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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      An associated difference was that philologists were more likely than critics to believe in what one might call ‘the reality of history’. One good reason for this was that they tended to work with manuscripts rather than printed books, and the former are much more instructive than the latter. In some cases they have been physically written by the original poet or author; in others they have been corrected by him; in others they all too clearly have not, with incomprehension so thick on the page that one can visualise the author’s baffled rage were he ever to guess (as Chaucer did, occasionally) what had happened or was going to. The sense that ghosts cluster in old libraries is very strong. Another reason for the feeling of intimate involvement with history, though, lies in the philologists’ awareness of the shaping of present by past – the stalactites of words again, but also the creation of nation-states by language-separation (e.g. Dutch and German), the growth of national myth from forgotten history (as with the Finnish Kalevala), but perhaps as much as anything the fastening down of landscape to popular consciousness by the habit of naming places. Less than thirty miles from Tolkien’s study stands the prehistoric barrow known as ‘Wayland’s Smithy’. Its name is more than a thousand years old; perhaps it was in the mind of King Alfred (born at Wantage seven miles off) when he interjected into his translation of Boethius the outcry: Hwæt synt nú pæs foreméran ond pæs wisan goldsmiðes bán Wélondes? ‘What now are the bones of Wayland, the goldsmith pre-eminently wise?’ Alfred might also have thought of Wayland as the father of Widia, who in the lost poems released Theodoric from the power of the monsters; maybe Alfred had heard them sung. But though the poems had gone, and the monsters with them, and ‘Wayland’ no longer meant anything at all to English people, the name survived down the centuries and carried with it a hint of what once had been. Such chains of association littered the landscape for Tolkien; they did not have to be confined to books. When he said that ‘History often resembles “Myth”’, or when Wilhelm Grimm refused to segregate ‘Myth’ from ‘Heroic Legend’, both had entirely prosaic reasons for doing so.² They knew that legend often became a matter of everyday.

      Something like these two awarenesses, of continuing history and continuing linguistic change, can be inferred (admittedly with the aid of vast quantities of hindsight) from the first thing Tolkien ever published, bar a few lines in school and college magazines: the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ in Oxford Poetry 1915.³ This begins:

      I am off down the road

      Where the fairy lanterns glowed

      And the little pretty flittermice are flying:

      A slender band of grey

      It runs creepily away

      And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.

      The air is full of wings,

      And of blundering beetle-things

      That warn you with their whirring and their humming.

      O! I hear the tiny horns

      Of enchanted leprechauns

      And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming.

      This is, admittedly, not very good. Indeed one can imagine the response to it of the literary ‘side’, full of armèd vision, not to mention critical temper. ‘Why’, it might ask, ‘do we have the past tense in line 2 and the present everywhere else? Does this mean the “fairy lanterns” have gone out and the “I-narrator” is pursuing them? Or could it be that the author is stuck for a rhyme to “road”? As for “a-sighing” and “a-coming”, these look like scansion devices, mere padding. But in any case there is nothing in nature to suggest that the hedges and the grasses were “sighing” at all, while the “creepiness” of the road is just something the poet has decided to project on to the landscape from himself. That’s why we don’t believe the “I-narrator” when he says he hears “tiny horns”! And what about “enchanted leprechauns”? Does that mean they’ve been enchanted by someone else; or that they’re enchanting; or are all leprechauns enchanted, i.e. magic, i.e. not-real? The poet gives himself away. This is an evasive poem, a self-indulgent one. “Off down the road” indeed! Road to nowhere!’

      So the critical indictment might run, and it is hard to counter. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will have noted further the as yet undiscriminating use of ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’ and later ‘goblin’, not to mention the quite cross-cultural use of ‘leprechauns’ and the insistence (later to be most strongly abjured) on the little, the tiny, the insect-like. Still, there are hints of hope in the poem after all, and better questions to be asked than those which have been.

      What is this ‘road’, for instance, the ‘slender band of grey’, the ‘crooked fairy lane’? It clearly is not a tarmac one; on another level it is to be a recurring Tolkienian image:

      The Road goes ever on and on

      Down from the door where it began …

      And oddly, G. B. Smith – Tolkien’s school and college friend, killed the following year in Flanders, to have his poems posthumously published with a foreword by Tolkien – had addressed himself to the same theme in a poem four pages earlier in the Oxford Poetry collection:

      This is the road the Romans made,

      This track half lost in the green hills,

      Or fading in a forest-glade

      ’Mid violets and daffodils.

      

      The years have fallen like dead leaves,

      Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed

      (Such as the autumn tempest thieves),

      Since first this road the Romans made.⁴

      Now this theme of time is intensely Tolkienian (if one may be permitted to put it that way round). The last sight of Lórien in The Fellowship of the Ring published thirty-nine years later, is of Galadriel singing Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen! ‘Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees …’ (LOTR p. 368, and see also Fangorn’s song, p. 458). In this case the hope which G. B. Smith expressed in his final letter to Tolkien before death – ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them’ – appears against all probability to have been fulfilled (Biography, p. 121). However the clue to follow, for the moment, is ‘the road the Romans made’.

      It may seem perverse to seek to identify this road, but on the other hand it isn’t very hard. There are only two Roman roads near Oxford, and the better-preserved is the old highway from Bath to Towcester, still visible as a straight line across the map but dwindled along much of its Oxford stretch to a footpath. It is now called ‘Akeman Street’, like ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ a name of some fascination for philologists. It implies for one thing an old and massive population change. No town in Roman Britain had a more simply descriptive name than СКАЧАТЬ