Chapter Nine

‘Far over the Misty Mountains cold’

IN THE FALL of Gondolin, Tolkien combines two elements that were to recur again and again in his work. The first is the theme of ‘sea-longing’, in this case a journey to the coast that leads to the momentous encounter with the god (or Vala) Ulmo, Lord of the Waters, the genesis of which was discussed in the previous chapter. The second is the motif of the mountain quest, the journey ‘far over the Misty Mountains cold’ which was to become the basis of the there-and-back-again plot structure of The Hobbit. For the actual details of walking in the mountains Tolkien drew on his own life-changing experience: a journey to Switzerland at the age of nineteen.

Mountain journey (Switzerland 1911)

He had left school at the end of July 1911 with the customary Speech Day and prize-giving and, typically for him, his participation in a school theatrical production of Aristophanes’s The Peace, performed in the original Greek. The summer was a particularly fine one, with hardly a drop of rain from April until the day of George V’s coronation in October. Tolkien, now at the end of ‘a poor boy’s childhood’, as he called it, was ready for adventures.¹ In August he travelled by boat to the Continent and by train to Innsbruck in southern Austria with a party of twelve people; at Interlaken they began their walking tour. As will be seen from the following account, many of the places Tolkien saw on the trip became models for the mountains and mountainous landscapes of the fictional world that he began to create in the years leading up to his service in the army in the First World War. He would go on many walking trips in the future, but this was the only Alpine mountain expedition that he ever experienced.

Participants in the tour included the Brookes-Smith family, the organisers of the trip (i.e. James the father, his wife Ellen, their daughters Phyllis and Doris, and their young son Colin); with them was their friend Jane Neave (who was Tolkien’s aunt), and Tolkien’s brother Hilary. The Tolkien Family Album has preserved a photograph of eight members of the party, all wearing hats to shade them from the bright sunshine: there are two males in the picture: Tolkien appears to be sitting on the grass at the front next to a woman, perhaps one of the Brookes-Smiths? A boy, either Hilary Tolkien or Colin Brookes-Smith, is seated on a rock at the back behind a row of six women, apparently of different ages (because of the effect of the bright sunshine it is difficult to make out the details). In his memoir of the trip to his son Michael, written in 1967–8 when apparently Michael had also visited Switzerland, Tolkien mentioned an ‘uneducated French-speaking member of the party’, perhaps one of the Swiss guides, and ‘one of the hobbits of the party (he is still alive)’, who was involved in the fun of damming a stream at Belalp near the Aletsch glacier and then breaking the dam with his alpenstock and allowing the accumulated waters to descend in a rush down the slope at the back of the inn, just as an old lady was going to the rill to fetch water: ‘she dropped the bucket and fled calling upon the saints’.² As Tolkien occasionally referred to himself as a hobbit, it is tempting to see this as his coded reference to himself; certainly he was soon to be involved in practical jokes while at university, so that such behaviour would not have been out of character.

The walking route took them ‘mainly by mountain paths’ to Lauterbrunnen, and they then ascended via Mürren to the head of the Lauterbrunnen valley. They then appear to have walked eastwards to Meiringen by crossing the Scheidegge to Grindelwald, with views of the two mountains the Eiger and the Mönch on their right. As the journey went on, it left an indelible impression of the eternal snows of the Jungfrau on his mind, so Tolkien writes; and he remembers the sharp outline of the Silberhorn against the dark blue background of the sky, calling it ‘the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams’. The name Silvertine (Celebdil in Elvish) refers to one of the three mountains of Moria in LOTR; it is here that Gandalf fights and overcomes the monstrous balrog, but is pulled with it into the abyss. The fictional name derives clearly from the Silberhorn (which in English would be ‘Silverhorn’) that Tolkien saw on his Alpine tour in 1911.

From Meiringen the walking tour went on over the Grimsell Pass and down to the Rhone; they stayed in the city of Brig where they spent a wakeful night disturbed by the noise of the trams. Spending some time at Aletsch, they took a long march one day onto the glacier, another eventful day on the journey, and in the end the most dangerous of their experiences. They were walking in single file along a narrow path with a ravine on their left and a steeply rising snow-covered slope to their right. Since the summer of 1911 had been so hot the upper layer of snow had melted, leaving exposed rocks and boulders which in the heat of the day started to break loose and roll down onto the hapless walkers below. Tolkien remembers it as a ‘hard pounding’, by implication like an artillery attack in the war. By luck and careful dodging, no one was hit, but Tolkien remembered that one ‘elderly schoolmistress’ let out a stifled scream and lurched forward as a small boulder passed between them on its way down to the ravine below.³ The mention of an ‘elderly schoolmistress’ in this account is a bit of a surprise on a tour of this nature, unless again this is a coded reference in the letter to his Aunt Jane, who was of course by 1967 an elderly and retired schoolmistress. In another letter (to Joyce Reeves, written in November 1961) he recalls the trip of 1911 and admires his ‘shrewd sound-hearted’ aunt, who had just been to Switzerland again on a ‘botanising’ tour.⁴

Fig. 9a Snow on the Misty Mountains

Mountain scenery in The Hobbit

The mountain crossing in The Hobbit draws directly on the details of the above episode, with boulders coming loose and galloping down the mountainside and passing between them, ‘which was lucky’, or over their heads, ‘which was alarming’. The passage is from ‘Over Hill and Under Hill’ (chapter 4), and it conveys the same sense of a danger that never became serious; the accident that never happened is one that people can afford to write about in light, almost humorous terms.

Eventually in the same chapter the party meet a great storm, which again is described in authentic and convincing detail based on experience,⁵ and there is an accompanying illustration by Tolkien in the standard editions of The Hobbit which shows the fork lightning spreading across the sky with the snow-peaks beyond it; the path winds up to the right and there is a precipitous drop into the deep and narrow valley to the left. The picture works well with the text at this point in the story. The narrator still loves his wordplay but uses it for rhetorical emphasis – the travellers do not meet a thunderstorm but a thunderbattle, when two storms from east and west wage war on each other. Tolkien evokes the sound effects of such a storm, the clashes that split the air, and roll and tumble around the mountainside.

The account of the Swiss mountain expedition back in 1911 is not yet complete. After the episode on the glacier, the party went on into Valais and then later continued to Zermatt, where they stayed in a high mountain hut of the Alpine Club; here Tolkien remembered seeing the bright white snow-desert between them and the black horn of the Matterhorn a few miles away from them.⁶ The mention of this famous Alpine peak recalls Tolkien’s Caradhras, or Redhorn, the most northerly of the three mountains of Moria, with its sheer red sides and snow-covered peak, and its difficult mountain pass which the travellers in FR fail to cross because of the falls of heavy snow. They flee a blinding blizzard and the apparent animosity of the mountain itself, with its eerie cries and laughter sounding in the crevasses and gullies of the rocky mountain wall; again boulders are described as coming down between or flying over their heads.⁷ The humorous account of the falling stones in The Hobbit is here given a rather more serious treatment, and the game played by the stone-giants has disappeared, only to be replaced now with vaguer but more menacing howls on the air, as though the mountain itself is alive and malevolent and deliberately hindering their progress. Mountains are not to be taken lightly.

One of the immediate consequences of the mountain tour of 1911 was its effect on Tolkien’s art. On his return, he inserted into his notebook a large pencil-and-watercolour entitled The Misty Mountains. In many ways it is an impressive picture, rightly given pride of place at the very end of Artist and Illustrator.⁸ Basically its title is fitting: in the mid-foreground an old stone road-bridge straddles a river flowing from left to right; over the bridge there passes a yellow road which – proceeding through areas of green foliage – disappears into a remote distance dominated by a skyline of tall, sharp grey mountain peaks outlined against a yellow sky. This is the very picture of alpine mountains in summer, and it was to be followed by many other illustrations of a similar nature. In a scene from the story of Tuor, another of Tolkien’s illustrations shows a ring of similar high mountains surrounding a plateau in the middle of which is the great city of Gondolin.⁹ A further classic example is the painting of the dragon Glorund emerging from the entrance of Nargothrond against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks not unlike Japanese prints (which Tolkien is recorded as owning at the time in his rooms at Exeter College).¹⁰

The picture The Misty Mountains provided, one may suspect, a possible model for at least two passages in The Hobbit. So, for example, in the ‘Roast Mutton’ chapter, the road is described as ‘fortunately’ passing over ‘an ancient stone bridge, for the river, swollen with the rains, came rushing down from the hills and mountains in the north’. As with the painting in the notebook, there is no further explanation given as to who built the stone bridge and when; it is simply there, a concrete image of the journey and the road ahead. Another passage of description in The Hobbit captures a similar scene at the beginning of chapter 3, ‘A Short Rest’. The hobbits ford a river and ascend the far bank; at the top they see that the mountains have marched down to meet them; the nearest one looks ‘dark and drear’, though behind it can be seen the gleam of snow on the taller mountains beyond. The snow-covered peaks would come to figure in various ways in Tolkien’s fiction. In fact, they are ever present, for mountains of many kinds remain the backdrop, the given setting in many of his stories. In his two most famous works, the Misty Mountains are a major hindrance to be overcome, and the crossing of that mountain range, or in the event the passing under this obstacle, is a necessary part of the plot.

‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’¹¹

The legendary story of Tuor, as we have seen, begins as a quest narrative that takes him from the shores of Lake Mithrim to his vision of the Sea at Falasquil, then further to his momentous experience of divine favour and his vision of ‘the piper at the gates of dawn’ on the banks of the river Sirion. This in fact is only the first stage of the quest, for the story then divides into further stages of there-and-back-again as a theme. Unlike Bilbo and Thorin, who want to recover a treasure and regain a kingdom, Tuor must undertake a long and dangerous journey to find the hidden mountain city of Gondolin and to deliver Ulmo’s message to its king, Turgon.

As in many such narratives, Tuor meets helpers who become his guides on the journey. In Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin, the helpers are various: the three seabirds and the three swans are instances of helper-figures from the natural world; then there are the Noldoli, or elves. Eventually, with the help of Bronweg-Voronwë, the father of Littleheart, the narrator who is recounting the story to Eriol in the frame narrative to The Book of Lost Tales, Tuor discovers in a gully in the upper reaches of the river Sirion the hidden entrance, a magically protected passage to the City of Stone. The two travellers find ‘a way dark rough-going, and circuitous’, and full of echoes, which the fearful Voronwë wrongly interprets as the footsteps of ‘Melko’s goblins, the Orcs of the hills’.

Again there is the passage underground, with all its implicit symbolic import. The theme of a fearful passage through tunnels is one that Tolkien knew from the Victorian novelist George MacDonald, and one which he reintroduced in both the Hobbit and LOTR, for in both the later novels the travellers are forced to journey under the mountains, where the goblins live, rather than passing over them, through the high passes. Eventually, in Tuor, the two protagonists find their way by fearful groping and falling over stones, out of the blackness and into the light, into the brightness of the open air, where a great sight awaits them. The hills encircle a wide plain in the middle of which stands the great citadel of Gondolin ‘in the new light of the morning’.¹² The scene depicted here verbally is the same in essence to that shown visually in Tolkien’s pencil drawing of 1928, Gondolin and the Vale of Tumladen from Cristhorn.¹³

Here a formal spoken dialogue of challenge and identification finally takes place, a statement of identity, kindred and allegiance. The newcomer declares himself to be Tuor son of Peleg, son of Indor, of the house of the Swan of the sons of the men of the North, and he announces that he has come to Gondolin on a much higher authority, the will of Ulmo, the god or Vala of the Outer Oceans.¹⁴ The amazed reaction of the citizens is one shared by the reader of the story, who as it were for the first time hears Tuor’s ‘deep and rolling voice’ and measures its startling effect on the citizens, ‘for their own voices were as the plash [sic] of fountains’. This is the first time Tuor speaks in any lengthy dialogue in the narration, and the fact that the reader has had to wait so long to hear it simply adds to the dramatic effect. There is a similar scene in The Hobbit in the chapter ‘A Warm Welcome’, when Thorin the bedraggled wayfarer arrives at Laketown and the guards snatch up their weapons and spring to their feet, demanding to know who he is. But Thorin declares in a loud voice that he is Thorin the son of Thrain, the son of Thror, and despite outer appearances the guards believe him, for his inner worth is there to be heard, and to be seen in the look in his eyes and the gleam of gold on his neck and his waist. Naturally, in both cases the citizens accept the impressive newcomer and lead him to the city hall to be welcomed by the head of the city.

After the inevitable fall of Gondolin, the theme of there-and-back-again recurs, and the mountain quest takes place in reverse as the beleaguered survivors make their escape from the devastated city over the encircling mountains to eventual safety. Long before the writing of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s Alpine journey to the Silberhorn now finds its first literary expression in his description of the severe climb and the harsh weather. The fugitives come to the Cristhorn, a dangerous place, so high that the snow lies all year round. As they try to cross along a narrow path with a sheer wall to their right, the wind howls and the snow blizzards swirl round them.¹⁵ In this first version of the theme of the mountain crossing, the falling stones, which in The Hobbit are to be attributed to melting snow or in FR to a hostile mountain spirit, are hurled down by an ambush of orcs, to the grievous harm of the refugees. Other motifs that anticipate people and events in LOTR are the names of the Gondothlim heroes such as Legolas Greenleaf, ‘whose eyes were like cats’ for the dark, yet could they see further’,¹⁶ and Glorfindel the great lord, who like Gandalf in FR defeats the balrog but is pulled down into the abyss in the moment of his triumph. Eventually the company win through, much depleted, and Tuor with his wife Idril and their son Earendel tarry for many years at the Land of Willows, where the whispering winds bring peace, healing and respite.

There is a discrepancy between the high style of Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin and the context in which it was composed: written in two battered exercise books as Tolkien sat surrounded by the accoutrements of war and military life in a crowded army hut with the gramophone playing loud ragtime music (which he detested), and written up later as he was recovering in a military hospital. One detail from the story – the seven names of the city of Gondolin – was apparently composed on the back of an army-issue leaflet detailing ‘the chain of responsibility in a batallion’;¹⁷ in The Book of Lost Tales these names are: Gondobar the City of Stone, Gondothlimbar the City of the Dwellers in Stone, Gondolin the Stone of Song, Gwarestrin the Tower of Guard, Gar Thurion the Secret Place, Loth the flower, and Lothengriol the flower that blooms on the plain.¹⁸ The contrast between the bureaucratic list and the poetic enumeration could not be more blatant. This was a world away from what had been his first adventurous expedition to the European continent, back in 1911, and it is tempting to see Tolkien as a lonely soul lost in the world of the modern military machine. Something of this attitude seeps through into The Hobbit, as will be seen shortly.