Frodo in a World of Boromirs (IV)

Image: Peter Xavier Price

To anyone who loves liberty as our Founders did the difference between the two major parties -- always slim -- has become invisible. Democrats and Republicans may disagree slightly on the structure and parameters of programs and how much money to pour into each. They no longer disagree on whether government should have its long fingers in everything.

It is no longer shameful to lust after power so long as one lusts for the good of the people. In the words of Boromir, speaking of the One Ring, "For you seem to think of its power only in the hands of the enemy: of its evil uses not of its good." The only rejoinder, in Frodo's words to Boromir, is that "we cannot use it, and what is done with it turns to evil." Yes, it's that simple. And as you ascend the levels of authority, from city to state to nation, it only becomes more true.

There are several reasons. One, already alluded to, is the corruption of power. No matter for what noble ends power may be sought, at some point it always becomes an end in itself, and then the jig is up… but the power and its abuses live on. This is why even the most flagrantly failed government programs are nearly impossible to kill.

The result is government programs that clumsily and ineptly ape the market, with none of its efficiencies and never coming close to achieving consumer satisfaction. A government program must be counted a success if it does not achieve the exact opposite of its stated goal.

Whatever it does achieve comes at a terrible cost. If you include all forms of taxation, government confiscates about 40 to 50 percent of our income every year. What we receive for this robbery in goods and services is a pretty poor trade by any measure. Our schools turn out ill-mannered ignoramuses by the millions, many of them not fit for anything but Congress. Our health care system is a shell game where Peter is robbed and Paul doesn't even get paid. Our social security system is a transparent Ponzi scheme that, if perpetrated by an individual, would earn him life in prison. The U.S. Treasury is the world's greatest counterfeiter, inflicting on us an invisible form of taxation called inflation.

(to be continued)

Kurt Luchs - First Things
Oct 27, 2008

Frodo in a World of Boromirs (III)

Image: Peter Xavier Price

Was Frodo less resistant to the temptations of power than America's greatest president? No, not Reagan, or FDR, or Lincoln, or even Jefferson. Washington: the only President who was ever offered a lifelong throne and turned it down for a temporary desk in a bureaucrat's office. Almost to a man, his successors have been offered that same desk and have mistaken it for a throne. The current occupant, however sincere, is no exception (nor does it matter what month this is published or what year you read it). Roosevelt II -- as H.L. Mencken aptly called FDR -- actually tried to get a throne for himself, or the next best thing in a democracy, a permanent presidency. He came frighteningly close to succeeding before death intervened. The Onion's book Our Dumb Century contains a headline I contributed to sum up this absurdity: "Roosevelt's Remains To Run For Fifth Term."

In a year of partisan bitterness and economic havoc, it is well to recall that not every step is forward, not every change is for the better. Our Founders knew this. They grasped the truth of Lord Acton's words -- “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- long before he wrote them. They understood, along with Thomas Paine: "That government is best which governs least." And to our everlasting blessing, they did their best to enshrine that precept into a system made to preserve it. They tried to create a government whose various powers were strictly limited and balanced, a government directly answerable to the people, in whom all rights and powers were ultimately held to reside. Their effort was heroic, and for a time, so were the results.

Looking at our current plight one could say they failed us. But the truth is, we have failed them. We have forgotten and abandoned nearly every principle they stood for. Where our Founders saw very little that government could do, and even less that it should do, we see no area of life in which government should not be involved. Too often we see government as the leader, all-knowing, all-providing, all-powerful. The worse the crisis, the more frantically and counter-intuitively we seek government solutions. Just now we are suffering through a government-generated economic debacle from which (we are assured) only government can save us. (to be continued)

Kurt Luchs - First Things
Oct 27, 2008

Frodo in a World of Boromirs (II)

Image: Peter Xavier Price

Boromir, you'll recall, is the Judas of the Fellowship of the Ring. Sworn to protect Frodo the Ring-bearer with his life if need be, Boromir betrays his trust and tries to take the Ring by force, thereby sundering the Fellowship. Tellingly, all of this is done for the best of motives in Boromir's eyes. He means to accomplish nothing but good with the Ring, to save his beloved kingdom of Minas Tirith from Sauron's conquering armies.

In one of their own satires on power, The Giant Rat of Sumatra, the audio comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre speaks of "a power so great, it can only be used for good or evil." This is Boromir's tragically mistaken view of the One Ring. Though masking an unchecked power, the Ring is, for Boromir, only a tool -- something no better or worse than the person who uses it. He seems almost unaware of the Ring's dark side. Insofar as he is aware, he dismisses it out of hand, swearing, "True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted." Like any politician lobbying for his favourite cause – himself -- he supplies a noble motive: "We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause." He also supplies a noble champion. Guess who? He muses, "What could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader?" Nor should Frodo have any fear that Boromir will succumb to the Ring's blandishments because, as he vows, "I give you my word that I do not desire to keep it."

Yet keeping or not keeping such power is not the main issue. Merely to desire it is to show oneself unworthy of it even for a moment. It is no accident that the Ring comes to a humble bearer who in no way has sought it and who wants no part of it. In the end it proves too much even for Frodo. (to be continued)

Kurt Luchs - First Things
Oct 27, 2008

Frodo in a World of Boromirs (I)

Image : Peter Xavier Price

(Written from an American point of view, but very interesting indeed from a British perspective too)

One mark of a great metaphor is that it functions on several levels. In this respect J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings can be, and has been, interpreted to mean any number of things by its central metaphor of "One Ring to rule them all." The battle over the Master-ring some have read as an allegory of the battle between the Allied and Axis powers in World War II. Christians may find in it a mirror of the battle between Satan and God; socialists (and communists), a re-enactment of the class war between capitalists and the working masses; environmentalists, a saga about the clash between industrialization and nature. Still others take it simply as a rousing tale so fine in the telling that these other possible layers of meaning become moot, or at least secondary.

Perhaps all of these views are valid; perhaps none are. That is the measure of how deeply and carefully Tolkien wrought his magic.

For me the Dark Lord's terrible ring holds another meaning, one that might serve as a warning for any age, but particularly, I fear, for our own. I see in it the lure of political power, specifically the ultimate power of the modern nation-state. And I must admit, even in trying to discuss this concept with most of those nearest and dearest to me, I feel like Frodo in a world of Boromirs. (to be continued)

Kurt Luchs - First Things
Oct 27, 2008

Love? Or Selfishness...

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

C.S. Lewis
The Four Loves

On the Passing of Time

The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.
LEGOLAS

The 'immortality' of the Elves is a subject of endless fascination for the mortal races, usually motived by jealousy or a lack of understanding. Being uninhibited by old age and death, Men or Dwarves would finally achieve the scope to indulge in endless, productive action, but the Elves (especially those of the Third Age) have no such ambition. For them, reminiscing about and preserving the light and beauty of the Elder Days - fighting 'the long defeat' in Galadriel's words - is enough.

David Rowe

http://misterdavid.typepad.com/middle_earth/

Carcharoth, the Red Maw

Him Carcharoth, the Red Maw, name
the songs of Elves. Not yet he came
disastrous, ravening, from the gates
of Angband. There he sleepless waits;
where those great portals threatening loom
his red eyes smoulder in the gloom,
his teeth are bare, his jaws are wide;
and none may walk; nor creep, nor glide,
nor thrust with power his menace past
to enter Morgoth's dungeon vast.
Now, lo! Before his watchful eyes
a slinking shape he far descries
that crawls into the frowning plain
and halts at gaze, then on again
comes stalking near, a wolvish shape
haggard, wayworn, with jaws agape;
and o'er it batlike in wide rings
a reeling shadow slowly wings.
Such shapes there oft were seen to roam,
this land their native haunt and home;
and yet his mood with strange unease
is filled, and boding thoughts him seize.

(lines 3,714-3,735)

The Geste of Beren and Lúthien
by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Song of the Ents

We come, we come with roll of drum: ta-runda runda runda rom!
We come, we come with horn and drum: ta-runa runa runa rom!
To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;
Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars - we go to war!
To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come;
To Isengard with doom we come!
With doom we come, with doom we come!

(LOTR - JRRT)

New Links

Some New links added... see left

An artificial abstraction?

We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected... but that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

A Delightfully Imaginative Journey

This is one of the most freshly original and delightfully imaginative books for children that have appeared in many a long day. Like "Alice in Wonderland," it comes from Oxford University, where the author is Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and like Lewis Carroll's story, it was written for children that the author knew (in this case his own four children) and then inevitably found a larger audience.

The period of the story is between the age of Faerie and the dominion of men. To an adult who reads of Smaug the Dragon and his hoard, won by the dwarves but claimed also by the Lake men and the Elven King, there may come the thought of how legend and tradition and the beginning of history meet and mingle, but for the reader from 8 to 12 "The Hobbit" is a glorious account of a magnificent adventure, filled with suspense and seasoned with a quiet humor that is irresistible.

Hobbits are (or were) a small people, smaller than dwarves - and they have no beards - but very much larger than liliputians. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large, stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colors, chiefly green and yellow; wear no shoes because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick, warm brown hair; have long, clever, brown fingers, good-natured faces and laugh deep, fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day, when they can get it).

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit whom we find living in his comfortable, not to say luxurious, hobbit hole, for it was not a dirty, wet hole, nor yet a bare, sandy one, but inside its round, green door, like a porthole, there were bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries, kitchens and dining rooms, all in the best of hobbit taste. All Bilbo asked was to be left in peace in this residence, known as "Bag-End," for hobbits are naturally homekeeping folk, and Bilbo had no desire for adventure. That is to say, the Baggins' side of him had not, but Bilbo's mother had been a Took, and in the past the Tooks had intermarried with a fairy family. It was the Took strain that made the little hobbit, almost against his will, respond to the summons of Gandalf the Wizard to join the dwarves in their attempt to recover the treasure which Smaug the dragon had stolen from their forefathers. Bilbo has an engaging, as well as an entirely convincing, personality; frankly scornful of the heroic (except in his most Tookish moments), he nevertheless plays his part in emergencies with a dogged courage and resourcefulness that make him in the end the real leader of the expedition.

After the dwarves and Bilbo have passed "The Last Homely House" their way led through Wilderland, over the Misty Mountains and through forests that suggest those of William Morris's prose romances. Like Morris's countries, Wilderland is Faerie, yet it has an earthly quality, the scent of trees drenching rains and the smell of woodfires.

The tale is packed with valuable hints for the dragon killer and adventurer in Faerie. Plenty of scaly monsters have been slain in legend and folktale, but never for modern readers has so complete a guide to dragon ways been provided. Here, too, are set down clearly the distinguishing characteristics of dwarves, goblins, trolls and elves. The account of the journey is so explicit that we can readily follow the progress of the expedition. In this we are aided by the admirable maps provided by the author, which in their detail and imaginative consistency, suggest Bernard Sleigh's "Mappe of Fairyland."

The songs of the dwarves and elves are real poetry, and since the author is fortunate enough to be able to make his own drawings, the illustrations are a perfect accompaniment to the text. Boys and girls from 8 years on have already given "The Hobbit" an enthusiastic welcome, but this is a book with no age limits. All those, young or old, who love a fine adventurous tale, beautifully told, will take "The Hobbit" to their hearts.

Anne T. Eaton
New York Times -- March 13, 1938

The audacious and unabashed believer or the sceptical ironist

There is ... a quality in his prose that is both ubiquitous and unsettling. Some readers will consider this quality to be a great strength in Williams' prose, and others will write it down as a weakness. It is an extension of the rather elliptical quality that we observed in his handling of Isabel. An amateurish and quasi-psychological way of getting at this quality would be to guess that Williams never could make up his mind which image of himself he liked better: the audacious and unabashed believer or the sceptical ironist.

He obviously was enthralled with everything preternatural, from the black arts and the Cabbala to the Mass; and there is something electrifying (and you get the impression that Williams enjoyed being electrifying) about a literate man in modern London and Oxford who makes no bones about believing all sorts of unclassifiable things like Virgin Birth and so forth that ordinary moderns balk at. On the other hand, there is something slightly eager, even fevered, in what looks like the wish on Williams' part that we see him as an easy member of the urbane and donnish fraternity of sceptics.

He had not himself been to university, least of all to Oxford, and he cannot have been indifferent to the stigma. If it comes to kindred minds, we seem to hear him saying to himself, give me the Sir Bernards of this world. He has a whole section in his brief history of the Church on "the quality of disbelief", and he cannot conceal his fascination with Voltaire and company.

Williams himself was squarely on the side of the orthodox believers, as his books and his circle of friends at I Oxford testify. But his prose seems bedevilled with an intermittent uncertainty of tone.

Thomas Howard
"Shadows of Ecstacy"
The Novels of Charles Williams (1983) OUP

Screwtape on the death of death

The first thing he did was to lower himself and be born as one of "them." We almost got him killed when he was a baby. But he eluded us then. He grew up to be a man. He taught those poor humans about himself, all the while not really spreading around who he was. Then one day he gave himself up to be killed by a bunch of jealous religious leaders. We figured it was a big bluff. Just an excuse to perform a public miracle and escape at the last minute. But he actually went through with it. He let them nail him to a cross and he died. We all thought, "Aha, you're beaten now! You've just made your big mistake!"

All of us were feeling, for a few hours, a big relief from that constant fear we had always felt toward the Enemy. Maybe all those prophecies about our last judgement would never happen after all. Death had claimed the Creator of life. Finally our Lord Satan would be undisputed ruler of all.

Then Sunday morning came. The Enemy reappeared. Suddenly, he was alive. Death could not hold him. But it was even worse than that. He had become an innocent sacrifice for the sins of all those humans. He had paid their penalty. He had died in their place. Now death could not hold them either. They could be forgiven and reunited with the Enemy. They can now live forever. For all practical purposes, death has died. There has never been a more disastrous day in the history of the universe.

That, my dear Wormwood, is the whole sad truth.

C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters

Two stories...

Mary Rogers gives two vignettes of Lewis in Headington in her article "C.S. Lewis — God's Fool" in Oxford, the Journal of the Oxford Society, for November 1998:

"Jack never minded looking a fool in a good cause. My sister-in-law tells me that he used to attend an annual party in Headington where guests were expected to arrive, not exactly in fancy dress, but to suggest some topic the hostess had decided upon. After Jack's marriage to Joy, he brought her along, obviously much to her disgust. She had chosen not to represent some character in Poetry or Opera... Lewis (of course) represented Wotan, wearing a black eye-shade over one eye — without embarrassment.

"Another Lewis-the-fool story involved an elderly dog. Both brothers were animal lovers, and cared for each dog lovingly to his last breath. One, in its extreme old age (probably Baron or Mr Papworth, also known as "Tykes") became very difficult, as we all do, in time. It was one of the rare sights of Headington to see Jack feeding an animal who was sensitive about being seen eating, and would not eat on home territory. So Jack would walk in front holding the dog dish in one hand, and a spoon in the other, ladling the food backwards over his shoulder to the following shambling dog, the leader being quite unmindful of the passers by and their reactions, as long as the dog got fed."

Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney (Final)

The child lies unborn in the queen's womb;
unformed in his brain is the web of all our doom,
as unformed in the minds of all the great lords
lies the image of the split Table and of surreptitious swords.

I am the queen's servant; while I live
down my eyes the cliff, the carving, the winged things drive,
since the rock, in those fleet lids of rock's hue,
the sculpture, the living sculpture, rose and flew.

Taliessin through Logres (1938)
Charles Williams

Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney (IV)

The eyes of the queen Morgause were a dark cavern;
there a crowned man without eyes came to a carved tavern,
a wine-wide cell, an open grave, that stood
between Caerleon and Carbonek, in the skirts of the blind wood.

Through the rectangular door the crowned shape went its way
it lifted light feet: an eyeless woman lay
flat on the rock; her arm was stretched to embrace
his own stretched arm; she had his own face.

The shape of a blind woman under the shape of a blind man
over them, half-formed, the cipher of the Great Ban,
this, below them both, the shape of the blatant beast matched,
his mouth was open in a yelp; his feet scratched.

Beyond them a single figure was cut in the rock;
it was hewn in a gyration of mow and mock;
it had a weasel's head and claws on hand and feet;
it twirled under an arch that gave on the city's street.

(tbc)

Taliessin through Logres (1938)
Charles Williams

Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney (III)

When from the sea I came again to my stall
King Arthur between two queens sat in a grim hall,
Guinevere on his right, Morgause on his left
I saw in her long eyes the humanized shapes of the cleft.

She sat the sister of Arthur, the wife of Lot,
four sons got by him, and one not.
I heard as she stirred the seamews scream again
in the envy of the unborn bastard and the pride of canonical Gawaine.

I turned my eyes to the lords; they sat half-dead.
The young wizard Merlin, standing by me, said:
'Balin had Balan's face, and Morgause her brother's.
Did you not know the blow that darkened each from other's?

'Balin and Balan fell by mistaken impious hate.
Arthur tossed loves with a woman and split his fate.
Did you not see, by the dolorous blow's might,
the contingent knowledge of the Emperor floating into sight?

'Over Camelot and Carbonek a whirling creature hovered
as over the Adam in Eden when they found themselves uncovered,
when they would know good as evil; thereon it was showed,
but then they must know God also after that mode.'

(tbc)

Taliessin through Logres (1938)
Charles Williams

Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney (II)

I had gone in summer at the king's word to explore
the coast of the kingdom towards the Pole; the roar
of the ocean beyond all coasts threatened on one hand;
on the other we saw the cliffs of Orkney stand.

Caves and hollows in the crags were filled with the scream
of seamews nesting and fleeting; the extreme theme
of Logres rose in harsh cries and hungry storms,
and there, hewn in a cleft, were hideous huge forms.

I remembered how the archbishop in Caerleon at a feast
preached that before the making of man or beast
the Emperor knew all carved contingent shapes
in torrid marsh temples or on cold crookt capes.

These were the shapes only the Emperor knew,
unless Coelius Vibenna and his loathly few,
squat by their pot, by the twisted hazel art
sought the image of that image within their heart.

Sideways in the cleft they lay, and the seamews' wings
everywhere flying, or the mist, or the mere slant of the things
seemed to stir them; then the edge of the storm's shock
over us obliquely split rock from rock.

Ship and sculpture shuddered; the crags' scream
mingled with the seamews'; Logres' convulsed theme
wailed in the whirlwind; we fled before the storms,
and behind us loosed in the air flew giant inhuman forms.

(tbc)

Taliessin through Logres (1938)
Charles Williams

Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney (I)

Hued from the livid everlasting stone
the queen's hewn eyelids bruised my bone;
my eyes splintered, as our father Adam's when the first
exorbitant flying nature round creation's flank burst.

Her hair was whirlwind about her face;
her face outstripped her hair; it rose from a place
where pre-Adamic sculpture on an ocean rock lay,
and the sculpture torn from its rock was swept away.

Her hand discharged catastrophe; I was thrown
before it; I saw the source of all stone,
the rigid tornado, the schism and first strife
of primeval rock with itself, Morgause Lot's wife.

(tbc)

Taliessin through Logres (1938)
Charles Williams

Why were the Rings of Power made, and what were their Powers?

The reason is tied to the regret the Elves had for the passage of time. The Elves were immortal and were fated to live as long as Middle-earth lasted. As such, the earth changed with the passage of time, and the Elves saw many things that were fair become destroyed and lost by the hurts of evil. Sauron, as tempter, awoke a desire in the hearts of Elves to heal the hurts of the earth and create a paradise on this side of the sea to compare to Valinor -- and to be its rulers; whereas in Valinor they were only subjects and below the Valar. The Rings of Power were primarily made to slow the passage of time and preserve their creations of beauty. Yet they had other powers as well.

Tolkien provides a revealing insight on to the nature of the Rings and their powers in one of his letters:

"The chief power (of all the rings alike) was the prevention or slowing of decay (i.e. 'change' viewed as a regrettable thing), the preservation of what is desired or loved, or its semblance - this is more or less an Elvish motive. But also they enhanced the natural powers of a possessor - thus approaching 'magic', a motive easily corruptible into evil, a lust for domination. And finally they had other powers, more directly derived from Sauron... such as rendering invisible the material body, and making things of the invisible world visible."
[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #131]

The Rings were not made as instruments of war or domination; they could not create lightning bolts or hail storms. Yet, they conferred powers commensurate with that of the user; a Great Ring in the hands of a weak and lesser person could not work effects to the extent of the wise or great. Notice Galadriel's words to Frodo in Lothlórien:

"Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor? Before you could use that power you would need to become far stronger, and to train your will to the domination of others." [The Fellowship of the Ring]

The Elves used the Three Rings to create "islands of timeless beauty" and guard them against the passage of time and evil. Their use can be seen at work at various points:

~ Elrond used the power of his ring, Vilya, to cause the flood of the river Bruinen when the Nazgûl tried to capture Frodo.

~ Galadriel used the power of her ring, Nenya, to keep a guard on Lothlórien so that none could enter without her leave.

~ Gandalf used the power of his ring, Narya, to kindle the hearts and spirits of the enemies of Sauron to do great deeds. And quite possibly to assist him in his battle to the death with the Balrog.

But the use of the Elven Rings was possible only after Sauron was defeated in the Second Age and his Ring taken and assumed lost. If Sauron regained the One, then all the works of the Elves and the use of their Rings would be subject to the evil will of Sauron.

What were the changes...

What were the changes made to "The Hobbit" after
"The Lord of the Rings" was written, and what motivated them?

[This question refers to the major revisions made to the Gollum chapter, "Riddles in the Dark", not to the multitude of minor changes made elsewhere.]

In the original 1937 edition of "The Hobbit" Gollum was genuinely willing to bet his ring on the riddle game, the deal being that Bilbo would receive a "present" if he won. Gollum in fact was dismayed when he couldn't keep his promise because the ring was missing. He showed Bilbo the way out as an alternative, and they parted courteously.

As the writing of LotR progressed the nature of the Ring changed. No longer a "convenient magical device", it had become an irresistible power object, and Gollum's behaviour now seemed inexplicable, indeed, impossible. In the rough drafts of the "Shadow of the Past" chapter Gandalf was made to perform much squirming in an attempt to make it appear credible, not wholly successfully.

Tolkien resolved the difficulty by re-writing the chapter into its present form, in which Gollum had no intention whatsoever of giving up the Ring but rather would show Bilbo the way out if he lost. Also, Gollum was made far more wretched, as befitted one enslaved and tormented by the Ruling Ring. At the same time, however, Bilbo's claim to the Ring was seriously undercut.

There are two issues involved, well summarised in the Prologue: "The Authorities, it is true, differ whether this last question was a mere 'question' and not a 'riddle' ... but all agree that, after accepting it and trying to guess the answer, Gollum was bound by his promise" (FR, 21). Thus, it was Bilbo's winning of the game that was questionable. Given that he had in fact won, albeit on a technicality, he was fully entitled to the prize, which, in the old version, was the ring. In the new version, however, he had no claim to the Ring at all, whether he had won or not, because the Ring was not the stake of the game.]

The textual situation thus reached was that there now existed two versions of the episode. Tolkien deftly made this circumstance part of the story by suggesting that the first time around Bilbo was lying (under the influence of the Ring) to strengthen his claim. (Bilbo had written this version in his diary, which was "translated" by Tolkien and published as "The Hobbit"; hence the error in the early editions, later "corrected".) This new sequence of events inside the story is laid out clearly in "Of the Finding of the Ring" (Prologue) and is taken for granted thereafter for the rest of the story (e.g. in "The Shadow of the Past" and at the Council of Elrond).

"The Hobbit" as now presented fits the new scenario remarkably well, even though Tolkien, for quite sound literary reasons, left this entire matter of Bilbo's dishonesty out (it was an entirely irrelevant complication which would have thrown everything out of balance). The present attempt to step back and view the entire picture is made more involved by the fact that there were two separate pieces of dishonesty perpetrated by Bilbo.

The first, made explicit, was that when he initially told his story to Gandalf and the Dwarves he left the ring out entirely -- this no doubt was what inspired Gandalf to give Bilbo the "queer look from under his bushy eyebrows" (H, 99). Later, (after the spider episode) he revealed that he had the Ring, and it must have been at this point that he invented the rigmarole about "winning a present" (an incredible action, given the circumstances). There is, however, no hint in the text of this second piece of dishonesty (as noted above, it would have been a grave literary mistake).

Readers are therefore given no indication that when "Balin ... insisted on having the Gollum story... told all over again, with the ring in its proper place" (H, 163) that Bilbo didn't respond with the "true" story, exactly as described in Ch V. In this regard, "Of the Finding of the Ring" in the Prologue is a necessary prelude to LotR.

Tolkien as Translator?

Tolkien's claimed that he was the "translator" of "The Silmarillion", the "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings"? Was he really serious?

Very serious indeed. The scenario was that "of course" hobbits couldn't have spoken English (the story took place far in the past); 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 "left alone", 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 the language of the Riders of Rohan, Rohirric. The "rationale" was that the hobbits' dialect of Westron was distantly related to Rohirric; therefore, when hobbits heard Rohirric they recognised 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:

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

~ 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). Similarly, the names of the Buckland hobbits were Celtic, in their case Welsh (e.g. Madoc, Berilac).

~ Among hobbits some of the older Fallohide families liked to give themselves high-sounding names from the legendary past (an example of hobbit humour). 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"

Elvish Philosophy of Death and Incarnation

Of their fate after life the Elves know much, because of their long staying in Valinor and of what they learned there from the Valar. Concerning Men the most lore on their afterlife are speculations, since Men have never got in touch with the Valar in any greater degree.

The fate of the Elves: The Elves see themselves as two different parts: the Fëa (spirit) and the Hroa (body). The two parts are not bound to each other, but without the Hroa, the Fea is powerless, and with no spirit, the body is dead and will soon dissolve.

The life-span of the Elves is by nature the same as that of the world (although they are often called immortal, which is a totally different thing). But the Elves call earth "Arda Sahta", the Marred World. Within its borders, nothing can be uninfluenced by Melkor, and Elves and Men, who are made of Arda's matter, are all likely to suffer in some way.

Thus the elvish Fëa tend to "consume" the Hroa, until all that is left of it is a vague shape and it is indeed indestructable. Also, the Elves may die of grief or wounds (but not by disease) and then the Fëa will leave the Hroa. Then the "houseless" Fëa will be summoned to the Halls of Mandos, and it may go there of its own free will. Most Fëa do this, but those who have been influenced by Melkor and are corrupt often dread the punishment they will receive in Mandos and stay in Middle-earth, trying to take over some other Hroa that already contains a Fëa. Those who follow the summons may, if they wish, be incarnated in a new-born body, identical to the previous. The others stay in Mandos until the end of the world. For the Elves are bound to the world, and cannot leave it. All Fëar, whatever way they choose, must wait in Mandos for a time; how long depends on the invidual. If the Fëa has done evil in its previous life it must often wait longer until allowed to return to life. But sometimes it has to stay for good. Fëanor was for instance never allowed to leave Mandos.

The reborn Elf is in all ways a child again, and does not remember its previous life until its experience and knowledge has grown. Then its life becomes double rich, since it has experienced two childhoods and has memories from two lives. There are few cases where an Elf has been reincarnated more than once. The reason for this is unknown. There are no documented examples of reincarnated Elves except, perhaps, Glorfindel of Gondolin who may have been reborn in the Second Age and helped Frodo and company to Rivendell. But it is not definitely established that the two Glorfindels are one.

The fate of Men: Men are not, contrary to the Elves, "bound to the world." They have by Eru been granted a special gift: death. When Men die, thy go to the Halls of Mandos but do not stay there for long. They proceed away from the world and leave its borders, to which fate no-one knows. This has become a dread among Men, since they do not know what will follow.

This dread is brought to them by Melkor; the Elves, who are bound to live on until the world's end, cannot understand this fear of Eru's gift. Some Men claim that they are not mortal by nature, but that it has been caused by Melkor. (The Elves, though, do not beleive this, since they do not think Melkor has the power to change the fate of a whole race.) This is based on an old legend that can be considered the story of the "fall" of mankind.

Before any Men had yet died, Eru spoke to them and told them he would watch over them and help them if the needed him. But when they later asked him things, he would more often urge them to find the answers for themselves and enjoy the finding.

Then Melkor appeared among them in a beautiful shape and told them that he would help them and give them much knowledge if they took him to lead them. He gave them many gifts and tought them much lore and they would start fearing for a life without him. Then they spoke of Eru, whom they had only heard as a voice. This made Melkor wrathful, and he said Eru was the Darkness that wished to devour them. Then he went away. After a long time of grief and poverty a darkness came over the world and blotted out the sun.

Then Melkor came back shining like a torch, and they bowed before him. Men built a temple for Melkor, and swore him their service. A long time they served him, but now he rarely gave out gifts or advice, or they had to pay for it with a gift or some evil deed.

Eru did not speak to them again, but once, when he said Men had abandoned him: but they were still his subjects. Therefore he would shorten their lives, and let them come to him and learn who was their true lord. After that, some started dying, and Men went to Melkor for help. But Melkor did not hide his plans any longer. He told them that they should obey him or he would slay them. In time he started rewarding those that served him the best, which often were those who were the most cruel to others. Some Men started talking against him openly, but those he let put to death by fire in his temple.

The legend ends saying that some Men flew and came to the sea, and found the Enemy there before them.

References:
• The History of Middle-earth Vol. 10, The later Quenta Silmarillion: Laws and Customs among the Eldar
• The History of Middle-earth Vol. 10, The later Quenta Silmarillion: of Finwe and Miriel
• The Silmarillion, Of the Return of the Noldor
• The History of Middle-earth Vol. 10, Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.

[Image: Roger Garland]

On a theme from Nicolas of Cusa

(De Docta Ignorantia III. ix.)

When soul and body feed, one sees
Their differing physiologies.
Firmness of apple, fluted shape
Of celery, or tight-skinned grape
I grind and mangle when I eat,
Then in dark, salt, internal heat,
Annihilate their natures by
The very act that makes them I.

But when the soul partakes of good
Or truth, which are her savoury food,
By some far subtler chemistry
It is not they that change, but she,
Who feels them enter with the state
Of conquerors her opened gate,
Or, mirror-like, digests their ray
By turning luminous as they.

Poems ~ CS Lewis (1964)

What the Bird said early in the year

I heard in Addison's Walk a bird sing clear
'This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

'Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

'This year time's nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

'This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

'This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

'Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.

Poems ~ CS Lewis (1964)

After Prayers, Lie Cold

[Image: 'The Passion' by Vitali Linitsky]

Arise my body, my small body, we have striven
Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven.
Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go,
White as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow,
Undress with small, cold fingers and put out the light,
And be alone, hush'd mortal, in the sacred night,
A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup
Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up,
Faded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness
By dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness.
Be not too quickly warm again. Lie cold; consent
To weariness' and pardon's watery element.
Drink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death;
Soon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.

Poems ~ CS Lewis (1964)

Sturch on Williams

In Descent into Hell the crucial choices are those of the military historian Lawrence Wentworth; there are three, and each time he chooses the worst. A rival historian is knighted. It could be an opportunity for joy, to take it as an honour to his profession. "At least he could refuse not to enjoy. [...] With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he rejected joy instead. He instantaneously preferred anger, and it came; he invoked envy, and it obliged him."

Then a girl to whom he is attracted prefers someone else, and he cannot accept this either; instead, out of his daydreams (egoistic castle-building!) is fashioned a succubus, a horrible parody of the girl which is in no danger of showing the independence the real girl had.

Finally, he is offered a chance for professional integrity, akin to the repentance through non-moral goodness that I have already discussed. His knighted rival, we are told, is "a holy and beautiful soul who would have sacrificed reputation, income, and life, if necessary, for the discovery of one fact". Wentworth has already lost much of this integrity; but now he is given a chance to regain it. The uniforms for a play being produced by some acquaintances are historically inaccurate. He could point this out. He is actually asked to say whether they are correct or not. But he cannot be bothered; he prefers to be lost in his fantasies. And, steadily, he loses touch with reality and slides into a mindless damnation.

Richard Sturch ~ Four Christian Fantasists [Walking Tree - 2001]

The Tryst of the Worlds

She knew what she must do. But she felt, as she stood, that she could no more do it than he. She could never bear that fear. The knowledge of being burnt alive, of the flames, of the faces, of the prolongation of pain. She knew what she must do. She opened her mouth and could not speak. In front of her, alone in his foul Marian prison, unaware of the secret means the Lord he worshipped was working swiftly for his peace, believing and unbelieving, her ancestor stood centuries off in his spiritual desolation and preluding agony of sweat. He could not see beyond the years the child of his house who strove with herself behind and before him. The morning was coming; his heart was drained. Another spasm shook him; even now he might recant. Pauline could not see the prison, but she saw him. She tried to choose and to speak.

Behind her, her own voice said: "Give it to me, John Struther." He heard it, in his cell and chains, as the first dawn of the day of his martyrdom broke beyond the prison. It spoke and sprang in his drained heart; and drove the riotous blood again through his veins: "Give it to me, give it to me, John Struther." He stretched out his arms again: he called: "Lord, Lord!" It was a devotion and an adoration; it accepted and thanked. Pauline heard it, trembling, for she knew what stood behind her and spoke. It said again: "Give". He fell on his knees, and in a great roar of triumph he called out: "I have seen the salvation of my God."

Charles Williams : "Descent into Hell" (Chapter 9)

Letter to W.H. Auden (excerpt #3)

7 June 1955
Since The Hobbit was a success, a sequel was called for; and the remote Elvish Legends were turned down. A publisher's reader said they were too full of the kind of Celtic beauty that maddened Anglo-Saxons in a large dose. Very likely quite right. Anyway I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of 'romance', and in providing subjects for 'ennoblement' and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals…

Letter #163 - J.R.R. Tolkien

To W.H. Auden (excerpt #2)

All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'. I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror's Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s, and was eventually published not because of my own children's enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough), but because I lent it to the then Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge when she had flu, and it was seen by a former student who was at that time in the office of Allen and Unwin. It was I believe tried out on Rayner Unwin; but for whom when grown up I think I should never have got the Trilogy published.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #163

To W. H. Auden (excerpt #1)

7 June 1955
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #163

Tolkien on Human Misery

[Image: Paul Nash]

10 April 1944

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their "causes" and "effects." No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

- from "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

Letter to C.A. Furth, Allen & Unwin

Could you give me any idea of the latest date by which the completed MSS. ought to reach you? I have worked under difficulties of all kinds, including ill-health. Since the beginning of December I have not been able to touch it. Among many other labours and troubles that the sudden death of my friend Professor Eric Gordon bequeathed to me, I had to clear up the New Zealand examinations, which occupied nearly all last vacation. I then caught influenza, from which I have just recovered. But I have other heavy tasks ahead. I am at the peak of my educational financial stress, with a second son clamouring for a university and the youngest wanting to go to school (after a year under heart-specialists), and I am obliged to do exams and lectures and what not. Perhaps you ought to be thinking about Mr Bliss. And what about Farmer Giles? You had the MSS. of the enlarged form in September or October.

I think The Lord of the Rings is in itself a good deal better than The Hobbit, but it may not prove a very fit sequel. It is more grown up - but the audience for which The Hobbit was written has done that also. The readers young and old who clamoured for 'more about the 'Necromancer' are to blame, for the N. is not child's play.* My eldest son is enthusiastic, but it would be a relief to me to know that my publishers were satisfied. If the part so far written satisfied you, there need be no fear of the whole. I wonder whether it would not be a wise thing to get what I have done typed and let you see it? I shall certainly finish it eventually whatever you think of it; but if it did not seem to be what you want to follow The Hobbit there would be no desperate pressure. The writing of The Lord of the Rings is laborious, because I have been doing it as well as I know how, and considering every word. The story, too, has (I fondly imagine) some significance. In spare time it would be easier and quicker to write up the plots already composed of the more lighthearted stories of the Little Kingdom to go with Farmer Giles. But I would rather finish the long tale, and not let it go cold.

JRRT Footnote:* Still there are more hobbits, far more of them and about them, in the new story. Gollum reappears, and Gandalf is to the fore: 'dwarves' come in; and though there is no dragon (so far) there is going to be a Giant; and the new and (very alarming) Ringwraiths are a feature. There ought to be things that people who liked the old mixture will find to have a similar taste.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
2 February 1939

Young Jack

Jack Lewis seated on one of the stones at Stonehenge. Taken on April 8, 1925 by Warnie Lewis.

Tree and Leaf

In a letter (# 98 -18 March 1945) to Stanley Unwin, Tolkien talks about 'Leaf by Niggle':

"...that story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one day (more the 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out."

‘Leaf by Niggle’ is very much an allegory of Tolkien's own creative process, and, to an extent, of his own life. He admitted having been just that in ‘Leaf by Niggle’ in a letter to Caroline Everett (24 June 1957):

"I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story..."

Niggle is an artists who paints to please himself, living in a society that holds art in little regard. His main occupation is a huge painting of great tree. He starts with one single leaf and the painting grows around it. Niggle hoping to draw every leaf in great detail. Soon Niggle finds birds in the trees and hills that are visible from the branches. And so the painting grows and takes up all the artist’s time. Niggle takes time off from his work, because of politeness, to aid his neighbour, a gardener named Parish who is lame and has a sick wife. In the process of helping, Niggle becomes ill.

Then he is forced to take a trip, but was ill prepared for it (partly due to his illness) and ends up in an institution of sorts where he must labour each day. He is paroled and sent to work as a gardener in the country. He realizes that he is in fact working in the forest of his painting, but the Tree is the true realization of his vision, not the flawed version in his art.

Although Tolkien was against allegory, he wrote ‘Leaf By Niggle’ as an allegorical tale. As he mentions (above) in a letter, it arose from his own pre-occupation with the ‘Lord of the Rings’, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all. To think further on that sentence, the hidden meaning could be that Tolkien himself is Niggle.

Tolkien was compulsive in his writing, his revision, his desire for ultimate perfection in form and in the ‘reality’ of his invented world, its languages, its chronologies, its existence and history. Like the painter Niggle, Tolkien came to being absorbed by his personal ‘Tree’, Middle-earth, and like Niggle, Tolkien had many duties that kept him from the work he desired to complete.

From www.tolkienlibrary.com

Trees (again)

[Oaks, festooned with 'spanish moss', on Jekyll Island, Georgia]

We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected... but that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

Failed in Divinity?

JOHN BETJEMAN’S carefully cultivated image of himself as a devil-may-care student who “failed in divinity” at Oxford has been exposed as a myth after the discovery of his examination results.

Far from being unfazed by his failure, as depicted in his biographical poem Summoned by Bells, he resat his compulsory divinity examination twice, passing on the third attempt.

The Poet Laureate fooled the academic community for 40 years by relating only part of his academic record in chapter nine of his poem, published in 1960. “Failed in Divinity! O, towers and spires!/ Could no one help? Was nothing to be done?/ No. No one. Nothing.”

He lamented that his dreams of “Reading old poets in the library,/ Attending chapel in an M.A. gown/ And sipping vintage port by candlelight” had been dashed.

But curators at the Bodleian Library stumbled across his examination results while researching an exhibition to mark the centenary of his birth today.

Judith Priestman, co-curator of the Betjeman exhibition at the library, said that she had argued with the archivist because she could not believe that Betjeman had passed. “That is how he presented himself. He needed myths to keep himself going. But he didn’t leave Oxford as a Byronic figure.

“He was a good boy really. He presented himself as this great outsider, but actually he did jump through the hoops. He wanted to be an aristocrat, and an aristocrat would have said ‘I’ve failed, so what?’ and swanned off. He came back like the good bourgeois that he was.”

At the time Summoned by Bells was published, Betjeman declared that “one is only interesting when young and struggling”. He recounted his failure to please his father, to learn carpentry or to pass his divinity exam. “I was a poet. That was why I failed.”

He failed his first divinity examination on November 25, 1927, but returned for a second attempt on March 2, 1928. His name finally appeared — misspelt as “Beljemann” — on the moderators’ “satisfied” list on July 18, 1928.

"Times" Online

28 August 2006

The Dilettante and the Don

[A radiant Princess Margaret with John Betjeman on her left in about 1950. On her right is her lady-in-waiting Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, Betjeman's intimate friend, and beyond her is the Old Etonian Simon Phipps, later Bishop of Lincoln. Lady Cavendish and Betjeman engaged in an illicit affair from their meeting (in the early 1950s) until Betjeman's death.]

Betjeman & Clive Staples Lewis at Oxford

Although only eight years older than his pupil, C S Lewis's undergraduate experience of Oxford had been very different from Betjeman's. Born in 1898, he attended University College for one term before being shipped out to the Western Front in 1917, where he was wounded by an exploding shell at the battle of Arras. He returned to Oxford after the war and took a First in Greats, then a degree in English, but like many ex-servicemen he found himself completely at odds with the fast cars and flappers mentality of the early and mid-'20s. There had been just twelve other undergraduates at University College in 1917, when Lewis was 18 and the right age to be carefree. By the time he returned, he was 21 and had lived through a war that had killed the golden boys of his generation and he was in no position to appreciate the so-called Golden Aesthetes of Betjeman's day.

Moreover, there was the additional problem of the School of English Language and Literature, whose establishment in 1894 had attracted the sort of intellectual opprobrium usually reserved for Media Studies today: 'a school for soft-optioners, school teachers, and women'. In order to elevate the study of English above 'mere chatter about Shelley', the emphasis in the taught syllabus was on language rather than literature. Alongside the big writerly guns (Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton), undergraduates were required to study Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and the history of English language and philology. Without an intimate knowledge of Grimm's Law formulating sound-change in early Germanic consonants, even the most diligent student taught by an entirely sympathetic tutor would struggle to excel if language was not their metier, and so Betjeman the puckish dilettante and Lewis the unyielding pedagogue embarked on a fraught master-pupil relationship, the repercussions of which haunted Betjeman for the rest of his life.

Lewis's idea of a literary salon at this pre-Inklings, pre-Christian stage of his career was a roistering beer-and-baccy session, reciting Norse sagas in his booming voice and encouraging his students to chant linguistic mnemonics out loud. His teaching style was pugnacious, and with his tweed jacket, pipe and aggressively unpoetic vocabulary (excellence was indicated by a laconic 'all right'; defaulters were said to need 'a smack or so' to get them into line), Jolly Jack Lewis appeared to be the embodiment of everything that was hearty and antithetical to the fey, Anglo-Catholic aesthete Betjeman, who admired Victoriana and minor poets and incensed his tutor by insisting that Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (with whom Betjeman had enjoyed an illicit correspondence when he was at Marlborough), was a greater writer than Shakespeare.

'I wish I could get rid of the idle prig', Lewis confided to his diary. 'I was rung up on the telephone ... from Moreton in the Marsh, to say that he hasn't been able to read the OE, as he was suspected for measles & forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?' Or again, when Betjeman did deign to turn up, he 'appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn't mind them, as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn't help replying that I should mind them very much myself but I had no objection to his wearing them.' Betjeman's attempt to win his tutor over by inviting him to tea in his rooms in St Aldate's only alienated Lewis further, as he was forced to participate in conversations about lace curtains and to mingle with 'a galaxy of super-undergraduates', including 'an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNeice [sic]'.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Betjeman failed the elementary but compulsory First Public Examination in Holy Scripture, his tutor was less than supportive of his requests for help. What was perhaps more surprising was that 'Bishop Betjy', with his attachment to all things ecclesiastical, should have been unsuccessful in his 'Divvers' exam, not once but twice in his third year, before being sent down at the end of Hilary term 1928.

Oxford Today
Volume 18 Number 3, Trinity 2006

From Betjeman to Lewis (never sent)

"It seems to me that we have two different approaches to poetry. Both, I hope, have a sense of the sound of words and of metre and stress in common. After that there is no common ground. Your approach is philosophical, or metaphysical or abstract or something I do not understand. Mine is visual. I would cite a bit of your own poetry - a poem called 'The Planets' which opens with the line: "Lady Luna in light canoe". I don't see how anyone who has looked at the moon can think of it as "cruising monthly" in a light canoe. If we are going back to the day of my lack of style, what 'style' us this?"

John Betjeman - Unpublished Letter : 13th December 1939
Cited in the 'Daily Telegraph' - 29th July 2006

Weapontake

The weapontake was set for the morrow. When all is ordered we will Set out. (Theoden, in LR v. iii)

The word wapentake (OED: 'a subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the "hundred" of other counties') is well known in the context of English history, but not in the sense in which Tolkien uses it. It derives from the Old Norse vapnatak, and clearly consists of the two components - weapon and take; the corresponding word in Icelandic was used to mean (among other things) the taking up once more of weapons which had been laid aside by those attending the Althing (the Icelandic parliament). The route by which this word came in English to mean an administrative region rather than an event can only be guessed at; the OED entry offers some ideas. Tolkien decided to take the word at face value, and thereby assign to it (or rather to the respelt form weapontake} an obvious meaning which he needed for his narrative.

The Ring of Words (OUP 2006)

Waybread

This waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. (LR vi. iii)

In ordinary English usage, this (OED: WAYBREAD) is a folk-name of the plantain (Plantago), meaning literally 'broad-leaved plant growing beside the way'. The second part of the word is related to broad, and has nothing to do with bread. However, Tolkien has punningly adopted the word as if it were a literal compound of 'way’ and 'bread' in order to have an English equivalent to the Elvish lenibas? (explained as being from len 'way5 and bos 'bread'), the cakes provided in Lothlorien which kept the Fellowship, especially Frodo and Sam, nourished on their journeys. It does not occur in Tolkien's earlier writings, but appears in 'Of Tuor and his Coming to, Gondolin' (1951) in Unfinished Tales.

Spiritually minded etymologists might also discern here a scholarly link with the word viaticum. In Roman Catholic practice, this is the consecrated bread of the Eucharist administered to someone; who is dying or in danger of death. The Latin word viaticum originally meant simply 'provision for a journey'; it comes from Latiri via 'way', and from it developed the word voyage (borrowed from French into English and originally meaning simply 'a journey'). Tolkien acknowledged the comparison between lembas and the Eucharist as miraculously sustaining forms of bread: the waybread provides food for Frodo and Sam on a journey that, to the best, of their knowledge, leads to death. He comments that 'far greater,: things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story1 (Letters 213, 25 October 1958).

The Ring of Words (OUP 2006)

Patches of Godlight

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are “patches of Godlight” in the woods of our experience.

C.S. Lewis ~ Letters from Malcolm

The Wood between the Worlds

There’s a brilliant section in one of the Narnia novels, The Magician’s Nephew, in which the book’s heroes, a boy and girl called Polly and Digory, find some magic rings which transport them into a place called the wood between the worlds. It’s a magical forest full of trees and little pools of water, and they discover that by jumping in the pools they can enter into hundreds of different worlds. It’s one of these jaunts that takes them to a brand new world which eventually becomes Narnia.

What’s great about this sequence is the moment of horror when the children realise that there is no way to clearly identify which pool leads to which world, or indeed, the one that leads them back to their own. They suddenly realise that they risk getting completely lost in the wood between the worlds, with no way to return home.

Michael Parsons ~ Times Online
19th October 2007

The Wood again...

“I suppose the mere fact of being walled-in gave the wood part of its peculiar quality, for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. As I went forward over the quiet turf I had the sense of being received. The trees were just so wide apart that one saw uninterrupted foliage in the distance but the place where one stood seemed always to be a clearing; surrounded by a world of shadows, one walked in mild sunshine. Except for the sheep, whose nibbling kept the grass so short and who sometimes raised their, long, foolish faces to stare at me, I was quite alone, and it felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house than like any solitude out of doors. I remember thinking, ‘This is the sort of place, which as a child, one would have been rather afraid of or else would have liked very much indeed.’ A moment later I thought, ‘But when alone―really alone―everyone is a child: or no one?’ Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.”

From C. S. Lewis (1945), ‘That Hideous Strength’

[The last two postings prompted by Ian Lowell]

The Image of Wood

“The image of wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of high poetry have place. Thus in one part there are the lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter’s rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues—Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees names, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.”

Charles Williams (1943), ‘The Figure of Beatrice’