Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath,
Fell Upas sits, the Hydra tree of death.
Lo from one root the envenomed soil below,
A thousand vegetable serpents grow.
The Upas is indeed a large tree, but in height rather than ‘girth gigantic’, native to Ind (here Asia or the East), most famously Java; and for an elephant-hunter to cut into one, risking contact with its poisonous sap, would be dangerous indeed.
Tolkien’s satire of the Physiologus concludes not with a moral lesson but with moral conflict, between drugs and drink. The exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek picture of ‘wine, and plenty of it’, the notion of Christians ‘universally’ embracing excess (in a nation traditionally of tea-drinkers), and the pursuit of ‘fun and frolic’ while canned or greased (intoxicated) are contrasted with Muslim abstinence. Mahound (or Mahoun) is a corrupt form of Muhammad (Mohammed, etc.), recorded from medieval times.
For Oliphaunt in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien transformed Iumbo into a ‘hobbit nursery-rhyme’, as he wrote to his son Christopher in 1944 (Letters, p. 77). In the process, he made it much simpler and cleansed it of anachronisms not to be found in Middle-earth, though it still retains the flavour of its bestiary ancestors.
FASTITOCALON
Tolkien published an earlier poem entitled Fastitocalon in the Stapeldon Magazine for June 1927:
Natura fastitocalonis.
Old Fastitocalon is fat:
His grease the most stupendous vat,
If He perchance were boiled,
Or tank or reservoir would fill,
Or make of margarine a hill,
Or keep the wheels well oiled
that squeak
On all the carts beneath the sun,
Or brew emulsion in a tun
For those whose chests are weak!
He wallows on a bed of slime
In the Ocean’s deep and weedy clime;
As merry organs roll,
So snores He solemn sweet and loud,
And thither tumble in a crowd
The sardine, and the sole
so flat,
And all the little foolish fry
Who pry about with goggle eye,
The skipper and the sprat
in glee
Approach the portals of His jaws;
What feast or frolic be the cause
They enter in to see.
Alas! they come not ever thence;
The joke is all at their expense,
As is the dinner too.
Yet are there times of storm and strife,
When equinoctial gales are rife,
And there is much ado
down there.
He finds the depths devoid of rest,
Then up He comes and on His chest
Floats in the upper air.
His ribs are tender, and his eye
Is small and wicked, wondrous sly;
His heart is black and fickle.
Beware his vast and blubbery back;
His slumbrous sides do not attack,
Nor ever seek to tickle.
Beware!
His dreams are not profound or deep,
He only plays at being asleep;
His snoring is a snare.
He, floating on the inky sea,
A sunny island seems to be,
Although a trifle bare.
Conniving gulls there strut and prink,
Their job it is to tip the wink,
If any one lands there
with kettle
To make a picnic tea, or get
Relief from sickness or the wet,
Or some, perhaps, to settle.
Ah! foolish folk, who land on HIM,
And patent stoves proceed to trim,
Or make incautious fires
To dry your clothes or warm a limb,
Who dance or prance about the glim —
’Tis just what He desires.
He grins.
And when He feels the heat He dives
Down to the deeps: you lose your lives
Cut off amid your sins.
Significacio sequitur.
This mighty monster teaches us
That trespassing is dangerous,
And perils lurk in wait
For curious folk who peep in doors
Of other folk, or dance on floors
Too early or too late
with jazz;
That too much grease is worse than none,
To spare the margarine on bun
Content with what one has
on hand;
That many noises loud and strong
Are neither music nor a song
But only just a band.
Fastitocalon in this version, written probably not long before its publication, was one of two ‘Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, Being the Freaks of Fisiologus’, modelled on accounts collected in medieval bestiaries and based in part on the earlier Physiologus (‘Naturalist’; see our notes for Iumbo under Oliphaunt, above). Here again, a description of an animal’s nature (natura) precedes a moral (significacio sequitur, ‘meaning follows’); and once more, Tolkien introduces anachronisms, such as margarine and squeaky wheels, transforming a ‘medieval’ poem into a tale for our time.
On 5 March 1964, Tolkien wrote to Eileen Elgar about his Bombadil poem Fastitocalon (but his comments apply also, and first, to the Stapeldon Magazine version) that it is
a reduced and rewritten form, to suit hobbit fancy, of an item in old ‘bestiaries’. I think it was remarkable that you perceived the Greekness of the name through its corruptions. This I took in fact from a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon bestiary that has survived [perhaps the tenth-century Exeter Book], thinking that it sounded comic and absurd enough to serve as a hobbit alteration of something more learned and elvish. … The learned name in this case seems to have been Aspido-chelōne ‘turtle with a round shield (of hide)’. Of that astitocalon is a corruption no worse than many of the time; but I am afraid the F was put on by the versifier simply to make the name alliterate, as was compulsory for poets in his day, with the other words in his line. Shocking, or charming freedom, according to taste.
He says: þam is noma cenned / fyrnstreama geflotan Fastitocalon, ‘to him is a name appointed, to the floater in the ancient tides, Fastitocalon’. The notion of the treacherous island that is really a monster seems to derive from the East: the marine turtles enlarged by myth-making fancy; and I left it at that. But in Europe the monster becomes mixed up with whales, and already in the Anglo-Saxon version he is given whale characteristics, such as feeding by trawling with an open mouth. In moralized bestiaries he is, of course, an allegory of the devil, and is so used by Milton. [Letters, pp. 343–4]
In the earlier Fastitocalon, the creature is explicitly a whale, whose blubber (fat) was once avidly sought for making oil. A tun is a brewer’s vat, and rubbing emulsion (oil) on the chest is a common remedy. A skipper is a sea-pike, and a sprat a kind of herring; these, with the sardine and the sole (as Tolkien plays with alliteration), are attracted to the whale, here by the sweet sound of his snoring, like ‘merry organs’; in the bestiary tradition, the whale attracts fishes by his breath, said to be as sweet as flowers.
When, at the equinoxes, stormy winds (‘equinoctial gales’) stir up the bottom of the sea, the whale, its back covered with sea-sand or shingle, rises to the surface, where it may be mistaken for an island – a deliberate ruse, while only pretending to sleep. The notion that sailors might land upon a whale, thinking it to be land, only to perish when it dives after feeling the heat of a fire, is from the bestiaries, and figures also in the medieval Voyage of St Brendan. In the poem, ‘conniving gulls’ are brought into service to tip the wink, or warn the whale when men arrive and trim (prepare) their patent (commercially manufactured) stoves. Glim here means ‘a faint light’, perhaps from a candle or lantern (cf. glimmer, gleam).
As the whale attracts fish and
drags them down into the deep, say the bestiaries, so Satan attracts men weak in their faith and carries them to hell. In contrast, Tolkien’s ‘moral’ condemns ‘curious folk who peep in doors / Of other folk, or dance on floors … with jazz’. It is in the vein of a comment he made years later to his son Christopher: ‘[postwar] music will give place to jiving: which as far as I can make out means holding a “jam session” round a piano (an instrument properly intended to produce the sounds devised by, say, Chopin) and hitting it so hard that it breaks’ (31 July 1944, Letters, p. 89).
When he came to revise Fastitocalon for the Bombadil collection, Tolkien shortened and simplified, but retained the central idea of a false island, with birds deceptively sitting upon it, and a crafty beast – now properly (from Aspido-chelōne) a giant ‘Turtle-fish’ with a horny shell. ‘Middle-earth’ is mentioned almost at the end, to place the poem within the context of The Lord of the Rings, and its new ‘moral’ (‘Set foot on no uncharted shore!’) better suits an unadventurous Hobbit author.
In the first printing of the Bombadil volume, Cat (see below) preceded Fastitocalon, but because all two-colour art for the book had to be placed (as an economy measure) on only one side of the large sheet later folded to make a gathering, the full-page illustration for Cat was placed within the text of Fastitocalon. This was corrected, at publisher Rayner Unwin’s advice and with Tolkien’s agreement, in the second printing, where Fastitocalon now preceded Cat. Thus the poems originally numbered 12 and 11 became 11 and 12; but the references to 11 and 12 were not emended in Tolkien’s preface, where Cat (not Fastitocalon) was meant to be included among the ‘marginalia’ in the Red Book, and Fastitocalon (not Cat) was described as by Sam Gamgee and a touched-up ‘older piece of the comic bestiary lore of which Hobbits appear to have been fond’.
CAT
Tolkien wrote Cat in 1956 for his granddaughter Joanna (Joan Anne), daughter of his second son, Michael. The poem was published for the first time in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. For the re-ordering of Cat in the sequence of poems after the first printing, see our notes for Fastitocalon, above.
Tolkien commented to Rayner Unwin that although he found Pauline Baynes’s large picture for Cat one of her best for the book, ‘as an illustration, it misses a main point in not making one of the “thought-lions” engaged in man-eating’ (29 August 1962, A&U archive; Chronology, p. 596). The poem refers to cats which ‘in the East feasted on beasts and tender men’.
In medieval lore, a pard was a distinct species among the great cats, parti-coloured and with a lion’s mane. Its attributes of speed and deadly violence – ‘fleet upon feet’, ‘leaps on his meat’ – are described in well-known bestiary manuscripts (‘Pardus id est genus varium ac velocissimum et praeceps ad sanguinem, saltu enim ad mortem ruit’). It is said that the offspring of a lion (leo) and a pard is a leopard; but the zoological name for the leopard is Panthera pardus, and pard came to be used in a poetic or literary sense for ‘leopard’ or ‘panther’.
SHADOW-BRIDE
An earlier version of Shadow-Bride was published in 1936 as The Shadow Man, in the twelfth Annual of Our Lady’s School in Abingdon-on-Thames, near Oxford. Our Lady’s School (now Our Lady’s Abingdon) was founded in 1860 as a convent school by the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic order of nuns with whom Tolkien, himself a devout Catholic, was familiar since his days in hospital during the First World War.
There was a man who dwelt alone
beneath the moon in shadow.
He sat as long as lasting stone,
and yet he had no shadow.
The owls, they perched upon his head
beneath the moon of summer;
They wiped their beaks and thought him dead,
who sat there dumb all summer.
There came a lady clad in grey
beneath the moon a-shining.
One moment did she stand and stay
her hair with flowers entwining.
He woke, as had he sprung of stone,
beneath the moon in shadow,
And clasped her fast, both flesh and bone;
and they were clad in shadow.
And never more she walked in light,
or over moonlit mountain,
But dwelt within the hill, where night
is lit but with a fountain —
Save once a year when caverns yawn,
and hills are clad in shadow,
They dance together then till dawn
and cast a single shadow.
Almost the same text as that published in 1936 is preserved among Tolkien’s papers in a fair copy manuscript, but with the title Shadow-Bride. Douglas A. Anderson in The Annotated Hobbit (2002 edn.) describes another manuscript version of Shadow-Bride, without a title and written on the same page as the poem Elvish Song in Rivendell; both appear to date from the early 1930s.
One possible analogue, first noted by Paul H. Kocher for Shadow-Bride but suited also to its precursor, is the myth of Persephone (Proserpine). In this, Hades (Pluto), ruler of the Underworld, abducts the maiden Persephone and takes her beneath the earth to be his wife. Her mother, Demeter (Ceres), goddess of the harvest, is so stricken with grief that the earth itself becomes desolate. At last, a bargain is struck, whereby (in some versions of the tale) Persephone returns to her mother each spring, but lives in the dark Underworld during winter, thus explaining the cycle of the seasons. If The Shadow Man and Shadow-Bride were inspired by this myth, the ‘man who dwelt alone’ is akin to Hades, master of darkness and shadow, and the ‘lady clad in grey’, entwining flowers in her hair, whom the man ‘clasps fast’ is Hades’ bride, Persephone. In The Shadow Man, the man and lady dwell within a hill, a common expression of the Underworld (or Otherworld) in Celtic mythology; in Shadow-Bride this is ‘below where neither days / nor any nights there are’, a good description of the darkness of Hades’ realm. The reference in both poems to ‘once a year when caverns yawn’, and especially in Shadow-Bride to the time when ‘hidden things awake’ – the return of spring after the long winter, or of growth after a drought – reinforces the comparison.
And yet, as Kocher comments, ‘since discrepancies between [Shadow-Bride] and the legend are as numerous as the likenesses, dogmatism would be unwise’ (Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (1972), pp. 220–1). Hades is not said to have ‘sat as long [or as still] as lasting [or carven] stone’ before capturing Persephone (which he does by violent action), nor do both king and queen of the Underworld ‘dance together then till dawn’ at the appointed time of year. At the same time, neither poem is likely to be a treatment of sudden and binding love, given the strangeness of their imagery and events: this is not, for example, the ‘Silmarillion’ story of Beren coming upon Lúthien Tinúviel dancing among hemlocks, or of Thingol caught by the spell of Melian in the shadows of the trees.
Was the man of the poem lying in wait, or was he, before he woke, bound by a spell as explicitly in Shadow-Bride? Does he acquire a shadow when he wakes, as in The Shadow Man, or does he take and share the lady’s, as in the revision? Is the lady an elf, as some critics have called her? In the latter case, it may be worth noting the poem Ides Ælfscýne, written by Tolkien in Old English in the 1920s, privately published in 1936 in Songs for the Philologists, and reprinted by Tom Shippey, with a translation, in The Road to Middle-earth: in this, a boy is embraced by an ‘elf-fair lady’ (ides ælfscýne), who takes him with her ‘under the gloom, where the shadow-way always flickered’ (2005 edn., p. 405).
For The Shadow Man, we are unable to explain the phrase ‘where night / is lit but with a fountain’ except perhaps as a reference to God in Psalm 36:9: ‘For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light.’
THE HOARD
The Hoard is the last in a sequence of poems which began with Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden, written possibly at the end of 1922 and published in the Leeds journal The Gryphon for January 1923. Tolkien revised I�
�monna Gold Galdre Bewunden extensively and published the second version under the same title (as printed, lacking the acute accent) in the Oxford Magazine for 4 March 1937; and this, in turn, became The Hoard in 1962, for the Bombadil collection, with a few further, minor alterations. ‘The Hoard’ as a title for the poem, however, existed by September 1946, when Tolkien used it to refer to a copy of the text – in whatever version was the latest by then – which he sent to George Allen & Unwin for possible publication with his story Farmer Giles of Ham. Here we reprint the first of the sequence, from The Gryphon (with one typographical error, ‘His’ for ‘He’, corrected in the third stanza):
There were elves olden and strong spells
Under green hills in hollow dells
They sang o’er the gold they wrought with mirth,
In the deeps of time in the young earth,
Ere Hell was digged, ere the dragons’ brood
Or the dwarves were spawned in dungeons rude;
And men there were in a few lands
That caught some cunning of their mouths and hands.
Yet their doom came and their songs failed,
And greed that made them not to its holes haled
Their gems and gold and their loveliness,
And the shadows fell on Elfinesse.
There was an old dwarf in a deep grot
That counted the gold things he had got,
That the dwarves had stolen from men and elves
And kept in the dark to their gloomy selves.
His eyes grew dim and his ears dull,
And the skin was yellow on his old skull;
There ran unseen through his bony claw
The faint glimmer of gems without a flaw.
He heard not feet that shook the earth,
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Page 12
