Of Kubla Khan in Greek, Tolkien in his Cups, and a Boat of Melted Butter.

In Tolkien's youth it was nothing unusual for Latin and Greek students to be told to translate a piece of English verse into verse in Latin or Greek. This is even more daunting than it sounds since Greek and Latin prosody has very different rules. When Tolkien says to W. H. Auden that his 'chief contacts with [English] poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin' (Letters, no. 163, p. 213), this is what he is talking about, as Auden likely knew from his own experience. Some people were actually quite good at this, and kept it up long after they had finished school themselves. In Oxford and Cambridge of Tolkien's day it was something of a college industry.

I remember one day when I was an undergraduate studying Greek one of my more terrifying professors showed us a version of Coleridge's Kubla Khan translated into Greek by an Oxford don named Maurice Bowra. It was really quite good and a lot of fun, too. Aside from the Greek being neatly turned and the versification skillfully handled, Bowra had also rendered the cultural references into something a Greek 2,500 years ago would have understood. The names 'Kubla Khan' and 'Xanadu' would have meant nothing to Sophocles, for example, but Minos and Knossos would have conveyed just the necessary air of power both mythic and exotic. So 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan' became 'In Knossos did King Minos' (ἐν Κνωσῷ βασιλεὺς Μίνως).(1) As mere American undergraduates of a decidedly less heroic age, my classmates and I were as awed to read this as we were grateful that no one was going to ask us to do anything similar.

Tolkien and Bowra knew each other. In the preface (p. viii) to the 1938 Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, edited by Bowra and T. F. Higham, Tolkien receives thanks for his 'valuable help' with the seventy-four page essay Higham wrote on Greek Poetry in Translation.(2) What help Tolkien gave seems unknown, however. Both Tolkien (1945-1955) and Bowra (1951-?) were later members of the Oxford Dante Society, and it is perhaps at the meetings of this society, which seem to have always included a dinner, that the rest of our story begins.

For C. S. Lewis' brother, Warnie, ran into Tolkien one summer evening in 1966 at gathering in Wadham College of those who had known C. S. Lewis. Warnie's diary entry for 22 July 1966 tells an intriguing tale:

'in company with Tollers, who struck me as having had as much sherry as was good for him, and he told me some fantastic story about how he had once emptied a sauce boat of melted butter over [Maurice] Bowra's head.'(3)

We do not know why Tolkien did this to Bowra, though the reputation of Bowra's sharp tongue lives on even today. But again, I emphasize, we do not know. We also cannot say when it happened. It is tempting, however, to suspect a link between the buttering of Bowra and the meeting of the Oxford Dante Society on 15 February 1955 at which Tolkien's resignation was 'accepted with regret'.(4) That Warnie didn't already know the tale suggests that Tolkien didn't talk about it, at least not without a tongue-loosening amount of sherry in him. It's also true that he had run into Warnie at a gathering in Wadham College, of which Bowra had long been the warden (head). So he may well have been there, and seeing him would certainly have called that previous meeting to mind, whenever it may have happened. 

Such memories might also have inspired Bowra five years later to write a letter attacking Tolkien's qualifications for government honors for which both he and Tolkien were then under consideration. Bowra disparaged Tolkien's academic output and dismissed the idea that someone who wrote 'only children's tales' merited recognition as a Companion of Honour.(5) (Tolkien in the end received the lesser distinction of Commander of the Order of the British Empire.)

It's worth noting that Tolkien had already felt the sting of such criticism long before. In letter 211, dated to 14 October 1958, Tolkien writes (p. 278):

I have only just returned from a year’s leave, one object of which was to enable me to complete some of the ‘learned’ works neglected during my preoccupation with unprofessional trifles (such as The Lord of the Rings): I record the tone of many of my colleagues.

And in letter 182 from sometime in 1956, he says (p. 238):

Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’. So the screw is on for many things of a more professional kind long overdue.

The similarity of these criticisms voiced at Oxford following the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring on 29 July 1954 and The Two Towers on 11 November 1954, to the comments in Bowra's 1971 letter invite us once again to wonder if a connection might exist between the butter boat incident and Tolkien's resignation from the Oxford Dante Society on 15 February 1955. Perhaps at table that evening Bowra unleashed his caustic wit at Tolkien, who was already sore from the criticism of his colleagues, but was not to be intimidated either. Perhaps not. We may never know, but it's a fine and fantastic image to cherish for a moment. 

ADDENDUM:

Lee Smith has suggested to me the perfect instance of provocation for the butter boat incident. Bowra makes some suitably witty and acid remark about there not being enough butter to scrape over their bread as he asks Tolkien to pass the butter. Which Tolkien does. 

I dedicate this post to my good friend, Shawn Marchese, who is leaving the Prancing Pony Podcast, but not (probably) because he has poured a sauce boat of melted butter over Alan's head. 

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(1) For Kubla Khan, see S. T. Coleridge, C. M. Bowra, et al. in Greece & Rome 3 (1934) 178-82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/641030.

(2) I owe my discovery of the acknowledgement of Tolkien in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation to Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195). 

(3) Warnie's diary entry is quoted in Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195) and in Chronology (2017:703). They draw the quote from Warnie's papers at the Marion E. Wade Center, at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Charles E. Noad in Maurice Bowra and the Inklings, Amon Hen 227 (2011: 12-17) notes Warnie's story, but does not speculate (as I do) about the story behind it.

(4) Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (2017: 47). 

(5) Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195-96) and Chronology (2017: 789-90, 863)

Hailing Frequencies Closed -- Nichelle Nichols (1932-2022)

Damn it. 

When I was a little boy, Uhura always struck me as so calm, so perfectly poised, and so completely on top of everything she had to do. Even in those episodes when they tried to make her act scared, that never seemed to fit her character. I never bought it. Now, when she had to play her part in Mirror, Mirror, fending off evil Sulu and tricking him, she did it with such sang froid and such charm -- that was Uhura all over. That was the Uhura I knew.

Yet there was more. Something seemed to emanate from her that I can only call beauty. I don't mean her looks -- though she certainly had the looks, and that silky voice -- but it was something that came from within which told you you were in the presence of someone very special and good. If anyone tries to tell me that this was just acting, I won't believe you. But if it was just acting, Nichelle Nichols was as stunning an actress as I have ever seen.

I didn't know anything about what she meant to others, to men and women of color in my own country and in other places. How could I? I was an eight year old white kid from a middle-class family. I had pretty much everything. Including hope. Maybe it was her cool competence playing itself out against the backdrop of the riotous  1960s in the United States that gave me this hope that we had somehow turned a corner, that what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature had prevailed, that the heart and words of Martin Luther King had rung in a new dream for us all. Lieutenant Uhura, I think, was one of those better angels to me.

I didn't know then, or learn for years afterwards, of the role Martin Luther King had played in keeping Nichelle Nichols from quitting Star Trek. That blew my mind as much he did and as Uhura did. It seemed to reaffirm what they stood for, and what I think I suspected even as a little boy watching Star Trek: that the future I saw every week on the bridge of the Enterprise was the promised land that King told us that we would all one day get to. Because it isn't the promised land unless every last one of us is there.

Lately all that hope seems so far away. I don't know that I believe in a promised land any more. I don't know that I can still sing that anthem of my youth in a land that is forgotten. Every day more of us seem to bear the mark of Cain. Every day more seem proud to wear it. Every day more seem proud to declare that we are not our brother's keeper. But the seed of Cain is monstrous. It can never do more than live in darkness and rail against the light.

When I saw that Nichelle Nichols had died, I wanted to weep, something I never do for people I don't know who have lived long, long lives. I keep choking up as I write this. But is it because there is no hope or because I have lost the courage to dare to hope in the face of darkness?

I don't know. The odds don't seem too good right now. But then I think of Uhura, so cool and brave and smart, and she reminds me of my favorite line by her, delivered as she sends Kirk and others off to rescue Spock from death itself: 'All my hopes.'

 

All our hopes, Ms. Nichols, all our hopes.

Somme Starlight

This year on Tolkien Reading Day I discussed the well-known tale of the inception of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth in a couple of lines he read the Old English poem Crist in 1913, which refer to the morning-star as Earendel. Convinced that there was a lost story behind that name, in 1914 he showed his close friend Geoffrey Bache Smith a poem he had written about Earendel. When Smith asked him what it all meant, Tolkien declared he would try to find out. 

Over the course of decades Tolkien thought and wrote more about Earendel, although he never fully told his whole story. For so important a figure in his mythology to be most conspicuous by his absence is frustrating, but Verlyn Flieger has recently suggested that Tolkien may have left this story an 'untold tale' on purpose. In time he reshaped the name into Eärendil, 'the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope! Hail Eärendil, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon! Splendour of the Children of Earth, star in the darkness, jewel in the sunset, radiant in the morning!' (S 248-49). When he sailed his ship, Vingilot, into the sky, wearing the silmaril bound upon his brow, it shone as a star of hope for the Elves and Men of a Middle-earth devasted by a hopeless war against Morgoth. Even Maedhros and Maglor, the bloody-handed, last remaining sons of Fëanor, were moved when they saw it.

Now when first Vingilot was set to sail in the seas of heaven, it rose unlocked for, glittering and bright; and the people of Middle-earth beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope. And when this new star was seen at evening, Maedhros spoke to Maglor his brother, and he said: 'Surely that is a Silmaril that shines now in the West?' 

(S 250)

Seven thousand years later in another war without hope, Sam Gamgee raised his eyes above the wastes of Mordor:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. 

(RK 6.ii.922)

Before continuing with Tolkien, let's take a moment to consider a quote which does not come from Tolkien at all, but from John Buchan's The Battle of the Somme (1916), a battle which he covered as a correspondent for The Times, while simultaneously holding an appointment at Wellington House, more transparently described as the British War Propaganda Bureau. Buchan, to be fair, does seem to have had a genuine interest in producing a work of History rather than a mere sham to be foisted on the British people. In this quote Buchan is not speaking in his own voice, but passing on the words of a witness whom he never identifies. He is describing the early morning hours of 14 July 1916:

“It was a thick night, the sky veiled in clouds, mottled and hurrying clouds, through which only one planet shone serene and steadily high up in the eastern sky. But the wonderful and appalling thing was the belt of flame which fringed a great arc of the horizon before us. It was not, of course, a steady flame, but it was one which never went out, rising and falling, flashing and flickering, half dimmed with its own smoke, against which the stabs and jets of fire from the bursting shells flared out intensely white or dully orange. Out of it all, now here, now there, rose like fountains the great balls of star shells and signal lights—theirs or ours—white and crimson and green. The noise of the shells was terrific, and when the guns near us spoke, not only the air but the earth beneath us shook. All the while, too, overhead, amid all the clamour and shock, in the darkness and no less as night paled to day, the larks sang. Only now and again would the song be audible, but whenever there was an interval between the roaring of the nearer guns, above all the distant tumult, it came down clear and very beautiful by contrast, Nor was the lark the only bird that was awake, for close by us, somewhere in the dark, a quail kept, constantly urging us—or the guns—to be Quick-be-quick.”

            (p. 33 Kindle edition)

The framing of this quote is marvelous. It begins with the planet shining high and steady and serene and ends with the beauty of larks' who sang above the trenches in the dawn (a constant of the poetry of this war) while the artillery barrage flashed and thundered, but who were heard only in the silent moments between detonations. In the planet and the larks, we see something of the remoteness of the beauty above the 'forsaken land' which we also find in Tolkien's accounts of Sam and Maglor and Maedhros gazing up at that same white star seven millennia distant from each other, but equally gazing up at it without hope until they see it. Fëanor's sons eschew a hope they recognize for a tragedy they have helped stage, being unable to let go of the hold their oath has on them; Sam takes the lesson of the selflessness of hope from the selfishness of his defiance. Like Maedhros and Maglor, however, the speaker of this quote finds the situation on the ground more complicated and less clear. The quail, sharing the darkness and the earth with the men in the trenches, call ambiguously. Are they encouraging the guns to be quick and done, or the soldiers to be quick rather than dead?

That planet, though. Shining high in the East before dawn in mid-July of 1916, it could be Jupiter or Venus. According to an astronomical almanac I found for 1916, Jupiter would have risen about 11:40 PM on 13 July, followed by Venus at roughly 3:30 AM on 14 July, and the sun at 4:13 AM. So Jupiter would have been much higher in the sky before dawn than Venus, though Venus would have been much brighter. So, I would guess that the planet Buchan's source was looking at was Jupiter. But Buchan's anonymous source was not the only British soldier who might have gazed up at the sky from the battlefields of the Somme. Buchan also tells us that the last week of July and the first fortnight of August had 'blazing summer weather', which he contrasts with the 'rain and fog' of the third week of July. Together with a remark about the heat on men wearing steel helmets, this gives us a picture of a hot sun beating down out of a clear sky (p. 38 Kindle edition). Again according to that almanac, Venus rose earlier and grew brighter each morning, peaking at a stunning apparent magnitude of -4.7 in early August. In technical terms that's really-damn-bright™.

Perhaps on one of those early mornings or towards the end of a duty shift at night, Tolkien looked up from the forsaken land of the Somme, and the high beauty of the morning star -- Venus, Earendel, Eärendil, call it what you will -- smote his heart and hope returned for a while. It's hard to believe he didn't see it, and that seeing it he wouldn't have thought of the lines from Crist with which his quest for Eärendil began. My incredulity proves nothing, of course. Yet Tolkien would have needed any glimpse of hope he could get during these weeks especially. For around 16 July he learned from Geoffrey Bache Smith that their other close TCBS friend, Christopher Quilter Gilson, who was also at the Somme, had been killed on the battle's first day. Perhaps, too, years later he remembered seeing the morning star above the Somme and wrote it into Maedhros and Maglor, but especially into Sam. 

Given the horrors of the battlefield and the loss of so beloved a friend, Tolkien might not have seen hope in the beauty of the morning star. It may well have been far too soon for hope, at least for himself. After all neither Maedhros and Maglor nor Sam take the sight of the morning star as a sign of hope for themselves, that they would succeed or survive, but only for the world at large. 

His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep. 

(RK 6.ii.922)

'I went out into the wood – we are out in camp again from our second bout of trenches still in the same old area as when I saw you – last night and also the night before and sat and thought.' 

Tolkien replying on 12 August 1916 to Geoffrey Bache Smith's letter about Christopher Quilter Gilson's death. (Letters #5, p. 9).

Hjelm Dyb and Helm's Deep

Hjelm Island from Hjelm Dyb, photo courtesy of Dr. B. A. Kaiser

                                  

I just learned that there is a small island off the coast of Denmark, called Hjelm, which is separated from the mainland by a body of water called Hjelm Dyb.*

And yes, Tolkien fans, Hjelm Dyb means exactly what you think it means, though obviously this is 'deep' in a different sense which Tolkien knew also quite well ('The love of the Elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea' [FR 2.vii.365]).

I don't know if Tolkien knew about Hjelm Dyn, but he did have Gimli say of Helm's Deep: "Give me a year and a hundred of my kin and I would make this a place armies would break upon like water" (TT 3.vii.532).

Elsewhere in the chapter Helm's Deep he continues to use sea related comparisons to describe this stronghold:

• "the great stones of it were set with such skill that no foothold could be found at their joints, and at the top they hung over like a sea-delved cliff" (TT 3.vii.533); 
• "But the Hornburg still held fast, like an island in the sea" (TT 3.vii.536).

He also compares the attacking forces to the sea three times.

• "They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point" (TT 3.vii.533).
• "Against the Deeping Wall the hosts of Isengard roared like a sea" (TT 3.vii.535).
• "Over the wall and under the wall the last assault came sweeping like a dark wave upon a hill of sand." 

So, this is all quite fun and fascinating and it certainly wasn't beyond Tolkien to take a phrase like 'Hjelm Dyb' and transform it. Whether he knew about the Danish island and the body of water is the question. It may well be unanswerable. I'd be interested to know if anybody else has any ideas. Obviously, Danish Tolkien fans would be most likely to see the words 'Helm's Deep' and recognize the echo, whether Tolkien intended it or whether it's coincidental. 

I have learned since first posting this that a Danish historian named Casper Clemmensen has just published a book on Tolkien and Jutland, Tolkien og det mytiske Jylland, which makes this and other similar observations. 

From Google Maps of course

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*I would like to thank my good friend, Dr. Brooks Kaiser of the University of Southern Denmark for letting me know about Hjelm and Hjelm Dyb. May the wind be ever at your back as you sail there.

Hope Shall Come Again: 'The Choices of Master Samwise' and 'The Children of Húrin'

In 'The Choices of Master Samwise', when Sam believes Frodo to be dead, his anguish leads him to contemplate his own death, by suicide:

He looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve.

(TT 4.x.732)

When the orcs arrive in the pass and discover Frodo's dead body (as Sam still believes), Sam again imagines his own death:

How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. I wonder if any song will ever mention it: How Samwise fell in the High Pass and made a wall of bodies round his master. No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs.

(TT 4.x.735)

In these moments one of the Great Tales of the First Age resonates within Sam's soul. Unlike the many explicit evocations of the Tale of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings, the allusions here are far more obscure, to the Tale of the Children of Húrin, where Túrin fell upon his sword, where his sister, Nienor, leaped to her death; and where their father, Húrin, made the heroic last stand to end all heroic last stands. To catch these allusions, however, requires detailed knowledge of a Tale never mentioned at all in The Lord of the Rings. Its two chief figures, Húrin and his son Túrin are scarcely more than names on a list of elf-friends mentioned by Elrond (FR 2.ii.270). Until The Silmarillion was published in 1977, moreover, no other information was available. We don't even know that Húrin and Túrin are father and son. Húrin and his family might as well have been the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Their story seemed just as unknowable. 

What's more surprising is that, as far as I have been able to tell, no one spotted these allusions even after the publication of The Silmarillion. Despite multiple versions of the story appearing across the decades in Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales I, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, The Children of Húrin, and elsewhere.

Part of what we see here is Tolkien's craft. He knows that he can draw on the mythic power of the Tale of the Children of Húrin without needing to draw our attention to the allusions by introducing explanations that would distract from the moment and the momentum of the story; and he can draw on this power in this way precisely because it is mythic and therefore transcends the particular details of the moment. What we see here is yet more evidence for how important these Great Tales are to the narrative and to the characters within it. The connection between the Tale of Frodo and Sam and the larger Tales of which theirs is a part does not need to be made explicit to be effective.

Part of it, finally, is that Sam is on the knife-edge of Tragedy here. If he makes a mistake in his choices, all is lost for him, and all is lost for Middle-earth. Sam, moreover, believing his master to be dead, already sees himself as in a story that has turned tragic. The Tale of the Children of Húrin is the tale for this crisis rather than the Tale of Beren and Lúthien because it is a Tragedy, and Beren and Lúthien, for all of its tragic moments, is a fairy-story that goes beyond sorrow into joy. We talk about Tolkien and fairy-stories far more often than we do about Tolkien and Tragedy. But in On Fairy-stories Tolkien speaks of the two types of story together. Each helps him define the other. He says:

At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

(OFS ¶ 99)

And if the catastrophe that marks a Tragedy cleanses us or purges us by means of fear and pity, then we can see the parallel between Drama and Fairy-stories even more clearly. For the eucatastrophe that is the 'true form' and 'highest function' of a fairy tale cleanses us through Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. It includes the renewed clarity of 'vision' we gain through Recovery (OFS ¶ 83-84). but goes beyond it by allowing a 'vision' of a transcendent reality (OFS ¶ 103).

There is more to be explored here, which I don't have time for right now. For example, an essential aspect of the situation Sam finds himself in here is the battle he has with Shelob directly before he comes to believe Frodo dead. For the narrator there names both Beren, the fairy-tale hero who also fought giant spiderlike monsters, and Túrin, the tragic hero who slew a dragon by stabbing him from below only to learn terrible truths about his own life in doing so. Sam of course is neither of these great heroes, sons of the chieftains of their peoples, and further reflection on these passages may well help us more deeply understanding of On Fairy-stories, The Lord of the Rings, and how the dynamic balance of Tragedy and Eucatastrophe fundamentally shapes Tolkien's Secondary World.

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If anybody knows of another discussion of these particular allusions to The Children of Húrin in The Choices of Master Samwise, please do let me know. I would be eager to see it.