The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology. Tom Shippey
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produced Smaug, the brooding over the riddle-contests of Vafðrúðnismál or The Saga of King Heidrek which led (somehow) to Gollum. The two most powerful fragments of all ancient poetry for Tolkien at this time, I cannot help thinking, were the two similar bits from Beowulf and Sir Gawain which imply there are whole worlds the narrator simply cannot get round to. The Old English poet hints at the ‘wide journeys’ which Sigemund the dragon-slayer made, ‘the wicked deeds and battles which the children of men’ (but maybe not of monsters) ‘never knew clearly’. His medieval successor says of Sir Gawain six centuries later that he would never even have reached his main adventure ‘Had he not been stalwart and staunch and steadfast in God’, so many were his clashes with worms and wolves, with wood-trolls ‘and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells’. In exactly the same spirit we are told that even going home Bilbo ‘had many hardships and adventures before he got back’, since ‘The Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it in those days beside goblins’. Some of them have been half-glimpsed already: eyes in the darkness, ‘old castles with an evil look’, ‘startled ears’ responding to the news of the death of Smaug. But in essence the plot of The Hobbit is a tour through darknesses, with no more connection between Gollum and the eagles and Beorn and the spiders than that of one-after-another. The true end of The Hobbit, as opposed to the last scene of chaos and tidying-up,* is the regretful farewell to the Wild just before, as archaic Took cedes to Edwardian Baggins:
They came to that high point at morning, and looking backward they saw a white sun shining over the outstretched lands. There behind lay Mirkwood, blue in the distance, and darkly green at the nearer edge even in the spring. There far away was the Lonely Mountain on the edge of eyesight. On its highest peak snow yet unmelted was gleaming pale.
‘So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!’ said Bilbo, and he turned his back on his adventure. (p. 271)
Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it. Insofar as the two worlds are related it is because the ‘inner consistency’ of Secondary Art must necessarily (in order to be consistent) be the same as that of Primary Art or truth.
* There are too many of these to fit into an argument: one might note, though, that the skill of Tolkien’s elves in archery goes back to ‘elf-shot’; that their association with the sea and their taking of Frodo is very like the passing of Arthur in (and only in) the account of Lazamon, a twelfth-century Worcestershire poet whom Tolkien regarded as the last preserver of Old English tradition; that the gifts of Galadriel correspond to stories preserved in English and Scandinavian family traditions such as that of ‘the Luck of Edenhall’ or the one recorded in Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter, part 2, ch. 6; that ‘elvishness’ is a quality recognised in men several times in The Lord of the Rings, but also ascribed to himself by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Tolkien makes no use, however, of the very common ‘changeling’ belief.
* ‘Orcs’ go back to the orcnéas, the ‘demon-corpses’ of the Beowulf-poet, and to another Old English word orcþyrs, ‘orc-giant’. ‘Wargs’ are a linguistic cross between Old Norse vargr and Old English wearh, two words showing a shift of meaning from ‘wolf’ to ‘human outlaw’. For the ‘ents’ see below and note Tolkien’s own comment in Letters, p. 208, that ‘As usually with me, they grew rather out of their name, than the other way about’. The ‘woses’ are perhaps primarily an apology for Sir Gawain line 721, where wodwos is offered as a plural, though historically a singular derived from Old English wudu-wása. It would not have escaped Tolkien, though, that his office at Leeds University (like mine) stood just off ‘Woodhouse Lane’, which crosses ‘Woodhouse Moor’ and ‘Woodhouse Ridge’. These names may preserve, in mistaken modern spelling, old belief in ‘the wild men of the woods’ lurking in the hills above the Aire. See further Tolkien’s notes on ‘Orc’ and ‘Woses’ in ‘Guide’.
* I do not know the origin of the personal name ‘Bilbo’, but can record that on one occasion I found myself using Ordnance Survey map no. 161, of S. Herefordshire, to locate churches of similar date to Ancrene Wisse and preserving fragments of the early Anglo-Norse style of stonework. As I did this my eye moved west from Kilpeck to Wormbridge to Abbey Dore to a hill called ‘Great Bilbo’. The Place-Name Survey has not done Herefordshire yet, and I have no explanation for the name; maybe Tolkien had one of his own.
* The contract he finally does deliver on p. 22 is typically more practical than Bilbo at his most business-like had thought. It covers profits, delivery, travelling expenses, but also defrayal of funeral expenses, ‘by us or our represenatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for’. This means, ‘you or all of us may die, and also be eaten’.
* There is a further weak analogue in the Grimms’ tale no. 195, ‘The Grave-Mound’, and a much stronger one in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (London: Bodley Head, 1945), end of chapter 16. There, though, the tale is given a moral significance, a little like Tolkien explaining ‘elf-time’ in Lothlórien.
* Even this, I suspect, has a philological root. In the 1928 introduction he wrote to W. E. Haigh’s Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, mentioned above in connection with ‘Baggins’, Tolkien had said that it was important to observe ‘the changes in sense that take place when words of more “learned” origin are adopted and put to everyday use in dialect (see keȩnsil, okshȩn, inséns)’. But okshȩn in Huddersfield dialect meant not ‘auction’ but ‘mess’. ‘Shu’z nout but ȩ slut; ȩr eȩs ȩz ȩ feȩr okshȩn’, quoted Mr Haigh, or for non-natives, ‘She’s nothing but a slut; her house is a fair auction’. When he gets home Mr Baggins finds his house a ‘fair auction’ in both senses. Not only are they selling his goods, they are failing to wipe their feet on the mat! The word has become a ‘fusion-point’ of outraged respectability.
Maps and Names
Seventeen years went by between the publication of The Hobbit and that of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is true that in the interim a World War was fought, and Tolkien’s family grew up, while Tolkien himself was committed to many professorial duties which, as he later insisted, he did not neglect. Nevertheless the main reason for the long hiatus was the pace and nature of Tolkien’s own creativity. He remained absorbed in Middle-earth, to it indeed he dedicated his ‘years of authority’ as a scholar; but he found the composition of The Lord of the Rings a matter which had to be allowed to obey its own laws. Thanks to the publication of (in particular) volumes VI to IX of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, we now know a good deal more about this process than we did when this book was first written.
To begin with, one can see that Tolkien was perhaps taken aback by, and was certainly not prepared for the success of The Hobbit and the very natural demand by his publishers for a sequel to it. As we again now know much more clearly, and as is discussed in chapter 7 below, he had been working on what was to become The Silmarillion for many years, and had a great deal of material available from that. He sent selections from this corpus to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, in November 1937 (The Hobbit had been published in September of that year), only to have them politely rejected, probably on