Master of Middle Earth (31 page)

12. Detailed
readings of each of these shorter pieces of fiction appear under appropriate
headings in Chapter VII.

1. All references
ar^ to
The Hobbit
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Cc,., 1967).

2. Only in the
very last paragraph does Tolkien attach this limited framework to a wider
cosmic order, foreshadowing the ideas discussed in the next chapter, as Gandalf
asks Bilbo laughingly: "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies,
because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really
suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere
luck, just for your sole benefit?" This reference is too fleeting to
affect the atmosphere of the tale as a whole and would not, I suppose, mean
much to children.

3. On one or two
occasions. Tolkien's choice of similes is obviously dictated by children's
interests: Bilbo laughs at the dwarf Fili wrapped around with spider webs
"jerking his stiff arms and legs as he danced on the spider-string under
his armpits, just like one of those funny toys bobbing on a wire." But his
atrocious punning in describing the origins of the game of golf seems destined
for the unlucky ears of adults.

4. See
The
Hobbit,
all of Chapter V.

5. Introductory
Note to
Tree and Leaf,
p. 2: "At about that time we had reached
Bree and I had then no more notion than they [Frodo and his companions] had of
what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of
surviving to hnd out."

6.
The Hobbit,
p. 297;
Lord of the Rings,
III, 226.

1. As discussed in
Chapter V, the section on the elves.

2.
The Road
Goes Ever On,
p. 60.

3.
The Road
Goes Ever On,
p. 65.

4. Compare
Gandalf's answer to Frodo's resentment that he is born in times troubled by
Sauron (I, 60).

5. In
The Road
Goes Ever On
Tolkien remarks that the prayers to Eibereth "and other
references to religion in
The Lord of the Rings
are frequently
overlooked." Despite the absence of churches, priests, formal liturgies,
and the like, Tolkien is not drawing a purely secular Middle-earth, as many
critics prefer to believe. His cosmos in the epic may not be exactly Christian
but it contains many of the transcendent elements of a more than pantheistic
religion.

1. W. H. Auden,
"The Quest Hero" in
Tolkien and the Critics,
edited by N.
Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,
1969), pp. 40-61.

2.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 58.

3.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 59. In
The Hobbit
(p. 229) Tolkien satirically describes
the rage of Smaug the dragon on discovering a theft from his hoard as "the
sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can
enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before
used or wanted." His condemnation of the compulsive lust of the dwarves in
that tale, and throughout
The Lord of the Rings,
for treasure for its
own sake aims at the same target.

4. W. H. Auden,
"Good and Evil in
The Lord of the Rings," Tolkien Journal,
III: 1 (1967), pp. 5-8.

5. Auden,
"The Quest Hero," p. 57.

6.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 57.

7. Auden,
"Good and Evil in
The Lord of the Rings,"
p. 5.

1. Edmund Wilson,
"Oo, Those Awful Ores,"
Nation,
182: 15 (April 14, 1956).

2. Mark Roberts,
"Adventure in English,"
Essays in Criticism,
VI (1956), see
especially p. 454.

3.
Tree and
Leaf,
pp. 13, 15, 66, 82.

4. Rose Zimbardo,
"Moral Vision in
The Lord of the Rings"
in
Tolkien and the
Critics,
pp. 100-8, tries to rank them according to the degree of
"essence" possessed by each, not very convincingly.

5. It is this
distinct uniqueness of racial character that makes it impossible for me to
agree with the view, for instance, that the members of Frodo's Company all
represent Man in his several aspects. See Gunnar Urang,
Shadows of Heaven
(Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1971), p. 107.

6.
The Hobbit,
p. 178.

7. "They were
valiant, but the history of those that returned to Middle-earth in exile was
grievous . . ." (Ill, Appendix F, p. 416.)

8.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 9: "... elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we
with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet."

9. Auden,
"Good and Evil in
The Lord of the Rings,"
p. 5, takes what I
think is the erroneous view that elves are sinless, unfallen. Fëanor's theft of
the light of the Two Trees was surely a fall, as was the departure of the
Noldor from Valinor against the command of the Valar.

10. Auden,
"The Quest Hero," p. 57: . . while Good can imagine what it would be
like to be Evil, Evil cannot imagine what it is like to be Good."

11
. The Road
Goes Ever On,
p. 60.

12.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 5: Because elves are not supernatural like men, "the road to
fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe." This
seems to mean that elves have no immortal souls in the same sense that men do.

13. Appendix F
(III, 415): The dwarves' name for their race is "the Khazad . . . and has
been so since Aule gave it to them at their making in the deeps of time."
Those living in the Third Age "are the descendants of the Naugrim of the
Elder Days, in whose hearts still burns the ancient fire of Aule the Smith . .
." Aule seems to be a Valar who created the first dwarves as the Norse
gods created dwarves out of the dead body of Ymir. See note 14 below.

14.
The Elder
Eddas and the Younger Eddas,
trans. B. Thorpe and I. A. Blackwell, 1906, p.
270.

15.
The Hobbit,
p. 24.

16.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 41.

17.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 15. .

18.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 2.

19. Wilson,
"Oo, Those Awful Ores," pp. 312-14.

20. In
The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil,
Tolkien includes a poem subtitled "Frodos
Dreme," which is a nightmare of rejection both in the Undying Lands and on
Middle-earth. See my discussion in Chapter VII.

1. Roger Sale,
"Tolkien and Frodo Baggins" in
Tolkien and the Critics,
pp.
287-88.

2. William Ready,
The Tolkien Relation
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1968), p. 101. Reprinted
in paperback under the title
Understanding Tolkien
(New York: Coronet
Communications, 1969).

1. "Leaf by
Niggle" was originally published in
Dublin Review,
216 (January
1945) and then reprinted in
Tree and Leaf.
Tolkien's Introductory Note
to the reprint states that it was "written in the ... period
1938-39."

2.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 2.

3. "One of its
sources was a great-limbed poplar tree which I could see even lying in bed. It
was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why."

4. Kenneth Sisam's
anthology,
Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose
(London: Oxford University
Press, 1921) for which Tolkien prepared the Glossary, includes the
Harrowing
of Hell
from the York cycle of religious plays and
Noah
from the
Towneley cycle. Tolkien obviously knew medieval drama well.

5.
Tree and
Leaf,
pp. 70-71.

6.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 70: "... a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or
truth." And on p. 68: "... a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the
walls of the world, poignant as grief."

7.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 57.

8. In
Welsh
Review,
IV: 4 (December 1945).

9. Eight English
Breton lays are collected in
The Breton Lays in Middle English,
ed.
Thomas C. Rumble (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965). And Mortimer J.
Donovan analyzes both French and English examples of the type in
The Breton
Lay: A Guide to Varieties,
(Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1969).

10.
Corrigan
does not appear in the
Oxford English Dictionary
or
English Dialect
Dictionary.
Both works, however, list
corrie
as a Scottish word
meaning "a circular hollow on a mountain side," which in effect is
the witch's "hollow dale" in the hills, also referred to as a
"bow" (p. 225). A Corrigan would seem to be a dweller in a corrie.

11. For example,
six of the eight lays in Rumble's collection have such endings. The prayer
which concludes "Sir Orfew" is especially close to Tolkien's in part
of its wording.

12. See
"Farmer Giles of Ham" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950).

13. "Farmer
Giles," p. 7. Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Historia regum Britanniae,
Book
II, Chapter 1.

14. Geoffrey of
Monmouth, Book V, Chapter 6.

15. Tolkien mentions
this king in the notes to line 26 of his edition of
Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight
(coedited by E. V. Gordon, London: Oxford University Press, 1925,
1960), as a British leader who fought against the Saxons.

16. In
The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil,
the third poem, entitled "Errantry,"
puts its knightly hero through a series of adventures so ridiculous as to
become a parody of the chivalric romance, in the same general class as
"Farmer Giles."

17. "The
Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son,"
Essays and Studies, of the
English Association,
New Series 6 (1953), 1-18. Reprinted in
The Tolkien
Reader.

18. See
The
Tolkien Reader
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1966).

19. Also
indicative of hobbit tastes and ambitions is the widespread fame won by the
hobbit hero of "Perry-the-Winkle," in
The Adventures of Tom
Bombadil,
by learning from a lonely troll the recipe for "cramsome
bread." He becomes "a Baker great" celebrated in song "from
the Sea to Bree."

20. See
"Smith of Wootton Major" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957).

21. See
Tree
and Leaf,
pp. 5 ff., 33-35, 53-54. Tolkien repeats the same protests often
in
The Lord of the Rings,
e.g., Ill, 415-16.

22. Very like the
Dead Marshes outside Mordor in
The Lord of the Rings.

23.
Tree and
Leaf,
p. 16.

24. The poem was
first published in
Time and Tide,
3 December 1955, and was accompanied
by two illustrations from Helen Waddell's
Beasts and Birds
(London:
Constable & Co., Ltd., 1934), which excerpts brief episodes of Brendan's
voyage from the
Navigatio
Latin mentioned in note 27 below.

25. Foreword to
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
in
University of Notre Dame
Publications in Medieval Science,
edited by Carl Selmer (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), XVI, pp. xxi-xxii. Also
Geoffrey Ashe,
Land to the West
(New York: Viking Press, 1962), pp.
53-63.

26. Selmer, VII,
pp. xxxi-ii.

27. All my
references to the
Navigatio
are to J. F. Webb's English translation
appearing in
Lives of the Saints
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965). This
is based on Selmer's edition of the Latin text mentioned in note 25 above.
Webb's footnote, p. 33, reads " 'Meadow of Miracles' (
saltus virtutum)
—
'Cluain Ferta,' Clonfert in Galway."

28. In another
early
imram, The Voyage of Maildun,
which Tolkien may or may not have
known, the "lovely country beneath the waves" is more fully described
than in the
Navigatio.
See the translation of the Maildun text in
Patrick W. Joyce,
Old Celtic Romances
(New York: Longmans Green and Co.,
1914).

29. This passage
describing the tree and fallen angels perched on it in the form of white birds
is translated from the Latin in substantially the same words by Helen Waddell
in the book from which the illustrations for Tolkien's poem were taken. (See
note 25.) I do not know whether Tolkien knew this little popular miscellany
before writing the poem or had anything to do with selecting the illustrations.

30. See "Leaf
by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major" in addition to "On
Fairy-stories," where the chief expositions of the symbol of the Tree are
to be found.

31.
The Elder
Eddas and the Younger Eddas,
p. 323.

32. See
The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963).

33. Unless the
"marsh of Tode" recalls the Dead Marshes just north of the boundary
of Mordor, where mining pits have been filled with water and men killed in
battle lie on the bottom. Is it possible, too, that the "Merlock
Mountains" are reminiscent of "the Mor-lockian horror of
factories" alluded to by Tolkien in "On Fairy-stories,"
Tree
and Leaf,
p. 64?