Arwen's Green Grave

"... and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of Lórien, and dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent.

"There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea."

(RK App. A, The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, p. 1063)

Tolkien says that "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" is "the highest love story" in The Lord of the Rings (Letters #131 p. 229). He also referred to it as "the most important [tale] of the Appendices; it is part of the essential story, and is only placed so, because it could not be worked into the main narrative without destroying its [hobbit-centered] structure" (Letters #181 p. 343). Since Arwen also makes the Choice of Lúthien, which is the heart of what Tolkien calls "the kernel of the mythology" (Letters #165 p. 320), and The Lord of the Rings is famously part of the story of Beren and Lúthien, it is undeniably a very important tale. 

Now sometimes people take the paragraph I quoted at the start to suggest that Arwen despaired at the last, that she lacked the faith Aragorn displayed in his last words: "Behold! We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!" In my book, Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many, I argued that this was not so (254-58). She is grieving, yes, and full of sorrow, but that is not the same thing as hopelessness. Indeed Aragorn concedes the bitterness of their parting, and that sorrow and grief are a natural part of it. But despair need not be. I am not going to repeat the evidence and arguments I made there, but I would like to add some points here that I think lend additional weight to what I wrote there. 

The words that stand out to me as most important are "her green grave" and the most important fact is that her green grave shall endure until the ending of the world and Arda is healed. If we look at an earlier version of these words, which Tolkien abandoned, I think we can notice something else of significance.

Then Arwen departed and dwelt alone and widowed in the fading woods of Lothlórien; and it came to pass for her as Elrond foretold that she would not leave the world until she had lost all for which she made her choice. But at last she laid herself to rest on the hill of Cerin Amroth, and there was her green grave until the shape of the world was changed.

(Peoples 355)

The tone here is quite matter of fact. It's a very prosy account, certainly when compared to the high romantic regster of the passage as published. The draft version records the passing of a world; the published version evokes the sorrow and beauty of its passing. The most significant change, however, is the shift in tense. The original passage simply reports the past. While the published text also begins in the past tense, once Arwen has "laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth," that changes. After a brief rest at the semicolon, the sentence begins again with a new movement in the present tense. The combination of the present tenses with the three clauses governed by "until" gives the sentence the vivid prophetic quality that anticipates the future. And the green grave shall be there when that future comes. 

Of course her grave's greenness by itself suggests life and growth amid death and the oblivion of time. It's as if the world itself will remember her even if we do not. I did a quick survey of signficant hills and mounds that I could recall. Unsurprisingly, many of those places called "green" are graves, but not all. 

But first here's a few hills, which are not graves, and other places where the green seems significant:

• "Before its western gate there was a green mound, Ezellohar, that is named also Corollairë; and Yavanna hallowed it, and she sat there long upon the green grass and sang a song of power, in which was set all her thought of things that grow in the earth" (S 38).
• "To [the Teleri] the Valar had given a land and a dwelling-place. Even among the radiant flowers of the Tree-lit gardens of Valinor they longed still at times to see the stars; and therefore a gap was made in the great walls of the Pelóri, and there in a deep valley that ran down to the sea the Eldar raised a high green hill: Túna it was called. From the west the light of the Trees fell upon it, and its shadow lay ever eastward; and to the east it looked towards the Bay of Elvenhome, and the Lonely Isle, and the Shadowy Seas. Then through the Calacirya, the Pass of Light, the radiance of the Blessed Realm streamed forth, kindling the dark waves to silver and gold, and it touched the Lonely Isle, and its western shore grew green and fair. There bloomed the first flowers that ever were east of the Mountains of Aman' (S 59).
• "Then Tuor looked down upon the fair vale of Tumladen, set as a green jewel amid the encircling hills" (S 239).
• "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" (S 165).
• Cerin Amroth had "... grass as green as Springtime in the Elder Days" (FR 2.vi.350).
• "Three Elf-towers of immemorial age were still to be seen on the Tower Hills beyond the western marches. They shone far off in the moonlight. The tallest was furthest away, standing alone upon a green mound. The Hobbits of the Westfarthing said that one could see the Sea from the top of that tower; but no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it" (FR "Prologue" 7). 
• "And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise" (RK 6.ix.1030).

Now here are some graves that are definitely not green, and that's definitely no surprise:

• "the Death Down" under which the orcs slain at Helms Deep had been buried by the Huorns: "no grass would grow there" (TT 3.viii.553).
• "With toil of many hands they gathered wood and piled it high and made a great burning and destroyed the body of the Dragon, until he was but black ash and his bones beaten to dust, and the place of that burning was ever bare and barren thereafter" (Children of Húrin 257).

The Barrow Downs are of course as full of graves as their name suggests, but the evil there is invasive and comparatively recent, having been summoned by the sorcery of the Witch-king (FR 1.vii.130; RK Appendix A 1041; UT 348). For thousands of years before that the dead had rested there in peace and shepherds had pastured their flocks on the downs. Contrast the sunlit green grass outside the mounds, on which Bombadil spreads the treasure hoard to break the spell on the barrow, with the cold "pale greenish light" within the barrow, which is a prelude to the incantation and human sacrifice the wight is about to perform (FR 1.viii.140-45). The present evil of the Barrow Downs, brought by a hostile force from the outside, uses the green of the grassy downs to hide.

Consider also a series of graves in which despite all attendant sorrow the green grass has positive connotations. 

• "By the command of Morgoth the Orcs with great labour gathered all the bodies of those who had fallen in the great battle, and all their harness and weapons, and piled them in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en-Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears. But grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, alone in all the desert that Morgoth made; and no creature of Morgoth trod thereafter upon the earth beneath which the swords of the Eldar and the Edain crumbled into rust" (S 197).
• "‘Yes,’ [Túrin] answered. ‘I fled [the darkness] for many years. And I escaped when you did so. For it was dark when you came, Níniel, but ever since it has been light. And it seems to me that what I long sought in vain has come to me.’ And as he went back to his house in the twilight, he said to himself: ‘Haudh-en-Elleth! From the green mound she came. Is that a sign, and how shall I read it?'" (UT 124; Children of Húrin 218).
• "They buried the body of Felagund upon the hill-top of his own isle, and it was clean again; and the green grave of Finrod Finarfin’s son, fairest of all the princes of the Elves, remained inviolate, until the land was changed and broken, and foundered under destroying seas. But Finrod walks with Finarfin his father beneath the trees in Eldamar" (S 175-76).
• The burial mounds of the kings of Rohan, Théoden's included (TT 3.vi.507; RK 6.vi.976) are all green."Green and long grew the grass on Snowmane’s Howe, but ever black and bare was the ground where the beast was burned" (RK 5.vi.844-45).
• "Then Thorondor bore up Glorfindel’s body out of the abyss, and they buried him in a mound of stones beside the pass; and a green turf came there, and yellow flowers bloomed upon it amid the barrenness of stone, until the world was changed" (S 243).
• Elendil's grave: "...the hallow was found unweathered and unprofaned, ever-green and at peace under the sky, until the Kingdom of Gondor was changed" (UT 309).

Finally, I would note how phrases like "until the world is/was changed" convey a sense of the promise of the endurance of the green grass. In the passages quoted above we've seen a half dozen variations on the phrase. The Silmarillion ends with a reference to a change coming to the world someday: 

Here ends the SILMARILLION. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.

(S 255)

The change it mentions is carefully presented in a conditional statement, but the main verb of the "if" clause is "shall," which all but promises that the change will come, and that Marring of Arda will be amended. Think of how differently this would read with even slightly different wording. For "if any change should come," or "will come," or "is to come," or "comes" are all less forceful than that prophetic "shall." 

Compare this to Tom Bombadil's enchantment as he breaks into the barrow to rescue the hobbits:

Get out, you old Wight! Vanish in the sunlight!
Shrivel like the cold mist, like the winds go wailing, 
Out into the barren lands far beyond the mountains! 
Come never here again! Leave your barrow empty! 
Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness, 
Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended.

(FR 1.viii.142)

He casts the wight not only out of the green grave he has invaded, but also out of the world itself into the outer darkness "till the world is mended." If anybody in Middle-earth knows for sure that the world shall be changed and amended, it's Old Tom. That is the change that he and the grass on Arwen's green grave look forward to.

Hope Shall Come Again: 'The Choices of Master Samwise' and 'The Children of Húrin'

In 'The Choices of Master Samwise', when Sam believes Frodo to be dead, his anguish leads him to contemplate his own death, by suicide:

He looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve.

(TT 4.x.732)

When the orcs arrive in the pass and discover Frodo's dead body (as Sam still believes), Sam again imagines his own death:

How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. I wonder if any song will ever mention it: How Samwise fell in the High Pass and made a wall of bodies round his master. No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs.

(TT 4.x.735)

In these moments one of the Great Tales of the First Age resonates within Sam's soul. Unlike the many explicit evocations of the Tale of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings, the allusions here are far more obscure, to the Tale of the Children of Húrin, where Túrin fell upon his sword, where his sister, Nienor, leaped to her death; and where their father, Húrin, made the heroic last stand to end all heroic last stands. To catch these allusions, however, requires detailed knowledge of a Tale never mentioned at all in The Lord of the Rings. Its two chief figures, Húrin and his son Túrin are scarcely more than names on a list of elf-friends mentioned by Elrond (FR 2.ii.270). Until The Silmarillion was published in 1977, moreover, no other information was available. We don't even know that Húrin and Túrin are father and son. Húrin and his family might as well have been the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Their story seemed just as unknowable. 

What's more surprising is that, as far as I have been able to tell, no one spotted these allusions even after the publication of The Silmarillion. Despite multiple versions of the story appearing across the decades in Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales I, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, The Children of Húrin, and elsewhere.

Part of what we see here is Tolkien's craft. He knows that he can draw on the mythic power of the Tale of the Children of Húrin without needing to draw our attention to the allusions by introducing explanations that would distract from the moment and the momentum of the story; and he can draw on this power in this way precisely because it is mythic and therefore transcends the particular details of the moment. What we see here is yet more evidence for how important these Great Tales are to the narrative and to the characters within it. The connection between the Tale of Frodo and Sam and the larger Tales of which theirs is a part does not need to be made explicit to be effective.

Part of it, finally, is that Sam is on the knife-edge of Tragedy here. If he makes a mistake in his choices, all is lost for him, and all is lost for Middle-earth. Sam, moreover, believing his master to be dead, already sees himself as in a story that has turned tragic. The Tale of the Children of Húrin is the tale for this crisis rather than the Tale of Beren and Lúthien because it is a Tragedy, and Beren and Lúthien, for all of its tragic moments, is a fairy-story that goes beyond sorrow into joy. We talk about Tolkien and fairy-stories far more often than we do about Tolkien and Tragedy. But in On Fairy-stories Tolkien speaks of the two types of story together. Each helps him define the other. He says:

At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

(OFS ¶ 99)

And if the catastrophe that marks a Tragedy cleanses us or purges us by means of fear and pity, then we can see the parallel between Drama and Fairy-stories even more clearly. For the eucatastrophe that is the 'true form' and 'highest function' of a fairy tale cleanses us through Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. It includes the renewed clarity of 'vision' we gain through Recovery (OFS ¶ 83-84). but goes beyond it by allowing a 'vision' of a transcendent reality (OFS ¶ 103).

There is more to be explored here, which I don't have time for right now. For example, an essential aspect of the situation Sam finds himself in here is the battle he has with Shelob directly before he comes to believe Frodo dead. For the narrator there names both Beren, the fairy-tale hero who also fought giant spiderlike monsters, and Túrin, the tragic hero who slew a dragon by stabbing him from below only to learn terrible truths about his own life in doing so. Sam of course is neither of these great heroes, sons of the chieftains of their peoples, and further reflection on these passages may well help us more deeply understanding of On Fairy-stories, The Lord of the Rings, and how the dynamic balance of Tragedy and Eucatastrophe fundamentally shapes Tolkien's Secondary World.

___________________________

If anybody knows of another discussion of these particular allusions to The Children of Húrin in The Choices of Master Samwise, please do let me know. I would be eager to see it. 

The 'Lame' Sovereignty of Melkor and Man -- Disability and Power in 'The Children of Húrin'

Fingolfin's Challenge © John Howe 2003

Plutarch's Agesilaos tells the story of a power struggle for the throne of ancient Sparta. When Agis II died in 400, his younger brother, Agesilaos challenged the claim of Agis' son, Leotychides, on the grounds that he was illegitimate. It was objected that Agesilaos could not succeed his brother because he had a limp, and a prophecy warned that Sparta should beware lest 'lame kingship' (χωλὴ βασιλεία) harm the state, which till then had been 'sound of foot' (ἀρτίποδος; Ages. 3.3-4). By dint of superior cleverness -- and no doubt better politicking -- the cause of Ageslaos prevailed. The real 'lame kingship,' he argued, would result from an illegitimate heir taking the throne (Ages. 3.5).

Here we see the word χωλή (khōlé) employed as an insult both literally and metaphorically, to suggest that the person or thing so described is impaired and therefore inferior to the 'sound of foot.' 'Lame' in English is similar in its range and potential for giving offense. A brain or an idea can be as 'lame' as a leg. The simpler, physical meaning, even if never wholly free from negative connotations, gives rise to the metaphorical and is then eclipsed by it. Clearly this has been going on since at least the time of Homer, centuries before the events of which Plutarch speaks:

ἄσβεστος δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐνῶρτο γέλως μακάρεσσι θεοῖσιν
ὡς ἴδον Ἥφαιστον διὰ δώματα ποιπνύοντα. 

(Iliad 1.599-600) 

Unquenchable laughter was roused in the blessed gods
When they saw Hephaistos bustling through the palace.

And why does the sight of Hephaistos bustling stir up such laughter, and why is it marked by the particle ἄρα, which signifies that their laughter is what was after all only to be expected? Because he is 'περικλυτὸς ἀμφιγυήεις / Ἥφαιστος', 'famous Hephaistos, lame in both feet' (Iliad 1.607-08).

Turning from Plutarch and Homer to Shakespeare, we see the magnificent villain, Richard III, revelling in and despising the stigma which his limp inflicts upon him (1.1.12-31). We can see it elsewhere, too, spread across his comedies, tragedies, and histories as well as the sonnets and other poems (see here). However much Tolkien may have preferred Old English and Old Norse, he was far from ignorant of Homer and Shakespeare; a knowledge of the history of the Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries and a familiarity with the Lives of Plutarch would have also been normal for an educated man of his day (cf. C.S. Lewis, Letters, of 13 May 1917, 11 January 1939, 12 October 1940, 1 January 1949).

So, if an author like Tolkien introduces a character affected by a physical disability, the author may well be using that particular disability to suggest something. When that author introduces a second character with the same disability, it becomes difficult to claim that the author is not suggesting something. But when the author brings in a third such character in a pivotal role, we have only ourselves to blame if we fail to see that some point is being made. Thus we have The Children of Húrin, in which Tolkien gives us three characters who have a limp.

Early in the tale we meet Sador. Maimed by an accident while cutting wood, and thus unable to serve Húrin, his lord, as a fighting man, Sador works as a servant in his household, making and repairing things (40-41). Morwen and Húrin treat him with indulgence, though they believe he could spend his time better than he does (49-50, 72). Young Túrin, however, loves him and spends much time talking to him and learning things about life he has not learned from his parents. He affectionately calls Sador 'Labadal', that is, 'Hopafoot', which in his childlike way Túrin means as an endearment, and at which Sador takes no offense because he knows that it is meant 'in pity not scorn' (41). Yet Labadal is Túrin's first attempt at naming, the first of many he will make in his life, and it succeeds, to the extent that it does at all, only because Sador is wise enough not to take offense at its misapprehension of reality. 'Labadal' is the beginning of a series of names through which Túrin comes to challenge the world around him, culminating in Turambar, Master of Fate.

It is late in the tale, when Túrin comes to Brethil where he will give himself the last of his names, Turambar, the Master of Fate, that Brandir enters the story, the second of the limping characters in The Children of Húrin. Unlike Sador, Brandir's disability arises from 'a leg broken in a misadventure in childhood' (193), but it also unfitted him for war, especially since he was already 'gentle in mood'. Like Sador, Brandir has more interest in wood than metal (41, 72, 193), with which we may contrast the importance of metal, both practically and symbolically, in Túrin's life -- the knife which he gives Sador as a gift, the dragon-helm that declares his identity as rightful Lord of Dor-Lómin, and the black sword with which he kills Glaurung, Brandir, and himself. Unlike Sador, however, Brandir is the lord of his people, a people at war whom he cannot lead in battle, which is of course his role.

Both Sador and Brandir also have crucial roles to play with Túrin's sisters. It is to Sador that the young Túrin turns when his beloved sister, Lalaith (Laughter), dies in childhood as a result of a plague sent by Morgoth (40-44). It is from Sador that Túrin first learns about the inevitability of death as the fate of all Men. It is from Brandir, on the other hand, that he learns that 'the feet of his doom were overtaking him' in his tragic ignorant marriage to Níniel (Maid of Tears), his 'twice-beloved' sister (250-56). And just as he had called Sador 'Labadal' in love and pity, he now calls Brandir 'club-foot' and a 'limping evil' in wrath and scorn. And just as 'Hopafoot' had told him of all that Men could learn from the Elves, it is the elf Mablung who teaches him the truth of 'Club-foot's' words. From the bewept Laughter to the beloved Maid of Tears, from the dear Hopafoot to the despised Club-foot, from the lore Men can acquire from Elves to the lesson of doom that Mablung brings, these two characters and their lameness frame this tale, both narratively by appearing at its beginning and end, and tragically by their involvement in and commentary on the life not only of Túrin, but of Man overall.

With lameness so interwoven into Túrin's tragic tale, it is impossible not to think of Oedipus and his tragic tale, which of course Tolkien himself openly acknowledged as a source of 'elements' in The Children of Húrin's (Letters, no. 131). Dimitra Fimi, moreover, has analyzed these 'elements' in her excellent '"Wildman of the Woods": inscribing tragedy on the landscape of Middle-earth in The Children of Húrin', where she comments:

Túrin is not lame or maimed himself, but two important characters in his tale are so afflicted: Sador [...] for whom young Túrin feels pity; and Brandir [...] whose position Túrin usurps as an able-bodied warrior. In Oedipus' case lameness is a sign of his real identity, while Túrin's reaction to lameness shows his change from sensitive youth to rash warrior, who associates the wilderness with aggression in order to channel his dangerous wrath. 

(Fimi, 55)

While I wholly agree with Fimi about 'Túrin's reaction' -- indeed he had previously usurped the authority of Orodreth at Nargothrond, whose leadership is also weak and who could be seen as metaphorically lame when viewed alongside Brandir's (CoH 160-65, 171-76) -- I would argue that there is more to be said about lameness in The Children of Húrin. Indeed, as Fimi has shown, the correspondences between the two stories are extensive. For anyone familiar with Oedipus, that Túrin himself is not lame is immediately noticeable but not necessarily noteworthy. After all, as Tolkien also pointed out, Túrin owes 'elements' to Sigurd and Kullervo as well (Letters, no. 131). Yet the development of lameness as a metaphor through not two but three other characters who play important roles in Túrin's life indicates that Tolkien was after something bigger here. Considering the third of these characters will help us see what that is.

For Morgoth is the third character, whose malice towards Húrin and his family drives the tale as much as Túrin himself does. Curiously, slyly, Tolkien never openly says in The Children of Húrin that as a result of his duel with Fingolfin 'Morgoth went ever halt of one foot after that day, and the pain of his wounds could not be healed' (Silm. 154). He does, however, emphasize that 'Morgoth hated and feared the House of Fingolfin, because they had scorned him in Valinor and had the friendship of Ulmo his foe; and because of the wounds that Fingolfin gave him in battle' (CoH 60, italics mine). Note the construction of this sentence. Rather than say that he hated Fingolfin's house because of a, b, and c, which would be the common way of phrasing it, Tolkien says that he hated them because of a and b -- pause (thus, the semicolon) -- and because of c. He thus quite literally singles out the final reason and signals through the balance of the sentence that this reason is of special importance, perhaps even of equal importance. And of the eight wounds which Fingolfin inflicted on Morgoth, the only one specifically named is the last, the wound that maimed his foot.

Morgoth punishes Hurin © Ted Nasmith

So, we have seen how the lameness of Sador and Brandir is meaningfully interwoven with Túrin's misfortunes. How does Morgoth's matter? It undermines the claims to unrivaled position and power he makes in his verbal duel with Húrin, whom he can dominate and destroy, but never daunt (CoH 61-65). In this respect Húrin's encounter with Morgoth parallels Fingolfin's. They both defy, though in different ways, a power by whom they are outmatched. Yet their linked defiance refutes their defeat and marks the inner deficiency in Morgoth which his outer disability exemplifies. Their defeat may be inevitable, but so is his; and because he is cruel and cowardly and selfish, Morgoth's defeat is a refutation of all that he claims. In the end his shall prove to be a 'lame' sovereignty. For as Ilúvatar told him before the beginning:

'And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'

(Silm. 17)

No matter Morgoth's boast to Húrin that he is 'the Master of the fates of Arda', he is not, no more than Túrin 'Turambar' is the 'Master of Doom' that he claims to be (CoH 65, 196, 218, 243-44). Their positions are analogous. Though each of them is powerful, neither one can finally prevail in thought or strength against one who is in turn mightier than he. The connections we see here between Morgoth and Túrin also call to mind another passage:

But Ilúvatar knew that Men, being set amid the turmoils of the powers of the world, would stray often, and would not use their gifts in harmony; and he said: ''These too in their time shall find that all that they do redounds at the end only to the glory of my work.' Yet the Elves believe that Men are often a grief to Manwë, who knows most of the mind of Ilúvatar; for it seems to the Elves that Men resemble Melkor most of all the Ainur, although he has ever feared and hated them, even those that served him. 

(Silm. 42)

© Alan Lee

There is more to be said here, I believe, more to be explored at length in greater detail, and I hope to turn to that before long. For now, however, it seems clear that the 'lameness' that surrounds Túrin and connects him and Men in general to Morgoth shows, directly in Morgoth and by reflection in Túrin, what Shakespeare might have called 'a will most incorrect to heaven' (Hamlet 1.2.101) and Homer, Sophocles, and Plutarch hybris. In such a case it is little wonder that, when Mablung arrives like the fateful messenger in Oedipus Tyrannos, and says to Túrin that the years 'have been heavy on you', he receives the reply (CoH 253):

'Heavy!' said Túrin. 'Yes, as the feet of Morgoth.'

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Works Consulted

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

Alan Lee © 2007 

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

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

(TT 3.vi.508)

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

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

(RK 5.iii.803)

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

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

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

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

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

(TT 4.v.678)

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

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

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

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

(RK 5.ii.781)

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

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

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

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

(Jewels 312-13)

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

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Works Consulted

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'Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?' -- A Shakespearean Túrin

Alan Lee © 2007

One of the strangest sidelights on the long dark tale of Túrin Turambar is perhaps the following:

[F]or indeed the speech of Doriath, whether of the king or others, was even in the days of Túrin more antique than that used elsewhere. One thing (as Mîm observed) of which Túrin never rid himself, despite his grievance against Doriath, was the speech he had acquired during his fostering. Though a Man, he spoke like an Elf of the Hidden Kingdom, which is as though a Man should now appear, whose speech and schooling until manhood had been that of some secluded country where the English had remained nearer that of the court of Elizabeth I than of Elizabeth II.

(Jewels 312)

Tybalt wouldn't stand a chance, but then again no one near Túrin did.

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Work Consulted

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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).