"Errantry," the third poem in the book, has a quite different sort of connection with The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien himself calls attention in the Preface to the identity of its verse form with that used by Bilbo in the lay of Eärendil, which he sang to Frodo in Rivendell. The two poems are utterly incongruous in content, however. The Eärendil lay narrates the apotheosis of a hero, whereas "errantry" details the aimless, wanderings of a messenger knight so ridiculous as to forget the very message he is charged to deliver. In his pose as editor Tolkien explains that Bilbo first wrote the piece as a specimen of hobbit "nonsense rhyme" and then later transformed it "somewhat incongruously" into the legend of Eärendil. We can believe, if we like, that under this editorial disguise Tolkien is tellng us the order in which he himself composed the two poems, but this would be to identify Bilbo with Tolkien and to make a playful editorial mystification a serious assertion of chronological fact. It seems far more likely that Tolkien wrote the Eärendil lay first, about 1939 or 1940, while inditing the Rivendell episode in Part I of the epic, and parodied it in "Errantry" much later, at the time when he composed all or most of the verses in the present miscellany. Besides, psychologically it is much more normal to break down heroic into mock-heroic than to build up heroic out of sportive "nonsense rhyme." Tolkien devised "Farmer Giles" as a spoof of knighthood not before but after the knightly adventures of The Lord of the Rings.
Be that as it may, "Errantry" and the saga of Earen-dil as sung by Bilbo are obviously designed for contrast. It is as if Tolkien challenged himself to see whether, using a theme of endless wandering common to both poems, the same metrical shapes and rhyme patterns, parallel descriptions of ships and armor, and even some identical lines and phrases, he could produce in the one case a tragedy and in the other an airy jest. Looking at the passages picturing the armor of the two heroes we can see both the similarity in structure and the polarity in tone:
"Eärendil"
In panoply of ancient kings,
in chained rings he armoured him;
his shining shield was scored with runes
to ward all wounds and harm from him;
his bow was made of dragon-horn,
his arrows shorn of ebony,
of silver was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony;
his sword of steel was valiant,
of adamant his helmet tall,
an eagle-plume upon his crest,
upon his breast an emerald.
"Errantry"
He made a shield and morion
of coral and of ivory,
a sword he made of emerald,
- - - - - - - -
Of crystal was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony;
with silver tipped at plenilune
his spear was hewn in ebony.
His javelins were of malachite
and stalactite—he brandished them,
- - - - - - - -
Knight Errant's sword of emerald, his javelins of copper and cavern stalactites are no more outrageously impractical than his "gondola" sprinkled with three separate perfumes, his proposal of marriage to a butterfly "that fluttered by," his battles with "the dragon-flies of Paradise," and so on. While Eärendil's ship is being readied by the Valar to sail the skies forever as the Evening Star, Errant's gondola "of leaves and gossamer" is performing a kind of "Imram" voyage among mysterious ocean isles, meeting with adventure after adventure until remembering that he started out with a message, he goes home to discover what it is in order that he may set forth again, only to forget it again, ad infinitum.
The two poems do not destroy each other. Each is good in its own kind. In aid of the distinction between kinds Tolkien keeps the Verse form sober for "Eärendil" but pushes it to baroque excesses in "Errantry" by often rhyming the middle of one line with the end of its predecessor:
There was a merry passenger,
a messenger, a mariner:
- - - - - - - -
He called the winds of argosies
with cargoes in to carry him
- - - - - - - -
The "Errantry" rhymes are often so far-fetched, as above, that it is hard to tell when Tolkien intends a rhyme.
"Princess Mee" falls in the category of poems of which the Preface remarks that, "sometimes one may easily suspect more than meets the ear." Since the Preface does not discuss it at all, and it is not related in any way to The Lord of the Rings or to any other poem in the compilation, we are free to make of it what we can. On its face it simply tells the story of the little (young?) elfin Princess Mee who, dancing one starry night on the surface of a pool in the woods, looks down to see for the first time Princess Shee dancing upside down toe to toe with her and returning her wondering gaze. Since none of her fellow elves can tell her the way to the land where Shee lives, Mee meets her nightly on the pool, where they dance together alone:
So still on her own
An elf alone
Dancing as before
With pearls in hair
And kirtle fair
And slippers frail
Of fishes mail went Mee:
Of fishes' mail
And slippers frail
And kirtle fair
With pearls in hair went Shee!
For the meaning of the poem the first two lines of this final stanza are decisive. Of all the elves Tolkien ever writes about, Mee is the only one who dances constantly alone—with her reflection. We are to understand that the poor Princess has fallen in love with herself, and that Tolkien is giving us a transcription of the Narcissus legend. With this realization the poem, heretofore merely quiet and charming, become studdenly deadly.
Tolkien also is proving himself master of the short line. He has done very well with the four-foot line of "Errantry" and now does eves better with the two-foot line of "Princess Mee." In the stanza quoted the descending description of Mee from hair down to toe, ascending from toe to hair in identical detail for Shee, admirably evokes the picture of the elf Princess dancing above her own image.
"Shadow Bride" and "The Mewlips" are the two poems of the collection which lend themselves to definite interpretation least readily, and perhaps not at all. One is never quite sure whether they are more than surface. "Shadow Bride" may be no more than what it seems, an abrupt little tale of a bewitched man without a shadow who, when a lady strays near, pounces upon her and "wraps her shadow round him." Whereupon she must dwell underground perpetually except for one night a year when the two of them dance together till dawn "and a single shadow make." Without invoking modern psychological theories about the shadow selves we are all supposed to have— theories which do not seem characteristic of Tolkien's thought—we may take note of resemblance to the Proserpina legend. But since discrepancies between the poem and the legend are as numerous as the likenesses, dogmatism would be unwise.
"Shadow Bride" remains puzzling partly because it cannot be related to any person or episode in Tolkien's other writings or, indeed, to any other poem in the miscellany in which it appears. The same can almost be said about "The Mewlips," mysterious creatures whom the poem warns the reader directly not to visit lest they devour him. The "Merlock Mountains" and "the marsh of Tode," which must be traversed before the visitor arrives at their underground dwellings "by a dark pool's borders" besides a "rotting river-strand," are not recognizable as known places in Middle-earth.33 The temptation is to see these Mewlips as just one more marvelous birth from Tolkien's imagination, like ores, shelobs, and woses. There are tantalizing hints of something more, however. These beings lurk in cellars where they count their gold by the light of a single candle. The cellars have doors with entrance bells to be rung, and their walls drip with moisture. These details bring to mind an urban slum, and the dangers of being swallowed up by its gray and greedy swampiness. Every reader of Tolkien knows his hatred of modern industrialism and its cities. Is he conjuring up here an allegory of its ultimate horrors? This is quite possible. No more can safe
ly be said.
The poems have been growing increasingly somber toward the end of the collection. Now the final three pieces take leave of the comic altogether. Nor is their meaning in doubt. For all of them Tolkien in the Preface forges bonds with The Lord of the Rings or its backgrounds, but the bonds are not always close. "The Hoard," for instance, is said to contain "echoes" of a Númenorean tale of the First Age concerning the man Turin and the dwarf Mim. Since nowhere are we told the story between them and they are never named in the poem itself, the nature of these "echoes" cannot be defined. The poem stands on its own as a grimly marching account of the power of a hoard of treasure to rot the characters of its successive possessors. Singing elves, the original artisans, are slain or chained by an avaricious dwarf, who thereafter spends his days doing nothing but work in order to add to the hoard. In his old age, too feeble even to see his precious stones or hear the approach of an enemy, he in turn is killed by a young dragon. After a lifetime of being "to his gold chained" the dragon, now old in his turn, is easily dispatched by a young knight. Many years later, "his glory fallen, his rule unjust," the old knight is easily surprised by the slayers who come to burn his hall and seize his kingdom. The murderers do not uncover the hoard, however, which remains lost underground in the care of its final owner, Night. It has been lethal, not merely physically but morally. A hoard of treasure is, as we know, Tolkien's perennial object of the cardinal sin of "possessiveness." face with a body of hobbit poems describing the "wandering-madness" which afflicts some of their race and leaves them "queer" if they ever return home. More particularly, he says, someone in the Red Book has subtitled it "Frodos Dreme," meaning one of those despairing dreams which tormented Frodo after his return to the Shire from Mordor. This ascription may account for its being written in the first person singular, the only poem in the book so written. Again, however, the poem needs no such connection to give it value. It is in fact a superb expression of a favorite theme of Tolkien's, the loneliness of the human being who can live neither with his own kind nor with those creatures of the imagination who inhabit Faery, the enchanted land to which he is irresistibly called.
Walking alone by the shore the narrator (or dreamer) is summoned across the seas by the clang of a buoy heard in a shell that he picks up. But he does not belong in the lovely country of "ever-eve," as he discovers when its invisible people whom he can hear singing and dancing flee him with "never a greeting." In a moment of high poignancy the wanderer shouts angrily that he is "king of this land" and demands, "Speak to me words! Show me a face!" In swift punishment he is isolated until he is old in a wood where he can hear insects and birds but no human voices. Even after he has crawled back defeated to his own country, his seashell dead and silent, he walks the sad lanes and blind alleys, not belonging there either; "To myself I talk;/for still they speak not, men that meet." Tolkien is saying something vital here about the homelessness of the creative artist.
The coming departure from Middle-earth of all the elves (save those content to lose the high heritage of their race) shadows the whole ending of The Lord of the Rings. "The Last Ship," also the last poem in the book, envisions the final boatload leaving Gondor. The elves in it call to Firiel, a mortal woman on the shore, to come with them in the one seat still empty. She would like to go, for she is "elven-fair" and her youthful beauty, inexorably fading on Earth, will not fade in Elvenhome, "where the White Tree is growing,/ and the Star shines upon the foam." But as she steps forward, "deep in clay her feet sank," and she cries out that she cannot come, for "I was born Earth's daughter!" She has to return home, don her smock of russet brown, and "step down" to her daily labors, as did Smith at Wootton Major. In one way or another the Ban of the Valar still holds, Tolkien seems to say. Mortal clay may visit Faery but can establish no lasting citizenship. To claim kingship there as does the nameless narrator of "The Sea-Bell" is to reenact the sacrilege of the Númenoreans trying to conquer Valinor, and to be punished by a death of body and spirit. The theme of limits to man's access to Faery haunts Tolkien's works, and never more tellingly than in the two poems that conclude this collection.
Bibliographical Note
Richard C. West, Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (Bibliographies and Checklists, no. 11. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970) gives full information about all of Tolkien's writings, their various editions, and places and dates of publication both in England and in America. Only a few highlights need be mentioned here as a help to the general reader.
The first edition of The Hobbit (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937) has achieved rare-book status, and the 1938 edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company) scarcely less so. Subsequent printings by these two publishers in London (1951) and Boston (1958) are available in large libraries. Most bookstores today stock a paperbound edition of The Hobbit (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965.)
The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings were first published in London by Allen and Unwin, 1954-55. This first edition was issued in the United States the following year, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955-56). Tolkien's own subsequent revisions, however, appear in a second, three-volume hardbound edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967). This is considered the standard edition and it is the one I have used in preparing this book. There is also a three-volume paperback edition published by Ballantine Books in 1965.
Most illuminating for Tolkien's theory of fantasy writing is his essay "On Fairy-stories," originally composed as a lecture for delivery at the University of St. Andrews in 1938. He has since revised and enlarged it several times. In its final form it appears in Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965) as well as in the paperback collection The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965). The texts are the same. The Tolkien Reader has the unique value of also including several of Tolkien's shorter pieces: "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son"; "Leaf by Niggle"; "Farmer Giles of Ham"; The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. In 1969, Ballantine Books issued the one-volume paperback Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Unfortunately two of Tolkien's narrative poems, "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (Welsh Review, IV:4 [December 1945]) and "Imram" (Time and Tide, 36 [December 3, 1955]), still can be read only in the periodicals in which they first appeared.
Notes
Chapter I Middle-earth: An Imaginary World?
1. Revised and enlarged, the lecture was published in essay form in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1947). The essay, further revised, is reprinted in Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965).
2. See The Lord of the Rings, 2nd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), Prologue, I, 23-24. All references to the epic will be to the three volumes of this edition.
3. Compare similar statements in I, 17; HI, 313, 385, and especially 411.
4. Tree and Leaf, pp. 24-25.
5. Ransacking the Pleistocene for niches into which to fit the Ages of Middle-earth is a pleasant pastime, which one hopes the players of the game are not taking seriously. See Margaret Howes' delightful article, "The Elder Ages and the Later Glaciations of the Pleistocene Epoch," Tolkien Journal, IV: 2 (1967), which picks a span from 95,000 years to 65,000 years ago.
6. Compare Sam's bestiary poem entitled "Oliphaunt" in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963).
7. "On Fairy-stories" considers communication with the animal world a basic human need. See Chapter V. On the wanton destruction of trees, see the Introduction of "Leaf by Niggle," Tree and Leaf, pp. 59 ff., and of course many passages about the ents in the epic itself.
8. The description I give of the Valar and their country in this and subsequent paragraphs is a blending of information from The Lord of the Rings (chiefly. Appendices A and B) with elaborations later published by Tolkien in The Road Goes Ever On (Boston: Houghton Mifllin Co., 1967), pp. 65-66.
9. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis is discussed in detail in my analysis of Tolkien's
"Imram." See Chapter VII.
10. The Road Goes Ever On, p. 66.
11. These examples come mainly from Appendices A and B, but most of them are alluded to also in the course of the three volumes of the epic.
12. Detailed readings of each of these shorter pieces of fiction appear under appropriate headings in Chapter VII.
Chapter II The Hobbit
1. All references ar^ to The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Cc,., 1967).
2. Only in the very last paragraph does Tolkien attach this limited framework to a wider cosmic order, foreshadowing the ideas discussed in the next chapter, as Gandalf asks Bilbo laughingly: "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?" This reference is too fleeting to affect the atmosphere of the tale as a whole and would not, I suppose, mean much to children.
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