Master of Middle Earth (26 page)

When the two
searchers finally uncover Beorhtnoth's body they say a Christian prayer for
him, but Torhthelm also feels the need to burst into a chant in praise of the
hero dead, traditional in ancient heathen lays (in
Beowulf,
for
instance) and incorporated by Tolkien into
The Lord of the Rings
for the
funerals of Boromir and Théoden. Torhthelm's song blends the pagan with the
Christian, praising Beorhtnoth on the one hand for his brave heart and generosity
in gift-giving, on the other for "his soul clearer than swords of
heroes," and culminating in the cry: "He has gone to God glory
seeking." Unknowing as yet that the earl's folly in pursuing
"glory" is the cause of the entire tragedy, the young singer later
again raises a burial chant for him as

to his
hearth-comrades help unfailing,

to his folk the
fairest father of peoples.

Glory loved he;
now glory earning ...

But the reader,
instructed by Tolkien's own analysis of the battle, is meant to know and catch
the full irony of lauding the dead leader for that very quality that destroyed
the people he was supposed to guard and guide.

One subtheme of
"The Homecoming" is Torhthelm's gradual and by no means uninterrupted
discovery that the heroic grandeur he sees in his sagas is not compatible with
the unheroic reality he is finding on the Essex battlefield. In consequence,
from time to time he wavers uncomfortably between the two. He has just seen
that youth can die. Now he is horrified by the revelation that Beorhtnoth's
mangled body, when it is found, is headless. "What a murder it is,/this
bloody fighting!" is the exclamation wrung from him. Tidwald seizes the
chance to educate him further by reminding him that war and death were just as
un-glamorous in the times of Froda and Finn, which he delights to sing about:
"The world wept then, as it weeps today." But in the next moment
Torhthelm is again envisioning for Beorhtnoth a magnificent funeral pyre and
burial in a high barrow surrounded by his weapons and jewels in the antique
fashion. He has to be brought back by Tidwald's impatient recall that since
these are Christian days the earl will be laid simply in the grave after a
Requiem mass by the Monks of Ely, and that the two of them had better get on
with the job of transporting the corpse.

Just then,
however, Torhthelm, startled by stealthy movements in the dark, is sure that
they are made by the "troll-shapes ... or hell-walkers" of Norse
folklore. He attacks them with Beorhtnoth's blade, which he has picked up, and
kills one of them. Sardonically Tidwald hails him as "my
bogey-slayer!" He shows the youth that he has killed nothing but a
miserable English corpse stripper, who could easily have been put to flight by
a boot in the pants. This, too, has been a needless death, in its own small way
not unlike the earl's greater slaughter, since both result from imaginations
unbalanced by emulation of the mighty past. And the fact that the killing has
been done by Beorhtnoth's own sword is another of art's little perfidies.

Up to this point
Torhthelm has not known that the English chief gave the Danes the advantage of
crossing the causeway. Now Tidwald tells him with a mixture of sorrow, anger,
and love. In so doing he tries to open his young companion's eyes to the part
played in Beorhtnoth's decision by the seduction of bardic fame: he was too
"keen ... to give minstrels matter for mighty songs./Needlessly
noble." But, to judge from Torhthelm's failure to comment, the lesson does
not sink in. Instead, he ruminates on the vagaries of historical change that
have pulled down the last living descendant of the Saxon earls who conquered
England, while bringing on the scene a new race of conquering Danes. To him
Beorhtnoth's chivalry was too much in accord with that of many of the noblest
heroes of old to seem "needless." So missing what Tidwald (and
through him Tolkien) considers the key to a proper understanding of the meaning
of the battle—the initial guilt of Beorhtnoth—Torhthelm never does comprehend
the true nature of the horror and pity hanging over that battleground. His
historical analogies are true enough, and well worth drawing, but they go off
at a tangent from the immediate tragedy of the battle itself. Also, what is to
Torhthelm only an interesting historical configuration translates itself for
Tidwald into concrete facts of farmers robbed and killed, wives and children
carried off into serfdom. "Let the poets/babble, but perish all
pirates!"

Though Tidwald
seems to have done most of the methodical physical work of getting Beorhtnoth's
corpse to the wagon that is to bear it to Ely, Torh-thelm's wilder emotions
have wearied him to the point of needing rest. But Tidwald's suggestion that he
lie in the wagon with the corpse, using it as a pillow, strikes the younger man
as revoltingly brutal. Not at all, replies the old farmer; Torhthelm has
misused his songs so long for dressing up ugly facts in the fancy language of
poetry that he has never learned to accept them bare. To demonstrate, Tidwald
by way of parody extemporizes a sentimental poem relating in high-flown style
how a faithful servant, weary with weeping for the master he loves, bows his
head on the beloved breast as they journey together toward the grave. Decked
out like that, he says, his suggestion about lying in the cart with Beorhtnoth
would appeal to Torhthelm as noble. The latter accepts the rebuke, gets into
the wagon, falls asleep, and dreams.

Speaking out of
his dream Torhthelm is no longer the callow romantic youth but a mouthpiece for
something greater and more impersonal than himself, the spirit of heroic
paganism. He foresees Beorhtnoth's burial and the slow oblivion of time that
overtakes him as his tomb crumbles and all his kin die out. Then his prophecy
broadens into a vision of the doom awaiting the whole human race when its
candles flicker out and everlasting night rushes in. Is there nothing men can
do to vanquish the darkness and the cold? No, for the doom is that of Ragnarok,
when gods and men will be swept away by the forces of chaos. But meantime
manhood demands that they gather together in lighted halls to defy with
undaunted spirits the defeat that is bound to come. Torhthelm, still dreaming,
hears and repeats what they chant:

Heart shall be
bolder, harder be

purpose, more
proud the spirit as our power lessens!

Mind shall not
falter nor mood waver,

though doom should
come and dark conquer.

Tolkien is
paraphrasing here the famous lines spoken by a member of Beorhtnoth's war band
in the
Maldon
poem as they await the last onslaught, lines praised by
Tolkien in his accompanying essay as "a summing up of the heroic
code" of the north. Likewise, in his celebrated lecture delivered to the
British Academy in 1936, "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,"
Tolkien had singled out this same defiance of fated doom, without fear and
without hope, as the core of that poem. He had used there, too, the same image
of man at bay in his lighted halls besieged by the darkness outside. In short,
he is giving us in Torhthelm's assertion of the will's inner victory what seems
to him the finest that Norse paganism has to offer. It is very fine indeed.
Tolkien admires it. He has said so repeatedly elsewhere, and by implication he
says so again in "The Homecoming." But for him personally as a
Catholic it is not enough, for it stops with life on earth.

As Torhthelm has
spoken for more than himself, so also Tidwald speaks for the new age of
Christianity (and for Tolkien, too, it seems) in his reply to the glee-man's
apprentice:

... your words
were

queer, Torhthelm
my lad, with your talk of

wind and doom
conquering and a dark ending.

It sounded fey and
fell-hearted,

and heathenish,
too: I don't hold with that.

So far as this
world goes, Tidwald's view of the prospects are hardly more cheerful than
Torhthelm's. The coming morning, like others before it, will bring only more
labor and loss till England is ruined. Wars will go on, "ever work and war
till the word passes," and roads will be rough for Englishmen in Æthelred's
or any other time. But the world will pass, and what lies beyond is
foreshadowed by the Requiem mass being sung by the Monks of Ely as "The
Homecoming" ends:
"Dirige, Domine, in conspectu tuo viam
meam."
Here at last after courage shines hope.

Looking back over
Tolkien's poem from its beginning, we may well be impressed by the crusading
spirit with which he has Tidwald knock down every attempt by Torhthelm to
idealize war. On the other hand he never hints that a fight with a determined
enemy can or should be avoided. It would be nice if the Danes would stay home
and stop ruining England, but since they will not they must be resisted by
arms. Tidwald hates the invaders, has often fought them in the past, and will
continue to fight them in days to come. His anguish after the Maldon fray is
not that there has been a fray but that bad leadership has lost so many
precious English fives without stopping enemy destruction of the land. If men
must die in battie, let their deaths at least buy safety for their people. Tolkien,
of course, writes here only about a specifically defensive war fought on
English soil. The situation is essentially the same in
The Lord of the Rings
where the war against Sauron is again a war of defense waged in the home
territories of the West against a foe implacably bent on invasion and
enslavement. About other sorts of wars fought elsewhere for other reasons it is
safe to deduce from the two works only that Tolkien's deep hatred of waste and
death would make him insist that they be plainly necessary to the defense of
freedom at home. He does not seem to be optimistic that wars will ever cease.

Finally, we should
be clear that Tidwald's impatience with Torhthelm's saga-quoting and
saga-living is less with the sagas themselves than with the young man's
misreading and misapplication of them. Tidwald objects to their use as a
substitute for life—and so does Tolkien through him. The writer or reader of
fantasy, he prescribes in his essay "On Fairy-stories," must start
from a strong grasp of the primary world of experience, and must always return
to it from his adventures in the secondary worlds of fancy, refreshed and
reawakened to present realities. Young Torhthelm, lacking such a grasp, is
constantly confusing the two worlds, with the result that he understands
neither. This is not the fault of the sagas. Properly seen, they reveal the
lacrimae rerum
in the battles, loyalties, treacheries they relate.
"You can hear the tears through the harp's/twanging . . ." says
Tidwald. And he concedes that they have comfort to offer today's suffering:
"The woven staves have yet worth in them/for woeful hearts . . ."
"The Homecoming" is certainly a warning against disproportion in the
uses of fantasy. But it is very far from being a repudiation either of the
heroic northern lays, which have been
a
lasting enthusiasm of Tolkien's
life, or, almost needless to say, of his own works of the imagination whose
forefathers they are.

This, the last in
(1967) of Tolkien's minor works to be published to date, has the same major
theme as "Leaf by Niggle," his earliest. Both are short prose
narrative meditations on the gift of fantasy, what it is, whence it comes, and
what it does to the life and character of the man who receives it. But since
the earlier story is deeply Christian, whereas "Smith of Wootton
Major" is not overtly religious at all, they formulate and resolve in
quite different terms the range of problems they have in common. As against
"Leaf by Niggle's" setting in modern England, followed by an
afterlife in Purgatory, the present story unfolds in a landscape of no
recognizable time or place, in which the village of Wootton Major lies only a
few miles away from the country of Faery, and those who know how may easily
walk across the boundary between them. Not that signs of date and nationality
are completely lacking. The villagers' English names, guild system, Great Hall,
and pregunpowder weapons hint at medieval England, but where are the knights,
castles, villeins, priests, and other features of the feudal Middle Ages, and
who ever heard of a medieval village with an independent Council electing a
Master Cook as key official?

No, though the
villagers are human beings, Tolkien skews them slightly hobbitward, and
consequently out of historical time and space. Their perpetual feasting all
year round, their insistence on "full and rich fare" at every feast,
and their exaltation of cooking into the supreme art, especially in the Great
Cake at the Twenty-four Feast for children (given once every twenty-four years)
are all marks of hobbitlike gusto for food.
¹⁹
This skewing is just
enough to make Wootton Major a compatible neighbor to a region of Faery
inhabited by elves and alien in its many marvels. Tolkien needs some continuity
of strangeness to prevent the journeys back and forth between village and Faery
from jarring the imagination.

The story opens
with the incursion of Faery into the village by the agency of the then Master
Cook, who brings back with him from a visit to that land a small "fay-star"
looking like tarnished silver and an apprentice named Alf, in appearance only a
boy "barely in his teens" but actually the King of the
"Fairies" (a name here used interchangeably for "elves").
²⁰
The King's immediate purpose is to see that the star, perennial symbol of the
elves, is given at the next Twenty-four Feast to a child fitted to wear it on
voyages of exploration into Faery, and, long range, to stir up in all the
children of the village their aptitudes for wonder. His efforts are opposed and
derided by his master, Nokes, the newly appointed Master Cook, a sly ignoramus
who holds the common view that a delight in fairies, and what they stand for,
is not for adults but only for the very young: "Fairies he thought one
grew out of." In this way Tolkien broaches one of his favorite themes, the
incessant war waged against fantasy and all its works by the dullard and the
skeptic who understand them superficially or not at all.