Читать книгу The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology - Tom Shippey - Страница 11

The Grimms and Tolkien prove that philological approaches to poetry did not have to exclude everything that would now be called ‘literary’. Still, their attitudes were sharply distinct from those now normal among literary critics. For one thing philologists were much more likely than critics to brood on the sense, the form, the other recorded uses (or unrecorded uses) of single words. They were not, on the whole, less likely to respect the original author’s intentions, but their training did make them prone to consider not only what a word was doing in its immediate contexts, but also its roots, its analogues in other languages, its descendants in modern languages, and all the processes of cultural change that might be hinted at by its history. It might be said that to Tolkien a word was not like a brick, a single delimitable unit, but like the top of a stalactite, interesting in itself but more so as part of something growing. It might also be said that he thought there was in this process something superhuman, certainly super-any-one-particular-human, for no one knew how words would change, even if he knew how they had. In one of his last published poems, a tribute in Old English to W. H. Auden, with facing page modern English translation, Tolkien begins by calling Auden a woðbora, and ends by promising him lasting praise from the searoþancle.¹ The first noun is translated ‘one [who] has poetry in him’, the second as ‘the word-lovers’. ‘Word-lovers’ is, however, etymologically parallel with ‘philologists’, while the first element of wóð-bora is also the word recorded in the god-name Woden, or Othinn, and in the archaic adjective ‘wood’, meaning ‘crazy’; it refers to the mystic rage of bard or shaman or (as we now say) berserker. Poets and philologists, Tolkien felt, were the ones to appreciate that.

An associated difference was that philologists were more likely than critics to believe in what one might call ‘the reality of history’. One good reason for this was that they tended to work with manuscripts rather than printed books, and the former are much more instructive than the latter. In some cases they have been physically written by the original poet or author; in others they have been corrected by him; in others they all too clearly have not, with incomprehension so thick on the page that one can visualise the author’s baffled rage were he ever to guess (as Chaucer did, occasionally) what had happened or was going to. The sense that ghosts cluster in old libraries is very strong. Another reason for the feeling of intimate involvement with history, though, lies in the philologists’ awareness of the shaping of present by past – the stalactites of words again, but also the creation of nation-states by language-separation (e.g. Dutch and German), the growth of national myth from forgotten history (as with the Finnish Kalevala), but perhaps as much as anything the fastening down of landscape to popular consciousness by the habit of naming places. Less than thirty miles from Tolkien’s study stands the prehistoric barrow known as ‘Wayland’s Smithy’. Its name is more than a thousand years old; perhaps it was in the mind of King Alfred (born at Wantage seven miles off) when he interjected into his translation of Boethius the outcry: Hwæt synt nú pæs foreméran ond pæs wisan goldsmiðes bán Wélondes? ‘What now are the bones of Wayland, the goldsmith pre-eminently wise?’ Alfred might also have thought of Wayland as the father of Widia, who in the lost poems released Theodoric from the power of the monsters; maybe Alfred had heard them sung. But though the poems had gone, and the monsters with them, and ‘Wayland’ no longer meant anything at all to English people, the name survived down the centuries and carried with it a hint of what once had been. Such chains of association littered the landscape for Tolkien; they did not have to be confined to books. When he said that ‘History often resembles “Myth”’, or when Wilhelm Grimm refused to segregate ‘Myth’ from ‘Heroic Legend’, both had entirely prosaic reasons for doing so.² They knew that legend often became a matter of everyday.

Something like these two awarenesses, of continuing history and continuing linguistic change, can be inferred (admittedly with the aid of vast quantities of hindsight) from the first thing Tolkien ever published, bar a few lines in school and college magazines: the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ in Oxford Poetry 1915.³ This begins:

I am off down the road

Where the fairy lanterns glowed

And the little pretty flittermice are flying:

A slender band of grey

It runs creepily away

And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.

The air is full of wings,

And of blundering beetle-things

That warn you with their whirring and their humming.

O! I hear the tiny horns

Of enchanted leprechauns

And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming.

This is, admittedly, not very good. Indeed one can imagine the response to it of the literary ‘side’, full of armèd vision, not to mention critical temper. ‘Why’, it might ask, ‘do we have the past tense in line 2 and the present everywhere else? Does this mean the “fairy lanterns” have gone out and the “I-narrator” is pursuing them? Or could it be that the author is stuck for a rhyme to “road”? As for “a-sighing” and “a-coming”, these look like scansion devices, mere padding. But in any case there is nothing in nature to suggest that the hedges and the grasses were “sighing” at all, while the “creepiness” of the road is just something the poet has decided to project on to the landscape from himself. That’s why we don’t believe the “I-narrator” when he says he hears “tiny horns”! And what about “enchanted leprechauns”? Does that mean they’ve been enchanted by someone else; or that they’re enchanting; or are all leprechauns enchanted, i.e. magic, i.e. not-real? The poet gives himself away. This is an evasive poem, a self-indulgent one. “Off down the road” indeed! Road to nowhere!’

So the critical indictment might run, and it is hard to counter. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will have noted further the as yet undiscriminating use of ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’ and later ‘goblin’, not to mention the quite cross-cultural use of ‘leprechauns’ and the insistence (later to be most strongly abjured) on the little, the tiny, the insect-like. Still, there are hints of hope in the poem after all, and better questions to be asked than those which have been.

What is this ‘road’, for instance, the ‘slender band of grey’, the ‘crooked fairy lane’? It clearly is not a tarmac one; on another level it is to be a recurring Tolkienian image:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began …

And oddly, G. B. Smith – Tolkien’s school and college friend, killed the following year in Flanders, to have his poems posthumously published with a foreword by Tolkien – had addressed himself to the same theme in a poem four pages earlier in the Oxford Poetry collection:

This is the road the Romans made,

This track half lost in the green hills,

Or fading in a forest-glade

’Mid violets and daffodils.

The years have fallen like dead leaves,

Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed

(Such as the autumn tempest thieves),

Since first this road the Romans made.⁴

Now this theme of time is intensely Tolkienian (if one may be permitted to put it that way round). The last sight of Lórien in The Fellowship of the Ring published thirty-nine years later, is of Galadriel singing Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen! ‘Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees …’ (LOTR p. 368, and see also Fangorn’s song, p. 458). In this case the hope which G. B. Smith expressed in his final letter to Tolkien before death – ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them’ – appears against all probability to have been fulfilled (Biography, p. 121). However the clue to follow, for the moment, is ‘the road the Romans made’.

It may seem perverse to seek to identify this road, but on the other hand it isn’t very hard. There are only two Roman roads near Oxford, and the better-preserved is the old highway from Bath to Towcester, still visible as a straight line across the map but dwindled along much of its Oxford stretch to a footpath. It is now called ‘Akeman Street’, like ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ a name of some fascination for philologists. It implies for one thing an old and massive population change. No town in Roman Britain had a more simply descriptive name than Aquae Sulis, ‘the waters of Sul’, and so prominent were its mineral springs with the Roman spa around them that even the Anglo-Saxons began to call it æt baðum, ‘at the baths’, and later Bath. One of them wrote a poem about the site, now called The Ruin. However they also called the town Acemannesceaster, ‘Akeman’s chester’ or ‘Akeman’s (fortified) town’. That is why the Bath–Towcester road acquired the name ‘Akeman Street’; the people who called it that knew it went to Bath, but had forgotten that Bath was ever Aquae Sulis; they were invaders, of a lower cultural level than the Romans, and soon they ceased to use the road for anything like the traffic it had once carried. Its name and its decline in status from highway to footpath bear witness to the oblivion that can fall on a civilisation. But what was the reaction of these invaders to the historical monuments they could hardly help seeing in their new land, the stone roads, the villas, the great ruins which they (as in The Ruin) called vaguely the eald enta geweorc, ‘the old work of giants’? Place-names again give suggestive clues.

About nine miles north-west of Oxford and half a mile from Akeman Street across the river Evenlode stands a villa, excavated in 1865 and once the property of some Romano-British noble. It is distinguished by the remains of a fourth-century tessellated pavement in different colours. The village nearby is called Fawler. To most people, including its inhabitants, this name now means nothing. But once it was Fauflor, a spelling recorded in 1205, and before that, in Old English, fág flór ‘the coloured floor, the painted floor’. There can be little doubt that the village was called after the pavement; so the pavement was still visible when the invaders came. Why, then, did they not occupy the villa, but chose to live instead on an undeveloped site a few furlongs off? No one can tell, but perhaps they were afraid. A further twist in the story is that there is another fág flór in Anglo-Saxon record, in the great hall of Beowulf, haunted by Grendel the maneater:

on fágne flór féond treddode,

éode yrremód; him of éagum stód

ligge gelicost léoht unfæger.

‘The fiend stepped on to the painted floor, angrily he paced; from his eyes there stood an ugly light, like fire.’

So wrote the poet, in one of his classic passages of ‘Gothic’ suggestion. Could Beowulf have been sung in Fawler? What would its inhabitants have thought? Tolkien knew Beowulf, of course, virtually by heart, and he knew what ‘Fawler’ meant, for he hailed the etymology with delight in his 1926 review of the Introduction to the Survey of Place-Names; such work, he pointed out, is fired by ‘love of the land of England’, by ‘the allurement of the riddle of the past’, it leads to ‘the recapturing of fitful and tantalising glimpses in the dark’ (YWES 5, p. 64). He was interested in the names of roads, too, for he had argued the year before that ‘Watling Street’ was an old name for the Milky Way, ‘an old mythological term that was first applied to the eald enta geweorc [i.e. the Roman road from Dover to Chester] after the English invasion’ (YWES 4, p. 21). Nor did he forget Bath and The Ruin. Legolas’s ‘lament of the stones’ on page 276 of The Fellowship of the Ring is an adaptation of part of the poem. At some stage of his life Tolkien must certainly have noted all the strange implications and suggestions of ‘Akeman Street’.

Did he know them in 1915, and share them with his friend G. B. Smith? Is the quest for Fairyland in ‘Goblin Feet’ a kind of translation of the quest for the romantic realities of history? Probably the answer to both questions is ‘No’. However, disentangling fact from inference as carefully as possible, one can say first that Tolkien and Smith evidently shared a feeling for the ancient roads, the ‘old straight tracks’ and ‘crooked lanes’ of England; second that Smith even in 1915 appreciated the sadness of the relationship between what these are and what they were; third that before many years were out it would be certain that Tolkien appreciated the same thing much more fully, with a wealth of reference to history and poetry and present-day reality. Even in 1915, one might say, a road, a real road, could possess a ‘creepiness’ for him which was based on some factual knowledge, not entirely self-generated. Philology would reinforce this. But already one image in his poem drew on some historical force.

Further, Tolkien was already thinking of words as ‘stalactites’. ‘Flittermice’ in line 3 is not normal English. According to the OED it was introduced in the sixteenth century by analogy with German Fledermaus, for ‘bat’. However ‘bat’ is not recorded in Old English, and it is possible that some ancestor of ‘flittermouse’, e.g. *fleðer-mús, was natural to English all along, but never got written down. There is an apparently similar puzzle over ‘rabbit’ (for which see below), which Tolkien at least signals awareness of in the second stanza by using the odd term ‘coney-rabbits’. Finally ‘honey-flies’ in line 30 is elsewhere unrecorded. From context one would think he meant ‘butterflies’. Perhaps he was aware, though, of the unexpected scatological sense of that innocent-looking word in Old English – a language which has had many rudenesses pruned by educated usage. He could have found out by looking ‘butterfly’ up in the OED, and at least it had occurred to him to wonder why butterflies were always and for no apparent reason so called. These verbal creations admittedly do not add much to the overall effect of ‘Goblin Feet’, but they exemplify an attempt to combine philological insight with poetry. Both roads and words hint at the early complexity of Tolkien’s inner life, its unusual combination of emotion with inquiry.