The Avoidance of 'Sin' in Tolkien

        In my forthcoming book, Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many, I discuss Tolkien's use of the Greek word ἁμαρτία (hamartia) in his essay Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics (17). He mentions the word there in connection with 'doom' as alternative factors effecting the tragedy we often see in human life and portray in stories. He is clearly thinking about Aristotle's use of ἁμαρτία in The Poetics, where it refers to the 'mistake' or 'flaw' in action, understanding, or both that causes the reversal of fortune and downfall of tragic protagonists like Oedipus. As the many mistakes and flawed choices made by characters such as the doomed character Túrin show, Tolkien saw both fate and choice as significant questions in the mythic world he created. 

        Of course Tolkien was also quite well aware that ἁμαρτία had another meaning, a Christian meaning, namely 'sin.' So I took the time to investigate places in his works where we find the word 'sin', and I thought some about what it might have to tell us. I found the time interesting and well spent, but for various reasons I decided not to include my discussion of it in the final copy of my book. But I still think what I found is interesting, and thought that some others might, too. I may yet spend more time on it and write it up as an article, but for now I'll just share it here. No doubt in some places the discussion will seem to refer to a larger discussion, which will (surprise) be found in my book when it appears later this year.

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        In view of the spiritual harm mortal Ring-bearers suffer from possessing and using the Rings of Power, and the significance we have already attached to how they begin their possession of it, both of which have a bearing on pity especially in this wider context, we should recall that another meaning of hamartia was available to Tolkien’s mind. For in the writings of early Christianity hamartia commonly means ‘sin.’[i] Yet in recalling this particular meaning we must not ignore that, though mistakes and misdeeds abound within the legendarium, Tolkien eschews the word sin in telling of them. It never appears in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, or in any of the original texts published in the eleven volumes of The History of Middle-earth. The three occasions in The History of Middle-earth where we find ‘sin’ used are editorial – once Christopher Tolkien, once C. S. Lewis, and once Tolkien himself – and serve only to emphasize how far from direct contact with his legendarium Tolkien kept the word and the concept.[ii]

        Similarly, in The Nature of Middle-earth three of the four uses of ‘sin’ are also editorial. In his appendix on the Metaphysical and Theological Themes found within the legendarium, Carl F. Hostetter discusses Death and the Fall of Man as related by Andreth in connection with the Roman Catholic view on ‘original sin’ (Nature 408-09). Tolkien himself, in a note from the 1970s speculating on life-cycles of the Elves, comments that it was ‘uncertain’ whether the fading of the Eldar was always a part of their nature or a ‘“punishment” for the sins of the Eldar’ (Nature 156). Finally, however, in a text written in the mid-1950s from the perspective of someone within the legendarium the unnamed author states that the Eldar did not regard eating the flesh of animals as ‘sinful or against the will of Eru’ (Nature 271). Indeed the closest engagement with ‘sin’ comes in his translations of the Hail Mary and the Our Father into his Elven tongues, a feat which blends his ‘secret vice’ with this personal devotion and gives it expression through the once widespread practice of translating English verse into ancient tongues, whether as a lark or a lesson.[iii] Tolkien’s contemporary, Maurice Bowra, may have produced a brilliant rendering of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan into Ancient Greek verse, but he didn’t have to invent Greek, too.[iv]

        From what we can see, Tolkien generally avoided categorizing the misdeeds and mistakes of characters as ‘sins,’ despite ample opportunities across decades of writing; or, if he did so name them, as we have seen him do on rare occasions after he finished The Lord of the Rings his practice resembles the editorial comments of his editors, like Christopher Tolkien and Carl F. Hostetter, or the mock editorial engagement of C. S. Lewis with The Lay of Leithian. Morgoth and Sauron, for example, and their works may be called evil, but neither narrator nor character within the legendarium calls them sinful or their deeds sins. So much for what we find in Tolkien’s writings in or on the legendarium. What of ‘sin’ in his letters, which are likely the single most important source for the legendarium that is not itself a part of it?

        Of the ten letters which speak of ‘sin,’ six use the word wholly in connection with Tolkien’s personal faith and his life in this world, with no mention at all of his writings.[v] Of the remaining four, one is a bit of a joke to his son, Christopher, about the RAF planes, called ‘Mordor-gadgets,’ whose destructive power and purpose Tolkien detested as an actualization of the desire to dominate others (no. 75, p. 88). In the other three, he is pondering certain actions or possibilities within the Secondary World in terms of the Christian understanding of ‘sin,’ but he is once again cautious in the application of Primary World Christian terminology to the theology of the Secondary World. In Letter 153 (p.195) in answering a fellow Catholic’s theological queries and objections about The Lord of the Rings he accepts that some acts within the legendarium can be viewed as ‘sinful,’ but at the same time he makes clear that in doing so he is undertaking a characterization in Primary World terms of what would be the case within the Secondary World if Morgoth or the Valar took certain actions contrary to the will of Eru.[vi] In Letter 181 (p. 237) he speaks of the Istari being susceptible to ‘the possibility of “fall”, of sin, if you will.’ Lastly, in Letter 212 (p. 285) he points out that the Elvish view of Death as the Gift of Ilúvatar to Men ‘does not necessarily have anything to say for or against such beliefs as the Christian that “death” is not part of human nature, but a punishment for sin (rebellion).’ His caution signals that he sees the applicability of the terminology of one world to the other, but that he resists going further. ‘Mistake’ and ‘sin’ both exist along the continuum of meaning inhabited by the word hamartia, but within Arda Marred the mistakes the characters make or avoid making determine whether they are in a tragedy of some sort or a fairy-story. In the same way the truth of myth partakes of the truth of the evangelium (OFS ¶ 103), but that does not make them the same.

        The avoidance of ‘sin’ suits the focus on pity and the problematic nature of justice being imposed by anyone who cannot provide justice for those who die but do not deserve to die as much as for those who do deserve death. Healing is another concern Gandalf has for both Gollum and Bilbo, but the death Gandalf admits that Gollum deserves perforce denies all possibility of the healing he hopes against hope that Gollum might find. The avoidance of ‘sin’ also better suits the pagan world of the Third Age of Middle-earth and better allows pity to span the divide between the hope of Christians and the hopelessness of Heathens. Just as the vision of the Beowulf-poet looks back from the Christian day into the Heathen night, so does Tolkien.

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[i] In Romans 5:13, Saint Paul writes: ‘Before the Law sin existed in the world, but sin is not counted [against us] if there is no Law.’ (‘ἄχρι γὰρ νόμου ἁμαρτία ἦν ἐν κόσμῳ, ἁμαρτία δὲ οὐκ ἐλλογεῖται μὴ ὄντος νόμου’.). That an accounting was not made of sins before the law existed might possibly have some bearing on why Tolkien almost never uses the various forms of the word sin within the legendarium.

[ii] Christopher Tolkien states that ‘suicide is declared a sin’ in his father’s description of why Túrin chose against it at LT II 125, but this is rather the son’s characterization than the father’s words. At Lays 379 ‘sin’ occurs in one of C. S. Lewis’ mock commentaries on The Lay of Leithian. Finally, in Morgoth’s Ring (392) Tolkien himself comments that ‘Manwë must be shown to have his own inherent faults (though not sin)’ which he follows directly with a footnote, pointing out that such a ‘weakness’ or ‘inadequacy’ ‘is not sinful when not willed, and when the creature does his best…as he sees it – with the conscious intent of serving Eru.’ So, in his one mention of ‘sin’ Tolkien mentions it only to deny it would be right to describe the fault in question as sin.

[iii] On the prayers, see J. R. R. Tolkien, Vinyar Tengwar 43 (2002) 5-39; 44 (2002) 5-38. On Tolkien’s ‘secret vice’ of language invention, see Tolkien, D. Fimi and A. Higgins.

[iv] C. M. Bowra’s rendering has the added charm of translating the cultural references into meaningful Greek equivalents. Kubla Khan becomes Minos, and Xanadu become Knossos. Such translations were something of a college industry at the time. Thus, Bowra’s Greek could be published alongside Coleridge’s original without explanation. See S.T. Coleridge, C.M. Bowra, et al. (178-82). Tolkien and Bowra were acquainted, if not always friendly. Tolkien once claimed to have poured melted butter over Bowra’s head and Bowra wrote a letter opposing honors proposed for Tolkien. Any link between the events is speculative. See Scull and Hammond (“C&G”) 2.195-96.

[v] Letters no. 43, p. 48 (to Michael Tolkien); no. 89, p. 101 (to Christopher Tolkien); no. 113, p. 127 (to C. S. Lewis); no. 213, p. 288 (to Deborah Webster[Rogers]); no. 250, p. 337 (to Michael Tolkien); no. 306, p. 395 (to Michael Tolkien).

[vi] Tolkien’s correspondent here was the manager of a Catholic bookshop in Oxford. In the passage, Tolkien’s is careful in his wording, as he imagines what ‘would’ or ‘could’ or ‘might’ come about, ‘if [the Valar or Maiar] fell.’

I also cite:

• The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (978-0261102637)
• Tolkien of Fairy-stories (978-0007582914)
• The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, vol 2 (978-0008214524)
• S. T. Coleridge, Maurice Bowra, et al. 'Versions' in Greece and Rome 3 (1934) 178-82.

Hellehinca, or Morgoth the Lame

Fingolfin's Challenge, © John Howe

Readers of The Silmarillion will recall Fingolfin's hopeless challenge of Morgoth to single combat in Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin (153-54), and how, beaten down at last, Fingolfin struck one final blow:

.... Therefore Morgoth came, climbing slowly from his subterranean throne, and the rumour of his feet was like thunder underground. And he issued forth clad in black armour; and he stood before the King like a tower, ironcrowned, and his vast shield, sable on-blazoned, cast a shadow over him like a stormcloud. But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail was overlaid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice. 

Then Morgoth hurled aloft Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld, and swung it down like a bolt of thunder. But Fingolfin sprang aside, and Grond rent a mighty pit in the earth, whence smoke and fire darted. Many times Morgoth essayed to smite him, and each time Fingolfin leaped away, as a lightning shoots from under a dark cloud; and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds, and seven times Morgoth gave a cry of anguish, whereat the hosts of Angband fell upon their faces in dismay, and the cries echoed in the Northlands.  

But at the last the King grew weary, and Morgoth bore down his shield upon him. Thrice he was crushed to his knees, and thrice arose again and bore up his broken shield and stricken helm. But the earth was all rent and pitted about him, and he stumbled and fell backward before the feet of Morgoth; and Morgoth set his left foot upon his neck, and the weight of it was like a fallen hill. Yet with his last and desperate stroke Fingolfin hewed the foot with Ringil, and the blood gashed forth black and smoking and filled the pits of Grond. 

Thus died Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, most proud and valiant of the Elven-kings of old .... Morgoth went ever halt of one foot after that day, and the pain of his wounds could not be healed.... 

(Silmarillion 153-54)

Now the first time I ever read this I was reminded of the Greek God, Hephaestus, who was lame because Zeus had hurled him down from Olympus. But, though Hephaestus also had a hammer, he was in no way evil. Of course the Vala he most closely resembles is Aulë, who was like him a smith. And yet the image of Hephaestus cast down from heaven still made me think of the fall of Lucifer as in Milton, or Isaiah 14:12:

'How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!'

Then this morning I was looking up something else in Bosworth-Toller and spied an entry for hellehinca, which it defines as 'the hell-limper, -hobbler, the devil lamed by his fall from heaven.' Which made me think of Morgoth once more. So I looked up the passage cited for the word, and found more interesting words:

Þa for þære dugoðe     deoful ætywde,
wann ond wliteleas,     hæfde weriges hiw.
Ongan þa meldigan     morþres brytta,
hellehinca,     þone halgan wer
wiðerhycgende,     ond þæt word gecwæð

Andreas 1168-72

Then before that band the devil appeared,
Black and unlovely, he had the look of a monster.
He then began, the prince of murder,
The hell-lame, to accuse this holy man,
With evil intent, and said these words...

The word weriges in line 1169, which I have translated 'monster,' comes, not from werig -- 'weary' -- as I thought at first glance, but from wearg/h -- 'a monster, a malignant being, an evil spirit.' In line 1170 I have rendered morþres as 'murder,' but it comes from morþor, which can also be more abstract -- 'mortal sin, great wickedness, torment' etc.

Morþor is of course the source of Mordor, and wearg of warg, which is nothing new to say. What is intriguing, however, is that hellehinca is quite a rare word (only one citation in Bosworth-Toller), and it records an equally unusual attribute of the devil, both of these in close proximity to words of significance for Tolkien. So it may be that this is the origin of Morgoth's limp,

Legolas at Night -- C.S. Lewis and the Dreams of the Elves

The other day I was listening to one of Malcolm Guite's marvelous talks -- I say marvelous, as if, absurdly, there were talks of his that were not marvelous -- this one was on C. S. Lewis and part of a series on The Inklings. Right near the end, he read aloud Lewis' poem, The Adam at Night, to convey Lewis' sense of what the consciousness of an unfallen human being might be like. In this poem, first published in Punch in 1949, Lewis imagines Adam not sleeping, says Guite, but, 'as it were, entering into the consciousness of the world itself without losing his consciousness as a person':

Except at the making of Eve Adam slept
Not at all (as men now sleep) before the Fall;
Sin yet unborn, he was free from that dominion
04  Of the blind brother of death who occults the mind. 

Instead, when stars and twilight had him to bed
And the dutiful owl, whirring over Eden, had hooted
A warning to the other beasts to be hushed till morning
08  And curbed their plays that the Man should be undisturbed,

He would lie, relaxed, enormous, under a sky
Starry as never since; he would set ajar
The door of his mind. Into him thoughts would pour
12  Other than day's. He rejoined Earth, his mother.

He melted into her nature. Gradually he felt
As though through his own flesh the elusive growth,
The hardening and spreading of roots in the deep garden;
16  In his veins, the wells filling with silver rains, 

And, thrusting down far under his rock-crust,
Finger-like, rays from the heavens that probed, bringing
To bloom the gold and diamond in his dark womb.
20  The seething, central fires moved with his breathing. 

He guided his globe smoothly in the heaven, riding
At one with his planetary peers around the Sun;
Courteously he saluted the hard virtue of Mars
24  And Venus' liquid glory as he spun between them. 

Over Man and his mate the Hours like waters ran
Till darkness thinned in the east. The treble lark,
Carolling, awoke the common people of Paradise
28  To yawn and scratch, to bleat and whinny, in the dawn. 

Collected now in themselves, human and erect,
Lord and Lady walked on the dabbled sward,
As if two trees should arise dreadfully gifted
32  With speech and motion. The Earth's strength was in each.

The first three quatrains (lines 1-12) called at once to my mind Tolkien's characterization of the dreams of Elves:

With that [Aragorn] fell asleep. Legolas already lay motionless, his fair hands folded upon his breast, his eyes unclosed, blending living night and deep dream, as is the way with Elves.

(TT 3.ii.442)

Legolas can do the same thing, or something very like it, by day as well:

and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world.  

(TT 3.ii.429)

While quatrains 4 through 7 (12-28) do not bear the same close resemblance to what we find in Tolkien, the essential closeness of Adam to the world and the creatures in it is reminiscent of how closely to Arda the Elves are bound. Even at death they do not leave it -- as do Men whose proper home is not in Arda, but somewhere beyond it -- but after a time live again. And this will be so for as long as Arda lasts. In keeping with this is their way with nature, ranging from Legolas' ability to hear the stones of Hollin and communicate with Arod, the horse loaned him by Éomer, to the Elves' power to enchant and to 'wake up' creatures and teach them to talk, as they did with the Ents. 

Even so, the reference to the 'common people of Paradise' in lines 27-28 seems far more Narnian, and it is hard not to think of Tor and Tinidril of Perelandra when Lewis calls Adam and Eve 'Lord and Lady' in line 30. Yet this also turns us back to Tolkien, since the names Tor and Tinidril are modelled on Tuor and Idril from The Silmarillion, and his Ents are very much trees 'dreadfully gifted with speech and motion'. But so, too, in a sense, are Ask and Embla, the first two humans of Norse Mythology, whom Odin, Vili, and Vé fashioned from tree-trunks they found on the seashore: '[o]ne of Bor's sons gives [them] spirit and life; the second, mind and movement; the third, appearance, speech, hearing, and vision' (Lindow, 62). Both Lewis and Tolkien of course knew this myth perfectly well.

Finally in this lovely web of influences we should not forget that Tolkien modeled the way Treebeard spoke 'on the booming voice of C. S. Lewis' (Carpenter, 1977, 194), just as Lewis drew on Tolkien to shape his hero, Ransom, the philologist and hero of his Space Trilogy.

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Works Consulted

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Quickened to Full Life by War (OFS ¶ 56) -- Living the Iliad

Julian Grenfell

Julian Grenfell was a poet and soldier of the Great War, who embraced the idea of battle and the war even as he also sneered at the lives of Staff Officers safely away from the trenches.  The moment before he died in hospital of a wound suffered at the front, a ray of sunlight came through his window. Grenfell said 'Phoebus Apollo', his last words. Within three months the war also claimed his brother. His mother received a letter of condolence from a family friend, in which the writer evokes both Christ and Apollo in the hope of offering some consolation:

How often Christ's cry upon the cross re-echoes through one's aching soul; that most desolate and piercing cry the saddest ever uttered in this sad world.... We do not know how God answered it; but we believe that, in spite of cruelty and sin and death, the answer is peace. I think the answer to you comes through the testimony, the living proof, of those most glorious boys, who never looked back, and went to death like Bridegrooms, like Phoebus Apollo running his course; Phoebus, who sent his shafts to Julian in his last moments on earth, and was answered by the flicker of his eyes; that gleam from Julian which will speak to you, in the long hours of waiting and darkness, of the immortality of the soul and the deathlessness of love.  

(Vandiver 204-205)

In her exceptional book, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, Elizabeth Vandiver comments on the 'remarkable ... unproblematized, matter-of-fact manner' in which the letter joins Christianity and Greek Mythology. It reflects the society from which the poetry of the Great War sprang, regardless of whether the poet was Grenfell or Brooke, Rosenberg or Owen:

In a cultural situation in which the elder generation chose to phrase its condolence letters and its exhortations in such terms, it is small wonder that poets who were themselves soldiers employed a similar amalgamation of Christian and pagan imagery and concepts, in which the idea of the soldiers as new Christ, who lays down his life for his friends and his country, is inextricably intertwined with classical exempla.  Some poets invoked not just classical allusions but the Olympians by name, and in a tone that would imply utter sincerity did we not know that the soldiers of 1914 were nominally, and often much more than nominally, Christians, and their poetry is permeated with invocations of Jehovah and Christ. Yet, although of course no British poet (soldier or civilian) writing in 1914-18 would have claimed to 'believe in' the Olympian gods in the sense of assuming those gods' objective reality, pagan imagery of the Olympians and the heroes is inextricably interwoven with Christian imagery. The Christian soldier must fight for justice and the protection of the weak; it is his Christian duty -- and Zeus and the heroes of Troy will spur him on to do so.

(Vandiver 206)

Clearly for Greek mythology to wield such imaginative power over these poets and their contemporaries, it must have been as alive as their faith was, even if not as objectively real. It is what we know, what we love and believe in, and what we find important that help us parse our experiences, all of them of course, but most noticeably those that shock our innocence and challenge the way we have seen things so far. Not long ago I wrote about C.S. Lewis and asked what it must have been like to go off to The Great War with a head full of Homer, as so many of his generation did. It was in discussing that post with Connie Ruzich that I learned about Vandiver's book, which explores precisely all the different ways in which British poets of The Great War used the imaginative tool given them by their knowledge of Homer and the Classics to grapple with the war and its meaning.

In that book, moreover, I came across a poem I am not sure I'd seen before.  However that may be, the poem now struck me in a new way:

Deaf to the music, once a boy
    His Homer, crib in hand, had read;
Now near the windy plains of Troy,
    He lives an Iliad instead.

Of these lines by Edward Shillito -- and I have not yet been able to ascertain whether they comprise the entire poem, or are but a selection, since the book in which they appear is hard to come by (road trip!) -- Vandiver aptly remarks:

Far from saying that the actual experience of real war shows the boy how insufficient literature in general and Homer in particular are, Shillito's poem implies instead that the actual experience of war shows the boy precisely how real Homer is. The contrast is not between reading the Iliad and experiencing actual war but between reading the Iliad and experiencing the Iliad. Thus the Iliad is assumed to occupy both realms -- active and contemplative -- simultaneously. 

(246, italics original)

Shillito's verses and Vandiver's observations on them together brought to my mind remarks by another veteran of The Great War, who had a similar experience, but with a different mythology. In his essay On Fairy-stories, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote:

Poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse. A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war. 

(OFS ¶ 56)

Indeed, one might well say that for the lad in Shillito's poem, the Iliad was 'quickened to full life by war.'  While I don't for a moment imagine that Tolkien needed a crib of Homer, Beowulf, or any other text, I find the parallel between his statement about fairy stories and Shillito's about Homer striking. Both chose to represent the effect of war as a bringing to full life to something not so before. If Shillito's young man found himself suddenly in the Iliad, as it were, Tolkien had already started down the road to Faërie. Philology had already given him the taste for fairy stories, but only the experience of war brought that taste 'to full life'.

It's certainly easy enough to see how the chaos, gore, and dismemberment that Grendel visited on Heorot every night could have become more vivid to a young subaltern on the Somme in 1916; and how the resistless doom that stalked Kullervo might have seemed more than just a tragic story to an officer with a life expectancy of six weeks (as was the common belief; cf. Tolkien, Letters, no. 43). Even many years after he wrote On Fairy-stories Tolkien still spoke of that time in words that convey a feeling of powerlessness in the face of something far more vast: 'to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends was dead' (FR xxiv). Tolkien being Tolkien, we should probably allow that by 'involved' he means far more than a dull variant of 'include'. In Middle English 'envolve' means 'envelop', as in John Lydgate's Troy Book: 'Vnhappyly with hap þei were envoluyd' (TB 2.3223): 'To their misfortune they were by fortune enveloped.' Sounds about right here. More importantly, however, the sudden shift from the impersonal forces and dates of Tolkien's first sentence here to the lonely private grief of the second stuns like a hammerblow. 

A similar disquiet born of memory can be heard in C. S. Lewis's letters of September 1939 in which he twice records 'the ghostly feeling that it has all happened before -- that one fell asleep during the last war and had a delightful dream and now has waked up again' (letters of  September 15th and 18th), and on October 2nd Lewis writes in a letter to his brother that the call-up of men 20 to 22 years of age would affect Tolkien's eldest son. Small wonder, then, that Tolkien or any man who felt he had been so 'caught' should think of escape, but it is the escape of the prisoner of war he speaks of, not of the deserter fleeing his duty. An important distinction is being made here. The prisoner of war who escapes is fulfilling his duty, and he escapes to carry on the fight, not to avoid it. Thus Tolkien is not speaking of an escape into fairy tales, but an escape through fairy tales. Just as Greek mythology did for others, fairy tales afforded Tolkien a way in which to parse his experience of the war and a framework in which to express the struggle to do so. 

In May 1944 in a letter to his son, Christopher, then in the RAF, Tolkien recommended writing as a means of expressing what he was feeling in the service:

I think also that you are suffering from suppressed 'writing'. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.  

(Letters, no. 66)

Just as the bitterness of exceptional voices like Sassoon and Owen did not sum up all the possible reactions to the war (as many once believed, following Paul Fussell's brilliant The Great War and Modern Memory), so too Classics and Greek Mythology were not the sole means of expressing or working through those reactions. In recent years scholars have been moving towards a broader view of the poetry of The Great War, as well as a more balanced assessment of Tolkien vis à vis the other writers of his 'Modern' era. We need to do the same with the reaction that found expression in the 'mode' of fairy tale and fantasy. To write The Fall of Gondolin while recovering from trench fever is not the same as to fall for the Cottingley Fairies. We don't need to defend it as if it were. 

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Works Consulted

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Tolkien: The Monsters and the Fascists

 

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.

(TT v.672)

With the rise of fascism from its too shallow grave, the liking so many of its adherents have for The Lord of the Rings as well as for other books they don't understand, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, has received a lot of attention. Tolkien himself didn't have much time for fascists, composing a famously salty 1938 letter to Rütten & Loenig, a German publisher who wished to publish a translation of The Hobbit but had the effrontery to ask Tolkien whether he was Aryan (Letters #29 & 30 pp. 47-48). Tolkien recognized, however, that his own publisher, Allen & Unwin, had a substantial financial interest in this matter, and that he could not assume that he could speak for them. So, he composed another letter, less scathing, and told Allen & Unwin to send the one they deemed more appropriate. Unfortunately, the letter that was actually sent has not yet been discovered. Yet the surviving letter makes clear the anger and contempt Tolkien feels towards the Nazi regime that required publishers to ask such questions. In any event, whatever precisely Tolkien said in the letter that Allen & Unwin sent to the German publisher, nothing further seems to have happened.

In a 1941 letter he called Hitler "that ruddy little ignoramus" and said that the "burning private grudge" he bore the Nazis for their perversion of pagan Germanic mythology and literature to serve their racist nationalism "would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22" during the Great War (Letters # 45 p. 77). In this same letter he said that Germany in the Nazi era was "under the curse of God." As Tolkien well knew, saying this consigned the Nazis to the same hellish status as the Beowulf-poet banished Cain and his descendants, most prominently Grendel and his mother.

He was also aware that fascism could grow in other lands, including his own, provided there was malice enough to nurture it. He wrote to his son, Christopher, in 1944 in a letter of particular relevance to more recent times: 

"We knew Hitler was a vulgar and ignorant little cad, in addition to any other defects (or the source of them); but there seem to be many v. and i. l. cads who don’t speak German, and who given the same chance would show most of the other Hitlerian characteristics" exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered, and the answer printed. The Vulgar and Ignorant Cad is not yet a boss with power; but he is a very great deal nearer to becoming one in this green and pleasant isle than he was.

                (Letters # 81 pp. 133-34). 

Earlier that same year Christopher, had written to him complaining about some of his comrades in the RAF at the post where he was stationed, apparently comparing them to orcs. Tolkien replied "I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction... only in real life they are on both sides, of course.... In real (exterior) life men are on both sides" (Letters # 71 p. 118).  

And so here we are, a hundred years and a few weeks after the German publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf, a work so stuffed with hatred of the Jews, daft misunderstandings of the world, and conspiracy theories that we could rename it "Project 1925." Are we really so surprised that Grishnákh can read? Yet those who consider empathy a weakness or a sin and the lethality of our weapons a virtue can never fully understand what they read, especially if it's fiction, which depends so much on a shared humanity. They look at Homer or Tolkien and see only the sharpness of the sword, the swiftness of the arrow, and the glory of the warrior (TT 4.v.672). They never see how extremely important a moment it is when Sam looks upon the enemy soldier dead before him in Ithilien:

It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace – all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind. (TT 4.iv.661)

Sam's "flash of thought" echoes other such moments in Tolkien, as when in The Hobbit Bilbo stands armed and invisible behind Gollum and his immediate desire is to kill him, but "a sudden understanding" came upon him in a "flash," in which he grasped the horror of Gollum's life and pitied him; and then a second "flash" gave him the "strength and resolve" to turn his back on murder (The Annotated Hobbit 133). Frodo has a similar moment when he and Sam catch Gollum near the Dead Marshes (TT 4.i.614-15). Another occurs on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, though there it is the readers who, guided by the narrator, look upon Gollum with pity and wish that Sam had seen all that they had (TT 4.viii.713-14). And again on the slopes of Mount Doom Sam, sword in hand, looks down at Gollum, meaning to kill him, but instead pities and spares him (RK 6.iii.943-44).

Without all these moments in which Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam choose pity and show mercy, Gollum is not there on Mount Doom to make sure, however inadvertently, that the Ring goes into the fire. He regains his Precious, but he is also set free from the misery he brought upon himself when he murdered Déagol instead of sparing him. As Gandalf replies when Strider explains why he, Legolas and Gimli, pursued the orcs who had captured Merry and Pippin rather than going after Frodo and Sam, "the choice was just, and it has been rewarded" (TT 3.v.500). Sméagol's choice 500 years earlier in the Gladden Fields was unjust and its own punishment. The pity of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam finally allowed him to be released from that sentence.

So much depends upon what governs our actions. Are pity and mercy, born of empathy for another, our guide? Or is it the self-centeredness that has lost sight of everything but its own immediate desire? The Lord of the Rings shows how very large the implications of pity can be for the world. I analyzed it at great length in my book. But such moments are crucial as far back as the Iliad, too, and the fates of individuals and cities depend on them. When Achilles kills Hector near the end of Book Twenty-two, he knows full well that he is quite literally determining his own fate.

In the Iliad Hector's death is the last and loudest note in a long crescendo of death, which many readers never fully experience because of the way we often read Homer nowadays. In the classroom, where the dearth of time conspires with the limits of interest, we often jump over Books Ten through Fifteen, which provide a grim, bloody account of the steadily worsening fortunes of the Greeks in the absence of Achilles. Over and over in these books Homer catalogs the men killed, telling their names and speaking of their homes and of their families who will never see them again. The dead have "lost the day of their homecoming," a phrase Homer employs more than once in the Odyssey, which is of course all about coming home from war. This heartbreak is true for both Greeks and Trojans, and by being told their names -- 95 out of 108 of the dead are named -- and about their families it is as if we meet them before they die. In Book Sixteen, with the Greeks on the brink of annihilation, Achilles' closest friend, Patroclus, prevails upon him to allow him to take their troops back into the battle, since Achilles still refuses to return himself. Patroclus drives back the Trojans, killing Sarpedon, a powerful Trojan ally and a son of Zeus so beloved by his father that he is tempted to set his fate aside, save him, and send him home. But Zeus decides that he must not save him. His part is to ensure that what should be shall be.

Patroclus then goes too far and tries to storm Troy, but Apollo drives him back and helps Hector kill him. Neither Sarpedon nor Patroclus will see the day of their homecoming. Their climactic deaths, one on each side, touch and involve the very gods. The killing continues through Book Seventeen, which ends with the day begun at the start of Book Eleven. The events of these books take place on a single day, a day so heavy with the mounting burden of both sides' losses -- 141 named victims out of 154 -- that far more than one day seems to pass. Yet this pain is only a prelude to the next day's far more heartbreaking slaughters and lost homecomings as Achilles returns to the battlefield to avenge Patroclus and kill Hector, thus assuring that his own death and Troy's fall will soon follow (Books Nineteen to Twenty-two). Loss on loss, grief on grief. Small wonder, then, that the phrase κακῶν Ἰλιὰς, "an Iliad of woes," became proverbial among the Greeks and Romans for an "endless series of woes."

All those families, those fathers and mothers, wives and husbands, children and siblings who shall never meet again, all those women of Troy and their children who will be carried off into slavery when their husbands and fathers have been killed, all those lives they might have lived -- they are what the bright sword, the swift arrow, and the glorious warrior defend. These are what war strips from everyone, on every side. Even for those who make it home in the end, like Odysseus, it is a long, long road. There is a passage early in Book Sixteen, which describes the incessant blows of the assault Ajax must endure as he tries to hold the line against the Trojans trying to storm the Greek camp (16.102-111). It may also be seen as an apt metaphor for the avalanche of deaths overwhelming the readers in the sorrows of war.

Αἴας δ᾽ οὐκ ἔτ᾽ ἔμιμνε: βιάζετο γὰρ βελέεσσι:

δάμνα μιν Ζηνός τε νόος καὶ Τρῶες ἀγαυοὶ

βάλλοντες: δεινὴν δὲ περὶ κροτάφοισι φαεινὴ

πήληξ βαλλομένη καναχὴν ἔχε, βάλλετο δ᾽ αἰεὶ                105

κὰπ φάλαρ᾽ εὐποίηθ᾽: ὃ δ᾽ ἀριστερὸν ὦμον ἔκαμνεν

ἔμπεδον αἰὲν ἔχων σάκος αἰόλον: οὐδὲ δύναντο

ἀμφ᾽ αὐτῷ πελεμίξαι ἐρείδοντες βελέεσσιν.

αἰεὶ δ᾽ ἀργαλέῳ ἔχετ᾽ ἄσθματι, κὰδ δέ οἱ ἱδρὼς

πάντοθεν ἐκ μελέων πολὺς ἔρρεεν, οὐδέ πῃ εἶχεν             110

ἀμπνεῦσαι: πάντῃ δὲ κακὸν κακῷ ἐστήρικτο.

Ajax could hold out no longer; he was being forced back by their spears.

Zeus's will and the noble Trojans kept striking him, overpowering him.

His shining helm rang dreadfully in his ears as it was struck, 

And he was being struck ceaselessly on his well-made helmet.

His left arm was exhausted from constantly holding up his flashing shield. 

Though the Trojans struck it hard with their spears, they could not knock it away. 

But Ajax gasped in pain all the time now. Sweat streamed down his every limb.

No way could he even catch his breath. Woe piled every which way upon woe.

Just as the will of Zeus and the ceaseless blows from the Trojan spears beat down even Ajax, the best Greek warrior after Achilles -- both "will" and "Trojans" are subjects of the verb "kept striking," which thus combines divine and human agency -- so the relentless cataloging of the dead over the course of Books Ten through Fifteen wears down the readers with its pity and horror. When Book Sixteen begins away from the battlefield in the camp of Achilles and Patroclus, it is almost a relief. Yet Patroclus and Achilles see disaster coming. Their discussion of what is to be done covers the first 101 lines of Book Sixteen, which then pivots swiftly back to the worsening fortunes of Ajax we just read about (16.102-111). I have highlighted certain words in the text and translation to show how the emphasis in this passage shifts from the relentlessness of the use of force against Ajax to the completeness and seeming endlessness of his woe. Homer then briefly pivots away again, and reinvokes the Muses, as if he needs fresh inspiration to tell the even darker tale of woe to come: "Tell me now, Muses who dwell in Olympian homes, how fire first fell upon the ships of the Achaeans" (16.112-13). Homer frames this moment of woe piled upon woe between the discussions of Patroclus and Achilles and the new invocation of the Muses, after which the story turns back again to Ajax, and then to Achilles and Patroclus once more.

Imagine, if you will, that the Iliad ended with Book Twenty-two. We would have a very different poem: Hector killed brutally outside the gates of Troy, his home; his corpse stripped, abused, and mutilated; his father and mother watching it all from the walls; lamenting the loss of their son and their city's champion, amid the wailing of the Trojans and jubilant singing of the Greeks; his wife at home, eager for his return, preparing for his return, then hearing his mother's shattering cry; overwhelmed, rushing to the wall, grief-stricken by his loss and mourning all the sorrows it entails for Troy, for herself, and for their little boy. The last line of Book Twenty-two is, and in our imagining here the last line of the Iliad would be, ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ᾽, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες: "So she spoke, crying out in pain, and the women wailed in answer" (22.515). This would be a brutal ending of unimaginable sorrow, unnumbered tears, and wholly without consolation. Only a barbarian, Conan the barbarian in fact, could look upon such an ending without horror. Crush your enemies? Check. See them driven before you? Check. Hear the lamentations of their women? Check. In this the barbarian is more honest than the fascist. He does not romanticize his own brutality, or wrap it in flags and glory, exceptionalism and toxic delusions about masculinity.

But though Homer acknowledges the barbarous darkness, he does not embrace it. He mourns it. He does not end there any more than he began there. The last thing that Hector says to Achilles before he dies is that he, too, will soon die before the gates of Troy. Achilles knows this. The choice before Achilles has been evident since the beginning, between war, glory, and an early death on the one hand, and home, obscurity and a long life on the other. Between the glory of the warrior and that which they defend. In Book Twenty-four, when Priam risks everything to beg Achilles for the return of his Hector's body, the son who will never see his father again meets the father who will never see his son again. Both weep, not for each other but because they see the reflection of their own loss in each other. They do not become friends. How could they be anything but enemies after so much blood? But they recognize each other's humanity. For his son, Priam humbles himself before his son's murderer; and Achilles feels pity for his own father and shows mercy to Priam. At least for now, Achilles and Priam free themselves for now from the power the force of violence wields over everyone in war, stripping them of their humanity and reducing them to objects even while they still live. Through pity and mercy they create what Simone Weil called "that small space between impulse and action where thought lives," without which "there is no place for justice or prudence."† In that space, Achilles returns Hector's body and arranges a truce so the Trojans may bury Hector. And that is where the Iliad ends. In loss and sorrow, with almost total loss soon yet to come, its final quietly dignified words directed not to the sword and the warrior, but to that which they defend: "ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο" (24.804) / "And so they buried Hector the tamer of horses." It brings a melancholy closure not entirely unlike Sam's "Well, I'm back"  (RK 6.ix.1031). Buried just below the surface of these words are others left unsaid: "Well, I'm back. (But Mister Frodo's not.)" Whatever a war's goal may be, whatever its result, such loss and sorrow are its cost, even for those who come home alive. 

In the Odyssey when a bard sings of the war at Troy, Odysseus does not strut and preen. He weeps. Helen in the Iliad and Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, in the Odyssey both say that the gods bring sorrows to humans so that there will be songs for later generations (Iliad 6.357-58; Odyssey 8.579-80).†† Homer begins the Iliad by asking the goddess to sing about the countless sorrows and deaths caused by the wrath of Achilles, which sent their ghosts down to Hades and left their bodies unburied to be eaten by the dogs and birds. So it was going to be for Hector. And while it was true that Zeus commanded Achilles to return the body, in the actual scene between Achilles and Priam in Book Twenty-four, empathy, pity, and mercy eclipse that command. It's not Zeus's command that moves our hearts, but the unfolding of the tragic drama between Achilles and Priam, the both of them weeping together.

Are we to imagine that the Greeks, who were not entirely dim, listened to bards sing Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for centuries, memorized these poems in whole or in part, and held competitions at the Olympic Games in reciting them, but heard none of this? That they heeded the ring of steel and the thrum of bowstring, but not the wailing cries of those the warriors slew or failed to save? They, too, had fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands who lost the day of their homecoming at war. In Athens, for one, a public funeral was held every year for those who had died at war in the previous twelve months. In Athens, the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey achieved their final form. In Athens, the first day of the Panathenaic Games was all about poetry and music, including contests in the performance of Homer as at the Olympic Games. In Athens, Tragic Poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, received the legacy of Homer, and they streamlined it to focus on the woes of Homeric epics, not the battles, even though we seem to think that battles are more dramatic, given the endless series of car-chases, fight scenes, and explosions so common in popular entertainment in recent decades.

The Greeks knew the value of courage and skill in battle, and that sometimes, as they saw it, war was necessary. They knew the value of life and love and home. And they knew the bitter cost we have to pay to hold onto or win these things. Tolkien knew it, too. His very first tale of Middle-earth, The Fall of Gondolin, written directly after his own experiences on the Somme, draws on the story of the fall of Troy. Despite much hard fighting and truly glorious feats of prowess by the Elves, the city falls with terrible loss of life. Fifty years after Tolkien wrote this, he made clear in the "Foreword to the Second Edition" of The Lord of the Rings that he still felt sorrow for what was lost in the Great War: 

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

(xiv) 

So is there the thrill of glory in the sound of "the horns of the Mark at the coming of the morning" (RK 5.iv.829; 6.vi.978)? Of course there is. Or in the hobbits rising up against their oppressors in "The Scouring of the Shire" (RK 6.viii)? Again, of course. But there is also the weeping of the army of the West at the Field of Cormallen as a minstrel sings of the war, and the tears shed in the Grey Havens as Frodo is about to go into the West (RK 6.iv.954; ix.1030). There is the litany of the named dead, ending "red fell the dew in Rammas Echor," as grim, still, and final a line as the last line of the Iliad (RK 5.vi.849). There is Merry weeping at Théoden's burial and calling him father as the Riders of the King's House sing of the history of the Mark and of how Théoden's death brought hope out of loss, and therein lay its glory (RK 6.vi.976): 

Out of doubt, out of dark, to the day’s rising 

he rode singing in the sun, sword unsheathing. 

Hope he rekindled, and in hope ended;

over death, over dread, over doom lifted

out of loss, out of life, unto long glory.

And so they buried Théoden King of the Horse-lords.

 

____________________________________

† Simone Weil, Simone Weil's The Iliad or the Poem of Force. James P. Holoka ed. & trans.. 2003. Peter Lang Publishing.  (L'Iliade ou la poème de la force. Les Cahiers du Sud.1940). The translations offered in the text and below are my own.

Celui qui possède la force marche dans un milieu non résistant, sans que rien, dans la matière* humaine autour de lui, soit de nature à susciter entre l'élan et l'acte ce bref intervalle où se loge la pensée. Où la pensée n'a pas de place, la justice ni la prudence n'en ont.

One who has the power moves through a medium that offers no resistance, without which there is nothing in the human material* around him of such a nature as to create that small space between impulse and act where thought lives. Where there is no room for thought, there is room for neither justice nor prudence.

*Weil's thesis is that the use of force in war reduces humans to objects without souls. This is as true of the conqueror as of the conquered. So the "medium that offers no resistance" and "the human material around him" refer to all that is left of us once force has stripped away our soul. Impulse leads to action without pause or reflection.

†† Speaking of herself and Paris, Helen says:

  

οἷσιν ἐπὶ Ζεὺς θῆκε κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω
ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι.

Iliad 6.357-58

[upon us] Zeus laid a destiny of woe, so that even

for men in days to come we shall be famous in song.

In Phaeacia the king Alcinous, sees Odysseus weeping to hear a bard singing of the Trojan War, and he says to him:

τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ᾽ ὄλεθρον
ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ᾖσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή.

Odyssey 8.579-80

So Sorry I Only Tore His Arm Off -- Beowulf 956-89

As I've mentioned here before, I've been working my way through Beowulf lately, pretty slowly and no doubt amateurishly, but I'm loving every minute of it. Not too long ago I went over the passage I give below, in which Beowulf, having just fought Grendel, speaks of it the next morning to the crowd outside Heorot:

Beowulf maþelode,  bearn Ecþeowes:
"We þæt ellenweorc      estum miclum,
feohtan fremedon,   frecne geneðdon
eafoð uncuþes.   Uþe ic swiþor
þæt ðu hine selfne      geseon moste,	960
feond on frætewum   fylwerigne.
Ic him hrædlice   heardan clammum
on wælbedde   wriþan þohte,
þæt he for handgripe   minum scolde
licgean lifbysig,   butan his lic swice.	965
Ic hine ne mihte,   þa Metod nolde,
ganges getwæman:   no ic him þæs georne ætfealh,
feorhgeniðlan.   Wæs to foremihtig,
feond on feþe.   Hwæþere, he his folme forlet
to lifwraþe   last weardian,	970
earm 7 eaxle.   No þær ænige swa þeah
feasceaft guma,   frofre gebohte.
No þy leng leofað      laðgeteona
synnum geswenced,      ac hyne sar hafað
in niðgripe,   nearwe befongen	975
balwon bendum.   Ðær abidan sceal,
maga mane fah,   miclan domes,
hu him scir Metod   scrifan wille."
Ða wæs swigra secg,   sunu Eclafes,
on gylpspræce   guðgeweorca,	980
siþðan æþelingas   eorles cræfte
ofer heanne hrof   hand sceawedon,
feondes fingras.   Foran æghwylc wæs
steda nægla gehwylc,   style gelicost,
hæþenes handsporu,   hilderinces	985
egl unheoru.   Æghwylc gecwæð
þæt him heardra nan   hrinan wolde,
iren ærgod,   þæt ðæs ahlæcan
blodge beadufolme   onberan wolde.

‘With kind hearts and cold courage,	955
We have entered this struggle against the unknown,
Ungrasped power, and snapped its strength,
I wish you might have seen it yourself,
The feast-weary fiend, scales dragging,
Falling in the hall, dead-tired.	960
I wanted to catch him quick, hold him
Hard with a hand-grip, cradle him
In a death-bed, a slaughter-couch,
So he might find a savage sleep,
His ghost lifting from the body-bed.	965
He was bound to stay in my unyielding grip
Unless his flesh could flee. I wanted
Him dead, no bones about it --
But I couldn't hold him the restless enemy,
Against God's will.  He slipped my grasp	970
To save his life he left his hand behind,
His arm and shoulder -- a nice touch!
The token claw gave him cold comfort,
No hope of life, that loathed spoiler,
Tortured by sin; but pain grabbed him	975
In a hard grasp, a wailing wound,
A misery-grip.  There he must wait,
Stained with crime, till bright God
Brings judgment on his dark deeds.'
After this, Unferth son of Ecglaf,	980
Boasted less of his battle-works,
His courage quiet, while all warriors
Gazed on the claw, the fiend's fingers,
Nailed near the roof by Beowulf's strength.
Each claw-nail, each hand-spur	985
In the heathen's banged up death-grip,
Was stiff as steel.  The old talk was dead --
Men claimed no hard thing could pierce him,
No ancient iron, no trusted blade,
Could cut his bloody battle-fist.’	990
(transl. Craig Williamson)

What's going on here is wonderful. Beowulf is quick to share the credit with his men (thus "We" in 957), who did little or nothing to help him, but just as quick to blame himself (thus "I" in lines 959-65), for failing to accomplish all he had set out to do. He virtually apologizes for failing to do more than mortally wounding Grendel by tearing off his arm.  But not even a hero who fights sea monsters (574-75) and can swim home from Friesland wearing thirty coats of mail (2354-68) can do what God wills not (966). This tells us two things. First, how great a hero it took to kill Grendel; and, second, how even such strength as that avails nothing against the will of God. And Beowulf accepts the limits of his strength here, surrendering his enemy and God's to the judgement of God.  In the very same way he had surrendered the outcome of the battle to God's will before it began (685-87).

Unferth, the king's counselor, with whom Beowulf had traded barbs and boasts the night before (499-606) is now reduced to silence by Beowulf's deeds just as he had previously been by his words. And those deeds, proven by Grendel's arm, not only silence the 'old talk' about the impossibility of defeating such a monster with weapons, but seems to allow no new talk, since in fact Beowulf had defeated the feond without them, just as he had said he would (675-687).

When you're down in the trenches of grammar, trying to sort out cases and syntax, parsing your way through a word or two at a time -- Why, why, why is that in the genitive plural? -- it's all too easy to overlook the way the poet has woven the story together. But when you have the fortune to notice as elegant a web as this one, it makes every moment of struggle worthwhile.

__________________________

Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited and translated by Craig Williamson, with a foreword by Tom Shippey, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia 2011). 978012222753