Master of Middle Earth (29 page)

In both
"Imram" and the Latin prose tale Brendan's pilgrimage is to a place
of ultimate holiness, but the two conceptions of its location differ radically.
The Land of Promise in the
Navigatio
is geographically an island in the
uttermost western Atlantic, hidden from sailors by a miraculous dense cloud yet
anchored physically in the same salt sea as all the other islands Brendan
visits. The prose narrator quietly assumes a flat earth at the western
extremity of which lies the Saint's goal. He accepts popular Irish thought of
the period about the shape of the world. Once Tolkien imports into his poem the
idea of a "round world" plunging "steeply down," the
Atlantic can have no western limit except continental America. He is thereby
forced to take the Land of Promise out of the physical universe altogether. He
does so by inserting a "parting of the seas" at which the visible
Atlantic continues on westward while the road to the Land of Promise separates
from it "as an unseen bridge that on arches runs" invisibly. This
solution, if it can be called that, may owe something to the Bifrost
³¹
of old Norse mythology, the bridge across which the hosts of Muspell will ride
to attack the gods in heaven at the end of the world. At any rate, Tolkien
purposely keeps it misty and semimetaphorical.

Having removed the
Land of Promise from the Atlantic, he is also free of the need to think of it
as an island, and indeed to think of it in any particular terms whatever. He
can transform it from a future haven from persecution for the saints into a
region outside time, "beyond the Door of Days," and mysteriously
evocative of a less literal Heaven. He can and does drop the very name of Land
of Promise of the Saints. And he further guards his mystery by the literary
device of Brendan's refusal to talk circumstantially about it. A medieval
audience, with its capacity to absorb all Brendan's adventures as "wonders
God had deigned to show him," would have begrudged the loss of every
detail Tolkien left out, but no doubt he well understood our less transmutative
modern imagination in deciding to draw the veil.

"Imram"
opens grimly enough with the tolling of Brendan's death bell as he begins his
tale to his eager questioner. Tolkien, however, has so selected and rewritten
the three episodes from the
Navigatio
as to make of his poem a
successful, and therefore essentially happy, pilgrim's progress toward
salvation. Surviving the demonic volcano under the cloud, Brendan toils on to a
difficult anchorage on the holy island of the Tree and hears the song of the
"third fair kindred," who are neither men nor angels but seemingly
somewhere between these two. He is then ready for admission briefly to some
Paradise-like place "beyond this world" where he sees "things
out of mind." Death becomes the only fitting climax to the poem, and the
tolling bell loses the grimness with which the poem began.

In publishing this
little miscellany of mainly light verse in 1962, Tolkien falls back on the same
scholarly pretense which served him well in
The Lord of the Rings
—that
he is merely the editor of material taken from hobbit records in the Red Book
of Westmarch. This disguise enables him in the Preface to say of the collection
as a whole that it reveals hobbit preferences for poetic forms which are full
of "rhyming and metrical tricks," and for subject matter "on the
surface, light-hearted or frivolous, though sometimes one may uneasily suspect
that more is meant than meets the ear."
³²
The description is
accurate. Most of the sixteen poems included are experimental in versification
and most are, inwardly as well as outwardly, frankly only playful trifles. Some
half-dozen, however,

invite a search
for deeper meanings, and one or two are downright cryptic. Tolkien uses his
editorial role to discuss in the Preface who the authors of individual poems
are (usually Bilbo, Sam, or Frodo), the genre of hobbit poetry to which they
belong, possible origins of some pieces in the lore of southern Gondor,
comparative dates of composition, and other matters traditionally within the
province of the editor.

Since only the
first two poems in the book have anything to do with Bombadil, its title can
mislead, but it has the larger truthfulness of telling the reader that most of
the pieces are connected in some degree with persons, events, or places
familiar to him in
The Lord of the Rings.
Indeed, three are repeated
verbatim from the epic: "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late,"
sung by Frodo in the inn at Bree; Sam's "The Stone Troll," sung to
cheer up his companions on the long road to Rivendell; and Sam's
"Oliphaunt," recited when he first sees the beast in battle in the
Vale of Ithilien. Why did Tolkien choose these particular songs for
republication here seven years after their appearance in the epic? Probably
because as sheer, gay nonsense rhymes they fit in well with the general tone of
his new collection. Also, each of the three is paired with one or more fresh
poems which serve as parallels or contrasts.

Thus
"Oliphaunt" is only the first of a group of three comic verse
versions of bestiary lore, the other animals treated being Fastitocalon, the
giant sea turtle, and the domestic cat. All of these creatures are presented
with the same kind of intimately affectionate wonder that runs through the
medieval bestiaries. Beneath the comic they all show a tinge of the formidable,
too. Oliphaunt is terrible in battle. Fastitocalon, like the bestiary whale,
will sink the unwary sailor who lands on him and kindles a fire, thinking him
an island. From the hobbit point of view, better never to land on uncharted
land; better still never go to sea at all. The cat seems all innocence in slumber,
but its dreams are of hunting and slaughter, like those of its savage kindred
in the jungle.

Similarly Frodo's
nursery jingle about the Man in the Moon carousing in the inn is followed by a
poem titled "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon," which barely
avoids a tragic tone. In it the Moon Man grows lonely in his pale, jeweled
domain and pines for the spinning earth below, the warmth of its fire, the
vivid colors of its land and sea, the "sanguine blood" of men, their
food, their wine, above all their companionship. What saves the tale for comedy
is that its hero is the sort of bumbler who trips by accident on his own stairs
and falls into the Bay of Belfalas. Netted up and set on land by fishermen, he
is a bedraggled figure who allows himself to be tricked out of his rich
garments, jewels, and silver by a surly innkeeper in exchange for a bowl of
cold porridge by a smoky fire:

An unwary guest on
a lunatic quest

from the mountains
of the Moon.

This is only one
of a series of puns and comic touches by which Tolkien keeps the poem light.
But he is almost of two minds about it, for he is treating a subject habitually
sad with him, the gulf fixed between men and dwellers in Faery, which is
institutionalized, so to speak, by the Ban of the Valar in
The Lord of the
Rings.
For a change, his approach here is from the side of the monarch of
Faery who tries to share the life of Earth in vain. The final two poems in the
collection will take up the theme again, but from the side of mortal men,
tragically.

The grisly
slapstick of "The Stone Troll" finds no parallels in its companion
piece, "Perry-the-Winkle." Whereas he first relates with relish the
encounter of a man with a troll who is gnawing his uncle's shinbone, the second
has some elements of pathos in picturing a lonely troll searching through the
Shire for a hobbit who will dare to be his friend. Its dominant mood, however,
is that of fun. His appearance scares the mayor and creates panic in the
marketplace until a brave hobbit rides off on his back to have tea with him in
his cave. The ensuing popularity of the troll because of his "cramsome
bread" and the fame as a baker, which comes to his hobbit friend from
learning the recipe, are pure Shire food-worship with a happy ending.

In none of the
poems so far discussed does Tolkien reach very high. Writing for amusement, he
purposely pulls back from the heights he sometimes attempts to scale in many of
the other poems embedded in his great prose epic. This intent to stay on a
comfortably gay level is particularly clear in the two Bombadil poems that open
the collection. Almost totally absent from them is the mysterious aura of
primal strength which sets Tom outside the spell of the one Ring and snatches
the hobbits from the tomb of the barrow-wights. So much so that Tolkien feels
it necessary to explain in the Preface that the two poems were written by
Buckland hobbits who "had . .. little understanding of his powers."
They regarded Bombadil "with amusement (tinged with fear)."

Accordingly, the
adventures Tom goes through in the poem which gives the collection its title
consist of his escapes from traps set for him by friends and enemies in the Old
Forest, but since none is made to seem really dangerous the tone is mainly one
of delight in woodland escapades. "No one had ever caught Tom walking in
the forest," says Goldberry in
The Lord of the Rings.
The present
verses show how he cannot be caught, and end by telling how he instead catches
Goldberry to be his bride. The events related, then, occur before Frodo and his
friends are rescued by Bombadil. The same is true of the boating trip in the
second poem, which he takes downriver to visit Farmer Maggot. The visit serves
an important function in the epic because it is by the Farmer that Tom is
warned that the four hobbits are traveling unprotected and will need his help.
This gravity of purpose, however, is smothered by episodes of converse with
woodland creatures as well as hobbits, and by the merry meeting of feast,
dance, and song with which the Farmer's family celebrate his coming. Both poems
employ the same couplet form— replete with feminine endings—which marks Tom's
every song in the epic, but fare all the better for the absence of intervening
"poetic" prose passages with the same rhythms, which make his talk in
the epic somewhat monotonous and too highly mannered.

"Errantry,"
the third poem in the book, has a quite different sort of connection with
The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien himself calls attention in the Preface to
the identity of its verse form with that used by Bilbo in the lay of Eärendil,
which he sang to Frodo in Rivendell. The two poems are utterly incongruous in
content, however. The Eärendil lay narrates the apotheosis of a hero, whereas
"errantry" details the aimless, wanderings of a messenger knight so
ridiculous as to forget the very message he is charged to deliver. In his pose
as editor Tolkien explains that Bilbo first wrote the piece as a specimen of
hobbit "nonsense rhyme" and then later transformed it "somewhat
incongruously" into the legend of Eärendil. We can believe, if we like,
that under this editorial disguise Tolkien is tellng us the order in which he
himself composed the two poems, but this would be to identify Bilbo with
Tolkien and to make a playful editorial mystification a serious assertion of
chronological fact. It seems far more likely that Tolkien wrote the Eärendil
lay first, about 1939 or 1940, while inditing the Rivendell episode in Part I
of the epic, and parodied it in "Errantry" much later, at the time
when he composed all or most of the verses in the present miscellany. Besides,
psychologically it is much more normal to break down heroic into mock-heroic
than to build up heroic out of sportive "nonsense rhyme." Tolkien
devised "Farmer Giles" as a spoof of knighthood not before but after
the knightly adventures of
The Lord of the Rings.

Be that as it may,
"Errantry" and the saga of Earen-dil as sung by Bilbo are obviously
designed for contrast. It is as if Tolkien challenged himself to see whether,
using a theme of endless wandering common to both poems, the same metrical
shapes and rhyme patterns, parallel descriptions of ships and armor, and even
some identical lines and phrases, he could produce in the one case a tragedy
and in the other an airy jest. Looking at the passages picturing the armor of
the two heroes we can see both the similarity in structure and the polarity in
tone:

"Eärendil"

In panoply of
ancient kings,

in chained rings
he armoured him;

his shining shield
was scored with runes

to ward all wounds
and harm from him;

his bow was made
of dragon-horn,

his arrows shorn
of ebony,

of silver was his
habergeon,

his scabbard of
chalcedony;

his sword of steel
was valiant,

of adamant his
helmet tall,

an eagle-plume
upon his crest,

upon his breast an
emerald.

"Errantry"

He made a shield
and morion

of coral and of
ivory,

a sword he made of
emerald,

- - - - - - - -

Of crystal was his
habergeon,

his scabbard of
chalcedony;

with silver tipped
at plenilune

his spear was hewn
in ebony.

His javelins were
of malachite

and stalactite—he
brandished them,

- - - - - - - -

Knight Errant's
sword of emerald, his javelins of copper and cavern stalactites are no more
outrageously impractical than his "gondola" sprinkled with three
separate perfumes, his proposal of marriage to a butterfly "that fluttered
by," his battles with "the dragon-flies of Paradise," and so on.
While Eärendil's ship is being readied by the Valar to sail the skies forever
as the Evening Star, Errant's gondola "of leaves and gossamer" is
performing a kind of "Imram" voyage among mysterious ocean isles,
meeting with adventure after adventure until remembering that he started out
with a message, he goes home to discover what it is in order that he may set
forth again, only to forget it again,
ad infinitum.