by John Garth
Vainly doth Ulmo trumpet and Uin with the flukes of his unmeasured tail lash the seas to wrath, for thither Ossë now brings every kind of deep sea creature that buildeth itself a house and dwelling of stony shell; and these he planted about the base of the island: corals there were of every kind and barnacles and sponges like stone…the isle has grown fast in the most lonely waters of the world.
When Eriol makes landfall to hear the Lost Tales, the Lonely Isle has yet to make the final voyage to its current location just off the European coast.
In leaving their place of origin, the Waters of Awakening, for a better life in the earthly paradise of Elvenhome, the Eldar follow the same progression as the Valar, who left heaven for their first paradise in the midst of the world. This curious repeated pattern, quite distinct from the Judaeo-Christian myth of Eden, seems less surprising in the context of Tolkien’s own wandering existence, particularly his childhood idyll, after leaving South Africa, in the English West Midlands – a home ‘perhaps more poignant to me because I wasn’t born in it’. This is not to say that the mythology was ‘about’ his own life; but that, like any artist, he instilled his creation with his values. For the Valar and the Elves, home is a blessing discovered, not inherited. Furthermore, no paradise may be taken for granted. Tolkien’s sense of home was fraught: his own rural idyll had soon been left behind for industrial Birmingham; he had lost both his parents; and since 1911 he had remained in no single place for more than a few months. In his mythology, Melko destroys both the divine and the faëry paradises.
The Elves find the serpent already loose in the garden. By the time they arrive in Valinor, Melko has been imprisoned and then released there as a penitent. Faithful only to his own original spirit, he exercises his malevolence again through envy of others’ creations – this time, that of the Eldar, whose art emulates the divine artistry behind the green world. In Tolkien’s poem ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, the fairies sing a ‘woven song of stars and gleaming leaves’; and in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ the heraldry of the elven battalions is a celebration of nature. The Gnomes of Kôr are the creators of the world’s gems, by a distinctively faëry science involving the infusion of stones with the multiform essences of light. Lusting for the products of this profligate genius, Melko pillages their treasury, destroys the Trees, and brings the vengeful Gnomes in hot pursuit to the Great Lands, where the rest of the Lost Tales take place.
But the Gnomes have fallen from creativity into possessiveness and have been suborned by Melko into rebellion against the Valar, who now shut Valinor against them so that the only way back for the exiles is the Road of Death. The story so far is Tolkien’s Paradise Lost, an account of the fall in heaven and the fall on earth it precipitates. The sequence embodies his early ambition (as expressed many years later to Milton Waldman) to depict ‘the large and cosmogonic’ upon ‘the vast backcloths’ of his mythology for England.
At the opposite end of the scale, ‘the level of romantic fairy-story…in contact with the earth’, lies ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, set in the Great Lands some time after the Valar have restored light to the wide world by creating the Sun and Moon. ‘Tinúviel’, drafted in the summer of 1917 and inspired by a walk in the Roos ‘hemlocks’ with Edith, features a love story, woodland fairies, and comedy in the kitchen of the Prince of Cats. But for all its light-heartedness, this Lost Tale most closely approaches the range of mood in The Lord of the Rings, ultimately acquiring the gravity of myth. The dialogue of low and high was something Tolkien had long valued; his comments in 1914 about the mystic poet Francis Thompson fit his own work perfectly: ‘One must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being’s harmony.’
Depicting the realm of Artanor, a wood where fairies hunt and revel but the intruder is bewildered or enchanted, Tolkien challenges the Shakespearean view of elves and fairies as frivolous, diminutive mischief-makers. First he restores the dignity of the fairy queen, whimsically maligned in Romeo and Juliet as Mab, the midwife of delusionary dreams whose carriage is
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web…
Such is the imagery that led Tolkien to pronounce ‘a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs’ for debasing Faërie. His own fairy queen, Gwendeling, is less ornamental and more substantial, a figure of mystery with a retinue of nightingales and a divine power of dream:
Her skin was white and pale, but her eyes shone and seemed deep, and she was clad in filmy garments most lovely yet of black, jet-spangled and girt with silver. If ever she sang, or if she danced, dreams and slumbers passed over your head and made it heavy. Indeed she was a sprite that escaped from Lórien’s gardens…
Gwendeling, one of the primeval spirits who accompanied the Valar into the world, is queen of fairies through marriage to Tinwelint, original leader of the third elven tribe. Their daughter Tinúviel inherits not only Gwendeling’s beauty and trappings, but also – in this most thaumaturgic of Tolkien’s tales – her powers of enchantment.
But this is also a love story in which love, transfixing and transfiguring the wanderer Beren when he sees Tinúviel dance among the hemlocks, seems a kind of magic. Its first enemy is not a demonic power but prejudice and mockery. Tinwelint regards the Gnomish Beren with suspicion because of his people’s thraldom to Melko.* When Beren asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he sets a seemingly impossible test: Beren must bring him one of the three Silmarils, peerless masterpieces of the Gnomes’ gem-making craft, now set in Melko’s iron crown. Tinwelint thinks this is impossible, and simply means no; but Beren takes the challenge at face value, pausing only to comment that the king holds his daughter cheap. His quest for the Silmaril is also a quest to overturn belittling irony and re-establish true worth.
Tolkien’s attempt to ‘reconstruct’ the lost tales behind surviving fragments – to restore the fairy queen’s dignity, for example – is an allied endeavour. For the confinement of Tinúviel in a fantastic tree-house, and Beren’s concurrent servitude under Tevildo, Prince of Cats, he excavated two familiar stories. He made a coherent, if mystical, narrative out of one of the surreal moments in ‘Rapunzel’, a story he knew from a childhood favourite, Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book. Whereas Rapunzel hauls visitors up to her treetop prison with her impossibly long hair, Tinúviel uses hers (vastly propagated by magic) to escape: Rapunzel is a thoroughly passive victim, Tinúviel anything but. Meanwhile Tevildo’s name (Gnomish Tifil, Tiberth – all related to Elvish words for ‘hate’) evokes Tybalt/Tibert, a cat name popular from the tom-cat in the medieval Reynard the Fox. Such beast fables left Tolkien dissatisfied; the beast was only ‘a mask upon a human face, a device of the satirist or the preacher’, he later said. He imagined therefore that the surviving incarnations of Tibert/Tybalt – down to Romeo and Juliet’s strutting street-fighter, who has shed his animal mask altogether – were only the shadows of a now-forgotten monster, Tevildo:
His eyes were long and very narrow and slanted, and gleamed both red and green, but his great grey whiskers were as stout and as sharp as needles. His purr was like the roll of drums and his growl like thunder, but when he yelled in wrath it turned the blood cold, and indeed small beasts and birds were frozen as to stone, or dropped lifeless often at the very sound.
It is a pity that later, as the exuberant Lost Tales gave way to the austere ‘Silmarillion’, there was no longer any place for this astonishing grotesque, vain, capricious, and cruel; but at least his role as Beren’s captor passed to no less a figure than Sauron the Necromancer. Meanwhile, Tevildo and the other animals in this tale, the faithful talking hound Huan and Karkaras, ‘the greatest wolf the world has ever seen’, are bold, blunt creations with magic in their blood;
such human characteristics as they possess serve to reveal the beast within.
But the cat-and-dog story is only the test before the real crisis. Arriving in Melko’s stronghold, Angband, a shadowy immensity above an industrial slave-pit, we reach the crux of Tolkien’s narrative: the moment when the small but resolute confronts the demonic embodiment of tyranny and destruction. Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinúviel as ‘the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, “the wheels of the world”, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak’. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations.
The lovers’ clandestine entry into Angband, under the dark cloak of slumber that Tinúviel has woven from her own hair, provides an intriguing parallel with the assault upon the Two Trees by Melko and Gloomweaver under the cover of the Spider’s suffocating webs. It is as if the quest for the Silmaril, in which the light of the Trees is preserved, were in its small way an exorcism of the older nightmare. But the enemy cannot be engaged on his own terms. Confronting Melko, Tinúviel’s weapon is aesthetic: her spellbinding dance, to which she adds a dream-song that brings the sound of the nightingale into the heart of darkness.
The scene epitomizes a narrative moment that Tolkien saw in life, and in fairy-tales, but rarely in other literary forms. He coined a word for it in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’: eucatastrophe, from the Greek eu ‘good’ and katastrophe, ‘sudden turn’, and saw it as a glimpse of the glad tidings (evangelium) of eternal life.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is…a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Tinúviel’s attendant bird, the nightingale, is a fitting emblem of eucatastrophe, pouring out its fluting song when all is dark. Its symbolic significance may be measured in the words of men on the Western Front. Rob Gilson, hearing a nightingale in the early hours one May morning from his trench dugout, thought it ‘wonderful that shells and bullets shouldn’t have banished them, when they are always so shy of everything human’, while Siegfried Sassoon wrote that ‘the perfect performance of a nightingale…seemed miraculous after the desolation of the trenches’.
The glimpse of joy from the depths of hell is nothing if not fleeting, and during the flight from Angband the wolf Karkaras bites off the hand in which Beren holds the recovered Silmaril. Victory, you might say, has been snatched by the jaws of defeat, and Beren must return to Artanor a visibly reduced figure. Yet far from accepting that the joke is on him, Beren repays King Tinwelint’s earlier mockery with a richer jest by declaring, ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now,’ before revealing his maimed arm. It is a lesson in true value: instead of the bride-price, Beren delivers proof of immeasurable courage and love. Conceived when thousands of men were returning from the battlefront permanently disabled, this seems a brave and timely illustration of Ilúvatar’s promise of consolation for the discords in Creation. Through endurance, Beren has achieved a moral victory against which material acquisitions are nothing.
Love conquers all – even, in the end, death. For its final impassioned paean to love, ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ enters the plane of myth. As the Silmaril is regained in a wolf-hunt, Beren is fatally injured; soon grief-stricken Tinúviel follows him down the Road of Death. But at her plea, Mandos releases the lovers from the halls of the dead, and they return to earthly life. Yet even this resurrection may not be the ultimate release, but only its prelude, as we shall see.
Túrin Turambar’s story is the unhappy counterpart to Beren’s, telling of hopes betrayed, fruitless heroism and love gone awry.
Tolkien was not alone among latter-day writers in characterizing the individual’s fate as the work of a malicious demiurgic power. Thomas Hardy pictured Tess Durbeyfield as a victim of an Olympian ‘President of the Immortals’, while the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, in ‘Soldier’s Dream’, imagined merciful Jesus spiking all the guns but God fixing them again. In contrast, though, Tolkien’s faith in God and the mythological method may be gauged by his personification of cruel destiny in satanic Melko rather than in Manwë or Ilúvatar; and by Melko’s status as an actor in the drama rather than a metaphor. Túrin falls victim to the demiurge’s curse on his father, Úrin, a soldier taken captive but defiant to Angband after battle.
In its scale, centrality, and tragedy, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (though never directly recounted in the Lost Tales) inevitably bears comparison with the Somme – though it spans days at most and produces an outright victory for the enemy rather than a Pyrrhic victory for the allies. Nearly half of these countless, hopeful battalions of Gnomes and Men are killed. Tolkien provides an arresting and concentrated emblem for the terrible carnage in the Hill of Death, ‘the greatest cairn in the world’, into which the Gnomes’ corpses are gathered. Survivors, many of them driven to vagabondage, do not speak of the battle. Of the fates of fathers and husbands, families hear nothing.
Yet the Battle of Unnumbered Tears is much more than a military disaster. An epochal stage in a war that Tolkien saw as everlasting, it ushers in the enslavement of individual art and craft by impersonal industry and cold avarice: the thraldom of the Gnomes in Melko’s mines, and their demoralization under the Spell of Bottomless Dread. Imagination thrives now only in scattered faëry refuges, such as Gondolin and Artanor, a ‘bulwark…against the arrogance of the Vala of Iron’. The majority of Men, meanwhile, having proved faithless in battle, are cut off from Elves and the inspiration that they represent.
Úrin’s people, who stood firm, are corralled by Melko in shadowy Aryador, whence his wife Mavwin, with an infant daughter to look after, sends young Túrin to fosterage in Artanor. This separation is only ‘the first of the sorrows that befell him’, the tale notes, beginning a tally. Four times Túrin travels from a new home (Aryador, Artanor, the hidden Gnomish kingdom of the Rodothlim, and a village of human wood-rangers) into peril (near-starvation in the forest as a child, capture by orcs as a grown man, capture by the dragon Glorund, the dragon’s return). In successive phases he draws nearer to happiness and heroic stature, but is then plunged into yet deeper anguish.
Savage irony is at work here. It is not simply that good times are replaced by bad: happiness and heroism are the very causes of sorrow and failure; their promise turns out to be not hollow, but false. By tremendous daring and ‘the luck of the Valar’, Túrin’s dearest friend, the elven archer Beleg, rescues him from orc captors; but in the dark, Túrin mistakes him for an assailant and kills him. In the final pages he finds a beautiful stranger wandering distraught in the woods, her memory a blank; but every step towards joyous union with Níniel ‘daughter of tears’ (as he names her) is a step towards tragedy: she is his long-lost sister.
This final, most fiendish irony is set up by Melko’s servant, Glorund. A creature apart from the mechanistic dragons of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, he belongs to the same species as Fafnir in the Icelandic Volsunga Saga and Smaug in The Hobbit: carnal monsters who ‘love lies and lust after gold and precious things with a great fierceness of desire, albeit they may not use nor enjoy them’, in the words of the Lost Tale. His trail is desolation:
The land had become all barren and was blasted for a great distance about th
e ancient caverns of the Rodothlim, and the trees were crushed to the earth or snapped. Towards the hills a black heath stretched and the lands were scored with the great slots that that loathly worm made in his creeping.
Glorund’s particular genius, then, is to undermine beauty and truth, either by destroying them or by rendering them morally worthless. His despoliation of treasuries, his desecration of nature, and his delight in irony are of a piece.
The contrast with ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ could not be greater. Beren could overturn mockery, but it vitiates Túrin’s every achievement. The elven lovers escaped all prisons, but Úrin only leaves Angband at Melko’s will, after years of extraordinary psychological torture. Tinúviel could hide in her enchanted cloak and Beren could shift his shape; but Túrin can only change his name. You can almost hear the laughter of Glorund when, on the eve of his unwitting incest, Túrin celebrates his foresight in taking the pseudonym Turambar, ‘Conqueror of Fate’: ‘for lo! I have overcome the doom of evil that was woven about my feet.’ There is a hint that, if he had told Níniel his real name, her memory would have returned, thwarting calamity.
But a darkness falls between families, friends, and lovers (surely reflecting something of Tolkien’s own wartime experience). Tolkien underlines the point with a mythographer’s flourish, in a scene in which Níniel and Mavwin meet Glorund’s eye: ‘a swoon came upon their minds, and them seemed that they groped in endless tunnels of darkness, and there they found not one another ever again, and calling only vain echoes answered and there was no glimmer of light.’
The narrative divides to follow first Túrin then, in a long flashback, his mother and sister, as the siblings move towards their collision. Thus the reader exchanges ignorance for infinitely more uncomfortable knowledge. We can taste the impotent misery of Úrin, whose torture is to watch from a place of vision in Angband as the curse slowly destroys his family. In an acutely distressing scene prior to the reunion of the fatal siblings, Túrin is similarly immobilized by Glorund while orcs take away the elven woman who might have been his own Tinúviel:
