Not What You Might Expect From Beowulf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Bliss of the Gods to a Jewel Shining in the Darkness -- What Tolkien's Kilbride Dedication Can Show Us

The sale at Sotheby's in London on 4 June 2015 of a first edition of The Hobbit for £137,000 has certainly drawn its share of attention, for having nearly tripled the last previous auction price of such a volume, and for Sotheby's misidentifying as Elvish a dedication which Tolkien had inscribed to Katherine Kilbride in Old English.¹ Here is an image from the page in the Sotheby's catalog:

We may transcribe the verses at the bottom of the page

 as follows:

Fela bið on westwegum werum uncuðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescyne lond,
eardgeard ylfa, eorclanstanas
on dunscrafum digle scninað.

And translate them:

There's many a thing on westward ways unknown to men,
Wonders and creatures, a land of splendor,
The homeland of the Elves; precious stones
In mountain caves secretly shine.

The first thing we must note is that the last word, scninað, is a rather surprising scribal error by Tolkien.  There is no such verb in Old English as 'scninan.' Clearly it should be scinað, which means 'shine.'  Professor Susan Irvine of University College London, whom The Guardian consulted for its article, has also rightly pointed out that the last line and a half of this poem -- from eorclanstanas to the end -- diverges from a similar poem found in Tolkien's The Lost Road (44):

Thus cwæth Ælfwine Widlást:

Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard elfa, and esa bliss.
Lyt ænig wat hwylc his longath sie
tham the eftsithes eldo getwæfeth.

Which Tolkien himself renders in prose as:

Thus said Ælfwine the far-travelled: "There's many a thing in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return."

(LR 44)

Now Tolkien had been working on The Lost Road in the year or so just before The Hobbit appeared (21 September 1937), and it's entirely reasonable to think that as he was casting about for some verses to inscribe in this presentation copy his mind came to rest upon the lines from The Lost Road.  These verses, however, have a much darker tone, which Tolkien perhaps judged inappropriate for his former student, Katherine Kilbride, who was an invalid.  So, he removed the grim bits and wrote new lines that he deemed more fitting for the occasion and for the nature of the gift he was giving.

This much is prologue, I would argue.  For to describe these two poems as 'similar' and to say that the poem in The Hobbit 'diverges' or 'varies' from the poem in The Lost Road is quite an understatement.  As Tolkien himself famously remarked in On Fairy-stories:² 

... to take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood: it is of merely secondary interest that the retold version of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault's story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault's version had not. And that is a very profound difference....

A 'variation', a 'divergence', would be Bilbo's 'eager feet' (FR 1.i.35) and Frodo's 'weary feet' (FR 1.iii.73) in The Road Goes Ever On.  There a small change of the sort that Tolkien was so good at alters the tenor of the poem, and thereby the characterization of the speakers, suggesting something about their views of the roads they were about to set out upon.  We may also say the same of the last version of the The Road Goes Ever On (RK 6.vi.987), which in a few new lines reveals yet another road and the speaker's attitude toward it. These changes are improving variations on a theme. Each is linked to the next, each reflects the story that is, and hints at the journey to come, just as the very first version of this poem, sung by Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit (313), relishes looking back down that road as part of the joy of returning home. He knows where he is going, and what he has escaped.

But we have nothing like these variations, these evolutions, in the poems we are considering here. The verses in the Kilbride dedication and from The Lost Road differ from each other as much as Errantry and Bilbo's Song of Eärendil in Rivendell (FR 2.i.233-36). For all the similarities of word and rhyme and meter in Errantry and Eärendil, for all that both tell of a mariner who sets out on a journey to convey a message, the two are different poems.  For the tale told in Errantry is silly and funny and the message slips the easily distracted mariner's mind, compelling him to start all over again, which is part of the humor of the poem. Eärendil, by contrast, is about the tragedy and triumph of a determined messenger who saves the world by delivering his message at great cost to himself.  The same is true here.  We have distinct poems that share part of a sentence.

Let's look first at those shared lines, ignoring the orthographic variations.

Fela bið on westwegum werum uncuðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescyne lond,
eardgeard ylfa,

As so often in Tolkien, going all the way back to the early poems Goblin Feet and You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (The Book of Lost Tales 1.27-32) there is the image of a road and a journey. Westwegum, literally 'westways,' places the end of this road in eardgeard ylfa, the shining homeland of the elves: Elvenhome. This suggests not only the West beyond the sea in Middle-earth, but also -- and this is especially true for those unacquainted with Tolkien's legendarium in 1937, which is to say, for almost everyone -- conjures the other mythic western lands of the great sea, from the Isles of the Blessed to Tír na nÓg, from Atlantis to the unknown destination of Scyld's funeral ship (Beowulf 26-52). We can also likely detect a connection to England itself in this word, since, as Tolkien would have known, vestr-vegir, the cognate phrase in Old Icelandic, referred to the British Isles themselves; and of course Tolkien once meant to make England itself the homeland of the Elves (BoLT 1.22-27).

In The Lost Road the wonder and splendor to be revealed in the West reaches yet higher. Not only will we men find Elvenhome, but we will glimpse esa bliss, the bliss of the gods. Though not for long, it seems. Esa bliss slips quickly away, beyond our grasp.  We are left only with longing and old age.  The wonder and beauty of the first lines turn dark because we cannot attain such bliss. It is not for us.  Even the sight of it awakens a longing we can neither turn from nor satisfy. The divide between us and them could not be more clear.

These lines, moreover, are 'laden with the sadness of Mortal Men,' as Legolas puts it after hearing Aragorn recite a poem of the Rohirrim in their own language (TT 4.vi.508).  As such they touch upon themes of 'Death and the desire for deathlessness' which Tolkien later said lay at the heart of The Lord of the Rings.³ Not only does The Lost Road employ these lines with immediate personal relevance to the characters speaking and hearing them, a son and his aged, failing father, but it affords them a wider application.  For with this work begins the Tale of Númenor, the island where men reject the fate of death and try to seize immortality and the 'bliss of the gods' by force, with cataclysmic results. Tolkien continued to develop this story for decades (as was his wont), in The Lord of the Rings, in The Notion Club Papers, in Akallabêth, and finally in Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth, which depicts men as already embittered about their 'swift fate' before the First Age had ended.⁴ The verses in The Lost Road may be said to contain within them the seeds, and perhaps the summary, of these themes. In the end, every man knows the longing for the bliss of the gods from which old age and death cut him off.

How different is the world the Kilbride dedication depicts. So far from an elegy of loss and longing, here a treasure shines secretly before us in the mountain caverns of Elvenhome. This is of course quite apropos in a presentation copy of The Hobbit, as is Tolkien's use of eorclanstanas, another form of which, eorcanstan, in the singular gives us arkenstone.  But eorcanstan itself brims with allusion, as this marvelous post by Dr Eleanor Parker makes clear, most prominently to Sigurd and to Christ, both of whom are likened to precious jewels using this word -- for Sigurd it's the Old Norse cognate jarknasteinn -- and both of whom fight dragons. 'And,' as Dr Parker points out,

'there's not as big a gap as you might think between Sigurðr and Christ; the scene of Sigurðr killing the dragon appears on early carvings in a Christian context, which are difficult to interpret but may show Sigurðr's triumph being cast as a battle between good and evil.'

And in Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which he was also working in the 1930s, there exists for Sigurd, though dead, the promise of bliss after death and the world's ending.

In the day of Doom
he shall deathless stand
who death tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Óðin:
not all shall end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head the Helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
When war passeth
in world rebuilt,
bliss shall they drink
who the bitter tasted.

(Völsungkviða en Nýja ix.80-81)

This mention of bliss here is interesting because even the possibility of it seemed to be denied to men in The Lost Road verses, and the defeat of old age and its sequel appeared quite final.  As above, it is not so difficult to see what Sigurd has to do with Christ: bliss beyond the ending of this world in a new heaven and a new earth. Others words, too, in the Kilbride dedication provide a link to Christ and his ancient enemy, the dragon. For the words 'on dunscrafum digle' allude to the bestiary poem The Panther* in the collection Physiologus.

Just as the common lines of both Tolkien poems begin by enumerating how 'many are' (fela bið) the wonders and creatures of the world, before narrowing the focus down to the homeland of the Elves, The Panther also begins by stating how 'many are' (monge sindon) the different kinds of creatures across the wide world, before drawing our attention to one single animal,the panther, who is the most wondrous of them all. He guards a far land and dwells æfter dunscrafum (12), 'among mountain caves.' Kind to all other creatures, he has but one enemy, the dragon, to whom he does all the harm he can (15-18).⁵  Twice he is described in terms familiar from the common lines of Tolkien's verses (19: wundrum scine; and 26-27: scinra / wundrum). And again after further descriptions of his beauty that dazzles the eye, with each of his hues more lovely than the last (19-30), and of his mild and moderate character, except when it comes to the dragon (30-34), we are told he retires to sleep for three days digle stowe under dunscrafum 'in a secret place beneath the mountain caves' (36-37). In the latter half of the poem (38-74), the panther is explicitly identified with Christ, now risen from the secret places of the earth (dīgle ārās, 62), and the poet ends with a formula like that with which he began:

monigfealde sind geond middangeard
god ungnyðe  þe ūs tō giefe dǣleð
and tō feorhnere Fæder ælmihtig,
and se ānga Hyht ealra gesceafta
uppe ge niþre. 

Many are the good things across middle-earth,
Abundant goods which the Almighty Father
Assigns us for grace and for salvation,
And he the only Hope of all creatures
Above and below.

So clearly points of contact exist between these texts, which help Tolkien to create the more hopeful tenor of the Kilbride dedication. For even if the reader of The Hobbit soon learns that the arkenstone glittering in secret beneath the mountain halls is guarded by a dragon, heroes, whether Sigurd or Christ, can also shine like a jewel in the darkness and defeat that venomous, ancient enemy (33-34: þām āttorsceaþan, his fyrngeflitan). And given his faith and his words on the wonders of far off Elvenhome, it is rather tempting to think that in the words geond middangeard Tolkien saw the meaning 'beyond Middle-earth.' However that may be, the allusive links are not to be doubted, even if in 1937 only C.S. Lewis and perhaps a few others could have felt their full import.

Within these two distinct poems -- for that is what they are -- we can see Tolkien working masterfully to create opposite effects through the 'divergence' of his materials. In The Lost Road we find elegy, in the Kilbride dedication to The Hobbit hope. And the difference that this makes suits the Tales he is telling in each work.  For The Hobbit is a Tale of hope and happy endings, of renewal and return. In The Lost Road the Tale of Númenor could only have ended in cataclysm, with the great green wave sweeping across the land and a world lost forever, just as it does in Akallabêth:

In an hour unlooked for by Men this doom befell, on the nine and thirtieth day since the passing of the fleets. Then suddenly fire burst from the Meneltarma, and there came a mighty wind and a tumult of the earth, and the sky reeled, and the hills slid, and Númenor went down into the sea, with all its children and its wives and its maidens and its ladies proud; and all its gardens and its halls and its towers, its tombs and its riches, and its jewels and its webs and its things painted and carven, and its lore: they vanished for ever. And last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam, climbing over the land, took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls. Too late she strove to ascend the steep ways of the Meneltarma to the holy place; for the waters overtook her, and her cry was lost in the roaring of the wind.

(Silmarillion, 279)

_________________________________

*Before anything else I would like to express my thanks to Dr Eleanor Parker for her gracious conversation and correspondence on the verses discussed above. It was she who brought The Panther to my attention. Any errors of translation or interpretation are entirely my own.

_________________________

¹The initial error in the Sotheby's catalog is doubly wrong, first as to the language of the dedicatory lines, and second in seeming to name John Rateliff as the source of that attribution: 'Rateliff identifies the Elvish verse as an extract from Tolkien's The Lost Road.' But in Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit (second edition, 2011) appendix v, which Sotheby's cites, Rateliff makes no mention of the language in which the verse is written. It is possible that Sotheby's did not intend the sentence to be read that way.

² On Fairy-stories has appeared in print and on the internet so many times that referring to a page number in any one edition is almost unfair. I shall follow the practice adopted by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson in their Tolkien on Fairy-stories (2014), where they number the paragraphs. The quotation in the text above is from paragraph number 24.

³ See letter 203 (Letters 1981): 'But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!' And also 211: 'It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the "escapes": serial longevity, and hoarding memory.' These letters date from 1957 and 1958, respectively.

⁴ The Athrabeth, or The Debate of Finrod and Andreth, seems to date from 1959 or a little earlier. See Morgoth's Ring (New York 1993) 303-304. The bitterness about their brief lives compared to the Eldar and the resentment men felt over it runs throughout the Athrabeth (303-366), appearing within the first page of the dialogue (307-308):

'More than a hundred years it is now,' said Andreth, 'since we came over the Mountains; and Bëor and Baran and Boron each lived beyond his ninetieth year.  Our passing was swifter before we found this land.'

'Then are you content here?' said Finrod. 

'Content?' said Andreth. 'No heart of Man is content.  All passing and dying is a grief to it; but if the withering is less soon then that is some amendment, a little lifting of the Shadow.' 

'What mean you by that?' said Finrod. 

'Surely you know well!' said Andreth. 'The darkness that is now confined to the North, but once'; and here she paused and her eyes darkled, as if he mind were gone back into black years best forgot. 'But once lay upon all Middle-earth, while ye dwelt in your bliss.' 

'It was not concerning the Shadow that I asked,' said Finrod. 'What mean you, I would say, by the lifting of it? Or how is the swift fate of men concerned with it?  Ye also, we hold (being instructed by the Great who know), are Children of Eru, and your fate and nature is from Him.' 

'I see,' said Andreth, 'that in this ye of the High-elves do not differ from your lesser kindred whom we have met in the world, though they have never dwelt in the Light.  All ye Elves deem that we die swiftly by our true kind.  That we are brittle and brief, and ye are strong and lasting.  We may be "Children of Eru", as ye say in your lore; but we are children to you also: to be loved a little maybe, and yet creatures of less worth, upon whom ye may look down from the height of your power and your knowledge, with a smile, or with pity, or with a shaking of heads.'

⁵ I find it impossible not to think of Aslan while reading of the panther, but it seems equally impossible that no one has never noted that before.

Peter Ibbetson and The Cottage of Lost Play

Every now and then you encounter a confluence of sources that simply need to be set out side by side, even if they also merit more extensive consideration later. That happened today as I was reading Verlyn Flieger's exceptionally interesting book, A Question of Time (1997, p. 32-33):

[George Du Maurier's novel] Peter Ibbetson is a story of the inner life, of the reality of dreams, and of the power of the mind to transcend observable reality.  A boy and a girl growing up in France, "Gogo" Pasquier and "Mimsey" Seraskier, are separated as children and meet years later in England, by which time their adult lives are established. He has become Peter Ibbetson and she the Duchess of Towers.  She is now married to a faithless and abusive husband, and Peter is the adopted dependent of his equally unsavory uncle, the wicked Colonel Ibbetson. They meet only briefly before being parted again, this time for life, when Peter is committed to a lunatic asylum for the unpremeditated murder of Colonel Ibbetson.  Cumbersome and arbitrary though it is, this plot device is necessary for Du Maurier's purpose, which is to separate the lovers in daily life so that they may meet in an share one another's dreams. Their dream life then becomes their primary mode of being, and their waking hours a secondary, merely interim existence. 

In their shared dreams the lovers travel together back to childhood, revisit their old life and old haunts and, themselves unseen, observe the children they once were. Here Du Maurier moves explicitly into the realm of parapsychology, presenting the past and the present as intermingled or, perhaps more psychically, presenting them as a unified concept occupying the same dream space, differentiated only by limited observation and experience.  The adult dreamers come to recognize that their present, dreaming selves were present in their own past, sensed by their childhood selves, who speak of being "haunted" by ghosts they cannot see, and which, of course, to ordinary perception do not even exist yet. 

Having taken the step from observable reality with the lovers to interior reality with the dreamers, Du Maurier makes and even greater leap from parapsychology to race memory.  Taking ever-greater risks with probability, he sends his dreaming lovers beyond their personal past and memory into their ancestral past and family memory and history and finally back as far as they can go, back through race memory into a nineteenth-century dream of prehistory.  Together they transcend the Paris suburb of their childhood to visit France in the ancien regime, to go back to the time of Napoleon, to Versailles and the Revolution and the taking of the Bastille, to the Renaisance of Villon, to the time of Charlemagne, and still on and back they go dreaming out into the ancient starlight, into a victorian vision of prehistory when only the earliest humans were awake, back to the Ice Age, the time of the mammoth and the cave bear. 

This dream-life goes on for many years, during which time, though their real-world selves age, their dream-selves remain youthful and vigorous. The lovers' apotheosis comes when the Duchess, whose death precedes Peter's, returns after death in dream to reassure Peter of her continuing, though now unmanifest, presence in his life. She tells him what she knows of the life beyond death, her realization that "sound and light are one" ... that "Time is nothing" ... and "time and space mean just the same as 'nothing'."

So much leaps off the page here, from Aragorn's farewell to Arwen, back to the dreams and time travel of The Notion Club Papers and of The Lost Road before that. But what resonated the most was the correspondences with the poem Tolkien wrote for Edith in 1915:

You & Me and  the Cottage of Lost Play

You and me--we know that land
And often have been there
In the long old days, old nursery days,
A dark child and a fair.
Was it down the paths of firelight dreams
In winter cold and white,
Or in the blue-spun twilit hours
Of little early tucked-up beds
In drowsy summer night,
That You and I got lost in Sleep
And met each other there--
Your dark hair on your white nightgown,
And mine was tangled fair?
We wandered shyly hand in hand,
Or rollicked in the fairy sand
And gathered pearls and shells in pails,
While all about the nightingales
Were singing in the trees.
We dug for silver with our spades
By little inland sparkling seas,Then ran ashore through sleepy seas,
And down a warm and winding lane
And never never found again
Between high whispering trees.

The air was neither night or day,
But faintly dark with softest light,
When first there glimmered into sightThe Cottage of Lost Play.
'Twas builded very very old
White, and thatched with straws of gold,
And pierced with peeping lattices
That looked toward the sea;
And our own children's garden-plots
Were there--our own forgetmenots,
Red daisies, cress and mustard,
And blue nemophile.

O! All the borders trimmed with box
Were full of favourite flowers--of phlox,
Of larkspur, pinks, and hollyhocks
Beneath a red may-tree:
And all the paths were full of shapes,
Of tumbling happy white-clad shapes,
And with them You and Me.
And some had silver watering-cans
And watered all their gowns,
Or sprayed each other; some laid plans
To build them houses, fairy towns,
Or dwellings in the trees;
And some were clambering on the roof;
Some crooning lonely and aloof;
And some were dancing fairy-rings
And weaving pearly daisy-strings,
Or chasing golden bees;
But here and there a little pair
With rosy cheeks and tangled hair
Debated quaint old childish things--
And we were one of these.

But why it was there came a time
When we could take the road no more,
Though long we looked, and high would climb,
Or gaze from many a seaward shore
To find the path between sea and sky
To those old gardens of delight;
And how it goes now in that land,
If there the house and gardens stand,
Still filled with children clad in white--
We know not, You and I. 

And why it was Tomorrow came
And with his grey hand led us back;
And why we never found the same
Old cottage, or the magic track
That leads between a silver sea
And those old shores and gardens fair
Where all things are, that ever were--
We know not, You and Me. 

(BoLT 1.28-29) 

I would like to return to the question of the correspondences between these two texts, but only after I have read Peter Ibbetson.  For now the poem and Flieger's description of the novel will have to suffice.

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.

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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.