Master of Middle Earth (30 page)

The two poems do
not destroy each other. Each is good in its own kind. In aid of the distinction
between kinds Tolkien keeps the Verse form sober for "Eärendil" but
pushes it to baroque excesses in "Errantry" by often rhyming the
middle of one line with the end of its predecessor:

There was a merry
passenger,

a messenger, a
mariner:

- - - - - - - -

He called the
winds of argosies

with cargoes in to
carry him

- - - - - - - -

The
"Errantry" rhymes are often so far-fetched, as above, that it is hard
to tell when Tolkien intends a rhyme.

"Princess
Mee" falls in the category of poems of which the Preface remarks that,
"sometimes one may easily suspect more than meets the ear." Since the
Preface does not discuss it at all, and it is not related in any way to
The
Lord of the Rings
or to any other poem in the compilation, we are free to
make of it what we can. On its face it simply tells the story of the little
(young?) elfin Princess Mee who, dancing one starry night on the surface of a
pool in the woods, looks down to see for the first time Princess Shee dancing
upside down toe to toe with her and returning her wondering gaze. Since none of
her fellow elves can tell her the way to the land where Shee lives, Mee meets
her nightly on the pool, where they dance together alone:

So still on her
own

An elf alone

Dancing as before

With pearls in
hair

And kirtle fair

And slippers frail

Of fishes mail
went Mee:

Of fishes' mail

And slippers frail

And kirtle fair

With pearls in
hair went Shee!

For the meaning of
the poem the first two lines of this final stanza are decisive. Of all the
elves Tolkien ever writes about, Mee is the only one who dances constantly
alone—with her reflection. We are to understand that the poor Princess has
fallen in love with herself, and that Tolkien is giving us a transcription of
the Narcissus legend. With this realization the poem, heretofore merely quiet
and charming, become studdenly deadly.

Tolkien also is
proving himself master of the short line. He has done very well with the
four-foot line of "Errantry" and now does eves better with the
two-foot line of "Princess Mee." In the stanza quoted the descending
description of Mee from hair down to toe, ascending from toe to hair in
identical detail for Shee, admirably evokes the picture of the elf Princess
dancing above her own image.

"Shadow
Bride" and "The Mewlips" are the two poems of the collection
which lend themselves to definite interpretation least readily, and perhaps not
at all. One is never quite sure whether they are more than surface.
"Shadow Bride" may be no more than what it seems, an abrupt little
tale of a bewitched man without a shadow who, when a lady strays near, pounces
upon her and "wraps her shadow round him." Whereupon she must dwell
underground perpetually except for one night a year when the two of them dance
together till dawn "and a single shadow make." Without invoking
modern psychological theories about the shadow selves we are all supposed to
have— theories which do not seem characteristic of Tolkien's thought—we may
take note of resemblance to the Proserpina legend. But since discrepancies
between the poem and the legend are as numerous as the likenesses, dogmatism
would be unwise.

"Shadow
Bride" remains puzzling partly because it cannot be related to any person
or episode in Tolkien's other writings or, indeed, to any other poem in the
miscellany in which it appears. The same can almost be said about "The
Mewlips," mysterious creatures whom the poem warns the reader directly not
to visit lest they devour him. The "Merlock Mountains" and "the
marsh of Tode," which must be traversed before the visitor arrives at
their underground dwellings "by a dark pool's borders" besides a
"rotting river-strand," are not recognizable as known places in
Middle-earth.
³³
The temptation is to see these Mewlips as just one
more marvelous birth from Tolkien's imagination, like ores, shelobs, and woses.
There are tantalizing hints of something more, however. These beings lurk in
cellars where they count their gold by the light of a single candle. The
cellars have doors with entrance bells to be rung, and their walls drip with
moisture. These details bring to mind an urban slum, and the dangers of being
swallowed up by its gray and greedy swampiness. Every reader of Tolkien knows
his hatred of modern industrialism and its cities. Is he conjuring up here an
allegory of its ultimate horrors? This is quite possible. No more can safely be
said.

The poems have
been growing increasingly somber toward the end of the collection. Now the
final three pieces take leave of the comic altogether. Nor is their meaning in
doubt. For all of them Tolkien in the Preface forges bonds with
The Lord of
the Rings
or its backgrounds, but the bonds are not always close. "The
Hoard," for instance, is said to contain "echoes" of a
Númenorean tale of the First Age concerning the man Turin and the dwarf Mim.
Since nowhere are we told the story between them and they are never named in
the poem itself, the nature of these "echoes" cannot be defined. The
poem stands on its own as a grimly marching account of the power of a hoard of
treasure to rot the characters of its successive possessors. Singing elves, the
original artisans, are slain or chained by an avaricious dwarf, who thereafter
spends his days doing nothing but work in order to add to the hoard. In his old
age, too feeble even to see his precious stones or hear the approach of an
enemy, he in turn is killed by a young dragon. After a lifetime of being
"to his gold chained" the dragon, now old in his turn, is easily dispatched
by a young knight. Many years later, "his glory fallen, his rule
unjust," the old knight is easily surprised by the slayers who come to
burn his hall and seize his kingdom. The murderers do not uncover the hoard,
however, which remains lost underground in the care of its final owner, Night.
It has been lethal, not merely physically but morally. A hoard of treasure is,
as we know, Tolkien's perennial object of the cardinal sin of
"possessiveness." face with a body of hobbit poems describing the
"wandering-madness" which afflicts some of their race and leaves them
"queer" if they ever return home. More particularly, he says, someone
in the Red Book has subtitled it "Frodos Dreme," meaning one of those
despairing dreams which tormented Frodo after his return to the Shire from
Mordor. This ascription may account for its being written in the first person
singular, the only poem in the book so written. Again, however, the poem needs
no such connection to give it value. It is in fact a superb expression of a
favorite theme of Tolkien's, the loneliness of the human being who can live
neither with his own kind nor with those creatures of the imagination who
inhabit Faery, the enchanted land to which he is irresistibly called.

Walking alone by
the shore the narrator (or dreamer) is summoned across the seas by the clang of
a buoy heard in a shell that he picks up. But he does not belong in the lovely
country of "ever-eve," as he discovers when its invisible people whom
he can hear singing and dancing flee him with "never a greeting." In
a moment of high poignancy the wanderer shouts angrily that he is "king of
this land" and demands, "Speak to me words! Show me a face!" In
swift punishment he is isolated until he is old in a wood where he can hear
insects and birds but no human voices. Even after he has crawled back defeated
to his own country, his seashell dead and silent, he walks the sad lanes and
blind alleys, not belonging there either; "To myself I talk;/for still
they speak not, men that meet." Tolkien is saying something vital here
about the homelessness of the creative artist.

The coming
departure from Middle-earth of all the elves (save those content to lose the
high heritage of their race) shadows the whole ending of
The Lord of the
Rings.
"The Last Ship," also the last poem in the book, envisions
the final boatload leaving Gondor. The elves in it call to Firiel, a mortal
woman on the shore, to come with them in the one seat still empty. She would
like to go, for she is "elven-fair" and her youthful beauty,
inexorably fading on Earth, will not fade in Elvenhome, "where the White
Tree is growing,/ and the Star shines upon the foam." But as she steps
forward, "deep in clay her feet sank," and she cries out that she
cannot come, for "I was born Earth's daughter!" She has to return
home, don her smock of russet brown, and "step down" to her daily
labors, as did Smith at Wootton Major. In one way or another the Ban of the
Valar still holds, Tolkien seems to say. Mortal clay may visit Faery but can
establish no lasting citizenship. To claim kingship there as does the nameless
narrator of "The Sea-Bell" is to reenact the sacrilege of the
Númenoreans trying to conquer Valinor, and to be punished by a death of body
and spirit. The theme of limits to man's access to Faery haunts Tolkien's
works, and never more tellingly than in the two poems that conclude this
collection.

Richard C. West,
Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist
(Bibliographies and Checklists,
no. 11. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970) gives full information
about all of Tolkien's writings, their various editions, and places and dates
of publication both in England and in America. Only a few highlights need be
mentioned here as a help to the general reader.

The first edition
of
The Hobbit
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1937) has achieved rare-book
status, and the 1938 edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company) scarcely less
so. Subsequent printings by these two publishers in London (1951) and Boston
(1958) are available in large libraries. Most bookstores today stock a
paperbound edition of
The Hobbit
(New York: Ballantine Books, Inc.,
1965.)

The three volumes
of
The Lord of the Rings
were first published in London by Allen and
Unwin, 1954-55. This first edition was issued in the United States the
following year, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955-56). Tolkien's own
subsequent revisions, however, appear in a second, three-volume hardbound
edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967). This is considered the
standard edition and it is the one I have used in preparing this book. There is
also a three-volume paperback edition published by Ballantine Books in 1965.

Most illuminating
for Tolkien's theory of fantasy writing is his essay "On
Fairy-stories," originally composed as a lecture for delivery at the
University of St. Andrews in 1938. He has since revised and enlarged it several
times. In its final form it appears in
Tree and Leaf
(Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1965) as well as in the paperback collection
The Tolkien
Reader
(New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965). The texts are the same.
The Tolkien Reader
has the unique value of also including several of
Tolkien's shorter pieces: "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's
Son"; "Leaf by Niggle"; "Farmer Giles of Ham";
The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
In 1969, Ballantine Books issued the one-volume
paperback
Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham.

Unfortunately two
of Tolkien's narrative poems, "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (
Welsh
Review,
IV:4 [December 1945]) and "Imram"
(Time and Tide, 36
[December 3, 1955]), still can be read only in the periodicals in which they
first appeared.

1. Revised and
enlarged, the lecture was published in essay form in
Essays Presented to
Charles Williams
(London: Oxford University Press, 1947). The essay,
further revised, is reprinted in
Tree and Leaf
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1965).

2. See
The Lord
of the Rings,
2nd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), Prologue,
I, 23-24. All references to the epic will be to the three volumes of this
edition.

3. Compare similar
statements in I, 17; HI, 313, 385, and especially 411.

4.
Tree and
Leaf,
pp. 24-25.

5. Ransacking the
Pleistocene for niches into which to fit the Ages of Middle-earth is a pleasant
pastime, which one hopes the players of the game are not taking seriously. See
Margaret Howes' delightful article, "The Elder Ages and the Later
Glaciations of the Pleistocene Epoch,"
Tolkien Journal,
IV: 2
(1967), which picks a span from 95,000 years to 65,000 years ago.

6. Compare Sam's
bestiary poem entitled "Oliphaunt" in
The Adventures of Tom
Bombadil
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963).

7. "On
Fairy-stories" considers communication with the animal world a basic human
need. See Chapter V. On the wanton destruction of trees, see the Introduction
of "Leaf by Niggle,"
Tree and Leaf,
pp. 59 ff., and of course
many passages about the ents in the epic itself.

8. The description
I give of the Valar and their country in this and subsequent paragraphs is a
blending of information from
The Lord of the Rings
(chiefly. Appendices
A and B) with elaborations later published by Tolkien in
The Road Goes Ever
On
(Boston: Houghton Mifllin Co., 1967), pp. 65-66.

9. The
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
is discussed in detail in my analysis of
Tolkien's "Imram." See Chapter VII.

10.
The Road
Goes Ever On,
p. 66.

11. These examples
come mainly from Appendices A and B, but most of them are alluded to also in
the course of the three volumes of the epic.