Radagast the Brown

In a 1954 passage in Unfinished Tales he (Tolkien) says "of all the Istari, one only remained faithful... for Radagast, the fourth, became enamoured of the many beasts and birds that dwelt in Middle-earth, and forsook Elves and Men". (1)

(This is patently unfair to Radagast, no a bad fellow as wizards go, who lent his aid to the watch on Sauron, and played a small but crucial - and completely faithful - part in the Great Years. But it illustrates Tolkien's pessimism.)

In 1954 he was uncertain about the Blue Wizards, but in a letter of 1958 he says of them "I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, thought doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and 'magic' traditions". (2)

However, in The Peoples of Middle-Earth they get a happier ending; they "must have had great influence on the history of the Second Age and Third Age in weakening and disarraying the forces of [the] East".

(1) Unfinished Tales, p.390

(2) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p.280

(3) The Peoples of Middle-Earth, p.385

Richard Sturch: 'On Tolkien and Williams'
The Charles Williams Quarterly - 118 (Spring 2006)

Gandalf and the Istari

"Gandalf is not, of course, a human being (Man or Hobbit). There are naturally no precise modern terms to say what he was. I would venture to say that he was an incarnate 'angel'... with the other Istari, wizards, (those who know), an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-Earth as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon. By 'incarnate' I meant they were embodied in physical bodies capable of pain and weariness... "

"Why they should take such a form is bound up with the mythology of the 'angelic' Powers of the world of this fable. At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of 'power' on the physical plane, so that they would do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron... "

The Letters of J. R. R Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, editor (page 202)

"Gandalf really 'died' and was changed... 'I am Gandalf the White, who has returned from death'."

(The Letters, page 201)

Cranmer renouncing his recantation

Cranmer renouncing his recantation" from the 1631 ed. of Foxe's Acts and Monuments;
 woodcut - Bodleian Library, Oxford

Good people, give not your minds to this glozing world,

Nor murmur against the glory of the Queen;

Love each other, altogether love each other;

Each to each be full of straight goodwill,

Wherethrough let the rich give naturally to the poor

Always, and especially in this present time

When the poor are so many and food so dear.

What else? Yet for myself I will something say:

I am quite come to believe in Omnipotent God

And in every article of the Catholic Faith.

But since the Queen will have me cut for obedience,

Outcast from her, I must have an outcast's mind,

A mind that is my own and not the Queen's,

Poorly my own, not richly her society's.

Therefore I draw to the thing that troubles me

More than all else I ever did - the writings

I let abroad against my heart's belief

To keep my life... if that might be... that I signed

With this hand, after I was degraded: this hand,

Which wrote the contrary of God's will in me,

Since it offended most, shall suffer first;

It shall burn ere I burn, now I go to the fire,

And the writings, all writings wherein I denied God’s will,

Or made God's will be the method of my life,

I altogether reject them.

Charles Williams - 'Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury'

(First produced in the Chapter House, Canterbury,

as part of the Festival of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral,

20 June 1936)

Addisons Walk, 20th September 1931

Just before 3am on the Sunday morning of the 20th September, Tolkien, Lewis and another Inkling, Hugo Dyson, took a stroll along the Cherwell in the grounds of Magdalen College. All the previous evening the men had been discussing their lifelong fascination with myths. It was sad, Lewis declared, to think that classic tales of courage, beauty, sacrifice and virtue are all untrue and ultimately worthless.

Tolkien stopped his skeptical friend cold by forcefully arguing: No! They are not lies! Myths contain great spiritual truths.

Lewis recalled later in a letter to a friend that whilst walking we were: "... interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath..."

Sing all ye People!

Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,
for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,
and the Dark Tower is thrown down.
Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard,
for your watch hath not been in vain,
and the Black Gate is broken,
and your King hath passed through,
and he is victorious.
Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West,
for your King shall come again,
and he shall dwell among you
all the days of your life.
And the Tree that was withered shall be renewed,
and he shall plant it in the high places,
and the City shall be blessed.
Sing all ye people!

JRRT

Tolkien as 'translator'

How thoroughly realised was Tolkien's fiction that he was the "translator" of "The Lord of the Rings"?

Very thoroughly indeed. The scenario was that "of course" hobbits couldn't have spoken English; rather, they spoke their own language, called Westron (but often referred to as the Common Speech). Tolkien "translated" this language into English, which included rendering all the Common Speech place-names into the equivalent English place-names. The object of the exercise was to produce the following effect: names in the Common Speech (which were familiar to the hobbits) were rendered into English (in which form they would be familiar to us, the English-speaking readers); names in other languages (usually Sindarin) were not changed in this way, and thus were equally unfamiliar to the hobbits and to us. Since the story was told largely from the hobbits' point of view, that we should share their linguistic experience is a desirable result (especially for Tolkien, who was unusually sensitive to such matters).

In portraying the linguistic landscape of Middle-earth he carried this procedure much further. The main example was his substitution of Anglo-Saxon for Rohirric. The rationale was that the hobbits' dialect of Westron was distantly related to Rohirric; therefore, when hobbits heard Rohirric they recognized many words but the language nevertheless remained just beyond understanding (RK, 65 (V,3)). Thus, Tolkien attempted to further duplicate hobbit linguistic perceptions by substituting that language of our world (Anglo-Saxon) which has (more-or-less) the same relation to English that Rohirric had to the hobbit version of Westron.

There were many other nuances in the intricate and subtle linguistic web he devised (always, he carefully explained, in the interests of reproducing the linguistic map of Middle-Earth in a way that could be easily assimilated by modern English-speaking readers). Thus:

a) Archaic English roots were used in those Common Speech place-names which were given long before the time of the story (e.g. Tindrock, Derndingle; etc.).

b) Some of the Stoors (who later settled in Buckland and the Marish) dwelt in Dunland at one time (Tale of Years, entries for TA 1150 and 1630 (RK, App B)); the men of Bree also came from that region originally (RK, 408 (App F, I, "Of Men", "Of Hobbits")). "Since the survival of traces of the older language of the Stoors and the Bree-men resembled the survival of Celtic elements in England" (RK, 414 (App F, II)), the place-names in Bree were Celtic in origin (Bree, Archet, Chetwood) (see also Guide). Similarly, the names of the Buckland hobbits were Welsh (e.g. Madoc, Berilac).

c) Among hobbits some of the older Fallohide families liked to give themselves high-sounding names from the legendary past (an example of hobbit humor). Tolkien represented such names by names of Frankish or Gothic origin (Isengrim, Rudigar, Fredegar, Peregrin).

These matters and much else is explained in detail in Appendix F of 'Return of the King'.

The day death died

But that moan was not only his. As if the sound released something greater than itself, another moan answered it. The silence groaned. They heard it. The supernatural mountain on which they stood shook and there went through Battle Hill itself the slightest vibration from that other quaking, so that all over it china tinkled, and papers moved, and an occasional ill-balanced ornament fell. Pauline stood still and straight. Margaret shut her eyes and sank more deeply into her pillow. The dead man felt it and was drawn back away from that window into his own world of being, where also something suffered and was free. The groan was at once dereliction of power and creation of power. In it, far off, beyond vision in the depths of all the worlds, a god, unamenable to death, awhile endured and died.

Charles Williams

“Descent into Hell”

Chapter 7, ‘Junction of Travellers’

Providence

[Image: Ophelia by John Everett Millais]

In the play Hamlet, Ophelia climbs out on a branch overhanging a river: the branch breaks, she falls and drowns. What would you reply if someone asked, ‘Did Ophelia die because Shakespeare for poetic reasons, wanted her to die at that moment - or because the branch broke?’ I think that one would have to say ‘For both reasons.’ Every event in the play happens as a result of other events in the play, but also every event happens because the poet wants it to happen. All the events in the play are Shakespearean events; similarly, all events in the real world are providential events… ‘Providence’ and natural causation are not alternatives; both determine every event. Both are one.

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C.S. Lewis - Miracles

Longing in Williams

With the longing and sensuality in this passage from All Hallows Eve, comes a sharp sense of tension and the macabre:

They were all now in a world of simple act. The time for thought, dispute, preparation was done. They were in the City. They were potent to act or impotent to act, but that was the only difference between any of them. The eyes of the woman who lay, incapable of act, against the abandoned chair, were also on Betty and greedy with the same murderous desire. The diseased creatures, also incapable, who lay around the circle, trembled and moaned a little with their helpless longing for the act of healing. She and they alike yearned towards act, and could not reach it. The dwarf-form was still in motion, and its motions as it forced its way on were both its own and Evelyn's - it magically drawn to its origin, she spiritually driving to her refuge. Betty felt that invisible soft mass press against her everywhere - against head and breasts, hands and thighs and legs. She gasped out to Jonathan: "Let go - you must. I may; not you. Only one of us, and I knew her." She wrenched her own hand free from his and struck it backward against him, as Lester had struck at Richard, one gesture whether accurst or blest. In the fierceness of her knowledgeable love, she struck so hard -- all heaven in the blow -- that he loosed his arm from her and fell back a pace. Richard caught and steadied him. At that moment, as Betty entered the circle, the rain broke in.

Charles Williams “All Hallows Eve”

Lewis on Longing

Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory: “If we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we will get in.”

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Lewis wrote that the sight of the Castlereagh Hills from his nursery window would cause a beautiful aching, an inconsolable longing to arise within his heart. “They taught me longing,” he recalled. He felt the same feelings, he said, when viewing great works of art or reading powerful literature. As he analyzed these experiences, he defined them as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

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Lewis asked himself, even as an atheist, “what is it that I am longing for?” George MacDonald’s book, Phantastes, helped him make the first connection between his feeling of longing and Christianity.

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Lewis found that no experience in this life completely fulfilled this longing or the desires it awakens in us. All we get are hints and guesses.

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He queried in a letter to his friend Sheldon Vanauken (author of A Severe Mercy) on December 23, 1950: “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or, if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?”.

In Mere Christianity, he concludes similarly,
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.”   C. S. Lewis wrote of longing often.

In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien had Gandalf try to explain it to Frodo. It ran through each of Charles Williams’ novels. It’s an experience we’ve all had from time to time.

Tolkien on Longing (excerpt)

What's also notable about THE LORD OF THE RINGS is, for a book as long as it is, many of its readers reread the novel many times over. Yet despite its enduring popularity, Tolkien is often held in complete disregard by the literary establishment.

The real question is why? In the literary climate that is characterized by modernism and post-modernism where the twentieth and twenty first century is a wasteland why does a "series" of fantasy novels become one of the most beloved works in modern times?

It's because the power of myth over the human imagination works wonders, creating a longing and a hunger that, Tolkien argues, is met by the Christian religion. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are the flip-sides of the same coin, with Lewis giving us accounts of the longing and Tolkien providing the books that would create that longing. And what about the longing? It's that longing for Myth, that love for those beauties which Tolkien shows us in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It's that longing that sets man apart from all other creatures in the universe: a craving for beauty and for joy. The German word for this longing is "senhsucht". In a time characterized by fast-food, cell-phones, materialism, superficiality, the account of a Hobbit working against all odds in a mythic landscape so captures the human imagination (and this is NOT hype) that an entire genre is created. It is because of how Tolkien so masterfully handles Myth that he has been so highly treasured by such a large fan base.

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Joseph Pearce - Tolkien: Man and Myth, Ignatius (1999)

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The Eden “myth” was at the very heart of Tolkien's creation of The Silmarillion, as well as being at the very heart of the Creation myth contained within it. Tolkien's longing for this lost Eden and his mystical glimpses of it, inspired and motivated by his sense of “exile” from the fullness of truth, was the source of his creativity. At the core of The Silmarillion, indeed at the core of all his work, was a hunger for the truth that transcends mere facts: the infinite and eternal Reality which was beyond the finite and temporal perception of humanity.

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Review of The Lord of the Rings – Amazon.com

Thû and Huan

Thus came Thû, as wolf more great

than e'er was seen from Angband's gate

to the burning south, than ever lurked

in mortal lands or murder worked.

Sudden he sprang, and Huan leaped

aside in shadow. On he swept

to Lúthien lying swooning faint.

To her drowning senses came the laint

of his foul breathing, and she stirred;

dizzily she spake a whispered word,

her mantle brushed across his face

He stumbled staggering in his pace.

Out leaped Huan. Back he sprang.

Beneath the stars there shuddering rang

the cry of hunting wolves at bay,

the tongue of hounds that fearless slay

Backward and forth they leaped and ran

feinting to flee, and round they span,

and bit and grappled, and fell and rose.

Then suddenly Huan holds and throws

his ghastly foe; his throat he rends

choking his life. Not so it ends.

From shape to shape, from wolf to worm,

from monster to his own demon form,

Thû changes, but that desperate grip

he cannot shake, nor form it slip

No wizardry, nor spell, nor dart,

no fang, nor venom, nor devil's art

could harm that hound that hart and boar

had hunted once in Valinor. 

The Geste of Beren and Lúthien
J.R.R. Tolkien
(lines 2,740 to 2,769)

Hope

[Image: Vitali Linitsky "Christmas Visitation]

When we were lost in the night

Down grass-paths old,   

Miserable, without light,

Hungry and cold,

Then your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.

We saw no lantern nor heard

Any man near:

But we stood still at the word

With hope to hear,

For your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.

When Satan had hold on me

To make an end,

In heaven, in earth, I could see

Sign of no friend :

Then your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.

Does one draw near where I grope,

To put off death ?

I see him not, nor have hope,

Yet hold my breath :

For your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.

Charles Williams

Poems of Conformity (1917) 

Lewisian Ents?

Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name. She thought at first it was her father's voice, but that did not seem quite right. Then she thought it was Peter's voice, but that did not seem to fit either. She did not want to get up; not because she was still tired - on the contrary she was wonderfully rested and all the aches had gone from her bones - but because she felt so extremely happy and comfortable. She was looking straight up at the Narnian moon, which is larger than ours, and at the starry sky, for the place where they had bivouacked was comparatively open.

"Lucy," came the call again, neither her father's voice nor Peter's. She sat up, trembling with excitement but not with fear. The moon was so bright that the whole forest landscape around her was almost as clear as day, though it looked wilder. Behind her was the fir wood; away to her right the jagged cliff-tops on the far side of the gorge; straight ahead, open grass to where a glade of trees began about a bow-shot away. Lucy looked very hard at the trees of that glade.

"Why, I do believe they're moving," she said to herself. "They're walking about." She got up, her heart beating wildly, and walked towards them. There was certainly a noise in the glade, a noise such as trees make in a high wind, though there was no wind tonight. Yet it was not exactly an ordinary tree noise either. Lucy felt there was a tune in it, but she could not catch the tune any more than she had been able to catch the words when the trees had so nearly talked to her the night before. But there was, at least, a lilt; she felt her own feet wanting to dance as she got nearer. And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ("And I suppose," thought Lucy, "when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.') She was almost among them now.

The first tree she looked at seemed at first glance to be not a tree at all but a huge man with a shaggy beard and great bushes of hair. She was not frightened: she had seen such things before. But when she looked again he was only a tree, though he was still moving. You couldn't see whether he had feet or roots, of course, because when trees move they don't walk on the surface of the earth; they wade in it as we do in water. The same thing happened with every tree she looked at. At one moment they seemed to be the friendly, lovely giant and giantess forms which the tree-people put on when some good magic has called them into full life: next moment they all looked like trees again. But when they looked like trees, it was like strangely human trees, and when they looked like people, it was like strangely branchy and leafy people - and all the time that queer lilting, rustling, cool, merry noise.

"They are almost awake, not quite," said Lucy. She knew she herself was wide awake, wider than anyone usually is.

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (1951)

Sweeter than Honey?

"More to be desired are they than gold, yea than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb"*.

One can well understand this being said of God's mercies, God's visitations, His attributes. But what the poet is actually talking about is God's law, His commands; His "ruling" as Dr. Moffatt well translates in verse 9 (for "judgements" here plainly means decisions about conduct). What is being compared to gold and honey is those "statutes" (in the Latin version "decrees") which, we are told, "rejoice the heart". For the whole poem is about the Law, not about "Judgement" in the sense to which Chapter I was devoted.

This was to me at first very mysterious. "Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery" -- I can understand that a man can, and must, respect these "statutes", and try to obey them, and assent to them in his heart. But it is very hard to find how they could be, so to speak, delicious, how they exhilarate. If this is difficult at any time, it is doubly so when obedience to either is opposed to some strong, and perhaps in itself innocent, desire. A man held back by his unfortunate previous marriage to some lunatic or criminal who never dies from some woman whom he faithfully loves, or a hungry man left alone, without money, in a shop filled with he smell and sight of new bread, roasting coffee, or fresh strawberries -- can these find the prohibition of adultery or of theft at all like honey? They may obey, they may still respect the "statute", but surely it could be more aptly compared to the dentists's forceps or the front line than to anything enjoyable and sweet.

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms,
Chapter VI "Sweeter Than Honey" (1955)

*Psalm 19

The Other Mrs. Moore

[Image : Quarry Church]

"There was in the grounds of The Kilns when I arrived there, away over beyond the desolate tennis court, a small two roomed weather-board shack. It was almost completely overgrown with creepers and bushes and was evidently not in use for any purpose. When I asked Fred Paxford about it he told me that it had been "Mrs Moore's house", and it had been built for her use. On further inquiry I came to understand that the "Mrs Moore" in question had been a family friend and had fallen on hard times and thus had been brought into the household in Ireland to "help", and that when things became very hard in her later life, Jack and Warnie had "rescued" her, brought her over from Ireland, and built that little bungalow for her so that she could spend her declining last years in peace and without worry.This information may or may not be completely accurate as it was gleaned over a period of time; neither Jack nor Warnie would ever openly talk about their charitable works.

The little house later became my "Gang Hut" (rather a posh one actually as it had two rooms and a coal fired heating stove) and also an alternative "sleep-out" bedroom for me to use when I was feeling adventurous or whatever.I visited Mrs Moore's grave only a few weeks ago as it happens in order to point it out to some visitors. She shares the burial place of her Earthly residue with that of the other Mrs Moore, at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry.

Douglas Gresham - Lenten Lands (1988)