Swanships and Swanroads in Tolkien and Beowulf

From the earliest days of the legendarium the swanships were present.  In 1917 (or so) Tolkien wrote in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One¹:

Now do the Solosimpi take great joy of [?their] birds, and of the swans, and behold upon the lakes of Tol Eressëa already they fare on rafts of fallen timber, and some harness thereto swans and speed across the waters; but the more hardy dare out upon the sea and the gulls draw them, and when Ulmo saw that he was very glad.  For lo! the Teleri and the Noldoli complain much to Manwë of the separation of the Solosimpi, and the Gods desire them to be drawn to Valinor; but Ulmo cannot yet think of any device save by help of Ossë and the Oarni, and will not be humbled to this.  But now does he fare home in haste to Aulë, and those twain get them speedily to Tol Eressëa, and Oromë was with them, and there is the first hewing of trees that was done in the world outside Valinor. Now does Aulë of the sawn wood of pine and oak make great vessels like to the bodies of swans, and these he covers with the bark of silver birches, or .... with gathered feathers with the oily plumage of Ossë's birds, and they are nailed and [?sturdily] riveted and fastened with silver, and he carves the prows for them like the necks of upheld swans, but they are hollow and have no feet; and by cords of great strength and slimness are gulls and petrels harnessed to them, for they were tame to the hands of the Solosimpi, because their hearts were so turned by Ossë.

(BoLT 1.124)

And though Tolkien never wrote more than a few scraps and notes of Eärendil's tale, he nevertheless had at least one detail of his ship clear in his mind. It was 'shaped as a swan of pearls' (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, 263).  Tuor, Eärendil's father, had a boat just like those of the Elves of Tol Eressëa, 'with a prow fashioned like to the neck of a swan' (BoLT 2.151), and he was subsequently guided by swans on a path that led him in time to Gondolin, where he adopted the swan's wing as the sign of his house (2.152-160).²  In his later years, after Gondolin had fallen, Tuor built a ship called 'Swanwing' in which he sought to sail to Valinor (2.253-55, 260, 263, 265), on whose shores was Alqualuntë (later Alqualondë), 'Swan-Haven,' where the ships of the Solosimpi were berthed (BoLT 1.163-64). 

In Tolkien's painting of Taniquetil from the 1920s, we can glimpse just such a ship

in the sea at the foot of the mountain:

Nor does Tolkien abandon the swanships as Middle Earth develops.  The one in which Galadriel comes to bid farewell to the Fellowship is only the most famous example from The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.372-73):

They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailing proudly down the stream toward them, they saw a swan of great size. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneath its curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyes glinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were half lifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; and suddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carved with elven skill in the likeness of a bird.... 

Aragorn stayed his boat as the Swan-ship drew alongside.... 

The Swan passed on slowly to the hythe, and they turned their boats and followed it.

In the song Bilbo sings at Rivendell he can still say of Eärendil's ship: '[h]er prow he fashioned like a swan' (FR 2.i.234); and the banner of the Prince of Dol Amroth bears 'a white ship like a silver swan upon blue water' (RK 5.viii.871; cf. 6.iv.953). We can also find swans and swanships in The Silmarillion (61, 238), and the link between these birds and Tuor is maintained in the lengthy fragment Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales (25-28). 

So clearly the images of the swans and the swan-ships had an abiding appeal for Tolkien, but where the swanships come from is a question that to my knowledge has not been answered.  There are a number of possibilities, and though I incline more to one than the others, it is not implausible or unlikely that several influences combined to produce the swanships.

The first is simple, and might seem ridiculous.  Indeed it might be ridiculous, but that in itself does not rule it out.  When I first read of the swanship of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, I found it odd, but I could visualize it immediately.  At that time I was a little boy spending my summers in a small beach town adjacent to Asbury Park, NJ, and in the lake between the two towns there was a swan-boat:

As I was considering this, and actually inclining to dismiss it, the latest issue of The Tolkien Society's newsletter, Amon Hen (253), arrived in my mailbox.  Inside, by chance, was a request from one member, Mr Anthony Roland Clent, to contact him if anyone remembered 'the "Swan" boats at Hinksey boating pool' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s, which he saw as a possible source of inspiration for Tolkien. And while I don't consider chance-if-chance-you-call-it an adequate basis for scholarship, it made me think twice.  Now the swan-boats at Hinksey Park cannot be the inspiration for the swanships themselves, since the park did not exist until the mid 1930s,³ and both The Book of Lost Tales and the painting of Taniquetil predate this. It's quite possible, however, that the boats at Hinksey influenced Tolkien's description of them in The Lord of the Rings.⁴ As the gentleman from The Tolkien Society put it in his reply to my email:

I cannot but think that Tolkien used the idea of these two boats at Hinksey for his Swan boat of Galadriel. The description is uncannily similar to how I remember them, with their "white wings half lifted", and I guess Tolkien must have seen them if he ever walked down that way. They were not, alas, propelled by two elves clad in white, using black paddles....

For a medievalist and a man of his time like Tolkien inspiration might also be found in the tale, first found in the late 12th century, of the Knight of the Swan and more recently in Wagner's Lohengrin. In sum, a mysterious knight arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to rescue a woman in peril. Here there clearly seems to be a link to the passage of The Book of Lost Tales I quoted above, which describes the swans pulling the rafts on the lakes of Tol Eressëa.

Lohengrin Postcard ca. 1900

17th Century Woodcut

But while this might explain the swans drawing the boats in the lakes, it does not explain the swanships themselves.  For this we must look elsewhere.  Fortunately an answer seems to be ready at hand, in a source that will surprise no one.

                             Hét him ýþlidan
gódne gegyrwan;   cwæþ, hé gúþcyning
ofer swanrade        sécean wolde
mærne þéoden,      þá him wæs manna ðearf.

(Beowulf  198-201)

                             He ordered his ship built,
A great wave-walker, and said he would seek
Over the long sea, the swan's road,
that well-known king needing brave new men.

(transl. Williamson)

Swanrad, the swan-road, as the context makes clear, is a kenning for the sea, much like the better known hronrad, the whale-road (Beowulf 10). But there's something odd about it.  Swans may be water fowl, but they are not seabirds.  That Tolkien perceived this is evident: in the lakes of Tol Eressëa swans pull the rafts of the Elves; but in the salt sea petrels and gulls are harnessed to the swan-ships.  Robert Woodward resolved this oddity by pointing out that swanrad is in fact a double kenning, in which swan is itself first a kenning for ship, and then is joined to rad to become a kenning for the sea.⁵ And it's only a few lines later, as Woodward notes, that the poet likens the 'neck' of the ship to a bird's:

Gewát þá ofer wægholm    winde gefýsed
flota fámiheals    fugle gelícost,

(Beowulf  217-18)

Over the scending sea, driven by the wind,
Went the ship, foamy-necked much like a bird,

(transl. mine)⁶ 

Heals, the second element in the adjective fámiheals, means both prow and neck, and the poet plays ably on both these senses in fámiheals fugle gelícost.  Birds don't move fast enough through the water to make the sea foam around them, but ships do; and ships don't have necks, but birds do. 'Its foamy prow so like a bird's neck' catches, I think, the double sense of it, but loses the poem's eloquent compression. Nevertheless, the poet evokes the image of a bird here to describe Beowulf's ship, and it can hardly be an accident that seventeen lines earlier he had chosen to use swanrad when he could just as easily have used hronrad,⁷ but instead of the whale he conjured the swan, whose neck curves so like the prow of a ship of this era.

The famous Oseberg ship, built ca. 820

And Tolkien's close attention to this passage could not be more clear.  He chose these very lines (210-228) to illustrate his explanation of the workings of alliterative verse in his essay On Translating Beowulf (61-71), in which he also already discussed swanrad, though the meaning of rad was his subject there (51-52). We have three separate renderings of fámiheals fugle gelícost by him: in verse as 'foam-throated, like a flying bird;' in prose as 'with foam at the throat most like unto a bird;' and a literal prose version in the Old English word order, 'foamy-neck (to) bird likest.'⁸ 

If, moreover, we turn back for a moment to consider Galadriel's swan-ship, 'wrought and carved with elven skill in the likeness of a bird,' we can see an interesting progression in Tolkien's description of it.  When the members of the fellowship first see it, they take it to be a proper 'swan.' Then they realize that it is in fact a 'swan-ship.'  And finally it becomes a 'Swan.'  From 'swan' to 'swan-ship' to 'Swan,' it's like watching the birth of a kenning.  If Tolkien did not recognize the swan in swanrad as itself a kenning for ship, he turned it into one here.

Now Old English possesses a second word for swan, ilfette/ilfettu, which establishes another link to the swanships and the Elves in The Book of Lost Tales.  In a marginal gloss on the words 'Kópas Alqualuntë, the Haven of the Swanships,' Tolkien wrote Ielfethyþ. This word, Christopher Tolkien explains,

is Old English, representing the interpretation of the Elvish name made by Eriol in his own language: the first element meaning 'swan' (ielfetu), and the second (later 'hithe') meaning 'haven, landing place.'

(BoLT 1.164)

As Christopher Tolkien's note indicates, ielfethyþ is his father's coinage through the character of Eriol, the seafarer who finds his way to Tol Eressëa and learns the stories told in The Book of Lost Tales (1.13-27). Why use ielfethyþ when swanhyþ would have worked just as well? Not to conceal one connection by choosing the less obvious synonym, but, I would argue, to suggest another by echoing ilfe, the Old English for elves, the entry for which directly precedes ilfette in Bosworth Toller.⁹

Hyþ, the second element in ielfethyþ, also has echoes in this connection since 'hithe' is used by Tolkien only to describe the landing place where the swan-ship of Galadriel lands; he spells it 'hythe' in an archaic manner evocative of Old English; and the three times the word 'hythe' appears here are the only three times the word appears in The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.371, 373, 377).  Except for Christopher Tolkien's note above, it also does not appear, in either spelling, in The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, or Unfinished Tales.  In an author so careful of his words, so knowledgeable about them, and so inclined to archaic words in the right context, the fact that he uses 'hythe' three times here and nowhere else indicates great deliberateness in choosing it.  It was not merely an old word that meant 'landing.'

On balance then there seems to be ample evidence for tracing Tolkien's inspiration for the swanships to the combination of swanrad and fámiheals fugle gelícost. Other influences are not to be ignored for other aspects of the swanships, like the Knight of the Swan and the likelihood that Tolkien saw swanboats at Hinksey Park. Michael Martinez has summarized still other likely reasons for the imagery of swans in Tolkien.  But the ships themselves first sailed the swanroad.

_____________________________________

¹ For those not familiar with The Book of Lost Tales, a couple of quick observations may be useful. First, it contains early versions of many stories that we later see in The Silmarillion, but these stories often differ greatly in emphasis, tone, style, names, and characterization (to name a few). Some find these differences as surprising as The Silmarillion itself is to those who have known only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Book of Lost Tales, however, is as interesting a work in its own right as it is as a precursor to the later tales. Second, Christopher Tolkien performed heroic work on chaotic manuscripts to come up with a publishable version, reading nearly unreadable handwriting set down in faded 70 year old pencil on paper that had sometimes held older versions which had been erased and overwritten. No doubt an electron microscope and a palantír would have come in handy.

For the date see The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (Boston 1984) 1.203; The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (Boston 1984) 2.146-47; Unfinished Tales (1981) 4-5.

² At BoLT 2.160 Tuor names himself as being 'of the house of the Swan.' He seems to have taken this description to himself rather than inheriting it: 'This [dwelling] by slow labor [Tuor] adorned with fair carvings of the beasts and trees and flowers and birds that he knew about the waters of Mithrim, and ever among them was the Swan the chief, for Tuor loved this emblem and it became the sign of himself, his kindred and folk thereafter' (2.152).

³ Hinksey Park was built on the grounds of the former Oxford Waterworks, which were purchased for this purpose in 1934.  See here.

⁴ I contacted the gentleman who had placed the notice in Amon Hen by email, to which he was kind enough to reply as quoted.  Unfortunately he did not have a photograph of his swan-boats, and I have so far been unable to find one.

⁵ Robert H. Woodward, 'Swanrad in Beowulf,' Modern Language Notes 69 (1954) 544-46.  He also identifies parallels in Old Norse using svan.

⁶ I supply my own translation here because I think a more literal rendering is necessary to the point being made. I also think Williamson's otherwise excellent translation of Beowulf stumbles on fámiheals fugle gelícost, for which he gives us 'the foam-necked floater.' To be sure flota is a rather colorless word for ship, but the super-literal 'floater' conceals more than it reveals. And revelation is what we seek here.

⁷ On hronrad see Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014) 141-43, where he argues that "'whale road'-- which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic" is not quite the right translation for this word.

⁸ The poetic and the literal prose translations come from On Translating Beowulf, 63 and 69 respectively, reprinted in in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London, 2006), and the prose from Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (New York 2014).

⁹ What the difference may be between swan and ilfette is unknown to me. Hexam. 8 suggests that to some there was one: sume fugelas beóþ langsweorede swá swá swanas ond ilfette. 'Some birds are long-necked like swanas and ilfette. According to Bosworth Toller, in Icelandic svanr, the cognate of swan is only poetical, while alpt/alft, the cognate of ilfette, was the normal word for swan, but it does not appear from the citations in Bosworth Toller that Old English maintained so neat a distinction.

Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (III)

A Long-Expected Party and The Shadow of the Past paint a very ugly portrait of Gollum.  The one thing that runs counter to this is Gandalf's attempt, fiercely resisted by Frodo, to draw a line from one hobbit to the next, from Sméagol to Bilbo to Frodo, all linked inexorably by the devouring corruption of the Ring.  Gollum's is a 'sad story...and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits I have known' (FR 1.ii.54). By whom of course the wizard means Bilbo, but his concern is not limited to him alone. For years now he has been concerned for Frodo, since what might have happened to the elder Baggins may yet befall the younger (FR 1.ii.49). What saved Bilbo, Gandalf has no doubt, was the pity he showed Gollum, and so for Frodo's sake -- not solely but in particular: 'the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many -  yours not least' (emphasis added) -- he tries to evoke the same pity from him (FR 1.ii.59).

Yet Gandalf fails. Frodo neither feels pity nor wishes to.  Even his concession that Gandalf may not be wrong about Bilbo's not killing Gollum is hedged about with qualifications: 'All the same...even if Bilbo could not kill Gollum...' (FR 1.ii.60).  All the same?  Even if?  Could not? That's a bit of a dodgy retreat from '[w]hat a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!' (FR 1.ii.59, emphasis added).  Frodo's fear of Sauron and loathing of Gollum prevail.  The Tale moves on, and the subject of Gollum vanishes from it for a long time.  Six months pass in narrative time, and 190 pages (FR 1.ii.60; 2.ii.249), before anyone mentions him again. In the press of events his image fades from the reader's mind.

Since, however, pity will prove to be of the greatest importance, we will do well to give it a moment's thought before we move on.  In our world pity often comes as the harbinger of rationalization.  'Sad stories' like Gollum's are adduced to argue that the villain is also a victim whose own sufferings mitigate in some degree his guilt and fitness for punishment. Not so here.  In this Tale, the Pity that really matters is not the kind that compassion beclouds or disgust taints -- of both of which we will see examples.  Gandalf recognizes Gollum's crimes and admits the justice of Frodo's assertion that Gollum 'deserves death' (FR 1.ii.59).¹  In the eyes of the wizard, it seems, all acts, just and unjust, are balanced against each other.  If one cannot save from death those who do not deserve to die, it may be better to withhold the punishment of those who do not deserve to live.  This is so even when the most his pity can say is that, because of the evil and malice within Gollum, there is little or no hope that he might be cured (FR 1.ii.55, 59).  It is the pity of a clear vision undeceived. But it, too, will seem as forgotten as Gollum by the time he is next mentioned in The Council of Elrond.

There, in Rivendell, Bilbo speaks of him, and in doing so reminds us of the effect the Ring has had on them both.

'Very well,' said Bilbo.  'I will do as you bid.  But I will now tell the true story, and if some have heard me tell it otherwise' -- he looked sidelong at Glóin -- 'I ask them to forget it and forgive me.  I only wished to claim the treasure as my very own in those days, and to be rid of the name of thief that was put on me.  But perhaps I understand things a little better now.  Anyway, this is what happened.' 

To some there Bilbo's tale was wholly new, and they listened with amazement while the old hobbit, actually not at all displeased, recounted his adventure with Gollum, at full length.  He did not omit a single riddle,  He would have given also an account of his party and disappearance from the Shire, if he had been allowed; but Elrond raised his hand.

(FR 2.ii.249)

How different Bilbo is now from the night of his birthday party, seventeen years earlier in narrative time. Then, as we saw, he revealed much about Gollum by acting and speaking like him.  He was full of the rationalizations which he now disavows -- that the Ring was his very own and he had not stolen it -- and of a rather savage willingness to defend his ownership, by murder if necessary.  Now he complies with Elrond's bidding with a readiness, and apologizes to Glóin with a grace, that bear little resemblance to his behavior his last night in Bag End, when he accused Gandalf of wanting his Ring for himself and set his hand to the hilt of his sword.  The difference is that now he is free of the Ring. The song and the laugh with which he left Bag End signaled more than a momentary relief.

His saying '[b]ut perhaps I understand things a little better now' also has a wider application than to his own days as a ringbearer.  For it was only the night before that he saw and understood what the Ring was doing to Frodo:

'Have you got it here?' he asked in a whisper. 'I can't help feeling curious, you know, after all I've heard. I should very much like just to peep at it again.' 

'Yes, I've got it,' answered Frodo, feeling a strange reluctance. 'It looks just the same as ever it did.'  

'Well, I should just like to see it for a moment,' said Bilbo.

When he had dressed, Frodo found that while he slept the Ring had been hung about his neck on a new chain, light but strong. Slowly he drew it out. Bilbo put out his hand. But Frodo quickly drew back the Ring. To his distress and amazement he 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. 

The music and singing round them seemed to falter and a silence fell. Bilbo looked quickly at Frodo's  face and passed his hand across his eyes. 'I understand now,' he said. 'Put it away! I am sorry; sorry you have come in for this burden; sorry about everything. Don't adventures ever have an end? I  suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story. Well, it can't be helped. I wonder if it's any good trying to finish my book? But don't let's worry about it now – let's have some real News!  Tell me all about the Shire!' 

Frodo hid the Ring away, and the shadow passed leaving hardly a shred of memory.  The light and music of Rivendell was about him again.  Bilbo smiled and laughed happily....

(FR 2.i.232)

Since the scene is told from Frodo's perspective, we can only speculate on what Bilbo saw in his face in that moment.  Perhaps a reflection of himself seventeen years earlier, perhaps of Gollum sixty years before that.  But he seems to guess what Frodo is experiencing, from a telltale gesture: Frodo pulls his hand suddenly back rather than let Bilbo touch the Ring, almost the same movement Bilbo had made the very last instant he held it and was in the act of trying to let it go (FR 1.i.35).

What we don't need to speculate about is that, as Bilbo has grown less like Gollum through freedom from the Ring, possession of it has made Frodo resemble him more.  He is at first reluctant to let Bilbo even see the Ring, but the instant Bilbo tries to do more than 'just peep at it again' and stretches out his hand to touch it, Frodo sees him as a 'creature' -- precisely what he had called Gollum (FR 1.ii.59) when he wished Bilbo had killed him -- Bilbo, whom he now sees as a threat, and feels the urge to strike.² In fact the vision he sees of Bilbo, 'with a hungry face and bony, groping hands,' resembles no one so much as Gollum, though the first time reader of The Lord of the Rings who has not read The Hobbit does not know this yet.³

It is a moment of darkness in the House of Elrond, the last place we would expect it, but that only reveals more clearly the shadow the Ring casts over its bearer.  As the music and light seem to die around them, the lesson we saw in A Long-Expected Party is repeated and extended.  Not only will the ties of trust and old friendship fail if the ring-bearer feels the Ring is threatened, but so will the bonds of kinship and love. Pity saved Bilbo, just barely; murder doomed Sméagol, almost certainly. Frodo, who held it a pity that Bilbo had shown mercy, is somewhere in between. This not only bodes ill for Frodo, but indirectly helps to maintain the ugly portrait of Gollum we have already been shown.  Putting both of Bilbo's statements together we may also see that his new understanding reaches all the way back to his earliest moments in possession of the Ring. It comprehends both his own behavior (even last night when he asked just to see the Ring, then reached for it at once), and Frodo's, which is so like his own, and evidently also Gollum's.⁴

When Elrond cuts Bilbo off, the old hobbit has just returned to the point in his tale where A Long-Expected Party begins. Perhaps it is no accident that the tale of Bilbo gives way to the tale of Gandalf and Aragorn's hunt for Gollum at this point rather than any other.  For Bilbo is now as free from the Ring as he can ever be.⁵  It is time, as he put it to Frodo in the passage just quoted above, for 'someone else...to carry on the story.'  For the reader Bilbo has come full circle back to the kindly and jocular character we met before he put on the Ring at the party and vanished, revealing the 'creature' who threatened Gandalf with a sword (FR 1.i.34) and whom Frodo thought he glimpsed just last night.⁶

It is also no accident that when Aragorn tells his part of the tale, he describes a Gollum we have seen before, in Gandalf's description of him to Frodo (FR 1.ii.52-55), head always down, eyes always down, 'nosing about the banks,' precisely what he was doing before Déagol found the Ring and he killed him for it.

'At once I took my leave of Denethor, [said Gandalf,] but even as I went northwards, messages came to me out of Lorien that Aragorn had passed that way, and that he had found the creature called Gollum. Therefore I went first to meet him and hear his tale. Into what deadly perils he had gone alone I dared not
guess.' 

'There is little need to tell of them,' said Aragorn. 'If a man must needs walk in sight of the Black Gate, or tread the deadly flowers of Morgul Vale, then perils he will have. I, too, despaired at last, and I began my homeward journey. And then, by fortune, I came suddenly on what I sought: the marks of soft feet beside a muddy pool. But now the trail was fresh and swift, and it led not to Mordor but away. Along the skirts of the Dead Marshes I followed it, and then I had him. Lurking by a stagnant mere, peering in the water as the dark eve fell, I caught him, Gollum. He was covered with green slime. He will never love me, I fear; for he bit me, and I was not gentle. Nothing more did I ever get from his mouth than the marks of his teeth. I deemed it the worst part of all my journey, the road back, watching him day and night, making him walk before me with a halter on his neck, gagged, until he was tamed by lack of drink and food, driving him ever towards Mirkwood. I brought him there at last and gave him to the Elves, for we had agreed that this should be done; and I was glad to be rid of his company, for he stank. For my part I hope never to look upon him again; but Gandalf came and endured long speech with him.'

(FR 2.ii.253)

From beginning to end Strider's loathing for Gollum is made clear.  Nothing in it inclines us to disagree with him; and all we have learned of Aragorn so far tells us to trust what he says.  With his first hand account, he corroborates Gandalf's damning assertion that Gollum had been to Mordor and was on his way back, on some errand of mischief as the wizard thought (FR 1.ii.59).  The time Aragorn spent with Gollum on the way to Mirkwood was 'the worst part of all my journey,' worse, that is, than 'walk[ing] in sight of the Black Gate, or tread[ing] the deadly flowers of Morgul Vale.' And after Gollum bit him, Aragorn began to treat him as if he were an animal, using a 'halter' to 'drive' him, and using hunger and thirst to 'tame' him.⁷ The harshness, indeed the brutality, of Aragorn's treatment of Gollum is surprising, but such is the opinion that the narrative has given us of him and of Gollum that there seems scant room for doubting that Gollum deserved what he got.⁸

There also seems little room for anything resembling pity, but again Aragorn surprises us.  When Boromir comments that Gollum is 'small, but great in mischief,' and asks 'to what doom you put him,' Strider replies:

'He is in prison, but no worse,' said Aragorn. 'He had suffered much. There is no doubt that he was tormented, and the fear of Sauron lies black on his heart. Still I for one am glad that he is safely kept by the watchful Elves of Mirkwood. His malice is great and gives him a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered. He could work much mischief still, if he were free. And I do not doubt that he was allowed to leave Mordor on some evil errand.' 

'Alas! alas!' cried Legolas, and in his fair elvish face there was great distress. 'The tidings that I was sent to bring must now be told. They are not good, but only here have I learned how evil they may seem to this company. Sméagol, who is now called Gollum, has escaped.' 

'Escaped?' cried Aragorn. 'That is ill news indeed. We shall all rue it bitterly, I fear. How came the folk of Thranduil to fail in their trust?' 

'Not through lack of watchfulness,' said Legolas; 'but perhaps through over-kindliness. And we fear that the prisoner had aid from others, and that more is known of our doings than we could wish. We guarded this creature day and night, at Gandalf's bidding, much though we wearied of the task. But Gandalf bade us hope still for his cure, and we had not the heart to keep him ever in dungeons under the earth, where he would fall back into his old black thoughts. 

'You were less tender to me,' said Glóin with a flash of his eyes as old memories were stirred of his imprisonment in the deep places of the Elven-king's halls.

(FR 2.ii.255)

Like Gandalf, Aragorn can see the suffering Gollum has endured.  Perhaps he would even call it 'a sad story' as Gandalf has done, but he is also in no way deceived about the 'malice' that drives and strengthens him, and the evil he could yet do. Just as Gandalf did in The Shadow of the Past Strider mentions Gollum in close connection with Sauron.  In his eyes, Gollum's suffering at Sauron's hands and black fear of him made him more than just a prisoner. To some extent he had become a servant of Mordor, set loose for an evil purpose.  And the statement Aragorn makes, finding the source of Gollum's strength in his malice, echoes words that Gandalf had only just uttered about The Dark Lord himself: '[this Ring is] the treasure of the Enemy, fraught with all his malice, and in it lies a great part of his strength of old' (FR 2.ii.254).

Nor should we neglect Strider's rebuke of Legolas in lofty, formal language as part of the portrayal of Gollum.  Though it might come as a surprise, given Tolkien's love of words native and archaic, 'rue' is a word he uses sparingly, reserving it for matters of serious regret.  The word appears only three more times in The Lord of the Rings, and not again after the present scene until The Return of the King. Speaking of the forlorn defense of Osgiliath, Faramir says: 'Today we may make the Enemy pay ten times our loss at the passage and yet rue the exchange' (5.iv.816). The Rohirrim on the Field of Pelennor, when they believe that Éowyn is dead, tell Prince Imrahil: '...we knew naught of her riding until this hour, and greatly we rue it' (5.vi.845). And Beregond, as he contemplates the body of the porter at the Steward's Door, states: 'This deed I shall ever rue...but a madness of haste was upon me, and he would not listen, but drew sword against me' (5.vii.855).

But the sting is in the tail. 'We shall rue it bitterly, I fear' expresses disappointment and the expectation of evil.  But '[h]ow came the folk of Thranduil to fail in their trust?' is not merely an archaic way of saying 'oh, no, how did this happen? And after all the trouble I went through to catch him?'  It's a reproach, and a demand for accountability.   It reveals just how dangerous Aragorn thinks Gollum is.

And a significant part of this peril -- but one easily missed at this point because we have not seen him yet ourselves --  is the cunning with which Gollum tries to use the misery of his life to play upon the hearts of those inclined to pity him.  We have seen hints of this in Gandalf's account of him to Frodo (FR 1.ii.54-57), and we will see it throughout Book 4. Here he treacherously uses the 'over-kindliness' of the Elves against them, who, hoping for his cure, allow him outside under guard.  While there he somehow manages to contact spies of the Enemy and is rescued by Orcs in a bloody affray.

As if being rescued by Orcs weren't telling enough, two details are of particular note here.  First, the notion that Gollum likes to climb trees in daylight and feel the breeze is almost wholly at odds with the portrait of him given by Gandalf.  It is rather 'roots and beginnings' that interested him, and the secrets buried in darkness beneath the mountains (FR 1.ii.53-54).  Second, Legolas' statement that by letting Gollum out of his dark cell the Elves were trying to keep him from 'fall[ing] back into his old black thoughts' (FR 2.ii.255), suggests that Gollum had shown improvement: 'fall back' makes no sense otherwise. But Gollum has that within which passeth show: an 'evil part' that would only become 'angrier' if any of this apparent change for the better in him were real (FR 1.ii.55).  The details of Legolas' story make it seem far more likely that Gollum was telling the Elves what they wanted to hear in order to cozen them, but his character, as Book Four will reveal, is so complex that we cannot rule out the flicker of hope amid the darkness that Gandalf allowed for.

The final element here is Glóin's rebuke, which bookends Aragorn's, and by scornfully stressing the 'tenderness' of the Elves' treatment of Gollum underlines both the folly of pity beclouded by compassion and the hideous treachery of Gollum, who will twist the kindness of others to his own ends.  That he might do so even when that kindness has had some positive effect on him is part of the dark complexity of his character. It has been suggested before. Consider Gandalf's statement that meeting Bilbo might have stirred pleasant memories for Gollum, memories of a time before the Ring (FR 1.ii.55).  Yet he was ready to kill him to regain it (FR 1.i.34).  Consider also how Bilbo acts towards Gandalf, with whom he has been friends for over sixty years, when he feels the Ring is threatened (FR 1.i.33-34), and Frodo's reaction when Bilbo tried to touch the Ring the night before this council.  In their behavior we see reflections of Gollum's.⁹

In The Council of Elrond we see the portrait of Gollum begun in the first two chapters enlarged by added emphasis on his cunning and his treachery, on the strength his malice bestows upon him, on his links to the Enemy, and on the penalty one may have to pay for 'overkindliness' to a creature so corrupt. That Gollum is so clever he made fools of the Elves and escaped them must have come as a bit of a shock to Frodo, who was incredulous at the idea that the Elves had not put him to death.¹⁰   Another reliable witness with first hand experience of Gollum comes forward in Aragorn, to confirm what Gandalf has already said about him.  Again, as in A Long-Expected Party we see Gollum's character illuminated by comparison with the changes in Bilbo, and now, too, Frodo.

If anything, the portrayal has grown darker since A Long-Expected Party and The Shadow of the Past. In a sense this is entirely fitting since Gollum first nears the stage in the darkness of Moria, to which we shall next turn our attention.

_________________________________

¹ Cf. Faramir's attitude towards Gollum: TT 4.vi.689-93.

² 'Creature' is a word used of Gollum far more often than of any other being in The Lord of the Rings. See Again That Vile Creature, With A Special Appearance by Grendel.  Frodo has a similar experience with Sam in The Tower of Cirith Ungol (RK 6.i.911-912).

³ As I discussed elsewhere, the portrayal of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings must stand on its own merits. Nor can we assume that the first time reader will have read The Hobbit or even the parts of the prologue that mention Gollum.  I will be discussing The Hobbit and the Prologue in Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (V) later this year.

⁴ Does his understanding here reach back to his moment of pity for Gollum, which began with 'a sudden understanding' (The Hobbit 97)?

⁵ Even near the end, after the Ring has gone into the fire, Bilbo is not finally and wholly free of the it. He again expresses a desire to see it when Frodo stops in Rivendell on his way back to the Shire (RK 6.vi.987).

⁶ In The Shadow of the Past (FR i.ii.48-49) Gandalf says that Bilbo felt better as soon as he gave up the Ring and that he stopped worrying about him once he did so. He also points out, however, that 'a lot of time' would have to go by before he could safely look upon it, and that Bilbo's giving up the Ring of his own free will made a crucial difference.  Obviously Gollum did not do so, nor in the end will Frodo. This does not augur well for their chances of recovery.

⁷ That he says he 'tamed' him is interesting in view of Frodo's later attempt to do the same in Book Four.  As the testimony of Legolas will reveal, Aragorn, like Frodo, never did more than subdue him.

⁸ I have always taken the words 'I was not gentle' to imply that he beat Gollum, since they seem to describe his immediate response to being bitten rather than to look forward to what he did later. With '[n]othing more did I ever get from him....' Aragorn seems to begin a new thought. Marching someone hundreds of miles, bound and gagged, and withholding food and water to make them compliant is extremely harsh treatment.  Gollum had no fond memory of Aragorn (TT 4.iii.643).  For more on this journey, described as 'not much short of nine hundred miles, and this Aragorn accomplished with weariness in fifty days,' see UT 342-43. With weariness indeed.

⁹ As Gandalf clearly suggests when Bilbo calls the Ring his Precious: 'It has been called that before...but not by you' (FR 1.i.33).  For discussion see here.

¹⁰ 'Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live after all those horrible deeds?' (FR 1.ii.59).  Note how the commas set off and emphasize 'and the Elves' by introducing the pause of incredulity.

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)

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. 

____________________________

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).

Me, Spock, and Beowulf, All on the Ferry.

In Beowulf, when the hero enters Heorot, the mead hall of King Hrothgar, he is greeted by the king and invited to join them at their feast. Then a man named Unferth, who sits in a position of great honor at the feet of the king, begins to speak, questioning Beowulf in a manner that probes his history and tests his character even as it insults him. Unferth is the king's þyle, his 'orator' or 'spokesman.' Beowulf, unprovoked and undaunted (as the hero no doubt should be), responds in kind, to the delight of the king. Evidently, Beowulf's response told Hrothgar everything he needed to know about him:

                             Then the treasure giver,
Grey haired, battle-famed, knew joy.
The Lord of Bright-Danes had heard Beowulf,
Counted his courage, his strength of spirit. 

Then laughter lifted in the great hall --
Words were traded, Wealhtheow walked in,
Hrothgar's queen....

(Beowulf, 608-13, trans. Williamson)

In his lecture on this scene and the character of Unferth for our Beowulf through Tolkien class, Professor Tom Shippey described the role of the þyle as follows:

'What's a þyle, which is what Unferth is? I think that's rather easy. Both Gríma Wormtongue and Unferth have a place and that place is at the feet of the king. Later on Hrothgar, lamenting the death of one of his men will say "he was my runwita and my rædbora" (1325). Runwita means "a knower of secrets;" rædbora means "giver of advice." And that, I think, is what Unferth is. He is a confidant, someone who knows the king's secrets. He is a "rædbora," someone who gives the king advice, a counselor.

'In fact, if you're thinking of The Godfather, which is often quite a good idea in these circumstances, he is the consigliere to Hrothgar, who is himself the godfather, you might say.... So we could say that Unferth is a counselor, he's a spokesman because of þelcræft [or "þylcræft" = "oratory," the skill of a þyle]. He's very possibly a kind of genealogist. We're often getting these remarks about people being well known. This is an oral culture dependent on memory. You need somebody who remembers everything and you need someone who can say to the king "yes, yes, he is the son of so-and-so, he's the grandson of so-and-so." Important to remember that. Somebody has to do these things and Unferth does it. Tolkien translates, I think very sensibly, that he is the king's "sage." He is the wise man for the king, who is there to give the king advice. He's a mixture of a kind of researcher and possibly also spin doctor.

'And I'd finally suggest that he's a bit like the king's subjunctive mood. He says what the king might be thinking, but the king won't have said it. So that if it's wrong, as it is when he challenges Beowulf, it's retractable. It's not the king's fault. It's his adviser, and you can blame the adviser....'¹ 

Last Friday morning (2/27/15) as I was crossing Long Island Sound on the 11:00 AM ferry out of Orient, NY, I was thinking about this scene and Professor Shippey's commentary on it, which I had just listened to again in my car as I drove to Orient. Suddenly I made a connection I had not thought of before.  I think it arose from the combination of the way Hrothgar waits and watches while Unferth fences with Beowulf, and Professor Shippey's explanation of the role of the þyle as ' bit like the king's subjunctive mood.'  But I remembered a scene in Space Seed, one of the best and most important episodes of the original Star Trek.

In this episode, just in case you've never seen it, the Enterprise discovers a 170 year old ship from earth floating derelict in an unexpected region of space. There is no historical record of such a ship, and they go on board to investigate, finding 84 cryogenic pods with humans inside them, more than 70 of whom are still alive.  One of these humans revives, a magnetic, mysterious man who will identify himself only as Khan.  Kirk and Spock suspect that he and his shipmates might be the genetically engineered supermen who vanished at the end of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.  A dinner (or feast, if you will) is held to welcome Khan to the 23rd century.  As they sit at the table, the following conversation takes place:

KIRK: Forgive my curiosity, Mister Khan, but my officers are anxious to know more about your extraordinary journey.

SPOCK: And how you managed to keep it out of the history books.

KHAN: Adventure, Captain. Adventure. There was little else left on Earth.

SPOCK: There was the war to end tyranny. Many considered that a noble effort.

KHAN: Tyranny, sir? Or an attempt to unify humanity?

SPOCK: Unify, sir? Like a team of animals under one whip?

KHAN: I know something of those years. Remember, it was a time of great dreams, of great aspiration.

SPOCK: Under dozens of petty dictatorships.

KHAN: One man would have ruled eventually. As Rome under Caesar. Think of its accomplishments.

SPOCK: Then your sympathies were with --

KHAN (turning to Kirk): You are an excellent tactician, Captain. You let your second in command attack while you sit and watch for weakness.

KIRK: You have a tendency to express ideas in military terms, Mister Khan. This is a social occasion.

KHAN: It has been said that social occasions are only warfare concealed. Many prefer it more honest, more open.

KIRK: You fled. Why? Were you afraid?

KHAN: I've never been afraid.

KIRK: But you left at the very time mankind needed courage.

KHAN: We offered the world order!

KIRK: We?

KHAN: Excellent. Excellent. But if you will excuse me, gentlemen and ladies, I grow fatigued again. With your permission, Captain, I will return to my quarters.

(Kirk stands, and Khan leaves.)

Unify, sir?

With your permission, Captain, I will return to my quarters.

Now I don't believe that the writers of this episode (Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilber) were thinking of Beowulf when they composed this scene. I couldn't even guess if they had read it (though the writer of Star Trek: Voyager, Heroes and Demons definitely had²).   Still I would say that the parallel between the scenes in Beowulf and Space Seed is much more illustrative than that between Beowulf and The Godfather. While the positions of Unferth and Hrothgar are indeed analogous to those of consigliere and godfather, it is in Space Seed that we see the parallels in behavior, as Spock questions Khan while Kirk looks on, evaluating Khan's reactions and responses.  

The verbal duel between Spock and Khan all but proves that Khan is the dangerous enemy they suspected he was, and makes amply clear for us the nature and purpose of such an exchange. For while a modern reader of Beowulf might not immediately recognize what Unferth is really doing, there is no mistaking what Spock is up to. Kirk's involvement makes the parallel even clearer.  First he pretends that it is not he, but his officers who have questions for Khan, which allows Spock to begin his 'attack,' as Khan puts it.  

Then, when Kirk moves to defuse the tense situation by claiming that a social occasion is no place for warlike speech, Khan challenges him more directly, saying that he prefers his warfare 'more honest, more open.' At which point Kirk presses his attack even more forcefully than Spock had.  Even so, when the exchange becomes too heated, Khan is allowed to retreat, avoiding a more dangerous confrontation. Like Hrothgar Kirk learns what he wanted to learn. That the king wished to see if the man before him was the sort of man he hoped for, and that the captain wished to see if the man before him was the sort of man he feared him to be, is not a material difference.  

So there I was with Beowulf and Spock on a ferry (a ferry) last Friday morning, thinking these thoughts. A few hours later I got to my hotel outside Boston.  I checked the news and said "Oh, no." Leonard Nimoy had died, at exactly the time I was thinking about him. No, I don't think there's a connection between these two events, not on any level, not even on the spooky chance-if-chance-you-call-it level. Except in my heart, where this wonderful character and the apparently decent man who gave him such persuasive life dwell now forever.  I am even especially glad I was thinking about him just then.  I now have another reason to remember him.

_________________________________ 

Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited and translated by Craig Williamson (Philadelphia 2011).  The line numbers cited above are for Williamson's translation; those directly below are from the Old English text.

Þa wæs on salum    sinces brytta
gamolfeax ond guðrof;   geoce gelyfde
brego Beorht-Dena;   gehyrde on Beowulfe
folces hyrde,    fæstrædne geþoht. 

Ðær wæs hæletha hleahtor,   hlyn swinsode,
word wæron wynsume.   Eode Wealhþeow forð
cwen Hroðgares....

(lines 607-13)

A more literal translation would run as follows:

Then the giver of treasure, gray haired and brave in battle, knew joy. The lord of the Bright Danes took hope in [Beowulf's] aid; in Beowulf the shepherd of the folk heard steadfast determination.

There was laughter from the men, it made a sweet sound, his words were pleasing. Wealhtheow, queen of Horthgar, came forth....

_________________________________

¹ Since I was transcribing an audio recording, all punctuation and paragraphing are of course mine. I have tried to faithfully represent Professor Shippey's words, though I am not completely sure whether the word after 'wrong' in the final paragraph is 'as' or 'and.'  The difference, if there is one, is minimal.

Gríma Wormtongue is of course the counselor of King Théoden in The Two Towers. He first appears in the chapter The King of the Golden Hall, in a scene which has much in common with this one.

The recording is proprietary so I may not link to it.

² See the article on Heroes and Demons at Memory Alpha for the comments of Naren Shankar, the writer of this episode, who states that he even went back and researched Beowulf in preparing the story. He was surprised to learn that no one else on the production team had ever read it.