4. "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son"
Having lived through two World Wars, in one of which he was severely wounded, Tolkien had most of a lifetime in which to think long thoughts about war. And having cut his philological baby teeth on the great Anglo-Saxon war poem The Battle of Maldon, along with its companion pieces in the Old English literary canon, he had the same length of time in which to decide that it was being generally misinterpreted. At some date not long after the Second World War these two streams of thought ran together to prompt him to write a sequel to Maldon in the form of a dramatic dialogue in alliterative verse between two of Beorhtnoth's retainers searching the battlefield by night for the corpse of the English leader after his defeat. Tolkien published it in Essays and Studies of the English Association17 in 1953, together with an explanation and defense of his new reading of the Maldon poem on which his sequel is based.
Briefly, as Tolkien summarizes it, the more orthodox interpretation saw the poem merely as a celebration of the heroic deaths of Beorhtnoth and all his hearth companions while resisting a Danish onslaught on the English coast in A.D. 991. Tolkien proposed instead that the hinge of Maldon was the poet's censure of Beorhtnoth's ofermod in letting the Danes freely cross an otherwise impassable causeway and hurl their over--whelmingly superior numbers at the English host. Ofermod, Tolkien suggested, was not the mere "over-boldness" it was usually construed to mean, but "overmastering pride," a criminal lust for personal fame. Hence, Maldon was predominantly the account of the unnecessary deaths of many brave men caused by the selfish folly of one.
Tolkien properly points out in the essay "Ofermod," which follows his poem, that Maldon, understood in this way, has a "sharpness and tragic quality" not present in an interpretation of it as purely heroic throughout, because "by it the loyalty of the retinue is greatly enhanced."18 Loving their chief and honoring their pledges of allegiance to him, Beorhtnoth's heorSwerod fight to the death in spite of his besotted judgment, which is betraying them all. "The Homecoming" takes its point of departure from this view of the events of the fight. By putting the reader right among the corpses on the battlefield after nightfall it drives home with utter immediacy the horror of a carnage that need never have taken place. Its method of doing so is to present the words and actions of two of Beorhtnoth's servants, sent by the Monks of Ely to bring back their master's body for burial. The searching, the finding, the carrying—these make up the whole action of Tolkien's short (under 400 lines) narrative poem.
The two searchers are cunningly chosen for maximum spread and contrast of outlook. Both are members of the earl's household, warmly devoted to him. Torhthelm is the young son of a minstrel, being trained in his father's profession to sing of Finn, Froda, Beowulf, and other heroes of northern saga. The old lays have captured him so powerfully that he lives more in the past than in the present. Though nominally a Christian, he is constantly seeing Christian England of A.D. 991 from the point of view of pagan beliefs and customs four centuries gone. Especially, since he has never been in any battle, he romanticizes war. Sharply set off against him is old Tidwald, who has had all too much experience over the years, fighting in the militia bands, and has seen too many stricken fields to have any illusions about this one. Harpers' songs mean little to him. As a farmer his mind is on the ravages to land and people by the Danes. As a committed Christian he looks to Heaven to give consolation for the sorrows he sees all around him in this life and due recompense in the next. Tolkien's artistry lies in devising a series of encounters between the outlooks of these two very different men so as to bring put the themes in which he is interested.
At the start of "The Homecoming" the long night search among the tangle of bodies, which death has robbed of identity as Englishman or Dane, has unnerved Torhthelm. Stimulated by pagan legends that ghosts of the unburied dead must walk the night, his imagination hears them gibbering in every gust of wind. For this he is mocked by Tidwald and told to "forget your gleeman's stuff." The old farmer is matter-of-factly unheaping corpses distinguishable only as "long ones and short ones,/the thick and the thin." Not unkindly he reminds the boy that England is Christian now and "ghosts are under ground or else God has/them . . ." But to Torhthelm the mirk seems "the dim/shadow of heathen hell, in the hopeless/kingdom where search is vain." It is no accident that Tolkien chooses a hell image here to describe the aftermath of battle.
Among the many of Beorhtnoth's household thanes whose deaths are sung in Maldon the author calls only two specifically young: Wulfmaer, son of Wulfstan, and Aelfwine, son of Aelfric. These are the two whose bodies the searchers discover first and identify by the light of their lantern. Tolkien has the point to make that promising young men are the most numerous and most lamentable victims of war. In order to make it, he goes far beyond the single adjective of Maldon, giving both Torhthelm and Tidwald repeated laments on the youth and worth of the slain men. Tidwald, particularly, thinks it "... a wicked business/to gather them ungrown." Wulfmaer was "a gallant boy" with "the makings of a man," Aelfwine "a brave lordling, and we need his like." Torhthelm likewise is moved to indignation against the bearded sons of Offa who fled while the Danes beat down "boys" younger than himself. Yet with an inconsistency born of his minstrel training he wishes he himself had been in the fight, to show that he loved Beorhtnoth as well as any of his titled lords and would never have run away as some of them did. Tidwald's sad retort is that Torhthelm's time for battle will come all too soon and, when it does, he will not find it as easy as the songs say to choose between shame and death. This part of "The Homecoming" accentuates the most wasteful side of the wide waste of war, that it cuts off the young. And Tolkien piles waste upon waste by putting it into a setting in which the deaths are all needless, all sacrifices to the pride of Beorhtnoth, whom even Tidwald still loves.
When the two searchers finally uncover Beorhtnoth's body they say a Christian prayer for him, but Torhthelm also feels the need to burst into a chant in praise of the hero dead, traditional in ancient heathen lays (in Beowulf, for instance) and incorporated by Tolkien into The Lord of the Rings for the funerals of Boromir and Théoden. Torhthelm's song blends the pagan with the Christian, praising Beorhtnoth on the one hand for his brave heart and generosity in gift-giving, on the other for "his soul clearer than swords of heroes," and culminating in the cry: "He has gone to God glory seeking." Unknowing as yet that the earl's folly in pursuing "glory" is the cause of the entire tragedy, the young singer later again raises a burial chant for him as
to his hearth-comrades help unfailing,
to his folk the fairest father of peoples.
Glory loved he; now glory earning ...
But the reader, instructed by Tolkien's own analysis of the battle, is meant to know and catch the full irony of lauding the dead leader for that very quality that destroyed the people he was supposed to guard and guide.
One subtheme of "The Homecoming" is Torhthelm's gradual and by no means uninterrupted discovery that the heroic grandeur he sees in his sagas is not compatible with the unheroic reality he is finding on the Essex battlefield. In consequence, from time to time he wavers uncomfortably between the two. He has just seen that youth can die. Now he is horrified by the revelation that Beorhtnoth's mangled body, when it is found, is headless. "What a murder it is,/this bloody fighting!" is the exclamation wrung from him. Tidwald seizes the chance to educate him further by reminding him that war and death were just as un-glamorous in the times of Froda and Finn, which he delights to sing about: "The world wept then, as it weeps today." But in the next moment Torhthelm is again envisioning for Beorhtnoth a magnificent funeral pyre and burial in a high barrow surrounded by his weapons and jewels in the antique fashion. He has to be brought back by Tidwald's impatient recall that since these are Christian days the earl will be laid simply in the grave after a Requiem mass by the Monks of Ely, and that the two of them had better get on with the job of transporting the corpse.
Just then, however, Torhthelm, start
led by stealthy movements in the dark, is sure that they are made by the "troll-shapes ... or hell-walkers" of Norse folklore. He attacks them with Beorhtnoth's blade, which he has picked up, and kills one of them. Sardonically Tidwald hails him as "my bogey-slayer!" He shows the youth that he has killed nothing but a miserable English corpse stripper, who could easily have been put to flight by a boot in the pants. This, too, has been a needless death, in its own small way not unlike the earl's greater slaughter, since both result from imaginations unbalanced by emulation of the mighty past. And the fact that the killing has been done by Beorhtnoth's own sword is another of art's little perfidies.
Up to this point Torhthelm has not known that the English chief gave the Danes the advantage of crossing the causeway. Now Tidwald tells him with a mixture of sorrow, anger, and love. In so doing he tries to open his young companion's eyes to the part played in Beorhtnoth's decision by the seduction of bardic fame: he was too "keen ... to give minstrels matter for mighty songs./Needlessly noble." But, to judge from Torhthelm's failure to comment, the lesson does not sink in. Instead, he ruminates on the vagaries of historical change that have pulled down the last living descendant of the Saxon earls who conquered England, while bringing on the scene a new race of conquering Danes. To him Beorhtnoth's chivalry was too much in accord with that of many of the noblest heroes of old to seem "needless." So missing what Tidwald (and through him Tolkien) considers the key to a proper understanding of the meaning of the battle—the initial guilt of Beorhtnoth—Torhthelm never does comprehend the true nature of the horror and pity hanging over that battleground. His historical analogies are true enough, and well worth drawing, but they go off at a tangent from the immediate tragedy of the battle itself. Also, what is to Torhthelm only an interesting historical configuration translates itself for Tidwald into concrete facts of farmers robbed and killed, wives and children carried off into serfdom. "Let the poets/babble, but perish all pirates!"
Though Tidwald seems to have done most of the methodical physical work of getting Beorhtnoth's corpse to the wagon that is to bear it to Ely, Torh-thelm's wilder emotions have wearied him to the point of needing rest. But Tidwald's suggestion that he lie in the wagon with the corpse, using it as a pillow, strikes the younger man as revoltingly brutal. Not at all, replies the old farmer; Torhthelm has misused his songs so long for dressing up ugly facts in the fancy language of poetry that he has never learned to accept them bare. To demonstrate, Tidwald by way of parody extemporizes a sentimental poem relating in high-flown style how a faithful servant, weary with weeping for the master he loves, bows his head on the beloved breast as they journey together toward the grave. Decked out like that, he says, his suggestion about lying in the cart with Beorhtnoth would appeal to Torhthelm as noble. The latter accepts the rebuke, gets into the wagon, falls asleep, and dreams.
Speaking out of his dream Torhthelm is no longer the callow romantic youth but a mouthpiece for something greater and more impersonal than himself, the spirit of heroic paganism. He foresees Beorhtnoth's burial and the slow oblivion of time that overtakes him as his tomb crumbles and all his kin die out. Then his prophecy broadens into a vision of the doom awaiting the whole human race when its candles flicker out and everlasting night rushes in. Is there nothing men can do to vanquish the darkness and the cold? No, for the doom is that of Ragnarok, when gods and men will be swept away by the forces of chaos. But meantime manhood demands that they gather together in lighted halls to defy with undaunted spirits the defeat that is bound to come. Torhthelm, still dreaming, hears and repeats what they chant:
Heart shall be bolder, harder be
purpose, more proud the spirit as our power lessens!
Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,
though doom should come and dark conquer.
Tolkien is paraphrasing here the famous lines spoken by a member of Beorhtnoth's war band in the Maldon poem as they await the last onslaught, lines praised by Tolkien in his accompanying essay as "a summing up of the heroic code" of the north. Likewise, in his celebrated lecture delivered to the British Academy in 1936, "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics," Tolkien had singled out this same defiance of fated doom, without fear and without hope, as the core of that poem. He had used there, too, the same image of man at bay in his lighted halls besieged by the darkness outside. In short, he is giving us in Torhthelm's assertion of the will's inner victory what seems to him the finest that Norse paganism has to offer. It is very fine indeed. Tolkien admires it. He has said so repeatedly elsewhere, and by implication he says so again in "The Homecoming." But for him personally as a Catholic it is not enough, for it stops with life on earth.
As Torhthelm has spoken for more than himself, so also Tidwald speaks for the new age of Christianity (and for Tolkien, too, it seems) in his reply to the glee-man's apprentice:
... your words were
queer, Torhthelm my lad, with your talk of
wind and doom conquering and a dark ending.
It sounded fey and fell-hearted,
and heathenish, too: I don't hold with that.
So far as this world goes, Tidwald's view of the prospects are hardly more cheerful than Torhthelm's. The coming morning, like others before it, will bring only more labor and loss till England is ruined. Wars will go on, "ever work and war till the word passes," and roads will be rough for Englishmen in Æthelred's or any other time. But the world will pass, and what lies beyond is foreshadowed by the Requiem mass being sung by the Monks of Ely as "The Homecoming" ends: "Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam meam." Here at last after courage shines hope.
Looking back over Tolkien's poem from its beginning, we may well be impressed by the crusading spirit with which he has Tidwald knock down every attempt by Torhthelm to idealize war. On the other hand he never hints that a fight with a determined enemy can or should be avoided. It would be nice if the Danes would stay home and stop ruining England, but since they will not they must be resisted by arms. Tidwald hates the invaders, has often fought them in the past, and will continue to fight them in days to come. His anguish after the Maldon fray is not that there has been a fray but that bad leadership has lost so many precious English fives without stopping enemy destruction of the land. If men must die in battie, let their deaths at least buy safety for their people. Tolkien, of course, writes here only about a specifically defensive war fought on English soil. The situation is essentially the same in The Lord of the Rings where the war against Sauron is again a war of defense waged in the home territories of the West against a foe implacably bent on invasion and enslavement. About other sorts of wars fought elsewhere for other reasons it is safe to deduce from the two works only that Tolkien's deep hatred of waste and death would make him insist that they be plainly necessary to the defense of freedom at home. He does not seem to be optimistic that wars will ever cease.
Finally, we should be clear that Tidwald's impatience with Torhthelm's saga-quoting and saga-living is less with the sagas themselves than with the young man's misreading and misapplication of them. Tidwald objects to their use as a substitute for life—and so does Tolkien through him. The writer or reader of fantasy, he prescribes in his essay "On Fairy-stories," must start from a strong grasp of the primary world of experience, and must always return to it from his adventures in the secondary worlds of fancy, refreshed and reawakened to present realities. Young Torhthelm, lacking such a grasp, is constantly confusing the two worlds, with the result that he understands neither. This is not the fault of the sagas. Properly seen, they reveal the lacrimae rerum in the battles, loyalties, treacheries they relate. "You can hear the tears through the harp's/twanging . . ." says Tidwald. And he concedes that they have comfort to offer today's suffering: "The woven staves have yet worth in them/for woeful hearts . . ." "The Homecoming" is certainly a warning against disproportion in the uses of fantasy. But it is very far from being a repudiation either of the heroic northern lays, which have been a lasting enthusiasm of Tolkien's life, or, almost need
less to say, of his own works of the imagination whose forefathers they are.
5. "Smith of Wootton Major"
This, the last in (1967) of Tolkien's minor works to be published to date, has the same major theme as "Leaf by Niggle," his earliest. Both are short prose narrative meditations on the gift of fantasy, what it is, whence it comes, and what it does to the life and character of the man who receives it. But since the earlier story is deeply Christian, whereas "Smith of Wootton Major" is not overtly religious at all, they formulate and resolve in quite different terms the range of problems they have in common. As against "Leaf by Niggle's" setting in modern England, followed by an afterlife in Purgatory, the present story unfolds in a landscape of no recognizable time or place, in which the village of Wootton Major lies only a few miles away from the country of Faery, and those who know how may easily walk across the boundary between them. Not that signs of date and nationality are completely lacking. The villagers' English names, guild system, Great Hall, and pregunpowder weapons hint at medieval England, but where are the knights, castles, villeins, priests, and other features of the feudal Middle Ages, and who ever heard of a medieval village with an independent Council electing a Master Cook as key official?
No, though the villagers are human beings, Tolkien skews them slightly hobbitward, and consequently out of historical time and space. Their perpetual feasting all year round, their insistence on "full and rich fare" at every feast, and their exaltation of cooking into the supreme art, especially in the Great Cake at the Twenty-four Feast for children (given once every twenty-four years) are all marks of hobbitlike gusto for food.19 This skewing is just enough to make Wootton Major a compatible neighbor to a region of Faery inhabited by elves and alien in its many marvels. Tolkien needs some continuity of strangeness to prevent the journeys back and forth between village and Faery from jarring the imagination.
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