Wonder Invoked -- On the Uses of Enchantment

Trying to find my room on day one of Mythmoot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mythmoot IV -- A New Hope

Here it is, folks, the very first, entirely unofficial, totally parodic, commercial for Mythmoot IV. (That may or may not be Harold Bloom's house at the end.)

A Few Poems, mostly silly, from Mythgard's "Almost an Inkling" Writing Contest

First the rather ridiculous, a couple of clerihews, none too good:

Sauron
Moron
No Ring
Nothing.

***

Ar-Pharazôn
Beyond comparison.
He stepped ashore.
No Númenor.

***

and a sonnet -- which may also be ridiculous, but not on purpose -- about the heartbreaking, too little known, tale of Andreth and Aegnor (Morgoth's Ring, volume X of The History of Middle-Earth, 323-25):

On sunlit heights our love ensnared our youth
In longing, passion’s swift flame, sharp and brave
To speed my years in dreams that knew not truth:
My love was time’s own master, I its slave.
How fair, how strong he’ll be, how bright his eye,
As clear as heaven’s lights in heaven’s kindling shine.
How glad his smile – how glad he smiled at me, how shy,
Once, once. How light his trembling hand on mine.
How long ago. How many Winters deep,
How many Summers bare of fruit remain,
Now all my nights are old and full of sleep?
Now word comes he loves and loves in pain.
Does he? Oh, does he wait for me as I
Awaited him? Wait still and waiting die?

Hobbit Verses Versus Verses by Hobbits: Orality, Poetry, and Literacy in Bilbo's Shire

On Saturday 3 October I had the good fortune to attend the The Mythgard Institute's Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium at the University of Maryland. It was as fine a mixture of work and play as you could want, with never a dull boy to be found. Among other subjects, we spoke of Star Wars, Philip Pullman, Prophecy and Predestination, Lovecraft, Tolkien, The Kalevala, film adaptation, On Fairy-Stories, Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, Ted Chiang, Frank Herbert, and Stephen Sondheim. Discussion was lively, and laughter abundant.

But for me the two highlights of the day were a trivia contest focusing on hapax legomena (words that occur only once) in The Lord of the Rings, and Sørina Higgins' interview of Verlyn Flieger about her latest book, a scholarly edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's first prose tale, The Story of Kullervo, which, alas, will not be published in the States until next spring. (If you can't wait -- I couldn't -- you can order it directly from Blackwell's, and doubtless other places as well.)

In all it was a wonderful time. I had the chance to become better acquainted with several people I had only met briefly before, or only on the web, and to chat for the first time with others I had not known at all.  I very much hope that we'll see more meetings like this in the near future. Supporting The Mythgard Institute will help that happen.

I was also fortunate enough to present a brief paper, Hobbit Verses Versus Verses by Hobbits: Orality, Poetry, and Literacy in Bilbo's Shire, which I have added below for all who may be interested. I plan to expand it at some point in the future, to discuss some of the material I had to relegate to the footnotes during my talk, the material I mention in my final paragraph, and other hobbit poems, like Sam's Oliphaunt, and Frodo's spontaneous verse, after the fashion of Tom Bombadil, when he first sees Goldberry. But for now, here it is.

_______________________________

One summer evening in the Ivy Bush Gaffer Gamgee was denying that Bag End was ‘packed with chests of gold and silver, and jools’ (FR 1.i.23):

‘… my lad Sam will know more about that. He’s in and out of Bag End. Crazy about stories of the old days he is, and he listens to all Mr. Bilbo’s tales. Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters – meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it. 

‘Elves and Dragons’ I says to him. ‘Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you,’ I says to him.

(FR 1.i.24, emphasis original)

Only a few days later Bilbo sent out so many party invitations that both local Post Offices were overwhelmed, and needed volunteers to handle all the replies: ‘There was a constant stream of them going up the Hill, carrying hundreds of polite variations on Thank you, I shall certainly come’ (1.i.26).

These few brief quotes suggest that basic literacy in the Shire was quite common, but not universal.[1] Moreover, the Gaffer’s defensiveness and his insistence that gardeners like him and Sam – thus  ‘cabbages and potatoes’ – shouldn’t get above themselves, point to a class distinction between those who can read and those who cannot, an impression reinforced by the colloquial illiteracies of his speech – ‘j-oo-ls,’ ‘learned’ as a synonym of ‘taught,’ and ‘says’ as a first person singular.[2]  That Sam, unlike his father, has learned to read is a sign of change, as are the children who witness Gandalf’s arrival and seem able to recognize the letter G in at least one and perhaps two writing systems (FR 1.i.25).

But there’s reading and there’s reading. Hobbits, we’re told in the Prologue, ‘delighted in such things [as genealogical tables], if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’ (FR 7). Thus, of the many works later composed by Merry, the best remembered in the Shire were his Herblore of the Shire, his Reckoning of the Years, which relates the calendars of Elves and Men to those of hobbits, and his Old Words and Names in the Shire (FR 15).  Among hobbits, The Old Farmer’s Almanac would have been a perennial bestseller.

The kinds of stories that Sam wants to read are of precisely the sort that hobbit literacy has no time for, stories of Elves and Dragons that take place in the ‘queer’ lands beyond the borders of the Shire which hobbit maps mark only with ‘mostly white spaces’ (FR 1.ii.43).[3]  Gil-galad may have been an elven king all right, but his name won’t fetch you a pint at The Ivy Bush.  A proper hobbit poem, however, might do just that.  But what’s a proper hobbit poem?

One type would be songs like Frodo’s The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late (FR 1.ix.158-160) or Sam’s The Stone Troll (FR 1.xii.206-208), drinking songs, if you will, that invite their audience to join in a rollicking good time.[4]  Another we would find in the songs which speak of life’s simple pleasures, such as long walks, cold beer, hot baths,  supper and, of course, bed.[5] Songs of this type share in a common meter, iambic tetrameter, which occurs so often in these poems that we may well call it ‘hobbit meter.’[6]  We can even see elvish poems translated by hobbits – like Gil-galad Was an Elven King and the hymns to Elbereth – rendered in this meter.[7]

A particularly noteworthy aspect of this type of hobbit verse is its mutability.  We have four versions of The Road Goes Ever On, each of which differs from its predecessor in its adaptation to the occasion.  Bilbo’s first version at the end of The Hobbit clearly reflects his hopes, fears, and sorrows as he returns home (313). His shorter, simpler version, sixty years later shows the heart’s ease he feels once free of the Ring (FR 1.i.35), just as Frodo’s alteration of a single word reveals the weight of the burden now upon him (FR 1.iii.73).[8]  The final version differs yet again, with more thorough changes in keeping with the end of Bilbo’s Road now being in sight, and Frodo’s just around the bend (RK 6.vi.987).  And in the only other poem that we get two versions of in ‘hobbit meter’ – Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red – there are likewise changes to suit the occasion (FR 1.iii.77-78; RK 6.ix.1028).

So we have here a form of poetry with an easily remembered four-beat line, with words that are readily changed to suit their context, and simple rhyme schemes, using couplets (AABB) or alternating lines (ABAB).[9]  Even the more rhythmically complex pub songs have mostly four-beat lines, and fairly straightforward rhyme schemes.[10]  Both these types of hobbit verse explicitly reuse old tunes, and seem to rely on oral transmission.[11] 

But there are other verses by hobbits which do not quite fit within these parameters.  More meditative and elegiac, they pursue paths that the other hobbit poems can suggest, but do not treat in detail.[12]  Bilbo’s  I Sit Beside the Fire and Think is the first clear example of this kind of verse (FR 2.iii.278-279).  Not only is its subject more somber, but only the even lines always have rhymes.  Frodo’s When Evening in the Shire Was Grey is even more directly concerned with death, though it remains traditional in rhyme and meter (FR 2.vii.359-60). But the most significant of all, I would argue, is Sam’s In Western Lands beneath the Sun (RK 6.i.908-09).

For through this poem we can see the arc of Sam’s growth as a storyteller and poet in parallel with the growth of hobbit poetry and literacy in a more literary direction.  After the good fun and nonsense of The Stone Troll we get Sam’s attempt to add to Frodo’s elegy for Gandalf, but The Finest Rockets Ever Seen is too full of childlike wonder at the ephemeral to touch the elegiac (FR 2.vii.360).  In Western Lands beneath the Sun, however, Sam not only leaves behind iambic tetrameter for alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter, but rises above even the contemplation of death we see in I Sit beside the Fire and Think and When Evening in the Shire Was Grey to meditate upon a beauty forever beyond the reach of the transient evils of this world.[13]  And the very words which introduce this poem describe that arc:

His voice sounded thin and quavering in the cold dark tower: the voice of a forlorn and weary hobbit that no listening orc could possibly mistake for the clear song of an Elven-lord. He murmured old childish tunes out of the Shire, and snatches of Mr. Bilbo's rhymes that came into his mind like fleeting glimpses of the country of his home. And then suddenly new strength rose in him, and his voice rang out, while words of his own came unbidden to fit the simple tune.

(RK 6.i.908)

Finally let us turn to a poem that in both form and substance reaches beyond such stuff as hobbit poems are made on. All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter, with its three-beat lines of irregular length, its nameless because un-nameable meter – iamb, anapest, anapest – and its simultaneous embrace of history, legend, and prophecy, is also the only poem in The Lord of the Rings that is actually presented to the characters in written form.  ‘It is not a very hobbity song,’  as Corey Olsen put it.[14]  It’s about as far from Sing Hey! For the Bath at Close of Day as we can get.

What we see here is Tolkien, with his uncanny heed of the smallest detail, suggesting a slow process across generations and classes, a shift from oral to written and a growth of the literary to extend beyond mere literacy. In this Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam all play their parts.  Had we the time, we might also examine Errantry and Eärendil and the poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.[15] And finally we might inquire how Sam’s ‘seed of courage’ had been nourished by poetry and tales of Elves and Dragons while it ‘wait[ed] for some final and desperate danger to make it grow’ (FR 1.viii.140).[16] But that is for another day.

---

[1] In addition, we may see Bilbo’s written notes to those to whom he gave gifts upon his departure.  He expects the recipients to be able to read them, and in two cases – Milo Burrows and Dora Baggins – he makes specific references to their literacy: FR 1.i.37.

[2] To be fair to the Gaffer, with ‘jools’ he is repeating what another has said, but that tends to reinforce the point about class since it shows more than one hobbit speaking so. Note also his description of Frodo as a ‘gentlehobbit’  and his concern to know whether ‘my Sam had behaved hisself and given satisfaction’ (RK 6.viii.1014).

[3] Though the Gaffer says that Sam is keen to listen to tales of Elves and Dragons, his words also clearly establish a link between such tales and Sam’s being taught to read by Bilbo. Sam’s later (mistaken) insistence that Bilbo ‘wrote’ The Fall of Gil-galad also suggests a connection with reading and writing (FR 1.xi.186).

[4] In At the Sign of the Prancing Pony Frodo sings his song a second time, ‘while many of [those in the room] joined in; for the tune was well known, and they were quick at picking up words’ (FR 1.ix.160). Note ‘words,’ not ‘the words,’ suggesting that they were good at this in general, as those who rely more on their memory than on writing would be.

If there should be any doubt that these two are in fact drinking songs, see HoME VI 142 n. 11, where Christopher Tolkien quotes his father’s outline, referring to the song in The Prancing Pony as precisely that.  It is also the case that Bingo (>Frodo) was originally meant to sing The Root of the Boot, an older troll song that evolved into The Stone Troll.  All versions of the troll song are sung to the tune of The Fox Went out on a Winter’s Night.  Subsequently  Bingo was given The Cat and the Fiddle to sing, which again evolved into The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late, and the troll song was made over to Sam and moved to its present location. See HoME VII.142-47.

Interestingly, Tolkien’s famous recording of the troll song deviates from the printed text of both The Root of the Boot and The Stone Troll, which lends indirect support to my suggestion below, p 4, that hobbit poetry of this kind was oral rather than written.  See the links below for recordings:

·         Tolkien sings The Stone Troll

·         The Root of the Boot

·         The Fox Went out on a Winter's Night

[5] ‘They began to hum softly, as hobbits have a way of doing as they walk along, especially when they are drawing near to home at night. With most hobbits it is a supper-song or a bed-song; but these hobbits hummed a walking-song (though not, of course, without any mention of supper and bed). Bilbo Baggins had made the words, to a tune that was as old as the hills, and taught it to Frodo as they walked in the lanes of the Water-valley and talked about Adventure.’  This passage both identifies what ‘most hobbits’ are like and in what ways “our” hobbits are like and unlike them.  Consider Pippin’s statement to Denethor (RK 5.iv.807): ‘[I can sing] well enough for my own people.  But we have no songs fit for great halls and evil times, lord.  We seldom sing of anything more terrible than wind and rain. And most of my songs are about things that make us laugh; or about food and drink, of course.’  Does ‘my’ imply that Pippin makes songs, or only refer to the songs he knows?  Note ‘of course’ in both passages, as if this should be obvious to everyone. Cf. Sam whistling on his way home to bed in The Shadow of the Past (FR 1.ii.45).

[6] I am indebted here to the discussions in classes 15 and 16 of Corey Olsen’s Mythgard course in Tolkien’s Poetry in the summer of 2015.

[7] While Bilbo seems to have consciously translated The Fall of Gil-galad (FR 1.xi.185-86), Frodo’s rendering of his first encounter with the hymn to Elbereth is described rather differently, as a spontaneous understanding produced by the art of elven minstrelsy (FR 1.iii.79): ‘One clear voice rose now above the others. It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it: Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear….’ See also FR 2.i.233 for a more detailed description of this effect.

[8] Between Bilbo’s version in The Hobbit and the versions in The Lord of the Rings there is one other difference that I believe is quite significant, the shift from ‘roads’ to ‘road,’ which signals a degree of abstraction, and reflects the frequent capitalization of Road in The Lord of the Rings.

[9] In addition to The Road Goes Ever On and Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red we have FR 1.iv.90: Ho! Ho! Ho! to the Bottle I Go; 1.v.101: Sing Hey! For the Bath at the Close of Day; 1.v.106: Farewell We Call to Hearth and Hall!; 1.vi.112: O! Wanderers in the Shadowed Land; 2.iii.273: When Winter First Begins to Bite; 2.vii.360: The Finest Rockets Ever Seen. Sing Hey! For the Bath at the Close of Day is also introduced as ‘one of Bilbo’s favorite bath songs,’ thus revealing the existence of a number of such songs.

[10] The Stone Troll has an A-A-B-C-C-A-C rhyme scheme, with four-beat lines that are basically iambic with some anapests and the odd trochee.  The fifth line in each stanza is the odd man out.  It has only four syllables, but I am unsure whether to take them as two trochees, or two spondees.  The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late has an A-B-C-C-B rhyme scheme, with the first, third, and fourth lines having four beats, and the second and fifth having three (anapest, iamb, iamb).  On these poems see also nn. 5 above and 11 below.

[11] Both The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late and The Stone Troll are said to be set to old tunes, using new words, as is Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red.  At Bree the tune is familiar to the patrons, who are so ‘good at picking up words’ that they are already singing along the second time through.  Bilbo, moreover, taught Frodo the words he had made up for Upon the Hearth while they were out walking in the Shire. With this we may compare the history of Farewell We Call to Hearth and Hall!  For since Bilbo kept his book away from prying eyes (FR 1.v.105), the only way Merry and Pippin could have learned the dwarf song (Hobbit 22-23) on which they modelled Farewell We Call to Hearth and Hall! (FR 1.v.106), is by hearing it. So in both cases we have evidence of oral transmission.

[12] Both of Bilbo’s road poems open the door to wider reflections, but do not really cross the threshold until their final versions late in The Lord of the Rings (RK 6.vi.987; ix.1028).  I believe that one could argue that Bilbo began weaving more distant horizons and larger perspectives Into the songs celebrating the loveliness of the countryside and the simple life. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Bilbo expanded the “genre” to include these things.

[13] RK 6.ii.922: ‘Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his masters, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.’

[14] In class 16 of his class on Tolkien’s Poetry in the summer of 2015 at 1:22.45.  The recording is proprietary.

[15] The Adventures of Tom Bombadil purports to come from near the time of The Lord of the Rings (29-30).  It clearly identifies Errantry as Bilbo’s work (30), and the hand that scrawled the words ‘Frodo’s Dreme’ at the head of The Sea Bell (33-34) must have been familiar with Frodo’s story in some form.

[16] ‘When [Frodo] came to himself again, for a moment he could recall nothing except a sense of dread. Then suddenly he knew that he was imprisoned, caught hopelessly; he was in a barrow. A Barrow-wight had taken him, and he was probably already under the dreadful spells of the Barrow-wights about which whispered tales spoke. He dared not move, but lay as he found himself: flat on his back upon a cold stone with his hands on his breast.

‘But though his fear was so great that it seemed to be part of the very darkness that was round him, he found himself as he lay thinking about Bilbo Baggins and his stories, of their jogging along together in the lanes of the Shire and talking about roads and adventures. There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit,

wailing for some final and desperate danger to make it grow. Frodo was neither very fat nor very timid; indeed, though he did not know it, Bilbo (and Gandalf) had thought him the best hobbit in the Shire. He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.’ 

(FR 1.viii.140).

With this passage on Frodo compare Sam’s famous discussion of the Great Tales with Frodo on the Stairs (TT 4.viii.711-13), his song in the tower (RK 6.i.908-909), his thoughts on the star and the song (RK 6.ii.922, quoted above n. 13), and the seeming death of hope (RK 6.iii.934).

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. 

Not What You Might Expect From Beowulf

A few months back I began a project I had long wished to undertake.  Ever since I was a lad and first read The Lord of the Rings, I had wanted to read Beowulf in Old English. At NYU I even began to learn Old English from Jess Bessinger, a wonderful, friendly teacher who made every class fun. I was, however, already taking five four credit courses that I needed for my majors that semester, and Old English, which I was only auditing, just had to go.

For me it was a remarkably responsible decision, since I was an arrogant young fool who thought I knew more and better than everyone, and who, consequently, usually did exactly as I pleased. Now all of that insolence served me about as well as you might imagine, but that's another tale. It took life nearly a decade to beat me into a state of reasonableness, and convince me of the error of false pride. To learn that all pride was false took another couple of decades.  And school's not out yet.

I was left with many regrets, and every one of them was doubtless of greater moment in the balance of my soul than failing to read Beowulf in Old English. Still, as time went on and all of the dust of a misspent youth slowly settled, the wish to read it in the original remained.  I knew from reading Homer and Vergil how much translations can differ, with one capturing one aspect of the text and another a different one, but none of them catching all of it. Then, a little over a year ago, the publication of Tolkien's translation and commentary breathed on the deeply banked coals of my desire, and the course I took at Mythgard with Professor Tom Shippey (another wonderful, friendly teacher of Old English), quickened them back into flame. 

So I found some resources online, like the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and Old English Aerobics.  I bought Clark Hall's dictionary and added a couple of useful apps to my tablet. In Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English I found a recent grammar that pleased my archaic philological soul and did not attempt to sneak the syntax, conjugations, and declensions in when I wasn't looking, as modern grammars often try to do.

Finally I added a copy of Klaeber's Beowulf, and a large, unlined Moleskine so I could copy out the text in my finest scrawl, write in vocabulary, and add notes. Now I wasn't starting entirely from scratch. The decades I had spent studying other inflected languages, like Latin, Greek, and German, left me familiar with the way the morphology and syntax of such languages worked.

So almost every night since March I have sat down with Klaeber and worked my way through some of the poem.  I puzzle out the forms and grammar and tease out the meaning, entering notes as I go into my handmade interleaved edition. Once I'm done with my lines for the night, I read Klaeber's notes, then Tolkien's translation and commentary. If necessary, as it usually is, I revisit my notes to make changes, references, corrections.  Mostly I do all this in silence, though sometimes I have a ballgame on low in the background, or Bach, or the incomparable Julie Fowlis.  There were nights earlier in the spring when the only sounds I could hear were the scritch of my pen on paper and the singing of the frogs outside.  I cover a dozen or a dozen and a half lines in a sitting, more lately as my Old English gets better and I begin to understand the words even as I write them out. And as I improve and read more, my admiration for Klaeber's Beowulf and Tolkien's continues to grow. 

The pleasure I have been granted from this has been so sweet. As strange as this may seem to someone whose tastes differ, for me every moment I've spent with it has been beautiful, a time in my day I greatly look forward to. If you think you are reaching out to touch the mind of another when you read a book, that is even more true when their thoughts are expressed in another language which you have to translate into your own. I love every minute of it. Even now, a piece of me begrudges the time I am taking to write this.  

Consequently I was looking forward to having some time off a couple of weeks back, thinking that I would devote hours every day to Beowulf.  I could read hundreds of lines and make 'real progress' in the poem, perhaps even finish the first half.  That was the plan. Push on.  Read more. Get better. But when my vacation came, I didn't do that.  I found I didn't want to. I read Beowulf at the same pace I'd been reading it before. It didn't take me long to realize why.

What sitting there reading in the quiet night after night had brought back to me were the endless hours I spent reading when I was in graduate school, night and day season after season long ago. Back then I would sit up all night reading, say, Greek Tragedy, taking notes, writing down vocabulary, flipping back and forth through my Liddell Scott Jones Greek-English Lexicon -- which probably weighs 20 pounds and, if the name Liddell rings a bell, it should.  Swathed in cigarette smoke, with a bottomless cup of coffee beside the ashtray, and my books open in a pool of lamplight before me, I would read forever, becoming lost in whatever it was, in the thoughts and lives of those people long ago who were so little different from me. 

I was in no hurry then. I read and studied because I loved to, because I wanted to.  My PhD was more a consequence of this passion than its object.  The reading days and nights were timeless, as childhood summers were timeless, with no purpose except to be what they were. It was utterly unselfconscious. Therein lay all my joy, in a time of my life that was otherwise nightmarish, a world of sorrow that is well lost and not mourned overmuch by me, or anyone else who was its victim. But the reading was all.

Later it all changed, as degree in hand I went forth to make a living, and very glad I was to make enough money to be able to afford more than five for a dollar Prince Macaroni and Cheese. But with the degree, the career, and the job came the pressure to publish in order to survive, which transmuted reading from an end to a means. I still read and still loved it, but a clock had begun ticking somewhere beyond the pool of light in which my books lay. Despite being fairly successful at publishing, the career never worked out the way I wanted it to.  I had traded something wonderful for nothing in the end. But one of my first and happiest thoughts when I decided to walk away from that world was that now I could read what I wanted when I wanted to do so.

And so -- gæð a wyrd swa hio sceal -- we come back to Beowulf years later, and the timeless summer of joy it has given back to me. I am in no hurry now.  Reading it will take as long as it takes.  

Again That Vile Creature, With A Special Guest Appearance by Grendel

In a series of recent posts I've been analyzing the portrayal of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings prior to his entry to the stage in The Taming of Sméagol.¹ One point I have touched upon is that the way Bilbo and Frodo see Gollum -- whether as an it or as a he, whether as a thing and a creature or as a person -- has a great impact on whether they can and do pity him.  And, though I am not yet ready to address this scene completely here and now, Sam finally attains the ability to pity Gollum at precisely the moment when Frodo, corrupted by the Ring, loses it and sees Gollum as only a thing once more.²

'Down, down!' [Frodo] gasped, clutching his hand to his breast, so that beneath the cover of his leather shirt he clasped the Ring. 'Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end. You cannot betray or slay me now.'  

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....  

Sam's hand wavered. His mind was hot with wrath and the memory of evil. It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature, just and many times deserved; and it also seemed the only safe thing to do. But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched. He himself, though only for a little while, had borne the Ring, and now dimly he guessed the agony of Gollum's shrivelled mind and body, enslaved to that Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again. But Sam had no words to express what he felt.  

'Oh, curse you, you stinking thing!' he said. 'Go away! Be off!'

(RK 6.iii.944)

If you've read my previous posts, the references to Gollum as it and thing and creature will seem familiar, but note also the effect that possession of the Ring has had on Frodo.  Just as Gollum is a shape and a shadow, a creature and a thing, so Frodo is a figure, not now or no longer a him, but also an it.  But even as this figure is 'untouchable now by pity' (a very bad sign), Sam at last discovers that same pity in his own heart, Sam who nevertheless still sees Gollum as a thing.

Clearly, however, Gollum has once again become for Frodo 'that vile creature' which -- not whom -- he thought it a pity that Bilbo did not kill.  Sam's thoughts, among other things, also remind the reader of that moment, and of Frodo's assertion that Gollum was ' "as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy.  He deserves death" ' (FR 1.ii.59).  This signifcant recurrence of the word 'creature' here argues that an examination of the uses of this word throughout The Lord of the Rings might prove interesting.

'Creature/s' occurs 105 times in The Lord of the Rings, 95 times in the tale itself, and 10 times in the prologue, synopses, and appendices.  Usage varies, describing a wide range of living or sentient beings, good, evil, and in between.  From the thinking fox in the Shire (FR 1.iii.72) to Treebeard's rhyme, 'Learn now the lore of living creatures' (TT 3.iv.464); from Gandalf's 'hobbits really are amazing creatures' (FR 1.ii.62) to Elrond's puzzled comment on Bombadil: 'He is a strange creature' (FR 2.ii.265); from Quickbeam and other ents (TT 3.viii.549, 568) to Grishnákh and the fell beasts the Nazgûl ride (TT 3.iii.447; 4.iii.645); and from the kind-hearted description of a post-Lockholes Lobelia as a 'poor creature' (RK 6.ix.1021), and of Bill the Pony as 'a poor old half-starved creature' (FR 1.xi.179), to Frodo's Ring-induced visions of Bilbo as Gollum (or something very like him), and Sam as an orc:

To his distress and amazement [Frodo] found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.

(FR 2.i.232)

and 

[Frodo] panted, staring at Sam with eyes wide with fear and enmity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist, he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes, and he passed a hand over his aching brow.  The hideous vision had seemed so real to him, half bemused as he was still with wound and fear.  Sam had changed before his eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and a slobbering mouth.

(RK 6.i.912)

Yet, despite the broad range of usage, the preponderance of uses is decidedly negative. Only 22 of the 95 uses can be called positive or neutral (23% -- see the starred items in the list below).  The other 73 are generally negative, as in the two quotes just above, or specifically describe beings that are evil.  28 of these 73 (38.4%) refer to orcs, trolls, Nazgûl, or other 'creatures of Sauron.'  But even more, 34/73 (45.6%), refer to Gollum.  No other single 'creature' -- not orcs nor even the Nazgûl -- comes close to his total.  So not only does the usage of the narrator (Frodo) show a decided preference for 'creature' as a description of evil beings, but in his eyes Gollum almost seems to define the category.

The evil of these creatures, we should note, lies not just in the eye of the beholder, as does that of the crickets of the Midgewater Marshes (FR 1.xi.183), of Sam as seen by Shelob (TT 4.x.728), or of Sam as seen by Frodo in the Tower of Cirith Ungol (RK 6.i.912).  Rather, they are evil in intention and action.  They are also almost all beings whose original natures have been corrupted, either individually or as a race: Gollum and the Ringwraiths by their rings, and orcs and trolls by the interventions of successive Dark Lords.³

Now here we need to draw attention to an intertextual link with Beowulf, specifically with Tolkien's translation of, and other remarks upon, on the poem. At lines 99-104 the poet mentions Grendel for the first time:

Swa þa drihtguman    dreamum lifdon,
eadiglice,     oð ðæt an ongan
fyrene fremman    feond on helle;
wæs se grimma gæst    Grendel haten,
mære mearcstapa,    se þe moras heold,
fen ond fæsten;

Which Tolkien translates:

Even thus did the men of that company live in mirth and happiness, until one began to work deeds of of wrong, a fiend of hell.  Grendel was that grim creature called, the ill-famed haunter of the marches of the land, who kept the moors, the fastness of the fens....

 (Beowulf, p. 16, ll. 81-85)

Creature renders gæst in line 102 of the Old English, which Bosworth-Toller defines as 'The soul, mind, spirit, spiritus, animus.'  Now one might object that this is just a coincidence, but Tolkien had clearly devoted some thought to the translation of the one word by the other.  In the appendix to his essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, he discusses 'Grendel's Titles,' like feond on helle, and in that context he says of gæst:

... it cannot be translated either by the modern ghost or spirit. Creature is probably the nearest we can now get.  Where it is genuine it applies to Grendel probably in virtue of his relationship or similarity to bogies (scinnum ond scuccum), physical enough in form and power, but vaguely felt as belonging to a different order of being, one allied to the malevolent 'ghosts' of the dead.⁵ 

And in his commentary on this same passage Tolkien writes:

The Old English féond on helle is a very curious expression.  It implies, of course, that Grendel is a 'hell-fiend', a creature damned irretrievably. It remains, nonetheless, remarkable; for Grendel is not 'in hell', but very physically in Denmark, and he is not yet a damned spirit, for he is mortal and has to be slain before he goes to Hell.  There is evidently a confusion or twilight in the thought of the poet (and his age) about these monsters, hostile to mankind.  They remain physical monsters, with blood, able to be slain (with the right sword).  Yet already they are described in terms applicable to evil spirits; so here (*102) gæst.

(Beowulf, p.119, emphasis Tolkien's)

And in a note on gæst here Christopher Tolkien points out that '[i]n all the texts of the translation [gæst] is rendered "creature".'  

Consider also part of Gandalf's description of Gollum:

'[t]he wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among the beasts and birds.  The Woodmen said that some new terror was abroad, a ghost that drank blood.  It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles.'

(FR 1.ii.58)

Ghosts that drink, and climb, and creep, and slip through windows are quite clearly 'physical monsters, with blood, able to be slain.'  Tolkien has taken 'ghost,' the direct etymological descendant of gæst, and used it here much as he has argued gæst is used in line 102 of Beowulf.

Similarly, Faramir says of the Nazgûl: 'to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they had become, terrible and evil' (TT 4.vi.692).  The Nazgûl, too, were 'physical enough in form and power' -- we should not confuse their invsibility with incorporeality -- else they would not need or even be able to ride horses, to wear cloaks or wield swords, open gates or knock on doors, be washed away by floods or killed by swords. And they, too, as we will recall, are called creatures as well as ghosts.

So we can see that the use of 'creature' to describe Gollum is hardly a neutral term. It does not just dehumanize him, as 'thing' does, but by itself almost defines him as evil, as being 'as bad as an orc,' and like the Ringwraiths themselves.  It classes him among the servants of Sauron, since not only orcs and trolls and wraiths are named 'creature' -- the very slaves of his will -- but so, too, are Saruman and Wormtongue (TT 3.ix.573; RK 6.vi.980), more remote servants who, like Gollum, mean only to serve themselves.⁶ Finally, we can see the link between 'creature' and gæst in Tolkien's thought, which can enhance our understanding of both The Lord of the Rings and Beowulf.

___________________________

¹ See Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (I), Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (II), Two Observations on Gollum's First Appearance at 4.i.612-613, and That Vile Creature -- An Observation Revisited.

² There is much in this scene on the slopes of Mt Doom that needs to be parsed, but to do so properly, with even the slim hope of a well founded understanding, requires working my way through the entire spiritual and psychological journey of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. That's going to take a while. 

³ Treebeard says that '[t]rolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves' (TT 3.iv.486); and Frodo: 'The Shadow that bred [Orcs] can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own.  I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined and twisted them....' (RK 6.i.914).  Before the time of this tale, orcs had begun to appear who did not fear daylight (TT 4.iii.449, 452; vii.540; RK A.1053), and trolls who 'were no longer dull-witted, but cunning' (FR 1.ii.44; RK F.1132). It nowhere says explicitly in The Lord of the Rings that Orcs were first made by Morgoth from Elves, but that is reasonably inferred from the statements just quoted.  See The Silmarillion (50):

Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressëa, that all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes.

Tolkien thought much about the origins of the Orcs in his later years.  See Morgoth's Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One.  The History of Middle-Earth (New York, 1993) x.408-424, a fascinating series of notes and essays in which Tolkien wrestles with the nature of Orcs and its theological implications.

⁴ For a fine discussion of intertextuality in Tolkien and Beowulf, I would like to refer the reader to Sørina Higgins' lecture on the topic in Professor Tom Shippey's current course at the Mythgard Institute, Beowulf Through Tolkien, and Vice Versa, but the recording is not available to the public at this time.  Should that change, I will add the link.

⁵ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, ed. C. Tolkien (London, 2006) p. 35.  The emphasis in the quotation is Tolkien's.

⁶ Gandalf suspected that Gollum had been released from Mordor '[o]n some errand of mischief' (FR 1.ii.59). Frodo also believes this to be true (TT 4.iii.643: 'Were you not rather permitted to depart, upon an errand?'). Which Gollum admits, with an explanation ('Indeed I was told to seek for the Precious; and I have searched and searched, of course I have. But not for the Black One. The Precious was ours, it was mine I tell you.' TT 4.iii.643). He also had had contact with orcs (TT 4.iii.42), perhaps including Grishnákh, who clearly knew who Gollum was (TT 3.iii.455-56).

___________________________

Occurrences of 'Creature/s' in The Lord of the Rings.

The Fellowship of the Ring

Prologue p. 2 ('the world after being full of strange creatures beyond count')

Prologue p. 10 ('There were many reports and complaints of strange persons and creatures prowling about the borders [of the Shire], or even over them')

Prologue p. 11 ('[Gollum] was a loathsome little creature')

Prologue p. 12 ('this slimy creature,' i.e. Gollum)

Prologue p. 12 ('[Bilbo] would not use [the Ring] to help him kill the wretched creature at a disadvantage,' i.e. Gollum)

1.ii.44 ('murmured hints of creatures more terrible than [orcs and trolls]')

1.ii.54 (Gollum)

1.ii,58 (Gollum)

1.ii,59 (Gollum)

*1.ii.62 ('Hobbits really are amazing creatures.')

*1.iii.72 ('A few creatures came.... A fox....')

1.iii.83 (black riders)

*1.iii.84 ('[The Elves] are little concerned with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creatures upon earth,')1.iv.90 (of a Black Rider: 'A long-drawn wail came down the wind, like the cry of some evil and lonely creature.')

1.v.108 (Frodo dreaming, apparently of Black Riders)

*1.vii.129 (Bombadil speaks of "the strange creatures of the forest")

*1.viii.145 (The narrator, quoting Bombadil's words, " 'free to all finders, birds, beasts, Elves or Men, and all kindly creatures.' ")

1.ix.152 ("[Sam] had imagined himself meeting giants taller than trees, and other creatures even more terrifying")

*1.xi.179 (Bill the Pony: 'a poor half-starved creature')

1.xi.183 ('there were also abominable creatures haunting the reeds and tussocks that from the sound of them were evil relatives of the cricket')

1.xi.189 ('the Riders can use men and other creatures as spies')

2.i.232 (Frodo's vision of Bilbo as 'Gollum')

2.ii.253 (Gollum)

2.ii.255 (Gollum)

*2.ii.265 (Elrond on Bombadil)

*2.iii.284 (No folk dwell here now, but many other creatures live here at all times, especially birds.')2.vi.348 ('...to the east the lands are waste, and full of Sauron's creatures....')

2.vi.350 (Gollum)

2.ix.383 (Gollum, 3 times),

2.ix. 387 ('a great winged creature, blacker than the pits in the night')

The Two Towers

Synopsis: 'Already they had become aware that their journey was watched by spies, and that the creature Gollum, who had once possessed the Ring and still lusted for it, was following their trail.'

3.i.415 ('The River of Gondor will take care at least that no evil creature dishonours his bones')3.iii.447 ('...Grishnákh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad with arms that hung almost to the ground.')

3.iii.450 ('[Pippin] was famished but not yet so famished as to eat flesh flung at him by an Orc, the flesh of he dared not guess what creature.')*3.iii.467 ('Many of the trees seemed asleep, or as unaware of him as of any other creature that merely passed by.')

*3.iv.464 ('Learn now the lore of Living Creatures.')

*3.iv.474 ('Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn'),

*3.iv.480 ('They had expected to see a number of creatures as much like Treebeard as one hobbit is like another')3.vii.536 ('But these creatures of Isengard, these half-orcs and goblin-men that the foul craft of Saruman has bred....')

3.viii.546 ('No Orc or other living creature could be seen.')

*3.viii.549 (Ents: '...and turning again, the riders saw other creatures of the same kind approaching, striding through the tall grass.'

*3.viii.549 (Ents; 'So it seemed to be; for as he spoke the tall creatures, without a glance at the riders, strode into the wood and vanished.')

*3.ix.568 ('Quickbeam is a gentle creature....')

3.ix.573 (of Wormtongue: 'and he looked a queer twisted sort of creature himself.')

4.i.614 (Gollum, twice)

4.i.615 (Frodo remembering his conversation with Gandalf about Gollum at 1.ii.59)

4.i,615 (Gollum)

4.i.617 (Gollum)

4.ii.624 (Gollum, twice)

4.iii.645 ('And these winged creatures that they ride on now...')

*4.iii.645 ('...they can probably see more than any other creature.') This instance and the previous are two parts of the same sentence. So, while I set down the second as neutral, it may be tainted by the first.4.iv.657 (Gollum)

4.iv.657 (again Gollum)

4.vi.685 (Gollum 3 times)

4.vi.686 (Gollum)

4.vi.687 (Gollum)

4.vi.689 (Gollum, 4 times)

4.vi.690 (Gollum)

4.vi.691 (Gollum, twice)

*4.vii.696 ('no living creature, beast or bird, was to be seen, but in these open places Gollum....'). I count this instance as neutral, but the presence of Gollum may give it a whiff of evil.

*4.x.728 ('No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate.') 

4.x.728 ('Now the miserable creature was right under her....')  This is Shelob's imagined perspective on Sam during their battle).  See n. on RK 6.i.912.

4.x.733 ('...may no foul creature come anigh you!')

The Return of the King

Synopsis: 'Already they had become aware that their journey was watched by spies, and that the creature Gollum, who had once possessed the Ring and still lusted for it, was following their trail.'

5.iv.815 (Gollum)

*5.v.832 (Ghân-buri-Ghân)

5.vi.840 (the fell beast, twice)

5.vi.841 (the fell beast)

5.x.885 ('the Orcs and lesser creatures of Mordor')

5.x.889 (The Mouth of Sauron speaking of Frodo)

5.x.892 (trolls)

6.i.900 ('the evil land of Sauron where his creatures still lurked')

6.i.911 (orcs)

6.i.914 (orcs)

6.i.912 (Frodo's vision of Sam as an orc,  Cf. Shelob's perspective on Sam above.  If this instance counts as negative, so, too, must that one.

6.ii.929 (Gollum)

*6.iii.934 ('turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue {not unlike Gollum in fact})

6.iii.944 (Gollum, twice)

6.iv.949 ('orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved' in an epic simile)

6.vi.979 (Treebeard, speaking of orcs: 'these same foul creatures')

6.vi.980 (Treebeard, speaking of Wormtongue: 'that worm-creature')

6.vi.980 (Treebeard, speaking of Saruman and Wormtongue: 'such creatures as these')

*6.ix.1021 (The narrator says of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins: 'When the poor creature died next spring....'  Cf. 'Then there was Lobelia. Poor thing....' in the previous paragraph on the same page.)

*6.ix.1029 ('none saw them pass, save the wild creatures' -- interesting, almost a full circle back to the fox and the elves from 1.iii.72)

Appendices

A.1040 (Orcs, and other fell creatures),

A.1067 (Men or other creatures more evil);

B.1087 (Sauron begins to people Moria with his creatures)