Master of Middle Earth (25 page)

Giles duly becomes
"the Hero of the Countryside," gets drunk, and comes home
"singing old heroic songs." He receives a testimonial and an ancient
sword from the reigning monarch of the Middle Kingdom, who rejoices in the
appellation
"Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus Pius et
Magnificus, dux, rex, tyrannus, et basileus Mediterranearum Partium."
The "Ambrosius Aurelianus" may derive from "Aurelius
Ambrosius," chronicled by Geoffrey of Monmouth
¹⁵
as Arthur's
predecessor and uncle. And if Tolkien wishes to aggrandize him further by
adding the name of a pope and a Roman emperor or two, so much the richer the
jest when the king in question is a petty miser and ineffectual fool.

It is left to the
village parson to read the runes on Giles' sword and so to identify it as
"Caudiomordax, the famous sword that in popular romances is more vulgarly
called Tailbiter," particularly renowned for slaying dragons. This busy
blade outdoes all the greatest blades of fable from Arthur's Excalibur and
Roland's Durendal to Aragorn's Anduril. Those others are merely wielded by
heroes, but Tailbiter makes a hero of any man who wields it. Whenever a dragon
is within five miles, it leaps from the sheath of its own accord, and during
combat it wisely delivers all the strokes at the dragon's most vulnerable spots
by forcing its owner's arm into the right maneuvers. Obviously this is an
embarrassing sort of weapon to own when a dragon named Chrysophylax Dives,
"cunning, inquisitive, greedy, well-armoured but not over bold,"
invades the kingdom after a hard winter, particularly for Giles who is not
overbold himself.

Tolkien now turns
his parody against the institution of knighthood.
¹⁶
In the brave
days of old, the King's knights efficiently kept down the population of
dragons, and when Augustus Bonifacius, etc., formerly held feast at
Christmastide (as Arthur did in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
and
other romances) he could always count on being served Dragon's Tail (as Arthur
never ate until he heard or saw some noble exploit). But that glory is fled.
Now the high table is reduced to eating an imitation tail made of cake baked by
the royal cook. The situation is so bad that in a delightful reversal of human
skepticism about dragons, the younger dragons never having met a knight,
conclude, "So knights are mythical! . . . We always thought so." The
knights are engaged in gossiping about the latest fashion in hats when
Chrysophylax descends on the kingdom, devouring "two persons of tender
age" and one very tough, stringy priest. Their information about these
ravages being still quite unofficial, the knights do nothing until officially
notified, and then bethink themselves of several remarkable reasons for
postponing action—of which Tolkien remarks wryly that "the excuses of the
knights were undoubtedly sound."

How the adventure
of killing the Worm is thrust upon Giles' unwilling shoulders, how the slow
village smith named Fabricius Cunctator (no doubt after Hannibal's Roman
adversary Fabius the Delayer) makes for him a ridiculous suit of armor surely
descended from that worn by Plautus' Braggart Soldier, and how Chrysophylax
refuses to fight because he was not challenged first according to the rules of
chivalry are narrated with fine zest. But to my mind the high points of comedy
come in the talk that ensues between Giles and the dragon, and other later
talks of the same kind. "Conversations with a Dragon" would be as
good a subtitle for the story as any. Chrysophylax the Rich finally buys his
release from the people of Ham by promising them incredible sums from his hoard
in the mountains. But the village folk have forgotten that dragons, once freed,
have "alas! no conscience at all" about keeping promises. "The
parson with his book-learning might have guessed it ... He was a grammarian,
and could doubtless see further into the future than others." Even
admitting that in the Dark Ages grammarians were often suspected of magic, we
should no doubt see in the word here a pun on philologists and a consequent
laugh at their pretensions. Tolkien is hitting out at every target in sight,
not excluding himself.

But he is not yet
finished with the knights. Enraged by the perfidy of Chrysophylax in not
keeping his word to bring back his treasure, the King orders all the knights
out in pursuit, and Giles too, though he is too "plain and honest" to
want to be "dubbed." As soon as the knights approach the mountains of
Wales and find ominous footprints, they bring Giles up to the head of the line
to examine them and tell him to go first. "Lead on!" they say. Then,
like Arthur's knights before the founding of the Round Table, they fall to
"discussing points of precedence" as they ride, but whereas Arthur's
champions dispute who shall be first, these paladins dispute who shall have the
post of safety in the rear. Chrysophylax's sudden attack kills several knights
"before they could even issue their formal challenge of battle" and
panics the others' horses, which flee, "carrying their masters off whether
they wished it or no. Most of them wished it indeed." The baggage ponies
and servants also run away at once. "They had no doubt as to the order of
precedence." Since his old gray mare (the Rosinante of the story) for her
own reasons refuses to budge, Giles is left to face the dragon alone. After
another long bargaining session, in which Tailbiter is very persuasive,
Chrysophylax agrees to carry his treasure back to the village then and there if
Giles will let him keep a part in his cave. Giles accepts, "showing a laudable
discretion. A knight would have stood out for the whole hoard and got a curse
laid upon it," as happened to Fafnir's hoard.

The tale of Giles'
founding his own Little Kingdom with the help of the dragon has its climax in
the Battle of the Bridge, wherein the forces of the Middle Kingdom are
dispersed by a single snort of steam from Chrysophylax, and Giles refuses to
meet the King in single combat for fear of hurting him. Many lays are sung' to
celebrate Giles' deeds. "The favourite one dealt with the meeting on the
bridge in a hundred mock-heroic couplets." Tolkien is leaving no doubt of
the literary genre to which this tale belongs. In the same vein he has Giles
get the jump on the future King Arthur by inaugurating "an entirely new
order of knighthood" called the Wormwardens, headed by the twelve village
lads who guard the dragon. Besides, if Arthur has his Guinevere Giles has his
Agatha, who "made a queen of great size and majesty . . . There was no
getting round Queen Agatha—at least it was a long walk."

Before the end
Tolkien has one shaft more to aim at philologists. The Foreword had promised to
throw light "on the origin of some difficult place-names." Take, for
instance, the name of the river Thames. One of Giles' titles was "Dominus
de Domito Serpente, which is in the vulgar Lord of the Tame Worm, or shortly of
Tame." But he was also known as "Lord of Ham." Out of "a
natural confusion" between "Ham" and "Tame" arose
Thame,
"for Thame with an
h
is a folly without warrant."
Tolkien says he gets this etymology from "the learned in such
matters." He may be laughing merely at bad philology, but more probably
his target is the speculative tricks played by philology as generally
practiced. Similarly, Worming-hall, the great hall of the Wormwardens, has sunk
today to
Wunnle,
"for villages have fallen from their pride."

"Farmer Giles
of Ham" is an outburst of pure good humor. The fact that it mocks the
heroic does not mean that in 1949 Tolkien embraced the fashionable cult of the
antihero, any more than his fun with his beloved philology meant that he
renounced his devotion to it in the past or its charms for the future. After
that date he gave years of revision to readying
The Lord of the Rings
for publication, and he has never stopped work on
The Silmarillion.
"Farmer Giles" is simply a vacation from the "things higher . .
. deeper . . . darker" which these epics treat. That a writer can laugh at
what is dearest to him does not signify that it has grown less dear. It
signifies only that he is able to laugh at himself.

Having lived
through two World Wars, in one of which he was severely wounded, Tolkien had
most of a lifetime in which to think long thoughts about war. And having cut
his philological baby teeth on the great Anglo-Saxon war poem
The Battle of
Maldon,
along with its companion pieces in the Old English literary canon,
he had the same length of time in which to decide that it was being generally
misinterpreted. At some date not long after the Second World War these two
streams of thought ran together to prompt him to write a sequel to
Maldon
in the form of a dramatic dialogue in alliterative verse between two of
Beorhtnoth's retainers searching the battlefield by night for the corpse of the
English leader after his defeat. Tolkien published it in
Essays and Studies
of the English Association
¹⁷
in 1953, together with an
explanation and defense of his new reading of the Maldon poem on which his
sequel is based.

Briefly, as
Tolkien summarizes it, the more orthodox interpretation saw the poem merely as
a celebration of the heroic deaths of Beorhtnoth and all his hearth companions
while resisting a Danish onslaught on the English coast in
a.d
. 991. Tolkien proposed instead that
the hinge of
Maldon
was the poet's censure of Beorhtnoth's
ofermod
in letting the Danes freely cross an otherwise impassable causeway and hurl
their over--whelmingly superior numbers at the English host.
Ofermod,
Tolkien suggested, was not the mere "over-boldness" it was usually
construed to mean, but "overmastering pride," a criminal lust for
personal fame. Hence,
Maldon
was predominantly the account of the
unnecessary deaths of many brave men caused by the selfish folly of one.

Tolkien properly
points out in the essay "Ofermod," which follows his poem, that
Maldon,
understood in this way, has a "sharpness and tragic
quality" not present in an interpretation of it as purely heroic
throughout, because "by it the loyalty of the retinue is greatly
enhanced."
¹⁸
Loving their chief and honoring their pledges of
allegiance to him, Beorhtnoth's
heorSwerod
fight to the death in spite
of his besotted judgment, which is betraying them all. "The
Homecoming" takes its point of departure from this view of the events of the
fight. By putting the reader right among the corpses on the battlefield after
nightfall it drives home with utter immediacy the horror of a carnage that need
never have taken place. Its method of doing so is to present the words and
actions of two of Beorhtnoth's servants, sent by the Monks of Ely to bring back
their master's body for burial. The searching, the finding, the carrying—these
make up the whole action of Tolkien's short (under 400 lines) narrative poem.

The two searchers
are cunningly chosen for maximum spread and contrast of outlook. Both are
members of the earl's household, warmly devoted to him. Torhthelm is the young
son of a minstrel, being trained in his father's profession to sing of Finn,
Froda, Beowulf, and other heroes of northern saga. The old lays have captured
him so powerfully that he lives more in the past than in the present. Though nominally
a Christian, he is constantly seeing Christian England of
a.d
. 991 from the point of view of
pagan beliefs and customs four centuries gone. Especially, since he has never
been in any battle, he romanticizes war. Sharply set off against him is old
Tidwald, who has had all too much experience over the years, fighting in the
militia bands, and has seen too many stricken fields to have any illusions
about this one. Harpers' songs mean little to him. As a farmer his mind is on
the ravages to land and people by the Danes. As a committed Christian he looks
to Heaven to give consolation for the sorrows he sees all around him in this
life and due recompense in the next. Tolkien's artistry lies in devising a
series of encounters between the outlooks of these two very different men so as
to bring put the themes in which he is interested.

At the start of
"The Homecoming" the long night search among the tangle of bodies,
which death has robbed of identity as Englishman or Dane, has unnerved
Torhthelm. Stimulated by pagan legends that ghosts of the unburied dead must
walk the night, his imagination hears them gibbering in every gust of wind. For
this he is mocked by Tidwald and told to "forget your gleeman's
stuff." The old farmer is matter-of-factly unheaping corpses
distinguishable only as "long ones and short ones,/the thick and the
thin." Not unkindly he reminds the boy that England is Christian now and "ghosts
are under ground or else God has/them . . ." But to Torhthelm the mirk
seems "the dim/shadow of heathen hell, in the hopeless/kingdom where
search is vain." It is no accident that Tolkien chooses a hell image here
to describe the aftermath of battle.

Among the many of
Beorhtnoth's household thanes whose deaths are sung in
Maldon
the author
calls only two specifically
young:
Wulfmaer, son of Wulfstan, and
Aelfwine, son of Aelfric. These are the two whose bodies the searchers discover
first and identify by the light of their lantern. Tolkien has the point to make
that promising young men are the most numerous and most lamentable victims of
war. In order to make it, he goes far beyond the single adjective of
Maldon,
giving both Torhthelm and Tidwald repeated laments on the youth and worth
of the slain men. Tidwald, particularly, thinks it "... a wicked
business/to gather them ungrown." Wulfmaer was "a gallant boy"
with "the makings of a man," Aelfwine "a brave lordling, and we
need his like." Torhthelm likewise is moved to indignation against the
bearded sons of Offa who fled while the Danes beat down "boys"
younger than himself. Yet with an inconsistency born of his minstrel training
he wishes he himself had been in the fight, to show that he loved Beorhtnoth as
well as any of his titled lords and would never have run away as some of them
did. Tidwald's sad retort is that Torhthelm's time for battle will come all too
soon and, when it does, he will not find it as easy as the songs say to choose
between shame and death. This part of "The Homecoming" accentuates
the most wasteful side of the wide waste of war, that it cuts off the young.
And Tolkien piles waste upon waste by putting it into a setting in which the
deaths are all needless, all sacrifices to the pride of Beorhtnoth, whom even
Tidwald still loves.