Читать книгу The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology - Tom Shippey - Страница 12

Such hints, of course, fizzle out immediately. The Silmarillion had begun its sixty-year gestation by 1914,⁵ but in 1915 Tolkien went off to the war in which G. B. Smith was to die. On demobilisation he was preoccupied with the problem of earning a living, first in Oxford with the OED, then in the English Department at Leeds University, finally, with secure status and no lure of further advancement, back in Oxford again in 1925. He published nothing (bar the note to Smith’s posthumous collection of poems) for five years after ‘Goblin Feet’, and a good deal of his subsequent work was written for simple motives – money, or to keep his name in front of the people who counted, who made appointments ‘with tenure’. Much of his inner life did find its way into the twenty or thirty poems contributed to various periodicals or collections between 1920 and 1937; Tolkien’s habit of thriftily rewriting them and using them in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil shows how important some of them were to him.⁶ Still, it is fair to say that these remain by themselves thin, or uncertain. The brew that was to become his fiction needed a good deal of thickening yet; and this could only come from the interaction of poetry with philology.

From this point of view one of Tolkien’s most revealing pre-Hobbit pieces is his almost unread comment on ‘The Name “Nodens”’ for the Society of Antiquaries in 1932.⁷ This virtually repeats the story of ‘Fawler’. In 1928 excavations on a site near Lydney in the west of England had revealed a temple devoted to some kind of mystery cult and still flourishing in the fourth century, i.e. well after the introduction of Christianity to England. The temple was eventually abandoned as a result of the barbarian and also non-Christian English, who however had their own cults. As with the villa at Fawler the Lydney temple fell into disuse – but not completely into oblivion. The iron-mines not far away were remembered: and whether because of them or from a continuing superstitious respect for the site, it was given a new Anglo-Saxon name, persisting to modern times — Dwarf’s Hill. The Society of Antiquaries made no comment on all this, but in the story and the place-name one can hear the echo of a hopeless resistance from the Darkest of Dark Ages, pagan to Christian, pagan to pagan, Welsh to English, all ending in forgetfulness with even the memory of the resisters blurred, till recovered by archaeology – and by philology. For Tolkien’s job was to comment on the name ‘Nodens’ found in an inscription on the site, and he did it with immense thoroughness.

His conclusion was that the name meant ‘snarer’ or ‘hunter’, from an Indo-European root surviving in English only in the archaic phrase ‘good neat’s leather’. More interesting was his tracing of the descent of Nodens from god to Irish hero (Núadu Argat-lam, ‘Silverhand’), then to Welsh hero (Lludd Llaw Ereint, also ‘Silverhand’), finally to Shakespearean hero – King Lear. Even Cordelia, Tolkien noted, was derived from the semi divine Creiddy-lad, of whom was told a version of the story of ‘the Everlasting Battle’, which interested Tolkien in other ways. Shakespeare can naturally have known nothing about ‘Nodens’, or about Beowulf (a poem in which some have seen the first dim stirrings of ‘Hamlet the Dane’). That did not mean that the old stories were not in some way working through him, present even in his much-altered version. Like ‘Akeman Street’ and ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, Tolkien might have concluded, even King Lear could bear witness to a sort of English, or British, continuity.

And one could say the same of Old King Cole. Tolkien never actually rewrote his saga in epic verse (though one can now see why he remarked casually of Milton, ‘Monsters’, p. 254, that he ‘might have done worse’ than recount ‘the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse’ – it would have been a monster-poem, like the lost ‘Rescue of Theodoric’). Still, he would certainly have recognised the ‘merry old soul’ as a figure similar in ultimate origin and final ‘vulgarisation’ to King Arthur or King Lear.⁸ This interest in the descent of fables probably explains why Tolkien did try his hand at two ‘Man in the Moon’ poems, ‘Why The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon’ (which appeared first in 1923 and was collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil thirty-nine years after), and ‘The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked’ (also out first in 1923 but to achieve far wider circulation as sung by Frodo in Book I, chapter 9 of The Fellowship of the Ring, ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’). No one would call either of these serious poems. But what they do is to provide a narrative and semi-rational frame for the string of totally irrational non-sequiturs which we now call ‘nursery rhymes’. How could ‘the cow jump over the moon’? Well, it might if the Moon were a kind of vehicle parked on the village green while its driver had a drink. How could the Man in the Moon have ‘come by the south And burnt his mouth With eating cold plum porridge’? Well, it doesn’t seem very likely, but perhaps it points to an ancient story of earthly disillusionment. If one assumes a long tradition of ‘idle children’ repeating ‘thoughtless tales’ in increasing confusion, one might think that poems like Tolkien’s were the remote ancestors of the modern rhymes. They are ‘asterisk-poems’, reconstructed like the attributes of Nodens. They also contain, at least in their early versions, hints of mythological significance – the Man in the Moon who fails to drive his chariot while mortals panic and his white horses champ their silver bits and the Sun comes up to overtake him is not totally unlike the Greek myth of Phaethon, who drove the horses of the Sun too close to Earth and scorched it. Finally, the reason why Tolkien picked ‘the Man in the Moon’ for treatment rather than ‘Old King Cole’ or ‘Little Bo-Peep’ is, no doubt, that he knew of the existence of a similar ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, in Middle English and from a time and place in which he took particular interest.

This is the lyric from Harley Manuscript no. 2253, now known generally as ‘The Man in the Moon’.⁹ It is perhaps the best medieval English lyric surviving, and certainly one of the hardest, prompting many learned articles and interpretations. However three points about it are clear, and all gave it especial charm for Tolkien. In the first place it is extremely bizarre; it is presented as a speech by an English villager about the Man in the Moon, asking why he doesn’t come down or move. It also has a very sharp and professional eye for English landscape; the villager concludes that the Man in the Moon is so stiff because he has been caught stealing thorns and carrying them home to mend his hedges with (an old image of the Moon’s markings is of a man with a lamp, a dog, and a thorn bush, see Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i). Finally, for all the poem’s thick dialect and involvement with peasant life, it is full of self-confidence. ‘Never mind if the hayward has caught you pinching thorns’, calls the narrator to the Man in the Moon, ‘we’ll deal with that. We’ll ask him home’:

‘Drynke to hym deorly of fol god bous,

Ant oure dame douse shal sitten hym by.

When that he is dronke ase a dreynt mous,

Thenne we schule borewe the wed ate bayly.’

‘We’ll drink to him like friends in excellent booze,

and our sweet lady will sit right next to him.

When he’s as drunk as a drowned mouse,

we’ll go to the bailiff and redeem your pledge.’

And without this evidence, clearly, the indictment will be quashed! It all sounds a most plausible way to work, and one which casts an unexpected light on the downtrodden serfs of medieval England – not as downtrodden as all that, obviously. Their good-natured resourcefulness seems to be an element in the make-up of Tolkien’s hobbits. More significantly, the poem makes one wonder about the unofficial elements of early literary culture. Were there other ‘Man in the Moon’ poems? Was there a whole genre of sophisticated play on folk-belief? There could have been. Tolkien’s 1923 poems attempt to revive it, or invent it, fitting into the gaps between modern doggerel and medieval lyric, creating something that might have existed and would, if it had, account for the jumble and litter of later periods – very like Gothic and ‘i-mutation’.

One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in AD 419, or after Harold died at Hastings in 1066. The post-Roman era produced ‘King Arthur’, to whose cycle King Lear and King Cole and the rest became eventual tributaries. Tolkien knew this tradition well and used it for Farmer Giles of Ham (published 1949, but written much earlier), the opening paragraphs of which play jokingly with the first few lines of Sir Gawain. However he also knew that whatever the author of Sir Gawain thought, the Arthurian tradition was originally non-English, indeed dedicated to the overthrow of England; its commemoration in English verse was merely a final consequence of the stamping-out of native culture after Hastings, a literary ‘defoliation’ which had also led to the meaninglessness of English names like ‘Fawler’ and the near-total loss of all Old English heroic tradition, apart from Beowulf. What, then, had happened to England and the English during those ‘Norman centuries’ when, it might be said, ‘language’ and ‘literature’ had first and lastingly separated?

Tolkien had been interested in that question for some time. Not much was known about Early Middle English, and indeed several of its major texts remain without satisfactory editions today. However, one important work was evidently the Ancrene Wisse, a ‘guide for anchoresses (or female hermits)’, existing in several manuscripts from different times and places, but one of few Middle English works to be translated into French rather than out of it. With this were associated several other texts with a ‘feminist’ bias, the tract on virginity Hali Meiðhad, the saints’ lives Seinte Juliene, Seinte Marherete, Seinte Katherine, the little allegory Sawles Warde. All looked similar in dialect, and in sophistication of phrase; on the other hand their subject-matter meant they were unlikely ever to take the ‘literature’ side by storm. What could be said about them?

Tolkien began with a review of F. J. Furnivall’s edition of Hali Meiðhad, in 1923; he went on to make ‘Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography’ in Review of English Studies (1925), most of them drawn from Ancrene Wisse, and some of them incidentally interesting, like the remark that medi wið wicchen must mean, not ‘meddle with witches’ but ‘bribe, purchase the service of witches’, apparently a known practice to the author of the ‘Rule’. In ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ in the same periodical that year he spent enormous effort on the single word eaueres from Hali Meiðhad, arguing that it did not mean ‘boars’ as the OED had said, but ‘heavy horses, draft horses’. Philologically this was interesting as showing a Germanic root *abra-z, meaning ‘work’ and connected with Latin opus. Mythologically it was interesting too as showing an image of the devil galloping away not on fire-breathing steeds, but on ‘heavy old dobbins’ – a contemptuous barnyard image of evil. All very well, but still, some would have said, distinctly peripheral.

The breakthrough came with Tolkien’s article for Essays and Studies (1929), ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, the most perfect though not the best-known of his academic pieces. This rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess. In Old English a distinction was regularly made between verbs like hé hiereð, híe híerað, ‘he hears, they hear’, and hé lócað, híe lóciað ‘he looks, they look’. An -að ending could be singular or plural, depending on what sort of a verb it was attached to. This clear but to outsiders utterly unmemorable distinction was, after Hastings, rapidly dropped. Two manuscripts, however, one of Ancrene Wisse, the other of its five associated texts, not only preserved the distinction but went on to make another new one, between verbs within the lócian class: they distinguished e.g. between ha polieð, ‘they endure’, O.E. híe poliað, and ha fondið, ‘they inquire’, O.E. híe fondiað. The distinction had a sound phonological basis and was not the result of mere whim. Furthermore the two manuscripts could not have been by the same man for they were in different handwriting. Evidently – I summarise the chain of logic – they were the product of a ‘school’; so were the works themselves, composed in the same dialect by another man or men; and this ‘school’ was one that operated in English, and in an English descended without interruption from Old English, owing words certainly to the Norse and the French but not affected by the confusion their invasions had caused. To put it Tolkien’s way:

There is an English older than Dan Michel’s and richer, as regular in spelling as Orm’s [these are two other relatively consistent writers of Middle English] but less queer; one that has preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England. (‘AW’, p. 106)

It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conqueror.

There are several signs here of Tolkien’s underlying preoccupations. One is the power of philology: the regularity and rigour of its observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts. These observations are incontestable. They are also suggestive, permitting us to make informed guesses at, say, the level of independence of western shires in the twelfth century and the nature of their race-relations. They pleased Tolkien further because their implication was so clearly patriotic, that there had been an England beyond England even in the days when anyone who was anyone spoke French. In that way they also corroborated the impression of self-confidence made by the ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, itself an example of what Tolkien in that article (p. 116) called ‘the westerly lyric, whose little world lay between Wirral and the Wye’. As for the Ancrene Wisse itself, Tolkien had little doubt that the ‘soil somewhere in England’ to which it should be ascribed was Herefordshire, a decision confirmed by later research. All in all the picture these inquiries gave was of a far-West shire, cut off from and undisturbed by foreigners, adhering to the English traditions elsewhere in ruins. If only such a civilisation had endured to be the ancestor of ours! Tolkien, with his family connections in and nostalgic memories of Worcestershire, the next most-western county to Hereford and like it a storehouse of Old English tradition, felt the pull of this ‘might have been’ strongly and personally. In a revealing passage at the end of the article (p. 122), he noted a few exceptions to his general rule and remarked:

Personally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and B before us and silently point to these forms, they would thank us, pick up a pen, and immediately substitute the -in forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it was pointed to.

The ghosts would be gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them.

This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse we might find them difficult people. There is a streak of wishful thinking in Tolkien’s remark near the beginning of this article that if his argument was sound, English in the west at that time must have been ‘at once more alive, and more traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else’. He was used to having ‘traditional’ literature viewed as dead: it was nice to think of a time when tradition was rated higher than modern fashion. Still, it is hard to say his sentiment was wrong. It was based on rational argument, and the whole theory integrated (as theories should) many thousands of separate facts which had been needing explanation already. With hindsight one can see that this philological vision of ancient Herefordshire was a strong component of Tolkien’s later conception of the hobbits’ ‘Shire’, also cut-off, dimly remembering former empires, but effectively turned in on itself to preserve an idealised ‘English’ way of life. But ‘the Shire’ is fiction, and philology fact. The questions which begin to show themselves in Tolkien’s work from about this time on are: how far did he distinguish the two states? And how much of his later success was caused by reluctance to admit a distinction?

Connections are exemplified in Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara land’, published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, ‘Ethiopian’, but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’, (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’, (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly ‘guess-work’, admittedly ‘inconclusive’? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something ‘which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems’.¹⁰ A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the ‘Balrog’ in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not ‘put-on’, but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends.