Middle-earth Journeys

Not only is it Veterans Day today but in 1954 The Tower Towers was first published.

Wanted to share this article found today. At first I felt put off as to the author's thoughts regarding Merry and Pippen. But I see he came around.

Great War was the making of Tolkien

By A N Wilson

n the second volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Merry and Pippin, having been taken prisoners of war by orcs, have escaped, and are now walking along, side by side in the dark through a wood.

One thing that distinguishes this moment is that J. R. R. Tolkien hardly ever makes authorial asides, and here he does so.

"As they walked they compared notes, talking lightly in hobbit-fashion of the things that had happened since their capture. No listener would ever have guessed from their words that they had suffered cruelly, and been in dire peril, going without hope towards torment and death; or that even now, as they knew well, they had little chance of ever finding friend or safety again."

It is one of the moments in this, generally speaking, austere narrative when many readers will feel a tear coming to their eyes.

And, of course, Merry and Pippin, who make light of everything and speak in irony, are the very embodiments of the British soldier.

After the orcs have tied them up and threatened them with torture, Merry says: "I don't think much of this. I feel nearly done in."

Much earlier, when they are still waiting to set out from Bree, and all their ponies and kit have been stolen, Merry says: "There is one crumb of comfort, and more than a crumb, I hope: we can have breakfast while we wait."

Much later, when they have been reunited with their – Army word – company, Merry says he'd give anything to sleep in a proper bed. Some of the hearers think he is hankering after some of the strange beds – in trees and elven hammocks – that have given them rest along their trek. But no, he insists, he means a proper bed, like you have at home.

Tolkien wrote a preface to his story, insisting: "As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical or topical."

Clearly, it would wreck any reading of The Lord of the Rings if, for example, you believed that the Ring of Power was the nuclear bomb, or that the story was an allegory of the Second World War, during which it was composed. But to say the story is not an allegory is one thing. That it gains much of its power from the author's own experiences, however much he might have wished to put them behind him, is quite another.

To tell you the truth, in previous readings of the book I had always found Merry and Pippin tiresome, because of their whimsical names. (Even such silly names, of course, are the sort which turn up in the obituaries of war heroes all the time.) I have been reading The Lord of the Rings again slowly, and my admiration for it has grown.

I think one of the things which has helped me to appreciate it once again is an extraordinary piece of literary-cum-biographical research, John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War, published in 2003 by HarperCollins.

Its central thesis is this: "If we were lucky enough now to survey a 20th century in which there had been no Great War, we might know of a minor craftsman in the tradition of William Morris called J. R. R. Tolkien; or we might know him only as a brilliant academic. Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world, and marked by the same terrible death pangs."

Garth's masterpiece – it really is one – sends us back to Tolkien's, and again and again he shows us how the experience of being a soldier in the Great War – the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers – deepened and changed the young Ronald Tolkien.

The haunting picture of his school rugby team (King Edward VI, Birmingham) for 1909-10 shows four boys who would be wounded and four killed in the war. "By 1918," wrote Tolkien, "all but one of my close friends were dead."

The extraordinary set-piece battle when the allies hold the pass at Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings could only have been written by someone with first-hand experience of war. What cracks you up, when you think of the young men on the Western Front, is their "talking lightly in hobbit-fashion".

I bet the same light-heartedness is found in our unfortunate troops today, posted by murderous politicians to impossible tasks.

Wonderful piece for today, Rememberance Sunday, Philipa. Merry and Pippin are indeed the emodiment of the spirit of a lot of the troops in, especially, WW1, who found it the only way to survive the appalling conditions, fear and carnage. So many letters home were written in the same vein, making light of their circumstances and holding onto the everyday and commonplace as though they were anchors in a stormy sea.

Garth's book makes a terrific argument for LOTR being a WWI mythology. He really does make one read it in a different way. But Tolkien's letters also reveal a deep appreciation for the ordinary person. Indeed, Tolkien thinks such a person can and does accomplish great things, better sometimes than the great can do. An example: if Merry and Pippin don't swing Treebeard and the Ents to their side through guilelessness and charm, the mere ability to make friends, the War of the Ring is lost.

In some ways just being true to themselves, no matter how circumstances changed around them, was a fulcrum. It's a lesson in never despising the ordinary or what can be accomplished by men or Hobbits who know and understand who they really are and value it.

Iolanthe wrote:It's a lesson in never despising the ordinary or what can be accomplished by men or Hobbits who know and understand who they really are and value it.

Wow that is quotable.

It's been my life's ambition to be quotable .

I met one of my students in the hallway today who said that they had been studying Beowulf in her English class. She reported that she had been taught that the modern world would not know much about Beowulf were it not for Tolkien's scholarship, and that JRRT borrowed liberally from Beowulf for his legendarium. (She actually called him "your man, Tolkien"!) Good to know our English faculty is paying attention, but I wonder if she was overstating the first case.

Interesting. I've always seen Beowulf as such a classic and famous piece of literature that I assumed it was well-known and well read before Tolkien, but now I'm wondering.

The ever-valuable Wikipedia has this to say:

A turning point in Beowulf scholarship came in 1936 with J.R.R. Tolkien's essay Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics when, for the first time, the poem and Anglo-Saxon literature were seriously examined for its literary merits—not just scholarship about the origins of the English language as was popular in the 19th century.

It's so charactaristic of Tolkien - artist and scholar that he was - that he could appreciate and study the scholarship and language side of it, and also have the greatness of soul to see it as a great literary work.

This is also interesting:

J.R.R. Tolkien believed the translation by J. J. Earle was not accurate, and did not convey the meaning and symbolism of the storyline or the beauty of the prose of the poem. Chauncey Brewster Tinker was much more positive about the translation, however. Tolkien never made a translation of his own, since he believed that the only function of a translation was to act as a crib sheet for someone reading the original, as he explains in his essay "On Translating Beowulf." Various publishers, among them Michael Drout, have made plans at one time or another to assemble loose scraps of translations of various passages that Tolkien made for his lectures and publish them as "Tolkien's translation of Beowulf", but the Tolkien Estate has not approved the idea.

I wish he had translated it. With his deep understanding of all aspects of the poem it would have been wonderful. We can't all read Old English and maybe something of its beauty which only Tolkien really grasped has been lost to us .

Interesting! Thanks, Iolanthe. Drout was at the big Marquette Tolkien conference, and he is an impressive scholar. It would have made an interesting project.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics can be called the most important article on Beowulf of the 20th century. Incredible as it may now seem, prior to Tolkien, Beowulf had been seen primarily as a curious linguistic-literary artifact, useful as a source of information about the early Germanic past (customs, language, laws, toponymy, etc.).

Tolkien was the first critic to draw attention to the poem as a poem and to point out that the central literary structure of the tale revolves around the hero's battles with them monsters, which previous critics had dismissed as mere fabulous emendations to a tale whose primary value was historical.

Originally published by Oxford University Press in 1937 (2nd ed. 1958, 3rd ed. 1969) and by Folcort Press in 1969, Norwood Editions in 1975, R.West in 1977 and Arden Library in 1978.

If you are unable to afford to buy the original "Beowuld: the Monster and the critics" you can buy "The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays":
A collection of seven essays by J.R.R. Tolkien arising out of Tolkien's work in medieval literature. It is a magnificent collection of speeches and essays from Tolkien's academic life.
It can be a little difficult for those without a signifigant amount of linguistic training or familiarity with Old English vocabulary. However, it is still highly readable if you are interested in Old English literature, Welsh, or just love Tolkien. This collection provides a glimpse of his life outside of his novels, and will certainly strike a chord with those who are sentimental about the author.

Also interesting is Beowulf and the Critics (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies) by M. Drout. This volume is well designed to convey a huge amount of information in as painless a form as possible. It is a meticulous edition, with commentary, of two manuscripts by J.R.R. Tolkien, representing stages of his thought in the years before his British Academy lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936; published 1937). That short work has been described as being, although not the beginning of "Beowulf" criticism, the beginning of all *modern* "Beowulf" criticism. It was a revised and condensed version of a longer work, which had already gone through two drafts, presented here as edited by Michael Drout, as the "A" and "B" Texts (designations apparently beloved by medievalists).

The 1936 lecture is the title piece in the 1984 collection of some of Tolkien's essays, with which this book should NOT be confused, and is found in several anthologies of "Beowulf" criticism. It is beautifully expressed, and vigorously argued, but, with its compressed references to old disputes, at times a little hard to follow in detail. I found that careful readings of R.W. Chambers' magisterial "Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem" (1921; third edition, 1953) and use of Fr. Klaeber's great edition (1922, 1928, 1936), both referred to by Tolkien, were very helpful, and worth the time (if not essential!) for any student of the poem anyway. But the critical (or uncritical) consensus Tolkien was attacking long ago faded from the scholarly mind. (It persists in third-hand opinions, often repeated by people who should know better.)

This presentation of the work-in-progress which produced "The Monsters and Critics" unfolds the reasoning process and critical disputes behind its crisp rhetoric, and reveals beyond any doubt that Tolkien's disclaimer of detailed knowledge of the secondary literature was the typical medieval-style "modesty trope" some of us suspected anyway. (More than suspected, really, since the 1983 publication of other Tolkien material on "Beowulf," edited by Alan Bliss as "Finn and Hengest.")

Among other issues, the resemblance of Tolkien's reading strategies for "Beowulf" to the then-emerging "New Criticism" is explored, and shown to be coincidental -- beyond sharing in the "spirit of the age," if one cares to take that approach. (I have actually seen a "history of criticism" which dismissed "Monsters and the Critics" as merely applying New Criticism to medieval literature, and offering nothing original -- which suggested, just as a matter of chronology, a lack of qualifications to write such a history.)

There is information, too, on the probable dates and present conditions of the manuscripts, on the emendations and original readings in the sometimes difficult-to-read handwritten pages, and similar matters. And this is tucked away where those who need the information can find it, and those who aren't interested can ignore it. (It might even serve as a student's introduction to physical descriptions of manuscripts, given that Tolkien's text is, mainly, in modern English, and the issues more immediately clear, than in, say, the case of the "Beowulf" manuscript itself, or of the two texts of Malory -- or the A, B, and C versions of "Piers Plowman.")

Annotations on the two versions supply identifications, translate quotations in a large number of languages, and generally clarify Tolkien's statements for non-professionals on the one hand, and for scholars seventy or eighty years removed from the intended readership on the other.

There are interesting sidelights. Some appear as Drout traces the origin of Tolkien's metaphors and allegories in the published lecture. The published version has a now-famous image of the poem as a Tower, made of more ancient stones which have attracted attention away from the view of the Sea at the top. The resemblance to passages in "Lord of the Rings" seemed to suggest he was borrowing an evocative image from his own developing mythology. Michael Drout shows that the passage started as a fable about a rock garden, and provides references to show that it was then the latest fashion in England. Who would have guessed it? Tolkien as landscape gardener, not Tolkien as secondary world-creator! And this doesn't stand alone, although it is the easiest example to describe.

Drout's editing, in my opinion, manages to meet the needs and expectations of two sets of readers -- scholars and students, and curious Tolkien fans -- quite well. A second reading has left me as convinced as the first time through. And I feel qualified to say this, although I am not the ideal reviewer for this book.

That ideal reviewer would be a professional scholar of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language and literature, who is also fully at home in the history of "Beowulf" criticism, and at the same time a well-informed fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. In other words, someone very much like the actual editor. There are such people; I am hoping to hear from some of them in the academic journals, whether Medievalist, Germanist, or Tolkienian (!).

For me, getting to see Tolkien's thoughts on the poem in the process of formation was very exciting. And learning precisely which critic or critics he was responding to, was a well-guided tour through unexpected corners of old familiar places. The editor's observations on how Tolkien's thoughts on the work of the Beowulf-poet sometimes reflect his own experiences writing stories and poems that would not appear before the public for years appealed to the fan side. At least the sort of fan who enjoyed the successive volumes of "The History of Middle Earth," even while despairing of mastering the mass of new material.

Many thanks, Beren! You have convinced me to make a couple of new purchases.

I had great fun reading this thread, and I marvel at its meanderings. Several times, I wished that I could post replies in between posts, and now that I have reached the end I feel a bit dizzy...

There are enough topics in here for many threads indeed. I'll keep reading around the forum. maybe it is not too late to give some input elsewhere, hehe.

Maybe the moderators could start new threads when a new topic appears in a thread? It would certainly make it easier for newcomers to contribute and revitalize the discussion.

I do realize that this is a 'general' thread, but still...

Maybe there are separate threads for all the topics in this thread somewhere already?

Glad you enjoyed our 'meanderings', PHA! No, there are not threads for all these topics elsewhere, and we do try to keep the number of threads here manageable. But we don't want to miss your comments, either, so please feel free to post your ideas on past topics here. We would be glad to revisit them.

Yes please feel free to quote from older posts here... and we will gladly talk all over it again.