Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  Such insight is never earned but is a power gratuitously bestowed. "It's a gift!" declares Niggle as he looks around him at the Tree and the woods. And Tolkien comments, "He was referring to his art, and also to the result, but he was using the word quite literally." Translate painting into verbal narrative. Broaden the reference from the single story about Niggle (Leaf) to the full panorama of Tolkien's legendary history of Middle-earth (Tree), which was in his thoughts when he wrote both story and essay. Then emerges Tolkien's faith that his own incomplete life's work images in some sense ultimate truths that are not bounded by the particular details it narrates. Even if he never survives to finish it, it will always have the eternal validity of shadowing forth in human words a portion of the great Tree of Tales, which soars always just at the edge of man's vision.

  There is more. The Tree itself may be finished but Niggle discovers that other scenes of the forest landscape, only roughly sketched in his painting, are likewise still shadowy in the reality he now inhabits: ". . . in the Forest there were a number of inconclusive regions that still needed work and thought." He sees what needs doing, but to his surprise is unable to accomplish it without the aid of his neighbor Parish, whom he had always considered the worst of pests and the bane of his art. Looking more precisely at the Tree, he has also become aware that its best leaves have been painted "in collaboration with Mr. Parish." When Parish is sent to help him it is the combined work and thought of the two men that gives the forest its final elaboration of substance.

  This episode of recognition and reconciliation has its Purgatorial function, of course, but it also introduces two associated literary meanings previously presented by Tolkien in the essay. One of these is Tolkien's belief that a subcreator of tales, besides "glimpsing" existing reality, is allowed by God's grace to contribute to the ongoing process of divine creation. In Tolkien's words, the quality of a writer's secondary worlds is "derived from Reality or flowing into it" (italics mine). More explicitly, Tolkien continues, "So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the affoliation and multiple enrichment of creation." Niggle begins by painting as well as he can a dimly discerned ideal world existing in the mind of God (the notion verges on the Platonic). He ends by bringing into being aspects of that world that were inchoate when he arrived. So, when he departs for the mountains, he leaves behind "the house ... the garden, the grass, the forest, the lake, and all the country," each complete "in its own proper fashion." Not that Niggle or Parish or any other subcreator can scheme such completions helter-skelter out of his own head. They have a "proper fashion," a law of their own, which must be observed. Nevertheless, the human contribution is genuine and original. Niggle's and Parish's contributions are so vital that the country they have helped to create is forever after known to the Two Voices as "Niggle's Parish." They find it "very useful indeed" in rehabilitating newcomers to the afterlife. It is not only "splendid for convalescence" but "for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains." This sounds like an application of the doctrine, defended in Tolkien's essay, that one prime function of fantasy is Recovery from physical and spiritual blindness to the astounding world we live in: "Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—re-gaining of a clear view."7

  Niggle's astounded perception that his best painting has been done in collaboration with Parish exemplifies a further doctrine of Tolkien's, that no writer can subcreate a secondary world successfully without first having a clear-eyed knowledge of life in our primary world. The only contribution which could possibly have been made to Niggle's painting by this lame, whining neighbor with his endless demands on Niggle's time and energy must consist in these very demands. Without them Niggle would not have been forced daily to grapple so closely with the hard facts of actual existence. Morally, this is his salvation. Artistically, it gives him a strong sense of fact essential to fantasy. Over and over the essay "On Fairy-stories," insists: "Fantasy does not blur the sharp outlines of the real world; for it depends on them." Tolkien's very definition of a fairy story requires it to construct an imaginary world that is recognizably different in content and tone from the workaday one. It must contain "images of things that are not only 'not actually present' but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all." A firm knowledge of the difference is the sine qua non of sanity. It is also necessary to the craft of writing a tale (or painting a picture) which allows us Escape from the humdrum in order that we may return to it with fresh eyes, able to see that it is not really humdrum at all. Parish's gift to Niggle, then, was to provide the frustrating dreariness that prickled his imagination to frame ("glimpse") a greener, more spacious world for the refreshment of himself and others.

  Perhaps mirroring his pessimism in 1939 as to the reception of his own work, Tolkien ends the story by showing how few people have the slightest appreciation of Niggle's painting. Typically, Parish and the Inspector value it only as a bit of canvas handy for patching leaks in the roof. After Niggle's death it is in fact used for that purpose. Only the mild little schoolmaster, Atkins, troubles to rescue a scrap bearing a single leaf, which is hung in the town Museum and seen by "a few eyes" before it is destroyed when the building burns down. At a meeting of the Town Council, which drifts into a discussion of whether Niggle's painting was of any "use" at all, the few words Atkins speaks in defense are loudly overborne by Tompkins, a gross man who says all the stupid things Tolkien's enemies were to parade later on. He considers Niggle's world "old-fashioned stuff" and "private daydreaming." Tompkins' idea of useful art is "a telling poster" and he is one of those reductionists for whom flowers are "digestive and genital organs of plants." This bitter little scene closes aptly with the remark of Perkins, another councilor: "Never knew he painted." Tolkien cannot long remain "bitter or despairing, however. The last words spoken are those of the Two Voices, whose idea of the "use" of Niggle's labors is not that of careless or wrong-headed humanity.

  Tolkien has fought through to a meaning for his work. Unheeded except by a few it may be, perish in the end with all man's other artifacts it certainly will, but it is a glimpse of ultimate reality, and there is a safe and continuing usefulness for it somewhere beyond "the walls of the world."

  2. "The Lay of Aotrou and ltroun"

  Published in December 1945,8 this fairy-tale tragedy in octosyllabic couplets was the second of Tolkien's short pieces to reach print, "Leaf by Niggle" having appeared earlier in the same year. Tolkien is predominantly a prose writer, but every reader of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is aware from their many inset poems that his prose easily spills over into verse. It was predictable that he would one day experiment with independent, longer narrative poems like "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" and "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth." And, given Tolkien's interest in ancient genres, it is also natural that the one should have a medieval model, the other an Anglo-Saxon. The "Lay" looks back to the Breton lays of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, sung by minstrels mainly to audiences in northern France but based on old Celtic tales from Britain.9 True to type, it tells a story of love and magic. But Tolkien has chosen to give his poem an unusually strong religious cast, which transforms the customary series of knightly exploits and amours into a story of temptation and fall. He has also built into it image patterns and variant refrains of more than medieval sophistication to deepen and darken the grim flow of its tragedy.

  Tolkien loves to wrap a past inside a past. The minstrel who is reciting the "Lay" says at the outset that the story he is about to tell happened in Britain long before his time. He has picked it up from "Briton harpers." The ruined castle by the sea described in the opening stanzas was once populous and prosperous. He will relate how the "dark doom" of its lord caused it to fall into its present decay. The cause began in the lord's own discontent. Failing to count the blessings of a loving wife and a rich demesne, he brooded on his wife's childnessness until he disprized what
he had: "his pride was empty, vain his hoard." In a medieval setting the word pride immediately evokes the idea of selfish arrogance bordering on sin. And the word hoard, in Tolkien's vocabulary, sounds the alarm against "possessiveness," the greed of ownership which lusts to make everything its own. The poet carries forward stress on this trait of the knight's by speaking of his repugnant visions of strangers taking over his property after his death if he has no heirs. He forgets prayer, abandons the "hope" he should repose in God, and falls into the mortal sin of despair. In consequence, without telling his wife or anybody else, he all alone adopts the "counsel cold," (later termed by the minstrel "evil rede") to seek the aid of a witch.

  This resolve is summed up in the minstrel's comment, "his hope from light to darkness passed." The significance of such a course would be immediately apparent to a medieval audience. To lose hope is to turn away from the second of the three cardinal theological virtues proclaimed by the Church: faith, hope, and charity—no one of which can long endure without the other two. The knight's faith and charity are as imperiled as his hope. By this comment the minstrel has begun in the mind of his audience an association of the words cold and darkness with evil despair, hope and light with good. He proceeds to build upon them.

  The witch whom the knight visits lives in a "cave" in the "homeless hills," a cunning weaver of spells to entangle heart and wits. The sunlight striking the upper edge of her "hollow dale" is "pale," but darkness fills the bottom of the bowl, where she sits waiting on her "seat of stone." At this strategic point the minstrel suddenly stops to insert his second four-line refrain. It is strategic because this refrain immediately strikes the hearer as being slightly different from the first four-line refrain which stands at the head of the "Lay," and moves him to think back to isolate the difference as well as the sameness. This comparison leads to the discovery that whereas the first refrain alluded only to wind ("blowing ever through the trees") and caves ("stoney shores and stony caves"), the second keeps these but adds other features:

  In Britain's land beyond the waves

  are stony hills and stony caves;

  the wind blows ever over hills

  and hollow caves with wailing fills.

  The additions are the witch's "stony hills" over which the wind is now blowing, and her "hollow cave" in which it is wailing ominously. By association through her stony hills and stony seat, "stone" has been sucked into the imaginative connection with evil, as have "cave," "pale," "hollow," and "hills," which are not only stony but "homeless" as distinguished from the warm home which the knight has left behind. Indeed this insight into the poet's method of establishing mood associations tends to hark back to the first refrain and to give to its "stony caves and stony shores" a retroactive quality of warning.

  The knight arrives at sunset "alone between the dark and light" and rides "into the mouth of night." The "alone" begins to take on a sinister urgency, which increases as the poem proceeds. The other references are literally to times of day, but they are also signs of the spiritual darkness into which the fight of the knight's "hope" was earlier said by the poet to have passed. The knight advances "halting to the stony seat" of the witch and meets her eyes, "dark and piercing, filled with lies," as the eyes of the minions of the Father of Lies always are. He need not tell her his errand. She knows "the hunger that thithet him had brought," because it is what gives her power over him. From her "darkening cave" she brings him

  a phial of glass so fairly made

  'twas a wonder in that houseless place

  to see its cold and gleaming grace;

  and therewithin a philter lay

  as pale as water thin and grey

  that spills from stony fountains frore

  in hollow pools in caverns hoar.

  In powerful combination here they all are again, the things and sensations already attached by the poet to evil: the "houseless," homeless place, the barren "stone" of seat and cave and fountain, the "cold" of phial and "fountains frore" (cognate with the "counsel cold" that drove the knight there), the "hollowness" of the pools from which the accursed potion comes, its liquid as "pale" and "grey" as the sun setting on the lip of the witch's dale, or the light of his hope fading into the night of despair. Additionally, the harper is preparing an antagonism between the accursed water of the witch and the "waters blest of Christendom," which are to redeem the knight later in the tale. An extra touch of irony enters with the use of the word grace to denote the phial's lovely outward shape and at the same time connote the fatal absence of divine grace as a spiritual component of its contents.

  Acceptance of such a potion is a mortal sin, which the knight tries to slough away by offering to pay for it in gold, the stuff that his greed considers irresistible. But the witch wants him to commit himself more deeply before she sets her price by actually using the phial on his wife, which will further endanger his soul. In good fairy-tale fashion she postpones naming the payment until after it has worked, on the suf-ficently sardonic pretext that she, the mistress of lies, will have no "lies" told about the efficacy of her product. Another major milestone in the story having passed with the knight's agreement to the bargain, the minstrel sings the third refrain. This keeps up the same unbroken roar of seas pounding and winds blowing, but adds suggestively that in Britain "woods are dark with danger strong," in reference to the knight's growing peril.

  The polarity of dark-death as against light-life appears again when the knight emerges from these woods to see the "living hght" in his castle windows where his wife waits. Sleeping beside her, he dreams that night of children playing in the "gardens fair" of his home. The audience will have opportunity to watch the minstrel's art make these gardens alive with children, the symbol of the "heart's desire" of the childless pair. A sunny morning greets the lord at his awakening, but it cannot win him back from his purpose. Deceitfully he proposes to his lady that on their coming wedding anniversary they hold a merry feast to pray for the birth of children:

  we'll pray that this year we may see

  our heart's desire more quick draw nigh

  than yet we have seen it, thou and I;

  for virtue is in hope and prayer.

  So spake he gravely seeming fair.

  That virtue lies in hope and prayer is indeed the Christian burden of the entire story. The minstrel's putting it into the mouth of a man who has abandoned both is another master stroke of irony to show up the knight for the hypocrite he is. The more so because his intent at the time is to win his wife's confidence so that he may slip the potion into her festive wine. And what is this "heart's desire" of which he speaks but the flawed "hunger" which drew him to the witch's den? The lady agrees happily to the feast. Superficially gay but plangently sad with inner meaning, the fourth refrain now pictures the innocent pairings of birds in Britain's springtime woods, against which the unnatural guilt that the knight is about to smuggle into his union stands out all the more grievously.

  Very different from the malicious laughter of the witch is the loving laughter with which his wife pledges him happiness and long life as she drains the enchanted cup. By his own fault he will be dead within a year. But before the scene darkens again a bright interlude intervenes during which the lady becomes pregnant and the lord dreams once more of those unborn children playing "on lawns of sunlight without hedge/save a dark shadow at their edge." The poet never lets that limiting shadow quite go away. When lovely twins are born the people of the castle rejoice, thinking them the answer to "prayer," and even envying their master and mistress, whose prayer they think has been "answered twice." The wrongness of their interpretation is meant to stab the audience with reminder of the knight's deceit. The story-teller now proceeds to intensify this deceit as the knight, standing at his wife's bedside still gay in manner, still hypocritical, assures her, "Now full . . . is granted me/both hope and prayer," and asks her whether the fulfillment of "heart's desire" is not sweet. In all purity she answers gaily that it is sweet indeed

  at
last the heart's desire to meet,

  thus after waiting, after prayer,

  thus after hope and nigh despair.

  She has meant and practiced the virtues to which he only pretends, though doing so has cost her struggle. The difference between the genuine and the false is starkly drawn.

  But the potion has not yet ceased its appointed work. It causes the knight to promise fatuously to get for his wife anything at all she may desire, even water from a well "in any secret fount or dell," without thinking of the danger of meeting the witch again. Indeed his mention of a secret fount suggests a compulsion to seek her out. In his lady, too, the potion has implanted a sharp longing for "water cool and clear" and for "deer no earthly forests hold." To find these for her the lord rides into what the fifth refrain now sinisterly calls "the forests pale," where he pursues a white doe, heedless of "dim laughter" ringing through the trees. He lusts feverishly for the impossible beast