Nienna's Room With a View -- Silmarillion, 28

Taken from the International Space Station in September 2010

[Nienna's] halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad. She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.

(Silmarillion, 28)

Recently on the Prancing Pony podcast (which I recommend) the hosts, Alan Sisto and Sean Marchese, were discussing a question sent in by a listener about the Valaquenta, specifically on the meaning of the last sentence quoted above. Is Nienna looking out across Ekkaia, the vast sea that encircles the world, to a physical horizon, or is she somehow looking beyond the world itself to the Void and the Timeless Halls of Ilúvatar? 

The question seems vexed. Over the decades Tolkien wrote of the Walls of the World, the Walls of Night, or even the Wall of Things; nor is it quite clear whether in every case he meant the same walls, or, if he did, whether he conceived of them in precisely the same way, or, if they were different, how they differed. It is also difficult to say if we should make something of the lack of capitalization of the phrase in The Silmarillion, though it is very tempting to do so. In Morgoth's Ring Christopher Tolkien examines these phrases, but does not feel that the matter can be completely sorted out (26-29, 62-64). At this point I can't disagree with him. 

But it got me thinking.  I have, quite literally, just been reading a book that furnishes an interesting context in which to begin thinking about Tolkien's description of the halls of Nienna. In his The Sea and Medieval English Literature Sebastian Sobecki discusses (72-99) how from antiquity onward England was seen as the end of the earth, the farthest shore bounded by the great, all encompassing, infinite Ocean. The Old English word for this shoreless sea that lay beyond England (Ireland notwithstanding -- pay no attention to that far green country behind the grey rain curtain) is garsecg, and while its etymology is in dispute one intriguing possibility is gares secg, literally 'promontory's edge', that is, 'the end of the world' (Anderson, 272; Smith, 16). What makes this attractive is the note of harmony it strikes with what we later find in Middle English (a citation for which I am indebted to Sobecki, 84). In the MED s.v. 'occean' 1a, 'the circumferential sea surrounding the world' we find two instances of the phrase 'clif of occean' defined as 'the end of the world.'

If we look earlier we will see that both the Beowulf poet and the translator into Old English of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, moreover, use garsecg to suggest the liminality of this natural boundary and to hint at what might lay beyond. In Beowulf Scyld comes from and returns to the western sea, and 'no man, not the counsellors in the hall, not warriors under heaven, could say in truth who received' the ship bearing Scyld back into the west (50-52). And as Sharon M. Rowley points out in The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica (71-72), the use of garsecg there, like that of oceanus in the original Latin Bede, not only places the island of Britain on the border of the world, but is part of the strategy of the translator to recast Bede's account of the salvation history of Britain. In both cases this outer sea is the edge of the world, but like an icon directs our attention beyond itself.  For beyond that sea might be found the Earthly Paradise, denied to men since the Fall. Seeing the western sea in this way was quite common in the Middle Ages, as Sobecki shows in his discussion cited above. Indeed, the tradition that the outer ocean was a path to another world was as old as Homer (Odyssey x.520-xi.25, transl. Fagles. See also here.)*

In Tolkien this notion of the sea does a kind of double duty. First there is Belegaer, The Great Sea, that lies between Middle-earth and the Undying Lands, which became inaccessible to all but Elves at the end of the Second Age when Ilúvatar removed Aman from the Circles of the World (another term only indifferently clear). But, in the second place, still the Halls of Nienna remain, and still presumably look outward across the Encircling Sea. There are, moreover, two other factors we cannot ignore here.  First,

it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen. 

(Silmarillion, 19) 

Second, Nienna is in and of the world, as all the Ainur became once they entered it, but her face is turned towards what is beyond. Her halls are near the Halls of Mandos, from which the Elves return to life in Aman, and from which Men depart Ëa entirely.  Let us turn back to the passage with which we began, but expand out focus somewhat:

So great was [Nienna's] sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope. Her halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad. She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world. 

(Silmarillion, 28)

Given the echo of the Music in the Sea, and given the weaving of Nienna's sorrow into that Music, it is hard to see how the Encircling Ocean, by sight and by sound, could not evoke the thought of what lies beyond the Walls of the World. The Sea does so in and of itself, even if those who hear the Music in its waters do not understand what they hear. And, without the reincarnation within Ëa that is natural to the Elves, the hope, strength, and wisdom Nienna brings to the souls of Men in Mandos can look nowhere but beyond Ëa.

The answer, I fear, can only be a bit Elvish. Do the windows of Nienna's halls look out from the edge of Creation? Physically, no; metaphysically, yes.

photograph by Rick Battle

_______________________________________

Works Consulted

_______________________________________

Anderson, Earl R., Folk Taxonomies in Early English, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (2003), 272, cited in Rowley, 71 n. 5.

Rowley, Sharon M., The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Anglo-Saxon Studies, Boydell and Brewer (2011) 71-98.  

Smith, Roger, Garsecg in Early English Poetry, English Language Notes 24.3 (1987), 16, cited in Rowley 71 n. 5.

Sobecki, Sebastian, The Sea and Medieval English Literature, Boydell and Brewer (2008).

_______________________________________

*For a good example of Tolkien's awareness and use of this idea of the Sea, see The Notion Club Papers (Part Two) in Sauron Defeated 257-273, passim, especially the included poem, The Death of Saint Brendan, and its revised (later separately published) version on 296-99:

 IMRAM

 At last out of the deep sea he passed,
 and mist rolled on the shore;
 under clouded moon the waves were loud,
 as the laden ship him bore                                        4
 to Ireland, back to wood and mire
 and the tower tall and grey,
 where the knell of Cluain-ferta's bell
 tolled in green Galway.                                             8
 Where Shannon down to Lough Derg ran
 under a rain-clad sky
 Saint Brendan came to his journey's end
 to find the grace to die.                                             12

 'O tell me, father, for I loved you well,
 if still you have words for me,
 of things strange in the remembering
 in the long and lonely sea,                                         16
 of islands by deep spells beguiled
 where dwell the Elvenkind:
 in seven long years the road to Heaven
 or the Living Land did you find?'                              20

 'The things I have seen, the many things,
 have long now faded far;
 only three come clear now back to me:
 a Cloud, a Tree, a Star.                                               24

 'We sailed for a year and a day and hailed
 no field nor coast of men;
 no boat nor bird saw we ever afloat
 for forty days and ten.                                                 28
 Then a drumming we heard as of thunder coming,
 and a Cloud above us spread;
 we saw no sun at set or dawn,
 yet ever the west was red.                                           32

 'Upreared from sea to cloud then sheer
 a shoreless mountain stood;
 its sides were black from the sullen tide
 up to its smoking hood,                                               36
 but its spire was lit with a living fire
 that ever rose and fell:
 tall as a column in High Heaven's hall,
 its roots were deep as Hell;                                         40
 grounded in chasms the waters drowned
 and swallowed long ago
 it stands, I guess, on the foundered land
 where the kings of kings lie low.                                 44

 'We sailed then on till all winds failed,
 and we toiled then with the oar;
 we burned with thirst and in hunger yearned,
 and we sang our psalms no more.                                48
 At last beyond the Cloud we passed
 and came to a starlit strand;
 the waves were sighing in pillared caves,
 grinding gems to sand.                                                 52
 And here they would grind our bones we feared
 until the end of time;
 for steep those shores went upward leaping
 to cliffs no man could climb.                                       56
 But round by west a firth we found
 that clove the mountain-wall;
 there lay a water shadow-grey
 between the mountains tall.                                         60
 Through gates of stone we rowed in haste,
 and passed, and left the sea;
 and silence like dew fell in that isle,
 and holy it seemed to be.                                             64


 'To a dale we came like a silver grail
 with carven hills for rim.
 In that hidden land we saw there stand
 under a moonlight dim                                                68
 a Tree more fair than ever I deemed
 in Paradise might grow:
 its foot was like a great tower's root,
 its height no man could know;                                    72
 and white as winter to my sight
 the leaves of that Tree were;
 they grew more close than swan-wing plumes,
 long and soft and fair.                                                  76

 'It seemed to us then as in a dream
 that time had passed away,
 and our journey ended; for no return
 we hoped, but there to stay.                                         80
 In the silence of that hollow isle
 half sadly then we sang:
 softly we thought, but the sound aloft
 like sudden trumpets rang.                                           84
 The Tree then shook, and flying free
 from its limbs the leaves in air
 as white birds rose in wheeling flight,
 and the lifting boughs were bare.                                 88
 On high we heard in the starlit sky
 a song, but not of bird:
 neither noise of man nor angel's voice,
 but maybe there is a third                                             92
 fair kindred in the world yet lingers
 beyond the foundered land.
 But steep are the seas and the waters deep
 beyond the White-tree Strand! '                                    96

 '0 stay now, father! There is more to say.
 But two things you have told:
 the Tree, the Cloud; but you spoke of three.
 The Star in mind do you hold?'                                    100

 'The Star? Why, I saw it high and far
 at the parting of the ways,
 a light on the edge of the Outer Night
 beyond the Door of Days,                                             104
 where the round world plunges steeply down,
 but on the old road goes,
 as an unseen bridge that on arches runs
 to coasts that no man knows.'                                        108

 'But men say, father, that ere the end
 you went where none have been.
 I would hear you tell me, father dear,
 of the last land you have seen.'                                      112

 'In my mind the Star I still can find,
 and the parting of the seas,
 and the breath as sweet and keen as death
 that was borne upon the breeze.                                    116
 But where they bloom, those flowers fair,
 in what air or land they grow,
 what words beyond this world I heard,
 if you would seek to know,                                            120
 in a boat then, brother, far afloat
 you must labour in the sea,
 and find for yourself things out of mind:
 you will learn no more of me.'                                       124

 In Ireland over wood and mire
 in the tower tall and grey
 the knell of Cluain-ferta's bell
 was tolling in green Galway.                                         128
 Saint Brendan had come to his life's end
 under a rain-clad sky,
 journeying whence no ship returns;
 and his bones in Ireland lie.                                           132

In the Dead Marshes We Hear No Larks at Morning

Paul Nash, We Are Making A New World, Imperial War Museum

Since at least the twelfth century larks at morning have featured in English poetry, at first not even in English, as these Latin lines from Alexander of Neckam show, playing on the similarity of 'lark' (alauda) and 'praises' (laudat) to derive a (false) etymology:

Laudat alauda diem, praenuncia laeta diei
    Laudat, et a laudis nomine nomen habet.
Quamvis moesta thorum properans Aurora Tithoni
    Linquat, surgentem laeta salutat avis. 

(De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, 2.765-68) 

The lark, day's happy herald, praises the day,
    She praises it, and from the name of 'praise' gets her name.
Though sad Aurora leaves in haste Tithonus' bed,
    The happy bird greets her as she arises.

Onward through the centuries in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Meredith, and Hopkins, the lark is jubilant, protective of its own, and soaring high and free to greet the dawn. There's nothing to wonder at in all this poetry on the lark. For long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green, every morning was full of birdsong. (In fact, it still is. Open your windows; mute your machines.)  As J. V. Baker, who knew firsthand what the poets he was writing about knew, said: 

 Any knowledge of the habits of the English lark will make it easy to see why it is always associated with rapturous and soaring flight; no bird is apparently more airy and carefree or ventures higher; yet it always has an invisible cord of attachment that pulls it back to its grassy nest concealed on the ground. My first recollection of larks is of hearing them above a wheatfield; the golden ranks of wheat, relieved here and there with blood-red poppies, stood right up to the edge of the chalk cliffs falling perpendicularly into the sea near Margate; and the blue sky was filled with the song of larks. 

(The Lark in English Poetry, p. 70)

It is thus no surprise that during World War One men raised on such poetry and such experiences would find solace in the larks that sang and soared about the fields of France at dawn. 'What the lark usually betokens' for the men at the front, writes Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (p. 242), 'is that one has got safely through another night', though men were also well aware of the absurdity of the birds singing while around them swirled a nightmare of slaughter, something the poets of the war saw both sides of.

A Lark Above the Trenches  

Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!
Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky-
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy,
His lyric wild and free – carols a lark. 

I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar,
I dream of Love, its ecstasy he sings;
Doth lure my soul to love till like a star
It flashes into Life: O tireless wings 

That beat love’s message into melody –
A song that touches in this place remote
Gladness supreme in its undying note
And stirs to life the soul of memory –
‘Tis strange that while you’re beating into life
Men here below are plunged in sanguine strife!

Will Streets

 And:

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg

Now, as has long been clear, Tolkien's experience of the Somme in WWI influenced his portrayal of Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor with Gollum. We can see this most clearly in The Passage of the Marshes, as Tolkien conceded (Letters, no. 226), and as John Garth has amply demonstrated in his splendid (if hard to come by) " 'As under a green sea': Visions of War in the Dead Marshes". Now we should not expect Tolkien to have included every commonplace of English literature, nor of the WWI poets, in his translation of his experience. Nor would its absence be particularly noteworthy, or even noticeable, if he did not draw our attention to it:

As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.  

'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.  

'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.

(TT 4.ii.626)

Larks belong to the serene, dazzling world of the golden sun, to a world where dawn came clear and bright, as it had not in the marshes that morning (TT 4.ii.625). Theirs is not the rotten, murky world in which the three hobbits seek to hide. Their absence is a silence that grieves and dispirits Sam. And Gollum, who regrets the lack of birds for a different reason, makes quite clear that their absence from the marshes is not merely a passing one. 

And Tolkien was well acquainted the image of the lark at dawn and the power it could have. He certainly knew it from Chaucer and from most if not all of the poets down to Meredith and Hopkins; and even if he had never read another WWI poet, he had edited Spring Harvest, the collection of his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who wrote of the lark in his poem 'Over the hills and hollows green' before perishing at the Somme. In The Lay of Leithian, moreover, he uses the image of the lark three times (Lays, 176, 291, 355), and then once in Aragorn's song of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.xi.192).  But it is in The Silmarillion (165) that he uses it with most striking effect:

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed. 

Then the spell of silence fell from Beren .... 

That Tolkien here likens Lúthien Tinúviel, the nightingale who sings in the dusk, to the lark is fascinating in its own right, and I think this juxtaposition signals just how epochal the love of Beren and Lúthien will be. Yet more importantly for us here now is that in both these texts without the song of the lark silence has lease. In The Silmarillion Lúthien sings like the lark and breaks the spell on Beren, whose naming her Tinúviel, nightingale, then casts a spell of love over her, thus changing the world. In The Passage of the Marshes, without lark or song, things just get worse for Frodo and Sam. Ahead of them that very night are the 'things in the pools' that Gollum slyly alluded to, the dead from whom the marshes take their name (TT 4.ii.627-28); and when, still later that same night, they at last hear a cry upon the air and the rush of wings, it is no skylark welcoming the dawn, but a creature of horror whose coming snuffs out even the candles of the corpses: " 'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings!' " (TT 4.ii.630). As a result, a shadow falls on all their hearts. Gollum begins to revert to his former self, and Frodo himself grows increasingly silent, like Beren before Lúthien sang.  After two more such visitations (TT 4.ii.634-35), the chapter ends :

So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they walked on in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.

(TT 4.ii.635)

So in The Passage of the Marshes not only does Tolkien eschew the common trope of larks at dawn, which is reasonable enough given the context, but by substituting the winged Nazgûl to break the larkless silence he reworks the trope to introduce the nightmare that will persist and deepen, with one contrasting interlude in Ithilien, until Mt Doom. 

___________________________________

Works Consulted

___________________________________

James V Baker, The Lark in English Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1950), pp. 70-79

Priscilla Bawcutt, The Lark in Chaucer and Some Later Poets, The Yearbook of English Studies,Vol. 2 (1972), pp. 5-12

Melkor's Song of Ice and Fire - A Brief Note on The Ainulindalë

And Ilúvatar spoke to Ulmo, and said: 'Seest thou not how here in this little realm in the Deeps of Time Melkor hath made war upon thy province? He hath bethought him of bitter cold immoderate, and yet hath not destroyed the beauty of thy fountains, nor of thy clear pools. Behold the snow, and the cunning work of frost! Melkor hath devised heats and fire without restraint, and hath not dried up thy desire nor utterly quelled the music of the sea. Behold rather the height and glory of the clouds, and the everchanging mists; and listen to the fall of rain upon the Earth! And in these clouds thou art drawn nearer to Manwë, thy friend, whom thou lovest.' 

Then Ulmo answered: 'Truly, Water is become now fairer than my heart imagined, neither had my secret thought conceived the snowflake, nor in all my music was contained the falling of the rain. I will seek Manwë, that he and I may make melodies for ever to my delight!' And Manwë and Ulmo have from the beginning been allied, and in all things have served most faithfully the purpose of Ilúvatar. 

(Silmarillion, 19)

In this conversation, which takes place before Ilúvatar creates the world described in the Music of the Ainur, we see shown forth the first example of Ilúvatar's warning to Melkor that anyone who 'attempteth [to alter the music in my despite] shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined' (17). Ilúvatar then repeats this warning to Melkor in the moment he grants the Ainur a Vision of their Music (17), and while the text tells us that he said 'many other things' (17) to them at this time, we get to hear only his words to Melkor and Ulmo. They are thus singled out, and Ilúvatar's words to them bookend the Vision, with Melkor addressed directly before it and Ulmo directly afterwards. 

While Ulmo responds with wonder and delight and declares his intention to collaborate with Manwë, as we saw, Melkor is for now silent and 'filled with shame, of which came secret anger' (17). The next (and last) time he speaks in the Ainulindalë follows immediately upon the entry of the Ainur into the newly made world:  

And in this work the chief part was taken by Manwë and Aulë and Ulmo; but Melkor too was there from the first, and he meddled in all that was done, turning it if he might to his own desires and purposes; and he kindled great fires. When therefore Earth was yet young and full of flame Melkor coveted it, and he said to the other Valar: 'This shall be my own kingdom; and I name it unto myself!' 

(20-21).  

Melkor's stated intention of course provokes a refusal to submit from Manwë -- 'This kingdom thou shalt not take for thine own, wrongfully, for many others have laboured here no less than thou' (21) -- and leads to war between Melkor and the other Valar.

What's most striking to me in all of this is that the beauty of water described in its various forms arises from the unintentional collaboration of Melkor and Ulmo. Melkor's hostility and selfish desire to dominate the Music has worked upon water to produce beauties 'fairer than my heart imagined,' as Ulmo recognizes. And precisely as Ilúvatar predicted. It should also stand out because it is the only time (I can think of off the top of my head) when Melkor's evil actions produce unquestionable, inspiring beauty untouched by any sorrow. It is a perfect example of the later statement that evil will prove good to have been, and yet remain evil (98). In that thought, however, there can be only sorrow, because Melkor cannot see the beauty he has helped to create, cannot be inspired by it to collaborate with Manwë, his 'brother ... in the mind of Ilúvatar' (21), cannot, therefore, repent of his desire to dominate.  Far from it in fact: 'Melkor hated the sea, for he could not subdue it' (30).

Clearly there is more work to be done here. A study of the meaning imparted by the way the Ainulindalë is structured looks like it could provide some intriguing results, given what we've seen here. I have skipped over the appearance of the Children in the Vision, for example, as well as the perhaps metaphysical implications of the question of why it is that water becomes more beautiful as a result of the effects of evil. Is it because it is the part of creation which best and most preserves the Music of the Ainur, and therefore the primordial thought of Ilúvatar as expressed in the themes he propounded to them? 

But so detailed a study I will have to leave for another day. 

________________________________

Works Consulted

________________________________

Wicked Bookish, or, Were the Books I Read as a Child Bad for Me?

As far back as I can remember I was a wicked bookish lad, devouring tales as hungrily as a drowning man gasps for air. The inner truths that permeate myth always moved me, even when I could not grasp them, even when I was only old enough to suspect that more lay between the hero and the quest, between the sorrow and the joy, than I could express. I know that this was so, because I quickly lost interest in tales that did no more than relate a series of events.  I still do. There must be something in the tale that speaks of life, the universe, and everything. But that's often not as grandiose as it sounds. It simply must speak of us and the dreams that are made on us.  Nor does it even matter if we cannot articulate these things. It is enough that we feel them.

So when I was a child, with all my road before me, every trip to a library or bookstore was a quest for a kind of Sangraal, as my mind strove to look over the horizons of my childish world and into the great mystery of the time before my birth.  I read every children's book I could find on the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their myths. I read any number of books for little boys on King Arthur and his knights. I made my aunt play the original Broadway cast album to Camelot at least once a week. She was probably sorry she'd bought it, if that's even possible.  I made my grandmother tell me stories of fairies and banshees over and over again.  When I was in fourth grade, I somehow came by a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology.  I read it several times before going where it led me, straight to The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Song of Roland, to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, to El Cid, the Norse Gods, and Beowulf. It was a special moment indeed when my fifth grade teacher refused, at first, to accept a book report I had written on Le Morte D'Arthur, because she could not believe I had actually read it. In all of these tales, there was that something which spoke of us.

No one who reads this blog will be surprised to read that just a year after Le Morte D'Arthur I found myself enchanted by The Lord of the Rings.

Wicked bookish, as I said.

So, why am I telling you this? Well several weeks ago, Graeme Whiting, the headmaster of a school in the UK, posted online a short essay entitled 'The Imagination of the Child'.  In it he stressed how sensitive the minds of children are, and the care with which their parents and teachers must act if they wish to protect the children from negative influences. So far, so good, I guess. I can't really criticize this position: children are sensitive; they need protection.  But setting out such a proposition is the easy part. Many would say -- indeed have said -- that in his efforts to identify some of the influences from which we must guard children, and the means by which we should do so, Mr Whiting went off the rails:

I stand for the old-fashioned values of traditional literature, classical poetry, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Shakespearean plays, and the great writers who will still be read in future years by those children whose parents adopt a protective attitude towards ensuring that dark, demonic literature, carefully sprinkled with ideas of magic, of control and of ghostly and frightening stories that will cause the children who read them to seek for ever more sensational things to add to those they have already been exposed to. What then of their subconscious minds? What then of the minds of children whose parents couldn’t give the time to look closely at childhood; the sensitive period of the development of every human being? Where will this addiction to unacceptable literature lead? 

I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children. For young adults, this literature, when it can be understood for what it is, is the choice of many!

Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children!

That first sentence alone is quite an experience. It begins stodgily enough, but if the authors and types of literature of which Mr Whiting approves are stodgy, so be it. I like everyone he recommends. But things take a strange turn with 'dark, demonic literature.' What starts out sounding like Digory Kirke ('It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?') ends up like a YouTube rant about the End Times and the Satanic Forces arrayed against us. For a man who thinks he's read all the right books, he appears not to have profited much by them. By this I mean they seem to have closed his mind rather than opening it, to judge by his later statement that he 'felt that by the age of thirty [he] had read all the books he wanted to read'. And I'll leave it at that. I'm not here to attack Mr Whiting. Lots of people have already done that, and it's all too easy to pick apart someone's sentences and censure them from afar.

Now I can't offer an informed opinion on The Hunger Games, since I've neither read the books nor seen the films. My knowledge of Harry Potter is also small compared to that of many I know, none of whom, as far as I can tell, have turned out badly because of early exposure to the boy who lived. As for Terry Pratchett, I've read a dozen or so of his novels and haven't felt compelled to attend a Black Mass, not even once.

On the other hand, George R. R. Martin.

His works are something else entirely.  While I wouldn't go quite so far as to call A Song of Ice and Fire 'demonic', I can only agree that it is very, very dark. I am pretty sure I wouldn't let children in grade school, if I had any, watch the HBO series. The books would be a tougher call, for conflicting reasons. With one exception, my parents never forbade me any book. For that I have always been grateful, though my choice of books may have made it easier for them to be so lenient. (I somehow can't see my parents letting me read Bukowski at ten years old.) But books engage the imagination so much more actively and completely than films do (at least as I experience them), and Martin's books are raw, brutal, and full of cruelty. Even if, as Martin has been quoted to say, his tale will have a bittersweet ending in the manner of Tolkien, what will have gone before will (to judge by the first five novels) be so dire and hopeless that the reader, whether adult or child, will come to the end more a Frodo than a Sam.

To be fair, I was an adult when these books came out.  But the first time I read The Lord of the Rings I was eleven, precisely the age Mr Whiting is talking about, still at least three years shy, as he claims, of having 'a thinking brain'. And there were indeed 'demonic' forces at work in the story. The Black Riders were creatures of horror, cut off from all light and life, undead slaves of the Ring; and Sauron, their master, was even worse, especially when 'seen' in the Mirror of Galadriel or glimpsed briefly and indirectly through a terrified Pippin's eyes. And Mordor, teeming with orcs and ash heaps, was clearly a land of dark, Satanic mills. 

Not quite the Eye, but appropriate to our topic.

But for every evil there was an opposite and apposite good, and often more than one. For Mordor there was The Shire, Rivendell, and Lothlórien. For the Black Riders there was shining Glorfindel, who puts them to flight; and, more fatally for their Captain, there was the pair who became heroes by force of love and courage despite the unheroic roles assigned them by stature and gender. Against Sauron himself we found Gandalf and Galadriel, who rejected the power of the Ring when it was offered to them, one of whom sacrificed himself, and the other the land she loved, for the sake of defeating evil. More subtly, though, and if we were paying attention, we recognized the hand of God (Eru) in all the references to 'chance' scattered throughout the work, almost never without qualification. Even Frodo's failure to complete the quest on his own strength bore witness to 'chance if chance you call it' (FR 1.vii.126), since it was 'more than chance' (FR 1.iii.84) that led Bilbo to Gollum, to the Ring, and most importantly of all to pity (FR 1.ii.59).^[1] 

So far from being damaged in my unthinking brain by all this, I was uplifted in my soul by 'Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief' (Tolkien, OFS para. 99).  I did not know these words for it then any more than I knew anything of grief at eleven, but it touched my heart and taught it; and in after years, many of which were very dark, its depictions of love, courage, endurance, and nobility gave me something to hold onto in my mind.  The Lord of the Rings was hardly the only book to teach me these lessons, both in childhood and now, well after the age of thirty.  My reading would have been very narrow indeed if it were. Perhaps it's a failure of my own imagination that I cannot see how any literate person who has actually read The Lord of the Rings while awake can see in it only darkness and demonic forces that endanger the minds of children. Or perhaps, as Sam says to Faramir, stating what amounts to a general truth about Faërie itself: 'It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they've brought it' (TT 4.v.680).

Now those words might seem a good place to end, but I think that would be shortsighted. Words can harm and words can heal. Thus there will be books that are inappropriate for children. I just cannot see The Lord of the Rings as one of them.

Still, if I am going to be wicked in any one thing, let me be wicked bookish.

A wholly extraneous image. I just like it.

_____________________________________ 

Works Consulted

_____________________________________ 

^[1] On Frodo's 'failure', see Tolkien, Letters no. 181.

The blood-ice of battle, the unseen hand of God, the blind eyes of men -- Beowulf 1584-1650

In my pilgrimage through Beowulf I often encounter phrases or passages in which the skill of the poet fills me with wonder.  In the lines below he weaves together the bloody aftermath of Beowulf's battle against Grendel's mother in her underwater cave with the slow anxious waiting of the Danes and Geats on the shore. It's a bit of a long extract, but I hope you'll bear with me, first for the Old English, and then for my hellehinca translation, which I am using lest I seem to be criticizing those of scholars far more proficient than I am. I'll try to keep the howlers to a rare few.

He him þæs lean forgeald,
reþe cempa, to ðæs þe he on ræste geseah           1585
guðwerigne Grendel licgan,
aldorleasne, swa him ær gescod                            
hild æt Heorote. Hra wide sprong,
syþðan he æfter deaðe drepe þrowade,
heorosweng heardne, 7 hine þa heafde becearf.      1590

Sona þæt gesawon, snottre ceorlas,
þa ðe mid Hroðgare on holm wliton,                    
þæt wæs yðgeblond eal gemenged
brim blode fah. Blondenfeaxe,
gomele ymb godne, ongeador spræcon                   1595
þæt hig þæs æðelinges eft ne wendon,
þæt he sigehreðig secean come                            
mærne þeoden. Þa ðæs monige gewearð
þæt hine seo brimwylf abreoten hæfde.
Ða com non dæges. Næs ofgeafon                        1600
hwate Scyldingas. Gewat him ham þonon,
goldwine gumena. Gistas setan                            
modes seoce, 7 on mere staredon;
wiston, 7 ne wendon, þæt hie heora winedrihten
selfne gesawon. 

                            Þa þæt sweord ongan               1605
æfter heaþoswate hildegicelum,
wigbil wanian. Þæt wæs wundra sum,                  
þæt hit eal gemealt, ise gelicost,
ðonne forstes bend Fæder onlæteð,
onwindeð wælrapas, se geweald hafað                   1610
sæla 7 mæla. Þæt is soð Metod.

Ne nom he in þæm wicum, Weder-Geata leod,
maðmæhta ma, þeh he þær monige geseah,
buton þone hafelan 7 þa hilt somod
since fage. Sweord ær gemealt,                             1615
forbarn brodenmæl. Wæs þæt blod | to þæs hat,
ættren ellorgæst se þær inne swealt.
Sona wæs on sunde, se þe ær æt sæcce gebad,
wighryre wraðra. Wæter up þurhdeaf,
wæron yðgebland eal gefælsod,                             1620
eacne eardas, þ se ellorgast
oflet lifdagas 7 þas lænan gesceaft.

Com þa to lande, lidmanna helm,
swiðmod swymman. Sælace gefeah,
mægenbyrþenne, þara þe he him mid hæfde.          1625
Eodon him þa togeanes, Gode þancodon,
ðryðlic þegna heap þeodnes gefegon,
þæs þe hi hyne gesundne geseon moston.
Ða wæs of þæm hroran helm 7 byrne
lungre alysed. Lagu drusade,                                  1630
wæter under wolcnum, wældreore fag.
Ferdon forð þonon feþelastum
ferhþum fægne foldweg mæton,
cuþe stræte. Cyningbalde men
from þæm holmclife hafelan bæron                         1635
earfoðlice heora æghwæþrum
felamodigra. Feower scoldon
on þæm wælstenge weorcum geferian
to þæm goldsele Grendles heafod.
Oþ ðæt |semninga to sele comon,                           1640
frome fyrdhwate feowertyne
Geata gongan, 

                         gumdryhten mid,
modig on gemonge, meodowongas træd.
Ða com in gan ealdor ðegna,
dædcene mon dome gewurþad,                               1645
hæle hildedeor, Hroðgar gretan.
Þa wæs be feaxe on flet boren
Grendles heafod, þær guman druncon,
egeslic for eorlum, 7 þære idese mid,
wliteseon wrætlic. Weras onsawon.                         1650

And:

[for his murders] the fierce warrior paid Grendel back then, as soon as he saw him lying on his bed, drained by the battle, lifeless, wounded just as their fight at Heorot had left him. Yet his body leaped once it felt Beowulf's blow in death, a hard sword blow, and Beowulf cut off his head. (1584-90)

At once the wise men, who were looking on the water with Hrothgar, saw that the surging waters were all stirred up, the lake colored with blood.  The greybeards around the king said "together" that they no longer had hope of this hero, that he would come with victory in hand to seek their renowned prince. Many of them agreed that the seawolf had done away with him. Then came the ninth hour of the day. The brave Scyldings left the steep shore; [Hrothgar] the gold-friend of men set off for home. Sick at heart the guests remained sitting and stared at the mere. They wished -- and did not expect -- that they would see their own friendly lord again. (1591-1605)

Then that sword, that battle-blade, began to melt into dripping icicles from the blood of battle. It was a thing of wonder, that it all dissolved, just as ice does when the Father who has dominion over seasons and times lets loose the bonds of frost, unwinds the death-ropes that bind ice. That is the true God. (1605-11)

Though he saw many treasures in that place, the prince of the Geats took none but the head and the sword hilt bright with jewels. Its blade of patterned steel had dissolved by now, had burned away. So hot was that blood, so venomous the otherworldly spirit which perished therein. In a moment he was in the water, he who had survived the fall of his enemies in battle. Up through the water he swam. The surging waves were now all cleansed, the immense lands cleansed, now that that otherworldly spirit had let go the days of his life and this fleeting world. (1612-22)

He came then to land, this guardian of his seamen, stouthearted at swimming. He rejoiced in the huge burden of the sea-booty he had with him. To him then, came the mighty crowd of his thegns; they thanked God, and rejoiced in their prince because they had been allowed to see him unharmed. From that bold man his helm and hauberk were soon loosed. The lake had settled down, the water shining under heaven with the blood of slaughter. Then they set off along the path from that place, glad at heart; they measured the road, the known way. Men bold as kings bore the head from the steep shore, a hard thing for any two of them. So four had to carry the head on a battle-spear, still no easy task, from there to the gold hall, until at last they came to that place, fourteen Geats, brave and ready for war. (1623-42)

Among them their lord, in high spirits with his men, trod the mead-plains. Then the prince of these thegns, a man keen for deeds, decked in glory, a warrior valiant in battle, entered the hall to greet Hrothgar. Then was Grendel's head carried by his hair onto the floor of the hall, where the men were drinking, a terrible sight for the nobles and their lady with them, an astonishing thing to behold. The men looked on. (1642-50)

The first lines here (1584-90) set the tone for what follows. The stillness of Grendel's corpse and the violence of the blow that makes even the dead leap prefigure the activity of Beowulf and the passivity of those who wait for him above. The hero says nothing -- he strikes -- while the grey-haired wise men say too much, and draw the wrong conclusions from the blood they see in the troubled waters. Not unreasonably, they despair of the hero's chances against the otherworldly 'seawolf' (brimwylf, 1599) in her own element.  But the 'brave Scyldings' tarry a while yet before they go, presumably waiting for Hrothgar who had been most forward in his welcome of Beowulf and generous in the rewards he bestowed on him, a generosity of which goldwine ('gold-friend', 1602) reminds us. 

'Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel­­' -- 'fate goes ever as it must' -- Hrothgar might have said here, echoing Beowulf himself, as he now turned for hearth and hall, and, presumably, for the renewed vengeance of Grendel's mother that night. The story of the Scyldings seems to loop back to where it began, with the life of the hall as usual by day, and death expected by night. But it is with the faithful Geats that our attention and sympathies abide: though 'sick at heart' (modes seoce, 1603) and expecting never to see their lord again, they stay behind abandoned by their hosts -- a relationship to which gistas ('guests', 1602),  juxtaposed with goldwine, also bears witness.

The North Cape of Norway and the Midnight Sun

Returning to Beowulf then, we encounter one of the most vivid and foreign images I have ever come across, a metaphor that reaches so far beyond my experience that it seems to inhabit those endless strange vistas of 'pure northernness' that C. S. Lewis speaks of in Surprised by Joy (73). The sword began to melt æfter heaþoswate hildegicelum, literally 'in battle icicles after the sweat of war' (1606). As odd as heaþoswat 'the sweat of war' might have seemed at first, it took scarcely a moment to recognize that it meant 'blood shed in battle', but hildegicelum drove me first to the glossary at the back of Klaeber's Beowulf, where it was defined as 'battle-icicle'. What? Battle-icicle? Here was a gloss that shed light without illumination.

The North Cape of Norway and the Midnight Sun

Then I looked to the commentary to see what it had to say: not a word -- which serves only to prove further what I have long held, that the likelihood of a note is inversely proportional to the need for one. Bosworth-Toller was slightly more helpful with its definition, 'a drop of blood', which I think is strictly wrong, but useful in conjuring the image of something dripping, as water does from a melting icicle, or blood from a sword. It at least helped me to begin to see the image the poet was invoking with such clarity and force for his intended audience. The discovery that there was an Old Norse word, blóðiss, 'blood-ice', meaning 'sword', in the later poem Liðsmannaflokkr showed me a sword viewed in similar terms. (My thanks to Eleanor Parker, The Clerk of Oxford, for this word.) And so the image took shape in my mind, of the bloody sword itself beginning to melt in Beowulf's hand, dripping like an icicle. Of all the strange images I've met so far in Beowulf this one has struck me as perhaps the strangest and most memorable.

As A. G. Brodeur said in The Art of Beowulf:

The unique compound hildegicel .... has no specific referent: 'the sword began ... to diminish in battle-icicles.'  The poet imagined the blade as melting in the she-troll's blood as icicles melt in the sun. This is an implied simile, projecting before the mind's eye the aspect of metal melting into the fingered shapes of melting ice. Curiously enough, hildegicel, though it is not a kenning, was evoked by an imagination working in a manner resembling the processes of thought behind the skaldic kenning diguljökull, 'ice of the crucible,' for the concept 'silver.'  As silver melts in the crucible, so ice melts in the sun. In hildegicel the thought is similar, but it is not concealed and strained as in the skaldic kenning; it is visualized and communicated in a clear and lovely image. The first element of the compound directly links with the image of steel dissolving like icicles with the warlike function of the sword itself.

(Brodeur, 21-22, emphases original)

But the poet does more. He uses this 'clear and lovely image' to reach beyond that vast northern world. The implied simile of hildegicel leads into an explicit comparison to real ice that reveals the hand of the 'true God' who is the master of nature and the enemy of otherworldly creatures like Grendel and his mother, identified long since in the poem as belonging to the race of Cain (in Caines cynne, 107). And since the poet has also recently told us that Beowulf had the favor of God in his fight with Grendel's mother (1550-56), the mention of God here, final and emphatic in 'This is the true God', is an affirmation of his belief in the moral as well as natural order of the universe. Beyond 'the huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of northern summer' (Lewis, 73) is a power both immanent and transcendent.

From the true God we return to the true hero who seems to disdain any 'treasure' that is more than a proof of his victory. We return also to the sword, but the image is now of heat. All but the hilt of the sword has 'burned away' (forbarn, 1616) in the 'hot' blood and venomous 'otherworldly spirit' (ellorgæst, 1619) of the monster. These lines even contain an echo of the prior lines on the sword through the poet's use of the related compound verbs, onlætan and oflætan. Just as God 'lets loose' (onlæteð, 1611) the bonds of frost -- thus, presumably, releasing the Spring -- so now the 'otherworldly spirit' (ellorgast, 1623) 'let go' (oflet, 1624) its life, thus purifying the lands and waters its existence had polluted.  And the word I have rendered as 'fleeting' (lænan, 1622) identifies this world as a 'loan' (læn), an image frequently found in biblical contexts. As such it, too, points to God. 

With that the hero returns to the land and is reunited with his thegns, who were no more hopeful than Hrothgar and his counselors, just more faithful. They had also looked upon the turbulent, bloody waters, misunderstood what they were seeing, and despaired. That Beowulf has both conquered his enemies and survived his battle with them transforms the 'sick at heart' (modes seoce, 1603), waiting deedless on the shore, into men as brave and active as he is. 'Glad in spirit' (ferhþum fægne, 1635) and 'bold as kings' (cyningbalde, 1636), they begin their reunion with their prince by thanking God -- whom they clearly regard as to some degree responsible for his return -- and end it by relieving him of the burden of Grendel's head, which four of them have difficulty carrying. No longer are they Hrothgar's gistas ('guests', 1602) who stare rather pathetically at the mere, but change as they 'measure the road' back to Heorot from a ðryðlic þegna heap, a powerful but undifferentiated 'lot' or 'heap' of thegns, to fourteen individual Geats, unnamed to be sure, yet eager and ready for war (1627). 

Finally, though Beowulf's thegns are invigorated by his return, Hrothgar's Danes experience nothing of the kind. Just as they were drinking before Beowulf first arrived (480-95), so they are drinking now; and just as before they could only look at the mere, so, too, now they can only look at the head in terror and astonishment. As I noted above, they seem to have lapsed back into the resignation that they showed at first. It is tempting, with all the emphasis in this passage on the decisive role of the true God in nature and in Beowulf's cause, to see a contrast between the old beliefs and the new. This is especially so since Beowulf himself immediately attributes his victory and survival to God's intervention, and assures Hrothgar that now, unlike before, he can sleep the night through without fear for his men (1654-78).

The study of Christian elements in Beowulf is a road long and well travelled, a cuþe stræte if you will, but it is not my road here today, however often the two might intersect (see Klaeber, lxvii-lxxix for an excellent summary).  Rather I have tried to illustrate the poet's use of single, clear, and striking image to help weave together the different scenes and levels of the tale he is telling, of events and interventions seen and unseen, and of misunderstandings of what is seen that are as poignant and revealing as Helen, standing upon the walls of Troy and thinking that she does not see her brothers in the field among the Achaeans because her faithlessness has so shamed them that they dare not show their faces (Iliad 3.280-91, trans. Fagles). Thanks to the poets, however, the audience knows better. Castor and Pollux are long dead; but Beowulf, by the grace of God, still lives.

__________________________________

Works Consulted

__________________________________