Master of Middle Earth
Page 23
3. On one or two occasions. Tolkien's choice of similes is obviously dictated by children's interests: Bilbo laughs at the dwarf Fili wrapped around with spider webs "jerking his stiff arms and legs as he danced on the spider-string under his armpits, just like one of those funny toys bobbing on a wire." But his atrocious punning in describing the origins of the game of golf seems destined for the unlucky ears of adults.
4. See The Hobbit, all of Chapter V.
5. Introductory Note to Tree and Leaf, p. 2: "At about that time we had reached Bree and I had then no more notion than they [Frodo and his companions] had of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to hnd out."
6. The Hobbit, p. 297; Lord of the Rings, III, 226.
Chapter III Cosmic Order
1. As discussed in Chapter V, the section on the elves.
2. The Road Goes Ever On, p. 60.
3. The Road Goes Ever On, p. 65.
4. Compare Gandalf's answer to Frodo's resentment that he is born in times troubled by Sauron (I, 60).
5. In The Road Goes Ever On Tolkien remarks that the prayers to Eibereth "and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked." Despite the absence of churches, priests, formal liturgies, and the like, Tolkien is not drawing a purely secular Middle-earth, as many critics prefer to believe. His cosmos in the epic may not be exactly Christian but it contains many of the transcendent elements of a more than pantheistic religion.
Chapter IV Sauron and the Nature of Evil
1. W. H. Auden, "The Quest Hero" in Tolkien and the Critics, edited by N. Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), pp. 40-61.
2. Tree and Leaf, p. 58.
3. Tree and Leaf, p. 59. In The Hobbit (p. 229) Tolkien satirically describes the rage of Smaug the dragon on discovering a theft from his hoard as "the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted." His condemnation of the compulsive lust of the dwarves in that tale, and throughout The Lord of the Rings, for treasure for its own sake aims at the same target.
4. W. H. Auden, "Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings," Tolkien Journal, III: 1 (1967), pp. 5-8.
5. Auden, "The Quest Hero," p. 57.
6. Tree and Leaf, p. 57.
7. Auden, "Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings," p. 5.
Chapter V The Free Peoples
1. Edmund Wilson, "Oo, Those Awful Ores," Nation, 182: 15 (April 14, 1956).
2. Mark Roberts, "Adventure in English," Essays in Criticism, VI (1956), see especially p. 454.
3. Tree and Leaf, pp. 13, 15, 66, 82.
4. Rose Zimbardo, "Moral Vision in The Lord of the Rings" in Tolkien and the Critics, pp. 100-8, tries to rank them according to the degree of "essence" possessed by each, not very convincingly.
5. It is this distinct uniqueness of racial character that makes it impossible for me to agree with the view, for instance, that the members of Frodo's Company all represent Man in his several aspects. See Gunnar Urang, Shadows of Heaven (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1971), p. 107.
6. The Hobbit, p. 178.
7. "They were valiant, but the history of those that returned to Middle-earth in exile was grievous . . ." (Ill, Appendix F, p. 416.)
8. Tree and Leaf, p. 9: "... elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet."
9. Auden, "Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings," p. 5, takes what I think is the erroneous view that elves are sinless, unfallen. Fëanor's theft of the light of the Two Trees was surely a fall, as was the departure of the Noldor from Valinor against the command of the Valar.
10. Auden, "The Quest Hero," p. 57: . . while Good can imagine what it would be like to be Evil, Evil cannot imagine what it is like to be Good."
11. The Road Goes Ever On, p. 60.
12. Tree and Leaf, p. 5: Because elves are not supernatural like men, "the road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe." This seems to mean that elves have no immortal souls in the same sense that men do.
13. Appendix F (III, 415): The dwarves' name for their race is "the Khazad . . . and has been so since Aule gave it to them at their making in the deeps of time." Those living in the Third Age "are the descendants of the Naugrim of the Elder Days, in whose hearts still burns the ancient fire of Aule the Smith . . ." Aule seems to be a Valar who created the first dwarves as the Norse gods created dwarves out of the dead body of Ymir. See note 14 below.
14. The Elder Eddas and the Younger Eddas, trans. B. Thorpe and I. A. Blackwell, 1906, p. 270.
15. The Hobbit, p. 24.
16. Tree and Leaf, p. 41.
17. Tree and Leaf, p. 15. .
18. Tree and Leaf, p. 2.
19. Wilson, "Oo, Those Awful Ores," pp. 312-14.
20. In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Tolkien includes a poem subtitled "Frodos Dreme," which is a nightmare of rejection both in the Undying Lands and on Middle-earth. See my discussion in Chapter VII.
Chapter VI Aragorn
1. Roger Sale, "Tolkien and Frodo Baggins" in Tolkien and the Critics, pp. 287-88.
2. William Ready, The Tolkien Relation (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1968), p. 101. Reprinted in paperback under the title Understanding Tolkien (New York: Coronet Communications, 1969).
Chapter VII Seven Leaves
1. "Leaf by Niggle" was originally published in Dublin Review, 216 (January 1945) and then reprinted in Tree and Leaf. Tolkien's Introductory Note to the reprint states that it was "written in the ... period 1938-39."
2. Tree and Leaf, p. 2.
3. "One of its sources was a great-limbed poplar tree which I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why."
4. Kenneth Sisam's anthology, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (London: Oxford University Press, 1921) for which Tolkien prepared the Glossary, includes the Harrowing of Hell from the York cycle of religious plays and Noah from the Towneley cycle. Tolkien obviously knew medieval drama well.
5. Tree and Leaf, pp. 70-71.
6. Tree and Leaf, p. 70: "... a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth." And on p. 68: "... a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
7. Tree and Leaf, p. 57.
8. In Welsh Review, IV: 4 (December 1945).
9. Eight English Breton lays are collected in The Breton Lays in Middle English, ed. Thomas C. Rumble (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965). And Mortimer J. Donovan analyzes both French and English examples of the type in The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties, (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).
10. Corrigan does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary or English Dialect Dictionary. Both works, however, list corrie as a Scottish word meaning "a circular hollow on a mountain side," which in effect is the witch's "hollow dale" in the hills, also referred to as a "bow" (p. 225). A Corrigan would seem to be a dweller in a corrie.
11. For example, six of the eight lays in Rumble's collection have such endings. The prayer which concludes "Sir Orfew" is especially close to Tolkien's in part of its wording.
12. See "Farmer Giles of Ham" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950).
13. "Farmer Giles," p. 7. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, Book II, Chapter 1.
14. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Book V, Chapter 6.
15. Tolkien mentions this king in the notes to line 26 of his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (coedited by E. V. Gordon, London: Oxford University Press, 1925, 1960), as a British leader who fought against the Saxons.
16. In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, the third poem, entitled "Errantry," puts its knightly hero through a series of adventures so ridiculous as to become a parody of the chivalric romance, in the same general class as "Farmer Giles."
17. "The H
omecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son," Essays and Studies, of the English Association, New Series 6 (1953), 1-18. Reprinted in The Tolkien Reader.
18. See The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966).
19. Also indicative of hobbit tastes and ambitions is the widespread fame won by the hobbit hero of "Perry-the-Winkle," in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, by learning from a lonely troll the recipe for "cramsome bread." He becomes "a Baker great" celebrated in song "from the Sea to Bree."
20. See "Smith of Wootton Major" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957).
21. See Tree and Leaf, pp. 5 ff., 33-35, 53-54. Tolkien repeats the same protests often in The Lord of the Rings, e.g., Ill, 415-16.
22. Very like the Dead Marshes outside Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.
23. Tree and Leaf, p. 16.
24. The poem was first published in Time and Tide, 3 December 1955, and was accompanied by two illustrations from Helen Waddell's Beasts and Birds (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1934), which excerpts brief episodes of Brendan's voyage from the Navigatio Latin mentioned in note 27 below.
25. Foreword to Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis in University of Notre Dame Publications in Medieval Science, edited by Carl Selmer (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), XVI, pp. xxi-xxii. Also Geoffrey Ashe, Land to the West (New York: Viking Press, 1962), pp. 53-63.
26. Selmer, VII, pp. xxxi-ii.
27. All my references to the Navigatio are to J. F. Webb's English translation appearing in Lives of the Saints (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965). This is based on Selmer's edition of the Latin text mentioned in note 25 above. Webb's footnote, p. 33, reads " 'Meadow of Miracles' (saltus virtutum) — 'Cluain Ferta,' Clonfert in Galway."
28. In another early imram, The Voyage of Maildun, which Tolkien may or may not have known, the "lovely country beneath the waves" is more fully described than in the Navigatio. See the translation of the Maildun text in Patrick W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (New York: Longmans Green and Co., 1914).
29. This passage describing the tree and fallen angels perched on it in the form of white birds is translated from the Latin in substantially the same words by Helen Waddell in the book from which the illustrations for Tolkien's poem were taken. (See note 25.) I do not know whether Tolkien knew this little popular miscellany before writing the poem or had anything to do with selecting the illustrations.
30. See "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major" in addition to "On Fairy-stories," where the chief expositions of the symbol of the Tree are to be found.
31. The Elder Eddas and the Younger Eddas, p. 323.
32. See The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963).
33. Unless the "marsh of Tode" recalls the Dead Marshes just north of the boundary of Mordor, where mining pits have been filled with water and men killed in battle lie on the bottom. Is it possible, too, that the "Merlock Mountains" are reminiscent of "the Mor-lockian horror of factories" alluded to by Tolkien in "On Fairy-stories," Tree and Leaf, p. 64?
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 : Middle-earth: An Imaginary World?
Chapter II : The Hobbit
Chapter III : Cosmic Order
Chapter IV : Sauron and the Nature of Evil
Chapter V : The Free Peoples
Chapter VI : Aragorn
Chapter VII : Seven Leaves
1. "Leaf by Niggle"
2. "The Lay of Aotrou and ltroun"
3. "Farmer Giles of Ham"
4. "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son"
5. "Smith of Wootton Major"
6. "Imram" 24
7. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
Bibliographical Note
Notes
Chapter I Middle-earth: An Imaginary World?
Chapter II The Hobbit
Chapter III Cosmic Order
Chapter IV Sauron and the Nature of Evil
Chapter V The Free Peoples
Chapter VI Aragorn
Chapter VII Seven Leaves