The Wonder of the Unexplained (TT 3.v.498)

Carl Emil Doepler

From early on, people have wondered if Tom Bombadil is really Eru Ilúvatar in disguise. As early as September 1954, within weeks of the first volume's publication on 29 July, Tolkien was answering the question of whether Old Tom was God (No: Letter 153). Even at the stage of page-proofs, the question of who Tom seems to have arisen. Naomi Mitchison, who had been reading them early that year, had written to Tolkien with a number of inquiries to which Tolkien responds, but does not answer. At one point he writes:

There is of course a clash between 'literary' technique, and the fascination of elaborating in detail an imaginary mythical Age (mythical, not allegorical: my mind does not work allegorically). As a story, I think it is good that there should be a lot of things unexplained (especially if an explanation actually exists); and I have perhaps from this point of view erred in trying to explain too much, and give too much past history. Many readers have, for instance, rather stuck at the Council of Elrond. And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally). 

(Letter 144, 25 April 1954)

Other mysteries remain as well, and always will I hope. The Watcher in the Water (FR 2.iv.308-09), the 'fell voices on the air' in the night on Caradhras (FR 2.iii.289), the 'nameless things' that gnaw the world 'far, far below the deepest delving of the dwarves' (TT 3.v.501) make up an intriguing set, centered on the Misty Mountains around Moria. Why did Galadriel marry such a dolt? The man Brego and Baldor met at the Door to the Paths of the Dead (RK 5.iii.797-98). Who is that guy? Where does the locked door lead outside which Aragorn found Baldor dead (RK 5.ii.787)? Was that an Entwife Sam's cousin Hal saw up on the North Moors, or was Hal as daft as everybody but Sam seems to think he is (FR 1.ii.xx.44-45). And whose voice was speaking to Sam as he debated what to do when Frodo seemed dead (TT 4.x.731-32). These are only a few of the mysteries we encounter that unexplained make our experience all the richer.  But there's one that seems to have an explanation, but is it the explanation that is suggested to us?

Recall the the night Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas spend beneath the eaves of Fangorn. They briefly see an old man, cloaked and leaning on a staff, wearing a hat pulled down over his eyes (TT 3.ii.442-43). They assume that is Saruman, but the next day they meet Gandalf the White, and Gimli wonders whether they had seen Saruman or Gandalf: "'You certainly did not see me,'answered Gandalf, 'therefore I must guess that you saw Saruman.'" (TT 3.v.498).

But must we guess the same? We never receive a definitive answer, never see a bit of evidence that it was Saruman. Saruman certainly never tells. Who then? In Letter 107 says that he thinks of Gandalf as 'an Odinic wanderer', since Odin sometimes appeared as a wanderer cloaked and in a broad-brimmed hat, much the same garb as Gandalf and (it seems) Saruman wear. He was also called 'All-father' (Alföðr), not unlike Ilúvatar, literally 'the father of the universe', which has il 'all' as one of its roots (Lost Road, 361).

Carl Emil Doepler

Do I really think it's Ilúvatar they see? No. That's not very likely, but it's fun to speculate (so idly) that a visit from god himself might lie hidden in plain sight.  Wouldn't be the first time, I imagine.

Review: Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology

Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology by Dimitra Fimi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was with a learned touch and a clear, precise voice that Dimitra Fimi gave us Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. This essential work she followed up, in splendid alliance with Andrew Higgins, with J. R. R. Tolkien: A Secret Vice. Now she devotes that same scholarship and persuasive clarity to Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology.

Calling out this intriguing partnership of myth and genre, Dr Fimi analyzes the ways in which today’s writers have drawn upon primary texts, centuries old folklore, 19th and 20th century scholarship (some of it problematic if not downright loony), as well as the fantasy of earlier writers (e.g., Alan Garner), and transformed these sources into stories of their own that resonate with their own times and concerns. In this regard they have much in common with Celtic writers, both Irish and Welsh, as far back as the Middle Ages.

Whether the young protagonists of these tales travel themselves to the past or to the Otherworld, or whether the past and the Otherworld come to them, these fantasies combine education and pleasure, utile dulci: family, culture, nationality, and growing up blend with enchantment, adventure, and wonder. They all take place within a continuum of ‘Celticity’, which sometimes seems best understood as a portmanteau of ‘Celtic’ and ‘elasticity’. If the writers Dimitra Fimi has studied here – Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Mary Tannen, Pat O’Shea, Lloyd Alexander, Kate Thompson, Henry Neff, Jenny Nimmo, and Catherine Fisher – have not told tales as up to date as they might have been from the perspective of contemporary scholarly understanding of the Celts, they have succeeded in telling tales that will inform and delight the young of all kinds, and spur them onward to learn both more and better. Thanks to Dr Fimi’s fine synthesis, the readers of the present volume will also go forward, informed and delighted, about these works in particular and about the writing of Children’s fantasy in general.

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Faërian Drama: the Final Curtain? (FR 2.viii.377-78)

The singing drew nearer. One clear voice rose now above the others. It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it.... 

(FR 1.iii.79)

If the power of Elvish song is such that those who do not know Elvish still understand it, as Frodo, Sam, and Pippin do when they encounter Gildor's troop in the woods of the Shire, why don't they also understand the lament of the Elves of Lothlórien for Gandalf, which Legolas refused to translate because it was too difficult and too painful (FR 2.vii.359); and why does Legolas feel the need to translate the song of Nimrodel (FR 2.vi.339)?

Or is it only poetry in Quenya and Sindarin that have this power? Legolas makes clear that the poem about Nimrodel is 'in the woodland tongue', by which he means the Silvan Elvish descended from Nandorin. Since the Elves of Lothlórien were of the same folk, their lament for Gandalf, which Legolas alone of the Company understood, was also in Silvan, or so it would seem. For, had it been in Sindarin, Aragorn and Boromir at least would have understood it.

This raises the intriguing and likely unanswerable question of why only song in Quenya and Sindarin might be capable of this effect. At first I thought that the power might be proper only to the High Elves, or Calaquendi, like Gildor or the minstrels in Rivendell, who are Noldorin. It would make a certain sense if singers who had dwelt in Valinor and seen the Light of the Trees possessed this ability, except that song the hobbits hear in the Shire is in Sindarin, and Daeron of Doriath, is said to have been 'the greatest of all the minstrels of the Elves east of the Sea, named even before Maglor son of Fëanor' (S. 183). It is perhaps not irrelevant here that Doriath had a twofold connection with Valinor, namely Thingol and Melian; and in the time of Daeron and Maglor, the fading of the Elves had scarcely begun. Still what we seem to be seeing is a clear distinction in powers of enchantment between different kinds of Elves.

We also should not ignore the two songs Galadriel sings before the departure of the company from Lothlórien.  The first, 'I sang of leaves' (FR 2.viii.372-73), they apparently understand at once, just as they did the hymn to Elbereth in the Shire and the songs at Rivendell. The narrator makes no comment to draw the reader's attention to their understanding of the language. Nor does he have any need to do so because of the continuity with these passages. On the contrary, it is precisely the failure to understand the songs of the woodland Elves that the narrator considers worthy of note.

In the case of 'Namarië', however, we find something strange and rather different, something which has had me wondering for decades and which I now believe I understand at last.  After Galadriel sings in Quenya, the narrator calls out the fact that Frodo has not understood her song, though he remembers the words and translates them, with difficulty, 'long afterwards'. Suddenly, the song of this most powerful and majestic of all the Elves in The Lord of the Rings, a lament to Varda herself in the language of Elven song, fails to convey its meaning to its audience, just as the songs of the woodland Elves did. 

The translation, moreover, is also into prose, not verse, which is odd in itself, given the power of Elven song to come to life, as it were, in the minds of its audience (FR 2.i.233; S. 140-41, 171). Finally -- and perhaps this is just a matter of taste --  that prose rendering, while sturdy and serviceable, has always seemed rather bookish and not the masterful elegy Galadriel's lament calls for. The rather intrusive 'scholarly' gloss on 'Varda', which we are probably meant to regard as the work of a later hand, only reinforces the lack of enchantment we find here. The answer, I would argue, lies in the introduction to the poem:

On the green bank near to the very point of the Tongue the Lady Galadriel stood alone and silent. As they passed her they turned and their eyes watched her slowly floating away from them. For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world. 

Even as they gazed, the Silverlode passed out into the currents of the Great River, and their boats turned and began to speed southwards. Soon the white form of the Lady was small and distant. She shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land. Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him. 

Yet as is the way of Elvish words, they remained graven in his memory, and long afterwards he interpreted them, as well as he could: the language was that of Elven-song and spoke of things little known on Middle-earth.

(FR 2.viii.377)

Lothlórien, as Verlyn Flieger has argued (1997: 89-115, 192-97), is the supreme example of Faërian Drama, where, to use Tolkien's words  'you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp' (OFS ¶ 74). Galadriel has already told us that Spring and Summer will never again come to Lothlórien (FR 2.viii.375). This song is over. Frodo does not understand 'Namarië' because the spell is broken. The curtain has come down on Faërian Drama, and Frodo must parse out his Quenya like the rest of us, huddled beneath our midnight lamps.

'Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.'

(FR 2.vii.365)

Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad. 

'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.'  

(FR 2.vii.366)

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Impossible Dates, in Greece, Rome and the Shire.

Today (23 September) is the birthday of Augustus Caesar, and yesterday was the birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. So it is entirely meet, fitting, and proper to write about a little known parallel between the Rome and the Shire. 

cum aliquos numquam soluturos significare uult, 'ad K(a)l(endas) Graecas soluturos' ait. 

When [Augustus] wished to indicate that some people would never pay their debts, he said that they would pay them 'on the Greek Kalends.' 

Suetonius, Augustus, 87.1

The first day of every Roman month was known as 'the Kalends' of that month (hence our 'calendar'). Since Greeks did not use the Roman calendar, there could be no 'Greek Kalends'. 

Meanwhile in the Shire the first day of a non-existent month also gave rise to a joke:

It will be noted if one glances at a Shire Calendar, that the only weekday on which no month began was Friday. It thus became a jesting idiom in the Shire to speak of 'on Friday the first' when referring to a day that did not exist. or to a day on which very unlikely events such as the flying of pigs or (in the Shire) the walking of trees might occur. In full the expression was 'on Friday the first of Summerfilth'.

(RK App. D 1109 n. 2)

The month 'Summerfilth' does not exist. It is a play on 'Winterfilth', which is roughly equivalent with October, a name Tolkien derived, Winterfylleþ, the first month of Winter among the Anglo-Saxons.

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A Low Place in the Hedge -- FR 1.i.36

'The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water' -- © The Tolkien Estate

He paused, silent for a moment. Then without another word he turned away from the lights and voices in the fields and tents, and followed by his three companions went round into his garden, and trotted down the long sloping path. He jumped over a low place in the hedge at the bottom, and took to the meadows, passing into the night like a rustle of wind in the grass.

Frodo and Pippin jump over the same low spot seventeen years later (FR 1.iii.70).  Now I had never really thought about this until now, but we're talking hobbits here. That must have been a very low spot indeed for Bilbo and the others to jump over it. 

Think about it.

Like a foot tall.

More of a shrubbery, really.

With Tolkien's eye for detail it is no surprise to find just such a low spot (⇧) in the hedge in his painting of the Hill.  I would like to thank Kate Neville and her eagle eye for pointing me to the correct "low spot" when I had initially believed it was another. (see Kate's comments below.)

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