"What's all this about stock and stone?" -- Treebeard echoes Hesiod

"Wood and water, stock and stone, I can master."

--- Treebeard

The word "stock" here comes from Old English "stocc," meaning "trunk" or "log."

As a phrase "stocks and stones" also goes back to OE, where it refers to idols made out of wood and stone. 

"Ge þeouiað fremdum godum, stoccum and stanum."

"You are servants of strange gods, [made] of stocks and stones." (Deuteronomy 28)

We also find it in Middle English in Chaucer's Troilus & Criseyde (3.589-90):

"He swor hir, yis, by stokkes and by stones,
And by the goddes that in hevene dwelle"

"He swore to her, 'indeed, by stocks and by stones,
And by the gods that in heaven dwell'"

And in Early Modern English in Milton sonnet 18: 

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones;

And in a 19th book Tolkien surely knew:

"There was a worship of nature instead of stocks and stones."

A. H. Sayce, Principles of Comparative Philology

Now when Treebeard uses it, he certainly isn't referring to idols or pagan gods. Yet by putting this phrase in Treebeard's mouth to cover the wide range of things in Nature Treebeard is saying he can master, Tolkien gives the phrase new life and meaning. This is something Tolkien does with his sources, whatever they may be, whether words or stories. Think of what he does with the world "mathom," which means "treasure" in OE, but is used ironically in LotR to mean a gift that is anything but. Or Plato's Atlantis myth which Tolkien turns into Numenor. 

Now this morning I was reading the Greek poet Hesiod, who in his Theogony (35) says:

ἀλλὰ τί ἦ μοι ταῦτα περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην;

"But what's all this about oak and stone?"

Another way to translate this would be 

"what's all this about tree and stone?" 

The Greek word here (δρῦν -- dryn) does mean "oak," but it also means just "tree" -- and so we're back to stock and stone.

But wait there's more. The word is also related to the word δρυάς, from which we get "dryad," a tree nymph, a word Tolkien uses in one of his best phrases, describing Ithlien as possessing "a dishevelled dryad loveliness."

And even more because, as Tolkien knew, the word used in Old English to translate "dryad" was "ælfen," and I'll give you one guess what that means. 

It always comes back to the elves. It's "ælfen" all the way down.

'Light as leaf of linden-tree': Chaucer, Langland, and Elven Poetry

I was browsing in the OED and MED the other day, as one does, and I decided, unsurprisingly, to see just how many times the OED quoted Tolkien. The search yielded 386 results distributed across 320 separate entries. So, for example, under 'orc' we find five quotes for 'orc' and its derivatives ('orc-guards', 'orc-speech', 'orc-host', 'orc-like'). I was scrolling through the list of entries to see where the quotes came from. As you would expect, The Lord of the Rings, The Letters, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion provide the most quotations.

One OED entry in particular caught my eye as it moved down the page:

c. (as) light as leaf on lind (also linden, tree, etc.)and variants: as light or weightless as a leaf; (hence) cheerful, merry; (also, in negative sense) heedless, unthinking. Now archaic and rare.

Readers of Tolkien will recognize this phrase of course from several places. The first is the song about Beren and Lúthien which Aragorn sings to the hobbits at Weathertop (FR 1.x.192):

He heard there oft the flying sound

   Of feet as light as linden-leaves,
Or music welling underground,
   In hidden hollows quavering.

The second comes from the song of Nimrodel sung by Legolas in Lothlórien (FR 2.vi.339):

Her hair was long, her limbs were white,
   And fair she was and free;
And in the wind she went as light   
   As leaf of linden-tree.

The third comes from The Lay of the Children of Húrin (Lays 104), where Tolkien describes the movements of Lúthien as 'light as leaf on linden tree'. The phrase also serves as the title of a poem Tolkien published in 1925 in The Gryphon, a magazine put out by the University of Leeds, where he had been teaching since 1920. An early version of the song Aragorn sings in The Fellowship of the Ring, it was also inserted into The Lay of the Children of Húrin (Lays 108-110), which puts it in the remarkable position of being 72 lines of rhyming iambic tetrameter embedded within over 2,100 lines of unrhymed alliterative verse as in Beowulf. While in Beowulf and long before that in The Odyssey we encounter bards singing songs about the exploits of heroes, we don't get to hear the songs themselves. At best we are told what they sang about and how it affected those who heard it. So, 'Light as Leaf on Lindentree', indented, rhyming, and in an entirely different kind of verse from the surrounding lay really calls attention to itself. 

That Tolkien used variations of this phrase repeatedly, in different poems sung in different places by different characters, is even more striking because it seems to offer up this image as part of the poetic vocabulary of Middle-earth, and more specifically perhaps as part of the Elven poetic vocabulary. For the songs of Aragorn and Legolas are clearly identified as such, and 'Light as Leaf on Lindentree' is in the same meter as Aragorn's.

What's just as cool is that, in making the phrase part of the Elven poetic vocabulary, Tolkien is drawing on the Middle English poetic vocabulary of the 14th through the 16th Centuries. Not only does Chaucer use it in The Clerk's Tale and Langland in Piers Plowman, but it appears in works less well known, such as the Harley Lyrics and one of the Robin Hood ballads. The phrase then vanishes from the record in the 1500s, becoming archaic and rare as the OED tells us. I have to wonder if Tolkien's resurrection of this lovely simile after 400 years is the sole reason why the phrase is described as rare rather than obsolete. It may also be the sole recorded instance of the poetry of mortals influencing the poetry of Faërie.

See the quotes, links, and translations below, with approximate date, author if known, and title of work.

_____________________________________________

a1350 In may hit murgeþ (Harley Lyrics 2253) In May hit murgeþ when hit dawes in dounes wiþ þis dueres plawes ent lef is lyght on lynde.

'In May it is merry when it dawns. So on the downs the animals play, And leaf is light on linden.'

c1390 (?c1350) Joseph of Arimathie 585: Þer nas no lynde so liht as þise two leodes, whon þei blencheden a-boue and eiþer seiʒ oþer. 

'There was no linden as light as these two people, when they grew pale and saw each other.

(c1395) Chaucer The Canterbury Tales, The Clerk's Tale E.1211: Be ay of cheere as light as leef on lynde.

'Be always of cheer as light as leaf on linden.'

c1400 (c1378) William Langland, Piers Plowman B 1.154: Whan it [love] haued of þis folde flesshe & blode taken, Was neuere leef vpon lynde liʒter þer-after. 

'When [love] had taken part of the flesh and blood of this world, never again was a leaf lighter upon linden after that.'

a1450 The Castle of Perseverance 3596: Lo here Mankynde, lyter þanne lef is on lynde!

'Behold mankind here, lighter than leaf is on linden!

c1450 The Chance of the Dice 104: So fers ys youre corage, Y russhen forthe as lyght as leefe on lynde. 

'So fierce is your courage, you rush forth as light as leaf on linden.'

?a1475 Lessons of the Dirige (2) 395: Than were I glad and lyght as lynde To haue Parce michi, domine. 

'Then were I glad and light as linden to have "Parce michi, domine."'

a1500(a1460) The Towneley Plays 97/368: A, what I am light as lynde! 

'Ah! I am as light as linden!'

a1500 Robin Hood & the Monk st.76: Robyn was in mery Scherwode, As liʒt as lef on lynde.

'Robin was in merry Sherwood, As light as leaf on linden.'

Chaucer's Troilus and Tolkien's Fool of a Took: Troilus and Criseyde V.1800-25 and The Return of the King 5.x.892-93

 Almost five years back (2 March 2017) I wrote a post about what I took -- and still take -- to be Tolkien having a bit of fun with Chaucer and everyone's favorite fool of a Took. Recently I came across another bit of evidence that convinces me even further that Tolkien had medievalist mischief in mind when he wrote the scene quoted below. The new evidence comes from a summary of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien included in the well-known 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, but which Humphrey Carpenter left out when he published many of Tolkien' s letters in 1981 (Letters, no. 131). Fortunately Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have made this summary available in an appendix to their The Lord of the Rings: a Reader's Companion (2014: 747). I shall insert the relevant part of the letter directly after the passage from The Return of the King upon which it comments. 

First RK 5.x.892-93:

Then Pippin stabbed upwards, and the written blade of Westernesse pierced through the hide and went deep into the vitals of the troll, and his black blood came gushing out. He toppled forward and came crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him. Blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin and his mind fell away into a great darkness.  

'So it ends as I guessed it would,' his thought said, even as it fluttered away, and it laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear. And even then as it winged away into forgetfulness it heard voices, and they seemed to be crying in some forgotten world far above: 

'The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!' 

For one moment more Pippin's thought hovered. 'Bilbo!' it said. 'But no! That came in his tale, long, long ago. This is my tale, and it is ended now. Good-bye!' And his thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more. 

And now Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman as quoted in Hammond and Scull:

In the last pages of this Book [i.e., Book 5] we see the hopeless defeat of the forlorn hope. The hobbit among them (Peregrin) falls under the weight of the slain, and as consciousness fails and he passes into forgetfulness, he seems to hear the cry of 'The Eagles'. But he knows that was the turning point of Bilbo's story, which he knew well, and laughing at his fancy his spirit flies away, and he remembers no more.

What first drew my attention in this scene of The Return of the King is the peculiar use of 'thought' in the second and fourth paragraphs, which is quite similar to its use in the famous scene in which Gollum's two 'thoughts' struggle with each other while Sam listens, fascinated and appalled (TT 4.ii.632-34). While there 'thought' seems very close to what we would call 'personality,' here 'consciousness' is a better fit, which is fact what Tolkien calls it in his letter. The word 'consciousness', however, did not enter English before the 17th Century, and the meaning in question here -- 'the totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person's conscious being. In pl. = conscious personalities' (OED sv. 5, emphasis original) -- seems to have awaited the invention of Locke. Given Tolkien's linguistic predilections, it is not hard to see why he would have preferred 'thought', since MED þoht (3c, d) offered the requisite meanings.  

I am as yet, however, unaware of any use of þoht to describe situations similar to those we see in these two passages of Tolkien.  (If any reader knows of one, please, do let me know.)  So I began to think that perhaps I should look for passages with similar elements.  Almost immediately Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde came into my mind, specifically the scene in which Troilus dies:

1800   The wraththe, as I began yow for to seye,
       Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;
       For thousandes his hondes maden deye,
       As he that was with-outen any pere,
       Save Ector, in his tyme, as I can here.
1805   But weylawey, save only goddes wille,
       Dispitously him slough the fiers Achille.

       And whan that he was slayn in this manere,
       His lighte goost ful blisfully is went
       Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere,
1810   In convers letinge every element;
       And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
       The erratik sterres, herkeninge armonye
       With sownes fulle of hevenish melodye.

       And doun from thennes faste he gan* avyse
1815   This litel spot of erthe, that with the see
       Embraced is, and fully gan* despyse
       This wrecched world, and held al vanitee
       To respect of the pleyn felicitee
       That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
1820   Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste;

       And in him-self he lough right at the wo
       Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste;
       And dampned al our werk that folweth so
       The blinde lust, the which that may not laste,
1825   And sholden al our herte on hevene caste.
       

(Troilus and Criseyde, V.1800-1825)

(*gon (11a) = 'proceed to', 'set about', 'go to', as in 'go to sleep'.)

Now clearly Pippin's experience here is meant to remind us first of all of Bilbo's at the Battle of Five Armies, when the Eagles came and Bilbo was knocked unconscious, but woke to find himself 'not yet one of the fallen heroes' (Hobbit 298-99). But there's more to it than that. Bilbo has no 'thought' as he loses consciousness. His reflections come after he revives. 

What happens to Pippin's 'thought' is far more like the experience of Troilus' 'goost': both of them laugh and undergo a profound change in attitude towards the troubles of the world of which they are letting go. Each of them believes his tale is over. True, Pippin is not in fact dying, but he thinks he is. So, the contrast between him and Troilus is also noteworthy. His 'thought' flies 'away', but Troilus' 'goost' rises heavenward. Troilus looks back down at the 'woe / of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste' and dismisses it; Pippin hears the 'voices...crying from some forgotten world above' (emphasis added) and dismisses them and the hope the coming of the Eagles should offer. These directions reflect the differences in worldview in each work. Chaucer's Troy is Medieval and Christian, whereas Tolkien's Middle-earth is pre-Christian and without any concept of a heaven above. Hence also Tolkien drew on a word like þoht rather than 'goost'. What notion Hobbits have may have of their continued existence after death is uncertain beyond their awareness of the existence of ghosts. As an offshoot of Men, however, they are doomed to leave the world after death, and go no one knows where. So it makes sense that Pippin's 'thought' has no expressed destination. And perhaps as a final bit of the absurdity that has often attended this once 'fool of a Took', Pippin is ignominiously squashed by a troll he has killed himself, while Troilus, a great warrior, is killed by the greatest of all warriors. In both cases, however, the dignified serenity both Troilus and Pippin attain with their last thoughts is remarkable. For neither of them could be said to have possessed that before. 

Finally, that Tolkien saw fit to point out Pippin's seemingly final thought in his letter to Milton Waldman seems quite curious, since in a letter attempting to persuade Collins to publish both The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion together the reference to Pippin serves no rhetorical purpose. In the entire letter to Waldman, a letter of over 10,000 words, Tolkien mentions Pippin by name but once, in the paragraph directly preceding this one, and mentions him parenthetically at that: 'The Fifth Book returns to the precise point at which Book Three ended. Gandalf on his great horse (with the Hobbit Peregrin Took) passing along the great "north-road", South to Gondor.' In the hierarchy of this sentence Pippin comes last. He seems just such 'a passenger, a piece of luggage' as he had imagined himself to be in his darkest hour when a prisoner of the Orcs (TT 3.ii.445). And even when Tolkien alludes to that hour in this letter, he denies him a name. One has to have already read The Lord of the Rings to know that he is one of 'the two hobbits that have been captured by Orcs' (Hammond and Scull: 745). 

So for Tolkien to include a detailed description of this hobbit's amused 'final' thoughts at the culmination of Book Five is quite curious indeed. Yet clearly Tolkien felt it worth doing so. I suggest that the hierarchy of the sentence comes to our rescue here. (Dare I say 'The parentheses are coming! The parentheses are coming!) For in the description of this scene, too, Pippin is also named only in a parenthesis. His name is an aside, an afterthought. His identify is less important to Tolkien here than the near-death experience which parallels the experience of Troilus, and the humorous parallel is briefly of greater import than the rhetorical purpose of this letter or even of Pippin himself to the action of the story at this point. Tolkien was simply too pleased with this parallel to omit it. 

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Works Consulted

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Ylfig and the Foresight of the Elves

Alaric Hall in his article Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and Elvish makes an excellent case for believing that in Chaucer's time and earlier 'elvish' could mean 'prophetic'. To be brief, Hall notes that ylfig

is transparently derived from the late West Saxon form of ælf and the denominative adjectival suffix -ig; as this suffix has been productive from Common Germanic to present day English, ylfig could have been coined at any time. Parallel Old English formations are werig (‘weary, tired, exhausted’ < wor ‘ooze, bog’); sælig (‘happy, prosperous’ < sæl ‘prosperity, happiness’); and gydig (‘possessed (by a god)’ < *γuðaz ‘god’). All these suggest ‘(like) one engaged with noun X’: ‘like one in a bog’, ‘one in good fortune’, ‘one engaged with a god’, and so forth. The etymological meaning of ylfig seems therefore to be ‘(like) one engaged with an ælf or ælfe’. 

Hall then notes a glossator's use of ylfig to clarify further a Latin gloss for the word fanaticus: futura praecinens. Ylfig thus explains futura praecinens, 'foretelling the future'. Elves thus at one point were believed to possess this ability or skill. 

In The Lord of the Rings foresight and foretelling are strongly associated with Wizards, Elves and those with elvish blood in them (Elrond, Galadriel, Aragorn, Gandalf, Saruman, Legolas, Arwen, Gilraen). I haven't the leisure right now to look more fully into this. It may be a coincidence, and it may well be impossible to prove. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if Tolkien, too, had seen this gloss, and that it lies behind the foretellings of Tolkien's Elves.


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I admit I find the derivation Hall gives for 'werig' very amusing, but I am a bit perplexed by it, since I haven't yet found another source that says the same. Admittedly my search has been short and this is far more his patch than mine. I would love to learn better.

Eleventy-One: Re-reading The Lord of the Rings 50 years on -- part four

 

Book One, Chapter 2: The Shadow of the Past

Indeed, [Frodo] at once began to carry on Bilbo’s reputation for oddity. He refused to go into mourning; and the next year he gave a party in honour of Bilbo’s hundred-and-twelfth birthday, which he called Hundred-weight Feast. But that was short of the mark, for twenty guests were invited and there were several meals at which it snowed food and rained drink, as hobbits say.

Always having felt a bit odd myself, as if on the outside looking in, I relished Frodo's wholehearted embrace of eccentricity. Part of the oddity for me was always being fascinated by words and languages. My mother taught me bits of Latin and French, my grandmother Irish, my father German, my brother Spanish. So, words like 'hundred-weight' were a delight to me. (I recognized it from the tables of 'useful information' on the back of my composition books, though I seem to recall some brief confusion since a hundred-weight in the US and a hundred-weight in the UK are not the same number of pounds.) 

I adopted the phrase 'it snowed food and rained drink, as hobbits say' at once. Some years later I read the following verses in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (343-48): 

Without bake mete was nevere his hous, 

Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentvous

It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke;

Of all deyntees that men koude thynke,

After the sondry sesons of the yeer,

So chaunged he his mete and his soper.

I was in high school when I first read these lines, and I recall gasping aloud in delight in class and having to explain my amusement to everyone: 'Thomas, would you share what's so funny with the rest of us.' 

Today what's catching my eye is the spelling of 'fissh' and 'flessh', and the variety of food reminds me of how well stocked Bilbo's larder had been before his adventures began. Chaucer has even more to say about the Franklin's table, and Tolkien has more to say of the 'high reputation' of Bilbo's. I am beginning to think that looking at The Franklin's Tale in this context would be very interesting.

And of course both Bilbo and Frodo leave unwashed dishes behind them when they leave. Bilbo was being hurried out the door by Gandalf. Frodo was being rather pettily spiteful towards the Sackville-Bagginses.

Eärendil and Wade's Boat, Or, what do you mean you're not going to tell us the story?

Artwork copyright Donato Giancola

Alan and Shawn over at The Prancing Pony Podcast (which, if you don't already listen to it, why not?) have just published another excellent and fun new episode (# 141, "Starship Trooper") on Eärendil and the poem about him that Bilbo sings in Many Meetings (FR 2.i.233-36).

Crucial to the tale of Eärendil the Mariner is his ship, Vingelot or Vingelótë, without which Eärendil would have been stuck in a port on a western bay where lonely sailors pass the time away talking about their homes. The name Vingelot gives us a tantalizing and frustrating example of how very easily stories can be lost, likely forever.

In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale is a (for us) obscure reference to 'Wades bote' (IV E 1424). Wade, son of Weyland the Smith, evidently had many stories told about him in the Middle Ages, of which virtually all trace has vanished. The boat was named Guingelot, which is even closer to Vingelot than appears at first glance, since in Norman French the word would have been pronounced something like Wingelot or Wingelok (Skeat).

In his 1598 edition of Chaucer Thomas Speight commented upon this line, and Thomas Tyrwhitt in his 1775 edition was scathing about Speight's neglect, as quoted below:

Ver. 9298. Wades bote] Upon this Mr. Speght remarks, as follows: "Concerning Wade and his bote called Guingelot, as also his straunge exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I passe it over." Tantamne rem tam negligenter?* Mr. Speght probably did not foresee, that Posterity would be as much obliged to him for a little of this fabulous matter concerning Wade and his bote, as for the gravest of his annotations. The story of Wade is mentioned again by our author in his Troilus, iii. 615. 

He songe, she playde, he tolde a tale of Wade.

It is there put proverbially for any romantic history; but the allusion in the present passage to Wades bote can hardly be explained, without a more particular knowledge of his adventures, than we are now likely ever to attain.

Tolkien, too, had many ideas about the 'straunge exploits' of Eärendil in his ship, the vast majority of which are known only, as with Wade, through comments and outlines (Lost Tales 2.252-277) and some thirty lines of poetry, in which Tuor, the father of Eärendil, is briefly called Wade (Lays 142):

'But Wade of the Helsings    wearyhearted'                     

 Upon which Christopher Tolkien comments (Lays 144):

The likeness of Guingelot to Wingelot is sufficiently striking; but when we place together the facts that Wingelot was Earendel's ship, that Earendel was Tuor's son, that Tuor was peculiarly associated with the sea, and that here 'Wade of the Helsings' stands in the place of Tuor, coincidence is ruled out. Wingelot was derived from Wade's boat, Guingelot as certainly, I think, as was Earendel from the Old English figure (this latter being a fact expressly stated by my father, II. 309).

Why my father should have intruded 'Wade of the Helsings' into the verses at this point is another question. It may conceivably have been unintentional - the words Wada Haelsingum were running in his mind (though in that case one might expect that he would have struck the line out and not merely written another line against it as an alternative): but at any rate the reason why they were running in his mind is clear, and this possibility in no way diminishes the demonstrative value of the line that Wingelot was derived from Guingelot, and that there was a connection of greater significance than the mere taking over of a name -- just as in the case of Earendel.

  

* 'so great a matter [handled] so negligently?'

'When winter first begins to bite -- Echoes and Re-echoes of Chaucer at FR 2.iii.273

In The Road to Middle-earth Tom Shippey argues (184-85) that the poem Bilbo recites to Frodo in The Ring Goes South 'in rhythm and theme ... echoes the magnificent coda to Love's Labour's Lost' :

When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare;

(FR 2.iii.273) 

When icicles hang by the wall
 And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,

(LLL 5.2) 

As far as rhythm and theme go there can be little argument, but I would suggest that we can say more here. For the words of Bilbo's poem echo the opening lines of þe Clerkes Compleinte, Tolkien's little known parody of the opening lines of Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien's Middle English original is followed by my rendering into Modern English:

þe Clerkes Compleinte 

Whanne þat Octobre mid his schoures derke
Þe erþe haþ dreint, and wetė windes cherke
& swoghe in naked braunches colde and bare,
& þ’oldė sonne is hennes longe yfare; 

The Clerk's Complaint 

When October with his showers dark
The earth has drowned, and wet winds creak
And sigh in naked branches cold and bare,

And the old sun has from here far fared;

The dark waters, the cracking stone and the creaking, naked branches, the cold of winter, the rhyme of bare and yfare tell the tale plainly: in composing Bilbo's verse Tolkien echoes his own echoes of Chaucer.* 

* þe Clerkes Compleinte is most easily found in J. Fitzgerald's A "Clerkes Compleinte": Tolkien and the Division of Lit. and Lang. Tolkien Studies 6 (2009) 41-57.

I have not yet completed my research on this connection yet, so I am unsure whether someone else has already noted it. Even so, I believe it is interesting enough to mention.

It Wants To Be Found

Near the beginning of his chapter on 'The Heavens' in The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis quotes from Chaucer to illustrate the view of Medieval science that '[e]verything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct':

Every kindly thing that is
Hath a kindly stede ther he
May best in hit conserved be;
Unto which place every thing
Through his kindly enclyning
Moveth for to come to.  

(Chaucer, Hous of Fame, II, 730 sq.) 

'Kindly' here has its old meaning of 'natural' or 'innate' -- every natural thing has a natural place and a natural inclination to go there.  This is not anthropomorphism, but metaphor, just as it is a metaphor to say (as Lewis also points out) that an object falls to earth when released because it is 'obeying the law of gravity'. Moderns aren't attributing sentience to the object when they speak thus, any more than Chaucer would have been if he said that a stone had a 'kindly enclyning' -- 'a tendency, a propensity, a bent' -- to fall to earth.

I have long been dubious of the position we often encounter, in various forms and places, that the One Ring is in some way sentient. At one extreme, in Peter Jackson's films, we are not just told that 'the Ring is trying to get back to its Master. It wants to be found', but presented with a Ring that can even whisper the names of those it would corrupt. We may also see view of the Ring in William Senior's more sober entry in The Tolkien Encyclopedia: 'as an extension of Sauron, it appears to have a power and sentience of its own' (484). Most scholarly and daunting of all is Tom Shippey. In The Road to Middle-earth (2003), he argues that The Lord of the Rings may be understood as an 'attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, both living, both seemingly contradicted by the other' (140).  The view of St Augustine and Boethius is that 'evil is nothing', that it has no independent existence and cannot create, and that it will in the end be 'redressed' by good. The other view holds that evil is in fact 'real, and not merely an absence' (140-41). Our own experience of this world makes the latter view a tempting one to embrace. Shippey continues:

Tolkien's way of presenting this philosophical duality was through the Ring. It seems in several ways inconsistent. For one thing it is notoriously elastic, and not entirely passive. It 'betrayed' Isildur to the arrows of the orcs; it 'abandoned' Gollum, says Gandalf, in response to the 'dark thought from Mirkwood of its Master'; it all but betrays Frodo in The Prancing Pony when it slips onto his finger and proves his invisibility to the spies for the Nazgûl then present. 'Perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room', thinks Frodo, and he is clearly right. For all that it remains an object which cannot move itself or save itself from destruction. It has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters.... These two possible views of the Ring are kept up throughout the three volumes, sentient creature or psychic amplifier. 

(142)

As we can see, it's a very simple matter to come up with quotations from the book that point in the direction of sentience if we take them literally. Even the film's 'It wants to be found', which does not occur in the book, is a reasonable extrapolation from the book's choice of active verbs -- 'betrayed' (FR 1.ii.55), 'abandoned' (56), 'is trying' (55) and many, many more -- to describe what the Ring is 'doing'. Indeed it is difficult to think of a way to speak of the effect the Ring has without making it sound as if the Ring is sentient. Which brings us back to 'obeying the law of gravity' and 'a kindly enclyning.'

What I wonder is this: what if we consider statements such as those Gandalf makes about the Ring betraying Isildur and abandoning Gollum and trying to get back to its Master from the perspective Lewis describes? As he tells us, such a way of speaking was Medieval, and Tolkien was, after all a Medievalist. Sauron made the Ring and 'let a great part of his former power pass into it', so much so that destroying it will undo him forever. Given this, Chaucer might well say that the hand of Sauron is the Ring's 'kindly stede' to which it would, of its nature, try to return, just as a stone returns to earth and fire to heaven.

But the Ring is not a natural thing, someone might object, unlike the stone Pippin which drops in the well in Moria. True enough. But surely even our benighted age does not yet require a demonstration that any object will fall if let go, regardless of whether it is a work of nature or craft? That palantír plummets rather nicely (TT 3.x.583-84); Frodo drops his sword at Weathertop (FR 1.xi.196); Gollum his fish at the forbidden pool (TT 4.vi.689); and, as everyone knows, 'not idly do the leaves of Lórien fall' (TT 3.ii.424).

How would our understanding of the problem of evil in The Lord of the Rings change if we took these expressions of what the Ring is 'doing' as metaphors? If we step back and say 'the Ring slipped off Isildur's finger' or 'the Ring fell out of Gollum's pocket,' doesn't the burden of evil shift? A complete answer would, I think, involve a long and complex examination of the Ring and all those affected by its 'gravity', both individually and together, and especially Bilbo, Frodo, and Gollum. I think I've been moving in this direction for a while. Let's see where it leads. 

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Works Consulted

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Troilus and WHO? (RK 6.x.892-93)

Then Pippin stabbed upwards, and the written blade of Westernesse pierced through the hide and went deep into the vitals of the troll, and his black blood came gushing out. He toppled forward and came crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him. Blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin and his mind fell away into a great darkness.  

'So it ends as I guessed it would,' his thought said, even as it fluttered away, and it laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear.  And even then as it winged away into forgetfulness it heard voices, and they seemed to be crying in some forgotten world far above: 

'The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!' 

For one moment more Pippin's thought hovered.  'Bilbo!' it said. 'But no!  That came in his tale, long, long ago. This is my tale, and it is ended now. Good-bye!'  And his thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more. 

(RK 6.x.892-93)

What first drew my attention here is the peculiar use of 'thought' in the second and fourth paragraphs, which is quite similar to its use in the famous scene in which Gollum's two 'thoughts' struggle with each other while Sam listens, fascinated and appalled (TT 4.ii.632-34). While there 'thought' seems very close to what we would call 'personality,' here 'consciousness' is a better fit. The word 'consciousness' did not enter English before the 17th Century, and the meaning in question here -- 'the totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person's conscious being. In pl. = conscious personalities' (OED sv. 5, emphasis original) -- seems to have awaited the invention of Locke.  Given Tolkien's linguistic predilections, it is not hard to see why he would have preferred 'thought', since MED þoht (3c, d) offered the requisite meanings.  

I am as yet, however, unaware of any use of þoht to describe situations similar to those we see in these two passages of Tolkien.  (If any reader knows of one, please, do let me know.)  So I began to think that perhaps I should look for passages with similar elements.  Almost immediately Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde came into my mind, specifically the scene in which Troilus dies:

1800   The wraththe, as I began yow for to seye,
       Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;
       For thousandes his hondes maden deye,
       As he that was with-outen any pere,
       Save Ector, in his tyme, as I can here.
1805   But weylawey, save only goddes wille,
       Dispitously him slough the fiers Achille.

       And whan that he was slayn in this manere,
       His lighte goost ful blisfully is went
       Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere,
1810   In convers letinge every element;
       And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
       The erratik sterres, herkeninge armonye
       With sownes fulle of hevenish melodye.

       And doun from thennes faste he gan* avyse
1815   This litel spot of erthe, that with the see
       Embraced is, and fully gan* despyse
       This wrecched world, and held al vanitee
       To respect of the pleyn felicitee
       That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
1820   Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste;

       And in him-self he lough right at the wo
       Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste;
       And dampned al our werk that folweth so
       The blinde lust, the which that may not laste,
1825   And sholden al our herte on hevene caste.
       

(Troilus and Criseyde, V.1800-1825)

(*gon (11a) = 'proceed to', 'set about', 'go to', as in 'go to sleep'.)

Now clearly Pippin's experience here is meant to remind us first of all of Bilbo's at the Battle of Five Armies, when the Eagles came and Bilbo was knocked unconscious, but woke to find himself 'not yet one of the fallen heroes' (Hobbit 298-99). But there's more to it than that. Bilbo has no 'thought' as he loses consciousness. His reflections come after he revives. 

What happens to Pippin's 'thought' is far more like the experience of Troilus' 'goost': both of them laugh and undergo a profound change in attitude towards the troubles of the world of which they are letting go. Each of them believes his tale is over. True, Pippin is not in fact dying, but he thinks he is. So, the contrast between him and Troilus is also noteworthy. His 'thought' flies 'away', but Troilus' 'goost' rises heavenward. Troilus looks back down at the 'woe / of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste' and dismisses it; Pippin hears the 'voices...crying from some forgotten world above' (emphasis added) and dismisses them and the hope the coming of the Eagles should offer. These directions reflect the differences in world view in each work. Chaucer's Troy is Medieval and Christian, whereas Tolkien's Middle-earth is pre-Christian and without any concept of a heaven above. Hence also Tolkien drew on a word like þoht rather than 'goost'. Whether hobbits have any notion at all of a continued existence after death is unknown and doubtful. And perhaps as a final bit of the absurdity that has often attended this once 'fool of a Took', Pippin is ignominiously squashed by a troll he has killed himself, while Troilus, a great warrior, is killed by the greatest of all warriors. In both cases, however, the dignified serenity both Troilus and Pippin attain with their last thoughts is remarkable. For neither of them could be said to have possessed that before.

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Works Consulted

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In the Dead Marshes We Hear No Larks at Morning

Paul Nash, We Are Making A New World, Imperial War Museum

Since at least the twelfth century larks at morning have featured in English poetry, at first not even in English, as these Latin lines from Alexander of Neckam show, playing on the similarity of 'lark' (alauda) and 'praises' (laudat) to derive a (false) etymology:

Laudat alauda diem, praenuncia laeta diei
    Laudat, et a laudis nomine nomen habet.
Quamvis moesta thorum properans Aurora Tithoni
    Linquat, surgentem laeta salutat avis. 

(De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, 2.765-68) 

The lark, day's happy herald, praises the day,
    She praises it, and from the name of 'praise' gets her name.
Though sad Aurora leaves in haste Tithonus' bed,
    The happy bird greets her as she arises.

Onward through the centuries in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Meredith, and Hopkins, the lark is jubilant, protective of its own, and soaring high and free to greet the dawn. There's nothing to wonder at in all this poetry on the lark. For long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green, every morning was full of birdsong. (In fact, it still is. Open your windows; mute your machines.)  As J. V. Baker, who knew firsthand what the poets he was writing about knew, said: 

 Any knowledge of the habits of the English lark will make it easy to see why it is always associated with rapturous and soaring flight; no bird is apparently more airy and carefree or ventures higher; yet it always has an invisible cord of attachment that pulls it back to its grassy nest concealed on the ground. My first recollection of larks is of hearing them above a wheatfield; the golden ranks of wheat, relieved here and there with blood-red poppies, stood right up to the edge of the chalk cliffs falling perpendicularly into the sea near Margate; and the blue sky was filled with the song of larks. 

(The Lark in English Poetry, p. 70)

It is thus no surprise that during World War One men raised on such poetry and such experiences would find solace in the larks that sang and soared about the fields of France at dawn. 'What the lark usually betokens' for the men at the front, writes Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (p. 242), 'is that one has got safely through another night', though men were also well aware of the absurdity of the birds singing while around them swirled a nightmare of slaughter, something the poets of the war saw both sides of.

A Lark Above the Trenches  

Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!
Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky-
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy,
His lyric wild and free – carols a lark. 

I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar,
I dream of Love, its ecstasy he sings;
Doth lure my soul to love till like a star
It flashes into Life: O tireless wings 

That beat love’s message into melody –
A song that touches in this place remote
Gladness supreme in its undying note
And stirs to life the soul of memory –
‘Tis strange that while you’re beating into life
Men here below are plunged in sanguine strife!

Will Streets

 And:

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg

Now, as has long been clear, Tolkien's experience of the Somme in WWI influenced his portrayal of Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor with Gollum. We can see this most clearly in The Passage of the Marshes, as Tolkien conceded (Letters, no. 226), and as John Garth has amply demonstrated in his splendid (if hard to come by) " 'As under a green sea': Visions of War in the Dead Marshes". Now we should not expect Tolkien to have included every commonplace of English literature, nor of the WWI poets, in his translation of his experience. Nor would its absence be particularly noteworthy, or even noticeable, if he did not draw our attention to it:

As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.  

'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.  

'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.

(TT 4.ii.626)

Larks belong to the serene, dazzling world of the golden sun, to a world where dawn came clear and bright, as it had not in the marshes that morning (TT 4.ii.625). Theirs is not the rotten, murky world in which the three hobbits seek to hide. Their absence is a silence that grieves and dispirits Sam. And Gollum, who regrets the lack of birds for a different reason, makes quite clear that their absence from the marshes is not merely a passing one. 

And Tolkien was well acquainted the image of the lark at dawn and the power it could have. He certainly knew it from Chaucer and from most if not all of the poets down to Meredith and Hopkins; and even if he had never read another WWI poet, he had edited Spring Harvest, the collection of his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who wrote of the lark in his poem 'Over the hills and hollows green' before perishing at the Somme. In The Lay of Leithian, moreover, he uses the image of the lark three times (Lays, 176, 291, 355), and then once in Aragorn's song of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.xi.192).  But it is in The Silmarillion (165) that he uses it with most striking effect:

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed. 

Then the spell of silence fell from Beren .... 

That Tolkien here likens Lúthien Tinúviel, the nightingale who sings in the dusk, to the lark is fascinating in its own right, and I think this juxtaposition signals just how epochal the love of Beren and Lúthien will be. Yet more importantly for us here now is that in both these texts without the song of the lark silence has lease. In The Silmarillion Lúthien sings like the lark and breaks the spell on Beren, whose naming her Tinúviel, nightingale, then casts a spell of love over her, thus changing the world. In The Passage of the Marshes, without lark or song, things just get worse for Frodo and Sam. Ahead of them that very night are the 'things in the pools' that Gollum slyly alluded to, the dead from whom the marshes take their name (TT 4.ii.627-28); and when, still later that same night, they at last hear a cry upon the air and the rush of wings, it is no skylark welcoming the dawn, but a creature of horror whose coming snuffs out even the candles of the corpses: " 'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings!' " (TT 4.ii.630). As a result, a shadow falls on all their hearts. Gollum begins to revert to his former self, and Frodo himself grows increasingly silent, like Beren before Lúthien sang.  After two more such visitations (TT 4.ii.634-35), the chapter ends :

So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they walked on in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.

(TT 4.ii.635)

So in The Passage of the Marshes not only does Tolkien eschew the common trope of larks at dawn, which is reasonable enough given the context, but by substituting the winged Nazgûl to break the larkless silence he reworks the trope to introduce the nightmare that will persist and deepen, with one contrasting interlude in Ithilien, until Mt Doom. 

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Works Consulted

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James V Baker, The Lark in English Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1950), pp. 70-79

Priscilla Bawcutt, The Lark in Chaucer and Some Later Poets, The Yearbook of English Studies,Vol. 2 (1972), pp. 5-12

The Mythgard Institute

In the winter of 2012 I was poking around the internet, looking as we all do for god knows what  -- our futures perhaps -- when I came across this guy named Corey Olsen who was calling himself "The Tolkien Professor."  Now I'll admit that my first reaction (okay, it's my default reaction) was skepticism.  "The Tolkien Professor" just sounded a bit geeky, and I'm old enough to remember when geek was not a compliment.  And what was with that definite article, huh?  The Tolkien Professor?  Was that like The O'Neill, The O'Donnell, The Humongous?

But since an essential part of real skepticism is to investigate those things at which we first look askance, and since I have always loved Tolkien, I decided to check it out.  First I listened to the podcasts of his undergraduate classes at Washington College, then to his Tolkien chats and Q&A sessions, and the Silmarillion Seminar (of blessed memory).  As someone who has read The Lord of the Rings so many times that, if I told you how many, you would roll your eyes and assume I was wearing a costume as I wrote this,* I can reasonably lay claim to being a competent judge.

And let me tell you this: Corey Olsen knows his stuff.

Now don't misunderstand me.  The discussions on the podcasts are only very seldom about whether Balrogs have wings (since of course they don't).  Rather, they are serious literary discussions that explore the ceaselessly amazing world of Middle Earth through careful study of the texts themselves.  At the same time they are also lighthearted, full of humor, and untrammeled by ponderous literary theories.  Instead they pay attention to what the author actually wrote.  Inconceivable.

While Professor Olsen's undergraduate lectures are still available through iTunes and his website (www.tolkienprofessor.com), ever since 2012 he has been embarked on a new adventure, creating and building up The Mythgard Institute, which offers graduate courses online for Master's credit and for auditing. (Tuition for both is quite reasonable.)  While many of the early courses have focused on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, the range of courses and the number of professors have been steadily expanding.  Most recently, for example, Professor Olsen, a Medievalist and Chaucerian by trade, has offered two semesters on Chaucer.  I have audited both of these classes, and rarely have I had so much fun and learned so much at the same time.  I'm thinking of making a pitch for more Middle English next spring or summer.  How about Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl?

But wait there's more.  In addition to the Mythgard Institute there's also The Mythgard Academy, which since the summer of 2013 has offered free courses on works and authors proposed and voted on by those of us who have made voluntary contributions (think NPR).  But to listen and participate is absolutely free, and if you miss a session the recordings are usually posted within a day or two.  Nor are the readings limited to Tolkien.  We recently had a course on Ender's Game, which raised my opinion of Orson Scott Card as a writer, and in the end of July or beginning of August we'll be starting Frank Herbert's Dune.  I'm very much looking forward to that.

Clearly I am quite pleased to have made this discovery.  I have learned a lot about Tolkien and tons about Chaucer.  I can't find enough good things to say about the job Corey Olsen does.  I just wanted to take the opportunity to say that.

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*Don't own one. Never worn one.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  It's all in good fun.  And the only convention I've ever been to was the first Star Trek convention in New York when I was eleven.  Even then no pointed ears.