Barrow-wights, Ringwraiths, and William Morris (FR 2.ii.248)

"Under the Spell of the Barrow-wight" © Ted Nasmith

"Strider" I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. 

(FR 2.ii.248)

While the identity of these foes has never been clear, that was hardly the point. Strider was speaking about the effect such foes would have on the North were it not for the Dúnedain, whose unknown efforts get repaid with scorn. Still I have from time to time wondered who or what he's talking about. If an author creates the illusion of depth, that very act invites us to embrace the perspective and inquire.  Of course that doesn't mean we'll find an answer, or even that there is one. Tolkien himself, for example, could only speculate about what happened to the Entwives (Letters, nos. 144 and 338), a question which far more people would like answered.

But a clue nearby in the text and a passage in the first draft are suggestive about who were the 'foes that would freeze [Butterbur's] heart.'  Just a moment earlier Strider had said: 'when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us.' The use of the definite article before 'houseless hills' and its absence before 'sunless woods' suggests he has specific 'houseless hills' in mind. The phrase is in itself evocative, both raising and rejecting the idea that the hills are inhabited.  It also rather nicely suits the Barrow-downs, which are inhabited and not by creatures that are alive and not, and which are easily within a day's journey of Bree. This immediately invites us to ask whether barrow-wights can leave their barrows.

The answer to this, in Tolkien's thought if not in his published text, would seem to be that they can. For in his first attempt at 'the New Hobbit', as he originally called The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien portrayed barrow-wights as pursuing Tom Bombadil and the hobbits after he has rescued them (Shadow 112, 118-120).  Years before that in the poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Tom comes home to find one lying in wait for him (stanzas 17-19). Tolkien, moreover, had also spoken of barrow-wights in his commentary on the word 'orcneas' in Beowulf (112):

The O.E. word occurs only here, orc is found glossing Latin Orcus [Hell, Death]. neas seems certainly to be né-as, plural of the old (poetic) word né 'dead body'.... 

'Necromancy' will suggest something of the horrible association of this word. I think that what is here meant is that terrible northern imagination to which I have ventured to give the name 'barrow-wights'. The 'undead'. Those dreadful creatures that inhabit tombs and mounds, They are not living: they have left humanity, but they are 'undead'. With superhuman strength and malice they can strangle men and rend them. Glámr in the story of Grettir the Strong is a well known example. 

(Beowulf 163-64)

Tolkien's phrasing at the end is intriguing since he does not call the tale 'Grettis saga' or even 'the saga of Grettir the Strong', but 'the story of of Grettir the Strong', which is precisely what William Morris and Eiríkir Magnússon entitled their translation of it.  Tolkien owned this translation as well as many other works by Morris, which he admitted were an influence on him and which he sometimes read to his children (Hammond and Scull [2006] 2.599-601). More than that he also at times dealt with them on a professional level (Hammond and Scull [2006] 2.603-04).  Morris, moreover, uses the very odd and unusual word 'wraithlings' to describe a creature such as Glámr has become (chapter 33). This word, which translates ON smávofur, literally 'little ghost' -- in the saga it is used contemptuously by a character who presently learns the error of false pride -- is unknown to the first edition of the OED and Google Ngram finds no trace of it between 1500 and 2000.  Since it is so very rare, possibly even hapax legomenon, we may well wonder if it is the source from which Tolkien derived the notion he briefly entertained that the Ringwraiths were barrow-wights on horseback (Shadow 75, 118-120).

However much it may look like Tolkien still had the barrow-wights in mind when he wrote the words with which we began this inquiry, it remains difficult to say if this is so. We must be cautious in the way we treat details that come from texts written before or after the published text. Tolkien was always rethinking what he wrote, and that should give us pause. This is especially the case with things written later, like the shifting conceptions of Galadriel, who did not exist before the tale reached Lothlórien, but whose history emerged and evolved in the two decades The Lord of the Rings's appearance and Tolkien's death. Yet we should not be too quick to dismiss what he had written, especially in a draft, and regard possible links to it as something that Tolkien forgot to delete. Surely some of what appears in the drafts, but was not included in the final text, may help to create the illusion of depth for which Tolkien is so justly famous.

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A Nice Tribute to Carrie Fisher

A Head Full of Homer, A Trench Full of Blood

The comradeship of poetry and war is one of the most ancient relationships humanity knows. They have served together on the plains of windy Troy and walked eye deep in the hell of the Somme. Sometimes it is all thrill and glory, sometimes horror and shame, sometimes the hypocrisy of promoting the first and pretending the second doesn't exist, or worse, doesn't matter. Having read a lot of Homer and a lot of history, and having been a young fool once held captive by the romance of the Lost Generation, I long ago found myself drawn to the cataclysm of the Great War and the brilliance of its poets.  From them I learned, in a way that only illuminated Homer, of the kaleidoscope of terror, disgust, and mad valor that people know in war. 

My late brother was in Vietnam. As often happens, he had little to say about it, especially to people like me, who had no clue of what it had been like. Once, though, when we'd both had too much to drink, I asked him if he'd been afraid in battle, and for once he answered. It all happened too fast for fear, he said, when you were in the middle of a firefight; it was beforehand, while waiting, that you were afraid, and afterward, when the things you'd seen and done came home to you.  Then he added in one of the most savage voices I've ever heard, 'It wasn't the fighting that got to you. It was the mud and the come and the scum and the f***ing every-day.' Years later, when the country began to try to make peace with all the internal turmoil the war had caused and veterans began to have reunions, I asked him whether he was going to his. 'Tommy,' he said, 'I love those guys like brothers, but I never want to see them again.'

So I often read the WWI poets and wonder what it must have been like for them to go off to war, young men with heads full of Homer.  Did it defend them, at least at first, from the shattering reality of dismemberment and death?  Did it lead to a greater disillusionment if that defense failed? And for those who did not 'lose the day of their homecoming', as Homer would have said, what about looking back years later? Did it help them come to an understanding they could live with? And what did it take and what did it mean for them to talk about it? Did the ghosts of who they were have to drink the blood again in order to speak once more, as the shades Odysseus meets in the underworld do (Odyssey XI.100ff, Fagles)? 

But I can never read any of the poems and memoirs these men wrote without thinking of what C. S. Lewis said about it many years later in Suprised by Joy (195-96):

The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it. Until the great German attack came in the Spring we had a pretty quiet time. Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely "keeping us quiet" by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day. I think it was that day I noticed how a greater terror overcomes a less: a mouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poor shivering man) made no attempt to run from me. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remem­bers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a pup­pet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me al­most like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet - all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have hap­pened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant. One imaginative moment seems now to matter more than the real­ities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it "whined" like a journalist's or a peacetime poet's bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, "This is War. This is what Homer wrote about."

All Lewis' understatement -- a shell every twenty seconds all day is not an attack, the discomfort of the leaking boots -- all his nonchalance -- the zombielike marching, the parenthetical 'I suppose' -- all his modest impotence -- 'futile', 'puppet' -- can, I think, lead the unwary into misapprehending his final statement.  Which is not glib.  It all turns upon 'quavering': the 'imaginative moment' hangs trembling between 'fear' and 'indifference', but is much closer to fear, an experience he can process only by means of his education. Yet he places War, with a capital W, first, as it came home to him in this moment, and Homer second. The emphasis is on War; Homer is the imaginative tool that was at hand. He's connecting Homer to the primary reality of War, not War to the secondary reality of Homer.

I would be interested, on a very personal level, to know if this was all Lewis felt as this thought came to him with the 'whine' of the first bullet.  If I could ask him only one perfectly impudent question, it would be about this moment. For, while I have not been to war, thank God, I once had someone who had been shot lie bleeding in my arms. He was a young man I barely knew who was shot by another young man I barely knew as the result of a profoundly stupid argument. He died not long after we reached the hospital. As I sat in the emergency room and looked at all his blood all over me, I could think only of Lady Macbeth.  Even now, just as Lewis says of himself, the rest of my experience that summer evening long ago seems cut off from me, though I can see it all quite clearly in the distance. The blood and Lady Macbeth remain. In that moment, however, I was ashamed of myself. I held this dying boy in my arms and all I could think of was Shakespeare? Now I know better. Now I know that it was the imaginative tool that was at hand.

Did Lewis have such a feeling? I don't know, but a remark he made several years after the war makes me think he must have done.  On 22 April 1923 in a letter to a friend he wrote of the wretched post-war death of a fellow veteran still suffering from his experience: 'Isn't it a damned world -- and we once thought we could be happy with books and music!'

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Stephen C. Winter -- Three Posts on The Houses of Healing

I just love how in these three posts Stephen C. Winter notes the difference of the fragrance of the athelas for each of the characters and builds upon it.  Well done.

The King and the Healing of Faramir

The King and the Healing of Éowyn

The King and the Healing of Merry

'Fear not' and μὴ φοβεῖσθε -- The King Revealed (FR 2.ix.393)

'The Pillars of the Kings' © Ted Nasmith

Reflecting on Stephen Winter's latest post on the hands of the King made me think again of this passage, which led me to see suddenly an allusion to scripture I had not seen before, but which now seems so obvious, as such things always do. Consider: 

Sheer rose the dreadful cliffs to unguessed heights on either side. Far off was the dim sky. The black waters roared and echoed, and a wind screamed over them. Frodo crouching over his knees heard Sam in front muttering and groaning: 'What a place! What a horrible place! Just let me get out of this boat, and I'll never wet my toes in a puddle again, let alone a river!' 

'Fear not!' said a strange voice behind him. Frodo turned and saw Strider, and yet not Strider; for the weatherworn Ranger was no longer there. In the stern sat Aragorn son of Arathorn, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skilful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land.

(FR 2.ix.393)

And Matthew 14:22-33 (KJV):

22 And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the multitudes away. 

23 And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone. 

24 But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. 

25 And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. 

26 And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. 

27 But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.

28 And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. 

29 And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. 

30 But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. 

31 And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? 

32 And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased. 

33 Then they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God.

We know from Mark 6:48 and John 6:19 that the apostles were rowing, just as the members of the Fellowship were rowing, which strengthens the possible link. We might even allow that Tolkien is a being a bit sly and mischievous, with Sam's swearing that he'll never stick even his toes in a puddle again if he gets out of the boat alive paralleling Peter's trying to walk on water, too. Moreover, the phrase present in Matthew, Mark, and John, μὴ φοβεῖσθε, which the KJV renders 'be not afraid' may equally well be translated 'fear not.' 

Of course Tolkien is not suggesting that Aragorn is Christ or even Christlike. Nor am I. The sword Aragorn brings is no metaphor. And a moment after he is revealed to Frodo as a king returning to his own land, his doubts about the course he should now take resurface and he wishes for the counsel of Gandalf.  Rather it is the demonstration of the King within him to those in the boat, just as it is Jesus' demonstration to his disciples that he is the Son of God, that lies at the heart of this parallel. In this moment those who follow them see them as far more than they had seen them before. 

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