Middle-Earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J. R. R. Tolkien [1 ed.] 1443825581, 9781443825580

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Middle-earth and Beyond

Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J. R. R. Tolkien

Edited by

Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kašþáková

Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J. R. R. Tolkien, Edited by Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kašþáková This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kašþáková and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2558-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2558-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations ................................................................................. vii Acknowledgments .................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Kathleen Dubs Sourcing Tolkien’s “Circles of the World”: Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi .................................................................. 1 Jason Fisher Staying Home and Travelling: Stasis Versus Movement in Tolkien’s Mythos....................................................................................................... 19 Sue Bridgwater The Enigmatic Mr. Bombadil: Tom Bombadil’s Role as a Representation of Nature in The Lord of the Rings ............................................................ 41 Liam Campbell Tom Bombadil – Man of Mystery ............................................................. 67 Kinga Jenike Grotesque Characters in Tolkien’s Novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings................................................................................................ 75 Silvia Pokrivþáková and Anton Pokrivþák “It Snowed Food and Rained Drink” in The Lord of the Rings ................. 91 Janka Kašþáková “No Laughing Matter”............................................................................. 105 Kathleen Dubs

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“Lit.”, “Lang.”, “Ling.”, and the Company They Keep: The Case of The Lay of the Children of Húrin Seen from a Gricean Perspective ... 125 Roberto Di Scala Contributors............................................................................................. 143

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Biography H “Leaf” Letters LR Monsters “OFS” Silm Smith TL UT

Humphrey Carpenter. Tolkien: A Biography J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit; or There and Back Again J.R.R. Tolkien. “Leaf by Niggle” J.R.R. Tolkien. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien. “The Monsters and the Critics” and Other Essays J.R.R. Tolkien. “On Fairy Stories” J.R.R. Tolkien. The Silmarillion J.R.R. Tolkien. Smith of Wootton Major J.R.R. Tolkien. Tree and Leaf J.R.R. Tolkien. Unfinished Tales

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would gratefully like to acknowledge the kindness of Ted Nasmith, Tolkien illustrator extraordinaire, in permitting us to use his unpublished “Bilbo and the Eagles” picture for the cover of this volume. The editors and he agreed that this choice captured the theme of the collection. Thank you, again, Ted. Further thanks belongs to Eva Kašþáková for her invaluable help with the technical side of this volume.

INTRODUCTION KATHLEEN DUBS

One wonders whether there really is a need for another volume of essays on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Clearly there is. Especially when the volume takes new directions, employs new approaches, focuses on different texts, or reviews and then challenges received wisdom. This volume intends to do all that. The subjects of the essays are not restricted to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or The Silmarillion – the most commonly studied texts – but consider the vast range of Tolkien’s works. Thus they provide comparative and comprehensive approaches to much of Tolkien’s prose as well as his poetry. Jason Fisher’s essay looks at analogies and sources, including one which might be surprising. He admits that source-hunting is a kind of literary archaeology in which one turns over first one stone and then another, using hints from the author as well as one’s own research and critical acumen, gradually piecing together what one hopes is a relatively complete explanation for the sources and origins of some object of study. Unfortunately for scholars – but fortunately for readers – it seems that Tolkien source-hunting has left very few stones unturned over the last quarter-century or so. Fortunately, however, there are still a handful of these literary fossils left to unearth, and the one which Fisher has uncovered, and which becomes the focus of his essay, is “The Circles of the World” – one of Tolkien’s most evocative and best-known tropes, woven throughout the backcloth of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and other writings. Sue Bridgwater’s essay investigates the significance of making choices to travel or to stay where metaphorical and actual movement and stasis are recurrent motifs. Thus the essay looks at selected instances of decisions to stay and to go. A wider concern is the various stresses acting upon Tolkien’s characters; thus the essay also attempts to demonstrate that within the many states of apparent stasis he depicts, there may be a number of impulses to transition – to movement away from the stasis. These may be drives to go and return; to leave, to depart, to be elsewhere; or to be different forever. How far Tolkien’s characters succeed in their

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Introduction

striving is closely related to the nature of their inner motivation and/or their ability to respond to and deal with both the external influences that disrupt their state, as well as the experience of being elsewhere than the familiar. Journeys lead to transitions between locations and between states of mind; they lead the traveler across physical boundaries; indeed, they may lead, in Tolkien’s evocative phrase, over the edge of the wild. Liam Campbell proposes that in The Lord of the Rings the struggle of the free peoples of Middle-earth against the rising shadows in Mordor and Isengard may be read as more than a struggle against tyranny and enslavement as behind the fight for freedom lies a struggle to resist powers which threaten the very land itself. And Tolkien’s most extraordinary creation and his most noteworthy representation of nature, or natural forces, is Tom Bombadil. The essay thus considers Bombadil’s role in and evocation of nature, and considers him in terms of his portrayal as a positive environmental model who delights in other life forms and seeks no mastery over any part of Middle-earth. It also examines Bombadil’s character in terms of how he may represent not just nature, but nature under threat – or nature in retreat when facing the destructive force of power hungry, machine–wielding, technocratic enemies – exemplified by such characters as Sauron and Saruman. Finally, it addresses the question of Tom’s origins and proffers a theory related to the much-touted enquiry: “who is Tom Bombadil?” Kinga Jenike quite simply and provocatively argues that Bombadil is quite a different, but equally familiar, person altogether: Tolkien himself. The essay by Pokrivþáková and Pokrivþák considers various aspects of archetype. They acknowledge that Tolkien’s fixed interest and inspiration in myths of various origins is a widely discussed fact. They also point out that, in opposition to numerous critics, Tolkien considered myths to be more realistic and “true” than any other realistic literature. Their essay, in focusing on the role of the grotesque in Tolkien’s work, draws attention to his lecture on Beowulf in which he identified the importance of monsters for an appropriate understanding of the literary value as well as ethical meaning of the myth, claiming that monsters, as distinguishing characters of Beowulf and other ancient myths, are “essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the problem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness” (Tolkien 1983, 7). The aim of their paper, then, is to identify the meaning(s) of those monsters and other literary characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which can be easily recognized by their various types and degrees of grotesqueness. Janka Kašþáková and Kathleen Dubs analyze The Lord of the Rings from a literary perspective. Kašþáková reminds us that when Tolkien

Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J. R. R. Tolkien

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compared himself to a hobbit, one of the most important features he mentioned was his love of “plain ordinary food” and mushrooms from a field, thus in part basing the identity of a hobbit on his own fondness for eating and drinking. In The Lord of the Rings, however, this love of food goes beyond the ordinary desire to satisfy hunger, and extends to the passions and tastes of other nations of Middle-earth. But food is not only a means of distinguishing among races and individuals, but as a prevailing and often repeated element it is a source for many comic situations. Further, Kašþáková demonstrates the use of the desire for eating as a structural device, the different attitudes toward food as expressed in linguistic terms, and points out the importance of food and eating to the narrator as well as the characters. In looking at humor and laughter, Dubs notes Michael Drout’s entry on humor in the Tolkien Encyclopedia, but argues that, correct as far as it goes, it overlooks a considerable amount of humor and laughter in The Lord of the Rings. Further, she argues, humor extends beyond type. Humor is also used as a structural device, for characterization, most obviously perhaps in the names (and nicknames) of the various hobbits, but less obviously in connection with who uses humor, of what sort, when and under what circumstances, and why. And humor is, of course, tucked into the narrative in terms of puns, witty remarks, and observations. Finally, of perhaps more interest is the question laughter: who laughs, and why, when, and how. For Tolkien seems to be using laughter, often not connected to humor at all, for various purposes, both positive and negative. Her essay discusses these different uses of both humor and laughter, and reaches some insightful conclusions. The essay by Roberto Di Scala addresses the problem of showing to what extent Tolkien’s fictional art is imbued with “linguistics,” whereby is meant the scientific study of human language, of how it works, and of the relationship between human language and thought. As a framework, Di Scala makes recourse to the Gricean concepts of speaker meaning vs. utterance meaning. As a case text, he uses The Lay of the Children of Húrin (ca. 1918) to prove that principles from Grice’s theory of communication can be adapted to the poem. He shows how Tolkien’s poetic fragment acts as an intentional, rational, and transparent token of communication, thus remarking how “linguistics” (and, more specifically, “general linguistics”), and not “philology”, is the right perspective from which to prove that the author’s production comprises the linguistic and literary aspects pertaining to any human work of art, thus bridging the gap between such disciplines as philology, literature, and linguistics.

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In sum, this volume covers new ground, and treads some well-worn paths; but here the well-worn path takes a new turn, taking not only scholars but general readers further into the complex and provocative world of Middle-earth, and beyond.

References Tolkien, J.R.R. 1983. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics. London: George Allen & Unwin. Available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/11790039/JRR-Tolkien-Beowulf-TheMonsters-and-the-Critics [Accessed January, 2010]

SOURCING TOLKIEN’S “CIRCLES OF THE WORLD:” SPECULATIONS ON THE HEIMSKRINGLA, THE LATIN VULGATE BIBLE, AND THE HEREFORD MAPPA MUNDI JASON FISHER

Source-hunting is a kind of literary archaeology in which one turns over first one stone and then another, using hints from the author as well as one’s own research and critical acumen, gradually piecing together what one hopes is a relatively complete explanation for the sources and origins of some object of study. Unfortunately for scholars – but fortunately for readers – it seems that Tolkien source-hunting has left very few stones unturned over the last, and very productive, quarter-century or so. A wide range of scholars, among them Tom Shippey, Marjorie Burns, Verlyn Flieger, and many others, has effectively excavated the great majority of Tolkien’s many and varied sources already. But, though they may be few, there are still a handful of these literary fossils left to unearth, and it is one of these I would like to discuss in this paper. Tolkien once wrote that he preferred to “wring the juice out of a single sentence, or explore the implications of one word” (Monsters, 224), and it is a short phrase of just this sort that I would like to make the focus for this paper. “The Circles of the World” – is one of Tolkien’s most evocative and best-known tropes, woven throughout the backcloth of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and other writings. New readers are likely to encounter it first in the appendices at the end of The Return of the King. Here, in the “Tale of Aragorn and Arwen,” which Tolkien called “the most important of the Appendices” (Letters, 237), Tolkien’s trope emerges as an eloquent and moving metaphor for the boundaries and limits of mortal lives within Arda. In his final living words, Aragorn says: “But let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory,

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Sourcing Tolkien’s “Circles of the World”

Farewell!” (LR, app. v, 344) We also see a more Elven perspective on the Circles of the World in the appendices. Earlier, in Appendix A, we are told that “to the children of Elrond a choice was also appointed: to pass with him from the circles of the world; or if they remained, to become mortal and die in Middle-earth” (LR, app. A. v, 315). And also in Appendix A, we learn that the pride and greed of Ar-Pharazôn brought about the ultimate cataclysm for his people and that “Númenor was thrown down and swallowed in the Sea, and the Undying Lands were removed for ever from the circles of the world” (LR, app. A.v, 317). Then, much later, in Appendix F, in literally the final words of The Lord of the Rings, we are told of the Elves that “their dominion passed long ago, and they dwell now beyond the circles of the world, and do not return” (LR, app. F, 416). In its essence, then, the Circles of the World is an image overflowing with nostalgia and loss.1 The character of this loss flows throughout Tolkien’s fiction, and forms an essential part of the nature of Middle-earth. Humphrey Carpenter speculates on the source of this sense of tragedy, loss, and nostalgia in his discussion of the death of Tolkien’s mother and Ronald’s subsequent separation from the West Midlands of his youth, writing that “his feelings towards the rural landscape, already sharp from the earlier severance that had taken him from Sarehole, now became emotionally charged with personal bereavement” (Biography, 40). That sense of loss would go on to pervade all of Middle-earth in Tolkien’s future world-making. When we press on into The Silmarillion we encounter the phrase again. In the Quenta Silmarillion, as Maedhros and Maglor, the last two surviving sons of Fëanor, plot to seize by force the last two Silmarils in Middle-earth, Maedhros exclaims, “But how shall our voices reach to Ilúvatar beyond the Circles of the World? And by Ilúvatar we swore in our madness, and called the Everlasting Darkness upon us, if we kept not our word. Who shall release us?” (Silm, 253) Here again, the Circles of the World are associated with what lies outside the material world of Arda. They come to stand for something like the great unknown beyond, where one finds God. Later, in the short “Akallabêth,” Tolkien uses the trope again,2 writing that the “home [of Men] is not here, neither in the Land of Aman nor anywhere within the Circles of the World. And the Doom of 1

See Richard West’s “‘Her Choice Was Made and Her Doom Appointed’: Tragedy and Divine Comedy in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen.” 2 In his account of the writing of “Akallabêth,” Christopher Tolkien points out that his father first wrote “the girdle of the Earth,” but later changed this to “the Circles of the World” (Peoples of Middle-earth, 150). Perhaps what we are seeing here is the emergence of a consistent image for Tolkien.

Jason Fisher

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Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar. It became a grief to them only because coming under the shadow of Morgoth it seemed to them that they were surrounded by a great darkness, of which they were afraid” (Silm, 265). Then, a few pages later, Ar-Pharazôn’s rebellion is described as the attempt “to wrest from [the Valar] everlasting life within the Circles of the World” (Silm, 278). In the end, what emerges in the metaphor of the Circles of the Word is a picture of the limits of the material existence in which both Men and Elves dwell. Prior to the Drowning of Númenor, after which the shape of the world was fundamentally changed, the Circles of the World included the Land of the Valar; however, after the world was changed and made round, the Circles of the World no longer included the Blessed Realm – although a Straight Road still remained, for those permitted to find it. Thus, over time, the Circles of the World diminished to those narrow material borders beyond which living Men cannot go, reinforcing the connection between mortality and the world, with the unknown Gift of Ilúvatar somewhere beyond them. But for all their evocative appeal, Tolkien’s Circles of the World appear to have escaped serious critical study. Yet I feel it may be possible to unravel some of the origins of this trope, if we are willing to chart a more speculative course. I have already touched on the immense tinge of loss and nostalgia Tolkien came to associate with the West Midlands where he grew up. But there are other sources to be tapped as well. Describing his creative process, Tolkien wrote that: One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter. (Biography, 131)3

We can think of this “leaf-mould of the mind” as that place where sources and images, echoes of mythology, and snatches of tales mingle and coalesce into new ideas, and I will attempt to show how Tolkien’s figurative Circles of the World may have emerged from three such disparate sources: the Ynglinga Saga, the opening of Snorri Sturluson’s great work, the Heimskringla; St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible, with a 3

Tolkien also used the metaphor of the “pot of soup” to describe the same mingling of sources, the soup’s ingredients, or “the bones,” as Tolkien refers to them, into altogether new tales (See “OFS”, in TL, 19-20, 26-27).

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Sourcing Tolkien’s “Circles of the World”

particular emphasis on the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom; and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a widely-known medieval map of the world, produced and still housed in the West Midlands of Tolkien’s youth. In order to make such speculative connections convincingly, one needs to establish, with reasonable certainly, either that the sources in question were, in fact, somewhere in the leaf-mould of Tolkien’s mind – or at least, that they could likely have been. To do this, I will attempt to link each of these three sources to Tolkien as directly as possible, drawing inferences from his letters and writings (as well as those of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien’s closest confidant among the Inklings), his academic career, literary predilections, and religious faith.

I. The Heimskringla The Heimskringla, written in the early decades of the 13th century by that preeminent Icelandic historian and storyteller Snorri Sturluson, is a series of prose sagas, interspersed here and there with verse, that traces the history of the kings of Norway from those almost contemporary with the author, going all the way back to the dynastic House of the Ynglings, reputed by Sturluson to have descended directly from the Æsir, the Norse Pantheon of Gods. Its more than a dozen individual sagas would certainly have been of much interest to Tolkien, both personally and professionally; however, he does not appear to have mentioned the work explicitly anywhere in his publicly accessible writings. This is in contrast to other Old Norse literary works, such as the Völsungsaga and the Völuspá, from which he has explicitly acknowledged his borrowings and inspirations. Be that as it may, we can nevertheless be certain that Tolkien was well versed in the Heimskringla, as he would have been with all of Sturluson’s writings. If C.S. Lewis, far from the biggest admirer of Germanic language and literature,4 wrote about the Heimskringla in both The Discarded Image and Studies and Words (Discarded Image, 141, Studies in Words 217, et passim), then it seems a virtual certainty that Tolkien knew the work, and most likely knew it far better than Lewis. We know that Tolkien formed the Viking Club while teaching at Leeds (Biography, 112) in the middle 1920’s, and that this club was the precursor to the Coalbiters at Oxford during the later 1920’s. As Carpenter explains: 4

Philip Frankley, Tolkien’s thinly disguised caricature of Lewis in The Notion Club Papers, “suffers from horror borealis (as he calls it) and is intolerant of all things Northern or Germanic” (Sauron Defeated, 159). On the other hand, we know that one of Lewis’s favorite traditional myths was the Old Norse story of Balder’s death.

Jason Fisher

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The Kolbítar, to give it the Icelandic title (meaning those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they “bite the coal”), [was] an informal reading club founded by Tolkien somewhat on the model of the Viking Club in Leeds, except that its members are all dons. They [met] for an evening several times each term to read Icelandic sagas … Tolkien started the club to persuade his friends that Icelandic literature is worth reading in the original language. (Biography, 125)

In fact, Carpenter proceeds to describe a typical evening meeting of the Coalbiters, effectively recapturing the mood of such gatherings and describing the way in which each member would take turns – usually started off by Tolkien – reading from an Old Norse text in the original language, and then making an extemporaneous translation of the passage. The only element of the description lacking in Carpenter is a text, though Carpenter mentions the Grettis Saga as an example. But even without a sample text, it is not difficult to imagine something that sounded a little like this: Kringla heimsins, sú er mannfólkit byggir, er mjök vágskorin; ganga höf stór or útsjánum inn í jörðina. Er þat kunnigt, at haf gengr frá Nörvasundum ok alt út til Jórsalalands.5

These are the opening lines of the Ynglinga Saga, the first of the sagas of the Heimskringla. But as beautiful as the Old Norse is, too few today are fluent enough to read it in the original language, so allow me to continue in translation: It is said that the earth’s circle which the human race inhabits is torn across into many bights, so that great seas run into the land from the out-ocean. Thus it is known that a great sea goes in at Narvesund, and up to the land of Jerusalem. From the same sea a long sea-bight stretches towards the north-east, and is called the Black Sea, and divides the three parts of the earth; of which the eastern part is called Asia, and the western is called by some Europa, by some Enea. Northward of the Black Sea lies Swithiod the Great, or the Cold. The Great Swithiod is reckoned by some as not less than the Great Serkland; others compare it to the Great Blueland. The northern part of Swithiod lies uninhabited on account of frost and cold, as likewise the southern parts of Blueland are waste from the burning of the sun. In Swithiod are many great domains, and many races of men, and many kinds of languages. There are giants, and there are dwarfs, and there

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The intrepid may read the entire Heimskringla in the original Old Norse on the world wide web at http://www.heimskringla.no/original/heimskringla/index.php.

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Sourcing Tolkien’s “Circles of the World” are also blue men, and there are many kinds of stranger creatures. There are huge wild beasts, and dreadful dragons. (Sturluson, 7)

In addition to the mention of dwarfs, giants, many languages – and perhaps, I may say, tongue in cheek, even an allusion to the Ithryn Luin (UT, 390) as “blue men” – and so forth, something stands out right from the beginning: “the earth’s circle.” This sounds remarkably like Tolkien’s Circles of the World, and in fact, one might just as easily translate the Old Norse kringla heimsins as “the circle of the world,” leaving literally only the difference of a plural. It is, in fact, from these opening two words of the Ynglinga Saga, kringla heimsins, that the entire Heimskringla takes its name; as Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson put it, “The vastness of its scope and conception is implicit in the very first words: […] ‘The orb of the world, on which mankind dwells […].’ It starts far back in the remotest past, in a world of mythology peopled by shadowy legendary figures” (Magnusson 11). One can be sure that this would have attracted Tolkien’s attention at some time, whether at the Oxford English School, at Leeds, or during his later professorship at Oxford.6 A little later in their introduction to King Harald’s Saga, a part of the Heimskringla, Magnusson and Pálsson go on to say that the Heimskringla is not a work of history at all, in the modern sense of the term. It is a series of saga-histories, and the distinction is a vital one. Snorri Sturluson saw history as a continual flow, and in Heimskringla he tried to convey this to his readers; but it was not so much a matter of historical evolution as [it was] a long chain of events, and these events he saw in terms, almost exclusively, of individual personalities. (Magnusson, 13-4)

This should sound familiar, mutatis mutandis, to anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with the structure of The Silmarillion. And in addition to the ear-catching collocation, kringla heimsins, we can hear something of a geographical echo in Tolkien’s conception of the landscape of Arda here. Narvesund means “narrow sound” – one thinks of Tolkien’s Helcaraxë, where Aman drew near to the outstretched arms of Beleriand and the waters of the Great Sea, Belegaer, froze into the Grinding Ice. And in addition to the freezing north, there is the burning heat of the south in Far Harad. In a letter to Rhona Beare Tolkien 6

One need hardly belabor the well-established importance of Old Norse mythology and literature to Tolkien, as many scholars have connected these dots for us already. Interested readers are referred especially to Tom Shippey’s “Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy” and to all of Part III of Jane Chance’s Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, among many other examples.

Jason Fisher

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described Middle-earth in this way: “Middle-earth is … not my own invention. It is a modernization or alteration … of an old word for the inhabited world of Men, the oikoumenƝ: middle because thought of vaguely as set amidst the encircling Seas and (in the northern-imagination) between the ice of the North and the fire of the South” (Letters, 283, emphasis added). This sounds, to my ear at least, more than superficially similar to the opening of the Ynglinga Saga. And there are other geographical elements in this passage to which I will return in my discussion of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. As a side note, it is worth pointing out that there are more than merely geographical links between Tolkien and the Heimskringla. For example, although Tolkien demonstrably took the names of Gandalf and the thirteen Dwarves from Snorri’s Völuspá (Letters, 383), Gandalf also appears in the Ynglinga Saga. We also find there a mention of Álfheim, which became Tolkien’s Elvenhome, and of one of its inhabitants Yngvi, who may have become the Elf, Ingwë, King of the Vanyar in Valinor. But next, let us take a moment to delve just a little bit deeper into the saga’s two opening words – “wring[ing] the juice out of a single sentence, or explor[ing] the implications of one word,” as Tolkien himself would have been wont to do. First, heimsins is the genitive singular of the masculine noun, heimr, “region, world, land,” with the addition of the definite article – therefore, “of the world.” The Old Norse heimr has cognates in the German Heimat (“homeland”), Old English hám (“home, region, dwelling,” whence the Modern English hamlet, and Tolkien’s hobbit-name, Hamfast), and of course in the familiar Modern English home. The other word, kringla, is a feminine noun, declined in the nominative singular case, meaning “disc, circle, orb.” The noun carries an obvious connection to the world-disc of Norse mythology, as Lewis points out in The Discarded Image (141). Its cognates include Greek kyklos, Latin circus (whence Old English circul), and German Kreis. But there is another word apparently closely related to kringla, and central to Tolkien studies: hringr, which means “ring,” but which is also given a secondary meaning of “circle.” This makes sense, of course, given the logical relationship between a circle and a ring (which is itself circular). Indeed, there is another Old Norse form of kringla, kringr, which seems to bring both kringla and hringr together in a single word! Tolkien’s Circles of the World, therefore, carries an ironic connection to the Rings of such importance to his mythos. Surely, a philological point like this would have been known to Tolkien, or if not, I am confident he would nevertheless have appreciated it.

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Sourcing Tolkien’s “Circles of the World”

Before I close my discussion of the Heimskringla, I think a side note on the “Ambarkanta” would help to drive home the significance of such seemingly minor linguistic points as I have just been making. The “Ambarkanta” is a short essay published in The Shaping of Middle-earth (the name of which volume is itself quite à propos). The word ambarkanta itself means “the shape of the world,” and, as such, immediately reminds one of the trope I have been talking about. Parts of this short essay remind us strongly of the opening of the Ynglinga Saga, but there is an even more interesting linguistic parallel to be teased out. Peering into the Elvish Etymologies, as published in The Lost Road, for the origins of the word ambar “earth,” one finds the root ¥MBAR, but one is immediately struck by a neighboring root, ¥MBARAT “doom” (Lost Road, 372). One sees this root in the second element of Túrin’s sobriquet Turambar, which means “Master of Doom.” Was it an accident of memory on Tolkien’s part that the Elvish word ambar appears to mean both “earth” and “doom”? It seems no great leap to assume not, and to extrapolate some kind of purposeful relationship between the world, its shape, and both its and its inhabitants’ final doom. Perhaps it is even possible that Turambar might be taken to mean “Master of the World;” after all, in the prophecy of the Dagor Dagorath, as only partially adumbrated in The Shaping of Middleearth, we learn that Túrin will one day return from the dead to destroy Morgoth – who himself was the cause of the refashioning of the world (Shaping of Middle-earth, 40-41, 73-74). 7 I would like to make one other philological connection. Just as I pointed out that there are two related words in Old Norse, kringla “circle” and hringr “ring,” so too we find a pair of interesting roots in Tolkien’s Elvish Etymologies. The first is ¥KOR, which means “round,” but which is also connected to the meanings “circle” and “ring” (Lost Road, 365). We see this element in the Field of Cormallen, the word cormalindor, meaning “ring-bearers,” and even in Tolkien’s “Kortirion among the Trees”. The second root, ¥RIN, is given the explicit meaning of “circle” (Lost Road, 383). But this looks very close to English “ring.” And in fact, if we boil Tolkien’s roots down to only their consonants, they look almost exactly like our two Old Norse words. Coincidence? Knowing Tolkien’s predilections, probably not. But let us move on. From the Old Norse collocation, kringla heimsins, I would like to turn next to an even older, but equivalent one, in Latin: orbis terrarum.

7

“Carl Hostetter has recently discussed these roots in the light of previously unpublished notes by Tolkien; these notes and Hostetter's commentary were published in Tolkien Studies 6 (2009).”

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II. Saint Jerome and the Latin Vulgate Bible The term orbis terrarum is at least two thousand years old, and means essentially the same thing as kringla heimsins: “circle of the world.” The term is first attested in a surviving fragment of the Roman consul, P. Rutilius Rufus, around the first century BCE. According to Michael Weiss, a linguist at Cornell University, “[i]t rarely refers to a sphere, never to my knowledge in Republican Latin, and in fact is explicitly contrasted with the word globus “sphere” by Cicero” (Weiss, 2). The collocation orbis terrarum (and the synonymous orbis terrae), indeed, is woven throughout the literature of antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and well into the Renaissance. Perhaps the most famous use of the term is in the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius, widely considered to be the first modern atlas. However, though Tolkien would surely have been familiar with this source, there are many others that were probably much more influential to his thinking. The Germania and Agricola of Tacitus, for example, which take as their subjects the history of the early Germanic tribes and of Roman Britain. Also, the term appears in letters of Saint Aurelius, an early Christian saint from the late third and early fourth centuries. And I have already alluded to another possible source in my paper: the Latin Vulgate Bible of Saint Jerome. Jerome’s text is still the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church, and as such, we know that Tolkien was very familiar with it. Jerome would also have appealed to Tolkien on a professional level. Jerome was unhappy with the older Latin translation of the Bible, and so, around the year 390, took upon himself the gargantuan (and largely thankless) task of executing an entirely fresh translation of the Bible from what were believed to be the earliest extant texts in their original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (Kelly, 159-67). As I have discussed elsewhere (Fisher 2007), this desire to return to the source, as it were, would have appealed to Tolkien, and indeed, Tolkien himself was a part of the new translation into English of the Jerusalem Bible, translating Jonah from the Hebrew, just as Jerome himself had done centuries earlier.8 Given the Vulgate’s importance to Roman Catholicism, then, we may be positive that Tolkien knew it well. Moreover, given Tolkien’s linguistic 8

He translated Jonah and “consulted on one or two points of style,” as discussed in Letters 378. Tolkien’s translation of Jonah, substantively different from the version actually published in the Jerusalem Bible, had been scheduled for publication in 2010; however, as of this writing, the publication has been placed on indefinite hold.

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predilections, it seems very probable that he read the Vulgate in its original Latin, where he would have encountered the collocation orbis terrarum over and over again. An important distinction between the Vulgate and other Bibles is the inclusion of the so-called deuterocanonical books (often referred to, not quite accurately, as the Apocrypha): ten or so additional books not generally read in Protestant denominations. One of these books is particularly interesting in light of the term orbis terrarum. Sapientia, or The Book of Wisdom, sometimes referred to as The Wisdom of Solomon, is a concise book, consisting of only nineteen short chapters. Yet for all of its brevity, orbis terrarum occurs ten times in these nineteen chapters, something that should have caught Tolkien’s eye. In English translation, the phrase is usually glossed simply as “the world,” so we have to read the Vulgate in the original Latin in order to notice the pattern – a pattern which would already have been familiar to Tolkien through his wide reading of the Classics, and reinforced by its echo in the Heimskringla. A couple of examples from the Book of Wisdom may help to illuminate the point. I include the original Latin in footnotes and present here only the English translations; as I have said, in most translations, orbis terrarum is simply translated as “the world” or in some cases, “the whole world;” however, I will be using the correct literal translation of the term here. In one verse, for example, we find: “For the circle of the world was enlightened with a clear light, and none were hindered in their labors.”9 This sounds almost as if it could have been written by Tolkien, describing the light of the Two Trees of Valinor. In another verse we read: “But they have imagined either the fire, or the wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the great water, or the sun and moon, to be the gods that rule the circle of the world.”10 In these words we cannot help but hear an echo of the pantheon of the Valar, each with his or her elemental association – Manwë with the air, Varda with the stars, Ulmo with the waters, and so on. And finally, my personal favorite: “And from the beginning also, when the proud giants perished, the hope of the world fleeing in a vessel, which was governed by thy hand, left to the circle of the world the seed of a generation.”11 This, to my ears, sounds very much like the Voyage of 9

Wisdom 17:19 : Omnis enim orbis terrarum limpido luminabatur lumine et non inpeditis operibus continebatur. 10 Wisdom 13:2 : Sed aut ignem aut spiritum aut citatum aerem aut gyrum stellarum aut nimiam aquam aut solem et lunam rectores orbis terrarum deos putaverunt. 11 Wisdom 14:6 : Sed ab initio cum perirent superbi gigantes spes orbis terrarum ad ratem confugiens remisit saeculo semen nativitatis quae manu tua erat gubernata.

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Eärendil, and the “seeding of a generation” certainly seems to capture Tolkien’s leaf-mould metaphor very nicely.

III. The Hereford Mappa Mundi12 Which brings us to what may be the final piece of the puzzle. As we know already, maps were of great use to Tolkien in the writing of The Lord of the Rings (as well as the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion, and other works).13 Without them, the author would have quickly become more lost than the Hobbits in the Old Forest, and I believe we may safely take Bilbo’s love of maps for Tolkien’s. It would seem, then, to make sense that Tolkien might have been interested in maps outside his fictive world also. Many of his early Silmarillion maps, in fact, resemble medieval maps of the known world. Most of these were what are called T-O maps. The term refers to two key aspects of such maps: the map looks like a capital T (sometimes a Y) inside a circle, the O. This divided the circle into three distinct regions – Asia, Europe, and Africa – as we saw in the opening to the Ynglinga Saga. The second reason is that the T-O may be taken to represent the words orbis terrarum, which I have discussed in detail already. As it happens, one of the most famous surviving medieval maps of the world happened to have been drawn, housed, and displayed in Hereford, just over the county line from Sarehole and Birmingham, where Tolkien grew up. As I mentioned above, Tolkien felt very strong connections to the West Midlands; moreover, he made them both the locus of his professional study as well as the model for key locations in Middle-earth. He once famously wrote: “I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)” (Letters, 213). In fact, it is perhaps a little bit more than mere coincidence that the West Midlands and Middle-earth share a common “middleness” in the mind of Tolkien. First, I would like to offer a bit more information on the Hereford Mappa Mundi. This map is one of the most impressive and largest surviving world maps from the Middle Ages (another aspect of “middleness” which we should not be too quick to dismiss as coincidence). It is believed 12 The phrase mappa mundi, literally “cloth of the world,” originated in the ninth century and was in common use by the time of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (Harvey 26). 13 Tolkien wrote that he “wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story” (Letters, 177).

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that the artifact was produced in the West Midlands during the thirteenth century (Harvey, 1). This is the same century which produced many of the literary works around which Tolkien made his academic reputation. Scholars think the map was made in nearby Lincoln; however, it was quickly brought to Hereford Cathedral, where it has remained for the ensuing seven hundred years (Harvey, 7). It was certainly at Hereford throughout Tolkien’s life, with two minor exceptions: during World War II, the map was removed from Hereford for safekeeping, and after the war, in 1948, the British Library carried out a conservation and restoration project on the map (Harvey, 17). It seems not altogether unlikely that Tolkien could have been aware of either of these events. In addition, the map is closely related to the history of the West Midlands and stands as an enormously important document of the thirteenth century. Though he never mentions the map explicitly in any writings I am aware of, it seems highly plausible that Tolkien was not only acquainted with the map, but that he may have even seen it firsthand. It is well known that some of the most important literary works of interest to Tolkien were produced in the West Midlands and written in the West Midland dialect. Moreover, that dialect emerged from the Old Mercian dialect of Old English, which we also know was of paramount interest to Tolkien.14 And there are even closer connections to Hereford and Herefordshire. For example, one of Tolkien’s contributions to the study of Middle English was his theory about the origins of the so-called AB language, the dialect in which the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group of poems are composed. And of particular interest to us, Arne Zettersten writes that “Tolkien placed the AB language in the West Midlands, more specifically in Herefordshire” (Zettersten, 16). Tom Shippey reinforces the same connection when he writes that “Tolkien had made a very considerable mark on Middle English studies with a 1929 article on the dialect of a group of early texts from Herefordshire (another of Tolkien’s favorite West Midland counties)” (Shippey, Author of the Century, 270).15 14

It seems unnecessary to offer a full accounting of Tolkien’s academic career here, but his professional and personal interest in the Old Mercian dialect of Old English and in the West Midland dialect of Middle English can be quite well substantiated. The majority of his professional work in Middle English – Sir Gawain, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, the Ancrene Wisse, and so on – were focused on Midland dialects. Refer to the excellent literary map in Sisam viii for a partial list. For just one example of how Tolkien worked these Midland as well as Old Mercian forms into his own fictive world, see Shippey Road to Middle-earth 123. 15 See also Shippey Road to Middle-earth 42, 72n for additional connections between Hereford and Tolkien’s fictive Shire.

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It seems, then, that there can be little doubt of the importance of Herefordshire (as with all the counties of the West Midlands) to Tolkien. It also seems probable, or at the very least, plausible, that Tolkien would have been familiar with the Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral. We do know that Lewis was acquainted with it, as he writes about it at some length in The Discarded Image (142-4.). But why is the Hereford Mappa Mundi important to the unraveling of Tolkien’s Circles of the World? As it happens, there are a number of important similarities between the map’s conception of our world and Tolkien’s vision for his own fictive world of Arda. Even the first and most superficial glance at the Hereford map is enough to reveal similarities. For example, the map, like most medieval mappae mundi, is surrounded by water (Harvey, 3), an obvious corollary to the ekkaia, the Encircling Sea, of Tolkien’s geography. Moreover, in roundels outside the outer circle of the map, we find the letters M-O-R-S, a rather ominous acknowledgment that “the world was God’s creation, a point brought home by the letters MORS, death, spaced out beyond its bounds” (loc.cit.). This echoes Tolkien’s Circles of the World, beyond which mortal “flesh unaided cannot endure” (Silm, 282). Also, unlike today’s maps, the Hereford Mappa Mundi shows east to be at the top, rather than north. The reason for this is that medieval maps were generally oriented toward Asia and the presumed location of the Garden of Eden, or earthly paradise. Tolkien’s Map of Thrór, from The Hobbit, likewise has east at the top, though this is probably coincidence, dictated by the requirements of publishing rather than any intention to recall the medieval mappa mundi tradition. Certainly not coincidental, however, is the fact that, in Tolkien’s fictive world, the Elves oriented their maps toward their own earthly paradise, in the West. In addition, on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, England is situated on the left-hand side of the map; allowing for a ninety-degree reorientation between the Mappa Mundi and Tolkien’s geographical conception of Arda, this places England in approximately the correct location for Tol Eressëa – which, as we know from the Lost Tales, was originally Luthany and was intended to correspond literally with England (Book of Lost Tales II, 301). In addition, to the right of England we see the Fortunate Isles, connected with the legend of Saint Brendan (Harvey, 48-9); these, it has been shown (Lobdell), are bound up in the leaf-mould of Tolkien’s conception of the Enchanted Islands in the Great Sea, Belegaer, between Middle-earth and Elevenhome. In addition,

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Tolkien also touched on the legend of Saint Brendan in his poem “Imram.”16 The late Karen Wynn Fonstad, in her indispensable Atlas of Middleearth, helps us to see the connection between this medieval map and Tolkien’s own geography of Arda: Tolkien was envisioning a world much as our medieval cartographers viewed our own. They showed the earth as a disk, with oceans around the circumference. The top was oriented toward “Paradise” in the east. Conversely, Tolkien stated that in Middle-earth the compass points began with and faced west – apparently toward Valinor, their Paradise. (ix)

And the connection is more than merely geographical. The purpose of medieval mappae mundi went far beyond simple cartography. “Their aim,” we are told by Peter Turchi in Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, “was, arguably, more ambitious: to diagram history and anthropology, myth and scripture” (130). The Hereford Mappa Mundi is a perfect case in point: ranging from Biblical elements, such as the Tower of Babel, the Exodus, and the Crucifixion; to historical sources, such as Isadore, Aethicus, Martianus, and others; to mythological elements, for example the myriad of legendary creatures supposed to have peopled the exotic expanses of Africa and India (Harvey, 41-53). And this, I would venture to say, is very much what Tolkien has accomplished in the creation of Middle-earth as a feigned history, built out of the bones of his own mythological studies and religious beliefs.

IV. Concluding Thoughts Can we ever be completely certain about the precise evolution of Tolkien’s evocative Circles of the World? Not unless further unpublished material should come to light. But can we feel reasonably confident in connecting this trope with the sources I have presented? I think so. Tolkien would have been extremely familiar with the Heimskringla, as he was with the entire surviving corpus of Old Norse literature, and as we know that he borrowed elements of the Old Norse mythological tradition for his fictive world, I think that the present speculations on the Ynglinga Saga are on firm ground. Likewise, we can be positive that the Latin Vulgate Bible would have been well known to Tolkien, both from a philological as well as from a religious perspective. And both of these sources contain a 16

First published in Time and Tide, December 1955 (see Biography, 174), the poem has been reprinted in Sauron Defeated 261-4.

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conspicuous and essentially literal version of Tolkien’s trope. The possible influence of the Hereford Mappa Mundi is more tentative. But the map was one of the most important artifacts of the period and region out of which Tolkien made his primary academic reputation, and moreover, its home was Tolkien’s home: the West Midlands. It seems unlikely to me that he would not have been aware of it, and I deem it quite likely that he had seen it, either during his early years at King Edward’s School, or perhaps during a return visit to the West Midlands, of which we know he made several. And what is more, the map has many observable similarities with Tolkien’s own fictive geography, and it captures in a very real sense the same mixture of religious, historical, and mythological tradition. Each of the three sources I have adduced in this article, then, can be linked, to one degree or another, to Tolkien. In addition, they can be linked or likened each to the other. Together, it seems to me that they may very well have fertilized the leaf-mould of Tolkien’s mind, out of which grew the seed of this beautiful and moving metaphor for mortality, for the passing of time, for change, and for nostalgia and loss.

References Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse. 1962. Edited by J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, (Early English Text Society; 249) The Book of Wisdom. In the Douay-Rheims text of the Latin Vulgate Bible. Available at http://www.drbo.org/lvb/chapter/25001.htm. [Accessed October, 2010] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 1925. Edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon. London: Oxford University Press. (Reprinted with corrections, 1946). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. 1975. Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey. 2000. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chance, Jane. 2004. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Lexington (Kentucky): University Press of Kentucky. Drout, Michael, ed. 2006. J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. New York: Routledge. Fisher, Jason. 2007. “From Mythopoeia to Mythography: Tolkien, Lönnrot, And Jerome.” In The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On, edited by Allan Turner, 111–38. Zollikofen: Walking Tree Publishers.

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Fonstad, Karen Wynn. 1991. The Atlas of Middle-earth. Revised Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Harvey, P.D.A. 1996. Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map. London: The British Library. Kelly, J.N.D. 1998. Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. Peabody (Massachusetts): Hendrickson. Lewis, C.S. 2005. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lobdel, Jared. 2006. “Saint Brendan.” In J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael Drout, 584-5. New York: Routledge. —. 2002. Studies in Words. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sisam, Kenneth and J.R.R. Tolkien. 1921. Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. London: Oxford University Press. (Reprinted with corrections, 1964). Shippey, Tom. 2002. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 2007. “Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, 187-202. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers. —. 2003. The Road to Middle-earth. Third Revised Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla (in Old Norse). Available at http://www.heimskringla.no/wiki/Heimskringla [Accessed October, 2010]. —. 1961. Heimskringla: Part Two: Sagas of the Norse Kings. Translated by Samuel Laing. Revised with Introduction and Notes by Peter Foote. Revised Everyman Edition. London: Dent. —. 1966. King Harald’s Saga. Edited by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson. London: Penguin Books. Tolkien, J.R.R. 2009. “Fate and Free Will.” Edited by Carl Hostetter. Tolkien Studies 6. —. 1981. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Selection. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1987. The Lost Road and Other Writings: Language and Legend before ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1983. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1996. The Peoples of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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—. 1965. The Return of the King. Second Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1986. The Shaping of Middle-earth: The Quenta, the Ambarkanta, and the Annals. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1992. Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age: (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Four); The Notion Club Papers and The Drowning of Anadûnê. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1977. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1965. Tree and Leaf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. 1980. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and of Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Turchi, Peter. 2004. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. San Antonio (Texas): Trinity University Press. Weiss, Michael. 2006. “Latin Orbis and its Cognates.” Historische Sprachforschung 119: 250–72. West, Richard C. 2006. “‘Her Choice Was Made and Her Doom Appointed:’ Tragedy and Divine Comedy in the Tale or Aragorn and Arwen.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Milwaukee (Wisconsin): Marquette University Press. Zettersten, Arne. 2006. “The AB Language Lives.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Milwaukee (Wisconsin): Marquette University Press.

STAYING HOME AND TRAVELLING: STASIS VERSUS MOVEMENT 1 IN TOLKIEN’S MYTHOS SUE BRIDGWATER

I. Introduction This paper grew out of the 2006 Tolkien Conference at Exeter College, Oxford, at which Patrick Curry spoke on Enchantment in Tolkien and Middle-earth. During this presentation he set the enchanted state in apposition to the domestic, and thus planted the seed for a developing investigation of movements between various states of being, locations, and experience; what forces operate on Tolkien’s characters with regard to the choice between staying and departing; and also how and why they decide which direction to take. These concepts - stay; go; choose direction – involve both the geographical and the metaphysical in Tolkien’s world. This preliminary essay will focus on choices to go away from home and choices to stay, their variety and similarities, as a first step toward a wider and deeper study. Frodo recalls Bilbo’s advice about travelling; “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?” He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End [...] (LR, Three is Company, 72-73)

1

Some sections of this essay have been previously presented as a paper entitled Stay or go; some reflections upon stasis and travelling in Tolkien’s mythos at the Tolkien Society Seminar held at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, on 27th June 2009.

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And of course the path does sweep Frodo away to even worse experiences than Bilbo’s. This strong personification of the Road, and of every path as a tributary of the Road, expresses clearly a sense of compulsion, of being pulled into things willy-nilly. Bilbo, we recall, To the end of his days [...] could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out. (H, Roast Mutton, 29)

Yet not all journeys described by Tolkien are so begun, and this essay will also examine other reasons for departure and for choice of direction. It is no matter for surprise or wonder that the Journey should be an important structuring device of Tolkien’s works, standing as they do in the long tradition of such quest-journeys. As Stratford Caldecott puts it, “[q]uite why the Ring cannot simply be transported to Mount Doom by friendly eagles is never explained” (Caldecott Secret Fire, 33). But this, although a favourite topic for the discussion threads of Tolkien websites, is never seriously in question; there has to be a journey, for this is a quest. “For Tolkien, it is the walking of the road in hope that matters” (Caldecott, Secret Fire, 69). However, we may profitably consider the implications of Tolkien’s suggestions – sometimes apparently contradictory - that one must take care over choice of direction, must not go off the road, must not arrogate to oneself a journey destined for another, must not seek to halt time and chance by not journeying at all, and must not necessarily expect the fairy-tale protagonist’s reward even if one does adhere to all these rules of Journeying. In fact the motif of travelling away from the familiar can be seen from the earliest existence of Tolkien’s chief sub-created world. Of Melkor we read, “[h]e had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame [...] Yet he found not the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar” (Silm, 4). This image of Melkor seeking a thing of beauty and power that it is not right for him to possess, and seeking it in the wrong place, stands with later examples of wrongly-determined journeys, some of which will be examined in the body of this essay. The history of the Elves in Middle-earth begins with an invitation to a journey. Kindliness and fear combine to motivate the Valar to summon the Elves into the West, “[b]ut the elves were at first unwilling to hearken to the summons, for [...] they were filled with dread” (Silm, 42). This most momentous of journeys, the Great Journey, was a response to an outside suggestion, not a spontaneous choice by the travellers. However “some, and of those Ulmo was the chief,” counsel against this in the beginning, saying that “the Quendi should be left free to walk as they would in

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Middle-earth” (Silm, 41-42). This is overridden, and the Valar summon Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë to Valinor. They are dazzled by the wonders of the Transcendent Realm, and urge their peoples to accept the bidding of the Valar. This leads to the sundering of the Eldar from the Avari, indeed Ingwë and the Vanyar “came never back, nor looked again upon Middleearth” (Silm, 42). For the Vanyar, involvement in the affairs of Middleearth is the road not taken – and it is impossible to say what great things might have been achieved had they, and the other Eldar, spent time and labour upon Middle-earth. Further divisions come, as the Noldor follow Finwë to Valinor, and the Teleri under Elwë and Olwë abide longer on the western shores of Middle-Earth. “Elves of Darkness” are those labelled who never came to Valinor; but who can say which was the better road, and whether the Eldar might in their escape to the West have been shirking duties that could have been theirs amid the forests and in the succouring of the Edain? But no one can stay and go at one and the same time. Nor can one easily be sure that the direction taken is “right” and the direction not taken, “wrong”. This is made clear in Celeborn’s speech to the departing Fellowship: “Now is the time,” he said, “when those who wish to continue the Quest must harden their hearts to leave this land. Those who no longer wish to go forward may remain here, for a while. But whether they stay or go, none can be sure of peace. For we are come now to the edge of doom.” (LR, Farewell to Lórien, 358, emphasis added)

The following sections will examine some examples of staying, travelling, and choosing directions, and their consequences.

II. Staying Staying at home, the stasis that involves remaining amid the familiar and the domestic, takes more than one form. The first is demonstrated by characters whose lives do not seem to evoke in them the desire for travel at all; these include Rosie Cotton, Nell Smith and Ioreth. All are closely associated with the traditional domestic arts; with homemaking, cooking, healing, cleaning and waiting – waiting in more than one sense. Rosie waits at home for Sam during the War of the Ring, and again when he goes to bid Frodo farewell at the Grey Havens. She works at making a home for him, and supports him in trying to make one for the distressed Frodo - waiting upon their “Master” as Sam himself has previously done. She is associated with warmth, light, children and safety, notably in the closing paragraph of The Return of the King, when “Rose drew him in”

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(LR, The Grey Havens, 1008, emphasis added). It is noteworthy that Tolkien here uses an ambivalent phrase – to draw in may be to welcome, to lead to safety and security, but may equally well be to lead into danger or sin or a trap. This serves to underline the fragile nature of any stasis, however cherished. Rosie’s hope may be that Sam is now settled in the Shire forever; but after her death he departs once more, into a state, as far as we can determine, outside her awareness or understanding. It will also be transient, for as a mortal, Sam cannot find his ultimate dwelling-place, even in the Undying Lands. Journeying leads to ever more journeying; and even arrivals at havens, resting places, or home may lead to a further choice of direction rather than to a permanent abiding place. “Well, I’m back” – but not forever. Nell, the wife of Smith of Wootton Major, waits as does Rose for a wandering husband, keeping the hearth and home and children while Smith roams in perilous lands. Nell shows understanding of Smith’s experiences, even though they do not fully bear exposure to the domestic light. When he crossed the threshold the star dimmed again; but Nell took him by the hand and led him to the hearth, and there she turned and looked at him. “Dear man,” she said, “where have you been and what have you seen? There is a flower in your hair.” She lifted it gently from his head and laid it in her hand. It seemed like a thing seen from a great distance, and a light came from it that cast shadows on the walls of the room, now growing dark in the evening. (Smith, 35)

This wondrous flower of Faery remains in the domestic setting, but as a cherished secret of Smith’s family, kept in a locked casket to be viewed only by those who inherit the key. It does not mingle with the life of the hearth and home. Yet Nell perceives it, and appreciates its worth. Ioreth’s superficially rambling comments in the Houses of Healing are on one level intended to bring light relief to scenes of war and sorrow; yet in the comparison between the Wise and the Old Wife, it is she who displays “Less lore and more wisdom,” playing a vital part in Aragorn’s healing of Faramir, Éowyn and Merry through her simple knowledge of domestic lore and practice. To a housewife, one dedicated to the home and the domestic, is given the insight that the man before her is the King Returning: “The hands of the King are the hands of a healer” (LR, The Houses of Healing, 844). It is important to remember too that Ioreth has made a choice – the choice to stay in the city she knows and loves – in the face of overwhelming danger.

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It seems appropriate to note here that Sam, who journeys long physical distances with Frodo and the Fellowship, and who certainly grows in wisdom and strength as a result, could also be characterised as one who never, in one sense, leaves home. He may dream of elves and magic, but he does not truly believe in himself as one who could actually go and see them. Indeed, Gandalf’s decision to send him with Frodo is described as “Something to shut your mouth, and punish you properly for listening” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 63). Sam’s unique contribution to the survival of Frodo and the success of the quest can be seen from one perspective as his ability to carry the domestic with him into the wild places, and to care for Frodo not only as a manservant, but also in the maternal ways of home. He cooks and cleans and contrives and makes shift to bring Frodo as much comfort as is possible on their dreadful journey. The prime example of this is the rabbit stew (LR, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit); but throughout the quest he displays other domestic virtues, as well. He shortens his own rations of water and lembas in favour of Frodo, as a parent would. He finds things for Frodo to wear and then willingly casts them away as soon as Frodo can no longer bear them. Sam is heartbroken at the loss of his cooking gear, even amid the horrors of Mordor. “The clatter of his precious pans as they fell down into the dark was like a death-knell to his heart” (LR, Mount Doom, 917). This signifies not a preoccupation with small and unimportant details of life, but rather the deep strength that Sam draws from the familiar, even in the midst of strangeness. He remembers past moments of brightness, like the eating of the stew, when Frodo is far beyond such memories, and it is vital that he should, that the domestic should protect him. This strength is sustained so that when Frodo is finally too weary to go on, Sam carries him, with the fatherly/motherly words, “Sam will give you a ride” (LR, Mount Doom, 919). Sam is, to the end, sustained by the familiar and the ordinary. This is why he is able to go “back again” for longer than Frodo, and to experience more domestic happiness. The second kind of stasis is that which is willed and consciously chosen. Perhaps the most extreme example of this in Tolkien is the tale of Elwe Thingol’s enchantment when he sees Melian in the glade. She spoke no word; but being filled with love Elwë came to her and took her hand, and straightway a spell was laid on him, so that they stood thus while long years were measured by the wheeling stars above them; and the trees of Nan Elmoth grew tall and dark before they spoke any word. (Silm, 45-46)

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So deep and pervasive is this enchantment that, under its spell, Thingol not only misses his chance to dwell in Valinor; he also builds and retreats into Menegroth, protected by the Girdle of Melian, within which he and his people seek to hold themselves clear of the sorrows that come into Middle-earth, not least those that follow on the heels of the exiled Noldor. The exquisite beauty of his experience of enchantment results in an attempt to sustain it against time and change in the stasis of his own will, ignoring as far as possible both the Middle-earth that surrounds him and the lands oversea. He maintains absolute control over entry to and departure from Doriath; his daughter Lúthien he imprisons in a tower, Beren he sends away on a quest, and although he shelters Túrin, he will not offer any support to the cause of Túrin’s people. “Then you must go alone,” said Thingol. “The part of my people in the war with Angband I rule according to my wisdom, Túrin son of Húrin. No force of the arms of Doriath will I send out at this time; nor at any time that I can yet foresee.” (CH, Túrin in Doriath, 84)

Turgon’s founding of Gondolin, and Finrod’s of Nargothrond, are parallels to Thingol’s impulse to preserve and hide. Yet, in the words of Sador, “a man that flies from his fear may find he has only taken a short way to meet it” (CH, The Childhood of Turin, 42). Both these realms are founded with the hope and intention of protecting the elves that dwell there as well as their culture and knowledge from the mutability of Middle-earth and the evils wrought by Morgoth. Yet their stasis is broken by the sequential journeying, change, activity and urgency of Túrin, indeed by the whole of the working-out of Morgoth’s curse upon Húrin and his family. One may trust in the plan of taking no more journeys, travelling no more roads; but the journeys of others will break in upon that trust and may bring about results undreamed of. In this regard we should consider Gollum’s Grandmother: “So they called him Gollum and cursed him, and told him to go far away; and his grandmother, desiring peace, expelled him from the family and turned him out of her hole” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 52, emphasis added). Similarly, Thingol expelled Beren in the hope of making an end to the troublesome matter of Beren’s love for Lúthien. Neither the matriarch nor the elven-king had any inkling of what the outcomes of their iron control might be, yet each contributed to turmoil, war and suffering for many thousands. We have considered Sam as an example of someone who travels, yet in one sense remains at home. There is a similar case to be argued for Fëanor, for although he travels from place to place, he does so in ways that parallel Thingol’s desire for stasis and control. “[D]riven by the fire of his own

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heart” (Silm, 58), he grows in skill and power until he achieves his mightiest work in the creation of the Silmarils. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s description of Fëanor’s motivation is not obviously condemnatory: “he pondered how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperishable” (Silm, 59). However, we learn in Unfinished Tales that Galadriel “in him perceived a darkness that she hated and feared” (UT The history of Galadriel and Celeborn). The combination of this darkness and the drive to preserve opens Fëanor to the influence of Melkor, and is allied to the stubbornness of Thingol in that both assume that only by their choices and deeds can the desired aims be brought about; both equate “preservation” with “unchangingness.” The light of the Trees in fact survives into the later history of Middle-earth, even into the “faithful brown hobbit-hand[s]” (LR, The Tower of Cirith Ungol, 894) of Frodo and Sam as they bear the Starglass of Galadriel; but not because of the contrivance of Fëanor. For the Silmarils were lost, and only through change and growth, not through imprisonment in even the loveliest of gems, could the hallowed light survive to accompany Frodo and Sam on their journey in the dark. Before leaving the consideration of staying, we may note that there are two Guarded Realms that display a hope “to preserve all things unstained” (LR, The Mirror of Galadriel) but without the desire for domination and control. Rivendell is unquestionably guarded; leaving aside the over-jolly welcome offered to Bilbo’s party in The Hobbit, Tolkien emphasises that “Evil things did not come into that valley” (H A Short Rest, 50) by later repeating it through Gandalf’s “Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. […] We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark” (LR, Many Meetings, 220). The reiteration has a darker note than the original, yet this “fortress” of Rivendell holds joy, laughter, music, meetings with friends and good food and wine. Travellers are welcomed to Rivendell, nourished, and sent forth with both supplies and blessings; contrast this with Tolkien’s depiction of quarrels leading to murder in Doriath and Gondolin. Lórien too is well guarded and the Fellowship is at first “taken into custody.” This is soon overthrown by orders from Galadriel which draw the eight walkers into the enchanted realm, into Faërie. There is ambivalence in Lórien as in Rivendell, in sharp contrast with what Thingol believes about Doriath: that it is and will ever be enduring and unchanging. In a phrase echoing Gandalf’s fortress, Haldir says, “[w]e live now upon an island amid many perils” (LR, Lothlórien, 339). Galadriel adds to this sense of embattlement with the words “together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat” (LR, The Mirror of Galadriel,

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348). Still, for the Fellowship, Lórien is a place of healing, peace and rest; as from Rivendell, they are sent forth only at their own will, and with gifts and blessings that serve them well for the duration of their Quest. Despite the land’s separation from mortal time (LR, The Great River) it is possible to enter and to leave and to feel welcome, to cross the boundaries between Faërie and the outer world by way of healing streams.

III. Travelling Yi-Fu Tuan says, “In open space one can become intensely aware of (a remembered) place, and in the solitude of a sheltered place the vastness of space acquires a haunting presence” (Tuan, 54). Just such experiences of vastness and wilderness, set against memories and dreams of home and the familiar, come to Tolkien’s travellers on their journeys. Bilbo, Frodo and the other hobbits travel further than they had realised it was possible to travel. Bilbo constantly thinks back to his comfortable home and contrasts it with his situation on the quest to Erebor. Pippin, when the company of three has travelled less than twenty miles from Hobbiton, wakes in the morning with the words, “’Sam! Get breakfast ready for half-past nine! Have you got the bathwater hot?’” (LR, Three is company, 71) This joking reference to the supposed privations of their journey is soon a distant memory, as true hardship, pain and fear cut the travellers off from their home. Each respite, at Bombadil’s, at Imladris, at Lórien, seems to lead only to further trials. Indeed, it is a mark of Frodo’s desperate state that he is eventually unable to recall more pleasant scenes. I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. (LR, Mount Doom, 916)

Frodo has gone beyond all known paths, over all edges, and far from any memory of home. Gandalf provides a warning of the dangers of travelling so far from home and the familiar in this admonition from his warning to Bilbo and the dwarves as he leaves them to enter Mirkwood without his guidance: “Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go” (H, Queer lodgings, 130). Gandalf, himself “responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures” (H, An unexpected party, 7), here relinquishes his role of guide while at the same time emphasising that the undertaking of his protégés is still shot through with danger. Setting out on any journey is a very serious undertaking indeed.

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How and why, then, do Tolkien’s characters undertake so many long leagues of travelling? The journey may come about by means of an imposition; Bilbo is chosen by Gandalf (H An unexpected party), Frodo by something resembling fate (LR, The Shadow of the Past), Smith by receiving the magic star (Smith, 18-21). These “fated” travellers may indeed succeed in their quests, but not without suffering. Yet on the other hand, those who travel because they themselves choose to, with whatever intentions, may find success as elusive as it was for Melkor in his search for the imperishable flame. First, we will examine the destined – though most likely unsought – route that leads over the Edge of the Wild, looking at some of the travels of the Fellowship of the Ring, of Frodo himself, of Niggle and of Smith of Wootton Major. Perhaps the most familiar to Tolkien’s readers of those who travel from the domestic scenes of Middle-earth into its wild/enchanted places are the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring. Of these, four begin their journey from a domestic stasis most nearly akin to that of our own world, or of its nostalgic recent past: the Hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin. By the time they reach the different “domesticity” of Imladris, they perceive themselves to have learned a great deal about the wild, about perilous realms. The Council of Elrond opens their eyes to the nature of those “domesticities” from which others have come. The familiar everyday environment of Legolas is the darkness of Mirkwood and its dangers; that of Boromir his realm’s constant vigilance and warfare against Mordor; that of Aragorn the endless privations of the Ranger; while Gimli comes from Erebor with tidings of new fears and dangers. To underline the apparently random nature of the “hero selection process” in this complex tale, it is made clear by Tolkien that Elrond has not summoned this Council. The representatives of the Free Peoples have arrived each on his own errand, coming together just in time to take counsel for the dangers facing Middle-earth. That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. (LR, The Council of Elrond, 236)

To find themselves bound upon a journey together is perhaps the last outcome that might have occurred to any of the nine as they travelled to Rivendell. Gandalf has previously stated that this is all part of some mysterious design, and that Frodo’s unsought journey is very much a continuation of Bilbo’s.

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Stasis Versus Movement in Tolkien’s Mythos “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to have the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it.” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 54-55)

The road to Frodo’s membership in the group of Nine Walkers in effect begins with Bilbo’s former journey. Indeed, it begins with their very natures; Bilbo, and Frodo after him are torn between the two impulses – to stay at home and to travel – which Tolkien has planted in them by giving them a Took heritage as well as a Baggins. As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. [...] Suddenly [...] he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr Baggins, of Bag-End, UnderHill, again. (H, An Unexpected Party, 16)

This dichotomy is repeated years afterwards in Frodo’s long conversations with Gandalf. When he has heard all there is to know about the Ring, his Tookish response is I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again. (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 61)

Yet “two or three weeks later” he was very reluctant to start, now that it had come to the point. Bag End seemed a more desirable residence than it had for years, and he wanted to savour as much as he could of his last summer in the Shire. (LR, Three is Company, 64)

However, after the first stage of his adventure the Summons comes again – and he makes the decision, much more deliberately than Bilbo did when Gandalf ushered him hatless out of the room. Amid a company of the great and wise, Frodo stands forth to say, “I will take the Ring [...] though I do not know the way” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 264). Niggle too is shown to be compelled to travel. He knew that he had “a long journey to make. He did not want to go, indeed the whole idea was

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distasteful to him” (Leaf, 73). The direction he really wants to take is the road into that enchantment which is creativity – for Niggle, this is the enchantment of working on his painting, his great masterpiece. However, although he is convinced that this is the only direction worth going in, he is pulled constantly in other directions, notably in the direction of doing things to help his neighbour, Parish. Niggle tries to resist the call of neighbourliness in favour of working on his vision. More than all his other paintings, he is entranced by the picture that began with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs, and had to be attended to. (Leaf, 73-74)

Niggle would rather be travelling on the journey of this painting than in any other direction; he is resentful of the time taken up by casual visitors as well as by the demands of Parish, and most bitterly of the impending journey that seems so much of an imposition. Yet however hard he tries to turn his face toward this, the only road that matters to him, the more other demands call him away. His whole being yearns toward the landscape of his painting, so much so that one feels he wishes to step through into it as Edmund and Lucy Pevensey leap into Narnia through a picture in a bedroom in The Dawn Treader. Instead he must go on a bicycle ride in the rain, miserable and cross, fearing that he will never journey back to his vision again. And for a while it seems that his fears are justified, as he is hustled off on the journey that he knows is all wrong, leaving behind the journey he so longed to complete. But then yet a third journey takes Niggle by surprise. This time he neither seeks nor resists it. He is told to go to the station and take the train, and so he does. He gets off the train and finds a bicycle, and so he rides it. He takes a journey with no expectation about its purpose or destination – and walks into his completed vision. He finds himself standing beneath the tree, his own tree, set amid his own landscape. Here too he finds Parish, and instead of antagonism, friendship grows between them. And eventually that land is called Niggle’s Parish in the bay (Leaf, 92). Like Frodo, Niggle has to learn the necessity of his journey and also his need for fellowship. For Smith of Wootton Major at the edge of the forest the first step along his way to Faëry is hidden from him, and from all around him, and is facilitated by a man who does not believe in Faëry at all. Only much later is it revealed to Smith and to the reader that the true instigator of this journey, or succession of journeys, between realms is in fact the ruler of Faëry. At the Twenty-Four Feast Smith swallows, unawares, the extra

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token, the silver star. It should not have been there, for it was one extra in number to the silver trinkets; and at the end of the Feast, “...when the Cake was all eaten, there was no sign of any magic star” (Smith, 18). So quiet is this magic that it then lies dormant for half a year, until the young Smith wakes in the summer pre-dawn and sings of Faëry, so that the Star falls out of his mouth and is transferred by a purely instinctive act to the centre of his forehead – where it remains for many years, although not visible to all. Protected by this token, Smith is able to cross the boundary between the domestic life of the village and the Faëry realm. Here “he remained a learner and an explorer” (Smith, 24). – he makes no such claims upon Faëry as the voyager of the Sea-bell makes upon his mysterious island (see below), and is devastated to learn that his presence can bring harm to the denizens of Faëry, as it does to the Birch. Yet he returns, travels deeper into the realm, and becomes acquainted with the Queen – still learning, still exploring, until it is time for him to pass on his right to Enchantment to another child. Throughout his unsought freedom of the land, Smith strives to learn from, to receive, what he is given, and does not seek dominion, wealth or power in any form. He is summoned to the journey, and he does not leave the path. So his familial and social life, as well as his inner being, are enriched by his journeying. He shares with Frodo the courage to enter upon journeys into the mysterious lands of Faërie, even though pain and sorrow are found there alongside joy. We turn now to four characters who made their own decisions to set out from home. In two of the selected cases that decision leads to positive results, and in two to negative. The first two are Boromir and Treebeard. It is clear from Boromir’s first appearance that he has what Tolkien would never have dreamed of calling “an attitude problem”. He is “seated a little apart [...] proud and stern of glance” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 234, emphasis added). He rises to speak as soon as Elrond concludes, without waiting to see if the Elven-Lord has any planned order of speakers. And when he speaks of his journey his assumptions and prejudices tumble forth. Although he has experienced the prophetic dream only once, and his brother Faramir, whom he does not trouble to name, has dreamed it many times, Boromir has insisted upon his own right to respond to it. Therefore my brother, seeing how desperate was our need, was eager to heed the dream and seek for Imladris; but since the way was full of doubt and danger, I took the journey upon myself. (LR, The Council of Elrond, 240)

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Boromir, then, is a clear example of the wrong person taking the wrong journey for the wrong reasons. He should not be there; Faramir should. It is this insistence on his own priority that leads in the end to Boromir’s death. However, his journey in its entirety – to Imladris and back again as far as Rauros – must be considered as having a positive outcome in the sense that he saves Merry and Pippin, who then play their parts in the unrolling of great events. His intent in deciding to travel was surely far from any idea of his own sacrifice in a cause – the destruction of the Ring – to which he is ambivalently committed at best. Yet Middle-earth as a whole benefits from that decision. Treebeard’s resolution to get up and go, taking the other Ents to war against Isengard, is much slower and more deliberate than Boromir’s decision to seek Imladris, although by Entish standards it is “hasty”. The Entmoot reverses the habits of long years of chosen isolation, as deep perhaps as that of Thingol in Doriath, and results in the Ents turning their attention to the needs of the other free peoples for the first time for all those years. Treebeard is aware of this as a “high-risk strategy”, and in the course of the journey of the Ents to Isengard tells Merry and Pippin: Of course, it is likely enough [...] that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. (LR, Treebeard, 475)

Here he echoes the image of the coming of the Fellowship into Lorien as the footsteps of Doom, and the adage of Sador, quoted above in Staying. Two travellers – the protagonist of The Sea Bell (Bombadil 57-60) and Ar-Pharazôn the Golden – assume a right to passage into the West and share an expectation of great outcomes for themselves. Their similar decisions to travel lead to similar negative results, the one personal and the other cataclysmic. Although The Sea Bell is dreamlike and the boat provided by fate rather than sought out by choice, the traveller/dreamer – perhaps a dark avatar of Frodo himself (Bombadil, 9) – unhesitatingly decides to cross the water and seek what may befall. On his arrival he displays pride and resentment rather than wonder at or respect for the western land. His reaction to the elusiveness of the elven inhabitants of the land is a declaration of his own superiority, and his claim of Kingship leads at once to his downfall. The enchanted realm becomes his prison, for the traditional year and a day, and he is borne back to mortal lands with nothing to show but “some grains of sand/ and a sea-shell silent and dead”

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(Bombadil, 60). Far from reaching a transcendent and wonderful existence, he has ended by losing his place in the familiar, where he no longer fits in. This outline tale is repeated and developed in the story of Ar-Pharazôn the Golden, whose reign over Númenor begins with an act of violent usurpation of the throne, and whose resentful and brooding nature is more than ripe for the temptations of Sauron (Silm, Akallabêth). His prideful assumption of his own merit and powers is clear in his conquest of Sauron and his decision to bring the Maia back to Númenor. This is Ofermod, the pride that is weakness rather than strength, and a ready weapon to the tempter’s hand (Battle of Maldon, lines 89-95; Sweet 119). While the Faithful prepare in secret to sail to the east – thus implicitly accepting the Doom of Men – Ar-Pharazôn prepares his mighty fleet for the invasion of Aman. In one of his strongest Biblical echoes Tolkien emphasises the evil of this act: they broke the Ban of the Valar, and sailed into forbidden seas, going up with war against the Deathless, to wrest from them everlasting life within the Circles of the World. (Silm, 286 and cf Genesis v, 22)

So deeply wrong is this choice that it results in a cataclysmic change to the very shape of Arda, and in the hiding forever from mortal eyes of the Blessed Realm. It is the decision of the Faithful to travel away from the West that is just and righteous.

IV. Choosing direction One of the most interesting features of this topic is the consistency with which characters who are thought by others, perhaps even by themselves, to be choosing a wrong direction turn out to have chosen the right one. This section will consider some of the directional choices facing Gandalf and Aragorn in their leadership of the Nine Walkers; Aragorn at the Dwimorberg; and Éowyn and Merry during the ride of the Rohirrim and the battle of the Pelennor fields. A good starting point is Gandalf’s farewell admonition to Bilbo and the dwarves as they enter Mirkwood; “They heard his voice come faintly: “Good-bye! Be good, take care of yourselves – and DON’T LEAVE THE PATH” (H, Queer Lodgings, 131). Despite this warning, the Dwarves and Bilbo do leave the path, and get into a great deal of trouble without Gandalf to protect them. This idea of the importance of choosing the right path to the right place at the right time recurs throughout Tolkien’s works, yet it is not a simple matter. Characters may turn away from or follow what seems to be the “right”

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path, and suffer shocking consequences in either case. However, just as often they come subsequently, as Bilbo himself does after his trials and suffering in Mirkwood, to their desired goal, “by the only road that was any good” (H, A Warm Welcome, 177, emphasis added). Indeed, the deeply underlying irony in this quotation is that Gandalf himself, the quintessential supernatural helper, is wrong in his advice. For the path recommended by Beorn “now came to a doubtful and little-used end at the eastern edge of the forest; only the river offered any longer a safe way from the skirts of Mirkwood in the North to the mountain-shadowed plains beyond” (H, A Warm Welcome, 177). When the appointed Fellowship begins the journey south from Imladris they face a further movement away from the familiar but not at first any difficult choice as to direction. The chapter-heading itself declares the initial choice: The Ring Goes South. Threats and danger surround them, from the cold of winter to the Balrog of Moria, from the Orcs and Wargs to the cruelty of Caradhras. But gradually, as they traverse the leagues between Rivendell and Rauros, there begins to emerge an underlying dissension and anxiety about their journey and its goal. Boromir’s repeated complaints that they would do better to travel directly to Minas Tirith are the most obvious of these. But Aragorn and Gandalf also display uncertainty: “What do you think of your course now, Aragorn?” [...] “I think no good of our course from beginning to end, as you know well, Gandalf,” answered Aragorn. “And perils known and unknown will grow as we go on. But we must go on [...]” (LR, The Ring Goes South, 279)

This is the underlying truth that binds the Company together, despite the uncertainties and dangers ahead and the contentions about which way to choose; they must go on. They have undertaken a task whose importance overrides their personal fears and needs. The passage of the mountains, a formidable barrier that must be overcome in order to proceed, offers a choice of paths but without hope of a perfect outcome, as we see in the unfolding of events. Caradhras drives the fellowship back, and the passage through Moria both alerts Gollum to the presence of his Precious and brings about the loss of Gandalf. Aragorn asserts during the journey in the dark that Gandalf will lead them true: Do not be afraid! I have been with him on many a journey, if never one so dark [...] He will not go astray – if there is any path to find. He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself. He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel. (LR, A Journey in the Dark, 303)

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And Gandalf soon fulfils this expectation, even to the beast-like instinct Aragorn implies, when he chooses the way at the point where the tunnels divide, by feel. “I do not like the feel of the middle way; and I do not like the smell of the left-hand way [...]” (LR, A Journey in the Dark, 306). The layers of dramatic irony here are many. Aragorn seems, in later retrospect, to have predicted both the safe passage of the mountains and the loss of Gandalf. And Gollum remains on the trail of the survivors. At the time, within the narrative, these are for the Companions events of unmitigated disaster, which bring them to despair. The wrongness of their road seems unarguable. Later, at Rauros, Aragorn voices this feeling to Legolas and Gimli; “All that I have done today has gone amiss” (LR, The Departure of Boromir, 404). Yet by the end of the tale it becomes clear that it is out of the “wrongness” that hope has come. Without Gollum, Frodo could not have destroyed the Ring, and Gandalf’s fall leads to his return, charged with greater power and fortitude to lead the thrust toward victory. Meanwhile, at Rauros, the onward directions of the fragmented Fellowship seem scarcely to be chosen at all. Scattered by the Orcs’ onslaught and the madness of Boromir, the friends appear to have lost all sense of both direction and purpose. This is a rout, a series of panicked flights, not a reasoned decision. And for Boromir, the journey comes to an end. Yet this series of apparently unchosen ways turns out to be the set of the best possible journeys for each character to take. Each group of characters must cross a different boundary: Frodo and Sam cross the water toward the east, the three hunters cross wide grasslands toward the West, and Boromir crosses the ultimate boundary for humanity, the gateway into death; yet even this has saved him from the horror of corruption by the Ring. From this scattering, each one comes to the place where it is essential that he should be – if the War of the Ring is to have any chance of a successful outcome. It is notable that in choosing a goal for the onward journey of the Three Hunters Aragorn is constrained to make at one and the same time a choice to move toward an objective, and a choice to move away from an alternative goal. He has to choose not to go in a particular direction. This is indicative of the complexity of knowing “which way to turn” in Tolkien’s created worlds. Yet further choices of direction lie ahead of Aragorn, who, before the Quest of Mount Doom, has trodden many ways. Within the space of two days in his youth he had been told by Elrond “who he was, and whose son” (LR, Appendix A (v), 1032) and had met Arwen Undómiel, falling irrevocably in love with her. In true fairy-tale fashion he then learns that “a

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great doom awaits you,” and “he went out into the wild” (LR, Appendix A (v), 1034, 1035). The tale of his adult life before he meets with Frodo and the other hobbits in Bree can be summed up in the phrase “he made many perilous journeys” (LR, Appendix A (v), 1035). Moreover, “as the years wore on he went more often alone.” Set apart by his destiny, he chooses paths of duty and service, returning rarely to havens of peace. Perhaps one of the signs that an enormous change is coming over Middle-earth is that at Bree the hobbits who have never before journeyed so far become the travelling companions of one who has journeyed for thousands of leagues – alone. Their ways join, and initial suspicion and doubt lead to companionship, friendship and trust. Butterbur believes the hobbits to be choosing the wrong way and the wrong companion – but Aragorn is adept at choosing the right way – “Strider can take you by paths that are seldom trodden” (LR, Strider, 162). Here is set the tone for their friendship and for the quest, in choosing the journey that is difficult and seemingly foolish, but which is the only way to success. This theme is further developed in the tale of the Paths of the Dead (LR, The Passing of the Grey Company). All mortals – save the Dúnedain – who hear of Aragorn’s intent either condemn or deride his plan. Theoden and Éomer are convinced that he will die and they will never see him again. Éowyn at first tries to dissuade him but then pleads to be allowed to accompany him; the hopelessness in her tone however suggests that she does so in her fey, death-seeking mood, not out of belief in his judgement. “…may I not now spend my life as I will?” (LR, The Passing of the Grey Company, 767) As the Grey Company rides for the Dwimorberg the voice of everyday common sense concludes: “They are elvish wights. Let them go where they belong, into the dark places, and never return” (LR, The Passing of the Grey Company, 768). Aragorn, however, is driven now by conviction, commitment, duty and long years of experience in terrible places. Although Gandalf counsels Aragorn, “Do not stumble at the end of the road,” still he presents the Palantír to the Heir of Elendil with a respectful bow, and the conditional “If I may counsel you in the use of your own” (LR, The Palantír, 580). The “Supernatural Helper”, after so many years devoted to trying to help people choose the right path, cedes to the King Returning the right to choose his own way. By the force of his will and the compelling strength of his leadership Aragorn brings his company through the darkness and annexes the Host of the Dead. This wrong way is the right way. The foolish act leads to victory. The journey into the dark leads to light. Éowyn of Rohan chooses a “wrong” path when she sets out in disguise amid the host of Rohan – one that she knows to be in direct disobedience

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to her uncle and lord, King Théoden. She makes this choice out of a combination of despair and love. The time she has spent watching the enslaved dotage of Théoden at the hands of Gríma Wormtongue has marked her. The added pain of Aragorn’s kindly but firm rejection of her offered love combines with that sorrow to produce despair. Yet she is also motivated by love for Théoden, for her brother Éomer, for her land and people, and by a desire to serve the right. Nevertheless when Merry, on his parallel journey through disobedience to victory, first sees Éowyn in her guise of Dernhelm, it is despair that seems uppermost; He caught the glint of clear grey eyes; and then he shivered, for it came suddenly to him that it was the face of one without hope who goes in search of death. (LR, The Muster of Rohan, 785)

The outcome of Éowyn’s journey in the “wrong” direction, for the wrong reasons, is perhaps one of the most notable and triumphant reversals of expectation in The Lord of the Rings. Just before the battle she makes another choice involving a change of direction, choosing to ride closely behind the King although her own éored is in quite another position. This directional shift expresses a shift in her mood and motivation, as she seeks to protect Théoden and forgets her despair. The end of her journey is not in wrong, but in triumph, for though she cannot save Théoden she comes to the right crux in time and space to enact the fulfilment of a geas of which she has never heard, and to rid the world of the Witchking. Merry too is vital to this outcome, as he too fulfils the condition that “no living man” alone can destroy the Nazgûl lord, and he too has disobeyed Théoden in order to be on the field of battle at the right time. Mere days have passed since Merry swore to the King to obey him as his liege-lord, yet he has served him best by this disobedience (Nicholas 2009).

V. Conclusions Clearly the themes of staying and going explored in this essay, as well as my proposed further study of transitions, will overlap with themes of disobedience, free will and fate, and liminality as treated by, among others, Verlyn Flieger, Hammond and Scull, Michael Cunningham and Angela Nicholas. These and other dimensions of the meaning and symbolism of the traditional quest journey are too wide-ranging to expound fully here, and much has been written upon them. Themes of maturation, of service and duty, of the search for immortality or for the acceptance of mortality, of the eternal struggle between good and evil are

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all valid interpretations of what is happening when a quest protagonist sets out on a journey to find a particular place or person or object – or in Frodo’s case, to rid the world of such. Difficulty in knowing which way to go is common to many such tales, and indeed may often function as a mode of expression for moral choices and the complexities of ethical behaviour. In Tolkien’s worlds, however, this is never a simplistic equation, a simple parable with one point to it. Galadriel sums up the difficulty of how one is to determine the right direction in her famous “yea and nay” answer to Sam: Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them. The Mirror is dangerous as a guide of deeds. (LR, The Mirror of Galadriel, 354, emphasis added)

And Sam seems to absorb something concrete from this counsel, as he determines, “I’ll go home by the long road with Mr. Frodo, or not at all” (LR, The Mirror of Galadriel, 354). In other words, he can only go home by continuing to travel away from home if he wishes to retain his moral integrity, to retain his true self. In retrospect it may seem that there is a discernible bias in Tolkien’s stories in favour of the notion that the foolhardy, those who seem to be taking the wrong road in terms of common sense, perhaps going against the advice of a more experienced guide or blindly committing themselves to the demands of fate, are the ones taking the right road in moral terms. The Fellowship sets out from Rivendell with a set of assumptions: that Frodo is the destined Ringbearer, that the time for the restoration of the Kingship is now at hand; and that the hope of success is vanishingly small. Over and again the view is expressed that this is foolishness in the extreme, while at the same time it is the only road possible. Denethor, Boromir, Saruman, Sauron himself, cannot believe that such a journey could possibly be undertaken. Indeed, it is almost a measure of one’s goodness in The Lord of the Rings that one should accept the necessity and wisdom of this most hopeless of quests. Tolkien does not come down on the side of staying or the side of going, as being right or wrong in any absolute way. Our look at examples of each choice indicates a different location of value. What Treebeard, Smith, Frodo and Bilbo, and – eventually – Niggle have in common is their willingness to embrace their fates, and this is evidenced in the quality of their staying or their going. What Boromir, Ar-Pharazôn, the voyager of “The Sea Bell,” Thingol and Fëanor have in common is the will to control, and the failure to understand the impossibility of maintaining that control.

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Indeed, they share the tendency that destroys Sauron: the inability to entertain the merest idea of the possibility that things might not come out as they want them to. For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. (LR, The Council of Elrond, 262)

And more attention needs to be given to the value and motivation of those who stay at home. Whether they stay or go, anyone may come to catastrophe and, maybe, beyond it to joy or to destruction, and not simply because of their own decisions or the compulsive circumstances of their particular staying or departing. It seems that the deeper relationships between staying home, journeying and transition may reward further study.

References Beowulf. Edited by Klaeber. 1950. Fr. Boston, D.C. Heath and Co. The Bible King James Version. Carroll, Lewis. 1973. Alice Through the Looking Glass. Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green, London: Book Club Associates. Curry, Patrick. 2008.“Tolkien and Enchantment.” In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Sources of inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger. Walking Tree Publishers. Caldecott, Stratford. 2003. Secret Fire; the Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Cunningham, Michael. 2008. “The Cry in the Wind and the Shadow on the Moon: Liminality and the Construct of Horror in The Lord of the Rings.” In The mirror crack'd: Fear and Horror in J.R.R Tolkien's Major Works. Edited by Lynn Forest-Hill. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Flieger, Verlyn. 2009. “The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth.” In Tolkien Studies 6: 151-181. Lewis, Clive Staples. 1965. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nicolas, Angela. 2009. “Disobedience in the Lord of the Rings.” In Amon Hen 215: 15-18. Scull, Christina and Hammond, Wayne G. 2006. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide. London: HarperCollins.

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Tolkien, J.R.R. 2004. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 2007. The Children of Húrin. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 1999. The Hobbit. London: HarperCollins. —. 1964. Leaf by Niggle in Tree and Leaf. London: George Allen and Unwin. —. 1995. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. —. 1962. “The Sea-bell” Poem number 15 In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. London: George Allen and Unwin. —. 1967. Smith of Wootton Major. London: George Allen and Unwin. —. 1980. Unfinished Tales. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin. Whitelock, Dorothy. 1967. Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Verse and Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tuan,Yi-Fu. 2007. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

THE ENIGMATIC MR. BOMBADIL: TOM BOMBADIL’S ROLE AS A REPRESENTATION OF NATURE IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS LIAM CAMPBELL

A new death for the old world, science that crosses boundaries because it can, winds of industrial change that gust across green hills and dales, ambition and desire for power that corrupt forces once good, machines and callous hearts that dig deep into the ecosystems of earth as trees crash upon the shrinking forest floors and new technologies threaten to devastate en masse. This is the darkest hour of Middle-Earth as presented in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This is the natural world, the non-human, at war with ambition, science and a machine-wielding threat made manifest in the technocratic presence of those such as Sauron, Saruman and their foot soldiers of destruction. How curiously all of this resembles the real world: the troubled and tainted planet upon which we live; the environmental issues that surround us, and the irreverent, indiscriminate power lusts that may yet preside over our fate. Indeed beyond the self-declared mythmaker, the philologist, and the storyteller we do not have to dig too deep into, not only Tolkien’s fiction, but also his papers and private correspondence to discover a visionary environmentalist who, as Tolkien scholar Ralph C. Wood comments, was “an unapologetic defender of nature before environmentalism had yet been made into a cause” (Wood 2003, 28). Aspects of Tolkien’s fiction, like those mentioned above, which present pastoral landscapes threatened by mechanised and industrialised powers or struggles between conflicting power bases are for the most part played out against the huge vista and history of Middle-earth: great forces are mobilised, counterforces resist and somewhere in the struggle we see our own reality reflected. Below the panoramic sweep of such epic battles Tolkien allows similar force and counterforce to exist in the presentation of his individual characters. In terms of his portrayal of characters that display positive environmental traits (as opposed to personas cast as being environmentally

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destructive), perhaps Tolkien’s most remarkable creation is Tom Bombadil. I am concerned in this discourse with analysing not only Tom Bombadil’s role and representation of nature in The Lord of the Rings, but also with examining Bombadil’s character traits and relating these to what I believe is Tolkien’s portrayal of Tom as a positive environmental model – a positive environmental model which, in alignment with Tolkien’s own concerns for the primary natural world, is under threat from technocratic aggressors. Also, staying within the parameters of Tolkien’s green themes, I will proffer a theory in answer to a question that has aroused and engaged the interest of many Tolkien readers and scholars: who is Tom Bombadil?

I. The Enduring Enigma of Tom Bombadil There is a general consensus among Tolkien commentators, even those very firmly in the pro-Tolkien camp, that Tom Bombadil is a somewhat incongruous element in The Lord of the Rings: an anomaly who, as Dickerson and Evans in Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien suggest, “exists, in a sense, apart from or alongside the mainstream of the narrative” (Dickerson, Evans 2006, 18). Thomas J. Gasque refers to the character of Tom Bombadil simply as “a technical failure” (Gasque 1968, 154). Indeed there is no doubt that Tom is a curious character who seems almost to stumble across the central plot of The Lord of the Rings for a time and then disappear from the “stage”. However in terms of plot we should note that Tom does in fact save the lives of the four Hobbits (Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry) on two occasions – once from Old Man Willow in the Old Forest and once from the Barrow-wights. He thus averts disaster for the Ringbearer and company (and by extension Middleearth itself) before their quest has even properly begun. And yet, in both early and modern adaptations of the book, Tom Bombadil has been (in many cases) the first cut: the unnecessary digression in the story that may be easily cast aside.1 Indeed the majority of adaptations choose to sidestep the Bombadil sections and move the action (after Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin’s early encounter with the Black Riders) speedily along to Bree. This is true of the two arguably most notable adaptations to date: Ralph Bakshi’s 1

Even when Tom Bombadil was left in, as was the case with Morton Grady Zimmerman’s proposed first film adaptation, the sections involving Tom and Goldberry proved to be particularly fraught with difficulty. Indeed Tolkien believed Zimmerman’s handling of the Bombadil passages to be wholly unrepresentative of his book and a prime example of how, Zimmerman had, in Tolkien’s words, “lower[ed] the tone towards that of a more childish fairy-tale” (Letters, 272).

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(unfinished) animated version and Peter Jackson’s phenomenally successful cinematic version (released as three separate films).2 Jackson, defending his decision to cut Tom, asks, “what does Tom Bombadil ultimately really have to do with the Ring? I know there’s Ring stuff in the Bombadil episode, but it’s not really advancing our story” (Jackson 2002). This has been the recurrent bugbear of critics and scriptwriters alike when dealing with Bombadil: what does he contribute to the plot? What function does he serve? And of course…who or what is he? Indeed the whole question of Tom Bombadil’s role and function in The Lord of the Rings is integrally bound up with who or what he is – a riddle that has fascinated and infuriated Tolkien critics for as long as his works have been in print. Many theories have arisen regarding Tom’s origins and place in Tolkien’s cosmology (some of which I will discuss in greater detail later). Tom has by turn been unmasked as one of the Istari, a Maia, a Vala or even as Eru Ilúvatar (God in Tolkien’s legendarium) and much more besides. Although, as we shall see, Tolkien was at times somewhat vague in his remarks relating to Tom, he did once famously and unequivocally comment that Tom Bombadil was “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside”, (Letters, 26) and in keeping with this understanding of Bombadil, the majority of Tolkien critics have concluded, in more general terms, that he is a manifestation of nature or a nature spirit of some kind. Edmund Fuller describes Tom as “an individual figure, unclassifiable other than as some primal nature spirit” (Fuller 2005, 18). Ruth S. Noel places Tom’s character in a category akin to Shakespeare’s Puck, and the Greek god Pan, referring to him as “a nature god in diminished form” (Noel 1977, 127). Dickerson and Evans suggest that “he may be the most explicit, concrete embodiment of the natural world – an incarnation, we might say, of environment itself” (Dickerson, Evans 18). Both Tom Shippey and Patrick Curry refer to him as being “a genius loci” (Shippey 2005, 123 and Curry 1997, 76) or the pervading spirit of the lands he inhabits. Shippey goes on to offer that Tom is derived “from the land”, and not just from the mythical or fictional lands of Middle-earth but, as Shippey points out, from “the river and willow of the English midlands” (Shippey 2005, 123). Moreover, Shippey reminds us that Tolkien most likely constructed the landscape and characters of Tom’s habitat, even the Barrow-wights, from lands he knew well: “fifteen miles from Oxford begins the greatest concentration of 2

Another very notable adaptation was the BBC’s second attempt at dramatising The Lord of the Rings for radio in 1980. The remit for production was to closely follow Tolkien’s original narrative, but although a valiant attempt was made to stay faithful to the book, the Bombadil passages were nonetheless bypassed.

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barrows3 in the country, where the green Berkshire downs rise from the plain” (Shippey 2005, 123-124). Indeed in a letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, “would be” producer of Morton Grady Zimmerman’s early planned film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien insists that Bombadil, contrary to Zimmerman’s portrayal, “is not the owner of the woods” and that the wild country surrounding Bombadil’s house should exude an evocation of the real world: “We are not in ‘fairy-land’, but in real river lands in autumn”. Tolkien goes on in the letter to say that Goldberry, “daughter of the river” and the female aspect of Tom’s embodiment of nature, “represents the actual seasonal changes in such lands” (Letters, 272). When we read Tolkien’s description of Goldberry, we can see to what extent she (like Tom) is a spirit of nature and derived “from the land”: Her long yellow hair rippled down her shoulders; her gown was green, green as young reeds, shot with silver like beads of dew; and her belt was of gold, shaped like a chain of flag-lilies set with the pale-blue eyes of forget-me-nots. About her feet in wide vessels of green and brown earthenware, white water-lilies were floating, so that she seemed to be enthroned in the midst of a pool. (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 121)

There is no question that, distilled purely from his portrayal as a character (as opposed to the wider significance of what he may embody or represent), Tom Bombadil’s harmonious relationship and kinship with the natural world around him, his understanding of the existence of things other than himself (either good or ill) casts him as a model of ecological ethics and environmental harmony. Indeed as Tom speaks to the Hobbits (whose lives he has saved) about the lands and living things around him, his voice becomes melody as if reflecting the harmony of nature itself: Often his voice would turn to song, and he would get out of his chair and dance about. He told them tales of bees and flowers, the ways of trees, and the strange creatures of the Forest, about the evil things and good things, things friendly and things unfriendly, cruel things and kind things, and secrets hidden under the brambles. As they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home. (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 127)

3

A barrow or tumulus is, in general terms, a burial mound – a heap of earth or mound of stones marking a prehistoric tomb. Tolkien’s creation of the Barrowwights would certainly have drawn on old tales that warned of malevolent ghosts stalking such tombs.

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Just in attending to Tom’s words the Hobbits begin to take account of other living things, to develop, one might say, their environmental conscience.4 Yet Tom offers no idealised portrayal of nature – the “evil”, “unfriendly” and “cruel things” he sings of do not exclusively refer to dark lords or orcs, but also to the harsh reality of nature as it is – “[n]ature, red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson 2007, 135) as Tennyson once proverbially put it. As Tom continues to speak and sing he offers the Hobbits the perspective of ancient things – the deeper and wider view of the old trees and the green hills. Speaking of the history of the Barrow-wights, Tom alludes to the transient nature of empires and he diminishes the importance of the rising and falling fortunes of war: Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell […] but soon the hills were empty again. (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 128)

Tom here is taking account of a different time scale: not that of Hobbits or Men, but that of an ancient, elemental life-force: the forest, the land and the earth. The implication is that nature itself is possessed of a waking consciousness and Tom gives it its voice. Andrew Light in his essay “Tolkien’s Green Time” makes a similar point: Tom Bombadil and other primordial inhabitants of Middle-earth either implicitly or explicitly acknowledge a different time scale than the other peoples and characters in the story […] it is a time scale more attuned to the rhythms of the natural world. (Light 2003, 151)

Indeed Tom’s melodious speech takes the Hobbits “beyond their memory” and leaves them “enchanted; and it seemed as if under the spell of his words”. Bombadil’s voice has power – great power; his words have resonance 4

There is a general propensity to associate Hobbits with an idyllic existence living in unblemished harmony with nature. Hobbit characters such as Ted Sandyman and Lotho “Pimple” Sackville-Baggins in “The Scouring of the Shire” prove that Hobbits may be just as quick to choose industry and ruination of the landscape over nature if it provides power or pecuniary reward. Moreover Merry recounts, in “The Old Forest” chapter, an incident involving Hobbits felling and burning hundreds of trees at Buckland hedge in what amounts to a gross overreaction to the trees of the Old Forest threatening to encroach upon Hobbit lands. This incident, and its implications for the perception of Hobbits as an ideal portrayal of humanity in harmony with nature, demonstrates that Hobbits have much to learn in terms of environmental ethics.

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and his songs carry authority and authenticity. The power inherent in Tom’s voice is evident from the first moment we meet him: he begins to free the Hobbits from Old Man Willow by a simple declaration to the great tree: “Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to Sleep! Bombadil is talking!” It is apparent also from the warning he issues that his voice contains the power to stir the elements, I know the tune for him. Old grey Willow-man! I’ll freeze his marrow cold, if he don’t behave himself. I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. (LR, The Old Forest, 117)

The force of nature itself lies in the melodious tones of Tom’s voice, an allusion which echoes the power inherent in the Ainur, who (as Tolkien describes in The Silmarillion) create the Earth and Middle-earth (Arda) through the harmony of music. Indeed we recall that Ilúvatar reveals Arda to the Ainur and declares, “Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy” (Silm, 17) Despite Tom’s obvious charm and potency as a character, Tolkien was very much aware that he did not sit as easily as other characters in the unfolding plot of The Lord of the Rings. As early as 1954 Tolkien writes, “many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient” (Letters, 192). But as Michael Treschow and Mark Duckworth point out in their essay “Bombadil’s Role in The Lord of the Rings”, “If we look for Bombadil to serve the story’s plot we have missed the point” (Treschow and Duckworth 2006, 175-196). Although acknowledging Tom as “a nature spirit” and a force for moral good, Treschow and Duckworth suggest that Tom’s primary purpose in the work is that he is (like Beorn in The Hobbit) “an adventure on the way”; a sidetracking of the main narrative in which the naïve and (up to this point in the tale) largely bungling Hobbits are awakened to the real dangers which lie on the path before them.5 In this sense, according to Treschow and Duckworth, the Bombadil episode acts as a kind of gateway through which the Hobbits must pass: they are saved by Bombadil from the dangers to which they are exposed, but nonetheless they are exposed to them, and thus they become hardier, more resilient and more aware of what they must face as a result (Treschow and Duckworth 2006, 175-196). Although Tolkien would certainly agree with this account of Bombadil’s role: “I put [Tom Bombadil] in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford magazine) and wanted an 5

Of course, contrary to Treschow and Duckworth, one could argue that Bombadil, in preparing the Hobbits for the harsh realities on the long quest ahead, is actually very much “serv[ing] the story’s plot”.

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‘adventure’ on the way”, Tolkien also is at pains to point out that Tom survives his ruthless editorial process for very different reasons: “[b]ut I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out” (Letters, 192, emphasis added). This seems to me to be a very critical distinction. Tolkien was very aware of narrative techniques such as this idea of “an adventure on the way” (especially in a quest saga) but he wanted Tom in the book not because of his value to the narrative but because of “something he represents”. Was Tolkien simply referring to the evocation of nature made animate in Bombadil’s character?6 Perhaps not, because we could easily attribute similar characteristics to Treebeard, whereas Tolkien specifically says that Tom embodies “things otherwise left out”. In a letter to Naomi Mitcheson, original proof reader of the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien tackles the question of Tom’s inclusion in the story: Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a “comment” […] he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. (Letters, 178)

Although unwilling to “analyze the feeling precisely”, Tolkien, in the letter, reveals that it was his objective to shroud Tom in mystery, “even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)” (Letters, 178). Speaking specifically about Tom’s character traits, Tolkien goes on to throw a little light on his literary worth and function, and so effectively begins to answer the question of what Bombadil’s presence in The Lord of the Rings might represent: The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken “a vow of poverty”, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view. (Letters, 178-179) 6

Tolkien declares that Bombadil appears in The Lord of the Rings “as he was”. This suggests that the character of Tom Bombadil remained purposely unchanged from that which appeared in the poem ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ years before.

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Despite the obvious power and ability Tom possesses to control the world about him, he has no wish to rule, exploit or master. Although, as we have seen, his voice has emphatic and conspicuous influence over nature itself, Tom has nevertheless “renounced control”, relinquished his command and he seeks no advantage over other things. He has, in Tolkien’s words, submitted to “a vow of poverty” – the “poverty” of discarded power. He takes “delight in things for themselves”, he places value not on power but on understanding – he is “a natural pacifist” and as such is, as Tolkien says: an “allegory”, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are “other” and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with “doing” anything with the knowledge. (Letters, 192)

In this sense Bombadil, in part, represents the harmony of nature itself – the spirit of humanity as it was meant to be: in complicit union with the natural world,7 seeking understanding without control. Indeed his refusal to exploit or rule the world about him casts him as “an exemplar” of environmental ethics. Perhaps more than any other character in Tolkien’s fiction, Tom Bombadil is an ideal – a pacifist expression of environmental harmony. In a drama in which all other characters to one degree or another concern themselves with the ability to control their own destiny, Tom’s indifference towards the struggle for power and control of Middle-earth, his refusal to harness the might at his command and his willingness to take others as they are – is found nowhere else in The Lord of the Rings. And whilst at first this would appear to diminish Tom’s strength as a character, it is precisely in his renunciation of power that Tom manages to effectively oppose what the others cannot. Let us consider the passage in which Tom encounters the One Ring:

7

We recall that listening to Tom speak of the natural world, Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry “began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves […] to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home” (LR In the House of Tom Bombadil, 127), and in a sense the Hobbits’ view of themselves as “strangers”, set against Tom’s evident harmony and union with nature, represents what Tolkien would have viewed as humanity’s gradual disconnection with nature in our world. Tom enlivens the Hobbits’ senses to the living force of nature, but ultimately only they can release their desire to control or master it (as observable in the Hobbit burning of trees at Buckland hedge) and thus reconnect with it.

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Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing! Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air – and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry – and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile. (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 130)

Given what we come to know of the Ring, in terms of how it is portrayed in the story, this incident is hugely significant: Bombadil cares nothing for it, yet the Ring wields a seductive influence powerful enough to corrupt the mighty Maiar (Saruman is utterly corrupted by the Ring and Gandalf fears to use it). The wise and powerful among the Elves such as Elrond and Galadriel know also that catastrophe awaits anyone who becomes ensnared by the Ring’s allure. We are shown too how the Hobbits (who show a remarkable ability to resist or at least hold off the effects of the Ring) eventually fall foul of its destructive power. The definitive example of this is the transformation of Smeagol (once a creature much like Frodo or Sam) into the snivelling, broken, craven half-life that is Gollum. Indeed Tolkien devotes a lot of The Fellowship of the Ring to emphasising just how potent and dangerous the One Ring is to all who encounter it. Yet he allows Tom to toy with this perilous and treacherous object and remain unaffected or unimpressed by it. Given Tolkien’s painstaking attention to detail, this decision to undermine the power of the Ring so early in the trilogy is curious – one might even say reckless. Indeed Treschow and Duckworth believe that with the inclusion of this scene the entire credibility of Tolkien’s tale is at stake: [this] is a dangerous moment for Tolkien’s story. It veers suddenly close to smashing into a wreck on Tom’s unassailable virtue. The whole rationale of the quest is poised to overbalance and fall down at this moment. For Bombadil is greater than the Ring. (Treschow and Duckworth 2006, 175196)

Of course Tolkien would have been acutely aware of the dangers of undermining the Ring in Tom’s hands so early in the tale – that he decided to keep these passages intact, therefore, reveals how much importance he placed on keeping Tom (and what he represents) in the story.8 And it turns

8

In a letter to his publisher Stanley Unwin responding to Unwin’s request for a follow up to The Hobbit Tolkien writes “[d]o you think Tom Bombadil […] could be made into the hero of a story?” (Letters, 26) This perhaps is an indication as to

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out that a clear understanding of what Tom symbolizes reveals that the Ring’s power has not been diminished, nor is Tom, as Treschow and Duckworth suggest, “greater than the Ring” but rather as Gandalf explains at the Council of Elrond, “the Ring has no power over him” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259). For as a result of Tom’s “vow of poverty” and his renunciation of control, the Ring holds no appeal for him, he can oppose its addictive pull and it is thus powerless in his hands. In a sense this is a coming together of two wills: one that seeks domination and control and one that sets the desire for ascendancy and dominion aside in the pursuit of understanding. More than anything else the Ring is suggestive and emblematic of a will to power. Many of the themes revealed in Tolkien’s depiction of the Ring’s controlling and destructive nature, and his recalling of its blood-soaked and perfidious past, are themes mirrored in the central threads which weave through the heart of the book: power-lust, tyranny, domination, corruption, exploitation, addiction, and more often than not these themes of vice are played out at the expense of the environmental well-being of the landscapes of Middle-earth, and they are tied to Tolkien’s understanding of evil. Moreover, in placing the One Ring at the centre of his story, in fashioning his epic tale around it and the struggle by all to either destroy it, harness it, resist it or find it, Tolkien, whether he wished to or not, has created a single symbol for all of these themes and motifs – and more besides. In effect the One Ring becomes a gauge; an object which when dealt with, considered or handled by a given character, betrays that character’s true nature and his or her susceptibility to the seduction of power (either corrupt or well-meaning). When considered from this point of view Tom’s dismissal of the Ring, his obvious control over it and that fact that it has utterly no control over him (even to the point that it does not make him disappear) is testimony to Tom’s incorruptibility, his “unassailable virtue” and perhaps more vitally (when considering the environmental significance of his character) – his lack of desire to command, control or conquer anything in Middle-earth from the smallest plant to the deadliest beast.9 Tom can easily

how much importance and credibility Tolkien placed on Tom Bombadil as a character. 9 In a sense Tom’s willingness to relinquish control, to take everything from harmless plants to deadly beasts as they are, and to seek no transformation in the natural order is an antidote to imperialist and colonial ideals which seek to impose one set of beliefs upon another, and which often identify and classify less advanced civilizations (in the opinion of the colonisers) as savages or “beasts” – whereupon moves are made to change, “civilise” or even neutralise them.

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resist the One Ring because what it offers him, he simply does not want – to him it is just a trinket.

II. Bombadil under Threat In considering Tom Bombadil’s significance as an environmental model I share Shippey’s understanding that he is, at least in part, representative of real pastoral lands that Tolkien knew well (and his sentiment that such lands should not be exploited or controlled but valued as they are). I see it as crucial to note, however, that Tolkien did not merely state the Bombadil was “the spirit of the […] Oxford and Berkshire countryside” but rather “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” (Letters, 26). The inclusion of the word “vanishing” in Tolkien’s statement, regardless of his cautionary parenthesis, transforms Tom Bombadil, in my mind at least, from some generalised nature spirit (as many have defined him) into something else entirely – a manifestation of nature under threat. Indeed there are many instances in The Lord of the Rings where the mention of Tom Bombadil and the lands he inhabits is coloured by a sense of impending peril. When Frodo puts on the Ring for example to convince himself it is indeed the One Ring (in the wake of Tom’s playful dismissal of it), Tom, because the power of the Ring has no influence over him, can see Frodo – and as Frodo moves towards the door Tom shouts after him, “Hey! Come Frodo, there! Where be you a-going? Old Tom Bombadil’s not as blind as that yet” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 131). The textual inclusion of the word “yet” (although this could be read as a frivolous comment) suggests that Tom is alluding to the notion that sometime in the future he may not be able to resist the dark forces symbolized by the Ring’s power. Of course, we are told also that the Old Forest itself is merely “a survivor of vast forgotten woods” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 127) and as Frodo and company travel through the Forest and Tom’s lands (before becoming ensnared by Old Man Willow) we hear Frodo sing: all woods there be must end at last, and see the open sun go past: the setting sun, the rising sun, the day’s end, or the day begun. For east or west all woods must fail… (LR, The Old Forest, 110)

The forewarning embedded in Frodo’s song that, in time, “east and west all woods must fail” indicates that the woods are, at the time of the story, in retreat and very much under threat.

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This theme is further recalled and revisited in the descriptions of the vista surrounding Tom’s home: the main room in Tom’s house is described as having windows at each end: “one looking east and the other looking west”. On the first morning when the Hobbits (now saved from Old Man Willow) awake in Tom’s house “Frodo [runs] to the eastern window” and as he gazes out we are told of his view, “[i]t was a pale morning: in the East, behind long clouds like lines of soiled wool stained red at the edges, lay glimmering deeps of yellow. The sky spoke of rain to come”. Pippin at the same time looks out of the west window and of his view we are informed, “the Forest was hidden under a fog” and “the stream ran down the hill […] and vanished into the white shadows” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 126). Taken together these views, echoing the east / west motif of Frodo’s song, offer a veiled suggestion that Tom’s land is under threat: “clouds” which are “stained red” holding “rain to come”, “the Forest […] hidden under a fog”, and streams which vanish into “white shadows” (despite the possible scientific accuracy of such observations) are surely ill-omens of a detrimental force which is gathering beyond Tom’s borders. Furthermore, despite the portrait of Tom as a happy-go-lucky character who seems indifferent to the crisis that threatens the free peoples of Middleearth, Gandalf remarks in Rivendell, “[Bombadil] is withdrawn into a little land, within boundaries he has set, though none can see them, waiting perhaps for a change of days” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259). The idea that a character who at some level represents such carefree natural energy should withdraw and set up protective borders whilst awaiting “change” is surely representative of a retreating and diminishing force under threat. Indeed this sense that something is at stake, that something is to be lost, is further suggested on the morning the four Hobbits leave behind the reassurance and comfort they had experienced in Tom’s house. As the Hobbits say their farewells, the narrator tells us, “[a] deep loneliness and sense of loss was on them. They stood silent, reluctant to make the final parting” (LR, Fog on the Barrow-downs, 144). Of all the various pieces of evidence that Bombadil represents not just nature but nature under threat, to my mind the Council of Elrond remains the most compelling. The delegates are debating whether Tom, given his power to resist the Ring, should be entrusted with the Ring’s safekeeping. Gandalf explains that “if he were given the Ring” he would “most likely throw it away” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259). Glorfindel adds that even if Bombadil were to take the Ring he could not defend against the oncoming might of Sauron: The Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it. Could that power be defied by Bombadil alone? I

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think not. I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall, Last as he was First; and then Night will come. (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259)

The implication is that nature itself as embodied in Bombadil would be the last bastion of resistance when all others have failed; but even that natural energy as it appears in the ecologically sustained landscapes of Middle-earth would pass from existence, and the lifelessness and desolation we witness in the tortured landscape of Mordor would come to dominate the entire panorama of Arda (Earth) and thus, in the end, to Bombadil’s lands. The suggestion that Sauron has the power not only to defeat Bombadil, but to actually purge Middle-earth of the natural forces he represents, casts Bombadil, despite his withdrawal behind borders, as being in just as much danger as the rest of Middle-earth (should Sauron prevail). To further underscore the premise that the character of Tom Bombadil symbolizes nature in retreat we hear Galdor proclaim “[p]ower to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259). Bombadil’s power to resist Sauron (and Saruman) is presented, by inclusion of the word “unless”, as measurable against the ability of the land itself to resist such onslaught. The only hypothesis that fully satisfies this assertion is that, in one sense or another, Bombadil is the land or draws his strength from it. Therefore when the land (or nature) is wounded: every time trees and forests diminish and rivers are polluted Tom loses a little more strength, and if the cycle of devastation continues, finally he “will fall”. At the time we meet him in the story it is clear, because he has withdrawn from the wider world, that the natural force Bombadil represents is already in decline. In other words the war against the land, against Middle-earth itself, is at an advanced stage. This notion that, should the threat of Sauron and Saruman not be defeated, eventually “Bombadil will fall”, is borne out by Tolkien himself who writes: “[u]ltimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron” (Letters, 179). Put plainly, just as the landscape surrounding Isengard suffers under Saruman’s regime, and the natural habitats surrounding Mordor have all but perished, so too Tom, hemmed “by borders he has set” into his naturally sustained enclave, faces what amounts to progressive assault and finally death. Since I have offered that Tom Bombadil represents nature or more specifically nature under threat, and the discussion of Tom at the Council of Elrond would seem not only to support such a claim, but also to suggest that the peril facing Tom could lead to his death – does not the extension of such an understanding mean that Tolkien was implying that (given an extreme set

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of circumstances) nature can actually die? And is not that just a little farfetched? Well, for a new generation of environmentalists, responding to present-day ecological concerns, perhaps not. One such environmentalist is Bill McKibben, who in 2006 led the largest ever demonstration and awareness campaign warning of the dangers of (amongst other things) global warming. I had the pleasure of listening to McKibben speak (whilst I attended a conference to give a paper on Tolkien’s green credentials) and I was greatly moved by the passion and commitment of the man. In his book The End of Nature McKibben specifically addresses the matter of nature in retreat when set against the progressive march of ecologically unsound human activity: An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is “nature,” the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental “damage.” But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces—the wind, the rain, the sun—were too strong, too elemental. But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life... could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts...We have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature. (McKibben 1989, 41)

McKibben declares unambiguously that nature can “end”: nature as we understand it, as we have experienced it, as we have lived it: “the wild province” – and although it encapsulates, like Bombadil, great strength – the power of the elements themselves – it seems that it can pass into memory. If this were the case, as McKibben suggests, what would our understanding of nature be replaced with? A distortion of what it once was? A world of deserts? Mordor perhaps? Although of course Tolkien could not have been addressing issues such as global warming, the themes he touches upon nonetheless have resonance with modern environmental theories on how the widespread progressive assault on natural resources can impact nature on a global scale.

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III. A Riddle of Sorts To widen and amplify our understanding of Tom Bombadil’s ecological significance in The Lord of the Rings, I wish to draw attention to what appears to be a textual anomaly related to the particular histories of Bombadil and Treebeard. Of course the two characters are similarly constructed and each is presented as (in effect) the (or a) voice of nature in Tolkien’s fiction. But when we analyse what is said of their respective backgrounds, we stumble onto a riddle. When responding to Frodo’s rather pointed question, “Who are you, Master?” Bombadil replies: Eldest, that’s what I am […] Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People […] before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside. (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 129)

And, as we have noted, Glorfindel at the Council of Elrond also refers to Bombadil as “First”. Later in the story, however, Gandalf tells Legolas that Treebeard “is the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth” (LR, The White Rider, 488). Celeborn much later in the story again refers to Treebeard as simply “Eldest” (LR, Many Partings, 959). Upon first reflection this appears to be an inconsistency, and it is hard to imagine that characters such as Bombadil, Gandalf or Celeborn would be wrong or have a motive to lie. Did Tolkien then simply fail to notice the contradiction? Or is the apparent irregularity reconcilable? In point of fact the two claims differ a little: whilst Bombadil claims to be simply “Eldest”, and Celeborn makes an equal claim for Treebeard, Gandalf is more detailed about the Ent’s origin, stating that he “is the oldest living thing” (emphasis added). Tom Shippey suggests that this could imply that Tom is not alive in a similar way as the Nazgul or Ringwraiths are undead – but that Bombadil’s character exists nonetheless in a category of one (Shippey 2005, 120-122). In his essay “Who is Tom Bombadil?” Gene Hargrove, believing that “Tom is not a nature spirit”, infers that the insinuation offered by Shippey – that Tom may not have life in a biological, earthly sense – is suggestive of a possibility that Bombadil is actually a member of the Valar: The word “living” probably means minimally that [Treebeard] is biotic, that is, an element belonging to the living system of the earth, the biosphere. There were in fact two classes of beings “living” in Middleearth, who, as beings from outside of Ea, were not part of this system: the

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The Enigmatic Mr. Bombadil Valar and their servants, the Maiar […] Instead, of placing Tom in an anomalous category of one, or associating him with the undead, Shippey's “inconsistency” may simply be a hint that Tom has extraterrestrial status as a Vala or Maia. (Hargrove 1986, 20-24)

Hargrove goes on to conclude that Tom is the Vala Aulë citing, amongst other factors, Bombadil’s reluctance to seek possession or control over anything: “since the lack of desire to possess or own was extremely rare among the Valar and the beings of Middle-earth, [and since] no other Vala is said to exhibit this moral trait, it seems reasonable to assume that Tom and Aulë are the same person” (Hargrove 1986, 20-24). Whilst Hargrove makes a determined case, it seems to me unwise to ignore Tolkien’s own declaration that Bombadil is the “spirit” of a dwindling pastoral landscape. Indeed in this context Tolkien’s use of the word “spirit” to describe Tom’s being is interesting – as a philologist Tolkien would have been aware of the ambiguous nature of the word. For me the possibility of differentiating between the statements – that Tom is “Eldest” and Treebeard “is the oldest living” being in Middle-earth is indeed testament to the fact that Tom is a “spirit” and not alive in the same sense that Treebeard is. Tom certainly has will, and power to execute that will, but as Galdor suggests, all his power lies “in the earth itself.” He therefore is a manifestation and representation of that natural power; waking and animate, but bound indelibly to the elemental power and fate of nature. There is one other creation in The Lord of the Rings which seems alive, but yet is possessed of a similar emblematic quality to that which marks Tom’s character, and understanding the nature of one may help to throw light on the nature of the other. I refer to the One Ring itself. The One Ring could not be said to be a living being in the same sense as Treebeard. The Ring, however, appears to have will and power of its own. Gandalf, recounting the history of how Gollum was parted from the Ring, tells Frodo, “It was not Gollum, Frodo, but the Ring itself that decided things. The Ring left him”. We are also told that “the Ring was trying to get back to its master” and that it “betrayed” Isildur (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 54). The Ring, then, like Tom, has influence and power over other living things but is nonetheless not alive in the truest sense. And, just as Tom is bound to the power and fate of the earth, so too the One Ring is tied to the malignant force and the destiny of Sauron, who in forging the One Ring poured much of himself and his malice into it. It is perhaps conceivable to suggest that Sauron too is not alive; we should remember, however, that although Sauron is not corporal, he is a corrupted Maia and an independent power and therefore not a representation or an evocation of a force in the manner of Tom. In Tom Bombadil and the One Ring, however, there lies the

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emblematic enshrinement of conflicting forces: nature and the will to power.10

IV. Tom as the Green Man In closing this discussion of the character of Tom Bombadil and his role as a representation of nature I would like to add a further thought to the raging debate of “Who is Tom Bombadil?” Or perhaps more accurately, ask anew – what are his origins? I submit that given the following three factors: 1. Tolkien’s own comments on Bombadil, 2. How Tom is portrayed and described as a character, 3. What Tom says, and what is said of him by other characters, it is reasonable to feel comfortable with the premise that Tom is the embodiment of nature itself or, as I have argued, the spirit of nature under threat. But whether this premise is accepted or rejected, many like Gene Hargrove and Jarred Lobdell have tried to account for Tom among the beings created within the spectrum of Tolkien's cosmology. I disagree with Hargrove’s conclusion that Bombadil is Aulë walking the earth in disguise (for one thing Aulë could not die, as is suggested of Tom – by Tolkien) but I concur with the sentiment that underscores Hargrove’s study: I personally find it inconceivable that there is no answer within the framework of the story to Frodo's question: “Who is Tom Bombadil?” Although Tolkien didn't want to tell his readers directly, it seems to me certain that he himself knew very well […] although he might not have wanted to tell his readers the correct answer, feeling that enigmas are important, he would nevertheless have left some clues for those who wanted to pursue the matter. (Hargrove 1986, 20-24)

In so pursuing it, I have come to believe that the “clues” related to Tom Bombadil’s origin actually lead us outside of Tolkien’s cosmology, and that the origin of “the spirit” Tolkien refers to when he speaks of Tom is that of 10

In contrast to the representation of nature made manifest in Bombadil one could also say that the One Ring is symbolic of the development of potentially destructive technology. Indeed Colin Duriez has determined that “[t]he Ring itself is a machine, the result of Sauron’s technological skills” (Duriez 2005, 149).

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the Green Man – an archetypal representation of the spirit of nature that dates back into prehistory. Often the image of the Green Man, usually a bearded face wreathed in leaves, is seen adorning the architecture of old Cathedrals or ancient buildings, but he has found his way into every aspect of culture and art. Tolkien, as a scholar of myth and mythology, would have been very familiar with the enduring legend of the Green Man, particularly as regards his studies of (and for) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the introduction to that work Tolkien, in association with his co-editor E.V. Gordon, comments “the greenness of the Knight, and his holly bob, are no doubt drawn from popular belief in a ‘green man’” (Tolkien and Gordon 1967, xx). Indeed some commentators such as Bob Curran and Ian Daniels in Walking with the Green Man: Father of the Forest, Spirit of Nature go a lot further and openly identify the Green Knight of the tale with the legend of the Green Man (Curran and Daniels 2007, 98). The first edition of Tolkien’s translation of the great medieval poem was published in 1925 and Tom Bombadil as a literary character first appears in the Oxford magazine in 1933, time enough perhaps for the Green Man to find his way into Tolkien’s creative thinking. John Matthews in The Quest for the Green Man suggests that once encountered or studied, legends related to the Green Man tend to take on “personal meaning” for the researcher: They have been studied at length by an increasing number of researchers, each of whom records his or her first encounter with the Green Man in terms of wonder which soon turns to passionate curiosity. They have found within the lore surrounding this figure a huge spectrum of personal meaning, ranging from feelings of nostalgia for a past long dead to the inspired recognition of the Green Man as the spirit of nature. (Matthews 2001, 21)

Certainly Matthews’ articulation that “the lore” connected or bound up with the Green Man resonates with “feelings of nostalgia” and that he has, to many, become “the spirit of nature” would ring true of Tolkien’s remarks concerning Tom Bombadil. Curran and Daniels offer that the appearance of the Green Man in modern culture often signifies “a longing look backwards to a simplified, less mechanical time” (Curran and Daniels 2007, 61) and again we are reminded of Tolkien’s comment that Tom represented the “vanishing” lands he knew well – “vanishing” as Tolkien would no doubt have concluded under the industrialised regime of the machine. Moreover, further study into commonly understood lore of the Green Man reveals a nature figure whose character traits (and mannerisms) are remarkably similar to those made evident in Tom Bombadil. Matthews for example tells us that

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across many incarnations throughout world culture the Green Man has been portrayed as a happy-go-lucky and convivial character who embraces life and the art of living with an unsuppressed delight. Furthermore as Matthews explains: “[h]e is a trickster too laughing both with us and at us – with us through the sheer joy of being and at us in our inability to comprehend and so embody his aliveness in our own lives” (Matthews 2001, 12). There is little question that Tom Bombadil possesses this “sheer joy of being”; but perhaps what is most noteworthy in this description of the Green Man is how the notion that he is a “laughing” “trickster” has obvious parity with the scene when Tom takes the ring from Frodo and mischievously causes it to disappear, laughing all the while: “Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air – and it vanished with a flash” (LR, In The House of Tom Bombadil, 130). Matthews goes on to offer reflections upon the Green Man throughout history that depict him as a laughing “spirit of the wood” and “messenger of nature” that is “dancing a curious springtime dance” (Matthews 2001, 12). The parallels with Tolkien’s portrayal of Bombadil are striking – when we first encounter Tom in The Lord of the Rings he is described as “singing carelessly and happily” whilst “hopping and dancing along the path” (LR, The Old Forest, 116-117). Later we are told “[o]ften his voice would turn to song, and he would get out of his chair and dance about” (LR, In The House of Tom Bombadil, 127). Tom’s character, wherever he appears, is decidedly marked (as are many representations of the Green Man) by this tendency to laugh, sing and dance a merry dance whatever the situation – even when faced with great danger. Tolkien instilled Bombadil with a kind of irresistible, natural life-force, and yet (as we have seen) Tolkien also cast him as a primordial, almost timeless figure. These distinguishing aspects of Bombadil’s persona are highly reminiscent of William Anderson’s suggestions in Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth that “[t]he Green Man signifies irrepressible life” and that as a character he comes to us “from the depths of prehistory” (Anderson 1990, 14). Anderson also points out that many cultural understandings of the Green Man present him as not only a physical representation but also as a spirit manifest in dance, verse or song: We think of the Green Man as a visual image […] but the emotions he expresses transcends the form and their vitality is equally powerful when transmitted through the dance or the dramatic rituals of folk custom and in the rhythms and melodies of poetry and song (Anderson 1990, 18).

Perhaps the fact that Tom first appears, from Tolkien’s imagination, in verse form in “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” is the clearest signifier

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that he is one such “transmission” of the Green Man legacy. And the Tom Bombadil we meet in The Lord of the Rings was placed into the story, as Tolkien himself stated “as he was” in other words with the persona presented previously in verse form – intact. Indeed in The Lord of the Rings Tom exactly mirrors his preceding poetic outing and is possessed of a prevailing inclination for song, dance, melody and verse. Even when Tom speaks (as opposed to when he actually bursts into song) he speaks in verse form. We see this exemplified when Tom first speaks to the Hobbits in the Old Forest: “Now, my little fellows, where be you a going to, puffing like a bellows?” (LR, The Old Forest, 117) Many other characteristics associated with the Green Man appear reflected in Tolkien’s portrayal of Tom Bombadil. Matthews, for example, offers that studies of the lore of the Green Man more often than not reveal an aspect of his persona as of a teacher or a giver of knowledge. “From the Green Man”, Matthews explains, “our ancestors learned the secrets of life […] the mystery of the seasons and the agricultural year, the lore of medicinal herbs and plants; the companionship of the natural world” (Matthews 2001, 12). Likewise Bombadil shares such knowledge with the Hobbits – explaining to them (amongst other things) “the ways of trees” and laying bare “secrets hidden under the brambles” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 127). Of course, as we noted earlier, Tom Bombadil has a lady by his side – Goldberry – and she is marked by many of the same characteristics that define Tom: a oneness with the natural world around her, a proclivity for song and dance, a welcoming and pleasant disposition. And as Matthews explains “[m]any aspects of the Green Man are partnered by a female aspect who bears identical or similar attributes” (Matthews 2001, 110). We see this recurrence of “a female aspect” again and again throughout various interpretive “versions” of the Green Man: Maid Marian to Robin Hood,11 Isis to Osiris12 and – as Tolkien would have been very aware – Lady Bercilak to the Green Knight. 11

The understanding of Robin Hood as the Green Man is a much older and perhaps more accurate myth than that which casts him as Robin of Loxley or Robin of Sherwood. In the elder myth he was known as “King of the Wood” and was an abiding symbol of fertility. Maid Marian as his female counterpart also was often portrayed as the mother or maid of the forest and a symbol of nature’s lifegiving qualities. 12 Osiris was an Egyptian god and one of the oldest known deities in civilization, dating back to 2500BC. He was associated with the power of fertile nature and rebirth and was often depicted as being green or green-skinned. Many students of the Green Man have celebrated him as among the first manifestations of the form.

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Perhaps more than any other characteristic, however, it is Tom Bombadil’s “vow of poverty”, his renunciation of power and his desire not to exploit but to live in harmony with the world around him that most aligns him with the legend of the Green Man. As Matthews tells us, “[t]he presence of the Green Man expresses an ancient ability to interact with our environment, to take only what we need to survive, and to preserve the rest” (Matthews 2001, 12). This is precisely what Tom Bombadil exemplifies in The Lord of the Rings: the desire to “interact” and understand rather than gain mastery, and in merely speaking to Frodo and the company of Hobbits, Tom opens out their minds to the community of nature. We recall the narrator’s words: “As they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves”. Likewise Matthews describes the Green Man as a “prophet” who “reminds us that we are not the lords of creation, but partners in the vast, living ecosystem that is our planet” (Matthews 2001, 12). I have argued for much of the above that Tom Bombadil is not just “the spirit of nature” but rather an evocation of nature under threat and I believe that is how he best may be understood. The “clues” to his origin mentioned by Gene Hargrove do not, I contend, lead us to the halls of the Valar or the gathering of the Maiar but rather more directly to the leafy doorstep of the Green Man. Indeed prominent among the Green Man’s many character traits, and emerging from many cultural understandings of his spirit, is this notion that he represents natural forces that are beginning to yield under the progressive assault of human activity. Matthews concludes “if anything [the Green Man] could be said to represent the spirit of nature and wildness that has been so steadily and completely encroached upon” (Matthews 2001, 39). In fact Matthews mentions The Lord of the Rings in his study of the Green Man, stating that “the character of Treebeard in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, [has] brought the presence of the Green Man back into our midst” (Matthews 2001, 39). There is no doubt that Treebeard displays many of the characteristics discovered in studies of the Green Man and that visually he would more resemble traditional manifestations of the appearance; but in terms of closely mirroring those attributes that most define popular understandings of the Green Man he falls far short of Tom Bombadil’s portrayal. It would be a stretching of the facts for instance to view Treebeard as a singing and dancing prankster who continually laughs whilst renouncing the power at his command. I can only suggest, therefore, that Matthews (whilst catching the spirit of Tom in Treebeard) opted for the

Isis may best be categorised as his sister-wife. She too had many associations with nature and natural forces.

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more visually arresting of Tolkien’s characters or simply that, as many have done before him, wrongly dismissed Tom as a dispensable anomaly in the tale. The reality of course is that Tolkien may have imbued more than one of his characters with the spirit of the Green Man, offering, as it were, differing aspects of that spirit. Indeed it is interesting to note that Philippa Boyens, scriptwriter for Jackson’s movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, decided, as Bombadil was cut from the script, to keep Tom’s “spirit” alive by giving some of his “lines” to Treebeard: [Tom Bombadil] is like a guardian of living things, and he is not in the movie, so of course we wanted to honour that spirit […] some people may recognise some of Tom’s lines as spoken by Treebeard. We figured that Tom wouldn’t mind us giving his lines to Treebeard of any character in the book. (Boyens 2003)

V. Closing Thoughts Of all the characters portrayed in Tolkien’s fiction, Tom Bombadil, more so even than Treebeard, could be said most to evoke the spirit of nature. Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings is both the embodiment of natural power and an exemplar of ecological ethics – his desire to understand and delight in other life forms, as Tolkien himself says “because they are ‘other’” (Letters, 192, emphasis in original), rather than to seek mastery over them, his “vow of poverty” (Letters, 178) and his surrendering of power casts him as a unique “natural pacifist” presence in Tolkien’s major work: who represents the interconnectedness and harmony of nature itself. This representation or incarnation of nature is, as we have seen, highly reminiscent of that primordial symbol of natural forces – the Green Man – a symbolic representation of nature that may be traced down through the culture and art of many ancient and modern civilizations. Indeed it is my contention that Tolkien created the character of Tom Bombadil from lore he had encountered related to the Green Man, casting him, as it were, from the mould of that legend. In The Lord of the Rings Bombadil appears as an antidote and counterforce to the overtly mechanistic depiction and oppressive presence of those such as Sauron and Saruman (Tom Shippey describes the White Wizard as “the most contemporary figure in Middleearth, both politically and linguistically” [Shippey 2000, 76]). And, in keeping with many cultural understandings of the Green Man, Tolkien’s portrayal of the character of Bombadil as, not just the spirit of nature but, as I have proposed, the spirit of nature under threat (or the “spirit of the (vanishing) […] countryside” (Letters, 26) sets Tom up against forces whose assault on the landscapes and ecology of Middle-earth becomes a

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vivid evocation of everything Tolkien feared was threatening the pastoral lands he knew well.

References Anderson, William. 1990. Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Boyens, Philippa. 2003. “The Appendices Part 3: From Book to Script: Finding the Story.” The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Dir. Peter Jackson, DVD Extended Version: New Line Cinema. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. Chance, Jane. 2001. Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Clark, George & Daniel Timmons, eds. 2000. J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth. Westport: Greenwood Press. Curran, Bob and Ian Daniels. 2007. Walking with the Green Man: Father of the Forest, Spirit of Nature. New Jersey: Career Press. Curry, Patrick. 1997. Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. London: HarperCollins. Day, David. 2001. Tolkien’s Ring. London: Pavilion Books. Dickerson, Matthew and Jonathan Evans. 2006. Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Duriez, Colin. 2005. J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Story of Their Friendship. Gloucestershire: The History Press. Fleming, Rutledge. 2004. The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings. Michigan: Eerdman’s Publishing. Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middleearth. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hargrove, Gene. 1986. “Who is Tom Bombadil?” Mythlore, 47 (4): 20-24. Honegger, Thomas and Frank Weinreich, eds. 2006. Tolkien and Modernity 1. Zurich and Berne: Walking Tree. Honegger, Thomas, ed. 2005. Reconsidering Tolkien. Zurich & Berne: Walking Tree.

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Jackson, Peter. 2002. “Appendices Part 1: From Book to Script.” The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Dir. Peter Jackson, DVD Extended Version: New Line Cinema. Light, Andrew. 2003. “Tolkien's Green Time: Environmental Themes in The Lord of the Rings.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson. Illinois: Open Court Publishing. Lobdell, Jared, ed. 1975. A Tolkien Compass. La Salle: Open Court. Matthews, John. 2001. The Quest for the Green Man. London: Godsfield Press. McKibben, Bill. 1989. The End of Nature. New York: Random House. Noel, Ruth S. 1977. The Mythology of Middle-earth. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin. Pearce, Joseph. 1999. Tolkien: Man and Myth. London: HarperCollins. Sale, Roger. 1973. Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H. Lawrence, William Empson and J.R.R. Tolkien. Berkley: University of California Press. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —. The Road to Middle-Earth. 2005. London: HarperCollins. Tennyson, Alfred. 2007. Selected Poems: Tennyson. Edited by Christopher Ricks. London: Penguin. Tolkien, J.R.R. and E.V. Gordon, eds. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd edition. Revised by N. Davies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tolkien. J.R.R. The Children of Húrin. 2007. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 2002. The History of Middle-earth Vol. 1: The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 1993. The History of Middle-earth Vol. 7: The Treason of Isengar. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 1997. The History of Middle-earth Vol. 8: The War of the Ring. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 2002. The History of Middle-earth Vol. 9: Sauron Defeated. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. —. 1996. The Hobbit. London: HarperCollins. —. 2006. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: HarperCollins. —. 1995. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. —. 1977. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin. —. 1966. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books.

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Treschow, Michael and Duckworth, Mark. 2006. “Bombadil’s Role in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 25 (1-2): 175-196. Tyler, J.E.A. 2002. The Complete Tolkien Companion 3rd edition. London: Pan Books. Wood, Ralph C. 2003. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Louisville: John Knox Press. Zimbardo, Rose, A. and Neil D. Isaacs, eds. 2005. Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. —. 1968. Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

TOM BOMBADIL – MAN OF MYSTERY KINGA JENIKE

The Lord of the Rings, one of the great treasures of 20th century English literature, is more than a simple tale. A fascinating mixture of legend, mystery and myth, invented languages and characters, both the archetypal and the truly original, with the traditional mix of the good and the bad, it has engaged scholars and entertained general readers since its publication. Most of the scholarly work on Tolkien’s opus has concerned itself with analogues, sources, and philosophical matters; less has looked at the work in terms of its fictional qualities as a work of literature. With one notable exception. Since its publication, one character has intrigued readers perhaps more than any other: of the fascinating major and minor characters the most interesting and enigmatic is surely Tom Bombadil. Determining who (or what) Tom Bombadil is is not easy. We can easily distinguish main groups of characters and arrange the major and minor figures among them. But Tom Bombadil does not seem to belong to any one group. However much we try to put him into a group and make comparisons with other group members, we always find differences. Sometimes it is his appearance, another time his internal values or magical power, which seem to show some similarity to other characters, although it is very difficult to declare for certain that he is a member of their particular group. Nevertheless, the aim of this essay is to try to find his origin and perhaps essence by making comparisons with other characters in the novel. If we begin with the most obvious classification: Tom Bombadil certainly is not an Orc. The difference appears, of course, at first sight; but appearances can be deceiving. Who would guess that Gollum is (or was) a Hobbit. The main difference which proves that Tom is not an Orc is that Orcs are absolutely wicked creatures. The counterfeits and corruptions of Elves that Morgoth managed to capture and modify according to his plan (Silm, 40), Orcs were made to be evil; their inclinations are always to wickedness and they have no tendency to establish any emotional link or friendship, even amongst themselves. Although there are incidents where members of the same “breed” act in concord against others (as during the

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captivity of Merry and Pippin, as well as of Frodo in the chamber of Shelob), these hardly present themselves as ties of friendship. It is rather a common aim or enemy that temporarily unites them than some bonds based on common principles or ideas. As Frodo aptly points out to Sam, hopeful that the quarrelling Orcs would kill each other and make their job easier, “they hate us far more, altogether and all the time. If those two had seen us, they would have dropped all their quarrel until we were dead” (LR, The Land of Shadow, 905). Tom Bombadil does not show any sign of hatred or desire to kill and destroy. Quite the contrary; his inclination is always to help and to save. It is also true that Tom is neither Troll nor Dragon, as these creatures are clearly altogether different in physical make up (although again appearances can be deceiving) as well as way of life and purpose, and have a fairly traditional history. They are simple in mind, show very little evidence of independent thought and most importantly have a tendency to be evil to others and gather possessions that do not belong to them. This is in stark contrast with Bombadil’s absolute indifference to the Ring that everybody, even the good characters, desire. Thus any identity here is more than unlikely. In appearance Bombadil looks like a Man or a Dwarf, at best, but apart from that there is not much similarity. The Dwarf’s natural surrounding is under the earth while Tom Bombadil lives in the forest. As to natural resources, the Dwarfs prefer the dead part of nature - stones, minerals, metals - that they work and shape as skilled craftsmen. Bombadil prefers everything that is green and grows, as well as the living creatures of nature. The Dwarfs seem to be rough, not very kind creatures, although they are usually peaceful and very good hosts. The main difference is that the Dwarfs are not immortal, nor are Men; their lives are also limited. But Tom is very old, older then everybody else. At least this is what he tells the Hobbits on their first meeting: Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside. (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 129)

But the most telling difference is that neither Men nor Dwarfs have special powers, but Tom does.

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The situation becomes more difficult when we compare Tom Bombadil with the Ents. As mentioned above, appearance is not always a basic difference, as Tom clearly does not look like a tree; but there are similarities: the Ents also live in the Old Forest and they have a particular relationship with their natural environment. They are old, older than other inhabitants in Middle-earth and they have wives – which is not common in this World – although they lost their Entwives and it is not clear that Goldberry is, technically, a wife. Still Tom Bombadil is not a kind of Ent. While it is true that these talking “trees” seem to possess special powers, it is also the case that being and seeming are two different things: their power arises rather from their physical strength. Otherwise, the Ents have the same mortal weakness as Men; even a simple axe can destroy them. The next group are the Hobbits. It may seem comical but Tom could easily be taken for an outsized Hobbit. Why not, since he is as kind and freehearted as many Hobbits, lives in peace, enjoys food and drink, and often seems a little bit careless in connection with the problems of the world. Furthermore, he seems to prefer an odd and colourful way of dressing, with his “bright blue jacket” and “yellow boots” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 122). But if this categorization were true it would not make sense for him to live separately from Hobbiton; and, as in the case of other Hobbits, he would be desirous of the Ring. Being of a Hobbit kind would also not account for his extraordinary powers. In turning to the Elves, it is clear that they are the first creatures we meet who are also immortal. In addition to the lines quoted above, Elrond spoke about Bombadil in this way: “[…] he was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 258). The fact that Elves have parents, as well as the fact that even the Lady Galadriel was affected by the power of the One Ring, whereas Tom was not, precludes this connection. According to the most likely assumption, Tom Bombadil is a Maia, since such powerful magi as Sauron, Saruman and Gandalf can be found in this group. In spite of the significant similarity of special powers, Tom does not belong in this group, either. While everybody wishes to possess the Ring, including the magi - either to use it to gain power or to destroy it in order to stop the war - Tom Bombadil does not show any interest in connection with it at all. When Elrond suggested in the council that they should ask Tom’s help, Gandalf replied: “[…] the Ring has no power on him. He is his own master” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259). - an observation which is confirmed by Tom’s own playful behaviour with the Ring. Moreover, Tom, unlike Gandalf, can actually see Frodo while he is

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wearing the Ring, an ability that he surprisingly shares with Sauron. But Sauron sees Frodo because, by wearing the Ring, he enters into his own evil power and realm; Tom’s ability seems to come from a completely different source. The conclusion which can be drawn from this is that we have to take a different line in order to solve the mystery of Tom’s identity. Tolkien invested Tom Bombadil with mystery rather well since it is not only readers who cannot know who he is, neither can characters in the novel. When Frodo asked Goldberry who Tom Bombadil is, exactly, she replied: “He is…. He is as you have seen him” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 122). Since he did not understand the answer, he also asked Tom Bombadil. Tom answered: “Eh, what? …Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer”1 (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 129). Does this information lead to the solution? How will we learn the name? And will that provide an answer to his essence? So the question remains: who was Tom Bombadil exactly? Was he just an absolutely unimportant person and was Peter Jackson right when he simply left him out him of the film adaptation? I think not. Tom Bombadil is a very important character and his story is not just a colourful episode in the novel. Tolkien’s own words verify this: Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a “comment.” I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. (Letters, 178)

This letter reveals two important facts: one, that Tom was not an episode but had some function in the novel; two, that the figure of Tom Bombadil existed before The Lord of the Rings. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tom Bombadil was a well-known figure in the Tolkien family, for the character was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael. The doll looked very splendid with the feather in its hat, but John did not like it and one day stuffed it down the lavatory. Tom was rescued, and survived to become the hero of a poem [...] (Biography, 216).

  1

This echoes the answer given to Moses when he inquires into the identity of God: ‘I am Who am.” And God, too, was “fatherless.”

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This was the story of his birth; but his story was not finished at all. This loveable figure became so important for Tolkien that he wrote many poems about him. The first, “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,” was published in The Oxford Magazine in 1934, and later included in an eponymous volume of poems. At first sight, he was a kind, funny-looking forester who would be a loveable character in bed-side stories. But there is other information, as well. We learn Tom’s residence, and we meet Old Man Willow and Goldberry – both of whom later appear in The Lord of the Rings. However, from this poem alone nobody would suspect that his story would continue. More interesting was the next poem in which he appeared, “Bombadil Goes Boating”. Here, too, we get more information about Middle-earth: Bombadil met hobbits (I've seen hobbit-folk digging holes to hide 'em), left Grindwall, and saw the Brandywine. He reached as far as the Shire and Bree, met Old Maggot and his family - who treated him as kindly as he later did the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. After this second poem it was not unreasonable to think that Tolkien began the story of Middle– earth and, possibly, that the whole trilogy developed in part from the Bombadil-story. Considering all the information we have about him, there are two arguable solutions for Tom Bombadil’s origin. According to the first, he might be source of the idea of The Lord of the Rings, that the whole story developed from this funny-looking, kind forester whose adventures inspired the work. Tolkien evidently liked him, since he did not write just one poem about him, but continued his story. Maybe Tom’s story developed into the novel so that Tolkien might give him a special role; that is why he made him so enigmatic. If this assumption is true it is also possible that Tolkien wanted to requite the “help” of Tom Bombadil by putting him into the novel. But his appearance and character did not fit well into the long narrative of the Middle-earth story, so the author put him in a particular place and did not let him cross the boundaries in order to prevent him from taking part in the events. But in this way Tom Bombadil would have become a minor character, a colourful but absolutely superfluous episode. But Tolkien was careful to create the opposite. Tolkien made him important in a very interesting way: he created an enigma. Nobody knows, neither inside nor outside the novel, who he is; but everybody is made to believe that he is a very important character. Although he does not leave the forest, his name appears in connection with important events. As stated earlier, Elrond, the King of the Elves, suggested

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him as a safe repository for the Ring. At the very end of the novel Gandalf said that he had to speak with him before travelling: I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another. (LR, Homeward Bound, 974)

In this way Tolkien continually kept him in the centre of interest and did not allow him to become superfluous. If this was Tolkien’s aim, he seems to have managed it. Tom Bombadil has become an enigma, the subject of controversy for many amateur and professional literary scholars.2 Another, perhaps more ingenious solution is that Tom Bombadil was Tolkien himself. It is not unprecedented that the creator wanted to be a part of his creation in some way3. Tom Bombadil is often called “The Master”, which could refer to the author, the “maker” of the novel. While reading the novel it is possible to feel a connection with Tom, although he does not belong, exactly, to it. But it is also the case that he is so special and unique that Tolkien could not have put him in it without a reason, as Tolkien himself stated in the quotation cited above. This might explain why Tom did not leave the forest. Tolkien wanted him to be only a minor but specific part of the novel, without a particular role or power. This argument is supported by Gandalf, when he speaks in the council: He cannot alter the Ring itself, nor break its power over others. And now he is withdrawn into a little land, within bounds that he has set, though none can see them, […] and he will not step beyond them. (LR, The Council of Elrond, 259)

So Tolkien created a set place for him and materialized his presence; thus, while he was part of the novel, he was not an important part of the narrative.4 Other evidence of this assertion is the quotation cited above in which Tom narrates his past to the Hobbits. His accurate description leads easily to the conclusion that Tom Bombadil was the first before everything. He saw all the members of Middle–earth arriving afterwards, since he created

  2

See the essay by Liam Campbell in this volume. There is of course a long tradition of British authors inserting themselves into their works, often in cameo appearances. This is true of American writers, as well. We think of Joyce, Roth, Nabokov, and, of course, Chaucer to name a few. 4 This is the argument Jackson made for omitting him from the films. 3

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them in a figurative sense. This is why he did not fit into any of the groups, and has so few similarities with other characters: he was the first, older than anybody – the writer who was “outside” and before the story. (Fatherless – as Tolkien certainly was – both in terms of his life, and, as for the novel – he is the father who created them all.) There is yet one final fact which might also be used as evidence. As noted above, in the house of Tom Bombadil Frodo put the ring round his finger, but Tom could still see him: “Hey! Come Frodo, there! Where be you a-going? Old Tom Bombadil’s not as blind as that yet. Take off your golden ring!” (In the House of Tom Bombadil, 131) In the novel only we – the readers – can “see” Frodo while he is wearing the Ring; that is, only those people who are outside the novel can see him. Thus Tom, like Tolkien himself, was both insider and outsider, seeing everything. Tom Bombadil’s story did not finish with the story of Middle-earth; he lived beyond his days in The Lord of the Rings. We can meet him again in a poem which was published first in Winter Tales for Children in 1965, and later in The Young Magician in 1969, just some years before the writer’s death. In the melancholy tones of “Once upon a Time” Tom Bombadil appears in a slightly different way. He does not seem to be as happy as earlier, and he does not wear his yellow boots. Although Goldberry is next to him, we cannot meet any other characters, not even Old Willow. In this poem, Tom seems old and tired, as if he feels that his story will soon be finished. In this poem Tom also meets the lintips who (or which) are new creatures we have not met before, a new and probably last enigma from Tolkien. Does their origin and identity contain a hint as to Tom’s identity? This is another story. But there is, however, one certain conclusion: Tolkien finished the story of Tom Bombadil as he began it: he left a specific and enigmatic “merry fellow” whose personality and purpose provide food for thought, and for good natured academic controversy.

References Carpenter, Humphrey. 2002. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: HarperCollins. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Available at http://aelib.org.ua/ texts-c/tolkien__the_adventures_of_tom_bombadil__en.htm [Accessed September 1, 2010] —. 1995. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. —. 2006. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.). London: HarperCollins.

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—. 2004. The Silmarillion. London: HarperCollins.

GROTESQUE CHARACTERS IN TOLKIEN’S NOVELS THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS SILVIA POKRIVýÁKOVÁ AND ANTON POKRIVýÁK

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fixed interest in and inspiration from myths of various origins (mostly Norse and Welsh myths, Icelandic sagas, and Finnish mythical epic poems) have been widely discussed. In opposition to numerous critics, however, Tolkien himself considered myths to be more realistic and “true” than any other realistic literature. In his study “J.R.R. Tolkien: Truth and Myth,” Joseph Pearce (2001) records the following fragment of discussion between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: “Myths,” Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.” “No,” Tolkien replied. “They are not lies. Far from being lies they were the best way - sometimes the only way - of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.”

We will begin our discussion of the role of the grotesque in Tolkien’s work by drawing attention to his lecture on Beowulf in which he identified the importance of monsters for an appropriate understanding of the literary value as well as ethical meaning of the myth, claiming that monsters, as distinguishing characters of Beowulf and other ancient myths, are “essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the problem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness” (Tolkien 1983, 7). Tolkien believed that because these “fantastic elements” lead readers under the surface of the plot, directly to the truth of the past, they must be

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respected as essential parts of the works. The aim of this paper is then to identify the meanings of those monsters and other literary characters in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which can be easily recognized by their grotesqueness of various types and degrees.

I.

The Grotesque and Grotesqueness

The formulation of the grotesque is one of the oldest means of figurative thinking; having gone through a dynamic and complex development over the millennia, the archaic grotesque was, first of all, a result of the primary activity of consciousness reflecting on and trying to explain the reality of the world. However, its emergence as a distinct figuration goes back to the Renaissance when, in the 15th century, a unique kind of oriental ornament was found during archaeological excavations at the underground parts of Tito’s spas in Rome as well as in other parts of Italy. This oriental ornament was by then thought to have been brought to the territory of contemporary Christianity only with the spread of Christianity, i.e. significantly later. This new kind of decorative art acquired its name from the underground caves in which the ornaments were found: the grotesque – from the Italian “grotto”, i.e. the cave, underground. In the 16th century, elements of the grotesque gradually spread from the art of wall painting to classical painting and sculpture, which is evidenced by, for example, the grotesques of Raphael which decorate the papal loggias (cca. 1515) In these the famous painter replaced abstract Oriental motifs with real objects (e.g. flowers and animals). In addition to its playfulness and carefree fancifulness, for the Renaissance humanists the grotesque was also a means of expressing the corruption, “madness”, and general sinfulness of human life. Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel1,

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The Rabelais grotesque was analysed by the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin who, in his work Rabelais and His Work, defined the basic features of Renaissance grotesqueness: 1. universality of material-bodily principle, 2. hyperbolisation of phenomena in a positive sense, emphasising fertility and abundance; 3. degradation of all the noble; 4. omnipresent freeing ambivalence of grotesque laughter; and 5. description of phenomena in the stage of un-readiness, non-completeness, change that is just happening. According to Bakhtin, the carnival-grotesque imagery can free itself from any conditionality, from generally accepted truths, from everything usual, common and generally valid. The grotesque allows for looking at the old world in a new way, feeling the relativity of the existing world order, and a possibility of its totally new arrangement. However, the result is not a feeling of helplessness and horror, as emphasised by the

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Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s tragedies2, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel and Jacques Callot are further examples. Even though in Classicism the grotesque imagination - so foreign to the clear and rational understanding of the world which Classicism attempted to provide - was forced to the area of low art, more exactly to the area of the low comic (such an understanding of the grotesque appears also in its first theoretical description by Giorgio Vasari – as mentioned in Losev and Šestakov 1978, 331), there are also works which defend the value of the grotesque as art. Justus Möser (1761) did not agree with the Aristotelian definition of the comic as the “lack which does not cause suffering”, but rather presented it as a portrayal of the “great without strength” (“die Größe ohne Stärke”): “If we suppose that this definition of the funny is correct [...], then the highest model of the funny is the caricature painting in which the image of the object is increased and its inner soul or strength is decreased, as much as possible” (ibid, 332). He saw in the grotesque the “chimerical”, the connection of foreign elements, the breakup of natural proportions (hyperbole), the use of caricature and parody. As in other 18th century authors the concept of the grotesque is connected with the analysis of a caricature portrayal. Christopher Martin Wieland claims that there are three types of caricature: 1) a proper caricature, where the author reproduces real disproportions as he/she observed them; 2) an overdrawn, exaggerated caricature where the author stresses, gradates the monstrosity of the subject, but keeps a similarity with the model; and 3) a clearly fantastic caricature or grotesque, where the author sets fantasy totally free, using monstrous creations, unnatural and absurd products of human imagination to evoke laughter, disgust, as well as surprise and horror (see Kayser 1963, 30-31). He concludes that the essence of the grotesque is its total separation from reality, since it denies the most fundamental rules valid in a commonly understood world. The grotesque does not imitate, but is a product of the unbounded imagination of the author. According to Wolfgang Kayser, the romantic grotesque is characteristic of the motifs of madness, mask and marionette. Laughter stops being cheerful and happy, and is reduced to a form of irony and sarcasm. The important representatives of romantic literature, who significantly influenced

 Romantic and modernistic authors, as well as by Wolfgang Kayser, but, on the contrary, a feeling of inexhaustibility, non-confinement and variability of life. 2 See W. Knight’s The Wheel Of Fire (1931) and his interpretations of grotesque elements in Shakespeare’s King Lear; even today this book is considered one of the basic sources for the theory of the grotesque.

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also the theory of the grotesque, include Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul, Victor Hugo, Friedrich W. Hegel, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Friedrich Schlegel, like Johann Wolfgang Goethe, does not draw a distinction between the concepts of the grotesque and the arabesque; thus when he discusses arabesques he in fact provides a description and definition of the grotesque. In his Athenaeum Schlegel claims that the grotesque is constituted through an antagonistic contrast between form and content, through an unstable mixture of heterogeneous elements and an explosive strength of the paradoxical, which has a funny as well as horrific effect. (Schlegel and Schlegel 1989, 348)

The grotesque, in his opinion, is characteristic by a bizarre connection of foreign elements of reality, a breaking up of the world order, free fantasy and an alternation of enthusiasm and irony. He considers it to be a natural form of poetry. The understanding of the grotesque as one of the basic constructive principles of art can also be found in Ruskin’s theory of symbolic grotesque (Ruskin 1894). Ruskin maintains that in the attempts to capture transcendence, the eternal and unchanging truths, to depict the undepictable, the divine - what is left to man is an unavoidable deformation of the absolute, its adaptation to human abilities of perception. In the 19th century the grotesque was perceived as a kind of low vulgar comic, or as a special kind of satire. Heinrich Schneegans defines it, for example, as a rare kind or caricature representing a marked type of negating satire, “the augmentation of that which should not be” (Schneegans 1884, 62) to monstrous, fantastic dimensions, and, through this, subjecting the depicted phenomenon to moral criticism. This gloominess and indeterminacy resulted in the grotesque’s becoming a frequent device in Modernist attempts at philosophical and poetic reform of twentieth century art, as well. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, for example, distinguished two types of the comic: 1) the “semantic”, common comic, and 2) the grotesque or “absolute comic”. While the first type of the comic was perceived as an expression of superiority of man over man and, from the artistic point of view, considered as imitation, the second type, according to Baudelaire, is the manifestation of the superiority of man over nature, according to the dominant creation principle. In his reflections Baudelaire continues the romantic explanation of the grotesque, explaining it, as with all forms of the manifestation of the comic, by means of the “initial absurdness and unsightliness of the world or the sinfulness of human nature.” The grotesque is understood as a

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phenomenon belonging to nature and human fantasy, and foreign to human society and morality. It is “an expression of inner ugliness and tragic nonsensicality of the world” (quoted according to Losev and Šestakov 1978, 336 – translated by AP). One of the most elaborate analyses of the nature of the grotesque imagination is the extensive work of Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature. His is the first scholarly work which focused on the issues of the theory of the grotesque in Europe. Kayser here provides a detailed description of the concept of the grotesque and a gradual enriching of its meaning in the visual and verbal arts. Differentiation of individual types of the grotesque is achieved by means of the historical approach, with greatest emphasis on the works and theory of the Romantic and Modernistic grotesque (Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and others), while preceding periods (Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance) are mentioned only marginally. This may be why he distinguishes just two types of the grotesque: 1) the fantastic (romantic) grotesque constructed as a dream world, and 2) the radically satirical grotesque constructed as a world of masks. Kayser also defines some of the most important motifs of Modern grotesque works: monsters; fusion of organic and mechanical elements; human bodies reduced to puppets, marionettes and automats with faces petrified to masks; madness. In his opinion, the Modern grotesque represents the “alienated” world, “not reflecting the fear of death, but the fear of life” (Kayser 1963, 184). In contemporary aesthetics and literary studies the grotesque can be understood as: • a type of ornament in visual arts – for example the Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics claims that “the grotesque is an ornamental motif of plants, animals and people; either real or fantastic” (Souriau 1994, 307); • a literary trope – a specific case of compound figurative denomination close to metonymy, a structured set of compositional and stylistic elements and procedures (transformed from visual to verbal art) evoking a specific reception effect. The grotesque in the position of a trope is understood as a turn of phrase based on the transfer of the meaning of word, when the signs of one phenomenon characterise another phenomenon, trying to explain it, or to create a clearer idea about it. In such cases the grotesque, as allegory or irony, “shows hidden relationships among things, makes their content visible, though in fact they do not have an immediately observable, concrete sensual form” (Timofejev and Turajev, 1981 – translated by AP);

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• a genre of literary, dramatic, cinematic, as well as visual arts. As for its literary meaning, the grotesque is most often taken to be a short prose form with grotesque elements, or with a grotesque point (some short stories of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Edgar Allan Poe, etc.); in theatrical art the grotesque is a “dramatic genre with a grotesque story” (Žilka 1987, 298); in cinematic art it is connected especially with short cinematic forms containing a grotesque-comic point (Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Voskovec and Werich, and so on).

II.

Tolkien’s Grotesque Characters

Tolkien’s literary works (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will be discussed here) are inhabited by numerous grotesque creatures. In his treatment, these creatures are not only examples of aesthetics and a subversive imagination (as illustrated above), but bear clearly recognizable ethical features as well; some of Tolkien’s grotesque characters belong to the powers of the good, while others are servants of evil. Their affiliation with either the good or the bad lies in the characters’ relationship to nature, for nature (always playing an essential role in Tolkien works) is “integral to life“(Di Frances, 2009) and is always identified by Tolkien with the good (see Keenan 1968 or Lobdell 1981). All characters with grotesque elements are in aesthetic or moral opposition either to Elves (as embodiments of “ideality”) or to Men (as manifestations of “normality, “reality”). The latent opposition of grotesque characters to the characteristics of fictional Men (or non-fictional people) is what makes Tolkien’s novels so extraordinary and their reception continue to be so overwhelming.

III.

Trolls and Orcs: Materialisation of Evil and Moral Wickedness

A discussion of grotesque characters in Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology is usually begun by the critics’ concentration on the monsters: Trolls and Orcs. Trolls with their huge size (usually twelve or more feet tall), incredible physical strength, but extremely poor character and intellect, exactly personify the concept of the grotesque as Justus Möser saw it back in 1761. The grotesque, in his words, is the image of the great without strength („die Größe ohne Stärke”) where the outer size of an object is extremely enlarged and its inner strength or soul is, on the contrary, as weak as possible (quoted according to Losev and Šestakov 1978, 332). Orcs, on the other hand, are of normal human size; their shapes, however,

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are radically deformed. They are depicted as ugly, with deformed facial traits, fanged, dark-skinned, bow-legged, and with long arms. Their habits and acts are as contemptible as those of Trolls, though intellectually they are more refined, and thus more vicious. While Orcs occasionally act and make an impression of the comic, Trolls in Tolkien’s works operate as creatures of utmost abomination and resistance, ridiculous only by their narrow-mindedness and awkwardness. Trolls and Orcs represent the powers of evil in the “rawest” possible, un-hidden visual manifestation. Their deformed, exaggerated traits, both inner and outer, act as a type of negating satire, “the augmentation of that which should not be” (Schneegans 1884, 62). Their grotesqueness is an instrument of their moral criticism (Schneegans 1884). Both Trolls and Orcs thus stand in open opposition to all powers of good. “Always hungry” for blood and meat of other creatures, hating everybody - even themselves - they are eager to destroy anything and hurt anybody. The evil-nature and incompleteness of Orcs and Trolls is emphasized even by their origin. In one passage in The Two Towers Treebeard explains the opposition between Ents and Trolls: “Trolls are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves. We are stronger than Trolls. We are made of the bones of the earth” (LR, Treebeard, 474). Being born by mockery, created by anybody but God, Trolls are weaker than Ents not only physically, but also morally. Or, as Frodo had it: “Shadow ... can only mock, it cannot make: no real new things of its own” (LR, The Land of Shadow, 896).

IV.

Gollum: Monster of Continual and Unfinished Transformation

One of the most remarkable characters, overflowing with grotesque traits, is Gollum. He was born as the Hobbit Sméagol. Since stealing the One Ring and becoming its slave, he has been continually transforming into a monster. This transformation is continual and never to be finished. The result of such an unfinished transformation is a real “monster”, unpredictable and devious. His grotesque transformation/deformation is multileveled, embracing his communication abilities, physical appearance, personal qualities and moral credit. Under the One Ring’s influence, the first trait to suffer was Gollum’s morality – causing him to steal and commit various iniquities on his friends and neighbours, who banished him. In his deep social isolation, he developed a kind of schizophrenia with two constantly quarrelling personalities. Communication deformations

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can be noticed in the way he speaks: he speaks always in the first person, his originally hobbit body has become scrawny and deathly pale, though unexpectedly strong and limber (the grotesque unity of contrasts). Gollum is a symbol of hunger for power and its destructive effects. He voluntarily abandons all the values he knew to be good, leaves his home and becomes a slave to evil. The continual changes in his appearance and behaviour from the “normal” to the “grotesque” mark his inner moral necrotization. The grotesque here thus has the same function as in the case of the Trolls and Orcs: it makes apparent what would stay hidden and dynamically emphasizes the fundamental ethical conflict between good and evil.

V.

Dwarves: Grotesque as Ambiguity

Tolkien’s dwarves are rather ambiguous creatures - in their appearance as well as their habits. Their appearance is defined by the grotesque unity of contrasting and, at first glance, contradictory elements. Dwarves are traditionally depicted as dark-skinned and haired, with ugly features, extraordinary figures having the heads of old men and the bodies of children. Their grotesqueness is based on the presence of a sharp contrast between the two opposites of the same phenomenon (youth and age); the conflict is solved, as a matter of fact, non-antagonistically, through a coexistence of the opposites in one unit. In dwarves, such opposites connected into one unit are childhood and age. (The importance of the dwarves’ appearance is demonstrated by a rather ridiculous discussion between Tolkien and his illustrators on whether dwarf-women in Middleearth have beards – of course they must have beards from the beginning of their lives, as one of the distinguishing traits of their race, he claimed). Dwarves thus represent the very essence of the grotesque: they are “both funny and frightening at the same time” (Schlegel and Schlegel 1989, 348). Tolkien respects and follows the tradition of ambivalent dwarves in his myth as well. In his earlier works (The Silmarillion, e.g.), dwarves appeared as evil beings; later they “improve”, sometimes becoming even comical, though still keeping some less noble characteristics as, for example, extreme pride and greed. The ethical ambivalence of Tolkien’s dwarves is clearly seen in their relationship to nature: they do not take care of it, they do not live in and with nature, as do the Ents, nor do they build and maintain beautiful gardens, as do the Elves, or grow plants and animals, as do Men and Hobbits. Dwarves rather look for, take and use what nature created without their effort (they are miners). They exploit

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nature’s resources (stone, metal ore) without giving anything back to it. They may act this way, however, because they live underground in order to be as close as possible to earth. They love earth (note Gimli’s description of underground beauty) and respect it. And thus it could be said that dwarves do not exploit nature, but just use, with respect, what the earth offers them. Dwarves’ grotesqueness here serves as an element of their characterization, opening the perspective of a possible link between their morphological and ethical ambiguity.

VI.

Hobbits: Grotesque Bon Vivants

Compared to other Middle-earth beings, hobbits are the closest to the carnivalesque grotesque. They like good society, good food (enjoying at least seven meals a day), good beer, good times, and bright colours. They are embodiments of a zest for the good life of enjoyment. Their carnivalesqueness is underlined by several physical deformities: short in height (between two and four feet), slightly pointed ears and unexpectedly (if compared to the “referential” human proportions) large feet covered with thick curly hair. Tolkien provided this description of Hobbits in one of his letters: I picture a fairly human figure, not a kind of “fairy” rabbit as some of my British reviewers seem to fancy: fattish in the stomach, shortish in the leg. A round, jovial face; ears only slightly pointed and “elvish”; hair short and curling (brown). The feet from the ankles down, covered with brown hairy fur. Clothing: green velvet breeches; red or yellow waistcoat; brown or green jacket; gold (or brass) buttons; a dark green hood and cloak (belonging to a dwarf). (Letters, 35)

Hobbits, like Ents, living in the country, display a tendency to a bucolic way of life. They live in and with nature. Unlike Trolls, Orcs and Dwarves, Hobbits eat and use what they can produce through gardening and farming: bread, milk, cheese, tea, ale, potatoes, mushrooms and tobacco. Despite these highly valuable qualities (according to Tolkien’s mythical taxonomy), they remain as ambivalent as dwarves, although there is a difference in degree. The Hobbits’ physical appearance, as we have learned from previous cases, suggests that there is something wrong with them. While their round faces and curly hair are reminiscent of small Rubensian angels, and their figures express their love for an abundance of food and comfort, and thus suggest nothing negative, or alarming, their height and foot size makes them different and disharmonious. Small stature is here associated with “littleness”, isolationism and ignorance;

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readers become aware that Hobbits care little for creatures and events outside the Shire, and do not like travelling or adventures, either. Big hairy feet may symbolize materialism, hidden smallness and baseness. Hobbits thus can be seen not only as comic caricatures of typical English countrymen, but also as a critical satire of those qualities that Tolkien would rather like to wipe away. However, there is a flash of light and hope: it is the Hobbit who was chosen “to save the world” and on whose strength and bravery the salvation of Middle-earth fully depends. In line with traditions of Christian myth, Frodo, as one of the smallest, became the biggest; he was the last who became the first. But is it not strange that, while Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin are celebrated as heroes everywhere, the Shire, again wrapped up in itself, seems to be ignorant of any news?

VII.

Ents: Grotesque Celebration of Life and Nature

The exterior grotesqueness of Treebeard and the other Ents, as a result of the symbiosis of a human and a tree, is obvious. Treebeard, the eldest of all Ents, is pictured during his meeting with Merry and Pippin as follows: They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. (LR, Treebeard, 452)

Together with Elves, from among all other beings of Middle-earth, Ents seem to be closest to nature: [...] the Ents gave their love to things that they met in the world [...] the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path; and they learned of the Elves and spoke with the Trees. (LR, Treebeard, 464)

Ent grotesqueness, based upon mixing human and inhuman concepts into transcendental unities, is of the archaic quality. By their appearance

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and manners, they manifest the one-time, very close and intense connection between men and nature. Treebeard’s hyperbolic appearance brings us directly to the very ancient times when man was seen as an integral part of the cosmos and nature. Man did not feel himself isolated from the world of plants and animals and stars, since he knew that he was directly determined by everything that surrounded him, a knowledge which may be documented as early as in the oldest mythological stories and arts of the Egyptians, Chinese, Etruscans, Aztecs, Greeks, Jews and other ancient nations. These ideas were later reflected in the philosophy of the Renaissance. Comenius, for instance, supposed identical fundamentals in the existence of three basic systems - man, nature, cosmos - and believed that discovering ontological rules of one system would automatically open the knowledge of the other two (Pokrivþáková, 2002). In ancient arts, this belief was often expressed by mixing human, plant and animal elements, leading to the creation of “strange“ unities of contrasting qualities (which Kayser 1963 calls fantastic grotesque), mostly in the function of deities (the effort to explain unknown laws and forces of nature). The grotesque appearance of Treebeard is undermined by his inner qualities. Despite his age, huge size and power, even despite the bad destiny of his species, there is nothing horrific or cruel about him. He is good-hearted, caring and humorous: One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground — asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years. (LR, Treebeard, 452)

In spite of all the fantastic grotesqueness and bucolic about them, Ents are tragic characters. Instead of a life-celebrating grotesque emphasizing the opulence, hyperbolized fertility, and regenerative powers of life (bacchanal), we witness here a kind of finitude, a nearing end (Bachtin, 1973, 158-159). The reason is obvious: “There have been no Entings – no children, you would say, not for a terrible long count of years. You see, we lost the Entwives.” “How very sad!” said Pippin. “How was it that they all died?” “They did not die!” said Treebeard. “I never said died. We lost them, I said. We lost them and we cannot find them.” (LR, Treebeard, 464)

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Treebeard and the Ents represent the life powers of nature. Being so close to it, they posses its unlimited life energy. One of the consequences is that they do not die. They just lose each other, as in the case of the Entwives or Entlings, or they grow tree-ish (when the circle of the grotesque metamorphosis of a man into a tree is completed). Treebeard and the Ents thus become not embodiments of the inexhaustible powers of nature; instead, they become sad personifications of a Modern nostalgia for the old times: their wisdom, stillness, calmness and green nature (compare Di Frances 2009). We are tree-herds, we old Ents. Few enough of us are left now. Sheep get like shepherd, and shepherds like sheep, it is said; but slowly, and neither have long in the world. It is quicker and closer with trees and Ents, and they walk down the ages together. (LR, Treebeard, 457)

Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin, pointing to the continual destruction of nature in Middle-earth. As in a mirror we see and feel here Tolkien’s pastoral, anti-urban and anti-industrial instincts (Rossi 1984, 131) coded into his mythology. No wonder B. J. Birzer saw Treebeard as “the ultimate personification of Tolkien’s antimodernism” (Birzer 2002, 113). In conclusion, it is clear that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings show how the grotesque, as a unique way of artistic imagination, constructs its world through the imaginative completion of a known reality through the use of mechanisms of irrationality. The grotesque enables readers to grasp the otherwise inexpressible and ungraspable aspects of the world and human existence by offering, in addition to its literal meaning, the meanings going “beyond”. It is thus an artistic tool to help portray the transcendent, to depict the undepictable, to express the inexpressible, the divine. Man cannot avoid deformation of the absolute, its adaptation to human perception. The grotesqueness of characters in Tolkien’s novels helps construct and highlight value taxonomy derived from Christian myth. Tolkien’s grotesque only rarely casts doubt, for it rather serves as a means of strengthening the meaning: the enrichment of a feeling of disgust and horror in the case of Trolls and Orcs, or a highlighting of the quality of ancientness and positive life force in the case of Ents. Grotesqueness of character is contrasted with the everyday and the average, which may evoke in readers a strong emotional experience of the text perceived through the deformations of reality and the intensification of fixed values. The grotesque often results in adding to the process of reading a feeling of tension, of uncertainty coming from the unexpected, the unknown, and, in causing ambivalence, indeterminacy through a continual

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weakening, interfering with, and transgressing the borders of parallel (otherwise not overlapping) or contrasting systems and worlds (laughter and fear, approval and rejection, admiration and disgust, reality and fantasy), which significantly increases the effect of its reception. Moreover, the grotesque’s unbounded imaginativeness and rationality makes it a significant instrument of self-reflection – especially in the turning periods of history. In Tolkien it becomes one of the instruments for the reflection of a continual moral decline, characterised by the development of a society based exclusively on consumerism, materialism, industrialisation, and environmental destruction.

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Kayser, Wolfgang. 1963. The Grotesque. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Keenan Heather T. 1968. “The Appeal of The Lord of the Rings: A Struggle for Life.” In Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 62 – 80. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Kilby, Clyde. S. 1979. “Meaning in The Lord of the Rings”. In Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Edited by Mark R. Hillegas, 70 – 80. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Knight, G. Wilson. 1931. The Wheel of Fire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Landow, George P. “The Symbolical Grotesque – Theories of Allegory, Artist, and Imagination.” Available at http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/ruskin/atheories/5.4.html [Accessed January, 2010] Lobdell, Jared. 1981. England and Always: Tolkien’s World of the Rings. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Losev, Alexander F., and Vasilij P. Šestakov. 1978. Dejiny estetických kategórií. Bratislava: Pravda. McElroy, Bernard. 1989. .Fiction of the Modern Grotesque. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pearce, Joseph. “J.R.R. Tolkien: Truth and Myth.“ Originally in Lay Witness (September 2001). Available at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0107.html [Accessed January, 2010] Pokrivþáková, Silvia. 2002. Karnevalová a satirická groteska. Nitra: Garmond. Rossi, Lee D. 1984. The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press. Ruskin, John. 1894. “Grotesque Renaissance”. In The Stones of Venice. Volume 3, 102-50. New York: Bryan, Taylor & Company. —. 1904. The Stones of Venice. The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Schlegel, August. W. and Friedrich Schlegel. 1989. Athenaeum: eine Zeitschrift. T. 1. Dortmund: Harenberg. Schneegans, Heinrich. 1884. Geschichte der grotesken Satire. Strassburg: K. Trubner. Segal, Robert. 2004. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Segura, Eduardo and Thomas Honegger, eds. 2007. Myth and Magic: Art according to the Inklings. Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. HarperCollins. Souriau, Etienne. 1994. Encyklopedie estetiky. Praha: Victoria Publishing. Timofejev, Leonid I., and Sergej V. Turajev. 1981. Slovník literárnovedných termínov. Bratislava: Slovenský spisovateĐ. Thomson, Philip. 1972. The Grotesque. Critical Idiom Series. London: Methuen. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1983. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics. London: George Allen & Unwin. Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/11790039/JRR-Tolkien-Beowulf-TheMonsters-and-the-Critics [Accessed January, 2010] —. 2006. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: HarperCollins. —. 1995. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. Wright, Thomas. 1968. A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art. New York. Žilka, Tibor. 1987. Poetický slovník. Bratislava: Tatran. —. 2000 „Groteskná postava a Frankenstein.“ In Postmoderná semiotika textu. Edited by Tibor Žilka, 97-112. Nitra: UKF.

“IT SNOWED FOOD AND RAINED DRINK” IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS JANKA KAŠýÁKOVÁ

When J.R.R. Tolkien once compared himself to a hobbit, among the most characteristic attributes he mentioned was his love of “good plain food” and mushrooms out of a field (Letters, 288). In this way he not only defined the identity of hobbits based on their passion for eating and drinking - which, as it is obvious from both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, highly exceeds not only the ordinary desire to feed one’s hunger - but often also the passions and likings of other nations of Middle-earth. Food thus becomes one of the main distinguishing elements separating hobbits from other nations, not so much because of what they eat (which is natural), but more significantly because of the extent to which food is embedded in their lives, but further, the extent to which food is present, in the narrative, to contrast other nations and races. It can be said without exaggeration that hobbits stand and fall on food, as it is clearly of great importance to them; further, it is important for Tolkien and his narrative that they are so concerned with food. The same can be said about the story: the great distance between the average and middle-class world of the Shire and the high, medieval and heroic world of the rest of MiddleEarth would not be so great (and entertaining, for that matter) were it not for the constant preoccupation of hobbits with food. Tolkien’s concept of food in Middle-earth, and the moral and ethical issues connected with it have been discussed by Marjorie Burns (2008), and the possible kinds and sources of food and ways of farming meticulously researched by William Sarjeant (2001). This paper aims at discussing food as the main distinction between hobbits and other nations in many different ways; argues for it being an important source of humour in The Lord of the Rings and points out its significant role in what Tolkien himself called “hobbits’ ennoblement” or what could also be characterized as “becoming a hero.” The fact that food and drink are predominant in the minds and lives of hobbits is expressed many times not only in Tolkien’s characterization of

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hobbits (the very fact that “The Prologue: Concerning hobbits” deals mainly with food, is telling); they also constantly prove it by their speeches and actions. The poetic Elvish name for the “golden brown river” running through the Shire, Baranduin, is in a thoroughly practical and down-to-earth hobbit manner modified into Brandywine, which is a brilliant example of the high style transformed into a lower style, and one of Tolkien’s subtle linguistic jokes. Both the sound of the word and the actual appearance of the river expressed in its name remain similar – the likeness of the colour of brandy (wine) and its phonetic similarity with Baranduin recall the way children modify the words they do not know or recognize into something that makes sense to them; often the new words are also connected with food or other simple pleasures of their lives. Hobbit speech and folklore (or “hobbitlore” as Gandalf refers to it) is also closely connected with food. They have songs about food to accompany their feasts and celebrations, and songs which are also used in everyday life: a supper song (LR, Three is Company, 76)1, proverbs or sayings: “apples for walking, pipe for sitting” (LR, A Knife in the Dark, 176). They also have a well worked-out system of regular daily meals, as well as “party manners,” and they even measure and assess things by means of food. The most telling example of the latter is when Bilbo is trying to describe to Gandalf his feeling after long years of co-existence with the Ring: “I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread (LR, A Longexpected Party, 32).” When somebody presumes to steal their food, they can become as fierce as any other nation protecting their greatest treasures, as Frodo found out on his own skin as a young boy when he tried to steal farmer Maggot’s mushrooms and had to deal with his stick as well as his ferocious dogs. Moreover, for hobbits, who as a rule do not travel much and do not meet with unknown people very often, food (and ale) can serve as markers of a more or less trustworthy people or place. Sam, who “had a natural mistrust of the inhabitants of other parts of the Shire” (LR, A Short Cut to Mushrooms, 91) as well as of almost everybody apart from Elves outside the Shire, is reluctant to enter the Prancing Pony because of its size and the 1

The nature of Shire songs becomes fully revealed when Pippin is asked by Denethor whether he could sing: “Well, yes, well enough for my own people. But we have no songs fit for great halls and evil times, lord. We seldom sing of anything more terrible than wind or rain. And most of my songs are about things that make us laugh; or about food and drink, of course.” (LR The Siege of Gondor, 789 emphasis added)

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fact that it serves hobbits and Big Folk at the same time. Yet when given “good plain food, as good as the Shire could show, and homelike enough,” his last misgivings, “already much relieved by the excellence of the beer,” (LR, At the Sign of the Prancing Pony, 151) are dispelled. Even after a long time, when he becomes more experienced and less “hobbitlike”, his assessment of people is still at least partially influenced by their food, although it is not of such a consequence as before. When he met Faramir, for example “[his reverence for Elves] even more than his courtesy, and his food and wine, had won Sam’s respect and quieted his suspicions” (LR, The Window on the West, 664). Hobbits’ preoccupation with food is something they do not deny and do not consider a fault, and it is quickly recognized as one of their main features by representatives of other peoples, as well. Treebeard, meeting them for the first time and never hearing of such a people before, deems it necessary to complete his “Long List” – a kind of capsule encyclopaedia of the nations of Middle-earth – and squeezes their characteristics into the two lines allotted to them; interestingly, the very first word refers to food: hungry as hunters, the Hobbit children, the laughing-folk, the little people, (LR, The Voice of Saruman, 572)

Further, when Merry and Pippin manage to free themselves from Orcs at the edge of the Fangorn forest, most surprisingly, instead of running away, they immediately sit down and munch their lembas, “heedless of the cries and sounds of battle nearby” (LR, The Uruk-hai, 447). When Aragorn reads what happened from the traces they leave he finds it comforting that they had lembas with them, in spite of the fact that they ran away without their gear and packs. Moreover, he finds it proof, comparable to footprints, that they were the hobbits the three hunters were trying to find not only because they had lembas with them, but also because they ate it in such circumstances. After arriving at Minas Tirith, Pippin is sent Beregond to teach him “the pass-words, and to tell [him] the many things that no doubt [he] will wish to know” (LR, Minas Tirith, 744). But before he lets him ask anything, he himself wants to know something about these hobbits which he had never seen in his life, and about Gandalf and Rohan. When realizing he came to offer answers rather than ask questions himself, he invites Pippin to ask. And Pippin’s first question does not concern Gondor, the country he has never seen before, the serious situation the whole city faces, or the eminent threat of nearby Mordor. He asks

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“It Snowed Food and Rained Drink” in The Lord of the Rings [w]hat about breakfast and all that? I mean, what are the meal-times, if you understand me, and where is the dining-room, if there is one? And the inns? I looked, but never a one could I see as we rode up, though I had been borne up by the hope of a draught of ale as soon as we came to the homes of wise and courtly men. (LR, Minas Tirith, 744)

The whole ensuing discussion turns mostly around eating and drinking, during which Beregond shrewdly and wittily remarks that “At the table small men may do the great deeds” (LR, Minas Tirith, 744). Correspondingly, even the last stage of the War of the Ring is also connected with food. Saruman in his revenge attacks what is most precious in the Shire. Apart destroying the environment, he has the inns closed and food “gathered and shared.” They get to know the “communist”2 system in which, although everything is available communally in theory, in practice the only thing that they have in plenty are rules. In stark contrast with hobbits, in The Lord of the Rings the food and food habits of other nations are mentioned much less frequently and that often in the presence of hobbits, by them or with reference to them. It is no wonder since, as Tolkien himself stated in his famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, [a]s the high Legends of the beginning are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale blends them. (Letters, 145)

2

Tolkien once commented on the question of Orcs representing communists (Letters, 262) and as always denied any allegory in his work; yet thoroughly in line with his belief in the applicability of his world, anyone living in Central or Eastern Europe in even a part of the second half of the 20th century, when reading what Saruman’s ruffians were ordered to do in the Shire, must indeed be strongly reminded of the communist treatment of their own people. Even the words “gathering and sharing,” one of the ideological cornerstones of communism, are reminiscent of this period. It was theoretically supposed to be fair and according to everybody’s needs yet resulted in shortages of everything: in some countries only causing a lack of variety of food, yet in others periods of near hunger. Furthermore, one can find similarities not only in the unnecessary destruction of both the natural environment but also of historical buildings, often ordered to be pulled down by uneducated “cadres” to give way to ugly, box-like panel houses; the presence of Orwellian ridiculous rules; ruffians from abroad in league with ruffians within; puppet leaders first caught on their greed or ambition, later abused and destroyed; the destruction of places where people could meet and socialize; an excess of “shirriffs,” that is police forces, to name the most striking parallels.

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So while The Silmarillion introduces Middle-earth from the point of view of the Elves, The Lord of the Rings offers human, I would argue, often the hobbit perspective, and so reveals more of what they are interested in as well as their way of thinking and understanding. The Last Homely House is re-introduced by Bilbo’s former description from The Hobbit as “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all,” (LR, Many Meetings, 219) which is a thoroughly hobbitic assessment, especially in its ordering of the different pleasures it offers. That Elves might have different priorities is soon revealed by the narrator, with a grain of hobbit bewilderment in his voice: “not that hobbits would ever acquire quite the elvish appetite for music and poetry and tales. They seem to like them as much as food, or more” (LR, Many Meetings, 231). One is almost tempted to modify it into “they seem to like them as much as hobbits like food, or more.” Moreover, readers are often left in the dark about what food and drink it is that Elves eat or offer to others; they are also, and repeatedly, witnesses to the hobbits’ (or the narrator’s) struggling descriptions of the Elvish fare and cuisine which is unfamiliar to them and therefore difficult to characterize by means of their own vocabulary. Just as Sam calls something beyond his understanding “magic,” while Galadriel cannot understand what he means, hobbits, unable to discern the ingredients, must take recourse in poetic language: a “cup that was filled with a fragrant draught, cool as a clear fountain, golden as a summer afternoon...” (LR, Three is company, 81) or “a clear drink, pale golden in colour: it had the scent of a honey made of many flowers, and was wonderfully refreshing” (LR, A Short Cut to Mushrooms, 88). In a chapter dedicated to eating and devouring, Burns goes as far as to claim that Elves are vegetarians, while other lesser creatures – “the unrefined” - are not (Burns 2008, 156). It is a tempting assumption, taking into consideration the fact that there is no evidence that they ever eat meat; yet there is likewise no proof to the contrary, and such a claim can therefore be challenged on the basis of the fact that the absence of a thing in the story does not necessarily mean it does not exist. This is especially valid in the case of Tolkien who, for the sake of his purposes, often omitted things he was not comfortable with. But Burns’ remark is valuable because it invites reflections in other directions. Not only, as Burns claims, do “the baddies eat bad and the goodies eat good,” (Burns 2008, 165) but Tolkien is intentionally selective in the way he presents the food and food habits of his characters in The Lord of the Rings. The fact that he does not mention meat in connection with Elves does not necessarily mean that

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they do not eat it; but it is true that avoiding it does indeed make them appear to be more sophisticated and refined. Being gentle, caring and not hurting any living creature is in fact what distinguishes them from their counterparts and counterfeits Orcs, who delight in crushing, stomping, killing and hurting. Meat, or, more precisely, its loaded synonym “flesh” - which Tolkien uses in the case of evil characters - is certainly not nice, and has many negative connotations. It can be evocative of blood-spilling, wars and murder, and can even have sexual undertones. Gollum, belonging to hobbit kind, yet corrupted and degenerate, is similarly mentioned as eating as much as hobbits, but with a more marked vocabulary: he gnaws, chews, sucks, slavers. His selection of food, although varied, is almost uniformly disgusting: whether it is goblins or hobbits in The Hobbit; or drinking blood, “creeping to cradles”, eating worms, snakes, raw fish and even attempting to taste dead bodies in The Lord of the Rings. In contrast with hobbits Gollum finds elvish food, more specifically lembas, uneatable; but he is surprisingly much closer to determining its substance than hobbits, of course, according to his measure. His assessment of lembas as “dust and ashes” is interesting not only as an antithesis to the hobbits’ genuine delight with it (serving as proof of Gollum’s moral corruption), but because it offers another idea behind Tolkien’s Eucharist-like cake. “Dust and ashes” is in fact exactly what the Eucharist might seem to a non-Christian presented for the first time with a somewhat macabre notion of it being the actual body of Christ. While for Christians it is a living body of a resurrected Christ (feeding the will and giving strength to “endure and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind” [LR, Mount Doom, 915]), for a non-believer it could, in an extreme sense, literally be the dust and ashes of a dead body. This leads to a conclusion that one of the essential ingredients of lembas and its “magical” properties is faith – faith in its power and in the ability and magic of Elves and in its receiver, who is, although not perfect, at least aspiring to good. Thus Tolkien uses food and food habits as a means of presenting his characters through careful selection of expressions, and by deliberately including or avoiding references to food and drink. In comparison with The Silmarillion, he can use this more often and in a more varied way because of the presence of hobbits and their ordinary, lower way of life. The Silmarillion, as a consequence of its high-style, heroic mode, contains very few references to food and eating, but in which, if at all, the good are “feasting,” the bad “devouring;” yet most of the time, whether explicitly or

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implicitly, the heroes rush to their adventures “fearing neither thirst nor hunger,” (Silm, 188) nor even caring about them for that matter. This is the consequence of the fact that eating, just as some other activities necessarily connected with the functioning of the body, although unavoidable in reality, in literature are necessarily considered low, and for that reason mostly avoided in such high-style heroic stories as this one. On that account even in The Lord of the Rings most of the good (high and noble) characters are presented as eating rarely or not at all; and it is mentioned that food is but of secondary importance to them and is spoken of in stylistically higher terms then in the case of hobbits. On the contrary, in the case of evil characters, their food and food habits function as yet further proof of their nastiness, degeneration, corruption, or evil. Hobbits surprisingly stand in the middle: usually not preoccupied with higher and nobler things, their life does seem to turn mostly around food, its production and consumption. Not having many notable events in their past even the history of the production of “pipe-weed” finds its way into their annals, and they remember and recount it the way others would recount the histories of battles and victories of their forefathers. However, in the time of crisis, they can forget food and become heroes “fearing neither thirst nor hunger” and surpass even the regular heroes (as Sam, Frodo, Merry and Pippin); or, like Gollum, become greedy and in some respects more evil than the worst Orc, yet paradoxically always hungry and empty. The Lord of the Rings is also a very interesting bridge between The Hobbit, which general readers liked and for which they requested a sequel, and Tolkien’s lifetime passion: his mythology: The Silmarillion, which he primarily wanted to work on and publish. The Lord of the Rings connects the best elements of both: it elevates the simple and straightforward tale for children into a complex yet even more fascinating story, and reduces the dense and heavy style of The Silmarillion, introducing its world in a much more accessible and “digestible” way. Tolkien himself, when discussing the “sequel” to The Hobbit, claimed he was “personally immensely amused by hobbits as such, and [could] contemplate them eating and making their rather fatuous jokes indefinitely” (Letters 38), at the same time he realized that they alone could not make a book he wanted to write: “And what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental” (Letters 26). It is true that this “setting against things more elemental” is the great attraction of The Lord of the Rings, compared to the genuinely mythological and certainly much less dynamic Silmarillion. What I would like to concentrate on in the following part is how this “collision” of two diametrically opposed worlds, often in

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the moments when food and food habits are concerned, creates the comic3 effect of the book, and at the same time enables other, more serious contemplations: as for example on the nature of true heroism, and the attributes of a hero that will be dealt with in the final section of this paper. Arguably the most surprising clash between the high and the low styles of The Lord of the Rings and one of the most comical situations of the book is at the same time one of the most serious and crucial moments of the story. The Council of Elrond is convened to decide the fate of Middleearth (and the course of the rest of the tale). It is a highly sombre meeting of representatives of all the free peoples of Middle-earth on one crucial question: how to save it from enslavement or complete destruction. Everyone is behaving solemnly, or at least behaves according to the circumstances; and each different representation brings tidings that constitute pieces of the whole picture, which is necessary for the final decision about the fate of Middle-earth. It is only Bilbo who does not seem to take the situation very seriously. Twice during this important meeting he interrupts Elrond’s Council and Elrond himself because he is hungry. The first time he reacts to Elrond’s solemn and formal “That shall be told” by a truly unceremonious “[b]ut not yet, I beg, Master! ... Already the Sun is climbing to noon, and I feel the need of something to strengthen me” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 242). In the second case he goes even further, mildly poking fun at Elves and Dwarves: Elves may thrive on speech alone, and Dwarves endure great weariness; but I am only an old hobbit, and I miss my meal at noon. Can’t you think of some names now? Or put it off till after dinner? (LR, The Council of Elrond, 263)

This quotation has a great comic tone: Elrond, the descendant of Beren and Lúthien, present at every important historical event in Middle-earth since its First age, and practically the chief of all Elves of Middle-earth, is trying to save the world and in doing so is reminded by the old hobbit that it can be put off for a while because it is dinner time. It is also no accident that Gandalf, the only wizard interested and learned in hobbitlore, falls into food parallels (and also fails occasionally to observe the solemn tone of the others) when recounting his adventures to the Council, but addressing mostly Frodo, whom he owes an explanation of his delay:

3

For a detailed discussion of humour in The Lord of the Rings see Kathleen Dubs’ essay in this volume

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“Butterbur they call him,” thought I. “If this delay was his fault, I will melt all the butter in him. I will roast the old fool over a slow fire.” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 256)

When he learns that Butterbur did less harm than expected, and even gave Gandalf good news about Frodo and company, he reports to have uttered this unusual blessing: “May your beer be laid under an enchantment of surpassing excellence for seven years” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 257). The reader might take it for simply a flowery way of expressing relief, yet it much later turns out to be a real blessing, making Butterbur’s beer excellent - to the great pleasure of not only the old innkeeper, but all the visitors to his establishment: hobbits and Big Folk alike. Another example of a highly comical juxtaposition of two normally incompatible worlds happens towards the end of the novel, again at a crucial moment for both the plot and the War of the Ring. Merry, after doing a great deed in helping Éowyn to rid the world of the chief of the Ringwraiths, is brought into the Houses of Healing and celebrated as a hero. Aragorn, coming to heal him and others, certainly treats him in a way and speaks in a language appropriate for the situation, from his point of view. Merry, on the contrary, acts and speaks as a genuine hobbit: “He is weary now, and grieved, and he has taken a hurt like the lady Éowyn, daring to smite that deadly thing. But these evils can be amended, so strong and gay a spirit is in him. His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.” Then Aragorn laid his hand on Merry’s head, and passing his hand gently through the brown curls, he touched the eyelids, and called him by name. And when the fragrance of athelas stole through the room, like the scent of orchards, and of heather in the sunshine full of bees, suddenly Merry awoke, and he said: “I am hungry. What is the time?” (LR, The Houses of Healing, 851 emphasis added)

This truly unexpected statement and question would indeed be hardly funny if not spoken in such a situation and closely following the poetic and dignified words of Aragorn and the narrator. What is more, Merry even asks Aragorn to provide him with pipe and pipe-weed, not as though he were the King who has just returned to his land from exile after a great battle and suffering, but rather a hobbit friend asked for a favour. Just as Elrond (for some, maybe, surprisingly) does not react to Bilbo with anger but smiles; Aragorn too is not offended but rather amused; and the reader is witness to one of the rare proofs that, besides great strength, bravery and

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moral integrity, he also has a sense of humour: he imitates the annoying explanations of the herb-master concerning the origin and names of plants. He only pretends he is offended, although he could rightly be in such circumstances. If your pack has not been found, then you must send for the herb-master of this House. And he will tell you that he did not know that the herb you desire had any virtues, but that it is called westmansweed by the vulgar, and galenas by the noble, and other names in other tongues more learned, and after adding a few half-forgotten rhymes that he does not understand, he will regretfully inform you that there is none in the House, and he will leave you to reflect on the history of tongues. (LR, The Houses of Healing, 851)

The conclusion of this discussion is even more telling: Aragorn knows and accepts the “otherness” of hobbits, even adopts their ways and acknowledges that, compared to his world and usual behaviour, such an attitude can be refreshing and its source is and has been worth preserving: “I know that well, or I would not deal with you in the same way,” said Aragorn. “May the Shire live for ever unwithered!” (LR, The Houses of Healing, 852)

A very similar situation to the two mentioned above is Merry’s discussion with Théoden about Tobold the Hornblower and his pipe-weed amid the ruins of Isengard. Unlike in the case of his discussion with Aragorn, here it is Merry who speaks in the high-style that he believes to be appropriate for the occasion (being even funnier than if he spoke as a hobbit); yet as soon as the first opportunity presents itself, his thoughts and speech turn towards hobbit pleasures, in this case, smoking. Théoden is immediately warned by Gandalf, who gives another very apt characteristic of hobbits, once again closely connected with food: “You do not know your danger, Théoden,” interrupted Gandalf. “These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.” (LR, The Road to Isengard, 545)

There are obviously other moments when the hobbits’ food passion creates humorous situations; from all the others it is worth mentioning Sam’s anachronistic “fish and chips” promised to Gollum in the middle of Ithilien, and Gollum’s appalled hissing reaction phonetically, calling to

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mind the sizzling when frying the very fish and chips he is so eagerly protesting against: “[I]f you turn over a new leaf, and keep it turned, I’ll cook you some taters one of these days. I will: fried fish and chips served by S. Gamgee. You couldn’t say no to that.” “Yes, yes, we could. Spoiling nice fish, scorching it. Give me fish now, and keep nassty chips!” (LR, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, 640)

From all that was said so far it is obvious that hobbits, at least seemingly, do not fit into the heroic world of the rest of the Middle-earth. They are small in stature, not experienced in battle and warfare, and used to a comfortable and peaceful life ensured by the incessant and unseen protection of the Shire by the Rangers. What is more, especially in the case of Merry and Pippin, they do not seem to understand well enough the dangers ahead, as Elrond pointed out when they begged to be included in the Fellowship: “We don’t want to be left behind. We want to go with Frodo.” “That is because you do not understand and cannot imagine what lies ahead,” said Elrond. “Neither does Frodo,” said Gandalf, unexpectedly supporting Pippin. “Nor do any of us see clearly. It is true that if these hobbits understood the danger, they would not dare to go. But they would still wish to go, or wish that they dared, and be shamed and unhappy. I think, Elrond, that in this matter it would be well to trust rather to their friendship than to great wisdom.” (LR, The Ring Goes South, 269)

Elrond is reluctant to let Pippin and Merry go, knowing, at least partially, what awaits them on the journey, and concerned about their safety, as well as their ability to be of any help. Yet, as Gandalf knows from his study of hobbits, as well as his experience with Bilbo, deeply hidden in their nature there is toughness and a will to resist even things others would succumb to. [I]t seems that Hobbits fade very reluctantly. I have known strong warriors of the Big People who would quickly have been overcome by that splinter, which you bore for seventeen days. (LR, Many Meetings, 216)

The four hobbits do not consider themselves heroes either and are reluctant or surprised when others do so, even after they all prove their valour in battle (Merry and Pippin) and in Mordor (Frodo and Sam). They are aware of their different from the other people they meet and constantly

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hint at their being only ordinary hobbits who like their meals regularly and in plenty. They evidently think that being a hero does not only mean wearing a sword and fighting the enemies (which they manage to do), but also thinking about other and much “higher” issues than breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In that they have a very good example in Aragorn. While only “Strider,” it is really difficult to catch him eating. There are always more important things to do. When we first meet him at the Prancing Pony he only has a “tall tankard in front of him” and smokes a pipe. He is not at the feast in Rivendell, because he has to discuss some important matters with Elladan and Elrohir. When he eats it is in a hurry, and sometimes while discussing important matters (with Gimli and Legolas in Helm’s deep). It is often implied and sometimes stated directly that he puts himself and his comfort in the last place and foregoes food and rest until all that he deems important is done. Such a situation occurs after the exhausting battle at Pelennor fields: he does not eat and sleep, but goes to the Houses of healing to help those that need him. After Merry’s request that he bring him the pipe-weed, Aragorn mentions that “[he has] not slept in such a bed as this, since [he] rode from Dunharrow, not eaten since the dark before dawn” (LR, The Houses of Healing, 851). It is no surprise that hobbits, when looking at such an example as Aragorn, can hardly believe themselves to be “heroic” enough. Yet in this adventure it is not only hobbits who have to learn what it means to become a hero; using Sam’s expression, many people in the course of the story have an “eye-opener” concerning the true nature of heroism. At the beginning it is probably really only Gandalf who believes that hobbits can play a crucial role in the War of the Ring, knowing their toughness and hidden nature better than they do themselves. Later, in the course of the story, many other people from different nations learn that there are many facets of heroism, and that even those who are half the size of ordinary men and are concerned with eating and drinking more than anything else can do great deeds, and not only at the table. Maybe the most surprising “hero-in-making” is Sam. Frodo, as the heir of Bilbo and sharing with him the “Tookish” side of his nature, exhibits the expectation to display the tendency towards adventure and heroism. Pippin and Merry, although often foolish and a bit immature, have nevertheless the daring and cheek of youth, and more adventurous genes than ordinary hobbits (Merry can row a boat and his family visited the Old Forest); and for that reason they are not unlikely heroes, even if they become heroes by accident and inadvertently. Yet Sam does not seem to display many qualities that usually characterize heroes.

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Sam is a simple gardener who, before this adventure, never quit the Shire and who undergoes the greatest change. Frodo recognizes at a quite early stage of the journey that he did not know Sam very well: “I am learning a lot about Sam Gamgee on this journey. First he was a conspirator, now he’s a jester. He’ll end up by becoming a wizard – or a warrior!” “I hope not,” said Sam. “I don’t want to be neither!” (LR, Flight to the Ford, 203)

Frodo sounds half-joking: certainly Sam seems to be the least likely of the four to distinguish himself in other ways than taking care of his master and cooking food. Yet Frodo might feel that this adventure can indeed reveal the hidden qualities in Sam, although he himself cannot imagine becoming something so “unhobbitic” as those he reads about and admires from afar. But whether he wants it or not (and whether he believes it or not), in spite of the improbability of such a thing, he does become a hero and even enters into songs, which for him is the highest measure of importance. While the prototype of a hero, Aragorn, wears a mythical sword-thatwas-broken (which has its proper name and reputation), Sam carries the cooking-gear and sometimes uses rather unorthodox weapons, as when he hits the villain Bill Ferny’s nose with an apple. It is no accident that Sam carries his cooking-gear all the way to Mordor, even if the opportunities to cook are scarce and the weight of pans and other equipment certainly quite significant. Sam, the most hobbit of all the four, sticks to his nature the most and is reluctant to acknowledge his change to the last moment. It is only after months of travelling and many hardships that he finally gives up his old self, renounces his “unheroic” nature and becomes a hero (if only unconsciously and for a certain time). This fact is symbolically expressed when Sam finally gets rid of his cooking-gear in Mordor, in a way that again is reminiscent of Aragorn, who does not want anybody to touch his sword at the door of Medusel. Hardest of all it was to part with his cooking-gear. Tears welled in his eyes at the thought of casting it away. [...] He was not willing to leave them lying open in the wilderness for any eyes to see. “Stinker picked up that orc-shirt, seemingly, and he isn’t going to add a sword to it. His hands are bad enough when empty. And he isn’t going to mess with my pans! (LR, Mount Doom, 916-917, emphasis added)

So Sam throws away all unnecessary things, many of them reminders of his old life (“The clatter of his precious pans as they fell down into the

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dark was like a death-knell to his heart” (LR, Mount Doom, 917)) and faces the remainder of the journey only with “the remnants of their waybread and the water-bottle,” his sword and “the phial of Galadriel and the little box that she gave him for his own” (LR, Mount Doom, 917). Sam, the cook and the gardener, changes into the hero by shouldering the responsibility for the quest and Frodo (and Frodo himself for that matter), and by accepting that he will probably die of thirst and hunger afterwards. To him also belongs the last adventure of the Lord of the Rings – accompanying Frodo to the Havens – and it ends, most characteristically – by eating. Sam returns just in time for dinner. Again symbolically, he, the last ring-bearer in Middle-earth, returns to food and ordinary things for a while; yet when his fruitful life with his wife is over, he resumes his heroic self, leaves the Shire and follows in the steps of Frodo. Tolkien uses food and drink for the portrayal of his characters very often and in many different ways, yet most often with the hobbits. The preoccupation of hobbits with food, which dates back to the adventures of Bilbo in The Hobbit and significantly contributes to the attraction of the story, is an important tool for addressing many interesting issues. It also helps lighten what would otherwise be a dark and sad story by creating many humorous situations. As Tolkien himself observed in referring to Charles Williams’ comments on The Lord of the Rings “the great thing is that [the book’s] centre is not with strife and war and heroism [...] but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good liking” (Letters, 105).

References Burns, Marjorie. 2008. “Eating, Devouring, Sacrifice, and Ultimate Just Deserts (Why Elves Are Vegetarian and the Unrefined Are Not)” In Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sarjeant, William A.S. 2001. “The Shire: Its Bounds, Food and Farming.” Mallorn 39: 33-37. Tolkien, J.R.R. 2006. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: HarperCollins. —. 1995. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. —. 2004.The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins.

“NO LAUGHING MATTER” KATHLEEN DUBS

As Michael Drout points out in his entry on humor in the Tolkien Encyclopedia, “humor can be divided into situational humor, acts and deeds, and verbal humor, or words. Tolkien’s humor falls largely into the verbal category” (287). He notes further, however, that “[i]n The Lord of the Rings, situations do not permit much humor, but there are partial exceptions,” (287) and gives a few examples.1 He later generalizes that, in addition to riddles, “[t]hroughout Tolkien’s work, however, the major modes of humor are two: comic verses and exaggeratedly elevated speech” (287). He does note in his final paragraph (of what is necessarily a short entry) that occasions of “[r]epartee or witty retorts are rarely part of Tolkien’s humor.” But he does provide one “notable exception (288). In large part I agree with Drout’s summary. However, in terms of humor, in The Lord of the Rings, at least, there is more than meets the eye. To begin, there are far more examples of repartee and witty retorts than Drout suggests. And they take place not only between Hobbits. Secondly, there are numerous instances of entire scenes which are humorous, and no doubt intended for this effect, whether as comedy for its own sake, or as comic relief. Further, the use of humor extends beyond type; humor is also used as a structural device, following the “fright and feast” pattern commonly noted in literature, especially that for children.2 Humor is also used for characterization, most obviously perhaps in the names (and nicknames) of the various Hobbits, but less obviously when we look at who uses humor, of what sort, when and under what circumstances, and why. And humor is, of course, tucked into the narrative in terms of puns,

1

“[…] the running jokes or contention between Gimli and Éomer about the beauty of Galadriel,” and the “’purely Bywater joke’ about New Row’s being locally known as Sharkey’s End.” He recognizes that the humor (and nonhumor) of the recurrent contention is used to show the growing respect between the two, and that the humor of the local renaming arises from the “grim situation.” But this is the end of his point. 2 Janka Kašþáková’s essay in this volume addresses this topic.

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witty remarks, and observations. Finally, of perhaps more interest, is the question of who laughs, and why, when, and how. For Tolkien seems to be using laughter, often not connected to humor at all, for various purposes, both positive and negative. The purpose of this essay is to discuss these different uses of both humor and laughter.

I. Bilbo Sets the Stage “’Thank goodness!’ said Bilbo laughing, and handed [Gandalf] the tobacco-jar.”’ This sentence closes The Hobbit, and it should come as no surprise that Bilbo is laughing. For in his introductory section to The Lord of the Rings, Concerning Hobbits, Tolkien is careful to include in his characterization that Hobbits “were a merry folk […]. […] Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red– cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them)” (2). So it is not only eating and drinking which are heartily and frequently indulged in, but simple jests. That this is true of Bilbo is later confirmed in The Lord of the Rings at his farewell party. The rumors of the party racing around the Shire are, of course, the hot topic at The Ivy Bush. In describing the scene, Tolkien provides evidence of a kind of humor reminiscent of the famous chapter in Silas Marner where Eliot brilliantly captures village dialect as well as village character. The locals reminisce about Frodo’s past (providing necessary background information for the reader), confirming that his orphaned status is a result of his parents having been “drownded,” and his prospects of inheriting Bilbo’s “jools” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 22-3). Throughout their conversations Tolkien presents not only the differences in speech which come to characterize these different characters—Sam’s grammar, for example, is often sub-standard—but the attitudes which, in Tolkien, often characterize villagers: disbelieving, half-believing, insistently convinced of whatever they believe, regardless of evidence or authority, each always pretending to know more than the next. Tolkien’s capture of rustic life here is excellent. With another well-known narrative technique, a characteristic tease, the narrator later hints at something special about this party— as well as about Bilbo—when Bilbo tells Gandalf that he intends to enjoy himself, “and have [his] little joke.” “Who will laugh, I wonder,” said Gandalf, shaking his head. “We shall see,’ said Bilbo.” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 25)

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And see we do. Bilbo indeed does enjoy himself; and he reveals his sense of humor, not only by his witty and perplexing speech to his guests,3 but by his elaborate—hardly “little”—joke at the end. For this is how his disappearance is characterized: “It was generally agreed that the joke was in very bad taste […]” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 30).4 Only Frodo enjoyed it, “even though he had been in the know. He had difficulty in keeping from laughter”— but not at Bilbo’s joke; rather “at the indignant surprise of the guests” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 30-1). Frodo, too, has a sense of humor, though perhaps here a bit unkind. Bilbo’s reaction is somewhat muted. He scolds Gandalf for the flash which covered his disappearance, a surprise to him, which, had he but known, he would have protested, as it “would spoil [his] joke. “ But he also acknowledged, laughing, that Gandalf probably knew best, “as usual” (LR, A Longexpected Party, 31). Gandalf admits his uneasiness about the whole affair, but reminds Bilbo that it has “now come to the final point. You have had your joke […]” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 32). And after the final arrangements for Bilbo’s departure have been made, and he and Gandalf have their at-times-difficult discussion, Gandalf agrees to Bilbo’s request to keep an eye on Frodo, “two eyes, as often as I can spare them” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 32), and Bilbo agrees to leave the ring behind, as not doing so “would quite spoil the joke” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 34). Then, when Frodo and Gandalf speak after Bilbo’s departure, Frodo confesses that his wish, his hope, had been that Bilbo’s leaving “was only a joke.” Because, according to Frodo, Bilbo “always used to joke about serious things” (LR, A Long-expected Party, 35). And finally, not to overstate the point, many of the gifts—and their to-and-from messages—which Bilbo had given away at his birthday party were perceived to be, indeed were intended to be, jokes—even those items not given away, but falling from their hide-away in the umbrella of the hastily-retreating Lobelia – a nice comic touch. Interspersed throughout this first chapter are examples of narrative humor as well, as when the residents grumble about “dealing locally” while cart loads of provisions are brought for the party, or when Gaffer stopped even pretending to work, or when it is pointed out that hobbits were not averse to letting their children stay up late—especially to get a 3

“I don’t know half of you as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” (A Long-Expected Party, 29). 4 This is followed by a pun on Tolkien’s part: “and more food and drink were needed to cure the guests of shock and annoyance.” And to rid the bad taste in their mouths, as it were.

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free meal. The names of the hobbits have long been recognized as sources of humor, from the Sackville-Bagginses (not only the insider’s literary jest, but a foreshadowing of their sacking of Bag End after Bilbo’s departure) to the Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies and Proudfoots (“’Proudfeet’ shouted an elderly hobbit”) (LR, A Longexpected Party, 32). In short, this first chapter, especially the party itself, provides examples of the various types of humor Drout rightly lists. It also introduces characters fond of joking, or jesting, in language as well as in actions, although, as we shall see, Gandalf’s jests are as often quite serious or even cynical—quite a contrast to his “two eyes” rejoinder above. And in this he will not be alone.

II. Timely Laughter Even when the party is long over, it is not forgotten. The Green Dragon is the scene of the hobbits’ reactions to the ominous rumors which have reached the Shire: “most hobbits still laughed at them” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 43). The puns are amusing but not brilliant: “‘There’s only one Dragon in Bywater, and that’s Green,’ [Ted] said, getting a general laugh.” Indeed, there may even be an oral pun when Sam remarks of his friend Hal that “you can’t deny that others besides our Halfast have seen queer folk crossing the Shire […]” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 44). As in The Ivy Bush, Tolkien presents the good-natured repartee convincingly. This scene also, I suggest, reveals the use of humor as a structural device. For immediately preceding the scene the narrative had made clear that ominous events are afoot, but little of all this, of course, reached the ears of ordinary hobbits (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 42-3). The ordinary hobbits are enjoying themselves at The Green Dragon—a deliberately menacing-named non-menace? The shift from evil darkness to lighthearted pub provides not only dramatic irony—we know the evil closing in on them but they do not—but comic relief. This same shift in settings will be repeated when the hobbits emerge from dangerous darkness to enter The Prancing Pony, amid the sounds of laughter and clapping (At the Sign of the Prancing Pony, 149). The pattern had already appeared after Gandalf’s and Frodo’s conversation about the history of the ring and its evil power, where Gandalf insisted on secrecy and the use of traveling names, cautioned that Frodo might not be able to trust even his closest friends, and asserted that “‘[t]he enemy has many spies and many ways of hearing.’ Suddenly he stopped as if listening. Frodo became aware that all was very quiet, inside

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and outside. Gandalf crept to one side of the window. Then with a dart he sprang to the sill, and thrust a long arm out and downwards. There was a squawk, and up came Sam Gamgee’s curly head by one ear” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 62). The remainder of this section is too long to present in its entirety but, again it displays several different types of humor. First, as it occurs immediately on the heels of the reality they face, structurally, it provides comic relief. Further, the scene is visually comic, clearly, with the snatching through the window of a trembling and grassclipping covered Sam—though the initial arm thrust of Gandalf might have suggested something more threatening. The pun is funny because clever as well as unexpected—“Eavesdropping, sir? I don’t follow you, begging your pardon, There ain’t no eaves in Bag End, and that’s a fact;” in addition it reveals something about Sam’s character—a something which will be revealed many times as the adventure proceeds. (This will be true of the other hobbits, as well.) And his stammering excuse, in which the absolutely terrifying situation outlined by Gandalf is reduced to a stuttering hope for Disney-like Elves and dragons and so forth, proven by the grass clipper entered into evidence, further reduces the situation, blackly, to the laughable. Finally, the notions of being turned into something horrible by the ferocious wizard is also humorous, at least to the reader, who by now knows that this wizard, at least, is beyond (or above) such magic tricks. It is no wonder that at this point Gandalf laughs. But if his laughter is out of relief at what he has heard (and seen), is it because it was Sam whom he caught, or because Sam’s impression is so amusing, or so naïve? And finally, there is a last bit of metaphorical humor: when Sam realized that his punishment is not to be turned into a spotted toad but to go along with Mr. Frodo, he sprang up “like a dog invited to go for a walk” (LR, The Shadow of the Past, 63). And burst into tears. Once again it is clear that humor is used not only verbally, but visually and structurally, as well.5

5

Similar situations occur, for example, the travelers are on the road with Strider and are frightened out of their wits by what they think are trolls. Strider breaks his stick on one (“’Get up, old stone!’), and reminds them of their family history. The response? They laugh. [Flight to the Ford, 200-203] Frodo “laughed in the midst of all his cares when Sam trotted out the old fireside rhyme of Oliphaunt, and the laugh had released him from hesitation” in following Gollum [The Black Gate is Closed, 633]

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III. Touché Drout’s contention that repartee and witty retorts “are rarely part of Tolkien’s humor” is surprising.6 Throughout the novel they appear frequently, at both expected and unexpected places, and often from unexpected characters. It would be tedious to list all the occurrences, but a selection of representative examples should make the point. When Gandalf is advising Frodo on his get-away plans, he warns him to keep his destination secret. “As for where I am going,” said Frodo, “it would be difficult to give that away, for I have no clear idea myself, yet.” “Don’t be absurd!” said Gandalf. “I am not warning you against leaving an address at the post-office!” (LR, Three is Company, 64)

And when Frodo casually ends with the cliché “as far as I can see,” Gandalf retorts: “But you cannot see very far” (LR, Three is Company, 65). *** When Gandalf learns that Butterbur has forgotten to deliver his letter, he fumes: “’Butterbur they call him, [….]. If this delay was his fault I will melt all the butter in him […]’” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 256). *** As Drout pointed out, the banter among the characters arriving at Isengard, especially with the door wardens, is such an extended dialogue of cheek that the Riders at once laugh, realizing that they have witnessed the meeting of dear friends. Even King Théoden joins in the light-hearted conversation which continues into the next chapter, in which the characters inform each other of their experiences (LR, The Road to

6

Drout provides the following as his “notable exception:” […] on the Hobbits’ second day out of Hobbiton, Frodo is munching Elvish leftovers, and Pippin is plaguing him with questions about Gildor. Frodo says sharply: “’I don’t want to answer a string of questions while I am eating. I want to think.’” “’Good heavens!’ said Pippin. ‘At breakfast!” (LR, A Short Cut to Mushrooms, 95) See also supra.

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Isengard, 548). In addition to once again catching the reader up, this banter also serves as a relief—for both characters and readers—from the tension which has preceded it. But even during that tense prelude Éomer was capable of a darkly humorous remark when he shouted down at Gimli: “‘I would cut off your head, beard and all, Master Dwarf, if it stood but a little higher from the ground’” (LR, The Riders of Rohan, 422). *** The adventure in the Old Forest provides ample opportunity for Tolkien’s penchant for playing with language. Here, the literal meaning.7 Treebeard laments to Pippin that the future of the Ents is uncertain because there are no Entings, as they have “lost the Entwives.” “How very sad!” said Pippin. “How was it that they all died?” “They did not die!” said Treebeard. “I never said died. We lost them, I said. We lost them and we cannot find them.” He sighed. “I thought most folk knew that.” (LR, Treebeard, 464)

*** Merry’s cheeky banter is not reserved for “safe” situations, only. When he and Pippin are in the hands of the Orcs, and Pippin reminds him that he has lembas in his pocket, he questions the good of it, as he “can’t put [his] mouth in his [pocket]!” (LR, The Uruk-hai, 444) *** Sam is perhaps the most “pun-ish” of the hobbits. One example: when attempting to sleep in a tree for the first time in his life (in Lothlórien) he tells Pippin that if he does get to sleep: “I shall go on sleeping, whether I roll off or no. And the less said, the sooner I’ll drop off, if you take my meaning” (LR, Lothlórien, 335). Perhaps the reason for this banter among hobbits lies in their character. As noted at the beginning, hobbits are eager to laugh.8 This need is reinforced not only through their actually doing it, but by admitting that 7

cf. Sam’s eavesdropping, and Gandalf’s two eyes, supra. The instances of the narrator indicating that the hobbits were talking and laughing are far too numerous to list. They begin, as we have seen, at the beginning, continue with Strider on the road, during the journeys, and end with Merry and Pippin laughing and singing as they travel around the Shire. Obviously, however, there are dark times when no banter takes place with anyone.

8

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they need it. For example, when Beregond invites him to join his mess for the day, Pippin is happy to accept. “I shall be glad to come,” said Pippin. “I am lonely, to tell you the truth. I left my best friend behind in Rohan, and I have had no one to talk to or jest with.” (LR, Minas Tirith, 750)

And when placed into the care of Bergil, Beregond’s son, Pippin seems to have found his place. Bergil proved a good comrade, the best company Pippin had had since he parted from Merry, and soon they were laughing and talking gaily as they went about the streets, heedless of the many glances that men gave them. (LR, Minas Tirith, 753)

Further, when invited by Denethor to sing, Pippin confesses that he can, well enough for his own people; But we have no songs fit for great halls and evil times, lord. We seldom sing of anything more terrible than wind or rain. And most of my songs are about things that make us laugh; or about food and drink, of course. (LR, The Siege of Gondor, 788-9)

When safely in the court of the returned King, after the destruction of the ring, Gandalf reassures Sam and laughs. The thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. […] But he himself burst into tears. Then […] his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed. (LR, The Field of Cormallen, 931)

IV. A Funny Thing Happened In addition to scenes which are comic,9 there are humorous short remarks, brief descriptions, and quick actions. For example, Pippin insists that he 9

In addition to Bilbo’s farewell party, discussed above, I suggest the reminiscence about Frodo’s unsuccessful attempt at picking Old Maggot’s mushrooms, and their following light banter when it is clear that they are willing to face the Balrogs but are afraid of Maggot’s dogs; much of the activity at The Prancing Pony— especially Pippin’s stories; and Sam’s near drowning as they break from the Company, to name a few. All are further examples of comic relief following tension, as well.

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and Merry accompany Frodo, as “Sam is an excellent fellow, and would jump down a dragon’s throat to save [Frodo], if he did not trip over his own feet” (LR, A Conspiracy Unmasked, 102). When the Company begin their journey, just out of Hobbiton, they camp for the night. A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. “Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.” He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it. (LR, Three is Company, 71)

Although this is not thigh-slapping humor,10 it is the sort of quizzical, head-shaking amusement one might expect from a “character” in Dickens. Sam is late in leaving Bag End. Frodo calls “‘Sam! Time!’” and Sam’s voice is soon followed by “Sam himself, wiping his mouth. He had been saying farewell to the beer-barrel in the cellar” (LR, Three is Company, 68-9). Probably for this reason Frodo decides against a shortcut through the Eastfarthing, as “Shortcuts make delays, but inns make longer ones,” and “at all costs” Pippin must be kept away from the Golden Perch (LR, A Short Cut to Mushrooms, 86). Surely it was intended as humorous that Gandalf, the most thoughtful of wizards, should attach three PS’es to a deadly serious letter, concluding with a wonderful simile about Butterbur’s memory: “like a lumber room: things wanted always buried” (LR, Strider, 167). Nob insists that the brown woolen mat is “a nice imitation” of Frodo’s head, causing Frodo to laugh and admit that it is “Very life-like!” (LR, A Knife in the Dark, 171) And when Sam’s departing toss hits Bill Ferny on the nose, he laments: “Waste of a good apple” (LR, A Knife in the Dark, 177). Lest it be thought that such humor occurs only at the beginning, before the appearance of real danger, witness these from the later stages of the journey. The “killing competition” between Legolas and Gimli, though a grim sort of humor—at least Aragorn laughs at it—begins mid-way through the novel (LR, Helm’s Deep, 522) and continues until the quest has succeeded. After Gandalf’s transformation, Aragorn observes that in one thing he has not changed: he still speaks in riddles.

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See Treebeard’s actions, below.

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“No Laughing Matter” “What? In riddles?” said Gandalf. “No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.” He laughed, but now the sound seemed warm and kindly as a gleam of sunshine. (LR, The White Rider, 485)

When freed from Orc captivity, Frodo admits “I can’t go all the way at a run, Sam,” said Frodo with a wry smile. “I hope you’ve made inquiries about inns along the road? Or have you forgotten about food and drink?” (LR, The Tower of Cirith Ungol, 892)

Finally, and appropriately, the Bywater joke of “Sharkey’s End” occurs towards the very end, after all dangers have passed.

V. What Are You Laughing At? The hobbits’ need for laughter seems more than a desire for entertainment. Tolkien gives us numerous examples of characters laughing in different ways: Hobbits do not just laugh, they can “roar with laughter.”11 We hear Gandalf laugh “like music, like water in a parched land,”12 and “long and merrily” at the “moving forest” (LR, The Road to Isengard, 530). But characters also laugh in situations which are hardly funny. As we have seen, Gandalf often engages in laughter at times of grim seriousness: for example, when Gimli recognizes that the White Rider is him and not Saruman (LR, The White Rider, 487); when telling of his imprisonment atop Celebdil (LR, The White Rider, 491); perhaps most importantly when facing down Saruman. This is an impressive scene. All the men listening are becoming increasingly convinced of Saruman’s strength, falling slowly into his power. Then Gandalf laughed. The fantasy vanished like a puff of smoke. “Saruman, Saruman!” said Gandalf still laughing. “Saruman, you missed your path in life. You should have been the king’s jester and earned your bread, and stripes too, by mimicking his counsellors. Ah me!” he paused, getting the better of his mirth. (LR, The Voice of Saruman, 568)

Dernhelm also uses laughter to vanquish, in her case in the face of the Lord of the Nazgûl. 11

At the situation of the new Shirriffs at the gate. In Ithilien after Sam and Frodo have been rescued (LR, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, 930).

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A sword rang as it was drawn. “Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.” “Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!” Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. (LR, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, 823)

These are clear examples of laughter used to conquer. With it Gandalf deflates the enemy and recalls the listeners to their senses. Dernhelm reduces the Ringwraith to silence, and perhaps sudden doubt, and helps Merry to conquer his own fear. The power of laughter might also be recognized by Sharkey’s gang when they are oppressing the Shire, for when the warriors return, It was rather a comic cavalcade that left the village, though the few folk that came out to stare at the “get-up” of the travellers did not seem quite sure whether laughing was allowed. A dozen Shirriffs had been told off as escort to the “prisoners” […] Merry, Pippin, and Sam sat at their ease laughing and talking and singing, while the Shirriffs stumped along trying to look stern and important. (LR, The Scouring of the Shire, 980, emphasis added)13

This scene in the Shire is also quite visually comic. Aragorn is also prone to laughter in situations hardly amusing. As noted, he laughs at Gimli’s and Legolas’ “killing competition;” at Frodo’s mithril armor; as Strider, he laughs at Frodo’s stout refusal to give his name, before putting on a fierce face and then laughing at his own many names; (LR, Strider,161) but he does admit that “often [he] must put mirth aside” (LR, Many Meetings, 26). When Gandalf refuses to part with his staff before entering the Golden Hall, and asks rather that Théoden hobble out to speak to him, Aragorn laughs: to defuse tension, or because Gandalf’s request is truly humorous? Attempts at humor can also go awry, or be misunderstood. Pippin declares that Frodo was looking twice the hobbit that he had been. “Very odd,” said Frodo, tightening his belt, “considering that there is actually a good deal less of me. I hope the thinning process will not go on indefinitely, or I shall become a wraith.”

13

I am reminded of Orwell’s observation in “The Lion and the Unicorn” that Hitler would never have succeeded in conquering Britain, as the reaction of the British to a parade of goose-stepping troops would not have been to salute but to laugh.

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“No Laughing Matter” “Do not speak of such things!” said Strider quickly, and with surprising earnestness. (LR, At the Sign of the Prancing Pony, 180)

*** Sam finds it no laughing matter, for example, when the Elf rope slips easily from its hold and Frodo laughs. “‘Who tied the rope? […] A good thing it held as long as it did! To think that I trusted all my weight to your knot.” But “Sam did not laugh,” and responds in injured tones (LR, The Taming of Sméagol, 597). Likewise, after the glance of Galadriel and his blushing when teased by Pippin, Sam was “in no mood for jest” (LR, The Mirror of Galadriel, 348). Though Gandalf often warns the hobbits not to jest, sometimes it is not clear that they are.14 They themselves come close to such ambiguity when on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. This scene is worth considering at length. They are speculating about their parts in the story, and Sam is convinced that they will be popular. […] And people will say: “Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!” And they’ll say: “Yes, that’s one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn’t he, dad?” “Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.” “It’s saying a lot too much,” said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. “Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?” “Now, Mr. Frodo,” said Sam, “you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.” “So was I”, said Frodo, “and so I am.” (LR, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, 697)

The humor and the laughter here are indicators of character (laughing in the face of danger) and of situation (comic relief). The scene also reinforces the need hobbits have for banter.

14

He scolds Merry, who has tried to make a pun about Saruman, not to jest. “This is not the time for it.” (LR, The Voice of Saruman, 562) He then warns them not to approach Saruman “with a light heart.” (LR, The Voice of Saruman, 563)

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Whether situations are in fact amusing can also be misunderstood, as when, following Frodo’s and Faramir’s serious discussion and Faramir’s refusal of the ring, “Men turned back to their drink and their talk, perceiving that their captain had had some jest or other with the little guests, and that it was over” (LR, The Window on the West, 666). “Some jest!” One of the finest examples of a comic situation which is not comic, and which provides clear irony, is the description of the “capture” by Sharkey’s men of Lobelia. The fight the old girl puts up is admirable, and not only in the face of the passivity or collaboration of some others; and it is ironic as, in presenting the awfulness of it, it is clear that the Shire hobbits have no knowledge of the genuine terror through their friends have just passed (LR, The Scouring of the Shire, 990). On occasion laughter can quickly turn to tears, as when we are told that Imrahil laughed aloud at “the greatest jest in all the history of Gondor,” predicting to Mithrandir that the Dark Lord will “not rather smile than fear […].” “No, he will not smile” replies Gandalf. “’Neither shall we,’ said Aragorn. ‘If this be jest, then it is too bitter for laughter’” (LR, The Last Debate, 864). Earlier, the men of the City had “laughed and did not greatly fear” the devices of the besieging Orcs. But the laughter did not last long. For “when men ran to learn what [the device’s impact] might be, they cried aloud or wept” (LR, The Siege of Gondor, 804). Conversely, anger or tears can quickly turn to laughter. After the tense confrontation with Denethor, Pippin asks Gandalf whether he is angry with him. “I did the best I could.” “You did indeed!” said Gandalf, laughing suddenly; […] Pippin glanced in some wonder at the face now close beside his own, for the sound of that laugh had been gay and merry. Yet in the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth. (LR, Minas Tirith, 742)

A laugh puts an end to Sam’s tears over the felling of the Party Tree; (LR, The Scouring of the Shire, 994) when he thinks he is dying, Pippin’s thought “laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear” (LR, The Black Gate Opens, 874). Even amid his tears at the final farewell, Pippin laughed (LR, The Grey Havens, 1007).

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Finally, tears and laughter can also mix, as when the entire company hears the minstrel promise to sing “of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.” And when Sam heard that he laughed aloud for sheer delight, and he stood up and cried: “O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!” And then he wept. And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. (LR, The Field of Cormallen, 933)15

VI. Look Who’s Laughing By now it is clear that Tolkien’s characters laugh, whether heartily, grimly, or desperately. And it is not simply the major actors who do so. When Pippin and Merry are being swallowed by Old Man Willow, and Frodo kicks one: “A hardly perceptible shiver ran through the stem and up into the branches; the leaves rustled and whispered, but with a sound now of faint and far-off laughter” (LR, The Old Forest, 115)—a laughter Pippin will hear again when, startled from his pleasant dream, he finds himself “listening to that horrible dry creaking voice laughing at him again.” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 125) This is in quite a different tone from that sung by Frodo in honor of Goldberry, celebrating spring “and the leaves’ laughter” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 122). Elves too laugh, of course. They laugh at Sam’s foolishness, especially his attempts at Elf speech, (LR, Three is Company, 79) as well one of Bilbo’s songs and his responses to their reactions at the end of it (LR, Many Meetings, 230). But their laughter can also be ironic (LR, Three is Company, 81). It is the laughter of Elves which welcomes the travelers to Lothlórien (LR, Lothlórien, 333); and they laugh at the farewell, when Gimli attempts to eat all the lembas (LR, Lothlórien, 360). Tellingly, the Lady Galadriel laughs when Frodo offers her the ring (LR, The Mirror of Galadriel, 356). Dwarves laugh, at least Gimli does, though not often, and not well. He laughs when it is decided that all shall be blinded for entry into Lothlórien (LR, Lothlórien, 338), when he recognizes Gandalf (LR, The White Rider, 484), and over battle (LR, Helm’s Deep, 522) At this point the following exchange takes place: “I shall not find it easy to repay you,” said Éomer.

15

Cf. his and Frodo’s speculations (The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, 697), cited above.

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“There may be many a chance ere the night is over,” laughed the Dwarf. “But I am content. Till now I have hewn naught but wood since I left Moria.”

However, it would be a strange sense of humor to see Legolas’ preference to pay gold rather than enter the caverns of Helm’s Deep as a “jest,” though Gimli does (LR, Helm’s Deep, 534). Men laugh, too, obviously. Éomer and his colleagues laugh goodnaturedly at the “Halflings,” (LR, The Riders of Rohan, 424) but with a rather different tone and intent at Gríma (LR, The King of the Golden Hall, 508). Boromir laughs, but sarcastically and inappropriately—as when he laughs at Bilbo, whom the others respect; as does Denethor—frighteningly when mad—thus confirming their arrogant characters. Faramir’s laughter when Éowyn declares no desire to be queen is hardly born of arrogance (LR, Many Partings, 943). And, like Galadriel, he laughs, though quietly, when he realizes that the ring might be his, but he rejects it (The Window on the West, 665). And he hopes that he and Frodo might one day sit “by a wall in the sun, laughing at old grief” (LR, The Forbidden Pool, 678). Strider, as Ranger and Aragorn as well, laughs often, in situations both amusing and grim, as we have seen. As with the laughter of others, his laughter provides commentary on the situation as well as his own attitude. Even a character as serious as Elrond laughs—at Bilbo’s attempts to prove that he had not been sleeping, and at his desire to see the Dúnadan (LR, Many Meetings, 224). Gandalf, too, laughs differently: ominously, truly, sarcastically, and defiantly. And at the end of the novel, surprisingly, he “laughs now more than he talks” (LR, Many Partings, 934). Merry’s and Pippin’s initial conversations with Treebeard are witty, and Treebeard laughs, though here only after standing in the falling rain (LR, Flotsam and Jetsam, 459, 463). He later not only laughs but slaps his thighs when announcing to the company that “Huorns have come back. All’s well; aye very well indeed!” (LR, Flotsam and Jetsam, 558) And probably laughed to himself when he sent Wormtongue to Orthanc, seeming “rather grimly delighted with the business” (LR, Flotsam and Jetsam, 560). He laughs after the victory when Merry and Pippin drink too much Ent water. In fact they all laugh (LR, Many Partings, 959). Quickbeam, too, “often laughed. He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees” (LR, Treebeard, 471). Of characters who laugh, perhaps none do so more than Tom Bombadil, which should come as no surprise, as “his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter” (LR, The Old

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Forest, 117). Tom does laugh a lot. He laughs when he frees Merry and Pippin from the trees of the Old Forest, (LR, The Old Forest, 118); when he returns to the house where they are resting he enters laughing, (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 122); he laughs when he puts the ring to his eye, and laughs again as he toys with it (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 130). He laughs after he teaches them the song which will call him to them (LR, The Old Forest, 131), and often after he saves them from the Barrow-Wights (LR, Fog on the Barrow-downs, 140, 141, 144). His Lady Goldberry is also quick to laughter. When she enters Tom’s house she does so laughing, encouraging the guests to “laugh and be merry” (LR, In the House of Tom Bombadil, 119); she does so later, as well, when the “rain has ended […] and new waters are running downhill, under the stars […]. Let us now laugh and be glad,” she said (LR, The Old Forest, 129). But we also hear characters laughing “grimly” or “wildly;” we hear “deadly laughter,” “hoarse laughter,” and laughter from a voice “cracked and hideous.” These are, for the most, part the wicked ones. Clearly it is not only “good” characters who engage in different sorts of laughter, for different reasons and at different times. The enemies also show senses of humor, thought often quite perverse. Saruman, for one, laughs and does not laugh. Before the Council of Elrond, Gandalf relates his confrontation with Saruman, who seemed to have “a cold laughter […] in his heart,” and when told the news brought by Radagast, scoffs: “’Radagast the Brown!’ laughed Saruman, and he no longer concealed his scorn’” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 252). And when the confrontation concludes with Gandalf’s threat, Saruman “laughed at [him], for [his] words were empty, and [Saruman] knew it” (LR, The Council of Elrond, 254). However, when Isengard is flushed with water— “all steaming and bubbling” through the power of the Ents—and Aragorn fears that Saruman was “brewing some new devilry,” Pippin assures him that Saruman “was probably choking and not laughing any more” (LR, Flotsam and Jetsam, 557). He does manage to laugh “wildly,” however, at Gandalf’s offer of conditions (LR, The Voice of Saruman, 569). After his defeat, and Gandalf’s pardon, Saruman “laughed, but his voice was cracked and hideous” (LR, Many Partings, 961). And in his final appearance, in the Shire, he laughs when recognized, and repeatedly at the hobbits’ riding like warriors (LR, The Scouring of the Shire, 994-5); but his last laugh is at Wormtongue’s pathetic excuses, just before Wormtongue slits his throat (LR, The Scouring of the Shire, 996). Sauron laughs through the Palantír. As Pippin tells Gandalf: “[…] he laughed at me. It was cruel. It was like being stabbed with knives. I struggled. […] Then he gloated over me. I felt I was falling to pieces” (LR,

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The Palantír, 579). The “Mouth of Sauron” laughs at the army of the Captains of the West, and mocks them, until he is vanquished by Aragorn (LR, The Black Gate Opens, 870). And when negotiating with Gandalf and Aragorn for the “spy from the little rat-land of the Shire,” he laughs at Pippin’s cry of grief at the thought that Frodo is dead; further, “seeing their faces grey with fear and the horror in their eyes, he laughed again, for it seemed to him that his sport went well.” Even when seemingly “at a loss […] swiftly he laughed again;” but when ultimately dismissed by Gandalf as one of Sauron’s slaves, “the Messenger of Mordor laughed no more” (LR, The Black Gate Opens, 871-2, passim). The Black Riders laugh at Frodo fleeing to the Ford, “with a harsh and chilling laughter” (LR, Flight to the Ford, 209). Wormtongue laughs grimly when welcoming Gandalf, Láthspell as he calls him, to Théoden’s hall (LR, The King of the Golden Hall, 502). The Balrog produces “hoarse laughter” before the attack in Moria (LR, Bridge of Khazad-dûm, 315). Gimli reports that the Haradrim, driven to the brink, fierce in despair, laughed at the dwarves attempting to escape down the river (LR, The Last Debate, 858). The Lord of the Nazgûl bellows with “deadly laughter at Gandalf’s command to retreat, (LR, The Siege of Gondor, 811) and even the gurgle of Ghân seems like laughter (LR, The Ride of the Rohirrim, 813). Other evil foes also laugh horrifyingly, Orcs perhaps most. They even indulge in the occasional pun. They laugh at the struggles of their captured hobbits, and when mistreating Pippin and Merry; they also reveal their readiness to reciprocate in a good joke: “Hullo, Pippin!” [Merry] said. “So you’ve come on this little expedition, too? Where do we get bed and breakfast?” “Now then!” said Uglúk. “None of that! Hold your tongues. No talk to one another. […] You’ll get bed and breakfast all right: more than you can stomach.” (LR, The Uruk-hai, 435, 438)

When Sam and Frodo are being driven mercilessly to Udûn, the orcdriver jeers at them. “‘There now!’ he laughed, flicking at their legs. ‘Where there’s a whip there’s a will, my slugs. Hold up!’” (LR, The Land of Shadow, 910) Shagrat and Gorbag also have their little “jests” when worrying about Shelob. Rather than silence his “rabble” and provoke her, Shagrat reassures him that there is no need to worry about her—she having been wounded by Sam—and that they can stop the racket anytime. “So let [the Orcs] laugh” (LR, The Choices of Master Samwise, 719, 720). Furthermore,

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when Gorbag and Shagrat discuss the “funny things going on.” […] they think that it is “Very funny!” “Yes, very funny. […]” (The Choices of Master Samwise, 721)

It is clear that this is not what most would consider funny. But it is to them. “Her Ladyship was having some fun.” And they do not interfere with her when she is playing (LR, The Choices of Master Samwise, 721). Later, however, they agree about entertainment: “D’you remember old Ufthak? We lost him for days. Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed! […]” “And what’s going to happen to [Frodo],” laughed Gorbag. “We can tell him a few stories at any rate, if we can’t do anything else. I don’t suppose he’s ever been in lovely Lugbúrz, so he may like to know what to expect. This is going to be more funny than I thought. Let’s go!” “There’s going to be no fun, I tell you,” said Shagrat. “And he’s got to be kept safe, or we’re all as good as dead.” (LR, The Choices of Master Samwise, 723-4)

And, finally, even Gollum has his share of “humor”. When Sam and Frodo are stumbling through the Dead Marshes, and Sam realizes that the old roots are anything but, he is horrified. “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!” Gollum laughed. “The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,” he cackled. (LR, The Passage of the Marshes, 613-4)

On the road to Mordor Sam asks whether they should not just walk up and knock at the gate, to save a long tramp, to which Gollum replies with a hiss: “‘Don’t make jokes about it. […] It isn’t funny, O no! Not amusing”’ (LR, The Black Gate is Closed, 628). But he (or at least one of his “personalities”) can make a joke, or at least try. When freed from Faramir and his men, he curses them as “Nassty wicked Men!” But when Frodo chastises him, admonishing him that if he cannot speak well of those who showed mercy he should remain silent, “‘Nice Master!’ said Gollum. ‘Sméagol was only joking’” (LR, Journey to the Cross-roads, 680).

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VII. Conclusion (A Last Laugh?) Clearly Tolkien uses traditional types of humor, and laughter, in traditional ways, and for traditional purposes. In addition to the riddles and songs pointed out in other Tolkien scholarship and so not discussed here, there are comic scenes and descriptions, humorous names, witty banter, puns and other plays on language. But, as I hope I have shown, Tolkien also uses humor or laughter as a psychological tool, often as a means of strengthening the courage of his characters—a type of whistling in the graveyard—and just as often for purposes quite the opposite: to ridicule, as a weapon to pierce the courage or position of others. It is also employed to soothe, as balm, to reduce tension in a situation, a character, or one’s self. In addition, the use of humor or laughter provides commentary as well as characterization. And, finally, it is used structurally, for comic relief, for both the characters in the story and the readers of the story. Perhaps Merry expresses Tolkien’s own attitude, and maybe that of his countrymen, when he apologizes to Aragorn for his cheeky remarks: “But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.” “I know that well, or I would not deal with you in the same way,” said Aragorn. “May the Shire live forever unwithered!” (LR, The Houses of Healing, 852)

References Drout, Michael D.C. ed. 2006. The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. New York: Routledge. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1994. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins.

“LIT.”, “LANG.”, “LING.”, AND THE COMPANY THEY KEEP: THE CASE OF THE LAY OF THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN SEEN FROM A GRICEAN PERSPECTIVE ROBERTO DI SCALA

I. Introduction: The Cultural and Linguistic Background In a previous study (Di Scala 2007) I underlined the basic role played by Tolkien’s love for languages within his works. I also remarked how Tolkien’s love for the past characterizes most of his literary production. In order to fully grasp the meaning of his involvement with language, one needs to go back to the time when he was a very young lad who had been struck with the sound which some Welsh inscriptions on the carts of an abandoned coal mine had evoked in him. Since then, the attraction he felt for the very essence of language, namely its sounds and the meanings they convey, kept growing to become his leading interest in his professional life both as a teacher and as a writer. He believed “in “linguistic aesthetic”–in the existence of distinctive qualities of beauty in the styles, especially the phonological styles, of languages, such that a person might, irrespective of his own mother tongue, prefer one to another” (Rosebury 2003, 138). The importance of language in Tolkien’s works is remarked by many critics (see for instance Kilby 1969; Shippey 1979, 1982, 1995b, 2001; Lodigiani 1982; De Anna 1996; Monda 2002; Caldecotto 2003; Del Corso and Pecere 2003; Garth 2003), as well as his love for the past. In particular, it was in Northern sagas and legends that Tolkien found the best environment where his imaginative creations could grow. Very soon, he had chosen his favourite ancient language, Old English, and with it he mainly copied from the professional point of view as well as from the artistic one. “To him, the world resounded with the echoes of the past” (Garth 2003, 35), and “he remained committed to an archaic air because it

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was the one he breathed” (Garth 2003, 291). As Caldecott (2003, 15) points out: “The other way back to the past was through language itself, and “linguistic ghosts” that are traces and vestiges of the ancient world in modern speech or names”. As he was “attracted by both the scientific rigour of phonology, morphology, and semantics, and by the imaginative or “romantic” powers of story, myth, and legend” (Garth 2003, 34), Tolkien provided his stories with a remarkable linguistic fabric which possesses an aura of past times. The most tangible result of said love was the language of the Elves, the language he had started to work on in his early years and which, by partly drawing on the Northern languages and culture he so profoundly adored, has everything a natural language is supposed to have, from grammar to morphology to phonetics. All this is beyond doubt his tribute to the linguistic side of his personality, that his, to the philologist (i.e. the lover of words and, more in general, of language) in him. Fragments of Elvish poetry as well as short Elvish quotations are scattered throughout his main works, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in particular. Their translation in English is seldom provided because Tolkien believed that readers ought to appreciate the bare sound of those words, even though unknown to them, since their sound was the means by which feelings and emotions could be conveyed, being, as they were, deeply rooted in the “basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language” (Tolkien 1997b, 190). One of the first results of the mixing of said elements is The Lay of the Children of Húrin. The Lay was probably begun in 1918 and was never completed because the author had turned his mind to another poem, The Lay of Leithian. We are thus left with a quite extensive fragment of about 2,300 lines of which a number of different versions exist (see Tolkien 2007 for further details). In writing the Lay, Tolkien wanted to transport his potential reader (and I say “potential” because at first the Lay was not intended for publication) into the emotional world of the tragedy of Húrin by mainly resorting to the sounds of the words he had chosen to use. In order to achieve his goal, Tolkien decided to resort to Old English poetic patterns and to the use of obsolete and archaic words. By “Old English poetic pattern” I am referring to the typical scheme of Anglo-Saxon poetry which is based on stresses and not on the number of syllables which make up every line. Each line is divided into two hemistiches, and cohesion within the line is provided by alliteration which is not “concerned with letters, with spelling, but with sounds, judged by the ear” (Tolkien 1975,142, emphasis added. For alliteration see also Minkova 2003). This adds to the

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past-oriented mood derived from his love for the culture and the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period. As Christopher Tolkien puts it, the Lay “is the most sustained embodiment of [Tolkien’s] abiding love of the resonance and richness of sound that might be achieved in the ancient English meter” (C. Tolkien 1994, vii). Here is an example of how the Lay is textually (and linguistically) organised from the very beginning of the poem. (It is not my intention here to highlight the different occurrences of alliteration, nor to point out the use of archaic words, which the readers will be able to find out for themselves.) Lo! the golden dragon the gloom of the woods the woes of Men, fading faintly is now to tell, of Níniel the sorrowful, of Thalion’s son Túrin

of the God of Hell, of the world now gone, and weeping of Elves down forest pathways, and the name most tearful and the name most sad o’erthrown by fate. (Tolkien 1994, lines 1-7)

The particular note which pervades the Lay is at the basis of the peculiarity of the text. Tolkien intentionally chose to recreate the style of Old English poetry, and therefore those elements pertaining to it must be regarded as basic textual components. This helps to understand how closely related the literary and the linguistic elements are in this early poem, a characteristic which was further developed throughout Tolkien’s other main fictional works. As Shippey (2001, 230) remarks: “Tolkien said, in many ways, as forcefully as he could, [...] that all his work was “fundamentally linguistic” in inspiration”. In this paper I will see to what extent the adjective “linguistic” can be applied to Tolkien’s fiction and how far Tolkien himself is involved in and with “linguistics”. In Section 2, I will briefly discuss the concept of linguistics as a science concerning language, and apply it to the way Tolkien devised “Lit.(erature)” and “Lang.(uage)”, confronting it with “philology” at large. In Section 3, I will touch upon the concept of communication as defined by the linguist Paul H. Grice and will introduce his distinction between speaker meaning and utterance meaning, while in Section 4 I will analyse the Lay from such perspective. Finally, in Section 5, I will consider Tolkien’s poem as a token of intentional, rational, and transparent token of communication on the basis of the definition of communication as intended by Grice.

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II. At the Crossroads of “Lit.”, “Lang.”, and “Ling.” Linguistics is the scientific study of language(s). On the one hand, it may be said that it studies how language works, and that it deals with the relationship between language and thought; on the other hand, though, its subject is far too complex to define and analyse due to its “naturalness”, as well as to the large number of issues it concerns (not to mention its tangled relationships with other subjects such as, for instance, philosophy, and psychology). Also, the uneasiness of defining linguistics partly may be derived from the quite broad range of the historical reflection it calls into question. The concept of linguistics intended as the study of language carried out on a scientific basis was developed around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. At first, though, linguistics had not much to do with the theoretical study of language. It acted more as a support to philology in that it helped with the interpretation of ancient texts, thus being closer to the history of words. In its prime, linguistics was also thought of as the science which defined and taught the correct use of a given language, being therefore closer to grammar. Linguistics began to gain a scientific status in 1786, when Sir William James, an English senior officer in Bengal (then an English colony), gave a lecture in which he highlighted the likeness he had discovered in many words from Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Jones’s studies led the way to comparisons among the ancient Indo-European languages, and was the main field of linguistics in its early years - when it mostly took on the name of “comparative philology”. In 1852 a citation was published in the Oxford English Dictionary by which “philology” indeed stood for “comparative philology”, “the science inspired by Sir William [Jones] and carried on through many inheritors to Professor Tolkien himself” (Shippey 1982, 9). As Shippey (1982, 10-13) himself notes, however, Somewhere towards the end of the nineteenth century things had begun to go wrong. [...] This is why “philology” has first the old vague sense of “love of learning”; then the new nineteenth century one of “study of the text leading to comparative study of language leading to comprehension of its evolution”; and in the twentieth century the specialised meaning, within departments of English Studies, of “anti-literary science kept up by pedants (like Professor Tolkien) which ought to be stopped as soon as possible.

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What Shippey (1982) is referring to here is the current status of philology within academia. As it seems, philology is nowadays seen by many as a subject separate from, if not conflicting with, literature. This supposed clear-cut division between the literary and the linguistic aspects of the language (which by sheer chance it comes to be “English language” in the case of Tolkien, but which is meant to take on the far wider meaning of “human language” in general) was something which Tolkien had never been able to accept in full. In his manifesto of 1930, “The Oxford English School”, he [...] makes clear that he thought both “linguistic” and “literary” approaches too narrow for a full response to works of art, especially early works of art, and that furthermore what was needed was not some tame compromise between them [...] but something as it were at right angles to both. This third dimension was the “philological” one: it was from this that he trained himself to see things, from this too that he wrote his works of fiction. “Philology” is indeed the only proper guide to a view of Middle-earth “of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired”. (Shippey 1982, 6-7)

Tolkien was deeply convinced that those two aspects (i.e. the linguistic and the literary) were to be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. “The right and natural sense of Language includes Literature, just as Literature includes the study of the language of literary works” (Tolkien 1997c, 232). Philology (“my real professional bag of tricks” as he once wrote in a letter to Allen & Unwin dated 31 August 1937 [Letters, 21]) was therefore to provide the fittest solution to embed the two “conflicting” sides mentioned above. As Tolkien himself remarked in summing up his experience as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford during his Valedictory Address of 5 June 1959: We have first: the linguistic effort and attention required for the reading of all texts with intelligence, even those in so-called modern English. Of course this effort increases as we go back in time, as does the effort [...] to appreciate the art, the thought and feeling, or the allusions of an author. Both reach their climax in “Anglo-Saxon”, which has become almost a foreign language. [...] We have second: actual technical philology, and linguistic history. [...] It may be “technical” […] but it is not incompatible with a love of literature, nor is the acquisition of its technique fatal to the sensibility either of critics or of authors. If it seems too much concerned with “sounds”, with the audible structure of words, it shares this interest with the poet. [...]

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“Lit.”, “Lang.”, “Ling.”, and the Company They Keep The third thing is the use of findings of a special enquiry, not specially “literary”, for other and more literary purposes. Technical philology can serve the purposes of textual and literary criticism at all times. If it seems most exercised in the older periods, if the scholars who deal with them make most use of philology, that is because Philology rescued the surviving documents from oblivion and ignorance, and presented to lovers of poetry and history fragments of a noble past that without it would have remained for ever dead and dark. (Tolkien 1997c, 234-35)

He could not have been clearer (and sharper) than that: “and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature” (Tolkien 1997c, 238; see also Pearce 1998). As Shippey puts it: In my opinion (it is one not shared, for instance, by the definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary), the essence of philology is, first, the study of historical forms of a language or languages, including dialectal or nonstandard forms, and also of related languages. [...] However, philology is not and should not be confined to language study. The texts in which these old forms of the language survive are often literary works of great power and distinctiveness [...]. In philology, literary and linguistic study are indissoluble. They ought to be the same thing. Tolkien said exactly that in his letter of application for the Oxford Chair in 1925, and he pointed to the Leeds curriculum he had set up as proof that he meant it. (Shippey 2001, xii-xiii)

In spite of all his efforts, and though he “is credited with achieving a more balanced relationship between literature and linguistics and with broadening the understanding of philology to encompass not mere mechanical descriptions of language and its history but a love for its use and invention in literary contexts” (Mathews 2002, 58-59), it seems that “Lit.” and “Lang.” (the term he used identify the two aspects) are bound to live on as cognate entities rather than overlapping sides–at least in some quarters of in the academy. Paul Bibire is right in underlining the role of Tolkien as heir to a philological tradition which embeds, on historical bases, the study of the language as well as of texts. Tolkien was heir to a generous tradition, one where texts were (and still are) studied and explored in terms of their language, and where the language was studied and explored in the texts which formed its fullest realisation. This tradition was philological in the older and wider sense, still current in German “Philologie”, and enjoying a happy renascence in American usage. [...] There is of course a second sense, a sub-set of the first, of the word “philology”. At least in British English it has roughly the

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same sense as German “sprachwissenschaft” (but not, at least in implication, as English “linguistics”). Tolkien was a philologist in this sense also, perhaps even more profoundly so. He was sharply aware of words and the organisation and senses of those words, which leads to a historical understanding of those larger organisations of words which are the texts. (Bibire 1993, 112)

While thus remarking that language and literature are inseparable aspects of the same Tolkien phenomenon, Bibire (1993) also points out how the German term Sprachwissenschaft (literally, “linguistics”), is close to “philology” but not entirely akin to “linguistics”. Mathews (2002, 58-59), on the other hand, speaks about a “more balanced relationship between literature and linguistics”. Curry (1999, 34) speaks about “an extraordinary work of philology and linguistics” with reference to The Lord of the Rings, but he fails to offer specific examples of what linguistic aspects he indicates. It seems to me that the very term “linguistics” is here being used in a rather loose sense. As can be quite easily derived from the definition of the word provided earlier (though limited and incomplete it may be), “linguistics” in its current meaning concerns human language in general, thus being severed from the specifications of a single language. If one restricts oneself to the historical development of the discipline, then it is “historical linguistics” one is focusing upon. Historical linguistics tends to cover the field of comparative philology in the sense outlined earlier. One needs to turn to “general linguistics” (and its several ramifications) then to see how the language intimately works, as well as to explore the many relations linguistics have with other subjects. It is from this point of view that I intend to “take sides”. Linguistics (and, more specifically, general linguistics) is my “third dimension”, and not philology. I do think that, in dealing with Tolkien’s works, the portmanteau word to look for should be “linguistics:” the one truly encompassing his literary and linguistic sides, the one providing a way to discover how language, the product of the human mind, works within his language and his texts. While I previously dealt (Di Scala 2007) with the Lay from the translator’s point of view (which, by the way, falls within the wider range of philology and linguistics as well, translation being a subject at the crossroads of the love for words and the study of how language itself works), I will now try and provide an approach to the poem from a different linguistic angle, namely that of the speaker vs. utterance meaning as defined by the linguist Paul H. Grice. In so doing, it is my intention to further bring to the surface the intimate relationship between linguistics and literature within Tolkien’s works, so much that I would venture to

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speak of a “new term”, “Ling.” (which stands for “linguistics”), to add to the more familiar “Lit.” and “Lang.”. The Tolkien minimal pair of “Lit. and Lang.” (for which see Shippey 1982), therefore, will be expanded into the new triad “Lit., Lang., and “Ling.”.

III. Communication According to Grice: A Brief Outline Paul H. Grice (Birmingham 1913-Berkeley 1988) was a philosopher of language and a university teacher at Oxford first and then at Berkeley. His research approaches philosophy through the study of daily language interactions. During his life he set up a rather complex but attractive theoretical scheme based on communication in its aspects of implication and meaning. (It might be noted that Grice, a sort of “spurious” linguist, is somehow akin to Tolkien who, in turn, was a kind of “spurious” linguist as well.) First and foremost, I think it useful to outline the Gricean concept of communication in brief. According to Grice, communication is the intentional production, on the part of a rational human being (named the producer), of specific effects (such as beliefs or actions) on another rational human being (referred to as the recipient). Furthermore, the intentions of the producer of the message must be made clear to the recipient. Therefore, Grice conceives communication as the intentional, rational, and transparent production of beliefs and actions in the recipient by the producer (see also Cosenza 1997). Intention, which forms part of communication, is also at the basis of another distinction by Grice, namely that between speaker meaning and utterance meaning (for further details see Grice 1989; Bertuccelli Papi 1993; Bianchi 2003; Bazzanella 2008). While speaker meaning refers to what the speaker wants to convey, utterance meaning refers to what the words uttered by the speaker literally say. On many occasions, what the speaker wants to say does not coincide with the literal meaning of the utterance. For communication to be effective and successful, though, even when speaker meaning and utterance meaning differ, the basic fact is that the speaker’s intentions must be recognised by the recipient. In this case, then, mutual knowledge of the communicative intention is achieved. If said knowledge were not reached, then communication would fail.

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IV. The Lay as Seen in a Gricean Light In the case of the Lay, I think that, when composing the poem, Tolkien did not want to create a gap between speaker meaning and utterance meaning because the Lay features a close relationship between what the speaker (i.e. the author) said and the literal meaning of what has been uttered (i.e. the Lay itself). It might be objected that, in the case of a poem, Gricean terms be adapted to the context of written communication. There is no problem at all in substituting speaker for writer/author and utterance for lines, as Grice’s theory concerns communication in all its forms and aspects, without being restricted to oral communication. Nonetheless, in the case of The Lay of the Children of Húrin, the distinction between oral and written communication seems destined to fade as the two terms overlap. One must never forget, in fact, that the Lay is a thorough recreation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry which was to be performed, i.e. read out loud before an audience–typically a chieftain or a king and his court–and possibly to be accompanied by the music of some instrument. The written word rests therefore on the oral production, of which it might be said to be a mere reproduction. In Old English poetry, then, sounds came first. This was due to a number of reasons; in particular, very few people could read, and poetry was therefore expected not to be read but listened to. Poetry was destined to entertain the hearers, where by “entertain” is meant “to divert from daily cares and problems”. Diversion was provided by listening to events related to adventures, battles, quests, and might have been characterised by grievous as well as lighter notes. Regardless of their subject, though, Old English poetic productions had one feature in common: they were able to convey feelings and sensations by arranging words and their sounds into an evocative, alliterative pattern, thus forming a mental image in the minds of the audience (see also Lewis 1967, 317: “Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions.”). The intentions of the poet were recognized by the hearers and mutual knowledge of the communicative intention was reached. In linguisticsrelated terms, the intention of the producer of the text was recognized by the recipient of the text, and thus communication was made properly to work. As regards Tolkien in particular, it is well known that he wrote his stories in order to provide his invented languages with an actual basis, so that such languages might achieve a fuller and more complete existence.

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The linguistic invention comes therefore first, and from it the entire narrative (i.e. literary) scheme is derived. The Lay of the Children of Húrin is one of his earlier attempts to provide poetic (i.e. linguistic and narrative/literary) shape for his love for Old English poetry, as well as for his longing for the past; and since Tolkien, as both scholar and author, was still in his prime at the time of composition, he obviously lacked the deep knowledge of linguistic and literary matters which he possessed in his maturity, and which are well testified by such works as The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. At that stage of his life he could but rely on his ability to imitate the style and language of alliterative poetry which he so loved and knew so well, as a learned reader of it). The Lay, therefore, can be said to represent: a) and b)

the poetic expression of mournfulness and melancholy; the linguistic expression of alliterative poetry.

On a different plan, a) and b) above can be seen as: i) ii)

a tension towards an emotional past; and a tension towards a linguistic past.

In the above, a) and i) have more to do with the literary aspect, while b) and ii) have more to do with the linguistic side. From a Gricean perspective, a) and i) may be termed as “speaker meaning”, while b) and ii) can be referred to as “utterance meaning”. On the grounds of what I have outlined so far, the following association can be drawn up: SPEAKER MEANING = TENSION TOWARDS AN EMOTIONAL PAST UTTERANCE MEANING = TENSION TOWARDS A LINGUISTIC PAST

If this holds true for The Lay of the Children of Húrin, it holds true for Tolkien’s major works as well, namely The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. In fact, they are deeply rooted in the linguistic soil which was so dear to the author’s heart and mind. In these books the reader can find and perceive–at least if he or she is an attentive reader–the essence of Tolkien’s cultural desire for the Old English world. Other works by Tolkien deal with linguistic issues. I refer, for instance, to Farmer Giles of Ham, which is more of a divertissement than a proper

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poem or novel. In order for the above-mentioned equivalence between linguistics and literature to be fully effective, we need to take into consideration those works where the professional side of Tolkien’s personality has no prominence over the emotional side. In other words, that part of his production (essays and criticism excluded, of course) where the philologist takes over the role of the narrator is not fit to show the complexity of the intimate relationship among the different aspects of Tolkien’s many-sided persona. In Farmer Giles of Ham there is a wide gap between speaker meaning and utterance meaning. Even The Hobbit, which is normally grouped together with The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, possesses a lesser degree of the “inner consistency” of the “Lit. and Ling.” pair–and that is due to the fact that The Hobbit was mainly conceived as children’s literature. In the light of the approach envisaged in this paper, then, there seems to exist a different grouping of Tolkien’s fictional works, namely those encompassing his “total” love for Anglo-Saxon world (where by “total” I mean love for the literature, culture, and language of that period) and those where one aspect of said love prevails over the others.

V. The Lay as a Token of Communication from a Gricean Perspective Let me now go back to the Gricean concept of communication as an intentional, rational, and transparent human activity, and see how these three features (intentionality, rationality, and transparency) can be applied to and fit the Lay of the Children of Húrin. I will carry out the operation by calling into question also the tools of text linguistics as defined by De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981. According to De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), in poetry, the aim of communication often conditions the surface organization of the text. Strategies of textual cohesion (which is carried out by means of specific elements) help the audience to understand the text when said text is orally transmitted (cf. Bertuccelli Papi 1993). All this has to do with the intentionality of the producer of the text who chooses to use specific strategies in order to achieve his or her goal through the text. In order for communication to be effectively performed, the recipient of the text, upon receiving the cohesive text by the producer, must accept it on the grounds of specific social and cultural co-ordinates. This is termed the acceptability of the text and were it not present communication would fail.

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VI. The Lay as an Intentional and Rational Token of Communication In the case of the Lay of the Children of Húrin, Tolkien aimed at conveying (i.e. communicating) specific meanings (both emotional and cultural) to his audience, and he resorted to Anglo-Saxon poetry, as that was the poetic form which could catch the audience’s attention best. As Bibire (1993, 125) has it: That aspect of Old English which evidently pierced Tolkien most deeply and which brought out from him the strongest response, is that of poetry. [...] He evidently responded as much to metre and vocabulary as to the more conventionally literary aspects of the texts.

As regards the Lay, cohesion, which is provided by alliteration at a phonetic level, helps the readers/hearers quite a lot. Phonetic cohesion is more important than syntactic cohesion because, in Tolkien’s view, poetry possesses musicality, and words/language are derived from sounds, so that “the auditory images precede the visual” (Lobdell 1981, 45; see also Shippey 1979, 302: “words will sound right” as their sound can somehow guide the reader/hearer and evoke meanings and feelings, even though the reader/hearer does not fully understand what the words mean). As Rosebury (2003) notes, before 1937 Tolkien wrote prose fiction which contained a larger number of archaic words and expressions than his later production, due to the overt influence of the style of William Morris. The same holds true for the poetry he composed before 1937, and the Lay, in Rosebury’s view,

suffers in the end from the unadaptableness of modern English to the metrical and assonantal idiom of Beowulf: diction and syntax are too often, and too obviously, constrained by the demands of the medium. (Rosebury 2003, 97)

This criticism seems to me to be a little too harsh. It is true that The Lay of the Children of Húrin will sound “strange” and “unusual” to modern ears, but it must be remembered that: 1) the poem was originally not intended for publication (i.e. in the first place, the Lay was meant to reach exclusively its author’s ears and no one else’s, for which reason the text was fully understandable by the recipient, as recipient and producer were, in this case, the same person);

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2) the aura of long ago was part of the author’s intention (i.e. even though Tolkien did not think of getting his work published–and indeed it was Tolkien’s son Christopher to have it in print–once the poem saw the light of day it was as if its “final user” had multiplied and had become the multitude of Tolkien’s readers–for which, see my definition of “Tolkienist reader” below).

In addition to being intentional, the Lay is also the rational production of a human being which was rationally meant to produce specific effects on its recipient(s). It goes without saying, in fact, that Tolkien, when composing the poem, was “in full possession of his rational faculties” and was rationally thinking about the creation of a whole legendarium for the people who were to speak his invented languages. As Shippey remarks: Tolkien [...] was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. (Shippey 2001, xvi)

Therefore, referring to the Lay as a “resourceful pastiche” (Rosebury 2003, 97) is, in my opinion, somewhat unfair and incorrect.

VII. The Lay as a Transparent Token of Communication Even if the Lay is an unfinished text (or a “fragment”), its basic meaning is quite clear to readers who can work out the overall sense of the poem, at least by comparing it to the rest of Tolkien’s production. Nonetheless, even if people read exclusively this fragment, they would still perceive a sensation of loss and dispossession when facing the lines. As a literary text offered to contemporary readers, the Lay is bound to have a distancing effect for them due to the hoard of obsolete words and to the complex structures and schemes of the poem. As I have already mentioned, originally the Lay was not meant for publication, and it was put on the market in 1986 by Christopher Tolkien (see Tolkien 1994) as part of the History of Middle-earth collection (which, at present, comprises 12 volumes). The series includes works by Tolkien which had never received his final imprimatur, and which therefore are more a testimony to the creative process of the writer than proper fictional works (either poems or novels) in the strictest sense of the word. The recipient of said publication, i.e. the target reader for whom these books are likely to have been edited, is not expected to be the

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occasional reader, nor the “standard” reader of fantasy works who has probably purchased The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion (and would never venture to go through the rest of his more complex, more diverse fiction). The recipient of the History of Middleearth series, and therefore of the Lay, is bound to be someone who loves Tolkien’s works in toto, knows his world quite well, and who longs to read his production down to the smallest fragment (and who may be termed the “Tolkienist reader”). Therefore, though as bewildered as reader might have been at reading an old-style composition such as the Lay, he or she will have fully understood the spirit behind those lines. Knowing Tolkien’s his cultural background as well as his literary tastes, author’s intentionality is made easily clear, and the text acceptability is thus ensured. Therefore, communication is effective because the author’s intentions are transparent to and are accepted by the modern, Tolkienist, readers, who vouchsafe the Lay’s aesthetic quality. As Eco (2003) states, all poetic texts are expected to produce an aesthetic effect on their readers / hearers. By “aesthetic effect”, Eco indicates an invitation towards understanding how the physical and emotional response to the text is triggered by the poetic form the text takes on, thanks to a “back and forth” movement between cause and effect. Therefore, aesthetic appreciation is something more than the effect one perceives: it is rather the appreciation for the textual strategies which lie behind said effect.

VIII. Concluding Remarks In the light of the linguistic framework provided by Grice’s theory of communication, it is clear that Tolkien’s poetic fragment acts as an intentional, rational, and transparent token of communication. This helps to remark how “linguistics” (and, more specifically, “general linguistics”), and not “philology”, is the fittest angle from which to prove that the author’s production comprises the linguistic and literary aspects pertaining to any human, intentional, and rational work of art, thus bridging the gap between such disciplines as philology, literature, and linguistics - which are normally kept separate within the generic scope of “English Studies”. I think that what I have so far brought to the foreground as regards the Lay can be extended to other items of Tolkien’s literary production (and which have been mentioned before). Furthermore, it must be kept in mind that Tolkien was convinced of the rights men have to exercise “fantasy”, and that he made every effort to defend his belief in the rational aspect of fantasy and the narrative art derived from it. In my opinion, all this adds to

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and completes the “Ling.” side of the triad which turns out to be the overarching term encompassing both “Lit.” and “Lang.”

References Bazzanella, Carla. 2008. Linguistica e pragmatica del linguaggio. Un”introduzione. Nuova edizione ampliata. Bari: Laterza. Bertuccelli, Papi Marcella. 1993. Che cos”è la pragmatica. Milano: Bompiani. Bianchi, Claudia. 2003. Pragmatica del linguaggio. Bari: Laterza. Bibire, Paul. 1993. “sægde se þe cuþe: J.R.R. Tolkien as Anglo-Saxonist.” In Scholarship and Fantasy, Anglicana Turkuensa 12, edited by Battarbee, 111-131. Turku: University of Turku. Caldecott Stratford. 2003. Secret Fire. The Spiritual Vision of JRR Tolkien. London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. Cosenza, Giovanna. 1997. Intenzione, significato, comunicazione. La filosofia del linguaggio di Paul Grice, Bologna: Cleub. Curry, Patrick. 1999. “Modernity in Middle-earth.” In Tolkien. A Celebration, edited by J. Pearce, 34-39. London: Fount-HarperCollins. De Anna, Luigi G. 1996. “Il saggio di J.R.R. Tolkien “On Fairy Stories”. Il verbum e la sub-creazione.” Minas Tirith 1 : 8-20. De Beaugrande, Robert and Wolfgang U. Dressler. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman (or. ed. Einfürung in die Textlinguistik, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1981). Del Corso, Lucio and Paolo Pecere. 2003. L”anello che non tiene. Tolkien fra letteratura e mistificazione. Roma: Minimum Fax. Di Scala, Roberto. 2007. “Across, and Astray. Leading the Sense in Translating Tolkien’s The Lay of the Children of Húrin.” In Voices on Translation. Linguistic, Multimedia and Cognitive Perspectives, R.I.L.A. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, XXXIX, 1-2, edited by A. Baicchi, 129-44. Roma: Bulzoni. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, (or. ed. Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione, Milano: Bompiani, 2003). Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War. The Threshold of Middleearth. London: HarperCollins. Grice, Herbert P. 1989. Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kilby, Clyde S. 1969. “Meaning in The Lord of the Rings.” In Shadows of Imagination. The Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles

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Williams, edited by Hillegas, 70-80. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Lewis, C.S. 1967. “At the Fringe of Language.” In Studies in Words, 313331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lobdell, Jared. 1981. England and Always. Tolkien’s World of the Ring. Grand Rapids (Mich.): William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Lodigiani, Emilia. 1982. Invito alla lettura di J.R.R. Tolkien. Milano: Mursia. Mathews, Richard. 2002. Fantasy. The Liberation of Imagination. New York and London: Routledge. Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monda, Alberto. 2002. Tolkien. Il signore della fantasia. Milano: Frassinelli. Pearce, Joseph. 1998. Tolkien: Man and Myth. A Literary Life. London: HarperCollins. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien. A Cultural Phenomenon. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. Shippey, Tom A. 1979. “Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings.” In JRR Tolkien. Scholar and Storyteller. Essays in Memoriam, edited by Salu and Farrell, 286-316. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. —. 1982. The Road to Middle-earth. London: Grafton. —. 1995a. “Tolkien and the Gawain-poet.” In Proceedings of the JRR Tolkien Centenary Conference, edited by Reynolds and GoodKnight, 213-19. Milton Keynes and Altadena: The Tolkien Society and the Mythopoeic Press. —. 1995b. “Tolkien and the West Midlands: The Roots of Romance.” Lembas Extra: 5-22. —. 2001. J.R.R. Tolkien. Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Tolkien, Christopher. 1994. Preface to The Lays of Beleriand. The History of Middle-earth vol. 3, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, vii-ix. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine Books. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1975. “The Verse-Forms of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl.” In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 142-48. London: George Allen and Unwin. —. 1990. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: Unwin.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sue Bridgwater (formerly Jenkins) lives in Devon, UK, where she works on fiction projects and mythopoeic studies. Her relevant publications include “Love, loss and seeking; maternal deprivation and the quest"; 'The sense of belonging; an introduction to the novels of Jane Louise Curry'; and Perian's Journey (with Alistair McGechie). The essay included in this volume was based on “Stay or go; some reflections upon stasis and travelling in Tolkien’s Mythos,” given at the Tolkien Society in June 2009, and forthcoming in Peter Roe Booklets). Liam Campbell is a freelance writer and researcher who has recently been awarded his Ph.D. in English literature. His doctoral work on Tolkien has been revised to be released in book form under the title The Ecological Augury in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Walking Tree Publishers of Zurich and Jena before the end of 2010. Liam has also given many talks on fantasy and Tolkien across Europe and America, and has lectured in English literature for the University of Ulster. Roberto Di Scala teaches English at Italian state vocational schools and at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He obtained his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pisa, where he previously received his degree in English Language and Literature with a dissertation on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Among his interests are translation studies and linguistics applied to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. His most recent publications include "Across, and Astray. Leading the Sense in Translating Tolkien's The Lay of the Children of Húrin" (2007), and "Negoziare con gli Hobbit. Il caso di Bilbo Baggins" (2007). Kathleen Dubs currently teaches in the Department of English language and literature at Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, as well as the Institute of English Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. Her most recent publications include “Devising Meaning in Genesis B,” the reprint of "Fate, Providence, and Chance: Boethian Philosophy in The Lord of the Rings,” and “Fortune and Fate” in The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. “Harry Bailey: Chaucer’s Critic?” and “Sleeping in Beowulf” are forthcoming.

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Contributors

Jason Fisher is an independent scholar specializing in J.R.R. Tolkien, the Inklings, and Germanic philology (among other interests). Recent publications include entries in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, as well as chapters in Tolkien and Modernity, The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On, Truths Breathed through Silver: The Inklings’ Moral and Mythopoeic Legacy, and Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien. Jason has also published scholarly essays in Tolkien Studies, Mythlore, Beyond Bree, North Wind, Renaissance, and others publications. Visit Jason at his blog: http://lingwe.blogspot.com. Kinga Jenike is a student in the Institute of English Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba, Hungary. The essay included here grew out of an elective advanced seminar on Tolkien. It is her first literary publication in English. Janka Kašþáková took her Ph.D. from Comenius University, Bratislava, and teaches English literature at the Department of English language and literature at Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia. Her research focuses on modernism and the modernist short story, and especially Katherine Mansfield. She also conducts research in fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In addition to presentations on Mansfield she has also presented papers on Tolkien. “Elves and Orcs in the Fictional World of J.R.R. Tolkien” is forthcoming, as are several publications on Mansfield. Anton Pokrivþák received his Ph.D. from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia, where he teaches in the Department of English and American Studies, and received his habilitation in theory of literature from Prešov University in 2005. He was a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of American Studies at Yale University (1992/1993). His essays on postmodern critical theories were collected in 1997 under the title Literatúra a bytie (Literature and Being). His recent studies of some nineteenth and early twentieth century American writers and have appeared under the title Americká imaginácia (American Imagination). Silvia Pokrivþáková received her PhD in Slovak literary theory and history from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. Her first book, Karnevalová a satirická groteska (Carnevalesque and Satirical Grotesque), studied major poetic characteristics of the grotesque in four contemporary Slovak novels. In 2006 she published an introductory guide to literary scholarship, Understanding Literature, co-

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authored with Anton Pokrivþák. Recently she has been interested in the study of children´s and juvenile literature, specifically nonsense literature and fantasy in Anglophonic literatures, which resulted in the book Children´s Literature in English.