Master of Middle Earth

In
1938 when Tolkien was starting to
write
The Lord of the Rings
he also delivered a lecture at the
University of St. Andrews in which he offered his views on the types of world
that it is the office of fantasy, including his own epic, to
"sub-create," as he calls it. Unlike our primary world of daily fact,
fantasy's "secondary worlds" of the imagination must possess, he
said, not only "internal consistency" but also "strangeness and
wonder" arising from their "freedom from the domination of observed
fact."
¹
If this were all, the secondary world of faery would
often be connected only very tenuously with the primary world. But Tolkien
knew, none better, that no audience can long feel sympathy or interest for
persons or things in which they cannot recognize a good deal of themselves and
the world of their everyday experience. He therefore added that a secondary
world must be "credible, commanding Secondary Belief." And he
manifestly expected that secondary worlds would combine the ordinary with the
extraordinary, the fictitious with the actual:
"Faerie
contains
many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants
or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth and
all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and
ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted."

Tolkien followed
his own prescription in composing
The Lord of the Rings,
or perhaps he
formulated the prescription to justify what he was already intending to write.
In either case the answer to the question posed by the title of this chapter is
"Yes, but—." Yes, Middle-earth is a place of many marvels. But they are
all carefully fitted into a framework of climate and geography, familiar skies
by night, familiar shrubs and trees, beasts and birds on earth by day, men and
manlike creatures with societies not too different from our own. Consequently
the reader walks through any Middle-earth landscape with a security of
recognition that woos him on to believe in everything that happens. Familiar
but not too familiar, strange but not too strange. This is the master rubric
that Tolkien bears always in mind when inventing the world of his epic. In
applying the formula in just the right proportions in the right situations
consists much of his preeminence as a writer of fantasy.

Fundamental to
Tolkien's method in
The Lord of the Rings
is a standard literary pose
which he assumes in the Prologue and never thereafter relinquishes even in the
Appendices: that he did not himself invent the subject matter of the epic but
is only a modern scholar who is compiling, editing, and eventually translating
copies of very ancient records of Middle-earth which have come into his hands,
he does not say how. To make this claim sound plausible he constructs an
elaborate family tree for these records, tracing some back to personal
narratives by the four hobbit heroes of the War of the Ring, others to
manuscripts found in libraries at Rivendell and Minas Tirith, still others to
oral tradition.
²
Then, in order to help give an air of credibility
to his account of the War, Tolkien endorses it as true and calls it history,
that is, an authentic narrative of events as they actually happened in the
Third Age. This accolade of history and historical records he bestows
frequently in both Prologue and Appendices. With the Shire Calendar in the year
1601 of the Third Age, states the Prologue," . . . legend among the
Hob-bits first becomes history with a reckoning of years." A few pages
farther on, Bilbo's 111th birthday is said to have occurred in Shire year 1041:
"At this point this History begins." And in Appendix F Tolkien
declares editorially, "The language represented in this history by English
was the
Westron
or 'Common Speech' of the West-lands of Middle-earth in
the Third Age."
³

Many writers of
fantasy would have stopped at this point. But Tolkien has a constitutional
aversion to leaving Middle-earth afloat too insubstantially in empty time and
place, or perhaps his literary instincts warn him that it needs a local
habitation and a name. Consequently he takes the further crucial step of
identifying it as our own green and solid Earth at some quite remote epoch in
the past. He is able to accomplish this end most handily in the Prologue and
Appendices, where he can sometimes step out of the role of mere editor and
translator into the broader character of commentator on the peoples and events
in the manuscripts he is handling. And he does it usually by comparing
conditions in the Third Age with what they have since become in our present.

About the hobbits,
for instance, the Prologue informs the reader that they are "relations of
ours," closer than elves or dwarves, though the exact nature of this blood
kinship is lost in the mists of time. We and they have somehow become
"estranged" since the Third Age, and they have dwindled in physical
size since then. Most striking, however, is the news that "those days, the
Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has
been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the
same as those in which they still linger: the Northwest of the Old World, east
of the Sea."

There is much to
digest here. The Middle-earth on which the hobbits lived is our Earth as it was
long ago. Moreover, they are still here, and though they hide from us in their
silent way, some of us have sometimes seen them and passed them on under other
names into our folklore. Furthermore, the hobbits still live in the region they
call the Shire, which turns out to be "the North-West of the Old World,
east of the Sea." This description can only mean northwestern Europe,
however much changed in topography by eons of wind and wave.

Of course, the
maps of Europe in the Third Age drawn by Tolkien to illustrate his epic show a
continent very different from that of today in its coastline, mountains,
rivers, and other major geographical features. In explanation he points to the
forces of erosion, which wear down mountains, and to advances and recessions of
the sea that have inundated some lands and uncovered others. Singing of his
ancestor Durin, Gimli voices dwarf tradition of a time when the earth was newly
formed and fair, "the mountains tall" as yet unweathered, and the
face of the moon as yet unstained by marks now visible on it. Gandalf objects
to casting the One Ring into the ocean because "there are many things in
the deep waters; and seas and lands may change." Treebeard can remember
his youth when he wandered over the countries of Tasarinan, Ossiriand,
Neldoreth, and Dorthonion, "And now all those lands he under the
wave." At their parting Galadriel guesses at some far distant future when
"the lands that he under the wave are lifted up again" and she and
Treebeard may meet once more on the meadows of Tasarinan. Bombadil recalls a
distant past, "before the seas were bent." By many such references
Tolkien achieves for Middle-earth long perspectives backward and forward in
geological time.

One episode in
particular, the reign of Morgoth from his stronghold of Thangorodrim somewhere
north of the Shire for the three thousand years of the First Age, produces
great changes in Middle-earth geography. To bring about his over-throw the
Guardian Valar release titanic natural forces, which cause the ocean to drown
not only his fortress but a vast area around it, including the elf kingdoms of
Beleriand, Nargothrond, Gondolin, Nogrod, and Belagost. Of that stretch of the
northwestern coast only Lindon remains above the waves to appear on Tolkien's
Third Age maps. The flooding of rebellious Númenor by the One at the end of the
Second Age is a catastrophe of equal magnitude.

But Tolkien gives
the realm of Morgoth an extra level of allusiveness by describing it as so
bitterly cold that after its destruction "those colds linger still in that
region, though they lie hardly more than a hundred leagues north of the
Shire." He goes on to describe the Forod-waith people living there as
"Men of far-off days," who have snow houses, like igloos, and sleds
and skis much like those of Eskimos. Add the fact that the Witch-king of Angmar
(thereafter called simply Angmar), Morgoth's henchman, has powers that wane in
summer and wax in winter and it becomes hard not to associate Morgoth in some
way with a glacial epoch, as various commentators have already done. In his
essay "On Fairy-stories" Tolkien refuses to interpret the Norse god
Thorr as a mere personification of thunder.
⁴
Along the same lines,
it is not his intention, I think, to portray Morgoth as a personification of an
Ice Age. However, it would seem compatible with his meaning to consider Morgoth
a spirit of evil whose powers have engendered the frozen destructiveness of
such an age.

The possibility
thus raised of fixing the three Ages of Middle-earth in some interglacial lull
in the Pleistocene is tempting, and may be legitimate, provided that we do not
start looking about for exact data to establish precise chronologies.
⁵
The data are not there, and Tolkien has no intention whatever of supplying
them. The art of fantasy flourishes on reticence. To the question how far in
Earth's past the Ages of Middle-earth lie, Tolkien gives essentially the
storyteller's answer: Once upon a time—and never ask what time. Choose some
interglacial period if you must, he seems to say, but do not expect me to bind
myself by an admission that you are right. Better for you not to be too sure.

Tolkien's
technique of purposeful ambivalence is well shown too in the Mumak of Harad,
which Sam sees fighting on the side of the Southrons against Faramir's men in
Ithilien: ". . . indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not
now walk in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in the latter days are but
memories of his girth and majesty." As compared with its "kin,"
the elephant of today, the ancestral Mumak was far more massive.
⁸
Is
Tolkien hinting that it is a mammoth? Perhaps, but it is not shaggy, it is
coming up from the warm south, and it is totally unknown to the hobbits farther
north, where that sort of creature might be expected to abound. Tolkien is
equally evasive about Angmar's huge winged steed, featherless and leathery:
"A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, lingering in
forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day ..." A
pterodactyl? It certainly sounds like one, but Tolkien avoids naming it, and
casts all in doubt with a maybe. If it is a pterodactyl, or a close relative,
then the Age of Reptiles in which those species throve is "older"
than the Third Age, apparently much older. Gwaihir is an eagle of prodigious
size whose ancestor "built his eyries in the inaccessible peaks of the
Encircling Mountains when Middle-earth was young." All these half-mythical
creatures of Middle-earth are meant to subsist partly in our world, partly in
another in which the imagination can make of them what it will.

Tolkien's lifelong
interest in astronomy tempts him into observations which have a bearing on the
distance of Middle-earth back in Earth's prehistory. Opening in Appendix D a
discussion of the calendars devised by its various peoples he remarks,
"The Calendar in the Shire differed in several features from ours. The
year no doubt was of the same length, for long ago as those times are now
reckoned in years and lives of men, they were not very remote according to the
memory of the Earth." A footnote on the same page gives "365 days, 5
hours, 8 minutes, 46 seconds" as the period of Earth's annual revolution
around the sun according to our best modern measurements. The year length for
Middle-earth of the Third Age was the same, Tolkien says. In other words,
Earth's orbit around the sun (or vice versa) was the same then as it is now.
This bit of information is not as informative as it looks. In the absence of
modern technology nobody before today could possibly have calculated the orbit
with sufficient accuracy to tell at what epoch.it began being different. But
the implication is that at least the Third Age was not many millions of years
ago. Tolkien wants for Middle-earth distance, not invisibility.

To strengthen
visibility, and also to counterbalance the alien topography of Middle-earth's
Europe, Tolkien lights its night skies with the planets and constellations we
know, however different their names. Orion is seen by hobbits and elves meeting
in the Shire woods: ". . . there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of
the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt."
Unmistakably Orion. Looking out the window of the inn at Bree, "Frodo saw
that the night was clear. The Sickle was swinging bright above the shoulders of
Bree-hill." Tolkien takes the trouble to add a footnote on that page- that
"the Sickle" is "the Hobbits' name for the Plough or Great
Bear." Glowing like a jewel of fire "Red Borgil" would seem to
be Mars. Eärendil's star is surely Venus, because Bilbo describes it as shining
just after the setting sun ("behind the Sun and light of Moon") and
just before the rising sun ("a distant flame before the Sim,/a wonder ere
the waking dawn ...").