. 242), 'is that one has got safely through another night', though men were also well aware of the absurdity of the birds singing while around them swirled a nightmare of slaughter, something the poets of the war saw both sides of.

A Lark Above the Trenches  

Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!
Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky-
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy,
His lyric wild and free – carols a lark. 

I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar,
I dream of Love, its ecstasy he sings;
Doth lure my soul to love till like a star
It flashes into Life: O tireless wings 

That beat love’s message into melody –
A song that touches in this place remote
Gladness supreme in its undying note
And stirs to life the soul of memory –
‘Tis strange that while you’re beating into life
Men here below are plunged in sanguine strife!

Will Streets

 And:

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg

Now, as has long been clear, Tolkien's experience of the Somme in WWI influenced his portrayal of Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor with Gollum. We can see this most clearly in The Passage of the Marshes, as Tolkien conceded (Letters, no. 226), and as John Garth has amply demonstrated in his splendid (if hard to come by) " 'As under a green sea': Visions of War in the Dead Marshes". Now we should not expect Tolkien to have included every commonplace of English literature, nor of the WWI poets, in his translation of his experience. Nor would its absence be particularly noteworthy, or even noticeable, if he did not draw our attention to it:

As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.  

'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.  

'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.

(TT 4.ii.626)

Larks belong to the serene, dazzling world of the golden sun, to a world where dawn came clear and bright, as it had not in the marshes that morning (TT 4.ii.625). Theirs is not the rotten, murky world in which the three hobbits seek to hide. Their absence is a silence that grieves and dispirits Sam. And Gollum, who regrets the lack of birds for a different reason, makes quite clear that their absence from the marshes is not merely a passing one. 

And Tolkien was well acquainted the image of the lark at dawn and the power it could have. He certainly knew it from Chaucer and from most if not all of the poets down to Meredith and Hopkins; and even if he had never read another WWI poet, he had edited Spring Harvest, the collection of his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who wrote of the lark in his poem 'Over the hills and hollows green' before perishing at the Somme. In The Lay of Leithian, moreover, he uses the image of the lark three times (Lays, 176, 291, 355), and then once in Aragorn's song of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.xi.192).  But it is in The Silmarillion (165) that he uses it with most striking effect:

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed. 

Then the spell of silence fell from Beren .... 

That Tolkien here likens Lúthien Tinúviel, the nightingale who sings in the dusk, to the lark is fascinating in its own right, and I think this juxtaposition signals just how epochal the love of Beren and Lúthien will be. Yet more importantly for us here now is that in both these texts without the song of the lark silence has lease. In The Silmarillion Lúthien sings like the lark and breaks the spell on Beren, whose naming her Tinúviel, nightingale, then casts a spell of love over her, thus changing the world. In The Passage of the Marshes, without lark or song, things just get worse for Frodo and Sam. Ahead of them that very night are the 'things in the pools' that Gollum slyly alluded to, the dead from whom the marshes take their name (TT 4.ii.627-28); and when, still later that same night, they at last hear a cry upon the air and the rush of wings, it is no skylark welcoming the dawn, but a creature of horror whose coming snuffs out even the candles of the corpses: " 'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings!' " (TT 4.ii.630). As a result, a shadow falls on all their hearts. Gollum begins to revert to his former self, and Frodo himself grows increasingly silent, like Beren before Lúthien sang.  After two more such visitations (TT 4.ii.634-35), the chapter ends :

So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they walked on in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.

(TT 4.ii.635)

So in The Passage of the Marshes not only does Tolkien eschew the common trope of larks at dawn, which is reasonable enough given the context, but by substituting the winged Nazgûl to break the larkless silence he reworks the trope to introduce the nightmare that will persist and deepen, with one contrasting interlude in Ithilien, until Mt Doom. 

___________________________________

Works Consulted

___________________________________

James V Baker, The Lark in English Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1950), pp. 70-79

Priscilla Bawcutt, The Lark in Chaucer and Some Later Poets, The Yearbook of English Studies,Vol. 2 (1972), pp. 5-12

Abraham, Wilfred, and John at the Pyre of Denethor (RK 5.vii.850-57)

The Parable of the Young Man and the Old

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. 

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In discussing Faramir during his recent course at Signum University, 'Tolkien's Wars and Middle-earth', John Garth astutely noted the parallels between Faramir's relationship with his father in The Pyre of Denethor (RK 5.vii).850-57 and Isaac's relationship with Abraham in Wilfred Owen's The Parable of the Young Man and the Old, which retells the story of Genesis 22:1-18.¹  Just as Owen has in this poem mythologized the distrust which the young soldiers on the Western Front often felt for their older superiors who sacrificed them needlessly, as they saw it, so, too, Tolkien: Denethor first sends his son on a hopeless mission from which he returns near death, and then he attempts to burn him alive on the funeral pyre on which he means to kill himself. Thus, as is often the case, we may see Tolkien incorporating and transforming his experience of World War One in his literary works.

This is an area of study too long neglected, but which has lately begun to receive proper attention, thanks to works like Garth's Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle-earth, and this year's Baptism of Fire: the Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I, edited by Janet Brennan Croft. And it is a mark of just how much study needs to be done that writers such as Owen and Tolkien, whom most readers and critics would consider worlds apart, can have so similar a response to the war. Indeed it is tempting to ask if Tolkien was acquainted with Owen's poem, but this may be impossible to answer, and the story of Abraham and Isaac was -- and is -- one of the best known in the Bible. All we can say with certainty is that both men would have known the story in Genesis.

Yet Tolkien's vision is as multifarious as C. S. Lewis said it was.  If we set aside the links between Tolkien, World War One, and the story (I nearly said 'the parable') of Denethor and Faramir, there's still more to see.  For Tolkien recasts elements of the tale of Abraham and Isaac to tell a story of his own in The Pyre of Denethor, one about fathers and sons and pride and despair, just as Genesis tells of humility and faith. While several sets of fathers and sons appear in The Lord of the Rings -- Glóin and Gimli; Elrond, Elladan and Elrohir; Beregond and Bergil; Sam and the Gaffer -- only in this case do both father and son play prominent and critical roles in the story. Nor can we ignore Boromir in this connection, since even dead he is part of the dynamic of sacrifice acted out by Denethor and Faramir.

First let us have a look at Genesis 22:1-18 (KJV):

22 And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.  

2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.  

3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.  

4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. 

5 And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.  

6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. 

7 And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?  

8 And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.  

9 And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.  

10 And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. 

11 And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.  

12 And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.  

13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.  

14 And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.  

15 And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time,  

16 And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son:  

17 That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;  

18 And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.

Abraham acts out of faith. When the Lord tells him to sacrifice his son, he does not question or balk. He accepts that the Lord is the Lord, and that obedience is his due. In fact we see faith in operation throughout the story, as Abraham's men and his son obey him without question.  Nor does the story tell us that Isaac resisted being bound.  He submits to his father's authority just as Abraham did to God's. The one hint we get that Abraham is not some entirely emotionless monster is his response to Isaac, that 'God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.' This statement is true of course (both presently and with prophetic irony), but it is also a prevarication. Abraham will not tell Isaac that he is to be the lamb.

Now it might seem that nothing in The Pyre of Denethor or the story leading up to it matches God's command to sacrifice Isaac, but that is not quite so. For after Denethor has dispatched Faramir on a fruitless errand against all advice (RK 5.iv.816) --  an act he characterizes as 'spending even my sons', which is the mark of 'all great lords' (RK 5.iv.818) --  Faramir is lucky to return alive:

The Prince Imrahil brought Faramir to the White Tower, and he said: 'Your son has returned, lord, after great deeds, and he told all that he had seen.' But Denethor rose and looked on the face of his son and was silent. Then he bade them make a bed in the chamber and lay Faramir upon it and depart. But he himself went up alone into the secret room under the summit of the Tower; and many who looked up thither at that time saw a pale light that gleamed and flickered from the narrow windows for a while, and then flashed and went out. And when Denethor descended again he went to Faramir and sat beside him without speaking, but the face of the Lord was grey, more deathlike than his son's. 

(RK 5.iv.821; cf. vii.856-57)

As we later learn, Denethor has just looked into the palantír of Minas Tirith, not for the first time, and been deceived by Sauron into abandoning all hope of victory or survival (RK 5.vii.856).  Add to this the bitter conflict within him over the way he has 'spent' his sons (RK 5.1.754-56; iv.812-13, 816-17, 824), and his mind is overthrown. Once all that he values seems lost -- city, sons, stewardship -- it does not matter that Faramir is not yet dead.

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

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

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

The messengers without bow or answer turned and fled.  

(RK 5.iv.825)

Gandalf, when informed of Denethor's actions, immediately comments: 'Even in the heart of our stronghold the Enemy has the power to strike us: for his will it is that is at work' (RK 5.vii.850), a sentiment he repeats or hints at no fewer than five more times in this short chapter (RK 5.vii,851, 853, 854-55, 856 [twice]). So it would seem that Sauron plays the same role here as God does in Genesis 22. Let me be clear about this.  I am not saying that Sauron told Denethor in so many words to burn himself and Faramir to death.  I don't think that's what Gandalf is saying either.

Rather, Sauron uses Denethor's pride and despair to destroy him by deceiving him about what he is seeing.  As with the temptation of the Ring, the creation of Sauron's malice and subtlety, the details will work themselves out in accordance with the stature of the person tempted: Gandalf and pity, Boromir and victory, Galadriel and rule, Sam and a garden, Gollum and murder. So, unlike God in Genesis 22, Sauron does not issue a specific command, but like him he sets events in motion.

Tolkien, moreover, was well aware that 'to tempt' is, fundamentally, 'to test,' even if it has acquired the predominant meaning 'to attempt to lure into evil.' And it is precisely as a test that he construes the act of looking into a palantír. Once Gandalf learns that Sauron has one of the seeing stones, he speaks of an encounter with him through the stones in just that way:

'Maybe, I have been saved by [Pippin] from a grave blunder. I had considered whether or not to probe this Stone myself to find its uses. Had I done so, I should have been revealed to [Sauron] myself. I am not ready for such a trial, if indeed I shall ever be so. But even if I found the power to withdraw myself, it would be disastrous for him to see me....' 

(TT 3.xi.595, emphasis mine)

and

'Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle's foot, the spider in a steel web! How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dur that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither? And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would...' 

(TT 3.xi.598, emphasis mine)

In fact the use of a palantir is always portrayed as a struggle against Sauron. Pippin struggles to break free and fails (TT 3.ix.592). Saruman is 'trapped and held,' 'persuaded', 'daunted,' and 'constrained,' all of which suggest his attempts to resist. Gandalf fears to hazard such a trial. Only Aragorn, has both the right to the stone and the 'will of adamant' that allows him to prevail -- 'barely' but completely -- in such a struggle (RK 5.ii.780).  Denethor, perhaps because he lacks the right to use the stone, which makes it folly for him to try, seems to himself to have won the contest of wills with Sauron, but the Dark Lord is deceiving him by influencing what he sees (RK 5.vii.856). Like Saruman, Denethor's wisdom fails. His pride and despair work against each other to counter his strength and undermine his reason.  Thus he fails the test, just as Abraham, through faith and humility, passed it. And in failing the test Denethor causes unnecessary death -- his own not least -- and strife among his own, in contrast to the unity and obedience that prevails among those who follow Abraham.

Both Abraham and Denethor, moreover, receive visits from messengers.  Denethor in fact receives two such visits, first by his own men who seek to recall him to his duty: 'What are your commands? You are still the Lord and Steward' (RK 5.iv.825).  His mad response so terrifies them that 'without bow or answer they turned and fled.' Their failure to bow signifies the breakdown of the bonds between them, in much the same way as Beregond's subsequent choice to forsake his post and draw his sword to protect the helpless Faramir (RK 5.iv. 826-27; vii.850-52, 854-55).

The second messenger is of course Gandalf -- all of the Istari 'were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron' (RK B 1084) -- and like the 'angel of the Lord' in Genesis he comes explicitly to stop the 'burnt offering' about to be kindled.² And every word of Gandalf's conversation with Denethor underlines the fact that, unlike Abraham, Denethor had no 'authority' to do as he was doing. Rather he was acting out of pride and despair, like 'the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power' (RK 5.vii.851-54). Gandalf's 'authority is not given to you' (by whom?) and his reference to 'heathen' kings are rare suggestions of supernatural authority in The Lord of the Rings, which the transition to a discussion of the earthly power of the Steward and the return of the King emphasizes by contrast.

Nor is Tolkien any stranger to making use of this passage in Genesis, but adapting it to his own needs. In the mid to late 1950s he wrote the chapter of The Silmarillion entitled Of Aulë and the Dwarves.³  There, in a passage whose language is quite biblical, Aulë is surprised by Ilúvatar after he has created the race of Dwarves.

Now Ilúvatar knew what was done, and in the very hour that Aulë's work was complete, and he was pleased, and began to instruct the Dwarves in the speech that he had devised for them, Ilúvatar spoke to him; and Aulë heard his voice and was silent. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to him: 'Why hast thou done this? Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority? For thou hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle. Is that thy desire?' 

Then Aulë answered: 'I did not desire such lordship. I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty of Eä, which thou hast caused to be. For it seemed to me that there is great room in Arda for many things that might rejoice in it, yet it is for the most part empty still, and dumb. And in my impatience I have fallen into folly. Yet the making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of his father. But what shall I do now, so that thou be not angry with me for ever? As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made. Do with them what thou wilt. But should I not rather destroy the work of my presumption?'  

Then Aulë took up a great hammer to smite the Dwarves; and he wept. But Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility; and the Dwarves shrank from the hammer and were afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to Aulë: 'Thy offer I accepted even as it was made. Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices? Else they would not have flinched from thy blow, nor from any command of thy will.' Then Aulë cast down his hammer and was glad, and he gave thanks to Ilúvatar, saying: 'May Eru bless my work and amend it!'

(Silmarillion, 43-44)

In humility and obedience, 'as a child to his father,' Aulë offers up what he has created without authority, and even asks if it would not be better to destroy 'the work of my presumption.'  For his submission he is rewarded, just as Abraham was. Denethor transgresses as well, by daring to use the palantír without the right to do so, by scorning the return of the lawful King, and finally by preferring suicide and murder to courage and duty. Unlike Abraham and Aulë he will not submit to authority. His pride and despair prevent it and destroy him.  Thus in The Pyre of Denethor Tolkien transforms the elements of the story of Abraham and Isaac to shape a powerful mythic portrayal of the terrible consequences of Denethor's flaws and errors of judgement. 

If, as Garth persuasively argues, Tolkien's portrayal of the relationship between Faramir and Denethor also draws form and power from the relationship between the young soldiers in the trenches and their generals who 'spent their sons' with such profligacy, then Tolkien's use of Genesis here, likening Denethor to an Abraham who refused the messenger's command to spare his son, seems even more powerful and damning. And, if anything, it is that detail, which both Tolkien and Owen share -- the refusal to heed the messenger -- that makes me believe Tolkien likely did know Owen's poem. 

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¹ As John Garth has also pointed out in class and in correspondence, the parallel between The Pyre of Denethor and The Parable of the Young Man and the Old has also been noted before here and here.

² 'Angel' comes from the Greek ἄγγελος, a translation of the Hebrew מלאך, 'malakh,' both of which mean 'messenger.' Quite frequently in the letters Tolkien refers to the Ainur in general as 'angelic.' See, for example, Letters, 153, p. 193-94. See also letter 181, p. 237 on Gandalf: 'His function as a "wizard" is an angelos or messenger from the Valar or Rulers: to assist the rational creatures of Middle-earth to resist Sauron, a power too great for them unaided.'

³ See The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion, Part Two. The History of Middle-Earth (New York 1994) IX 212-13.

An Allusion to Rupert Brooke in Tolkien?

In addressing the assumptions of some readers that The Lord of the Rings was about World War II, Tolkien reminds us that he had been in World War I (FR xxiv, emphasis added):

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. 

In John Garth's Mythgard class on Tolkien and the Great War today we were reading Rupert Brooke's 1914 sonnet Peace and a phrase leaped out at me (emphasis added):

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love! 

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Even if the striking similarity of phrase is accidental -- which I don't believe for a moment, given Brooke's fame early and late as the poster boy of World War I poets -- Tolkien and Brooke take the idea of youth being caught in such different directions that I think I will have to give these passages further thought.  But not tonight.  Tonight I just want to revel in the pleasure of having heard the echo. 

Tolkien Reading Day 2015 -- On Friendship

The other day, thanks to +Jeremiah Burns, I read a BBC article on a 98 year old woman whose mother gave her the middle name of 'Somme' in remembrance of the horrific battle in which her father had died some months before she was born.  It was a moving piece.  The woman, Tiny Somme Gray, said she could not sign her name without thinking of the father she had never known.  Her mother did not speak of her husband's death, she told the BBC, or visit the local WWI memorial on which his name was inscribed.  But she made certain her daughter went there and would always remember.  The depth of her sorrow is clear even now, as is the depth of the love and friendship she must have shared with her husband.

Since we were just reading the first version of the story of Túrin in our class on The Book of Lost Tales, Part II at Mythgard, I was reminded of that story, in which Túrin's father, Húrin, goes off to fight in the battle that came to be known as the Battle of Unnumbered Tears.¹  But in addition to a son, Húrin left behind Morwen, his wife who was carrying their child. Since Húrin did not return from the battle and no news of his fate could be learnt, Morwen named their daughter 'Nienor, which is Mourning' (Unfinished Tales, 73).² 

Stories like this must have been all too common in WWI.  Thousands of children, conceived on a brief visit home or a briefer honeymoon, must have been born to wives who waited in what was most likely stoic dread for the word that their child would be born too late to know its father; or, if these wives were not left pregnant, many of them must have wondered if they would ever have children at all. Among these women was Edith Tolkien, who married Tolkien 99 years ago today, on 22 March 1916, but 'May found [him] crossing the Channel ... for the carnage of the Somme' (Letters, no. 43, p. 53). He was 'a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily' (Letters, no. 43, p. 53). Their first child, John, was born in November 1917:

She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now [in 1941].

(Letters, no. 43, p. 53)

Even a quarter of a century later everything is seen in terms of the doubt and peril of the war (which seemed to be repeating itself, only worse in March 1941, when England stood entirely alone). What must it have been like for Edith in 1916 and 1917, with letters and telegrams arriving in every town in Britain every day to transform a woman's worst fear into sorrow? I have heard it said that people hated the very sight of the telegram delivery man. 

It was a time of horrors that shattered the mirror of complacency in which Europe had long admired itself.  Old Poets, like Yeats, felt it in The Second Coming.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And Young Poets felt it more so, men like Siegfried Sassoon, a contemporary of Tolkien, who also served in France and wrote many increasingly bitter poems about the war.

Suicide in the Trenches 

I knew a simple soldier boy 
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.  

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again. 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

I could easily find and cite a hundred more poems -- not to mention short stories and novels -- that would bludgeon this point home, but the wonder here is that Tolkien did not become lost as so many others of his time did.³ And I at least always hear an echo of the disillusionment and despair that inform these poems in Frodo's words to Sam in Mordor:

'No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star, are left to me now.  I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.'

(RK 6.iii.937-938)

Frodo knew 'the hell where youth and laughter go.' And so, therefore, did Tolkien. Frodo never returned from that dark wood.  Sam and Tolkien did.  When you read the WWI poets you see the way they feel about England, and how much a part of their affection for their homeland some vision of the English countryside is.  This is especially true early on in the war.  But if you know your Tolkien, it is clear that his vision is much the same as theirs.  His found expression in the Shire.

Because of his faith, because of the stories he began to write down during the war, and probably just as importantly because of his friendship and love with his wife, Edith, who subsequently vanishes from our view into the life of raising her children, and whose presence is lost in the impossible whirlwind of her husband's stories and teaching and better known friendships with C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Tolkien was able to transform that experience into something greater.  And I don't mean something as pseudo-intellectual as 'he transformed his experience into The Lord of the Rings.'  No, if anything his writing was a tool for him as much as it was a tale for others.  He transformed his experience into a full and round and thoughtful life.  And again I do not mean he sat down to write as a form of therapy.  That was just a large part of the way he approached the world and understood it.

What do most of us know of Edith?  Not much.  But if all we know is just one thing, it is that when she died Tolkien had 'Luthien' inscribed on the headstone, to be joined by 'Beren' when he died two years later. He even said at one point in a letter to his son, Christopher, that Edith had provided the inspiration for the Tale of Beren and Luthien (Letters no. 340, pp. 420-421).  This is of course all quite romantic and charming.  But if all we do is look warmly upon it, and think how sweet it is, we are missing something very important.  The relationship of Beren and Luthien changed their world.  They were not just lovers in the old or new sense of the word.  Through their love and friendship they worked together and accomplished what all the armies of Men and Elves could not; and their love and deeds had an effect that rippled down the ages, and more than once gave birth to hope in darkness. In that respect it is the most important Tale of Middle-Earth, and the Great Tales never do end. 

That is what love and friendship, as Tolkien sees them, can do. 

We should not neglect where the Tale went in remembering the sweetness of where it came from. 

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¹ British killed and wounded at the Somme between July and November 1916 numbered over 350,000. I have long thought that these casualties, combined with Tolkien's memory of Homer, who said that the destructive wrath of Achilles μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ἔθηκε (Iliad 1.2) -- 'put unnumbered woes on the Achaeans' -- was the inspiration (hardly the proper word for something so grim) for the name 'Unnumbered Tears.' μυρία means 'numberless, countless, infinite.' I would be quite surprised if I were the first to point this out.

² I take a liberty here, using the more familiar, later forms of the names Húrin, Morwen, and Nienor. In The Book of Lost Tales, Part II they are called Úrin, Mavwin, and Nienóri.

³ For the WWI poets, see Santanu Das, The Cambridge Companion to the Poets of the First World War (2013); Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall (2013); Max Egremont, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew (2014); and John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: On the Threshold of Middle-Earth (2004).