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

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СКАЧАТЬ the devil galloping away not on fire-breathing steeds, but on ‘heavy old dobbins’ – a contemptuous barnyard image of evil. All very well, but still, some would have said, distinctly peripheral.

      The breakthrough came with Tolkien’s article for Essays and Studies (1929), ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, the most perfect though not the best-known of his academic pieces. This rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess. In Old English a distinction was regularly made between verbs like hé hiereð, híe híerað, ‘he hears, they hear’, and hé lócað, híe lóciað ‘he looks, they look’. An -að ending could be singular or plural, depending on what sort of a verb it was attached to. This clear but to outsiders utterly unmemorable distinction was, after Hastings, rapidly dropped. Two manuscripts, however, one of Ancrene Wisse, the other of its five associated texts, not only preserved the distinction but went on to make another new one, between verbs within the lócian class: they distinguished e.g. between ha polieð, ‘they endure’, O.E. híe poliað, and ha fondið, ‘they inquire’, O.E. híe fondiað. The distinction had a sound phonological basis and was not the result of mere whim. Furthermore the two manuscripts could not have been by the same man for they were in different handwriting. Evidently – I summarise the chain of logic – they were the product of a ‘school’; so were the works themselves, composed in the same dialect by another man or men; and this ‘school’ was one that operated in English, and in an English descended without interruption from Old English, owing words certainly to the Norse and the French but not affected by the confusion their invasions had caused. To put it Tolkien’s way:

      There is an English older than Dan Michel’s and richer, as regular in spelling as Orm’s [these are two other relatively consistent writers of Middle English] but less queer; one that has preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England. (‘AW’, p. 106)

      It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conqueror.

      There are several signs here of Tolkien’s underlying preoccupations. One is the power of philology: the regularity and rigour of its observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts. These observations are incontestable. They are also suggestive, permitting us to make informed guesses at, say, the level of independence of western shires in the twelfth century and the nature of their race-relations. They pleased Tolkien further because their implication was so clearly patriotic, that there had been an England beyond England even in the days when anyone who was anyone spoke French. In that way they also corroborated the impression of self-confidence made by the ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, itself an example of what Tolkien in that article (p. 116) called ‘the westerly lyric, whose little world lay between Wirral and the Wye’. As for the Ancrene Wisse itself, Tolkien had little doubt that the ‘soil somewhere in England’ to which it should be ascribed was Herefordshire, a decision confirmed by later research. All in all the picture these inquiries gave was of a far-West shire, cut off from and undisturbed by foreigners, adhering to the English traditions elsewhere in ruins. If only such a civilisation had endured to be the ancestor of ours! Tolkien, with his family connections in and nostalgic memories of Worcestershire, the next most-western county to Hereford and like it a storehouse of Old English tradition, felt the pull of this ‘might have been’ strongly and personally. In a revealing passage at the end of the article (p. 122), he noted a few exceptions to his general rule and remarked:

      Personally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and B before us and silently point to these forms, they would thank us, pick up a pen, and immediately substitute the -in forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it was pointed to.

      The ghosts would be gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them.

      This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse we might find them difficult people. There is a streak of wishful thinking in Tolkien’s remark near the beginning of this article that if his argument was sound, English in the west at that time must have been ‘at once more alive, and more traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else’. He was used to having ‘traditional’ literature viewed as dead: it was nice to think of a time when tradition was rated higher than modern fashion. Still, it is hard to say his sentiment was wrong. It was based on rational argument, and the whole theory integrated (as theories should) many thousands of separate facts which had been needing explanation already. With hindsight one can see that this philological vision of ancient Herefordshire was a strong component of Tolkien’s later conception of the hobbits’ ‘Shire’, also cut-off, dimly remembering former empires, but effectively turned in on itself to preserve an idealised ‘English’ way of life. But ‘the Shire’ is fiction, and philology fact. The questions which begin to show themselves in Tolkien’s work from about this time on are: how far did he distinguish the two states? And how much of his later success was caused by reluctance to admit a distinction?

      Connections are exemplified in Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara land’, published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, ‘Ethiopian’, but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’, (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’, (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly ‘guess-work’, admittedly ‘inconclusive’? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something ‘which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems’.¹⁰ A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the ‘Balrog’ in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not ‘put-on’, but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends.

       Allegories, Potatoes, Fantasy and Glamour

      One may now see in rather a different light the four minor prose works written by Tolkien in the late 1930s and early 1940s, those years in which The Hobbit came to term and The Lord of the Rings began to get under way – the years, one may say, when Tolkien turned away from pursuing his trade and began instead to use it. He knew he was doing this, as one can see from the little allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (published 1945, but written c. 1943). Since Tolkien said in later years that he ‘cordially disliked’ allegory, it is perhaps worth repeating that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly is one.¹¹ СКАЧАТЬ