Tom Shippey - The Road to Middle-earth - How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology

This remained completely unperceived by his critics. ‘He has explained that he began it to amuse himself, as a philological game’, translated Edmund Wilson. ‘An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity – that is, then, what The Lord of the Rings really is.’ Philology, you note, is peculiar but not serious. Lin Carter (who prepared for his commentary on Tolkien by looking up ‘philology’ in ‘the dictionary’, to little profit – maybe it was the wrong dictionary) professed the same opinion even more blankly, if kindly, by claiming that Tolkien was really interested in ‘the eternal verities of human nature’, and that the appendices of The Lord of the Rings needed to be seen that way and not just as ‘the outgrowth of a don’s scholarly hobbies’. The idea could be right, but the notion of ‘scholarly hobbies’ is singularly naive. Neil D. Isaacs, also writing in Tolkien’s defence, took the blunder on by asserting that ‘Tolkien’s own off-hand remarks about the importance of philology to the creative conception of the trilogy need not be taken too seriously’, and R. J. Reilly put the tin lid on the whole discussion by saying, in attempted refutation of Edmund Wilson, that The Lord of the Rings can’t have been a philological game because it’s too serious, and therefore, seemingly, cannot possibly be philology. ‘No one ever exposed the nerves and fibres of his being in order to make up a language; it is not only insane but unnecessary.’ 28 Like the reviewers quoted at the start of this chapter, Mr Reilly here makes a factual statement about humanity which is factually wrong. The aberration he talks about may not be common, but is not unprecedented. August Schleicher exposed the nerves and fibres of his being to make up Primitive Indo-European, and had them shredded for his trouble. Willy Krogmann, of the University of Hamburg, not only came to the conclusion that the Old High German Hildebrandslied (the oldest German heroic poem) must originally have been composed in Lombardic, a West Germanic language surviving outside ‘*-reality’ only in a handful of names, but also reconstructed the language and rewrote the poem, publishing his new edition as late as 1959. No one, as far as I know, went so far as to reconstruct the Burgundian Nibelung-story, the first Ostrogothic Ermanaric-lay, or the Danish Ur-Beowulf , but such thoughts were in many minds. The only extant Gothic poem is by Tolkien, ‘Bagme Bloma’, in Songs for the Philologists , reprinted and translated in Appendix B below; nor was this his only attempt at poetic reconstruction, see Letters p. 379. The drives towards creativity do not all emanate from the little area already mapped by ‘literary’ criticism. Awareness of this fact should have aroused a certain humility, or anyway caution, in Tolkienian commentators.

As it is, some of Tolkien’s earliest writings seem to carry a certain foreboding truth. It has already been remarked that he tended to open learned articles with attacks on, or ripostes to, the ‘literature’ or the ‘criticism’ of his particular subject, whether this was Chaucer or the Ancrene Wisse or translators of Beowulf. Probably the sharpest and most revealing instance comes in the British Academy lecture on ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, as Tolkien moves on from the melancholy state of Beowulf criticism as a whole to the remarks of W. P. Ker and then of R. W. Chambers – philologists whom Tolkien respected but who he thought had given too much away to the other side. ‘In this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge’, wrote Chambers, of a subject the Beowulf- poet had neglected for the sake of monsters, ‘we have a situation whichhol the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.’ ‘A wilderness of dragons!’ exploded Tolkien, repeating the phrase and grasping instantly its deliberate syntactic ambiguity (between phrases like ‘a field of cows’ and phrases like ‘a pride of lions’):

There is a sting in this Shylockian plural, the sharper for coming from a critic, who deserves the title of the poet’s best friend. It is in the tradition of the Book of St. Albans, from which the poet might retort upon his critics: ‘Yea, a desserte of lapwyngs, a shrewednes of apes, a raffull of knaues, and a gagle of gees.’ (‘Monsters’, p. 252)

Geese, knaves, apes, lapwings: these formed Tolkien’s image of the literary critic, and they are emblematic respectively of silliness, fraud, mindless imitation and (see Horatio in Hamlet V ii) immaturity. But there is a multiple barb on the second phrase, the ‘shrewednes of apes’. For ‘shrewednes’, like most words, has changed its meaning, and as with ‘literature’ Tolkien thought the changes themselves significant. Nowadays it means (OED again) ‘Sagacity or keenness of mental perception or discrimination; sagacity in practical affairs’. Once upon a time it meant ‘maliciousness’, with particular reference to feminine scolding or nagging. No doubt the transit came via such phrases as ‘a shrewd blow’, first a blow which was meant to hurt, then one that did hurt, then one that was accurately directed, and so on. In all these senses Tolkien’s remark was ‘shrewd’ itself. It creates a vivid if exaggerated picture of the merits and demerits of the literary profession seen en bloc : undeniably clever, active, dexterous (so exemplifying ‘shrewdness’ in the modern sense), but also bitter, negative and far too fond of ‘back-seat driving’ (see ‘shrewed’ in the old sense) – overall, too, apish, derivative, cut off from the full range of human interests. It would be a pity for his claim to ring true. But the history of reactions to Tolkien has tended to uphold it. One can sum up by saying that whether the hostile criticism directed at The Lord of the Rings was right or wrong – an issue still to be judged – it was demonstrably compulsive, rooted only just beneath the surface in ancient dogma and dispute.

* The letter ð here is used in several Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse quotations throughout this book. Like the other (runic) letter retained almost into the modern era, ‘þ’, it stands for ‘th’. Thus Meiðhad = Meith-had = Maid(en)hood. The work mentioned is a treatise on ‘Holy Virginity'.

* His signed copies are in the Taylorian Library at Oxford.

The Grimms and Tolkien prove that philological approaches to poetry did not have to exclude everything that would now be called ‘literary’. Still, their attitudes were sharply distinct from those now normal among literary critics. For one thing philologists were much more likely than critics to brood on the sense, the form, the other recorded uses (or unrecorded uses) of single words. They were not, on the whole, less likely to respect the original author’s intentions, but their training did make them prone to consider not only what a word was doing in its immediate contexts, but also its roots, its analogues in other languages, its descendants in modern languages, and all the processes of cultural change that might be hinted at by its history. It might be said that to Tolkien a word was not like a brick, a single delimitable unit, but like the top of a stalactite, interesting in itself but more so as part of something growing. It might also be said that he thought there was in this process something superhuman, certainly super-any-one-particular-human, for no one knew how words would change, even if he knew how they had. In one of his last published poems, a tribute in Old English to W. H. Auden, with facing page modern English translation, Tolkien begins by calling Auden a woðbora , and ends by promising him lasting praise from the searo þ ancle. 1 The first noun is translated ‘one [who] has poetry in him’, the second as ‘the word-lovers’. ‘Word-lovers’ is, however, etymologically parallel with ‘philologists’, while the first element of wóð -bora is also the word recorded in the god-name Woden, or Othinn, and in the archaic adjective ‘wood’, meaning ‘crazy’; it refers to the mystic rage of bard or shaman or (as we now say) berserker. Poets and philologists, Tolkien felt, were the ones to appreciate that.