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

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СКАЧАТЬ These two words are related, historically, for the Old English translation of Greek evangelion, ‘good news’, was gód spell, ‘the good story’, now ‘Gospel’. Spell continued to mean, however, ‘a story, something said in formal style’, eventually ‘a formula of power’, a magic spell. The word embodies much of what Tolkien meant by ‘fantasy’, i.e. something unnaturally powerful (magic spell), something literary (a story), something in essence true (Gospel). At the very end of his essay he asserts that the Gospels have the ‘supremely convincing tone’ of Primary Art, of truth – a quality he would also like to assert, but could never hope to prove, of elves and dragons.

      There is a better word, though, buried in Tolkien’s remarks, which I can only conclude he decided not to discuss as being too complicated for a non-philological piece; he would have done better to focus on it. This is ‘glamour’. Actually Tolkien may also have been too revolted by the semantic poisonings of modernity to want to discuss the word, for now in common parlance it means overwhelmingly the aura of female sexual attraction, or to be more exact female sexual attraction at a distance – a showbiz word, an advertiser’s word, false and meretricious, taking a part in such nasty compounds as ‘glamour-girl’, ‘glamour-puss’ and even ‘glamour-pants’. The 1972 Supplement to the OED concedes the point and adds the coinages ‘glamourize’, ‘glammed-up’, and even ‘glam’ (a word Tolkien would have especially hated as showing that the old word used in dialect and in Sir Gawain for ‘mirth, merriment’, glam, glaum, was so dead as to be no competitor). The main G volume, published in 1897, however tells a story not much happier. ‘Glamour’, it alleges, is a made-up word, ‘introduced into the literary language by Sir Walter Scott’. What it means is ‘Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one’; from this sense has evolved the idea of ‘A magical or fictitious beauty … a delusive or alluring charm’, and so, pretty obviously, the cardboard senses of today. Tolkien would have been more interested in the quotation cited from Scott, which says ‘This species of witchcraft is well known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus, and was supposed to be a special attribute of the race of Gipsies’. What he knew, and what the OED didn’t, was that exactly this phenomenon was at the centre of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which begins with the Gylfaginning or ‘Delusion of Gilfi’, and includes within that the highly prominent and amusing tale of the delusion of Thórr by sjónhverfing = ‘aversion of the sight’ = deceptio visus = ‘glamour’. ‘Glamour’ was then well exemplified in Norse tradition and never mind the gypsies.

      Further, the word was evidently by origin a corruption of ‘grammar’, and paralleled in sense by ‘gramarye’ = ‘Occult learning, magic, necromancy’, says the OED, ‘Revived in literary use by Scott’. Cambridge University had indeed preserved for centuries the office of ‘Master of Glomerye’, whose job it was to teach the younger undergraduates Latin. Tolkien must have been amused at the thought of a University official combining instruction in language – his own job – with classes in magic and spell-binding – his own desire. He wrote of the parson in Farmer Giles of Ham (a figure underrated by critics, but having some of the good as well as the bad points of the professional philologist), ‘he was a grammarian, and could doubtless see further into the future than most’. But once again Tolkien knew more than the OED. The first citation it gives under ‘gramarye’ in the ‘magic’ sense is from the ballad of ‘King Estimere’, ‘My mother was a westerne woman, And learned in gramarye’. How right that a ‘western’ woman should know grammar, like the sages of Herefordshire! How pleasing if the study should turn out to have a few practical advantages. But besides, the vital facts about ‘King Estmere’, as Tolkien could have observed from a glance at the introduction to the poem in F. J. Child’s famous collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), were that its closest analogues came from Faroese and Danish (which once again related ‘glamour’ to the ancient traditions of the North); and that the philologist Sophus Bugge had gone so far as to relate it to the Old Norse Hervarar saga. This itself is possibly the most romantically traditional of all the Norse ‘sagas of old times’; it contains fragments with a claim to being the oldest heroic poetry of the North; and it was edited and translated in 1960 by Tolkien’s son Christopher, under the title The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise.

      Þess galt hon gedda fyrir Grafár ósi, er Heiðrekr var veginn undir Harvaða fjöllum.

      So writes the forgotten poet: ‘The pike has paid/by the pools of Grafá/for Heidrek’s slaying/under Harvad-fells’. But, Christopher Tolkien comments, ‘the view is not challenged … that Harvaða is the same name in origin as “Carpathians”. Since this name in its Germanic form is found nowhere else at all, and must be a relic of extremely ancient tradition, one can hardly conclude otherwise than that these few lines are a fragment of a lost poem … that preserved names at least going back to poetry sung in the halls of Germanic peoples in central or south-eastern Europe’. One could hardly have a more romantically suggestive comment, or a more rigorously philological one, for as Christopher Tolkien footnotes, ‘The stem karpat- was regularly transformed into xarfap- by the operation of the Germanic Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law)’.¹⁷ ‘Glamour’, ‘gramarye’, grammar, philology – these were on several levels much the same thing.

      One can see now why Tolkien used the same word for both the characteristic literary quality of Beowulf, a ‘glamour of Poesis’ (‘Monsters’, p. 248), and for the characteristic but maybe not literary quality of ‘fairy-stories’, the ‘glamour of Elfland’ (‘OFS’, Tree p. 6). He did not know quite what he was detecting, but he was in no doubt that he felt something consistent in many stories and poems which could not all be the work of the same man. It might after all only be the result of age and distance, the ‘elvish hone of antiquity’, or we might think the distorting glass of philology; it might point to some great lost truth in the areas of utter historical darkness of which he was so conscious; it might be a memory, or a prophecy, of Paradise, as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’; or, again as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’, it might be mankind’s one chance to create a vision of Paradise which would be true in the future if never in the past. Tolkien’s theories on all this never coalesced. Still, we can say that the quality he evidently valued more than anything in literature was that shimmer of suggestion which never quite becomes clear sight but always hints at something deeper further on, a quality shared by Beowulf, Hervarar saga, ‘Fawler’, ‘The Man in the Moon’, ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, and so much else. This was ‘glamour’, the opposite one may say of ‘shrewdness’ – for as the one had climbed into favour the other had been debased, in simultaneous proof of the superiority of ancient over modern world views. If Tolkien took ‘glamour’ too seriously, translating it into an entirely personal concept of fantasy, he had at any rate precedent and reason. As Jacob Grimm wrote (it is quoted under the definition of philologie in the Deutsches Wörterbuch):

      You can divide all philologists into these groups, those who study words only for the sake of the things, or those who study things only for the sake of the words.

      Grimm had no doubt that the former class was superior, the latter falling away into pedantry and dictionaries. Of that former class Tolkien was the preeminent example.

^* The tower looking out over the sea, for instance, is a strong and private image of Tolkien’s own for what he desired in literature. The 1920 poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ begins ‘I know a window in a western tower/That opens on celestial seas …’ In The Lord of the Rings (p. 7) the hobbits believe that you can see the sea from the top of the tallest elvish tower on the Tower Hills; but none of them has ever tried to climb it.

CHAPTER 3 THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR

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