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.