Chapter Seven

William Guest

William Morris and the theme of hospitality

ONE OF THE strongest modern influences on Tolkien’s writing is to be found in the work of the poet and designer William Morris (1834– 96), author of a number of romances (romances here in the sense of novels or fantasies with legendary or exotic settings), which many scholars consider to be important precursors of The Hobbit and LOTR.

A number of parallels may be drawn. Both Morris and Tolkien were well read in Old English and Old Norse, in what Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis called northern literature, and its themes are everywhere apparent in their fictional writings. Both Morris and Tolkien were educated at Exeter College, Oxford, and Tolkien must have seen the tapestry The Adoration of the Magi in the college chapel, designed by Morris’s long-term collaborator, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and made at Morris’s tapestry works at Merton Abbey. Morris and Burne-Jones were members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement in art that sought to revive medieval themes and styles in Victorian art and design; the notion of a brotherhood of like-minded writers is one that appealed to Tolkien and his school friends in their writers’ circle the TCBS. Undoubtedly, Tolkien was influenced also by Morris’s designs – the patterns of tiles and internal decorations – and he made his own designs in a similar manner.¹ Morris’s medievalism extended into production and manufacture following the trail laid by John Ruskin: it was felt that all household goods should be valued equally for their beauty as well as for their function – such ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement surely influenced Tolkien, for instance, in his descriptions of the artistry and craftsmanship of the inhabitants of Rivendell or Lothlorien in LOTR or Nargothrond and Gondolin in The Silmarillion. Not that Tolkien drew all his inspiration directly from Morris, for, as a university teacher of Old and Middle English, Tolkien had direct knowledge of the same medieval texts that had influenced Morris.

As well as a writer, Tolkien was a moderately gifted cartographer, illustrator, painter and calligrapher, and this was also an ability he shared with William Morris. Tolkien sometimes began with an image, map or picture and worked out his story and characters on that basis: the most obvious example is The Hobbit, and there is a clear parallel in the cartographic plots of many of Morris’s romances, from The Roots of the Mountain to The Sundering Flood or The Water of the Wondrous Isles. Tolkien never achieved great success as a painter of human figures, as he was the first to admit, and here again there is a similarity to Morris, who – though more gifted in this respect – was nevertheless also reluctant to paint human subjects. In both artists we can admire landscapes – impressive views of trees, mountains and water – and fine illustrations of buildings and interiors. And not content to be only passive admirers of medieval manuscripts and scripts both Morris and Tolkien developed skills in calligraphy (in Tolkien’s case there was influence from his mother, and perhaps his grandfather), and they adapted and invented new scripts to suit the nature of their writing. In an ideal world, we ought to read their work in facsimiles of the original manuscripts, as can be done in some editions of the work of William Blake, in order fully to appreciate the artistry of both visual form and narrative content.

Fig. 7a Exeter College, Oxford, rear quad and garden

Tolkien seems to have known all of Morris’s fiction and poetry,² and back in 1914 while a student he had even composed a story based on the Finnish legend of Kullervo, written in the same archaic prose-and-verse style that Morris had employed in The House of the Wolfings (1888), the first of two stories set in northern Europe in the so-called Dark Ages. For an example of that style, the following is a passage from the sequel The Roots of the Mountains (1889) dealing with the arrival of the man Goldmane, a stranger from Burgdale, at a mysterious house in the pine-forest, and his reception in the hall of the Wolfings or mountain-people (which may be compared to the reception of strangers in the Beorn chapter of The Hobbit or the chapter ‘King of the Golden Hall’ in The Two Towers):

Therewith she led him gently over the threshold into the hall, and it seemed to him as if she were the fairest and the noblest of all the Queens of ancient story.

When he was in the house he looked and saw that, rough as it was without it lacked not fairness within.³

Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891) is another variation on the theme of guestkindliness, a utopian vision of a London of the future to which the main protagonist finds himself transported one morning. The rest of the novel narrates the journey he undertakes from a house in London to a house on the Upper Thames, and it bears some similarity with The Book of Lost Tales, in which, had he completed his task, Tolkien would have moved his guest from the house in Warwick–Kortirion to a country house at Tavrobel, a place corresponding to Great Haywood in Staffordshire (again significant to Tolkien for family reasons).

Both Morris and Tolkien open their narratives in a similar manner: a traveller responds favourably to the hospitality he receives in a wonderful house that he arrives at by chance. In News from Nowhere the traveller, who calls himself William Guest in this allegorical and partly autobiographical dream, begins with an account of ‘a brisk conversational discussion’ on the subject of the ‘future of the fully-developed new society’.⁴ Returning home, he retires to sleep, and wakes up – or more precisely seems to wake up – in his own bed, like Chaucer’s dreamer in The Book of the Duchess, only to find his house and garden and city all changed for the better, with the air and water cleaner, the people brighter and freer. His reactions are partly those of a stranger (as the people he meets in the new world imagine him to be) and partly those of the time traveller who is shocked, though in this case pleasantly shocked, by the changes that have taken place in the world and the society with which he is familiar.

The buildings of this fictional world partly mirror Morris’s inspirational work in architecture and design, for the story begins at a newly designed guesthouse in London and ends at an old country house on the upper Thames. In the fine illustrated edition of News from Nowhere, published by the Kelmscott Press in 1892, the frontispiece illustration reveals the second house to be Morris’s property Kelmscott Manor itself, an old house that Morris saw as embodying pre-industrial architectural principles, while the guesthouse where Guest begins his river journey is reminiscent of Morris’s own architectural creation Red House, designed to his own specifications. As Marcus Waithe has reminded us, Red House was made to embody, within a modern, newly designed building, something of the old values of hospitality as found at Kelmscott, or indeed in any other manorial hall of the medieval centuries. Pictures of Red House can be viewed for instance in Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris (1994): the large front door with its big strap hinges ‘set in a deep porch, giving a sense of monumental welcome’; then the interior hall with its high ceilings, arched corridors and spaces that seem ‘to flow from room to room’; finally the first floor drawing room below the roof that Morris wished to be ‘the most beautiful room in the world’, with its rugs and two carved oak chairs before the huge hearth and red-tiled fireplace and a huge celebratory wedding scene derived from a scene in the medieval writer Froissart’s Chronicle, painted by Edward Burne-Jones to cover the whole of the far wall of the room.⁵

Morris’s architecture and its influence on Tolkien

With the design of these rooms in mind, let us return to Tolkien’s The Cottage of Lost Play. Like Goldmane in Morris’s Roots of the Mountains, Eriol is invited to seek of the lord and lady a night’s ‘guest-kindliness’ and pass across the threshold. He enters the building, which turns out to offer more attractions than the initial impression would give, since the house is delightfully spacious, and lord Lindo and his wife Vairë come forth to greet him. The guestkindliness or hospitality follows a time-honoured ritual pattern of word of welcome, naming, and stating of purpose. Eriol declares his name to be the Stranger, from the Great Lands (i.e. from Middle-earth), and that he was ‘seeking whither so his desire for travel led him’. After this ritual has been fulfilled he is invited to join his hosts at dinner.

Fig. 7b Door to Exeter College Chapel

In a sequence anticipating the chapter ‘The Last Stage’ in The Hobbit and ‘Many Meetings’ in FR,⁶ both set in the Last Homely House of Elrond at Rivendell, the company now repair to the great hall, a place of warmth generated by a fire burning in a hearth set in three out of the four walls of its internal space. A gong sounds and a throng of people of all ages and types gather to dine (compare this with the statement that ‘the hall of Elrond’s house was filled with folk’ in FR ). Again the ritual pattern is rehearsed, here one of song and blessing, followed by talk – the first word being given to the Stranger, allowing him to tell his story and then in return to ask his questions about the city he is visiting. At the end of the meal the cups are filled for a final ritual drink, then the big oaken doors at the far end of the hall are flung open, and the Stranger is conveyed even further into the interior of the house. Again one might compare Morris’s Roots of the Mountains; there the rough but fair interior of the hall is similar to the hall of Beorn in The Hobbit, though more sociable and hospitable and more elaborately decorated:

The hangings on the walls, though they left some places bare which were hung with fresh boughs, were fairer than he had ever seen, so that he deemed that they must come from far countries and the City of Cities: therein were images wrought of warriors and fair women of old time and their dealings with the Gods and the Giants, and Wondrous wights; and he deemed that this was the story of some great kindred, and that their token and the sign of their banner must needs be the Wood-wolf, for everywhere it was wrought in these pictured webs. Perforce he looked long and earnestly at these fair things, for the hall was not dark yet, because the brands on the hearth were flaming their last […]⁷

The hall of the mountain forest people is decorated with the tapestries depicting their myths and legends – the ‘fair things’ that catch and hold the attention of the newcomer. Similarly, in The Cottage of Lost Play, the assembled company passes through a short broad corridor whose walls are decorated with tapestries telling stories which Eriol cannot make out in the dark because the candle-bearers are behind him. Like the frame tale itself, the narrative art on the walls of the dark building further serves the function of mediation, attracting both the traveller and also the reader with the promise of stories to come.

At this point in the narrative, however, the pictured stories are still hard to make out in the darkness, and as Eriol walks the short broad corridor the only light comes from the room ahead, the Tale-fire burning in the Room of Logs. In some respects the Room of Logs is similar to the hall of the Wolfings in Morris’s Roots of the Mountains. More to the point, it is not unlike the drawing room of Morris’s Red House, since it is an attractive room lit by firelight dancing on the walls and the low ceiling, with many rugs and soft cushions placed around the hearth, and one ‘deep chair with carven arms and feet’.⁸ Lord Lindo the host will take the chair, and the listeners will take their places on the cushions or comfortably stretch by the great hearth fire. The scene is now set for the telling of the tales. This is a ‘fair room’ and, as already intimated, it will have a close analogue in the tale-telling at Rivendell in LOTR (a scene anticipated, albeit very briefly, on Bilbo’s second visit to Rivendell in The Hobbit). In LOTR it is Elrond and Arwen his daughter who are the hosts, and in a similar manner they rise together at the end of the meal and lead the company down the hall. The doors are thrown open and they proceed down a passageway to another hall in which there are no tables, but a fire is burning brightly in the hearth between carved pillars.⁹ Lindo’s Room of Logs of course correspond to Elrond’s ‘Hall of Fire’, the room where Frodo discovers Bilbo after the feast at Rivendell. This room is the place and occasion for ‘many songs and tales’.

Tolkien’s concept of guestkindliness

On the theme of hospitality Marcus Waithe makes the following salient point that ‘the manner in which a household receives its guests – the unexpected as well as the expected – can tell us a great deal’, notably about a society’s ideals of cooperation and isolationism.¹⁰ He goes on to consider the political ideal of openness to the outside that a hospitable society tends to proclaim and to contrast it with the suspicion and stasis, the unwillingness to change, of a closed society. As he demonstrates, there is – in the thinking of Karl Popper and others – a theory that western utopias have had an emphasis ‘on perfectionism, on order, on social unity and on splendid isolation’ that can verge on totalitarianism. In Waithe’s view, it was Morris’s medievalism that made the difference: the model of the medieval manorial hall open to travellers. In Morris this ideal of ‘old English hospitality’ celebrated by William Cobbett and John Ruskin is commingled with a Marxist view of history in order to present a liberal, open-handed Socialist alternative. And, in literary terms, Morris’s project in the 1890s offered a way of dealing with such themes through the symbolism, the ‘applicability’ as Tolkien would call it, of imaginative fiction. In Morris’s romances, different peoples at different stages of societal development are brought into contact in imaginary worlds set at different periods in the idealised past.

Tolkien shared Morris’s views on ethnology, on the environment, home and work, arts and crafts, but all this without the Socialism that makes Morris the man so distinctive. This means that Tolkien is closer to, say, Ruskin than to Morris in his political attitude, which is hierarchic and traditionalist, if also environmentally aware. But Ruskin provided no literary models for Tolkien to follow. Morris’s influence on Tolkien on the other hand is literary rather than political. Through a writer such as Morris, Tolkien saw the possibilities open up for the use of medieval themes and styles in modern literature. And although Tolkien is not an overtly political writer, his work nevertheless shares in the context of debate on the applicability of the English past that is widespread in early twentieth-century fiction and poetry.

A good deal hinges on the nonce word guestkindliness. This is a particularly apt example of a hapax legomenon (the philological term is used to identify a word appearing in a text such as Beowulf and then nowhere else in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature). In fact, Tolkien employs his new coinage on three occasions in The Book of Lost Tales: in volume I, chapter 1 (with a hyphen, ‘guest-kindliness’) to describe the welcome at the Cottage of Lost Play and then again, this time naturalised without the hyphen as ‘guestkindliness’, in chapter 8, where the talk is of Eriol moving on to enjoy the hospitality of Gilfanon at the ancient ‘House of the Hundred Chimneys’ near the bridge of Tavrobel. (A third example occurs in volume II in The Nauglafring.) As a place-name Tavrobel was associated biographically in Tolkien’s writing with the village of Great Haywood in Staffordshire, where his wife Edith lived for a time while he served in the war.

Tolkien seems to have enjoyed coining words that, in his considered opinion, could or should have existed in Old English. His first published book was A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), to be discussed further in chapter 14, which was basically a glossary or dictionary to accompany the textbook of Middle English compiled by Kenneth Sisam (1887–1971), a young specialist in early English from New Zealand who had taught Tolkien at Oxford. The two books were soon amalgamated into one volume.¹¹ The Vocabulary contains a number of examples of words unrecorded in the surviving texts; each of these hypothetical words is marked with an asterisk to show that it is ‘theoretically reconstructed’. One is the entry for Middle English pypynge, which is glossed as ‘piping, playing on pipes’ and given an Old English etymology: since the noun pipe existed in Old English, Tolkien feels justified in reconstructing a verb *pipian, ‘to play on pipes’. Similarly, guestkindliness is a reconstruction, a hypothetical Old English compound word apparently made up of the elements giest (guest), cynde (kind), lic (ly), nes (ness). Tolkien nowhere discusses the word. However, he does enter kynd(e)ly in his Middle English Vocabulary, as it appears twice in the selected texts in the accompanying textbook by Sisam, and Tolkien gives its Old English origin as gecyndelic, explaining its meaning ‘having natural feeling’ as a semantic development from the original idea expressed by kynde of ‘inborn, naturally belonging to one’. In this way, then, guestkindliness is more suited to his theme, promising more ‘natural feeling’ than the Latin- and French-derived term hospitality, which more simply connotes the receiving of guests.

Frodo’s sojourn at Rivendell is in fact the second instance of Elvish guest-kindliness in LOTR. The first occurs in FR in the Shire, the encounter with Gildor Inglorion in the chapter ‘Three is Company’, where Frodo is hailed as elf-friend because of his knowledge of their language. On this occasion Gildor and his men fashion a temporary guest-hall out of a suitable tree-lined location in the forest above Woodhall. In this encounter, there are two important factors: the closeness and connectedness of the elves to the land in which they move, and the notion of elf-friend, the special guest (for both Frodo and Eriol are granted this status). Eriol’s story is one made round the notion of a wish: it is a reworking of the old legend of the elf-friend, the man who becomes a guest at Elvenhome and in the end develops a strong desire to join in kinship with his hosts. That this notion had an ancient pedigree is suggested by the existence of the Anglo-Saxon name Ælfwine, a compound name meaning ‘Elf-friend’ in Old English, with a related form in the cognate name of the early medieval Lombard King Alboin (where Lombardic Alb- corresponds to Anglo-Saxon Ælf- and -oin to -wine). In the later draft notes for the continuation of The Book of Lost Tales, Eriol’s name is changed to Ælfwine, and Tolkien’s later time-travel story The Lost Road again features a protagonist by the related name of Alboin Errol. In The Hobbit, Bilbo himself formally receives the title ‘elf-friend and blessed’ from the Elvenking in exchange for his gift of a dwarvish necklace of silver and pearl at the end of the novel. This theme of the ‘elf-friend’, and the otherworldly hospitality that he enjoys, is remarkably persistent in Tolkien’s writings.

Tolkien perhaps thought of himself as a latter-day Ælfwine. A driving force in his work is his rejection of the mechanical and the soulless, a hatred of bureaucracy and mechanisation as found for instance in modern factory production and experienced at its worst in modern trench warfare. By contrast he had a strong feeling for the world of nature: a love of trees, rivers, mountains and the tillage and husbandry of the land and the fruits of the earth, all embodied in the notion of the Eldar or elves. The earlier model for all this, the kindred spirit, was – as we have seen – the Victorian writer and designer William Morris. Ellen, a character in Morris’s News from Nowhere, captures the feeling very well:

She led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun browned hand and arm on the lichened wall as if to embrace it, and cried out, ‘O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it, – as this has done!’ (chapter 31)

In Tolkien’s writing the love of the earth can be equally intense, but because of his staunch Catholic faith he adds a theological twist to its expression that is absent from Morris’s mostly Socialist perspective. In this he resembles the Catholic writer and poet Francis Thompson, who shares similar interests in the beings of other worlds.¹² Tolkien’s concern is the immortality of the elves – those unfallen, near-human beings who seem to have their source on the margins of classical and above all medieval literature – and their relationship with the earth. As a passage in The Silmarillion makes clear, one of Tolkien’s themes is the transience of human beings and the immortality of elves, whose love of the Earth is all the more poignant because of it, and who see human beings as transient guests or strangers among them.¹³ Often in Tolkien’s fictions, the children of men – mortal human beings – are literally the guests enjoying the hospitality or, as he calls it in The Cottage of Lost Play, the ‘guest-kindliness’ of the people of the Otherworld, whether this is Eriol visiting Lindo’s hall at Kortirion on the Lonely Isle, or Tuor arriving at the city of Gondolin in The Lost Tales, or Bilbo reaching the Last Homely House at Rivendell in The Hobbit.

Fig. 7c Exeter College inside passageway behind the chapel