Young C. S. Lewis, Arrived at Oxford

C. S. Lewis first came to Oxford in the spring of 1917. So many students were absent, abroad on the battlefields of France, that the town and its colleges seemed empty. Lewis himself had entered the University Officers' Training Corps and would spend much of the year preparing to serve in France.

One weekend that summer he wrote to his friend, Arthur Greeves, back home in Ireland:

Last night, at about nine o'clock I wandered out into the deserted quad. & after 'strolling' for some time went up a staircase where nobody ever goes in these days into the oldest part of the College.  The windows here are all tiny & ivy covered & stained so that it was very dark already.  I walked up & down long passages with locked rooms on each side, revelling in 'desolation'.  The 'oaks' of these rooms were mostly (as I say) locked, but by good luck I found one open & went in.  On the inner door the faded name 'Mr Carter' greeted me: inside was a tiny room, smaller than my own at home, very dark & thick with dust.  It seemed almost sacrilege to turn on the light in such a forsaken place, but I simply had to inspect it.  The furniture was all just as the owner must have left it & his photos were there on the wall.  I also inspected his books (mostly ordinary Everymen) including 'Lavengro', 'Tristram Shandy', [Edmund] Burke's Speeches & 'Tom Jones'. I suppose this sounds trivial to you; but perhaps you can picture the strange poetry of the thing in such a time & place.  I wonder who Carter is, and if he has been killed yet, & why he left his pile of music so untidily on the dressing table? 

(Letter of 8 July 1917)

University College, Oxford 

The respect, the poignant reverence, with which Lewis examines this scene, seeing poetry and near sacrilege, and wondering in a single breath whether the war had killed Carter 'yet' -- as if it were inevitable -- and about the mess of papers he had left behind him -- as if he were in a rush to leave -- all of this can only make me wonder how much of himself Lewis saw in this room. How much of his own onrushing future in the trenches loomed in this isolated room, dark and thick with dust, with a faded name on the door, and the pieces of a life left behind?

Perhaps as I continue reading his letters, I will learn the answer for sure, just as I think I sense it now. Part of the problem is that it's so easy to read this fluid prose, and think of the C. S. Lewis we all usually think of, the teacher, the scholar, the apologist, the Inkling, the novelist of more mature years, of this fellow here below:

and not this other fellow in the next photograph, this very young man soon to go off to war when all he really wants to do is read and learn, this very young man whom we don't see when our minds conjure up the image of C. S. Lewis.  This young man has never met Tolkien, is somewhere between atheist and agnostic, and in his letters talks about girls and music as well as the books he loved and devoured.  The man who wrote the letter above was not merely describing a scene and evoking a mood.  He was writing something that lay in his own future. And after several hundred pages of his letters it becomes easier to sense the fear that lies behind his words as his own time in the trenches draws nearer.  What books did he leave behind on his desk, what papers? Was his door locked behind him when he went?  Or did he perhaps leave it open for the next very young man to find?  Did he ever learn what happened to Carter?

Lewis in 1919.

Carter lived, by the way.

Is That An Allusion To Ulmo and Tuor in "The Great River" (FR 2.ix.380-81)?

... they let the River bear them on at its own pace, having no desire to hasten towards the perils that lay beyond, whichever course they took in the end. Aragorn let them drift with the stream as they wished, husbanding their strength against weariness to come. But he insisted that at least they should start early each day and journey on far into the evening; for he felt in his heart that time was pressing, and he feared that the Dark Lord had not been idle while they lingered in Lorien. 

Nonetheless they saw no sign of an enemy that day, nor the next. The dull grey hours passed without event. As the third day of their voyage wore on the lands changed slowly: the trees thinned and then failed altogether. On the eastern bank to their left they saw long formless slopes stretching up and away toward the sky; brown and withered they looked, as if fire had passed over them, leaving no living blade of green: an unfriendly waste without even a broken tree or a bold stone to relieve the emptiness. They had come to the Brown Lands that lay, vast and desolate, between Southern Mirkwood and the hills of the Emyn Muil. What pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy had so blasted all that region even Aragorn could not tell.

Upon the west to their right the land was treeless also, but it was flat, and in many places green with wide plains of grass. On this side of the River they passed forests of great reeds, so tall that they shut out all view to the west, as the little boats went rustling by along their fluttering borders. Their dark withered plumes bent and tossed in the light cold airs, hissing softly and sadly. Here and there through openings Frodo could catch sudden glimpses of rolling meads, and far beyond them hills in the sunset, and away on the edge of sight a dark line, where marched the southernmost ranks of the Misty Mountains. 

There was no sign of living moving things, save birds. Of these there were many: small fowl whistling and piping in the reeds, but they were seldom seen. Once or twice the travellers heard the rush and whine of swan-wings, and looking up they saw a great phalanx streaming along the sky.

'Swans!' said Sam. 'And mighty big ones too!' 

'Yes,' said Aragorn, 'and they are black swans.'

(FR 2.ix.380-81)

The Valar and Ilúvatar are famously obscure in The Lord of the Rings.  While the Dark Power, Sauron, is named and identified as a present actor in the affairs of this world from near the very beginning (FR 1.ii.47, 51), the other Powers are much harder to descry. The best example is of course Elbereth.  She is mentioned by Frodo as early as Three's Company (FR 1.iii.79) as someone whom the High Elves greatly revere. Clearly she is a godlike figure of great power -- she made the stars themselves -- but neither here nor later is she identified as one of the Valar, and it is not suggested that she is anything more than a source of inspiration or illumination to the Elves of Middle-Earth. She is sung of, sung to, invoked (with varying effect), and her name is even used as a password, but, within The Lord of the Rings itself, she is never explained.¹ Manwë, her spouse and ruler of the Valar, receives notice only from Bilbo in a single mention of the 'Elder King' in the poem Eärendil (FR 2.i.235);

Moreover, Frodo's ability in Three's Company to recognize the Elves he meets as High Elves because they call Elbereth's name reveals almost nothing.  Even an atheist, for example, could recognize as Roman Catholic someone heard reciting the Hail Mary, and could know that devout Catholics honor the Virgin Mary with a special reverence, but that does not imply any greater knowledge of the Virgin Mary or Roman Catholicism on the part of the atheist.²

It is likely, moreover, that Frodo knows little or nothing about the Valar in general or Elbereth in particular at this point -- not to mention Eru Ilúvatar -- since he is rather mystified when Gandalf hints at the intervention of Providence within time:

‘There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was trying to get back to its master. It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Déagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean; and as long as it stayed with him he would never leave his deep pool again. So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable:  Bilbo from the Shire! 

‘Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that maybe an encouraging thought.' 

‘It is not,’ said Frodo.  'Though I am not sure that I understand you.' 

(FR 1.ii.56, emphasis original)

One could well regard Frodo's lack of knowledge and clarity here as typical, at least for the hobbits, by whom and from whose viewpoint the Tale is told.  When, for example, Gildor invokes Elbereth's protection for Frodo, his instant response is hardly one of faith and understanding, and not at all unlike his reply to Gandalf: 'But where shall I find courage?... That is what I chiefly need' (FR 1.iii.84).

Another example of this comes in Henneth Annûn.  Faramir and the other Dunedain of Gondor turn to the West for a moment of silence before they eat, as they 'look towards Númenor that was, and beyond that to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be' (TT 4.v.676), but this custom is unknown to the hobbits, who are left 'feeling strangely rustic and untutored' (TT 4.v.676).  Here again the Valar are alluded to quite vaguely, not even named, not even in a periphrasis of the kind Elrond had used when he said that 'they who dwell beyond the Sea would not take' the Ring (FR 2.ii.266).  Here reference is buried in an allusion to a nameless land, remote and eternal.

Indeed the word Valar appears only three times in The Lord of the Rings. In Ithilien a soldier of Gondor calls upon them for protection from the Mûmak (TT 4.iv.661). At Aragorn's coronation Gandalf wishes that the days of the King may 'be blessed for as long as the thrones of the Valar endure' (RK 6.v.968).³ And finally in a moment that is as shining and evocative as it is mysterious, the narrator likens Théoden to 'Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young' (RK 5.v.838).

Yet the Valar and Ilúvatar are involved, exerting a subtle but important influence on events from afar that may be detected through seeming coincidence.  Gandalf suggests (but cannot openly say) as much in his remarks to an uncomprehending Frodo in The Shadow of the Past. In the same conversation the wizard also points out that Frodo was 'chosen,' but without saying by whom (FR 1.ii.61), and that '[i]t was the strangest event in the whole history of the Ring so far: Bilbo's arrival just at that time, and putting his hand on it, blindly, in the dark' (FR 1.ii.55-56).⁴ Gildor says of his meeting the hobbits that '[i]n this meeting there may be more than chance' (FR 1.iii.84). Bombadil remarks: 'Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it. It was no plan of mine....' (FR 1.vii.126). And finally Elrond states at the beginning of the Council:

'...The Ring! What shall we do with the Ring, the least of rings, the trifle that Sauron fancies? That is the doom that we must deem. 

'That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say. though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.' 

(FR 2.ii.242)

'Tuor is Led by the Swans to Vinyamar'© Ted Nasmith

We needn't labor this point. It is long established and well understood, and obvious to every attentive reader. What is not so obvious is what looks like an allusion to the Vala Ulmo, the Lord of Waters -- of lakes, streams, and rivers as well as seas -- and to Tuor, an important forefather of Aragorn, an allusion so subtly made and so quickly passed by that I've only just caught it after over four decades of reading The Lord of the Rings. Though I had at times wondered about Aragorn's comment about the swans when I encountered it, I had never given it any further thought in all the years I had known it.

Elsewhere in Tolkien, in works ranging across his entire career of work on the legendarium -- in The Book of Lost Tales, in Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, and in The Silmarillion -- Ulmo is the Vala who most openly involves himself in the affairs of Elves and Men in their war against Morgoth.⁵ And not just then, it would appear: '[n]or has he ever forsaken Middle-earth, and whatsoever may have since befallen of ruin or of change has not ceased to take thought for it, and will not until the end of days' (Silmarillion, 40). So not only did Tolkien continue to cherish the links between Ulmo and Tuor and the swans as important elements in his tales, but he asserts that Ulmo's concern for Middle-earth never ended; and the intertextuality between The Lord of the Rings and the versions of Tuor's tale quoted below harmonizes nicely with Ulmo's ongoing devotion to the affairs of Middle-earth.  Let's turn to those other works for a moment.

One morning while casting his eye along the shore -- and it was then the latest days of summer -- Tuor saw three swans flying high and strong from the northward.  Now these birds he had not before seen in these regions, and he took them for a sign, and said: "Long has my heart been set on a journey far from here; lo! now at length I will follow these swans." Behold, the swans dropped into the water of his cove and there swimming thrice about rose again and winged slowly south along the coast, and Tuor bearing his harp and spear followed them. 

(BoLT 2.152)

Then Ulmo arose and spake to him.... And Ulmo said: 'O Tuor of the lonely heart, I will not that thou dwell for ever in fair places of birds and flowers.... But fare now on thy destined journey and tarry not, for far from hence is thy weird set.  Now thou must seek through the lands for the city of [Gondolin]....

(BoLT 2.155) 

And, maybe, from afar birds saw the fell winter that was to come; for those that were want to go south gathered early to depart, and others that used to dwell in the North came from their homes to Nevrast.  And one day, as Tuor sat upon the shore, he heard the rush and whine of great wings, and he looked up and saw seven white swans flying in a swift wedge southward.  But as they came above him they wheeled and flew suddenly down, and alighted with a great plash and churning of water. 

Now Tuor loved swans, which he knew on the grey pools of Mithrim; and the swan moreover had been the token of Annael and his foster-folk. He rose therefore to greet the birds, and called to them, marvelling to behold that they were greater and prouder than any of their kind that he had seen before; but they beat their wings and uttered harsh cries, as if they were wroth with him and would drive him from the shore.  Then with a great noise they rose again from the water and flew above his head, so that the rush of their wings blew upon him as a whistling wind; and wheeling in a wide circle they ascended into the high air and went away south.

Then Tuor cried aloud: 'Here now comes another sign that I have tarried too long!' And straightaway he climbed to the cliff-top, and there beheld the swans still wheeling on high; but when he turned southward and set out to follow them, they flew swiftly away. 

(Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, in UT, 25-26)

And Tuor came into Nevrast, and looking upon Belegaer the Great Sea he was enamoured of it, and the sound of it and the longing for it were ever in his heart and ear, and an unquiet was on him that took him at last into the depths of the realms of Ulmo. Then he dwelt in Nevrast alone, and the summer of that year passed, and the doom of Nargothrond drew near; but when the autumn came he saw seven great swans flying south, and he knew them for a sign that he had tarried overlong, and he followed their flight along the shores of the sea. Thus he came at length to the deserted halls of Vinyamar beneath Mount Taras, and he entered in, and found there the shield and hauberk, and the sword and helm, that Turgon had left there by the command of Ulmo long before; and he arrayed himself in those arms, and went down to the shore. But there came a great storm out of the west, and out of that storm Ulmo the Lord of Waters arose in majesty and spoke to Tuor as he stood beside the sea. And Ulmo bade him depart from that place and seek out the hidden kingdom of Gondolin; and he gave Tuor a great cloak, to mantle him in shadow from the eyes of his enemies.  

(Silmarillion, 238-39)

While the presence of the swans alone clinches the allusion, I think, there's more here to link these passages than that. The swans in The Lord of the Rings seem to be flying south, just as Tuor's were. For the members of the fellowship detect them only when they hear the whirring of their wings, which suggests that the swans came up from behind them. In both cases they are also of a remarkable size, large even for swans. And like his distant ancestor Tuor, Aragorn has an errand to a white city that is nearly the last bastion of defense against the evil of its age, and the names of their destinations echo each other by sound and etymology: Gondor and Gondolin. Moreover, one of the names of Gondolin in The Book of Lost Tales is Gwarestrin, which means Tower of the Guard, just like Minas Tirith (BoLT 2.158).  Both Tuor and Aragorn feel that they have tarried on their errand.

But why black swans?  It seems too trite to think that Tolkien is here playing with the belief popular from antiquity to the 18th century that black swans did not exist -- the very source of the phrase rara avis -- or with the superstition that associated black animals with evil. Aragorn does not react to them as he did to the spying crows in Hollin (FR 2.iii.284-86). If anything, he seems surprised and pleased by the sight of them. Clearly he regards their color as noteworthy, neither common, which would call for less comment, nor unheard of, which would call for more. But what makes it noteworthy?

In Tolkien swans are most commonly identified or associated with ships, and in a lengthy scene, almost the last before this one, Galadriel comes in a swanship to bid farewell to the company, who have already embarked in their boats.

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. 

(FR 2.viii.372)

But if swans mean ships, then black swans mean black ships. What of that? Again in a scene during the company's sojourn in Lothlórien, in the powerful and memorable vision Frodo sees in Galadriel's mirror, we find black ships:

The mist cleared and he saw a sight which he had never seen before but knew at once: the Sea. Darkness fell. The sea rose and raged in a great storm. Then he saw against the Sun, sinking blood-red into a wrack of clouds, the black outline of a tall ship with torn sails riding up out of the West. Then a wide river flowing through a populous city. Then a white fortress with seven towers. And then again a ship with black sails, but now it was morning again, and the water rippled with light, and a banner bearing the emblem of a white tree shone in the sun. A smoke as of fire and battle arose, and again the sun went down in a burning red that faded into a grey mist; and into the mist a small ship passed away, twinkling with lights. 

(FR 2.vii.364)

The first black ship here is that of Elendil, whose heir Aragorn is, and who is also a descendant of Tuor.  Like Tuor, Elendil escaped from the destruction of his homeland to found a new hope. The second is the ship captured from the Corsairs of Umbar in which Aragorn arrives at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, just in time to turn the tide of battle and save Minas Tirith.

For this allusion to have weight for us, we need to know all this.  That is not so for Aragorn, however. Nothing suggests that he knew of Frodo's vision, but he did not need such knowledge to recall the story of Tuor and Ulmo and the swans here, and therefore to see in them an omen for himself. How much more he might have seen here is debatable.  He was familiar with the Corsairs of Umbar and the danger they posed to Gondor from the time of his service there decades earlier (RK App. A 1055), and black sails appear to have been an identifying characteristic of their ships (RK 5.vi.846-47; vii.853).  Both Galadriel and Elrond subsequently direct his attention that way, as if reminding him of something he already knows (TT 3.v.503; RK 5.ii.775, 781); and once he takes control of the palantír of Orthanc he sees the threat from the Corsairs and their black-sailed ships (RK 5.ii.780-81).

Of the allusion alone can we be sure. As for the rest we can only speculate. Yet I would not find it surprising if Tolkien, whose attention to detail in such matters is a constant revelation, left such an interpretation of this omen there to be found, just as he left the allusion to the tale of Tuor and Ulmo and the swans hanging by a single clue, Aragorn's remark upon their color.

____________________________

¹ I am attending here to only those mentions of the Valar and Eru contained in The Lord of the Rings proper, not the appendices, which within the conceit of authorship are represented in the Prologue as later additions (FR 14-16). Elbereth invoked: FR 1.xi.195, xii.198, 214; sung to: FR 1.iii.79; 2.i.238, TT 4.x.729 (perhaps also an invocation), RK 6.ix.1028; sung of FR 2.i.236, viii.377-78; password: RK 6.i.912-13.

At FR 1.xii.198 Aragorn states that Frodo's invocation of Elbereth on Weathertop (1.xi.195-96) had some effect on the Witch-king, but when Frodo does it again at the Ford of Bruinen it appears to have none at all (1.xii.214).  The resolution of this seeming contradiction probably lies in the greater desperation of the Nazgûl to retake the Ring before it reaches the comparative safety of Rivendell. This harmonizes with Aragorn's earlier description of their methods: they will not attack openly themselves, 'not until they are desperate, not while all the long leagues of Eriador lie before us' (FR 1.x.174).  On this showing Strider's 'leagues' could be those between Bree and Rivendell.

² I do not suggest here any connection between Elbereth and the Virgin Mary, except perhaps in the degree of reverence the Elves show her. The example means to indicate that the ability to identify someone as belonging to a certain group because of a reference that person makes does not entail any greater familiarity with that person's beliefs.

³ It is interesting to note that the word Valar is used in Gondor and by the people of Gondor. This contrasts with Elrond's avoidance of the word. Without more evidence it is difficult to say much, but this may reflect a difference in human and elven attitudes towards the Valar.

⁴ Gandalf then goes on to say: 'There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was trying to get back to its master.... So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire!' We appear to have here an example of what Ilúvatar tells Melkor in the Ainulindalë: 

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

(Silmarillion, 17)

⁵ The Silmarillion, 26-27, 40, 103, 114-15, 125-26, 155, 158, 196, 209, 212, 238-41, 243-44, 247, 249.

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.