Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  The volcanoes in "Imram" and the Navigatio are unmistakably the same volcano. As the poem pictures it,

  Upreared from sea to cloud then sheer

  a shoreless mountain stood;

  its sides were black from the sullen tide

  up to its smoking hood,

  but its spire was lit by a living fire

  that ever rose and fell:

  tall as a column in High Heaven's hall,

  its roots were deep as Hell.

  In the Navigatio, too, the peak is towering, steep, and black: "The cliffs at the water's edge were so high that the summit was obscured; they were as black as coal and wonderfully sheer, like a wall." Besides, the monks see the flames rising and subsiding periodically just as in the poem: "they saw the mountain . . . vomiting forth flames sky-high and then sucking them back upon itself." One of their number is trapped by demons there. Tolkien prefers to suppress the demons, but their presence may have contributed to his phrase about the roots of the volcano being "deep as Hell." For his additional idea that the peak rises from drowned lands "where the kings of kings lie low" there are suggestions in the Navigatio of transparent waters through which Brendan and his companions discern undersea landscapes,28 but more probably Tolkien is thinking of kingdoms overrun by the ocean in The Lord of the Rings, specifically Númenor.

  The second landfall of the monks in "Imram" corresponds basically to the Navigation "Paradise of Birds," but with many significant changes. Most obvious of these is in the topography of the island. In the prose it is green and pleasant, easy of access, sunlit. To make Brendan's landing excitingly hazardous Tolkien surrounds it with "cliffs no man could climb." Nor can any boat find harbor except in one very narrow rockbound inlet, which his crew does not discover until they have almost despaired of their lives. This is precisely the monks' experience at a rocky island in the Navigatio, which does not connect with the Paradise of Birds at all. Moreover, Tolkien transfers to the latter's beaches gems which in the Navigatio belong to the Land of Promise. But the monks in "Imram" show no interest in taking home a boatload of precious stones, as they do in the prose account. In this way Tolkien keeps their monastic vow of poverty unbroken and preserves the ascetic tone of his poem.

  This care is in keeping with his effort in the poem to present the island as a holy place, both explicitly and by use of Grail imagery. On landing, Brendan's party senses an atmosphere of sanctity "and holy it seemed to be"—even before it arrives at the White Tree standing in a dale, which is "like a silver grail, with craven hills for rim." The Tree itself, "more fair than ever I deemed, in Paradise might grow," is as thick as a tower and immeasurably tall, and is covered with white "leaves" growing "more close than swan-wing plumes." When the monks chant their prayers a sound of trumpets rings out overhead:

  The Tree then shook, and flying free

  from its limbs the leaves in air

  as white birds rose in wheeling flight

  and the lifting boughs were bare.

  By twice calling the white objects covering the boughs "leaves" Tolkien is plainly saying that, although they look like plumes of swans and wheel in the air like birds, they are in fact not birds but birdlike leaves of a mysteriously responsive kind. This point explains why he never calls the island the Paradise of Birds as does the Navigatio. There are no birds on Tolkien's island. For him it is, if anything, the island of the Tree.

  Nevertheless, a comparison of Tolkien's passages with those in the Navigatio's description of the Paradise of Birds shows that he took many elements from it, while rejecting others. Thus the Paradise of Birds, too, is holy but for different reasons. It is blessed because it is the sanctuary of fallen angels, not allied to Lucifer, who are permitted to come there on holy days in the form of white birds to sing the praises of God.29 During the whole stay of the monks on the island from Easter to Pentecost these expiatory spirits join them daily in chanting the divine offices. They perch so thickly on "an exceptionally tall tree . . . with a trunk of colossal girth" as almost to cover it: "This tree was full of pure white birds; so thickly had they settled on it that there was hardly a branch, or even a leaf, to be seen." They never fly off from the tree like Tolkien's leaves but, unlike them, they are definitely birds, not leaves. Why has Tolkien changed the identity of the white objects covering the Tree in his poem? Because he wants to summon up once more one of the master images of all his work, the Tree of Tales, which is the symbol of Faery. As noticed often before,30- every leaf on that Tree is a tale organically linked to all other tales of secondary worlds to form the Tree which symbolizes the whole. Neither birds nor fallen angels fits in with that well-established symbolism. Yet the beauty and airiness of birds in flight, suggested by the Navigatio, have moved Tolkien in "Imram" to incorporate them into his Tree metaphorically for this occasion.

  But Tolkien has still another meaning to add to the Tree and its island. In the poem he specifies that after the leaves have whirled up from the Tree, the song which the monks hear coming down from the "star-lit sky" is "not of bird:/neither noise of man nor angel's voice . . ." Rather, he says, it may be sung "by a third fair kindred in the world" yet lingering "beyond the foundered land." Remembering Tolkien's predilection for elves, we are driven to conclude that the singers here are indeed elves, whose delight is always in singing. This conclusion is reinforced by Tolkien's repeated description of the island as lit by stars or "moonlight dim," never by the sun. In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien called elves "the People of the stars" and assigned to them in the Undying Lands of the far West the island of Eressea, also known as Evereve, where no sun shone. Things begin to fall into place. The island to which the monks have come is this homeland of the elves. And the Tree, besides being the Tree of Tales, is also a seedling of Telperion, the White Tree of the Valar, transplanted to grow in Eressea before being taken on to Númenor and thence to Middle-earth to grow in the courtyard of the kings of Gondor.

  The cluster of associations around the image of the Tree in "Imram" is therefore very rich. Nor do they jar with the religious theme of Brendan's search for salvation. The White Tree of the Guardian Valar has a religious penumbra in The Lord of the Rings. And in his essay "On Fairy-stories" Tolkien invests the Tree of Tales with an aura of holiness as an emblem of man's cooperation with God in the work of continuing creation. As for elves, their adoption by the half-divine Valar as neighbors and disciples endows them with many attributes not granted to men. Compared with his first stop at the volcano of raw fire, Brendan's experience of the sacred Tree and the elves ethereally singing marks a stage forward in his spiritual odyssey.

  In "Imram" what happens to the little band after they leave the island of the Tree is veiled in indistinct allusion. Brendan speaks of seeing a single great Star,

  a light on the edge of the Outer Night

  beyond the Doors of Days,

  where the round world plunges steeply down,

  but on the old road goes,

  as an unseen bridge that on arches runs

  to coasts that no man knows.

  At this edge of the created universe he has smelled, he says, the sweet odor of flowers "as keen as death" and heard "words beyond this world," both, it would seem, coming from the Land of Promise he set out to seek. The implication is that Brendan has been allowed to reach it somehow and to disembark there, but he refuses to tell his questioning disciple anything more about it. Let the discipline go labor on the sea and find out the answers for himself. Of that kind of knowledge each man must earn his own.

  Here again the "Imram" account both resembles and differs from that in the Navigatio. In the latter, two landings on the Land of Promise, an earlier one by the monk Barinthus and a later by Brendan, are explicitly related, and many details about the features of the Land itself are supplied. Among them, according to Barinthus, "All the plants we saw were flowering plants . . ." so that he was able to ask his brethren on his return home: "Can you not smell by our garments that we have been in Paradise?" This is the odor
the poem refers to. Both voyagers on landings are greeted by a shining man (called an "angel" by Barinthus) who informs them that they are indeed walking on the island God "intended for His saints," which "will be revealed to your successors at the time when Christians will be undergoing persecution." These presumably are among the "words beyond the world" heard by Brendan in "Imram," but Tolkien refuses to come out and say so. Tolkien also omits the angel's direction to Brendan to "return to the land of your birth" because his time has come to die and he is to be buried with his predecessors: ". . . you shall soon be laid to rest with your fathers." However, the poem shows Brendan carrying out the command by returning to Galway and dying in his own monastery of Cluainferta. And what of the Star, which in "Imram" Brendan sees "high and far ... a fight on the edge of the Outer Night"? It stems, apparently, from the light which everlastingly brightens the Land of Promise in the Navigatio, its source being Christ Himself: "for Christ Himself is our light." Tolkien lifts it into the sky and concentrates it symbolically in a Star, in which, however, any Christian reference is left covert. We are reminded of the one star seen by Sam shining high above Mordor as the sign of a transcendent beauty that its shadow can never darken.

  In both "Imram" and the Latin prose tale Brendan's pilgrimage is to a place of ultimate holiness, but the two conceptions of its location differ radically. The Land of Promise in the Navigatio is geographically an island in the uttermost western Atlantic, hidden from sailors by a miraculous dense cloud yet anchored physically in the same salt sea as all the other islands Brendan visits. The prose narrator quietly assumes a flat earth at the western extremity of which lies the Saint's goal. He accepts popular Irish thought of the period about the shape of the world. Once Tolkien imports into his poem the idea of a "round world" plunging "steeply down," the Atlantic can have no western limit except continental America. He is thereby forced to take the Land of Promise out of the physical universe altogether. He does so by inserting a "parting of the seas" at which the visible Atlantic continues on westward while the road to the Land of Promise separates from it "as an unseen bridge that on arches runs" invisibly. This solution, if it can be called that, may owe something to the Bifrost31 of old Norse mythology, the bridge across which the hosts of Muspell will ride to attack the gods in heaven at the end of the world. At any rate, Tolkien purposely keeps it misty and semimetaphorical.

  Having removed the Land of Promise from the Atlantic, he is also free of the need to think of it as an island, and indeed to think of it in any particular terms whatever. He can transform it from a future haven from persecution for the saints into a region outside time, "beyond the Door of Days," and mysteriously evocative of a less literal Heaven. He can and does drop the very name of Land of Promise of the Saints. And he further guards his mystery by the literary device of Brendan's refusal to talk circumstantially about it. A medieval audience, with its capacity to absorb all Brendan's adventures as "wonders God had deigned to show him," would have begrudged the loss of every detail Tolkien left out, but no doubt he well understood our less transmutative modern imagination in deciding to draw the veil.

  "Imram" opens grimly enough with the tolling of Brendan's death bell as he begins his tale to his eager questioner. Tolkien, however, has so selected and rewritten the three episodes from the Navigatio as to make of his poem a successful, and therefore essentially happy, pilgrim's progress toward salvation. Surviving the demonic volcano under the cloud, Brendan toils on to a difficult anchorage on the holy island of the Tree and hears the song of the "third fair kindred," who are neither men nor angels but seemingly somewhere between these two. He is then ready for admission briefly to some Paradise-like place "beyond this world" where he sees "things out of mind." Death becomes the only fitting climax to the poem, and the tolling bell loses the grimness with which the poem began.

  7. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

  In publishing this little miscellany of mainly light verse in 1962, Tolkien falls back on the same scholarly pretense which served him well in The Lord of the Rings—that he is merely the editor of material taken from hobbit records in the Red Book of Westmarch. This disguise enables him in the Preface to say of the collection as a whole that it reveals hobbit preferences for poetic forms which are full of "rhyming and metrical tricks," and for subject matter "on the surface, light-hearted or frivolous, though sometimes one may uneasily suspect that more is meant than meets the ear."32 The description is accurate. Most of the sixteen poems included are experimental in versification and most are, inwardly as well as outwardly, frankly only playful trifles. Some half-dozen, however,

  invite a search for deeper meanings, and one or two are downright cryptic. Tolkien uses his editorial role to discuss in the Preface who the authors of individual poems are (usually Bilbo, Sam, or Frodo), the genre of hobbit poetry to which they belong, possible origins of some pieces in the lore of southern Gondor, comparative dates of composition, and other matters traditionally within the province of the editor.

  Since only the first two poems in the book have anything to do with Bombadil, its title can mislead, but it has the larger truthfulness of telling the reader that most of the pieces are connected in some degree with persons, events, or places familiar to him in The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, three are repeated verbatim from the epic: "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late," sung by Frodo in the inn at Bree; Sam's "The Stone Troll," sung to cheer up his companions on the long road to Rivendell; and Sam's "Oliphaunt," recited when he first sees the beast in battle in the Vale of Ithilien. Why did Tolkien choose these particular songs for republication here seven years after their appearance in the epic? Probably because as sheer, gay nonsense rhymes they fit in well with the general tone of his new collection. Also, each of the three is paired with one or more fresh poems which serve as parallels or contrasts.

  Thus "Oliphaunt" is only the first of a group of three comic verse versions of bestiary lore, the other animals treated being Fastitocalon, the giant sea turtle, and the domestic cat. All of these creatures are presented with the same kind of intimately affectionate wonder that runs through the medieval bestiaries. Beneath the comic they all show a tinge of the formidable, too. Oliphaunt is terrible in battle. Fastitocalon, like the bestiary whale, will sink the unwary sailor who lands on him and kindles a fire, thinking him an island. From the hobbit point of view, better never to land on uncharted land; better still never go to sea at all. The cat seems all innocence in slumber, but its dreams are of hunting and slaughter, like those of its savage kindred in the jungle.

  Similarly Frodo's nursery jingle about the Man in the Moon carousing in the inn is followed by a poem titled "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon," which barely avoids a tragic tone. In it the Moon Man grows lonely in his pale, jeweled domain and pines for the spinning earth below, the warmth of its fire, the vivid colors of its land and sea, the "sanguine blood" of men, their food, their wine, above all their companionship. What saves the tale for comedy is that its hero is the sort of bumbler who trips by accident on his own stairs and falls into the Bay of Belfalas. Netted up and set on land by fishermen, he is a bedraggled figure who allows himself to be tricked out of his rich garments, jewels, and silver by a surly innkeeper in exchange for a bowl of cold porridge by a smoky fire:

  An unwary guest on a lunatic quest

  from the mountains of the Moon.

  This is only one of a series of puns and comic touches by which Tolkien keeps the poem light. But he is almost of two minds about it, for he is treating a subject habitually sad with him, the gulf fixed between men and dwellers in Faery, which is institutionalized, so to speak, by the Ban of the Valar in The Lord of the Rings. For a change, his approach here is from the side of the monarch of Faery who tries to share the life of Earth in vain. The final two poems in the collection will take up the theme again, but from the side of mortal men, tragically.

  The grisly slapstick of "The Stone Troll" finds no parallels in its companion piece, "Perry-the-Winkle." Whereas he
first relates with relish the encounter of a man with a troll who is gnawing his uncle's shinbone, the second has some elements of pathos in picturing a lonely troll searching through the Shire for a hobbit who will dare to be his friend. Its dominant mood, however, is that of fun. His appearance scares the mayor and creates panic in the marketplace until a brave hobbit rides off on his back to have tea with him in his cave. The ensuing popularity of the troll because of his "cramsome bread" and the fame as a baker, which comes to his hobbit friend from learning the recipe, are pure Shire food-worship with a happy ending.

  In none of the poems so far discussed does Tolkien reach very high. Writing for amusement, he purposely pulls back from the heights he sometimes attempts to scale in many of the other poems embedded in his great prose epic. This intent to stay on a comfortably gay level is particularly clear in the two Bombadil poems that open the collection. Almost totally absent from them is the mysterious aura of primal strength which sets Tom outside the spell of the one Ring and snatches the hobbits from the tomb of the barrow-wights. So much so that Tolkien feels it necessary to explain in the Preface that the two poems were written by Buckland hobbits who "had . .. little understanding of his powers." They regarded Bombadil "with amusement (tinged with fear)."

  Accordingly, the adventures Tom goes through in the poem which gives the collection its title consist of his escapes from traps set for him by friends and enemies in the Old Forest, but since none is made to seem really dangerous the tone is mainly one of delight in woodland escapades. "No one had ever caught Tom walking in the forest," says Goldberry in The Lord of the Rings. The present verses show how he cannot be caught, and end by telling how he instead catches Goldberry to be his bride. The events related, then, occur before Frodo and his friends are rescued by Bombadil. The same is true of the boating trip in the second poem, which he takes downriver to visit Farmer Maggot. The visit serves an important function in the epic because it is by the Farmer that Tom is warned that the four hobbits are traveling unprotected and will need his help. This gravity of purpose, however, is smothered by episodes of converse with woodland creatures as well as hobbits, and by the merry meeting of feast, dance, and song with which the Farmer's family celebrate his coming. Both poems employ the same couplet form— replete with feminine endings—which marks Tom's every song in the epic, but fare all the better for the absence of intervening "poetic" prose passages with the same rhythms, which make his talk in the epic somewhat monotonous and too highly mannered.