Tolkien and Historical Criticism: An Issue of Method
First folio of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x.
Tolkien and Historical Criticism: An Issue of Method
Historical criticism was historically conceived first of all as a method of Biblical Studies, also being called “higher criticism,” and being first traced to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). During the Enlightenment, Biblical criticism commonly applied the term “higher criticism” to mainstream scholarship in contrast to “lower criticism” (textual criticism). Historical criticism required the detachment of the scholar from devotion to the object of their study and, as such, at first it was opposed by the Catholic Church.
In the middle of the 20th century, however, such attitudes changed. The Instruction on the Historical Truth of the Gospels (21 April 1964) by the Pontifical Biblical Commission textually confirmed the legitimacy of the historical-critical method, describing its exegetical traits as source analysis, textual criticism, literary criticism, linguistic studies, and the method of form history. The 19th century approach to higher criticism in Classical Studies similarly renounced attempts to provide ancient religion with modern sense and applicability to focus instead on the collection and chronological ordering of the sources. This way, historical criticism came to be applied to any text: Biblical, Classical, Byzantine, Medieval, Eastern, or other.
Tolkien was well aware of the history of historical criticism, since he referred to textual criticism of the Bible in his Valedictory Address to Oxford University: “I have once or twice, not so long ago, been asked to explain or defend this language [Middle English]: to say (I suppose) how it can possibly be profitable or enjoyable. [. . .] To compare the less with the greater, is not that rather like asking an astronomer what he finds in mathematics? Or a theologian what is the interest of the textual criticism of Scripture?” (MC 237, emphasis original).
It is important to clarify that Tolkien never objected anything to the methodology of historical criticism. His remarks on Beowulf in his 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics are not aimed at historical criticism. There, Tolkien rather objects to a literary work that he considers a masterwork being studied exclusively as an historical document and not as a literary text:
The historian’s search is, of course, perfectly legitimate, even if it does not assist criticism in general at all (for that is not its object), so long as it is not mistaken for criticism. To Professor Birger Nerman as an historian of Swedish origins Beowulf is doubtless an important document, but he is not writing a history of English poetry. Of the second case it may be said that to rate a poem, a thing at the least in metrical form, as mainly of historical interest should in a literary survey be equivalent to saying that it has no literary merits, and little more need in such a survey then be said about it. But such a judgement on Beowulf is false. (MC 7)
In other words, Tolkien is here distinguishing pure history from historical criticism. There is no doubt that by criticism he means historical criticism, because he admits that the historian’s search is helpful to criticism. Besides, Tolkien’s own study of Beowulf was historical. He was interested, among other things, in the dating of the poem, the reconstruction of the identity of the author, textual criticism, and the relations of the poem with other Old English and Germanic works. In his studies on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, similarly, Tolkien was concerned with the dating of the poem, the identity of the author, textual criticism, and sources and analogues. And the same applies to his studies on Chaucer, with due distinctions. Despite his own protests at being defined a critic (Letters 126, no. 113), then, Tolkien undoubtedly was a historical critic.
While this observation does not directly implicate that historical criticism is the best way to study Tolkien, it is certainly noteworthy. In 2023, contrarily to the idea, Tom Emmanuel suggested that critics bypass Tolkien the author in the study of his works, referring to Michel Foucault’s problematic notion of the author-function:
In everyday speech we are used to talking about an author quite transparently as the historically specific writer of a given text. [. . .] Foucault problematizes this simple equation with his formulation of the author-function. The name of an author is not simply a proper noun with a single, identifiable referent; it is a frame for the texts which are ascribed to it, a heuristic “to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.”. (Emmanuel 2023: 34)
The unintended irony implicit in the suggestion to bypass Tolkien the author is that it recommends forsaking the methodology of historical criticism for the sake of avoiding to idolize the author when historical criticism is a methodology that was born after the effort to de-idolize the Bible. Emmanuel is then saying that what it takes to desecrate the Bible not only is not sufficient to desecrate Tolkien, but it actually consecrates him. According to Emmanuel, it follows, Tolkien is not as sacred as the Bible, but more. The problem is not addressed at all in Emmanuel’s article, and yet it undermines its very premises of opposing the sacralization of Tolkien. As a consequence, I think that Emmanuel’s criticism of the application of historical criticism to Tolkien is untenable and historical criticism remains the preferable methodology to be applied to Tolkien’s works.
Abbreviations
Letters = The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
MC = The Monsters and the Critics
Works Cited
Emmanuel, Tom. 2023. “”It Is ‘About’ Nothing But Itself”: Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author.” Mythlore, Vol. 42, No. 1, Article 3, pp. 29-53. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/3/. Accessed 22 April 2024.
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Harper Collins, 1995.
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Monsters and the Critics. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Harper Collins, 2013.
Reenactment of the Past in Tolkien and Robert Holdstock
Reenactment of the Past in Tolkien and Robert Holdstock
Abstract: In A Question of Time Verlyn Flieger argued that Tolkien’s time-travel story The Lost Road was influenced by the theories of the philosopher J.W. Dunne about time, but Tolkien’s tale is also an instance of what another philosopher, R.G. Collingwood, called reenactment of the past, to be effected by the historian in his mind in order to reconstruct history in a scientific fashion. Robert Holdstock’s Mythago series of fantasy novels can also be read in the light of Collingwood’s theory, as well as based on Carl Jung’s notion of collective unconscious, another notion that was also applied to Tolkien’s works. An exploration of the ways in which the two authors develop their respective fictitious reenactment can shed further light on their creative accomplishments as well as contribute to better appreciation of their works. More in particular, the idea that any time is a spontaneous reenactment of the times preceding it is foreshadowed by both authors, even though the “repetition” is not simply meant as slavery to the past nor as the perpetuation of the faults of the ancestors, but is also seen as the perpetuation of a past glory and a tradition of greatness, or at least as the repeated opportunity to remedy past faults. Another instance of reenactment in Tolkien is the story of Aragorn and Arwen, both because they are the heirs of Beren and Lúthien, and because he is Isildur’s heir. A comparison of Arwen with Gywenneth from Mythago Wood reveals the shared connections of the two maidens with woodlands and the theme of mortality/immortality, but also the earthier, much more explicitly sexual glamour of the latter. Both characters are clearly meant to parallel Queen Guinevere from the Arthurian Legend, which again is a form of reenactment.
Reenactment of the Past in Tolkien and Robert Holdstock
R.G. Collingwood was a philosopher, historian, archaeologist, and a colleague of Tolkien’s at Pembroke College. Collingwood (1889-1943) is especially known for his posthumous work The Idea of History, dated 1946, wherein he seeks to uncover the presuppositions governing historical inquiry into the past, developing his original concept of the historical science as re-enactment of the past.
According to Collingwood, the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind in order to know and understand it, in order to have historical knowledge. This is the main proposition put forward by the philosopher in his treatise The Idea of History, after surveying the chief philosophical views on the idea of history since Antiquity. He then proceeds to explain the difference between the common way of thinking and historical thinking:
If the reasons why it is hard for a man to cross the mountains is because he is frightened of the devils in them, it is folly for the historian, preaching at him across a gulf of centuries, to say “This is sheer superstition, there are no devils at all. Face facts, and realize there are no dangers in the mountains except rocks and water and snow, wolves perhaps, and bad men perhaps, but no devils.” The historian says that these are the facts because that is the way in which he has been taught to think. But the devil-fearer says that the presence of devils is a fact, because that is the way in which he has been taught to think. The historian thinks it a wrong way; but wrong ways of thinking are just as much historical facts as right ones, and, no less than they, determine the situation (always a thought-situation) in which the man who shares them is placed. (Collingwood 1993: 317)
In other words, it is necessary for the historian to recreate in their own mind the way of thinking of the historical character they are to study, so to be able to enter the same state of mind and be granted access to historical character’s thought. In order to better explain this process, Collingwood distinguishes between what he calls the outside and the inside of an event, namely the objective and subjective components of a given experience:
The historian, investigating an event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood across the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and the inside of an event. He is interested in the crossing of the Rubicon only in its relation to Republican law, and in the spilling of Caesar’s blood only in relation to a constitutional conflict. (Collingwood 1993: 213)
This proposition has much to bear on the idea of cause when it is to be understood historically. Indeed, it is very different, Collingwood claims, to talk about cause in the natural sciences, which means the objective forces producing a phenomenon according to fixed natural laws, and cause in historical science, which means the thought driving the actions of the characters involved in an historical event. As the philosopher put it:
When a scientist asks: “Why did that piece of litmus paper turn pink?” he means “On what kinds of occasions do pieces of litmus paper turn pink?” When an historian asks “Why did Brutus stab Caesar?” he means “What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab Caesar?” The cause of the event, for him, means the thought in the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about: and this is not something other than the event, it is the inside of the event itself. (Collingwood 1993: 214–215)
In short, these are the foundations upon which Collingwood’s theory of history as reenactment are founded. Since history is concerned with the inside of the event, with an understanding of the mind of the historical characters involved in an historical event, it only follows that history will be a practice of reenactment of the past in the historian’s mind. An example which Collingwood gives is concerned with the history of philosophy in particular, but the general formulation applies to all human history:
… in its immediacy, as an actual experience of his own, Plato’s argument must undoubtedly have grown up out of a discussion of some sort, though I do not know what it was, and been closely connected to such a discussion. Yet if I not only read his argument but understand it, follow it in my own mind re-enacting it with and for myself, the process of argument which I go through is not a process resembling Plato’s, it is actually Plato’s so far as I understand him correctly. (Collingwood 1993: 301)
Therefore, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes it, “The task of the historian, as he saw it, is to transport us to another world by immersing oneself in the historical agent’s own context of thought.1”
When Tolkien wrote his unfinished novel The Lost Road, according to Verlyn Flieger, what Tolkien had in mind was “a narrative of a 20th-century father and son who by means of racial memory and serial identity dream themselves back through time” (AQoT 61). Tolkien himself had stated that, in the narrative of The Lost Road, “the thread was to be the occurrence time and again in human families (like Durin among the Dwarves) of a father and son called by names that could be interpreted as Bliss-friend and Elf-friend” (Letters, 347). Indeed, in the novel Edwin tells Elwin:
“I might have called you Ælfwine (…) not only after Ælfwine of Italy, but after all the Elf-friends of old; after Ælfwine, King Alfred’s grandson, who fell in the great victory in 937, and Ælfwine who fell in the famous defeat at Maldon, and many other Englishmen and northerners in the long line of Elf-friends” (LR 37-38)
About Edwin, we are told that “his most permanent mood (…) had been since childhood the desire to go back. To walk in time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship” (LR 45). Eventually, in a dream, Edwin is given the opportunity of a lifetime: “You must, if you choose to go back,” he is told, “take with you Herendil, that is in the other tongue Audoin, your son” (LR 49).
Verlyn Flieger famously claimed: “Given the probable time of composition, it seems not only possible but highly probable that this presentation of myth and history as seen through an overarching consciousness that spanned the centuries was influenced by J.W. Dunne and that Tolkien found in [Dunne’s work] An Experiment with Time the ideal mechanism by which to effect time-travel without magic or machinery” (AQoT 66). I am not going to dispute Flieger’s claim, but only add to it that Tolkien may very well have been just as much influenced by Collingwood as he may have been by Dunne.
Indeed, Tolkien’s preoccupation not to have time-travel effected through magic or machinery seems to echo Collingwood’s distinction between the outside of an event (objective, calculable, mathematical, pertaining to natural sciences) and the inside of an event (subjective, incalculable, historical, psychological). Since the technology necessary to build machinery is given thanks to the developments of natural sciences, it seems that Tolkien may well have thought that an unhistorical mindset could never produce time-travel, that is, traveling through history.
But, mostly, it is the idea of reenacting the past in one’s mind that, although framed in dreams, in the repetitions of father-son couples, and through something akin to a notion of collective unconscious, instead than being the normal activity of the historian, is quite similar in Tolkien’s and Collingwood’s account. Indeed, it is in one’s mind that it is possible to, quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia once more, “transport us to another world by immersing oneself in the historical agent’s own context of thought.”
There is another contemporary novel that may be said to be concerned with the same subject, and that is A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). A novel narrating the discovery of an unknown extramarital relationship between a fictional poet and an underrated female poet from the 19th century, Possession is especially relevant since it details the way in which two researchers fall in love with each other in their turn by following the connection between the two earlier poets. Coherently, Byatt herself writes: “The historian and the man of science alike may be said to traffic with the dead” (Possession 104), and a character in the novel even goes as far as to say that he “mixed my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, in the business of every thinking man and woman” (Possession 104). Scattered throughout the novel, one finds expressions such as “the young vitality of the past” (136), “a present past” (240), “the past lies all around” (255), “unutterably long past” (256), “the eternal existence of the past and the future in all presents” (287), and, in the outburst of the passion between the two protagonists, “she contained his past and his future” (287). Eventually, it is even mentioned “the fount of Urd [from Norse mythology], where past and future mixed” (464).
Nonetheless, the interest in Byatt’s Possession for our purposes may only be passing, as it is not a fantasy novel. Instead, what will be more fruitful for us is the comparison with Robert Holdstock’s 1984 Mythago Wood. The novel’s story begins with Stephen Huxley’s return home at the end of World War II. He discovers that his brother is in the grip of the same obsession as their father: Ryhope Wood. The obsession with the forest and the creatures/myths that populate it had led George Huxley, their father, to get lost in it. And it looks like Stephen’s brother Christian is well on his way to following suit.
One of the key passages in the novel is the explanation of the mythagos:
It’s in the unconscious that we carry what he [George Huxley] calls the pre-mythago – that’s the myth imago, the image of the idealized form of a myth creature (…). The form of the idealized myth, the hero figure, alters with cultural changes, assuming the identity and technology of the time. When one culture invades another (…) the heroes are made manifest, and not just in one location! Historians and legend-seekers argue about where Arthur of the Britons, and Robin Hood really lived and fought, and don’t realize that they lived in many sites. And another important fact to remember is that when the mind image of the mythago forms it forms in the whole population… and when it is no longer needed, it remains in our collective unconscious, and is transmitted through the generations (MW 31-32)
The mention of the unconscious, and even the collective unconscious, makes one think of Carl Gustav Jung. In 1936, Jung delivered a lecture titled “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious”, hosted by the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Jung there explained in clear letters what he meant by collective unconscious, in terms that are clearly echoed in Holdstock’s works:
My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents. (Jung 1996: 43)
From the above quote from Mythago Wood it is then evident that, although Holdstock does not use the specific word, he has a serial phenomenon in mind as much as Tolkien had when writing about his father-son couples in The Lost Road. And, although we are not informed whether Holdstock read Collingwood, the former’s stress on the “identity and technology of the time” echoes the same preoccupation with the inside and outside of an historical event which we surveyed in the latter’s writing. Indeed, “there were many Robin Hoods, and all were as real or unreal as each other, created by Saxon peasants during their time of repression by the Norman invader” (MW 30). It is not Robin Hood which we are chiefly concerned with in the plot of the novel, though, but with a female mythago with whom father, son, and brother all fall in love: Guiwenneth, who initially:
….was my father’s mythago, a girl from Roman times, a manifestation of the Earth Goddess, the young warrior princess who, through her own suffering, can unite the tribes (…) [like Queen Boudicca since] Boudicca was historically real, although much of her legend was inspired by the myths and tales of the girl Guiwenneth. There are no recorded legends about Guiwenneth. In her own times, and her own culture, the oral tradition held sway. Nothing was written, but no Roman observer, or later Christian chronicler, refers to her either, although the old man thought that early tales of Queen Guenevere might have been drawn partly from the forgotten legends (MW 33)
In a sense, Guiwenneth may be compared to Tolkien’s Arwen, the Elven maiden who, like the Elf-friends in The Lost Road, is tied to the same fate as her own ancestor, Lúthien Tinúviel. Both Guiwenneth and Lúthien/Arwen are connected to woodlands, since Guiwenneth cannot leave Ryhope Wood, Lúthien lives in the woods of Doriath, and Aragorn and Arwen are betrothed in the woods of Lorien. When she is described in The Lord of the Rings, Arwen is even said to be the likeness of Lúthien born again in Middle-earth:
In the middle of the table, against the woven cloths upon the wall, there was a chair under a canopy, and there sat a lady fair to look upon, and so like was she in form of womanhood to Elrond that Frodo guessed that she was one of his close kindred. Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost, her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one who has known many things that the years bring. So it was that Frodo saw her whom few mortals had yet seen; Arwen, daughter of Elrond, in whom it was said that the likeness of Lúthien had come on earth again; and she was called Undómiel, for she was the Evenstar of her people. (LotR II, i)
Thus we can also see how all three maidens are connected with the theme of mortality and immortality. Guiwenneth is reincarnated in every subsequent incarnation of her mythago form, while the two Elven maiden renounce immortality for their lovers. Besides, even the myth of Guiwenneth is concerned with the same theme, as much as the theme is overarching in Tolkien’s mythology.
However, Guiwenneth’s sexuality is way more explicitly underlined than it is the case with Tolkien’s heroines. Guiwenneth “smelled… earthy. Yes. And also of her own secretions, the sharp, not unpleasant smell of sex. And sweat too, salty, tangy. When she came close to me and peered down I got an idea that her hair was red, and that her eyes were fierce” (MW 63). In other passages too her femininity is stressed in a sexual sense: “On some mornings, there was a strange smell in the house, neither earthy, nor female, but – if you can imagine this bizarre combination – something that was a little of both” (MW 61). The smell described is specified to be a “peculiarly erotic aroma” (MW 61). In another passage: “The girl affects me totally. (…) It is the nature of the mythago itself. (…) She is truly the idealized vision of the Celtic Princess, lustrous red hair, pale skin, a body at once childlike and strong” (MW 86).
Eventually, the father incarnates the primitive mythago, the monstrous Urscumug, while the two brothers become the Outsider (Christian) and the Kin (Stephen) destined to kill the former:
Christian was the Outsider, then. The stranger who is too strong to subdue, too alien, too powerful. The Outsider must have been an image of terror to very many communities. (…) The story that Kushar had told was fascinating, for there were so many ingredients I could recognize: the girl made from the wild, (…) the creator of the girl reluctant to part with her; the Outsider himself terrorized of one thing only (…) [, that is,] the Urscumug (MW 173).
Indeed, “the legend is clear. It’s the Kin who kills the Outlander – or is killed” (MW 203). The power of the archetype is so great that the story eventually turns out to produce exactly the foreseen outcome: Stephen inadvertently kills Christian after losing their duel over the right to Guiwenneth’s love.
It is therefore evident that, despite Holdstock’s explicit references to Jungian psychology, his story is coherent with Collingwood’s account of history as well, which is another way it comes to parallel Tolkien’s Legendarium. Even though Holdstock’s tale of the mythago has an explicit sexual character that is lacking in Tolkien’s narratives, in other respects the two authors’s characterization and conception of the plot converges in a shared account of the reversibility of time which is fleshed out in their respective ways to carry out a fictitious reenactment of a fictitious past, something that powerfully resonates the need for our contemporary times to not only look back into where we come from, but also, in a way, to relive those times nowadays in our own lives.
Abbreviations
AQoT = A Question of Time
LotR = The Lord of the Rings
LR = The Lost Road
MW = Mythago Wood
Works cited
Byatt, Antonia S. Possession. A Romance. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
Collingwood, Robin George. The Idea of History. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent State University Press, 1998.
Holdstock, Robert. Mythago Wood. In The Mythago Cycle: Volume 1. Gollancz, 1988.
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Routledge, 1996.
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Lord of the Rings. Harper Collins, 2009.
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Lost Road and Other Writings. Harper Collins, 2015.
Unpublished Arthurian Poems by Charles Williams
Longaevi: The origins of fantasy creatures in Medieval Literature
Tolkien’s Allegory of the Tower, Matthew Arnold, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Tolkien, “Orthanc”
The famous allegory of the tower in Tolkien’s 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is often taken to imply that source criticism is an impostor that usurps the rights of a literary work as Art, and the critic practicing it has even been likened to a monster, as though that would be Tolkien’s idea in providing the lecture with its given title. That this is certainly not a case will be argued in detail.
“A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.” (MC 8)
The allegory as it stands is perfectly coherent with his remarks on the bones in the soup in On Fairy-stories. And yet, not only what is more important to us, as the taste of the soup compared to curiosity to see the bones, should not be taken as implying that source criticism should be discredited, but also it can be proven how Tolkien has an antecedent, not to say a source, in criticism in the devising of said allegory. In fact, the scholar and poet Matthew Arnold in his 1867 On the Study of Celtic Literature wrote:
“The very first thing that strikes me, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely – stones “not of this building”, but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical.” (Arnold 1976: 54)
Tolkien’s argument is no doubt entirely his, informing the sense he gives to the allegory: the tower (the poem as we have it) should be more important to us than the stones (its sources) out of which it was built. In comparison, Arnold is chiefly interested in describing the peculiar “architecture” of the Mabinogion, without further arguments being clearly spelled out. Nonetheless, it is probably out of the above-cited passage that Tolkien developed his allegory, Arnold’s phrasing being the spark lighting the brilliant fire of Tolkien’s imagination.
Tolkien wrote a first version of the allegory of the tower in summer 1933 and it is much briefer, amounting to two sentences:
“A man found a mass of old stone in a unused patch, and made of it a rock garden; but his friends coming perceived that the stones had once been part of a more ancient building, and they turned them upsidedown to look for hidden inscriptions; some suspected a deposit of coal under the soil and proceeded to dig for it. They all said “this garden is most interesting,” but they said also “what a jumble and confusion it is in!” — and even the gardener’s best friend, who might have been expected to understand what he had been about, was heard to say: “he’s such a tiresome fellow — fancy using those beautiful stones just to set off commonplace flowers that are found in every garden: he has no sense of proportion, poor man.”” (BC 32)
So, Arnold has a hut, while Tolkien first talks of a rock garden, then to decide it is a tower. But this is unrelevant, since the whole point of the allegory is the stones and the fact that they are put to a new use. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture is a milestone in Old English studies and has often been taken to hold the key to Tolkien’s own inspirations. It is generally thought that Tolkien saw himself as the gardener/tower-builder, and the fact that his inspiration in devising the allegory may have come from a discussion of the Welsh Mabinogion should not be taken lightly. Quoting Michael D. C. Drout:
“Tolkien’s 1936 British Academy lecture “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” is not just the most important single essay written on Beowulf, but also one of the most influential and widely quoted literary essays of the twentieth century. According to received literary history, it opened the door for modern Beowulf criticism and, like a bolt from Olympus, convinced generations of scholars henceforth to consider Beowulf as a significant piece of literature.” (Drout 2007: 134)
Taking the importance of the essay into account, and not just to Beowulf criticism or to literary criticism in general, but to Tolkien himself, who was undoubtedly very conscious of what he was doing in writing it, it is remarkable to consider that probably the most famous passage in the same essay, the allegory of the tower, was actually influenced by scholarship on Celtic literature and specifically the Mabinogion. Arnold’s mention of the sites of Halicarnassus and Ephesus should also be taken into account, in order to understand that Tolkien probably had in mind a restauration of Anglo-Saxon culture that may be compared to the Celtic Revival of W.B. Yeats’s Ireland, or to the Classicism that inspired the whole European Renaissance.
The point is that Tolkien agreed with the ideas that Arnold expresses beyond their specific application, even their strictly medieval one: he extends their validity to the whole kind of works such as Beowulf, the Mabinogion, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the W. P. Ker lecture in fact he writes about this last poem:
“It belongs to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past, deeper even than its author was aware. It is made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the poet: like Beowulf, or some of Shakespeare’s major plays, such as King Lear or Hamlet” (MC 72)
Tolkien saw Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a similar light as Beowulf with respect to the process of reworking ancient motifs in an original fashion. Such an observation agrees pretty consistently with the references to Celtic-inspired works such as King Lear and Macbeth (Tolkien quotes Hamlet, but one may infer that the same discourse applies to Macbeth), since Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also inspired by Celtic sources. In this light, it is all the more probable that the comments by Matthew Arnold on the Mabinogion might lie behind the allegory of the tower, since Tolkien was interested both in the Saxon and Celtic remote past of England. Arnold’s Classical references, instead, chiefly apply to Tolkien in the sense of a comparison with ancient Greek and Roman past.
Beren’s Hill
Interview with Kristen Britain
Tolkien’s Collected Poems!!!
A Review by Hannah Skipper: The Gests of Nhalbar by Sebastiano B. Brocchi (Streetlib, 2023)
A Review by Hannah Skipper: The Gests of Nhalbar by Sebastiano B. Brocchi. Translated by Giovanni Carmine Costabile. (Streetlib, 2023)
The Gests of Nhalbar is a great read. The characters come alive vividly and the plot is engaging throughout and easy to follow. In particular, I enjoyed the descriptions of the different regions and cities, plus the peoples who inhabit them and their alliances with or treacheries against one another. My favorite scene was the Amazon’s battle against the Dragoneers and Nhalbar’s hunt for and capture of their mother dragon’s heart. I also liked the gathering of all the peoples at the end, for the final battle, and finding out how the various characters were connected. Iriah’s return, with the Crown of Sibereht, and her speech was more climatic than the battle itself though.
My favorite character is Iriah. I relate to her as being a sort of unsung hero who stays in the background until she suddenly returns to save the day. I also liked reading about King Helewen and his struggles with love and raising two sons who seemed to embody the fate of the world. His responses seemed entirely plausible. I also think his character was well chosen as the narrator and makes me interested in reading the two books in the series that preceed this one. I did wonder, however, if Helewen knew that Sighur was really Dhorin when he sent Nhalbar to be tutored by him?
Another thing that made me interested in reading the other stories is the fact that I had two dreams about the characters. In the first, I defeated Nothal with a magical whip in the kitchen of an amusement park restaurant. The second started out with King Helewen riding in a stagecoach with Gandalf, Gimli, and Legolas. They are run off the dirt road they’re traveling on by bad guys in another stagecoach and forced to camp beside the road, in a dark forest, for the night. While they’re sitting beside the campfire, they start arguing about whose race has the most historical prominence. Then they realize that, in the answer, they would be able to solve the case of the crime that the bad guys had committed. Unfortunately, that was as far as I got because the cat woke me up.
I think that the theme of an individual’s struggle between their good impulses and bad one was best illustrated in the conversations and inner monologues of Storm, Nothal, and King Helewen and I also appreciated the dilemma of the outlaw brigade that Nhalbar joined. The actual illustrations were also helpful to understanding the different races of people who inhabited the lands, thus adding depth to the story. It would’ve been cool to see more landscape drawings though.
Hannah Skipper
The Green Girdle 