Chapter Eight

‘The lonely sea and the sky’

The hobbit and the sea

THE SEA IS a major archetypal image in Tolkien’s mythology. He was fascinated by its changing aspects, its rolling breakers and wailing gulls, rocky coastline and far-off islands. In LOTR, the last we see of the character Legolas, son of the elvenking of the Forest of Mirkwood, is his departure downhill singing of the future time when his people will leave Ithilien and follow the course of the Anduin down to the sea, where a grey ship is waiting to take them across the sea to the undying lands beyond:

To the Sea, to the Sea! The white gulls are crying,

The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.¹

There are echoes here of ‘I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky’, the opening line of the popular poem ‘Sea-Fever’ by John Masefield (1878–1967), the Herefordshire boy who became a naval apprentice on the White Star Line, then a journalist and critic living in the countryside near Oxford, a writer of sea yarns and other stories, and eventually, in 1930, Poet Laureate. Tolkien met Masefield in Oxford in the 1930s, when Masefield recruited him to take part in the live recitations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. Given that Masefield also wrote an account of the Battle of the Somme and was the author of children’s stories and fantasies such as The Midnight Folk (1927), it seems likely that Tolkien knew his poems; here for comparison is the second stanza of Masefield’s ‘Sea-Fever’:

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

The poem had been in the public consciousness for some time since it first appeared in the Salt-Water Ballads of 1902, and it is regarded as one of Masefield’s best-known pieces. Tolkien’s choice of phrase in ‘white gulls are crying’ and ‘white foam is flying’ sets up further verbal echoes of Masefield’s ‘white clouds flying’ and ‘sea-gulls crying’, as well as expressing a similar theme of sea fever.²

At one stage early in his writing of the sequel to The Hobbit, before it took shape in his mind as the ‘Lord of the Rings’, Tolkien considered that Bilbo also might catch something of the sea-longing. Tolkien at this stage (early 1938) had written only one chapter, the essence of which is that Bilbo leaves the Shire. Scratching around to find the new direction for the sequel, Tolkien wrote various plot summaries in note form and fragments of narrative. In these it appears that Bilbo is short of money: this is one possible motivation for his journey. Another more serious urge to travel is also mooted: that Bilbo seems also to have caught the dragon-sickness, in the manner of Thorin in the early stages of The Hobbit as discussed above. He travels to Rivendell to consult Elrond and ask for his advice on how to heal his unsettlement and desire for money. The note is brief, but it appears that Elrond advises him to travel to an island (that may be Britain) called the Perilous Isle, far in the west where the elves still reign supreme. A snatch of their conversation is recorded in the fragment, and it appears that Bilbo tells Elrond that he has a great wish to look again on a live dragon.³

Fig. 8a Sea-mew

Bilbo of course does not make this journey to the Perilous Isle in any of Tolkien’s extant writings. But the possibility is intriguing: the story would have sent Bilbo off on voyages in the wake of Eriol, the traveller who hears all the lore and wisdom of his hosts in The Book of Lost Tales. There is also a hint that perhaps Bilbo’s adventures might have mirrored those of the great mariner of Tolkien’s mythology, Eärendel.

Early experiences of the sea

Tolkien’s appreciation of the sea was deep-rooted, going back to his childhood. In 1891, his father Arthur, a descendant of German émigrés, married Mabel Suffield: her respectable mercantile family from Worcestershire in the Midlands seem to have agreed to the match only with reluctance. The Tolkien family firm had gone bankrupt, and Arthur Tolkien’s solution was to take up a post in a South African bank and set up house in Bloemfontein with his wife and the young family that appeared soon afterwards (Ronald was born in 1892, his brother Hilary in 1894). From a European perspective, the town of Bloemfontein was a distant inland outpost: a ‘horrid waste’ is how Mabel described it. A photograph of the Tolkien house reproduced in Carpenter’s biography shows a long dusty street lined with houses and shops with wooden frontages not unlike a (Hollywood) Dodge City.⁴ The open veldt was not far away. In this rough township, several incidents in the life of the boy are of arguable effect on the later life of the man, or at least of the writer; they include a brief (and only playful) abduction by the house boy, a painful encounter with a tarantula spider and bouts of ill-health – attributed to the climate and followed by convalescence at the coast, and then the return back permanently to England with his mother and brother Hilary.

In England, Ronald was to live for settled periods in various villages, towns and cities: in Sarehole, in Birmingham, in Warwick, in Leeds and in Oxford, all locations in the Midlands or north of England, all inland places roughly equidistant in any direction from the various coasts of the island of Britain. But the coast had been a place of refuge in Tolkien’s very early years in South Africa: he remembered ‘a wide flat sandy shore’;⁵ and of the long voyage home to England he recalled in later life ‘the clear waters of the Indian Ocean’ and also the harbour of Lisbon at sunrise, with the ‘great city set on the hillside above’.⁶ During his childhood in England the sea continued to be a place of escape for Ronald and his brother Hilary. With their mother Mabel there were visits to the English Channel, recorded in an image of the two boys on a beach in Dorset, painted by Ronald at the age of ten. Later, after their mother’s untimely death, there were visits with their guardian to the east coast, to Yorkshire and the North Sea, seen in sketches of Whitby harbour and the ruins of the Abbey on the hill overlooking the town to the north and the open sea to the east.

These summer visits to the relatively gentle English seaside resorts did not prepare him for what was to be the essentially overwhelming experience of the ‘Great Sea’ as a young man. In the period 1910–12, he made two visits to St Andrews in Scotland, probably to see his aunt Jane Neave, née Suffield, his mother’s sister, a school-teacher who (as was pointed out in chapter 1) turned out be a great encourager and patron of his poetry. Contemplating the coastline at St Andrews, he wrote his unpublished twelve-line poem ‘The Grimness of the Sea’.⁷ The title reflects well the direction of his thoughts at the time, although this was not to be the final version. According to Christopher Tolkien, a new poem was eventually written, and it passed through three distinct versions: ‘The Tides’ dated 1914; ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’ of 1915; and ‘The Horns of Ulmo’ of 1917. The titles are significant, indicating the line of development. From what was purely a nature poem set in the present day of 1914, Tolkien moved to a legendary setting in the ‘elder day’ in the text of 1915, and thence to a specifically mythological incident in The Fall of Gondolin, one of the stories from The Book of Lost Tales, which he wrote in 1917.

In the mythology of Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales, men had appeared in the world from great lands to the east and thus had no knowledge of the ocean. And in The Fall of Gondolin, Tolkien narrates the first moment of human contact with the sea. The hero Tuor, who at the start of the tale is living alone on the shores of Lake Mithrim, has been singled out as a man of destiny by Ulmo the Lord of the Waters. One day, by the banks of a secret river, Tuor takes up his quest, the challenge of his life, and sets off downstream following the river through strange caverns and dark passages.

Fig. 8b The lonely sea and the sky

He emerges near the coast and for the first time in his life hears the mournful calling of the gulls and feels against his face the wine-fresh wind from the Great Sea. As will be seen below, the story originates in the imagery of the poem ‘The Horns of Ulmo’, which is extant in three versions of 1914, 1915 and 1917. The way the poem changed is important. The textual history of Tolkien’s poem ‘The Horns of Ulmo’ in fact mirrors the germination of Tolkien’s mythology over a period of four significant years in his life.

An artist at work: the three revisions of ‘The Horns of Ulmo’

During this eventful period Tolkien finished his university studies in English philology at Exeter College, Oxford, married Edith Bratt, and went to fight in the Great War. He attained the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers, serving as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme; then, after contracting trench fever, he spent a period of recovery and creative convalescence in the north of England. Here he completed the third and final version of the poem.

The poem can be read in Christoper Tolkien’s edition of The Shaping of Middle-earth; the 1914 version, ‘The Tides’, begins as follows:

I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea.⁸

The occasion was a walking holiday on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall in the far south west of England in August 1914. Led by Father Vincent Reade of the Birmingham Oratory (the well-known Catholic church of Cardinal Newman that Tolkien as a child had attended with his mother), there were hikes along the cliffs with views of the Atlantic; and there were inland walks across fields and steep valleys with streams, with the ever-present sound of the ocean in the background. As he recorded in a letter of 8 August to his fiancée Edith, the walk passed over moorland above the cliffs as far as Kynance Cove. The summer sun was hot but there was a huge swell out on the green Atlantic Ocean sending breakers against the rocky coast. The cliffs had wind-holes which made trumpet noises and there were holes right down to the sea which sprayed water like the spout of a whale.⁹

Out of this experience came the new, forty-line poem, along with several new paintings, as Tolkien the artist sat on the ‘ruined margin’ and drew and painted what he saw. He made a sketch of the Lion Rock, a huge cliff jutting out into the sea from Pentreath Beach on the west coast of the Lizard; here the sea is in gentle mood. Sitting at some elevation with a stretch of coastal water below him the artist/observer looks across to the Lion Rock in the mid-distance, to the dark rocks of a sheer cliff that falls abruptly into the water and against which the Atlantic swell is breaking in large white waves. Above and behind the summit of the Rock is a warm balmy sky, stirred by the lines of a breeze. The ocean in another mood is seen in the painting Cove near the Lizard.¹⁰ Again the artist–viewer sits near the water’s edge, but now he depicts a cauldron of white foam and breakers washing the dark rocks, and he looks up towards tall cliffs that curve around the coastline to his right. The breakers smash against the sea-walls in the distance while above the grassy cliff-tops there is a dark line of fierce cloud.

Fig. 8c Rough sea

The two moods – fierce and calm – are captured also in the words of the poem ‘The Tides’, written in 1914.¹¹ First there is the ‘embattled tempest’ conceived in imagery of siege warfare in which the armies of the grey sea rise to war like ‘billowed cavalry advancing at the shore’ (lines 23–4). Initially the attack is flung back by the defenders but finally the full force of the waves strikes the land in explosive anger. In the vivid expression ‘and their war song burst to flame’ (line 32) the sense of something heard (war song) is transformed into something seen and felt (the flames). In an abundance of adjectives Tolkien seeks to convey the force of the collision: the ‘shouting water’ (line 43), ‘catastrophic fountains’ (44), ‘deafening cascades’ (44). But then the mood changes, the imagery of loud music and voices changes to ‘an immeasurable hymn of Ocean’ played by an organ ‘whose stops were the piping of gulls and the thunderous swell’ (line 46). But the sound stills to an ‘endless fugue of echoes’ (49), and ‘a music of uttermost deepness’ (51), until eventually a ‘murmurous slumber’ (60) overtakes the listener when he hears the music cease, and he eventually awakes ‘to silent cavern and empty sands and peace’ (66) at the end of the poem.

In January 1915, during the Oxford Christmas vacation, Tolkien revised this poem, giving it the new title ‘Sea-Chant of an Elder Day’, and an Old English title of the same meaning, ‘Fyrndaga Sæ´léoth’; two extra lines of verse at the beginning and end now framed the main text and emphasised the setting in ancient times, ‘in those eldest of the days’ (compare this with lines 14 and 62). Back in Oxford for the Hilary Term from January, Tolkien read out ‘Sea-Chant’ at a meeting of the Exeter College Essay Club, a regular gathering of undergraduates. Evidently encouraged, Tolkien sent the poem to his school friend and fellow TCBS member G.B. Smith, who showed it to others.¹²

At this stage Tolkien also painted a watercolour based on the text. This painting, entitled Water, Wind & Sand, appears alongside some lines from the poem in the notebook The Book of Ishness, along with an added comment ‘Illustration to Sea-Song of an Elder Day’.¹³ The composition here is far from what you would expect given the discussion so far: instead of a realistic sketch of a recognisable sea-view, abstract symbolist shapes and splashes of colour dominate the imagery, done in pencil and watercolour. On the left are iconic brown cliffs with high round arches over yellow sand, presumably representing line 19 of the text:

And its arches shook with thunder and its feet were piled with shapes.

In the centre of the illustration is an explosion of jagged, pointed flames in red, white and grey; these must represent the waves of the sea at that key moment in the narrative of the poem when ‘their war song burst to flame’ (line 32). In contrast then to the two more conventionally realist seascapes of the previous year, this picture has been conditioned by the words of the poem; it is a verbally inspired symbolic picture, reflecting the images and metaphors of the written text.

Significantly, and again unlike the two other sea paintings, a single diminutive human figure stands in the foreground of the picture, highlighted in a small white circle that stands out against lines of black rock. This seems to be the ‘I’ persona of the poem, reduced as it were to insignificance by the elemental drama that surrounds him in his vision. Indeed, the observer figure in the white circle may not be part of the main picture: as in Tolkien’s later painting of Bilbo with the dragon Smaug, he may be in a different ‘plane’ to the rest of the picture. Scull and Hammond suggest that the observer figure may also be the seed of a new idea: that this poem will come to illustrate a scene from The Silmarillion.¹⁴

In the third version of the poem, then, done in 1917 at Roos, not far from Hull in Yorkshire, during a highly creative period in which Tolkien wrote a good deal of his The Book of Lost Tales, the new idea burgeoned and came to fruition. The title now is ‘The Horns of Ylmir’ (Ylmir being an alternative spelling of the name Ulmo), and it is stated that the song derives from events in the story The Fall of Gondolin, when Tuor sings a song to his son Eärendel about the visions he once experienced on hearing the horns of Ylmir when sitting by the river at dusk in the Land of Willows.

The figure in the painting Water, Wind & Sand is now clearly to be identified as that of Tuor, lulled into inaction and tarrying in the Land of Willows, where for a time he forgets his quest. The Vala, or god, Ulmo now intervenes directly, hurrying to the river where he plays ‘deep melodies’ (compare the poem’s ‘music of uttermost deepness’ in line 51) ‘of a magic greater than any other among musicians hath ever compassed’. Seeing in a vision the strife and music of the sea, Tuor listens and is ‘stricken dumb’.¹⁵

In accordance with the new idea, Tolkien revised the text of the poem once again in order to bring it in line with his mythology, adding a new, more mythical introduction and conclusion.¹⁶ In the final version of the main text there are now specific mythogical references: thus the ‘anger’ is attributed to the trumpets of the mythological figure of Ossë, a fierce and unpredictable spirit of the sea, whereas the ‘music of uttermost deepness’ and the calming of the sea are attributed to Ulmo himself, the Lord of the Waters, a figure akin to the Greek god Neptune. As for the narrator, Tuor, the sea-longing has clearly come over him by the end of the poem, and never to the end of his days will he forget the dream music he has heard.

By 1917, then, Tolkien had become a myth-maker – what his later Inkling friend and collaborator C.S. Lewis would call a mythopoeic writer. In the process of painting a view of land and ocean, and writing and rewriting a poem on this theme, Tolkien invented a character, Tuor, who goes on to act significantly in a wider and more complex story. In terms of The Fall of Gondolin, the prose tale that now accompanies the newly revised poem, it is this experience of the horns of Ulmo which incites Tuor to leave the Land of Willows and resume his quest to find Gondolin, where he has a greater purpose to fulfil. For Tuor will marry the Gondolin princess Idris; he will play a major role in the defence of the city; and he will become the father of the half-elven Eärendil, the great mariner who was to assume an even more significant place in the developing text of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.

Theories of myth-making

The process by which Tolkien turned a nature poem into a mythological poem is an interesting one, for it mirrors in some ways the reflections on poetry and myth-making to be found in Victorian and Edwardian anthropology, particularly in the work of Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), professor of comparative philology at Oxford, and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), who became the first person to hold a chair in the new academic discipline of anthropology. In chapter 8 of his Primitive Culture, Tylor had presented his famous theory of animism, which he also called ‘the doctrine of universal vitality’ and defined as ‘that primitive mental state where man recognises in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will […] sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies’.¹⁷ For Tylor, it is modern poets who recreate this old worldview through the imagery and metaphors they employ:

The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once pictures for the imagination and music for the ear. But besides this it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world.¹⁸

In particular, Tylor had the Romantics in mind, who had the ability, he thought, to ‘throw their minds back into the world’s older life’:

Wordsworth, that ‘modern ancient,’ as Max Müller has so well called him, could write of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the sky as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring of his race, ‘seeing’ with his mind’s eye a mythic hymn to Agni or Varuna. Fully to understand an old-world myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but deep poetic feeling.

Andrew Lang, the folklore collector and literary critic, in whose memory Tolkien was to give his well-known lecture On Fairy-stories in 1939, lent his support to the Tylorian view:

Homo, in the earliest stage at which we make his acquaintance, is already the philosopher, artist and man … We cannot escape from him in any field of activity; we repeat his theories without knowing; or knowingly, as when Mr. F.W.H. Myers boldly proclaimed his reversion to ‘Palaeolithic psychology’. Without the ideas of the savage (as Keats averred) we should have no poetry worthy of the name, and these fruitful rudiments, not to be styled ‘superstitions’, Mr. Tylor named ‘survivals’; a term which implies no reproach.¹⁹

The etymological pursuit of the ‘old poetic thoughts’ involved tracing back words to their roots in the postulated Germanic parent language. Thus we find Max Müller, one of the great philologists of the Victorian period, speculating on why the word ‘soul’ (Gothic saivala) should be related to Gothic saius (sea) and Greek seio (to shake): ‘we see that it was originally conceived by the Germanic nations as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath, and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep’.²⁰ There was a long tradition of using the comparative method in this way, and it was Max Müller among others who had sought to apply this methodology to the reconstruction of early European myths out of the ‘survivals’ of these ideas in the various early literatures of the Indo-European family of languages.

It is clear that Tolkien in his imaginative writings also sought to recreate the old-world myths, ‘the ways of thought of the most ancient world’ that so fascinated the Oxford anthropologists and comparative philologists of the previous generation. But where in the end Tylor or Müller were sceptical about their value, Tolkien sought through his literary work to create a world in which the old myths could ring true. In short, then, although The Cove near the Lizard is an accomplished picture, the painting Water, Wind & Sand is far more striking because of its symbolic importance. Similarly, ‘The Tides’ is a readable poem, but ‘The Horns of Ulmo’ is more arresting, since it takes the conventional imagery as literally true and reinterprets it in terms of the developing Silmarillion mythology. The poem now deals with the elf-friend Tuor, his quest for the sea, and his momentous encounter with the Lord of the Waters on the banks of the river Sirion. Thus Tolkien’s holiday in the Lizard peninsula was enlightening in many and various ways. Over the years, as his imagination worked on his first literary endeavour, he transformed it into an image that came to be part of his wider and far more original project of myth-making.