Chapter Twelve
Visions of peace
‘I’m back’
BOTH THE HOBBIT and LOTR have war as one of their major themes, and both in their own way deal with the aftermath, the last stage in the journey. In The Hobbit the first task of the narrator is to get the protagonist back again, and he tells this part of his story far more speedily than the journey there, in a matter of a few pages.
There are many precedents for this sort of accelerated narrative strategy. In one of Tolkien’s favourite medieval English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain heads back through the Wild after his fateful encounter with the Green Knight. His journey is recounted in a handful of lines of verse (2489–94); there is no time to give any details of ‘mony aventure in vale’, for the main purpose of the story has been achieved. The parallel in The Hobbit, probably intentional, is not hard to see. At the end of chapter 18, Bilbo Baggins ‘turned his back on adventure’ and begins his return journey. He and Gandalf visit Beorn again, but very little is told of their stay, though like Gawain at Bertilak’s house, they spend an agreeable Yuletide feast. The narrator now looks ahead, speaking of how Beorn became a great chief whose descendants would rule the wide region between the mountains and the wood. In their time the last goblins disappear from the Misty Mountains, ‘and a new peace came over the edge of the Wild’.
Peace has been declared. But in the last stage, chapter 19 of The Hobbit, we see that the protagonist is not yet at peace in his heart. The travellers are returning to Rivendell, and they reprise their original visit. They come to the brink of the valley, ride down the steep path and hear the elves singing in the trees, just as before, ‘as if they had not stopped since he left’. At first even the song seems just the same, with its fair nonsense of a ‘trala-la-lally’ refrain. But things have changed; there is loss and grief to bear; and the singers know it. Their song reflects the news they have heard, the death of the dragon and the loss of Thorin, and the burial of his great treasure the Arkenstone. But the song goes further and proposes alternatives: the stars for jewels, the moon for silver, the fire for gold – these are the compensations that the guest-hall can provide for sad and weary travellers. And through all this, though it is not stated in so many words, the river is flowing. Consolation is at hand: tale-telling in Elrond’s house; the story of their experiences; the hearing of myths from time out of mind. (Here more than anywhere else there is a strong hint of the story of Eriol of Lost Tales I and the comfortable hall where stories are told by the burning hearth fire.) After this comes drowsiness and the cure of sleep. The elves’ second song, which Bilbo hears at dead of night, though it is called jokingly a lullaby, is a kind of hymn to the blossoming stars, the flowering moon and the silver river, and it brings rest and peace to the wanderer’s spirit.
Recovery from the war
As soon as he was discharged from the army in 1918, Tolkien returned with his wife and young son to Oxford. The town and university were recovering from the war. Looking for permanent work he started teaching part-time for various colleges in the university, while retaining membership of Exeter College (where he had been an undergraduate) for its dining rights and academic connections.
An impression of change in the air can be felt on the pages of issue no. 25 of the biannual Stapeldon Magazine, the newsletter of Exeter College, Oxford.1 Almost in every article, on whatever subject, there are instances of recovery from the war. The college rowing club, for instance, had forty members in December 1919, of whom twenty-eight were first-years or Freshers; for obvious reasons to do with wartime service, there was a ‘shortage of senior oarsmen’ (p. 33). Even more explicit is the editorial that opens the magazine: ‘the work of gathering together the threads of pre-war life was successfully accomplished’ and it was now clear that student numbers had reached a record high; and despite the normal practice of allowing all students to ‘live in’ during their first year, the College was unable to accommodate all the newcomers (p. 1). The debating club, known as the Stapeldon Society, even complained that the JCR (student common room) was too cramped for their meetings (p. 37). A sign of the times in this issue of the magazine is a travelogue entitled ‘Constantinople 1919’, in which the writer called on his fellow Exonians to send in their own travel experiences of peasant life or foreign cities that they had had while on active service abroad. Even more pertinently, the same issue records a speech by the Rector (i.e. Principal) of Exeter College:
Fig. 12a Cloister shadows
A university should be a rallying point in the conflict with those disintegrating forces, commonly summed up in the word ‘Bolshevism’, which threaten the very existence of our civilisation.2
In the following Hilary Term, as we know, Tolkien read his The Fall of Gondolin – his own story of a threat to civilisation – to the Essay Club, and the Stapeldon Magazine reported that Mr Tolkien ‘entertained the Club with an unpublished work of his, an imaginative mythological fairy story after the manner of Lord Dunsany, entitled “The Fall of Gondolin”’.3 In fact, Tolkien’s name appears a number of times in Stapeldon Magazine in this period. An entry in the magazine for the Michaelmas (i.e. autumn) Term of 1919, for example, lists Tolkien as ‘Critic’, one of the officers of the Essay Club, the college literary society. Papers read to the society that term included:
October 29: H.D. Hancock, ‘The Comic Spirit in Molière’
November 12: C.H.B. Kitchin, ‘World Progress and English Literature’
November 26: E.C. Dickinson, ‘The Place of the Ballad in English Literature’.
Tolkien possibly influenced the choice of topic for the third of these papers, by the poet Eric C. Dickinson, while the second is surely a mirror of the times. The literary contributions to the magazine make for some revealing comparisons.
‘The Happy Mariners’
Tolkien had originally written his mythological poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ back in July 1915, while staying with his Incledon relatives at the village of Barnt Green in Worcestershire. (It often happened that Tolkien worked on his poems and stories while on vacation.) He revised it at training camp in Bedford on 9 September 1915.4 During the war years it was put to one side. He now returned to the poem, and it was published for the first time in issue 26 of Stapeldon Magazine (June 1920). Tolkien’s poem is one of a number of discrete items, linked apparently by their theme. A short, bleak sonnet ‘Ypres, 1917’, by F.A. Greenhill, describes ‘the tortured city […] deep plunged in the abyss of agony’ and pictures the ‘shrine of Beauty’ that has been ‘blasted into ruins’ (p. 64). Another sonnet, ‘The Radcliffe Camera’ by M.A. Cardew, printed immediately after Tolkien’s ‘Happy Mariners’ on p. 70, pictures the ‘magnificent dome’ of the Radcliffe Camera of Oxford University, one of the most prominent landmarks in the city, a stone’s throw away from the walled garden at the rear of Exeter College.
The author of the poem ‘The Radcliffe Camera’ imagines a time in the distant future when the dome, now ruined, still stands majestic – in sad contrast, it must be said to be the blasted ruins of the museum at Ypres, described only five pages before. On the same page as ‘Ypres, 1917’ a moralistic piece ‘So Strange it Is’ by J.H. divides young people into two bands: the pleasure seekers and the adherents of ‘Truth and Beauty’ (p. 64). There follows a short story ‘The Vision of Ludovico Neroni’ set in medieval Italy by the poet Eric C. Dickinson (the same who had spoken to the Essay Club on the subject of the Ballad), recounting a dream vision in the style of the great medieval Italian writer Dante’s La Vita Nuova (pp. 65–8). Whether by chance or design, word or ideas in the poem ‘Ypres, 1917’ on the facing page are taken up in the first and second sentences of the story. Here is the opening (written, it should be noted, in a deliberately archaic medievalising English):
And the days were ill of my suffering till I longed for the cool of that garden and the splash of the fountain which had once been vouchsafed to me in a vision as the goal of my grievous wandering. For one day when I was an hungered and athirst for peace, I rose and went out upon the high hill above my city, and slept a little while. There while I did sleep I dreamed a dream. (p. 65)
The dream is set in a garden, where the dreamer meets a guide who tells him of his life and asks him:
My son, tell me. Have you left your love without my garden?
Fig. 12b The Radcliffe Camera seen from Exeter College
Evidently all this has great symbolic import, though it is hard to fathom. The dreamer finally awakes to find the ‘sun’s last radiance all about the towers of the city’ (p. 68). His troubles are not over, but now he has had a vision, a goal towards which he can work. Here are the closing lines of the story:
Again I am longing for the touch of his sweet garden, the wondrous rest of his mien, the murmur of his singing fountain. And lastly, I would learn the riddles he had left unanswered, some of which appeared within his garden, and some upon the faces of his pupils that have been so much with the pictures of Messer Sandro Botticelli. Messer Sandro, I would come to you, and lay the matter before you of this riddle which vexes me, and of these troubles about my heart. (p. 68)
In short, the narrator of the short story is inspired through his dream to attempt to restore his love, both in a personal and social sense but also apparently in a more spiritual direction.
Following the end of Dickinson’s story, on the facing page (p. 69) is Tolkien’s poem ‘The Happy Mariners’, and it is tempting to see a connection, a thematic link perhaps perceived by the editor in the arrangement of pieces for the magazine. Set in Tolkien’s mythical landscape, ‘The Happy Mariners’ belongs to the Eärendel cycle of poems. Reprinted most recently in Lost Tales II, it opens as follows:
I know a window in a western tower
That opens on celestial seas.5
Fig. 12c Celestial sea
Given the context in which it appears the poem seems an apposite choice in its theme. Rather than dreaming a vision as in Dickinson’s story, the narrator of the poem sees it with his waking eyes: he looks through the window of his Tower of Pearl at the fairy boats making their way to the celestial seas, and he longs to travel with the happy mariners, as far as the star-dashed, dragon-headed portals of the Night where they ‘follow Eärendel through the West’.6 The mythical figure here named is of course Eärendel son of Tuor, the fabled seafarer of Tolkien’s private mythology, and at the time only someone well versed in Old English could make any sense of the name, perhaps seeing it as a personification of the ‘dayspring’, which is the meaning of the word in Old English. Another of the mythical or even fantastical themes of the poem is the notion of starlight as a liquid dashed against the blue night like water out of a fountain, or of sunlight as a tangible substance collected by divers in the ‘waters of the unknown Sun’. All these details must have been very mysterious and obscure, and even more difficult to interpret than the preceding piece by Dickinson.
Despite the obscurities, there are continuities of theme. The longing to return is very strong in the passage by Tolkien in which he addresses the mariners who continue on their journey ‘chanting snatches of a mystic tune’ (line 28), just as it is in Dickinson’s story. The narrators in both the story and the poem are overcome with longing in a time of trouble, a time of trial in which the Great War clearly played a significant role as background to the act of writing, and in which the recounted visionary experience seems at one and the same time to be very personal and intensely spiritual.
A Northern Venture
In 1920 Tolkien took a teaching job at Leeds University and again he returned to his poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ in a university publication. A Northern Venture, an anthology of ‘Verses by Members of the Leeds University Association’, is a small green paperback pamphlet of a mere twenty-five pages, published in 1923 at Belle Vue Road in Leeds, by the Swan Press, the publisher of the periodical Yorkshire Poetry.7 Its theme is signalled by a woodcut print on the front cover showing a dragon-ship on the tossing waves, presumably a Saxon or Viking longboat. The collection contains four poems by Tolkien: a reprint of his poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ (here provided with an additional Old English title ‘Tha Eadigan Saelidan’); the folklore piece ‘Why the Man in the Moon Came Down too Soon’; and two riddle-poems written in an Anglo-Saxon style. Again the arrangement and juxtaposition of poems makes for interesting comparisons, and again the theme of vision and recovery seems to dominate the selection, four years after the war had finished. In the following discussion the themes of this anthology will be explored and Tolkien’s ‘The Happy Mariners’ will be compared to the poems contributed by his colleagues and friends W.R. Childe, E.V. Gordon and A.H. Smith. These are printed in Appendix 2 of the present book.
The broad ‘northern’ theme of the anthology covers myth, medieval literature and Yorkshire country dialect, as well as more personal themes, and all this probably had a special significance to readers in the English department at Leeds, which was home to the Viking Club, a student society founded by Tolkien and his friend and colleague E.V. Gordon, probably in 1922. Its aims were both educational and recreational: to encourage the reading of Old Norse language and literature, especially the Icelandic sagas and the verse of the Norse skalds or court poets; to attract students to take English language options offered by the department; and to allow them to socialise over a glass of beer, for which purpose songs and poems were composed in Old Norse and Old English for singing to well-known tunes. Gordon is nowadays a well-known name among medievalists, chiefly through his Introduction to Old Norse (1927), a textbook still widely in use, and through his editions of Old English poems, in particular The Battle of Maldon, published in 1937, and The Seafarer, adapted and completed by his wife Ida Gordon in 1960. Just as Tolkien worked together with his former tutor Sisam, E.V. Gordon was a former student of Tolkien’s who cooperated with him on various projects, in particular an edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight published in 1925, the same year that Tolkien became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. The two men got on well, and Tolkien jokingly referred to him as ‘an industrious little devil’. In 1926 Gordon was appointed Tolkien’s successor as Professor of English Language at Leeds, and eventually he finished his career as Smith Professor of English Language and Germanic Philology at Manchester University, where he went in 1931.
A prominent undergraduate member of the Viking Club was A.H. Smith, who contributes two poems to the anthology. Hugh Smith was to become a distinguished figure in English language studies, and professor at University College London, with various special interests. He maintained a life-long interest in the craft of printing with hand-presses, and taught it to students at London: he later printed, for private circulation, Songs of the Philologists (1936), many of which were based on songs penned for the Viking Club by Tolkien and Gordon. Like Gordon, Smith was a respected editor of Old English texts, such as Three Northumbrian Poems (1933), and he worked also in Old Norse and Middle English studies as well as in linguistics; while the related work that he carried out during the Second World War on the decipherment of documents for army intelligence earned him an OBE.8
Probably his chief academic glory is his work in place-name studies, covering in particular in many volumes the place-names of the three Ridings of Yorkshire, as well as of Gloucestershire and Westmorland. The earliest of these volumes is The Place-names of the West Riding (1928), in which he thanks Tolkien for his philological advice and encouragement. Linked to this work was his knowledge of northern English dialects. While still an undergraduate, Smith published The Merry Shire (1923), a short book of six dialect poems, in a similar green pamphlet format to that of A Northern Venture, with a picture of a horse-drawn Romany caravan moving towards a crossroads in the middle of the countryside.9 The title could, or perhaps should, have been used by Tolkien for his late collection of poems and light verse The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962). A major theme of these poems is nature: the opening piece ‘Gnats’ is printed as ‘Spring’ in A Northern Venture (see Appendix 2 for the text). Other themes include the difference between countryside and town, folksong and dance, legends of hobs, and cities drowned by supernatural means.
The woodcut on the cover of A Northern Venture is likely to be Smith’s work, since he is credited with a similar printed image of a galleon in full sail on the cover of the slightly later companion volume Leeds University Verse 1914–1924. In its artistic style, the image of the Viking longboat is almost a caricature, for its dragon figurehead appears to smile, and the flag at the top of the mast is flying in the wrong direction, towards the stern, whilst the decorated sail nevertheless bellows out towards the prow. The dragonship is of course an iconic symbol of the north, but the picture is an allusion possibly to Tolkien’s poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ and also more obviously to Gordon’s humorous poem ‘A Skald’s Impromptu’, which appears on page 6 of the anthology (for which see also Appendix 2). This contribution by Gordon to A Northern Venture is an edition of a ‘Norse verse composed by Skull, Earl of the Orkney (in the twelfth century), while launching his ship at Grimsby’. Gordon provides an edited text of the Old Norse poem and follows it with his own verse translation.
Fig. 12d Viking longship in full sail
‘Grumblingly at Grimsby’ seems well placed in the anthology: the theme of tarrying in towns resonates with that of three preceding poems: the jaunty ‘Tumbledown Town’ by W.D. Chapman (p. 3), and the visionary ‘Fairy Tales’ and mystical ‘The Summer Creek’ by W.R. Childe, with its ‘little and narrow and strange sea-shipman’s-town’ (pp. 4–5). Grimsby is appropriate not simply because it is a Yorkshire sea port but also because it is a Viking place-name dating back to the ninth- and tenth-century Norse settlement of the area. In his modern English version, which is arguably a new poem rather than a literal translation, Gordon the Old Norse expert seeks to imitate and follow closely the metre, internal rhymes and alliterative patterns of the medieval original. The dominant mood is a mixture of humorous complaint and serious theme: there is a strong sense of release in the poem, as the boat finally sets off on its return voyage to Bergen. Based loosely on the words of the original, Gordon begins with a marvellously apt wordplay ‘Grumblingly at Grimsby’, matching and contrasting with the sound effects on the vowel of the final line ‘Merrily to Bergen’.
Wilfrid Rowland Childe (1890–1952), another friend and collaborator of Tolkien while he was at Leeds, joined the English department there as a lecturer in 1922, the same year as E.V. Gordon. His previous university education had been at Oxford, and he was one of the joint editors of Oxford Poetry in 1916 and 1917 (Tolkien and his school-friend Geoffrey Bache Smith had contributed poems to the 1915 volume). He remained at Leeds making his career there, and served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1943 to 1945. Childe was a fellow Roman Catholic, and in 1924 became godfather to Tolkien’s son Christopher. In a letter to his publishers in September 1937, Tolkien mentioned Childe as a possible promoter of The Hobbit, since he was ‘specially interested in elves and related creatures’. This interest is reflected in ‘Fairy Tales’, the first of his two contributions to A Northern Venture. Set in the narrow streets of an ancient town, the poem speaks of a ‘Child … wiser than his heart was ware’, who perceives ‘a certain Presence’ brooding everywhere, in the calm statues on a monument ‘an aery steeple lone amid the blue’, and in the ‘gracious speech’ of the doves that circle round it. The poem suggests that fairy-tales contain ‘visions’ of truths behind surface appearances to which privileged persons are granted access. It is hard not to think of the theological slant of Tolkien’s later work On Fairy-stories when reading this poem.
A similarly suggestive vision of faery occurs in the dialect poem ‘A Vision’ by Smith, the other philologist contributor to the book; here it is combined with the same grouchy kind of good humour that is seen in Gordon’s ‘A Skald’s Impromptu’. In the anthology, Smith’s ‘A Vision’ (pp. 13–14) immediately precedes Tolkien’s ‘Tha Eadigan Saelidan’ or ‘The Happy Mariners’ (pp. 15–16), and whether deliberately or not the theme of ‘vision’ also pervades both poems, though their style and tone differ considerably. Smith’s northernness is his language, for he writes in Yorkshire dialect, and he begins with the classic adventure formula ‘T’neet war dark an’ stormy’ (‘the night was dark and stormy’). Everyone, as might be expected, is abed; everyone, that is, except the Yorkshire shepherd, the poet narrator, who is out and about on the mountain fell in search of a lost ‘yowe-lamb’, otherwise referred to by the more opaque dialect word of ‘gimmer’. The stage is set for the vision in stanza 2, the poet’s ‘unkerd seet’, his strange sight, of Roman soldiers, ghosts or reminiscences of the past, which then in the next stanza transform into dancing elves, rather like figures in the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo or in Tolkien’s Mirkwood in The Hobbit. In a humorous scene in the fifth stanza the shepherd finds the lost ‘yowe-lamb’. It seems to appear suddenly in the ditch in which he finds himself sheltering when he eventually awakens from his vision. Giving a stark physical reminder that he is back in everyday reality, the lost lamb licks his face:
I’m swaimish in this place [my head swims]
I waken up i’ t’ delf-hoil;
T’ lost gimmer licks my face.
Another moment of vision appears in the opening piece in the anthology, ‘A Kiss of Peace’ by H. Brearly, which tackles memories of the war and its consequences. In this short narrative, the I-narrator and a close companion are walking in the Yorkshire countryside of hill and valley when they encounter ‘fair Peace, gray-clad, with gentle eyes’:
Where the long ridges stare across the dip,
Changeless and still against the changing skies,
We met fair Peace, gray-clad, with gentle eyes
The daughter of our quiet companionship.
The personification of Peace perhaps recalls the closing lines of Shakepeare’s Richard III, where ‘smooth-faced Peace’ is evoked at the moment when the new King Henry VII takes to the throne. The visionary experience, expressed in terms of ‘presence’, is one that recurs regularly in the anthology:
Content, we watched her grave and shining way
Across the austere line of moor and hill
By windy tracks; yet felt her presence still,
When moonlight faerily on the river lay
And lit the valley.
The moon here is a sign of the peace that now bathes the landscape in light; to decribe its light Brearly uses the unusual adverb ‘faerily’, and sets up a faery theme to which other poets (in particular Childe and Tolkien) return later in the volume.
Brearly’s poem continues in the following lines, which eulogise the personified figure of Peace in terms of affection and song:
Her restrained caress
Gave meaning to the sound, in quiet places,
Of water welling through soft moss and grasses –
Her benediction and voiced loveliness,
And all the undistinguished homely stir
Of daily life together, sang of her.
The benediction of water is suggestive also of a recurrent theological motif, one which becomes explicit in the themes of ‘vision wonderful of joy’ and ‘God of the great infinite, thou / Quest of my heart’ in two of the poems by G.M. Miller (pp. 8–9), and of ‘radiant secret’ and ‘God’s great love’ in those by M.A. Northgrave and H.S. Pickering (pp. 10–11).
Following Tolkien’s poems the final section of the anthology (pp. 21–5) is given over to six poems by Geoffrey Woledge (1901–88). A graduate of Leeds who became a well-known librarian, Woledge began his career in 1919 at Leeds University Library, where he remained until 1931; in 1938 he became University Librarian at Queen’s Belfast, and from 1944 to his retirement in 1966 he served as Librarian at the British Library of Political and Economic Science. In the 1920s his poems appeared regularly in the periodical Yorkshire Poetry, which was also published (like A Northern Venture) by the Swan Press at Leeds. Though arranged alphabetically, Woledge’s pieces nevertheless trace a path of ideas that move from earthly love to regret, penitence (p. 23), return and sunrise. The last poem ‘The Sunrise’ (p. 25) begins and ends with a refrain:
The sun-deserted clouds were pure as water
That wanders cold over the mountain pebbles.
The image of the flowing stream in this final poem resonates well with the first poem; the theme there is the benediction of water, welling through soft moss and grasses. In this way, flowing water and its healing powers become the opening and closing image of the anthology.