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

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СКАЧАТЬ later Bath. One of them wrote a poem about the site, now called The Ruin. However they also called the town Acemannesceaster, ‘Akeman’s chester’ or ‘Akeman’s (fortified) town’. That is why the Bath–Towcester road acquired the name ‘Akeman Street’; the people who called it that knew it went to Bath, but had forgotten that Bath was ever Aquae Sulis; they were invaders, of a lower cultural level than the Romans, and soon they ceased to use the road for anything like the traffic it had once carried. Its name and its decline in status from highway to footpath bear witness to the oblivion that can fall on a civilisation. But what was the reaction of these invaders to the historical monuments they could hardly help seeing in their new land, the stone roads, the villas, the great ruins which they (as in The Ruin) called vaguely the eald enta geweorc, ‘the old work of giants’? Place-names again give suggestive clues.

      About nine miles north-west of Oxford and half a mile from Akeman Street across the river Evenlode stands a villa, excavated in 1865 and once the property of some Romano-British noble. It is distinguished by the remains of a fourth-century tessellated pavement in different colours. The village nearby is called Fawler. To most people, including its inhabitants, this name now means nothing. But once it was Fauflor, a spelling recorded in 1205, and before that, in Old English, fág flór ‘the coloured floor, the painted floor’. There can be little doubt that the village was called after the pavement; so the pavement was still visible when the invaders came. Why, then, did they not occupy the villa, but chose to live instead on an undeveloped site a few furlongs off? No one can tell, but perhaps they were afraid. A further twist in the story is that there is another fág flór in Anglo-Saxon record, in the great hall of Beowulf, haunted by Grendel the maneater:

      on fágne flór féond treddode,

      éode yrremód; him of éagum stód

      ligge gelicost léoht unfæger.

      ‘The fiend stepped on to the painted floor, angrily he paced; from his eyes there stood an ugly light, like fire.’

      So wrote the poet, in one of his classic passages of ‘Gothic’ suggestion. Could Beowulf have been sung in Fawler? What would its inhabitants have thought? Tolkien knew Beowulf, of course, virtually by heart, and he knew what ‘Fawler’ meant, for he hailed the etymology with delight in his 1926 review of the Introduction to the Survey of Place-Names; such work, he pointed out, is fired by ‘love of the land of England’, by ‘the allurement of the riddle of the past’, it leads to ‘the recapturing of fitful and tantalising glimpses in the dark’ (YWES 5, p. 64). He was interested in the names of roads, too, for he had argued the year before that ‘Watling Street’ was an old name for the Milky Way, ‘an old mythological term that was first applied to the eald enta geweorc [i.e. the Roman road from Dover to Chester] after the English invasion’ (YWES 4, p. 21). Nor did he forget Bath and The Ruin. Legolas’s ‘lament of the stones’ on page 276 of The Fellowship of the Ring is an adaptation of part of the poem. At some stage of his life Tolkien must certainly have noted all the strange implications and suggestions of ‘Akeman Street’.

      Did he know them in 1915, and share them with his friend G. B. Smith? Is the quest for Fairyland in ‘Goblin Feet’ a kind of translation of the quest for the romantic realities of history? Probably the answer to both questions is ‘No’. However, disentangling fact from inference as carefully as possible, one can say first that Tolkien and Smith evidently shared a feeling for the ancient roads, the ‘old straight tracks’ and ‘crooked lanes’ of England; second that Smith even in 1915 appreciated the sadness of the relationship between what these are and what they were; third that before many years were out it would be certain that Tolkien appreciated the same thing much more fully, with a wealth of reference to history and poetry and present-day reality. Even in 1915, one might say, a road, a real road, could possess a ‘creepiness’ for him which was based on some factual knowledge, not entirely self-generated. Philology would reinforce this. But already one image in his poem drew on some historical force.

      Further, Tolkien was already thinking of words as ‘stalactites’. ‘Flittermice’ in line 3 is not normal English. According to the OED it was introduced in the sixteenth century by analogy with German Fledermaus, for ‘bat’. However ‘bat’ is not recorded in Old English, and it is possible that some ancestor of ‘flittermouse’, e.g. *fleðer-mús, was natural to English all along, but never got written down. There is an apparently similar puzzle over ‘rabbit’ (for which see below), which Tolkien at least signals awareness of in the second stanza by using the odd term ‘coney-rabbits’. Finally ‘honey-flies’ in line 30 is elsewhere unrecorded. From context one would think he meant ‘butterflies’. Perhaps he was aware, though, of the unexpected scatological sense of that innocent-looking word in Old English – a language which has had many rudenesses pruned by educated usage. He could have found out by looking ‘butterfly’ up in the OED, and at least it had occurred to him to wonder why butterflies were always and for no apparent reason so called. These verbal creations admittedly do not add much to the overall effect of ‘Goblin Feet’, but they exemplify an attempt to combine philological insight with poetry. Both roads and words hint at the early complexity of Tolkien’s inner life, its unusual combination of emotion with inquiry.

       Survivals in the West

      Such hints, of course, fizzle out immediately. The Silmarillion had begun its sixty-year gestation by 1914,⁵ but in 1915 Tolkien went off to the war in which G. B. Smith was to die. On demobilisation he was preoccupied with the problem of earning a living, first in Oxford with the OED, then in the English Department at Leeds University, finally, with secure status and no lure of further advancement, back in Oxford again in 1925. He published nothing (bar the note to Smith’s posthumous collection of poems) for five years after ‘Goblin Feet’, and a good deal of his subsequent work was written for simple motives – money, or to keep his name in front of the people who counted, who made appointments ‘with tenure’. Much of his inner life did find its way into the twenty or thirty poems contributed to various periodicals or collections between 1920 and 1937; Tolkien’s habit of thriftily rewriting them and using them in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil shows how important some of them were to him.⁶ Still, it is fair to say that these remain by themselves thin, or uncertain. The brew that was to become his fiction needed a good deal of thickening yet; and this could only come from the interaction of poetry with philology.

      From this point of view one of Tolkien’s most revealing pre-Hobbit pieces is his almost unread comment on ‘The Name “Nodens”’ for the Society of Antiquaries in 1932.⁷ This virtually repeats the story of ‘Fawler’. In 1928 excavations on a site near Lydney in the west of England had revealed a temple devoted to some kind of mystery cult and still flourishing in the fourth century, i.e. well after the introduction of Christianity to England. The temple was eventually abandoned as a result of the barbarian and also non-Christian English, who however had their own cults. As with the villa at Fawler the Lydney temple fell into disuse – but not completely into oblivion. The iron-mines not far away were remembered: and whether because of them or from a continuing superstitious respect for the site, it was given a new Anglo-Saxon name, persisting to modern times — Dwarf’s Hill. The Society of Antiquaries made no comment on all this, but in the story and the place-name one can hear the echo of a hopeless resistance from the Darkest of Dark Ages, pagan to Christian, pagan to pagan, Welsh to English, all ending in forgetfulness with even the memory of the resisters blurred, till recovered by archaeology – and by philology. For Tolkien’s job was to comment on the name ‘Nodens’ found in an inscription on the site, and he СКАЧАТЬ