The Song of Middle-earth: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Themes, Symbols and Myths. David Harvey
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The themes of the epics were heroic and followed the pattern which has already been outlined.
Those who recounted the myths and legends, the priests, shamans or bards and poets, were the keepers of the sacred tradition and the sacred stories. The initiation for shamans and priests was long and complex and, like the Irish ‘seauchan’ or ‘master poet’, required passage through various stages of wisdom. Poets, like shamans, were believed to be a medium between man and the gods and were considered seers or soothsayers, yet, as in the case of Homer, Tiresias or the Delphic Sybil, may have had to contend with some physical disability or disorder. By being so disabled they were not totally of the world. The disability set them apart and allowed an acceptable link with the supernatural.
So the poet is not merely an artist, but an inspired artist and a keeper of the sacred tradition. It is therefore no accident that myth, legend and literature were, in early days, so closely linked. Even the use of verse forms is part of the ritual tradition. The Iliad and Odyssey were written in a dactylic hexameter, a form inappropriate to both Greek and English. But it was the metre of prophecy and religious narrative. In using this form, Homer’s work invokes a quality that makes it transcend a mere tale and takes it to the point of religious myth. Of course, an oral tradition results in modifications with the passage of time, although poetic forms would contain mnemonic tricks of metre or rhyme form. An example of the former is the Kalevala with its distinctive metre adopted by H. W. Longfellow in The Song of Hiawatha. But despite such aids the tales changed, not necessarily in theme but in detail. Much would depend upon the audience for whom the tale was written or created. According to Eliade, Homer created his work for a military and semi-feudal aristocracy. Thus Homer may have avoided some of the themes which would not be of interest to his audience, and rather glorified certain aspects.
Despite such critics as Pindar and Thucydides who rejected the incredible myths and fabulous tales, the Greek myths represent a literary work which documents a religious belief. None of them have come to us in their cult context and, were it not for the work of Graves, it is doubtful that the religious or ritual explanation of them would be available to any but a few scholars. Any myth that has been documented or has been the subject of a literary work is primarily literary in nature. Thus we see the Eddas and sagas not as religious documents but as linguistic records and part of the literary history of society.
Myth has appeared throughout the history of literature even down to the present time. Mythical archetypes survive in the modern novel in the symbolic sense. Hemingway’s Old Man is Everyman, adrift on the Primordial Waters undertaking his Quest for the Monster of the deep. Dickens returns to the folktale idiom. Nickleby searches for his real background kept hidden by his wicked uncle, Ralph. Dickens’ characters may be wicked witches or people or institutions and his heroes are often aided by the guileless fool who leads them to salvation.
The writer, in creating his own myth, will accept the supernatural as operating within nature. Within the world of nature exist inexplicable forces which are fickle and can turn at will. The use of mythic forms and archetypes by the writer is an aesthetic device for bringing the imaginary but powerful world of preternatural forces into a manageable collaboration with objective and experience facts of life in such a way as to stimulate unconscious passions and the conscious mind. It can bring together the real experience and the submerged impulses of life. The use of myth in the creative sense is the province of the poet or bard; the artist not the historian. The poet may feign a history for his artistic purpose and pattern, using an imagined history or an historical form within which to cast his fictional or symbolic action. Thus the poet’s or artist’s world is a ‘middle-earth’ situated between the lower present day historical world and an unexperienced but nevertheless mythically real Heaven.
Fiction, imagination and myth all occupy the same level for the artist. Fiction may be a deviation from reality or an approximation of it. With fiction, the artist can explain the inexplicable. There has been a tendency in modern literature to dispense with the mythic forms and the successful achievement of the Quest or the ‘happy ending’. Such literature is literature without hope and says little for Man’s ability to transcend or overcome his universal tragedy. But by the same token it is important to consider the element of tragedy in myth. So far we have looked at the hero and his Quest from a positive or ‘eucatastrophic’ point of view. Tragedy can provide us with a positive point of view, but with anything but happiness for the protagonist. The tragic hero carries within him the well-being of people and the welfare of the State. He engages in a conflict with the representative of darkness and Evil. He suffers a temporary defeat or setback. After a period of shame and suffering he emerges triumphant as the symbol of the victory of light and good over darkness and evil, a victory sanctified by the covenant of the settling of destinies which reaffirms the well-being of the people and the welfare of the State. In the course of the conflict comes a point where the protagonist and antagonist merge into a single challenge against the order of God. The protagonist commits an evil he would not normally do, and fails to do good when he should. At this moment we become aware that the real protagonist of the tragedy is the order of God against which the hero has rebelled. The pride and presumption which is within us all as a result of our mixed state is symbolised and revealed, and it is this hubris which is purged from us by the suffering of the tragic hero.
It is the function of the artist, the writer, the creative myth-maker to highlight and focus the symbols in his creative effort. As Blake says in ‘Jerusalem’, ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.’
The end product of such creativity may be an eclectic synopticon such as W. B. Yeats’ A Vision or Graves’ The White Goddess, or a creation-like myth such as that of Wordsworth’s personal cosmos in The Prelude. Furthermore, it is difficult to achieve a totally clean break with the allegedly extinct mythologies and source studies have been devoted to Blake and Yeats. No matter how hard a creator may try, inevitably he draws upon extant mythology, and the mythopoeic impulse in imaginations as powerful as Joyce and Mann may be impeded by a reluctance to let go of the traditional mythologies. The invented mythology rarely contains the resonances of an inherited one and must always remain private except to the happy few who take the trouble to work it out. Those who advocate that myths are collective in nature consider it impossible for any one person to be credited with the creation or invention of a myth. What Melville and Kafka create is not myth, but an individual fantasy expressing a symbolic action equivalent to and related to the myth’s expression of a public rite. Yet initially the myth must have a source in the form of ballad, narrative or saga. Someone has to supply the raw material to which others may add or may alter. Thus, anyone can contribute his ‘bit’ to a myth but is obliged to respect the original integrity of the raw material. In literature myths are moulded and shaped. Imported materials are adapted to fit local custom, landscape or belief and usually suffer slightly. In the continued retelling of a traditional tale, accidental or intentional dislocations are inevitable.
Tolkien created a setting for his mythology. His world was Arda, the realm of mortals, Middle-earth. The themes of his mythology are universal. Many of the themes have been borrowed and reworked to fit the artist’s structure. Tolkien’s mythology is, however, rare. It is a private mythology but it is available to all. Although it began as a shared experience with a small group, it carries within it elements of universal acceptability. Tolkien’s themes, archetypes and symbolism can appeal to us all in that they are universal. It is the use to which they are put, the tailoring within the created mythological world, that makes Tolkien’s work one of the most significant of the created mythologies of English literature.
The Music of Ilúvatar: Tolkien and the Major Mythic Themes
Also … I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English.1
Tolkien wanted to create