“WHERE NOW THE HORSE AND THE RIDER?”: THE ANGLO-SAXON INSPIRATION OF THE

SONGS AND POEMS OF MIDDLE-EARTH

By Aaron Kilgore

A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Hillsdale College:

Drs. Jackson, Turner, and Gamble

Kilgore 1

I

J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings—and indeed the whole rich history of his

Middle-earth—has had an enduring impact on its readers since its publication; certainly, in all of

Tolkien’s subsequent fame and celebrated accomplishment in this matter, critics and fans have

over the years picked apart his legendarium in great detail. It could be argued that many of this

collective epic’s clearest literary elements, from Middle-earth’s creation in The Silmarillion to

the conclusion of its renowned trilogy, have already been thoroughly discussed and analyzed by

men and women who have dedicated much of their own lives to unraveling the mythos of this

Oxford professor. And yet, a particular thread in Middle-earth’s grand tapestry nevertheless

calls for greater scrutiny and appreciation in several respects.

Beneath the surface of Tolkien’s world there lies a fundamental theme which most

clearly arises in the majority of the seventy distinct poems and songs found within the three

books of The Lord of the Rings. As indicated by this quantity, such an appearance is no small

matter; in a compiled edition whose pages number one-thousand, one hundred and ninety-three

(including appendices, indices, and prologue), nearly six percent of these pages contain some bit

of rhyme or a set of lyrics. Such poetic pieces range in length from a pair of lines to several

pages, and their mood may be anywhere between mournful, martial, and merry. Yet within each

of these categories, the underlying motif emerges with enduring vigor, and it resounds

consistently behind the text like a horn blown from afar by one of Tolkien’s heroes. That theme

is the language of wandering and of separation leading to a realization of something greater

beyond transient troubles.

From where does this theme arise, in what form does it appear, and for what purpose did

Tolkien structure so much of his tale around it? The answer is tied up in one of the writer’s

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reasons for shaping Middle-earth in the first place. As Tolkien explains in his well-known letter

to Milton Waldman: “[I] had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging

from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story…which I could dedicate

simply to England; to my country.”1 In this collective body of legend, Tolkien sought to create

an epic cycle with an atmosphere fit for England’s heritage as a “land long now steeped in

poetry.”2 As such, regardless of Tolkien’s eventual satisfaction (or lack thereof) with the scope

of his ambitious project, The Lord of the Rings presents one essential manifestation of this desire

in his fantastic world: the elegiac attitude of Anglo-Saxon literature, refashioned for Middle-

earth. Indeed, as would befit an English mythology, this sorrowful theme saturates the work’s

text, and that of the whole history of Middle-earth. A close inquiry reveals that Tolkien’s words

of wandering and of separation indicate the presence of this Old English motif primarily by

invoking the relationship between a transient world and the eternal—especially in demonstrating

how one finds each nestled within the other, whether in the bitter awareness of what lies beyond

one’s reach or in the consolation of the immutable in the midst of earthly troubles.

II

To understand Tolkien’s placement of the Anglo-Saxon attitude as a thematic pillar of his

legendarium, the reader must investigate the Oxford professor’s sources of the same. In the

words of S.B. Greenfield, “We may perhaps formulate a definition of the Old English elegy as a

relatively short reflective or dramatic poem embodying a contrasting pattern of loss and

consolation, ostensibly based upon a specific personal experience or observation, and expressing

1 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1981), 144. 2Ibid, 144-45.

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an attitude towards that experience.”3 Upon this basis, several of the most studied works of the

Anglo-Saxons invite inspection to set the stage for Tolkien’s world. The Wanderer, The

Seafarer, and The Ruin each, as Old English elegiac poems, have attracted much scholarly

analysis over the years—of which Tolkien, as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-

Saxon at Oxford, certainly had extensive knowledge.4 A reading of these works focusing upon

the language of sorrow and of hope in exile provides the key to this culture of elegy; as such, this

foundation will set the standards for the critical treatment of loss and renewal within Middle-

earth, for both of these worlds turn upon the notion of bereavement prompted by a life of change

in relationship with the eternal. Additionally, the famous Old English epic Beowulf reveals

much in the same way, and here it serves the reader to know that Tolkien himself not only

translated part of the work into modern English poetry, but has also had great influence upon the

epic’s critical reception since the publication of his lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the

Critics.

The Wanderer relates the thoughts and sorrow of a man without a lord; he travels alone

and friendless, “often wretchedly anxious, separated from my home, far from noble kinsfolk”

because his “generous and loving lord” has died.5 Indeed, to compound his wearisome and

heart-wrenching trials, he is not only a man bereft of the things he holds dear, but he very well

may have lost them through his own actions, at least in part. As noted by Stuart Lee, Tolkien

had considered replacing the title ‘The Wanderer’ with ‘The Exile’s Lament’ on account of the

subject being himself “an exile” or “alone a banished man.”6 Yet in the end, regardless of the

way he came to this point, the Wanderer has been separated from that which he loves and which

3 S.B. Greenfield, “The Old English Elegies,” in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature,

ed. Eric Gerald Stanley (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1966), 143. 4 Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), 111. 5 Anglo-Saxon Poetry, trans. and ed. S.A.J. Bradley (London: Everyman, 1955), 322-23. 6 Stuart D. Lee, “J.R.R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application,” Tolkien Studies 6 (2009): 197-98.

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gives him a purpose to live; because the circumstances of his world have changed to such a

drastic degree, he is set adrift. Furthermore, it is only—he concludes—in the consolation of an

immutable Father in heaven that he may be secure. Indeed, the whole work sets up this

realization from the beginning, as the need for an earthly provider and protector simply gives

temporal form to the innate need for an eternal lord, which the writer acknowledges in the

poem’s first and final lines.

This poem also provides the appropriate and much discussed ubi sunt motif, which

encompasses and emphasizes the elegiac feeling of this strand of Old English poetry. For the

Wanderer to ask, “Where has gone the steed? Where has gone the man? Where has gone the

giver of treasure?...Alas, the gleaming chalice; alas, the armoured warrior; alas, the majesty of

the prince!” is for him to lament the world as a place of desolation; where fair things once were,

now they pass away into the night, leaving men to grieve their absence.7 The speaker has

already dwelt on the passage of time and how it has laid low what was once mighty and full of

joy, so his sad summation expresses continuing remorse not only for his lord but for all those

worldly things which he considered of value.

Much like its fellow poem, The Seafarer presents the lament of a man forever sailing icy

waters away from the place he calls home, and it does so in much the same language: “I,

wretchedly anxious, have for years lived on the ice-cold sea in the ways of the sojourner, bereft

of kinsfolk, hung about by ice-spikes; hail pelted in showers.”8 The subject of the work explains

his circumstances as a naturally unenviable state, but he also brings forward a vision of eternity

more strongly; while he is saddened that there are no longer lords and good kings to give gold to

7 Anglo-Saxon Poetry, trans. and ed. S.A.J. Bradley (London: Everyman, 1955), 324; Stanley B. Greenfield and

Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986),

284. 8 Anglo-Saxon Poetry, trans. and ed. S.A.J. Bradley (London: Everyman, 1955), 332.

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their followers, he also conveys the hope of reaching the Lord’s home above.9 By the poem’s

end, the speaker turns his focus to the exhortation of his readers to live in a manner worthy of

their heavenly Lord, and he contrasts this with the wretchedness of a world filled with transient

men and comforts. He reveals his expectation that, for the sake of one living in such a way, “The

ordaining Lord will make stable his heart, because he trusts in his might,” and so will touch even

mortal man with eternal grace.10

The initial sense of transience and change finds another voice in The Ruin, wherein the

speaker hearkens back to the broken wonder of ages past. For an Anglo-Saxon living after the

fall of the Roman Empire, the sight of “tumbled roofs, towers in ruin, high towers rime-frosted,

rime on the limy mortar, storm-shielding tiling scarred, scored and collapsed, undermined by

age” must have inspired both awe and gloom; awe because of the visible heights of human

accomplishment scattered across the English countryside, and gloom because of the knowledge

that they must inevitably fade away—no matter the greatness of such builders, all that remains of

them are cracked and falling stones, on account of the world’s nature of change and resulting

decay.11 Such references to fallen structures are a hallmark of this poetic mood, even when it

does not treat them directly; The Wanderer itself, for instance, has its own remark upon an old

and high wall presumably left behind by the Romans. But again, it is not only physical remnants

of buildings which demonstrate this awareness of the ravages of time and the turning of the

world; as the poem Deor states in its refrain, concerning fortune and misfortune alike, “That

passed away: so may this.”12 Such a melancholic theme in The Ruin, as with The Wanderer and

The Seafarer, likely sets up a paradigm wherein the decaying earthly city prompts the reader to

9 Ibid, 334-35. 10 Ibid, 334. 11 Ibid, 402. 12 Ibid, 364-65.

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consider its eternal counterpart, as in the tradition of Augustine.13 In the sense of loss and

absence which opens the heart of man in this contemplation, he begins to receive the

impression—and perhaps the revelation—of that which stands over all things which pass away.

Yet, elegiac poems are by no means the only Old English genre which expresses a

concern for things that are passed and otherwise beyond one’s reach. The Anglo-Saxons further

illustrate their preoccupation with the inexorable fall of great men and of their cities in the poetic

retelling of Biblical events; as noted by R.M. Liuzza, for example, “One of the most eloquent

treatments of the fall of Babylon in OE prose, that found in the OE Orosius, is entirely directed

to the topos of mutability.”14 It is, however, the account of Babel that serves as a particularly

significant example of transience and change in the Anglo-Saxon corpus. The Biblical

elaboration of Genesis A presents the ancient endeavors of the Tower of Babel’s builders as the

“first of all ruins,” and the import of this status should not escape the reader.15 By summoning

up this event and overlaying it with their own reading, the Anglo-Saxons emphasize the place

that the lost past holds in their understanding of the world. Indeed, as it teems with complex

issues not limited to the ruin topos, the Anglo-Saxon retelling of Babel must be revisited later in

order to convey fully its significance to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

As with the aforementioned works, the celebrated epic Beowulf clearly contains both the

sense of personal loss and the broader ruin topos, each rooted in the nature of transience and

leading into something greater. Tolkien himself notes, “Its author is still concerned primarily

with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient theme: that man, each man and all

13 Ibid, 401. 14 R.M. Liuzza. “The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History,” Studies in the Literary Imagination

36.1 (2003): 7. 15 Ibid, 6.

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men, and all their works shall die.”16 Reviewing the tale of the Geats’ hero and king in this light

led Tolkien to regard Beowulf not as an epic, but rather stated that, “It is an heroic-elegiac poem;

and in a sense all its first 3,136 lines are the prelude to a dirge: him þa gegiredan Geata leode ad

ofer eorþan unwaclicne: one of the most moving ever written.”17 Allowing for this reading of

the work, the poem’s conclusion must lead the critic to consider not only Beowulf’s heroic

deeds, but also the fact that his life must end in death; earthly glory cannot forestall or preserve a

man from his mortality, even if his memory lingers on in the words of a poet. From this, the

author’s attitude towards the mortality and transience of such a man can come into question: for

what may a man live when his accomplishments are doomed to fade away into the

commemoration of song and verse? What lingers that is of true value in this life?

As indicated by these works, the nature of transience requires inspection because it

reveals not only a preoccupation with worldly concerns, but it also points to the eternal behind

and above them. Milton McC. Gatch succinctly states, “If in the literature of Anglo-Saxon

England there are strong motifs of fatalism about life in this world and a sense of its transience,

there is the equally persistent belief that this life prepares one for a more enduring life.”18 Even

in the case of the slain warrior, who surrenders his life to achieve glory, “The praise of the living

clearly includes heavenly and earthly voices….For the Anglo-Saxons, having inherited one set of

values through secular Germanic thought and acquired another through Christian Latin teaching,

the one does not preclude the other.”19 Not only does this passing existence provide the

16 J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed.

Christopher Tolkien (Hammersmith: Harper Collin Publishers, 2006), 23. 17 Ibid, 31. 18 Milton McC. Gatch, “Perceptions of Eternity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed.

Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 190. 19 Christine Fell, “Perceptions of Transience,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm

Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 176.

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opportunity and the motivation to contemplate one’s place within the world, it invites one to

marvel at his participation with that which lasts beyond it.

In all this, it should become apparent that Old English elegy may be summed up in the

sensation of longing. Whether stirred by the loss of his lord, by the memory of yesteryear’s

glories, or by the knowledge that all things under heaven pass away in time, the subject of

Anglo-Saxon literature finds himself first enthralled by a state of sorrow for a thing which he

cannot meet or regain. But hand in hand with this yearning, a hope of fulfillment at times rises

with the promise of an enduring heavenly home, though this consolation cannot fully veil or

replace the sorrow of a man wandering in exile upon the earth. It is with a blend of these two

sentiments that the traveler crosses over his threshold and onto the road.

III

In the light of Old English elegy, the reader may turn to Middle-earth anew. By peering

through this Anglo-Saxon lens in which the ephemeral and the everlasting, through subtle

interplay, continually elucidate existence, he finds that the shape of Tolkien’s work unfolds into

an elaboration of their relationship—and culminates in a wordless exhortation. Identifying the

one theme (particularly the transient) regularly uncovers the other on some level, and when taken

together they reveal an approach to life which Tolkien would encourage others either to adopt or,

at least, to bear in mind. To perceive and appreciate fully this endeavor, the reader must reach

into the mythology of the professor’s constructed world and unearth the elegiac motif’s

manifestation among Tolkien’s many races: most notably, as it regards Elves, Men, Ents, and

Hobbits.

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Perhaps in no other place does the theme of the doomed exile and his sorrow come

through so strongly in Middle-earth as it does in the narrative of the Elves. For this, the reader

must turn to The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s collected tales of his fantastic world’s early days. In this

foundation of his legendarium, the professor delves into the history of Arda’s creation, the

angelic powers which brought it about under the direction of Ilúvatar, and the conflicts between

these powers and Melkor, their fallen kin. Upon the awakening of the Elves, the stories shift

their focus to these first Children of Ilúvatar, who are brought by the Valar to dwell in the land of

true light and peace, Valinor. Yet by both the machinations of Melkor and the pride of Fëanor,

greatest craftsmen of the Elves, the elven race of the Noldor are brought to ruin; they defy the

decree of the Valar that they not leave Valinor in pursuit of Melkor and the stolen Silmarils, and

their own oath of vengeance exiles the Noldor from the blessed land.20 The vengeful Elves then

compound their trespass with the murder of their kin for the ships needed to reach Middle-earth.

This pivotal point in The Silmarillion sets the stage for all the future deeds and thoughts of the

Elves; after arriving in Middle-earth, the Noldor come to realize the severity of their error over

time, and nearly every piece of Elvish verse in The Lord of the Rings is framed by the context of

their separation from Valinor.

Here, the Elves reveal their link with Anglo-Saxon elegies. The firstborn Children of

Ilúvatar do not die of old age, for they are immortal if they are not killed or give themselves up

to despair. It is this fact which intensifies their cultural grief: “when death actually does occur,

the anguish and agony of those left behind is both heightened and prolonged.”21 And yet it is not

merely the death of loved ones that the Elves mourn, nor that they themselves are left behind by

such a passing (though this certainly plays its part); rather, it is their exile and division from

20 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 75. 21 Amy M. Amendt-Raduege, “’Worthy of a Song’: Memory, Mortality, and Music,” in Middle-earth Minstrel:

Essays on Music in Tolkien, ed. Bradford Lee Eden (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010), 118.

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Valinor which so often occupies their thoughts. In their first appearance in The Lord of the

Rings, a company of Elves are singing of their patron Vala, “O light to us that wander here /

Amid the world of woven trees!…We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the

trees, / Thy starlight on the Western Seas.”22

In a more somber and personal manner, the Lady Galadriel gives her sad and sweet song

thus: “O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore…But if of ships I now should

sing, what ship would come to me, / What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a

Sea?”23 Indeed, Galadriel herself defied the Valar in the First Age of Middle-earth, and she

continues to drink from her bitter cup—a state of lonely separation in her exile which she

presumably describes when singing forlornly, “Who now shall refill the cup for me?”24 In this,

the reader ought to note a similar passage in Beowulf, where the Lay of the Last Survivor

laments, “Now I have none / who might carry sword, [polish] the cup, / gold-plated vessel; the

company is gone;” this cup, considered by some critics to be the stolen vessel which prompts the

dragon’s fateful feud with Beowulf’s people, calls to mind the Silmarils seized by Melkor.25 If

the pilfered cup in Beowulf has invited the death of the Geats’ king, then so the cup of

Galadriel—that is, the stolen Silmarils, which remain forever lost to the Noldor—has brought her

the inescapable pain of the exile wandering far from her home.

Yet the true prick of this grief is a barb which not only pains but pulls: rather than merely

fixating on their graying presence in Middle-earth, Galadriel and the Noldor are afflicted

primarily by a deep longing for Valinor, and so to return there. For in the awareness of his exile,

the only thought left to the wanderer is that of his proper home—both in transient and eternal

22 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 92-93. 23 Ibid, 393. 24 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 74; J.R.R.

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 398. 25 Beowulf, trans. Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 183-85; ibid, 358.

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terms. The travails of the cold and lonely road can do nothing in the end but point to the place

from which a man has come or to which he is going. Whether in the mournful memory of a

mead-hall filled with warm companionship or in the empty space in his heart where he knows a

heavenly hearth should be tended, this sojourner cannot escape the knowledge that he is

distanced from men or from God. Exile casts the shape of a proper relationship on his troubles

like the shadow of a hall upon the highway, which he may read and recognize as the place where

he is meant to be. It is with this recognition that he may turn his feet towards the object of his

desire and his attention to his innate need for participation in such a relationship.

When speaking of the Elves’ mythological past in this light, it is only fitting to treat also

its promise of fulfillment. As recorded in the professor’s biography by Humphrey Carpenter,

when Tolkien read the collected Anglo-Saxon religious poems Crist, he found himself inspired

by a figure depicted in two lines: “Eala Earendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum

sended. ‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men.’”26 From

this angelic figure the Oxford professor would later develop Eärendil, the mariner holding a

place of high honor in the Elves’ epic canon. But to Tolkien as well, the original Earendel had

great significance; as he said long after he first read the aforementioned lines, evoking an image

of elegiac consolation in the eternal, “I felt a curious thrill…as if something had stirred in me,

half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind

those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.”27 Although his legacy resides most

in The Silmarillion, Eärendil appears also in The Lord of the Rings as the subject of a song; while

sung by the hobbit Bilbo, its content is an Elvish tale, and it sums up the experience of the

Noldor in this one mariner’s life. Much like the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, Eärendil “wandered far

26 Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), 64. 27 Ibid.

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from northern strands, / bewildered on enchanted ways / beyond the days of mortal lands;” yet,

in search of Valinor’s aid in defending Middle-earth, “A wanderer escaped from night / to haven

white he came at last.”28 His journey completed, Eärendil takes up one of the Silmarils into the

heavens in his hallowed ship and becomes a beacon of hope to the Elves who remain in Middle-

earth—much as the Seafarer points out the way to the heavenly home of the Lord.

In the shadow of this hope, the Elves are prone to even greater longing to return into the

West. Galadriel’s message to Legolas in The Two Towers warns him that the sound of the sea

will forever capture his heart, and the woodland Elf confirms this by the story’s end when he

sings, “do you hear them calling, / The voices of my people that have gone before me? / I will

leave, I will leave the woods that bore me; / For our days are ending and our years failing;” for

Legolas, only Valinor now lingers in his mind.29 Yet, a tragic element still remains in the chance

of completing this longed-for journey home. Legolas himself relates the tale of the maiden

Nimrodel and her lover Amroth, who did not come to Valinor despite their intended return:

“Where now she wanders none can tell, / In sunlight or in shade; / For lost of yore was Nimrodel

/ And in the mountains strayed.”30 Although the ship waits to bear her into the West, at last it

can delay no longer, and it sets sail; Amroth, aboard the ship, cannot bear this separation from

his love even when he himself will reach Valinor, and he dives overboard. No doubt should

remain that many wanderings of the heart, whether springing from misdeeds or from love, lead

the Elves away from their true home. In truth, they are exiled by their own agency, for they

cannot set aside the things of which they become enamored—be they stolen Silmarils or lost

lovers. Even with the awareness of that which is forever lasting, the Elvish road remains paved

28 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 250; ibid, 251. 29 Ibid, 524; ibid, 992-93. 30 Ibid, 358.

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and pitted with transient affairs which both foreshadow and obscure the everlasting. The elder

Children, as Tolkien seems to say, have no guarantee of their homecoming.

In the songs and poems of the Elves, then, Tolkien certainly has demonstrated an

undercurrent of sentiment strikingly similar to that conveyed within Anglo-Saxon works: the

exile of some and their yearning for what they have lost, which may lead to eternal fulfillment

when they pursue it properly. But no less do the Men of Middle-earth express such a motif, for

these younger Children of Ilúvatar also live in a world which spins in a cycle of fading and

decay. Indeed, the mortality and transient nature of Men prompts its own flavor of elegiac

sorrow to complement that of the immortal Elves, and this mood seems to arise most often in a

martial context. In The Lord of the Rings, the kingdoms of Gondor and of Rohan provide the

most ready occurrences of this theme.

The death of Boromir calls for the reader’s attention on account of the lament sung for

him by both Aragorn and Legolas. Speaking for the winds of the cardinal directions, they

declare, “I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey; / I saw him walk in

empty lands, until he passed away…I looked afar, / But you came not from the empty lands

where no men are.”31 In describing the wanderings of Boromir prior to his arrival in Rivendell

and his joining with the Fellowship, the lament reminds the reader of one who journeys far from

home. Still, the focus of his death is clearly also on the last stand of a proud warrior fighting to

the bitter end, for “Many Orcs lay slain, piled all about him and at his feet.”32 Even in distant

lands and in the face of his mortality, Boromir battles to protect his companions, and he fells

many foes before he himself falls. Such a death echoes those of Beowulf and of Byrhtnoth by

winning glory but losing life in the process, and leaving others behind to remember the fallen

31 Ibid, 437. 32 Ibid, 434.

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with sorrowful verse characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons. Likewise in Boromir’s dirge, Tolkien’s

“imagery reprises the conventions of nostalgia, idealization and harmony that define the English

elegy in all eras.”33

The Men of Rohan, a people inspired by the Anglo-Saxons of poetry and legend, also

invoke the Old English elegiac motif in a setting of armed conflict.34 When mourning Théoden

and the men he led into battle, the Rohirrim sing, “Farewell he bade to his free people, / hearth

and high-seat…Forth rode the king, fear behind him, fate before him…Doom drove them on.”35

One poet of Rohan later records, “There Théoden fell, Thengling mighty, / to his golden halls and

green pastures / in the Northern fields never returning, / high lord of the host;” likewise, he lists

other great warriors who “fought and fell there in a far country” and were forever separated from

their homes.36 Clearly, the idea of dying in battle far from one’s hearth and homeland holds

some significance to the Rohirrim, for the whole poem revolves around the distance between

these heroes and those places from which they came. Although they are remembered with

honor, such men will not ride home again.

Théoden and others live out the theme of a man who achieves greatness in life but

nevertheless dies performing similar deeds when the changing world passes him by. Still, even

before the death of its beloved king in The Lord of the Rings, Rohan has always borne this motif

upon its shoulders. Upon hearing the language of that kingdom, Legolas remarks, “it is like to

this land itself; rich and rolling in part, and else hard and stern as the mountains. But I cannot

33 Lynn Forest-Hill, “Boromir, Byrhtnoth, and Bayard: Finding a Language for Grief in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of

the Rings,” Tolkien Studies 5 (2008): 85. 34 T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983), 94. 35 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 834-35. 36 Ibid, 882-83.

Kilgore 15

guess what it means, save that it is laden with the sadness of Mortal Men.”37 The Elf says this in

response to Aragorn’s chanting of a song from Rohan, which the ranger translates thus:

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

…

They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.38

As direct a reference as any to the ubi sunt motif from The Wanderer, this song unmistakably

demonstrates Rohan’s conscious awareness of and response to the world’s transience and its

effect upon men.

The language of wandering continues to appear in other matters concerning Men, but as

with the Elves, there is also a note of consolation to be found; of particular note is the act of

calling home distant travelers. When Galadriel sends her messages in The Two Towers, she

declares to Aragorn,

Where now are the Dúnedain, Elessar, Elessar?

Why do thy kinsfolk wander afar?

Near is the hour when the Lost should come forth,

And the Grey Company ride from the North.39

Galadriel’s declaration announces that the long-overdue homecoming of the Dúnedain from the

kingless wilderness is at hand, and although the way for them is hard, their wandering soon

comes to an end. And indeed, these Men’s circumstances are also softened when the reader

considers Bilbo Baggins’ words concerning Aragorn, and so also his kin: “Not all those who

wander are lost.”40 Related to the consolation of the Dúnedain is the release of the Sleepless

Dead whom Aragorn calls up in The Return of the King. Men who broke their oaths of support

to Isildur in the early days of Gondor, these faithless beings were cursed by the son of Elendil “to

37 Ibid, 530. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid, 524. 40 Ibid, 265.

Kilgore 16

rest never until your oath is fulfilled.”41 In Aragorn’s return, however, they receive the

opportunity to redress their wrong, and bring their wandering as wretched shades to a close; in

the verse of Malbeth the Seer, whom Aragorn quotes, “Whose shall the horn be? Who shall call

them / from the grey twilight, the forgotten people?”42 Under the auspices of the king, these

exiled dead gain the freedom to travel on to their proper resting place beyond life’s borders.

In these reflections upon death and exile, Men receive a particular vision from Tolkien’s

hand. As in keeping with the elegiac motif of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the passing nature of life—

whether it culminates in oath-breaking or in glory—indicates to mortals that such an end is not

the end, and that there is no reason to dread its coming. Behind the veil of the transient world

which man finds wanting, he glimpses the shape of things to come: separation from kith and kin

by the sword fosters and educates his need for the endless, while the enduring praise of both men

and heavenly powers uplifts his heart until it looks on those things which are both truly

praiseworthy and permanent. In Middle-earth, the heavenly hearth reaches out through death to

take Men up in accordance with a higher purpose surpassing sorrow and anxiety. As Dr. Bradley

Birzer explains, “Indeed, Ilúvatar did not intend for men to fear death. Instead, the restlessness

he placed in man was intended to prompt them to accept and desire eternal life with him. But

because of the disorder Morgoth’s actions introduced prior to the birth of man, men

misunderstood Ilúvatar’s intentions and feared death.”43 The Anglo-Saxons thought in much the

same way, as when the poet of The Dream of the Rood concludes that “it is a fair and joyful

thing when the blessed person dies, for death fixes one’s destiny once and for all time. For on

41 Ibid, 813. 42 Ibid, 812. 43 Bradley J. Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington: ISI Books,

2003), 96.

Kilgore 17

doomsday such a one is admitted to the eðel or ‘homeland’, the goal for which all the righteous

have yearned and laboured.”44

Thus far the language of wandering has remained consistent: there is great sorrow in a

world which by itself offers nothing of permanence, and which compels the exile to stray far

from home. The paths leading to the eternal, for the most part, have been implicit and

submerged in the text. It is, however, in the songs of the Ents that Tolkien begins to turn this

attitude by emphasizing its consolation. The Ents shepherd the forest of Fangorn with slow and

steady care, but the eldest of their number, Treebeard, recalls distant days when the woods

stretched unbroken far across the land. In those times, he says,

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.

Ah! The sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!

And I said that was good.

I wandered in Summer in the elm-woods of Ossiriand.

Ah! The light and the music in the summer by the Seven Rivers of Ossir!

And I thought that was best.45

Here and elsewhere, the Ents recall their roaming with pleasure, for they “loved the great trees,

and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and

ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path;” and in contrast to the Entwives, who ordered

and tended the land so that it would readily meet their own desires, “we Ents went on wandering,

and we only came to the gardens now and again.”46 If Treebeard’s words invoke the image of

one who travels widely without a hearth to call his own, like an Anglo-Saxon exile, then at least

this traveler seems to be happy in his lot: a far cry from the somber Elves and grim Men who

endure such a life reluctantly and must search for their consolation.

44 Milton McC. Gatch, “Perceptions of Eternity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed.

Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 194. 45 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 490. 46 Ibid, 497.

Kilgore 18

Yet despite Tolkien’s developing treatment of the wandering itself, such constant roving

still brings pain to the Ents in the end, for when they later return to greet the Entwives as before,

the latter are nowhere to be found. “Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is

fair…Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best,” the Elves suppose that the

shepherds sing; the elder Children of Ilúvatar also express the Ents’ hope that, when all

remaining in Middle-earth has at last passed away, “Together we will take the road that leads

into the West, / And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.”47 Still, the Ents

must in the meantime endure the passage of time and the loss it brings, as Bregalad laments: “O

rowan fair, upon your hair how white the blossom lay! / O rowan mine, I saw you shine upon a

summer’s day…O rowan dead, upon your head your hair is dry and grey; / Your crown is

spilled, your voice is stilled for ever and a day.”48 Even with an accepting and perhaps

appreciative view of wandering, these beings continue to find sorrow in its context and its

consequences. Still, in light of the Anglo-Saxon elegy and its balance of the transient and the

eternal, the measured Entish attention to the hasty world grows more subtly seasoned than

heavily leavened by loss. In this respect, the shepherds of trees become the half-way point in a

transition from heavy grief and bleak endurance to overt anticipation of and reliance upon the

immutable.

Accordingly, if the verses of the Ents offer some different emphasis on traveling the

passing earth without a home, then the songs of hobbits must give the reader pause, for they also

maintain the elegiac awareness of change and wayfaring—but they stress most strongly the

consolatory vision of a home at the end of the long and winding road. In contrast especially with

the poets of Elves and of Men, the attitude of hobbits towards wandering encompasses an even

47 Ibid, 498. 48 Ibid, 505.

Kilgore 19

broader acceptance which displays unquenchable optimism even on the surface. For instance,

before the Fellowship departs from Rivendell, Bilbo sings quietly,

I sit beside the fire and think

of all that I have seen,

of meadow-flowers and butterflies

in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer

in autumns that were,

with morning mist and silver sun

and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think

of how the world will be

when winter comes without a spring

that I shall ever see.

…

I sit beside the fire and think

of people long ago,

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think

of times that were before,

I listen for returning feet

and voices at the door.49

In this song, Bilbo expresses a strong awareness of the world’s transience, and of his own

mortality in it. Likewise, he remembers those who came before him but are no more. The end of

his verse, however, presents a new paradigm; whereas many of the previous poems have focused

primarily upon one’s own loss and his reaction to it, Bilbo here offers an expectation common to

the majority of hobbit verse found in The Lord of the Rings: the idea that one’s return from the

wilderness of change is nevertheless a given, and that others share equally in this future

fulfillment. While Elves grieve for the things that are lost to them and mourn even in the hope of

49 Ibid, 295-96.

Kilgore 20

homecoming, hobbits instead seem to view these trials of life as a brief journey; where Men are

at first inclined to regard death as an end to all but the faint assurance of remembrance, hobbits

readily look to that long rest without ever acknowledging it as the final end. Indeed, their tone

invokes the closing lines of The Wanderer and The Seafarer most easily of all Tolkien’s poetry,

and sets up the anticipation of something beyond life’s transient adversities.

To the hobbits, every road has a welcoming destination at its end, in one form or another.

As these small folk muse, “Home is behind, the world ahead, / And there are many paths to

tread…Then world behind and home ahead, / We’ll wander back to home and bed.”50 As

Frodo’s friends declare before setting out from the Shire, “Farewell we call to hearth and

hall!…With foes ahead, behind us dread, / Beneath the sky shall be our bed, / Until at last our

toil be passed, / Our journey done, our errand sped.”51 For this small company, the cheery

anticipation of an end to the worry and danger of such travels shines through even in the midst of

impending troubles. The hobbits continue in this vein while upon the road, as Frodo sings, “O!

Wanderers in the shadowed land / despair not! For though dark they stand, / all woods there be

must end at last, / and see the open sun go past.”52 Most telling of the enduring quality of this

optimism is Sam’s song in the dark tower of Cirith Ungol, where all seems lost: “Though here at

journey’s end I lie / in darkness buried deep…I will not say the Day is done, / nor bid the Stars

farewell.”53 Even if Men, Elves, and Ents hold such hope in their own hearts, nowhere does this

sentiment arise as consistently and as clearly in their verse as it does in that of the hobbits.

50 Ibid, 91. 51 Ibid, 120. 52 Ibid, 127. 53 Ibid, 943.

Kilgore 21

Bilbo’s walking song and its multiple versions throughout The Lord of the Rings

epitomize this unique attitude towards the challenges of one who must wander the world.

Uplifting the singer and spurring him on, the tune states:

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.54

Even when he tires and reaches the end of his travels, and the changing world gives his place to

others, he readily declares:

Let them a journey new begin,

But I at last with weary feet

Will turn towards the lighted inn,

My evening-rest and sleep to meet.55

Far from sorrow and fear, such wandering for the hobbits—when they sing of it—simply gives

them a vision of home, for which they are always striving. For these little people, perhaps, the

wilderness is not so wild and foreboding as it is for larger folk, who more easily lose sight of the

hearth in the circumstances of their separation from it. As a result, the everlasting gains elegiac

precedence in the hobbits’ consideration of their relationship with the world, for the ephemeral

lingers much more briefly in their minds.

But if the hobbits present a marked turn in Tolkien’s elegiac treatment of transience and

wandering in Middle-earth’s verse, then the presence of Tom Bombadil provides the reader with

as vivid a paradigm shift as is found within the professor’s legendarium, with curious

implications. Ever jolly and full of inexplicable cheer, Bombadil is a being singularly unaffected

by the turning of the world. Living with his wife Goldberry in a peaceful region, Bombadil says

of himself, “Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the

54 Ibid, 48. 55 Ibid, 1024.

Kilgore 22

river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.”56 In his effusive song,

he states merrily, “Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing / Comes hopping home again. Can

you hear him singing?…Tom’s going home again water-lilies bringing. / Hey! Come derry dol!

Can you hear me singing?”57

The verse’s mention of homecoming alone will catch the reader’s attention straightaway,

but the true import of Bombadil’s words is revealed by the understanding that he never truly

leaves his hearth at all: “Tom’s country ends here: he will not pass the borders. / Tom has his

house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting!”58 Even when walking in the outdoors and running

such errands as flower-fetching during the day, Bombadil does not in fact journey anywhere. As

Gandalf says, “he is withdrawn into a little land, within bounds that he has set, though none can

see them, waiting perhaps for a change of days, and he will not step beyond them.”59 There

might be no greater dissimilarity between this being and the members of the Fellowship than that

he is fixed in one place of his own accord, while they must walk the long road towards Mordor.

What then should be made of Tom Bombadil? An odd, colorful, and certainly static

character in a world suffused with an awareness of the sorrow inherent in change, he presents a

puzzle when placed next to the races of Middle-earth and their own reactions to one’s separation

from home. Yet, Bombadil in fact proves the elegiac motif of Tolkien’s mythology, as well as

its significance. This cheery man, with all his careless songs and capers, becomes the exception

to the elegiac rule and personifies the ideal state for a weary traveler: sitting by the hearth with

his wife, shutting the deep night out with curtains and a roaring fire. But this analogy does not in

fact go far enough, for Bombadil becomes a near manifestation of the eternal within The Lord of

56 Ibid, 146. 57 Ibid, 134. 58 Ibid, 163. 59 Ibid, 283.

Kilgore 23

the Rings: he is utterly untouched by the cares of the earth while he simultaneously gestures

towards the immutable and endless. By placing this pillar of stability and enchanting gravity in

his imagined world, Tolkien invites the reader to recognize (along with the hobbits) that Tom

Bombadil does not participate in nature as a fellow being who is subject to change and decay; he

is instead more akin to an emissary of Valinor or of Ilúvatar in the cosmogonic hierarchy of

Middle-earth, and so he evokes an awe of the divine, which cannot be bounded by transient time.

But in this, Bombadil also reveals the unattainability by Tolkien’s characters of this

unearthly and supernally serene existence, and demonstrates that it lies beyond mortal reach for

the time being—the hobbits must carry onwards, else they be overtaken by the servants of

Sauron; the Ents still do not know where the Entwives have gone, and they will not acquire this

knowledge without traversing the wide earth; Men will not endure the Shadow without the heroic

valor which leads also to death; and the Elves cannot return to Valinor without now leaving

Middle-earth behind. Yet Tolkien understood elegy well, for he keeps its consolation apparent in

the text. Eärendil reminds the Elves that Valinor does remain open to those who seek it. Men

are called home, whether by their earthly lord or by Ilúvatar, regardless of tragedy or death. The

Ents are not rooted in place as their leafy wards are, and they may yet also hear news of their lost

loved ones from other travelers. And hobbits, least but perhaps greatest of all Middle-earth’s

folk, know how to approach their wandering in such a way that their hearts remain strong and

hopeful, for they remember what awaits them at the end of the road.

In each of his races and their general cultural reactions to the world which he constructed,

Tolkien unveils an ‘elegiac spectrum’ which offers up portions of the Anglo-Saxon motif. At

one end of this range of responses, Elves and Men emphasize the sad transience of the world,

and the underlying links to the eternal require some analysis to uncover. In the case of the Ents,

Kilgore 24

midway through the spectrum, the shepherds’ reaction grows milder as Tolkien balances the

bitterness of earthly wandering with the growing awareness of the everlasting, with which

worldly affairs are more easily endured and even enjoyed. On the other side, hobbits express

clear appreciation for that which awaits them beyond Middle-earth as they know it, whether

regarding their road or life itself. Above all this stands Tom Bombadil, a grand figure fashioned

as a type of deus ex machina model for the eternal when it reaches down and touches upon the

world’s doings and inhabitants. Taken as a whole, this so-called spectrum presents a movement

from the implicit possibility of a relationship with the eternal to the explicit acknowledgement of

the same; it ought not to come as a surprise that it is the four hobbits, carried along their journey

by a forward- and upward-looking spirit, who meet and stay with Bombadil for a time in The

Lord of the Rings. In the manner of Eärendil’s salvific voyage and in the tradition of The

Seafarer, perhaps, Tolkien sought to exhort his readers by offering up an array of exempla

which, when studied through the Old English elegiac lens, leads to a simple conclusion: of all

possible responses to the changing world’s turmoil and sorrow, the best attitude to take is one of

acceptance and anticipation of the lighted inn. The Anglo-Saxon poet, focused upon a vision of

his heavenly lord waiting in the mead-hall beyond the end of one’s earthly exile, would agree.

IV

Having addressed the manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon elegiac theme in The Lord of the

Rings, the reader ought then to examine the means by which Tolkien chose to express it.

Certainly, the reason for crafting his own verse within the text at first appears unclear: why

should Tolkien have so clearly placed the motif of wandering in so many songs and poems when

writing a long work of prose? Peter Wilkin, after analyzing the relationship between the poetry

Kilgore 25

of Tolkien’s characters and the significance of Valinor in his legendarium, concludes that,

“despite the futility of attempting to restore the paradise of Eden, mankind’s longing for the

deathless lands of the West is the crucial catalyst for the poetic process.”60 Perhaps this is indeed

the case within the fictional bounds of Middle-earth, and such a statement does contain the

Anglo-Saxon attitude of loss and consolation, but it does not explain why Tolkien himself

believed poetry particularly fit for such a use. The answer to the question which Wilkin does not

ask lies in Tolkien’s understanding of the very nature of language, and this explanation not only

elucidates the presence of Middle-earth’s poetics in his published works, but it also reveals

another link with Old English literature which complements and reinforces the primary focus

upon man’s relationship with the transient and the eternal. As the professor himself says, “To

ask what is the origin of stories (however qualified) is to ask what is the origin of language and

the mind,” for “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”61

To understand Tolkien’s mind in this matter, the reader must first know Owen Barfield’s

thoughts on language and poetics. As Margaret Hiley testifies, “One profound influence on

Tolkien’s ideas on both myth and language was his fellow Inkling Owen Barfield. Barfield was

interested in semantics, and in his best-known work, Poetic Diction, he develops a theory that

links the earliest evolution of meaning with that of myth.”62 Indeed, Tolkien found himself

enchanted by the whole concept, as C.S. Lewis once told Barfield: “You might like to know that

60 Peter Wilkin, “Ǽfre me strongode longað: Songs of Exile in the Mortal Realms,” in Middle-earth Minstrel:

Essays on Music in Tolkien, ed. Bradford Lee Eden (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010), 57. 61 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien

(Hammersmith: Harper Collin Publishers, 2006), 119; ibid, 122. 62 Margaret Hiley, “Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien,” MFS Modern Fiction

Studies 50.4 (2004): 854.

Kilgore 26

when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, a propos of something quite different, that

your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook.”63

Barfield’s linguistic model revolves around the assertion that words once held a concrete,

undivided meaning. In the distant past, he contends, man’s speech did not distinguish between

material things and matters of the mind, and instead functioned as a poet’s figurative use of

language does now:

Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects,

and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to

reveal.…The language of primitive man reports them as direct perceptual

experience. The speaker has observed a unity, and is not therefore himself

conscious of relation.64

For example, the Latin spiritus signified to its native speakers a concept which English and other

languages afterward differentiated into the distinct breath, wind, and spirit; yet the original

meaning did not separate the physical movement of air from the “principle of life,” but rather

“contained within itself the germs of both later significations.”65 From this one word, the listener

perceived a wider range of meaning which he did not parse or separate into tidy abstract

concepts. Concerning this, he might explain, “The body’s act of respiration, man’s spiritual

existence, and the earth’s own breath, which likewise sustains life—why should spiritus not

mean each thing simultaneously and equally to a living man who understands his relationship

with them all?” Barfield explains the importance of this concept when remarking, “Connections

between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once

perceived as immediate realities.”66 To pick and choose one definition or understanding of these

phenomena limits such a man’s ability to associate himself with the rest in that same moment,

63 Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Grand Rapids: WM B. Eerdmans

Publishing Company, 1983), 35. 64 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 86. 65 Ibid, 80-81. 66 Ibid, 92.

Kilgore 27

which in turn fractures both his awareness of and his participation in the whole of existence

around him.

The claim that a growing attitude of specificity or exclusivity in one’s vocabulary affects

the way he views the world should not meet much skepticism; given the labeling of myriad

diseases according to their causes, the natural question of the modern day is not simply, “Is he

ill?” but, “Which of a thousand physical illnesses identified by doctors afflicts him?” The claim

that such a restrictive change in meaning is detrimental to man, and that his sight grows more

limited with these abstract and specialized tools, may require more persuasion—yet the reader

should note that saying, “You have pneumonia” does not also explicitly remind the listener that,

“You are spiritually sick.” How much wiser would man be if he had a single word to discern

that, “In all your being, you are unwell and need healing—heart, mind, body, and soul,” and how

much more effective in his exhortations regarding health! How much more fulfilling would he

find life if all his speech were enriched thus! Certainly, a movement away from harmony and

understanding towards a state of separation and isolation rarely strikes the critic as an

improvement of fortune. Barfield considers this trend in a linguistic context and concludes that,

“now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this

unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception,” for it is by this path that men may see

and grasp the world around themselves properly and in full.67

Unified meaning, according to Barfield, existed naturally at the birth of language and “is

interested in knowing what things are,” whereas divisive abstraction and analysis highlights

differences and states what things are not. Similarly, the act of reaching beyond the later and

artificial definitions of words recalls the time in which speech reflected relationship more truly. 68

67 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 87. 68 Ibid, 87-88.

Kilgore 28

By approaching language in this fashion, poets may illuminate truths of existence with a message

less darkened by divided meaning, and so craft:

the analogy between death and sleep and winter, and again between birth and

waking and summer, and these, once more, are constantly made the types of a

spiritual experience—of the death in the individual soul of its accidental part and

the putting on of incorruption.69

Here, such edifying expressions emphatically educate the listener about his place both in the

present world and the hereafter, and they will accordingly reveal the way in which he ought to

regard life; but clinical and concise terms undercut this message by severing the bridge between

heaven and earth which metaphor raises up when emulating that native recognition.

Tolkien likewise recognized the importance of the poet’s figurative language, and

thought it essential in guiding men: “words were for Tolkien not just a window onto the past but

the key to that lost relationship between man and God of which our sense of the Fall is our only

memory.”70 The professor reasoned from this premise that, “the sundered connection can be

refreshed—by the philologist, who knows the history of the sundering of sound and sense, but

also the poet, who knows when the sound is carrying his sense, even if he doesn’t know why.”71

The way back to man’s eternal Lord then begs such a use of language that does not obscure what

is by setting blinders over the eyes of the word’s receiver. As Sam says when praising the

seemingly transcendent beauty of Galadriel, “I’m not much good at poetry…so I can’t tell you

what I mean. It ought to be sung.”72 Indeed, The Silmarillion displays this divide between unity

and separation of meaning outright in the Great Music of the Ainur, where the discordancy of

Melkor muddles the harmony of the angelic powers so that they are dismayed—and so only

69 Ibid, 91. 70 Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Grand Rapids: WM B. Eerdmans

Publishing Company, 1983), 9. 71 John R. Holmes, “’Inside a Song’: Tolkien’s Phonaesthetics,” in Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in

Tolkien, ed. Bradford Lee Eden (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2010), 31. 72 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 706.

Kilgore 29

Ilúvatar, its Great Conductor and Author, knows the full measure of the Music and its future

fulfillment.

So much for the poet’s high calling. Wilkin’s observation receives its justification:

Tolkien sought not merely for his characters to recall an early paradise of Middle-earth and thus

yearn for the eternal, but he wished moreover for the very words of his work to sound out an

Edenic echo, recalling the glory of undivided language and so uplifting the reader himself in a

meaningful sense. But in all this talk of poets and poetry, the problem of meaning again raises

its head, for certainly Barfield’s poetic theory applies also to prose and not merely to structured

verse. Presumably, many thoughtful uses of language hearkening back to unified meaning fall

within its scope; restorative metaphor appears in both Biblical and casual speech. Yet, regarding

the sometimes ambiguous connections between metered poetry, prose, and the poetic, Barfield

also states:

for historical reasons, most of the poetry with which [those seeking to define

poetry] have actually had to deal has, in fact, been in metrical form; and it is this,

in all probability, which has given rise to the terminological confusion.

…We can understand the origin of metre by going back to the ages when

men were conscious, not merely in their heads, but in the beating of their hearts

and the pulsing of their blood—when thinking was not merely of Nature, but was

Nature herself.

It is only at a later stage that prose (= not-verse) comes naturally into

being out of the growth of that rational principle which, with its sense-bound,

abstract thoughts, divorces man’s consciousness from the life of Nature.73

Meter, then, appears to be a natural characteristic of the poet’s edifying work, if only because

“All literatures are, in their infancy, metrical, that is to say, based on a more or less regularly

recurring rhythm.”74 Indeed, Tolkien himself explained at length the role of rhythm in Old

English literature, stressing its importance to that language’s meter in his essay On Translating

73 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 146-47. 74 Ibid, 146.

Kilgore 30

Beowulf.75 Given the professor’s awareness of this fact, the verse of Middle-earth ought to be

viewed as distilled exempla wherein Barfield’s theory finds its clearest expression: Tolkien is

able to work his enchantment of restoration, much as Poetic Diction describes, while keeping

with the primeval heritage and conventions of formal poetry. By so using words and meaning in

The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien not only exemplifies the elegy’s attention to the proper

relationship of man with the transient and the eternal, but he simultaneously reinforces this

principle by approaching man’s ideal participation in language. This participation, in its own

way, also reflects man’s relationship with the world around and above him.

Fittingly, the Anglo-Saxons provide the capstone to Barfield’s argument when Tolkien

applies it to the treatment of elegy. Here, the Old English retelling of the Babel account again

calls for attention concerning the theme of Tolkien’s poetry. As demonstrated by this episode of

Genesis A, the Anglo-Saxons’ preoccupation with the motif of wandering and separation extends

into their own understanding of language—and furthermore, it is entirely consistent with

Barfield and Tolkien’s linguistic theory. As the Babel text says, while attempting to raise their

great tower, “Each tribe became a stranger to another, after the Creator divided the languages

of men, through the success of His might. Then the sons of nobles scattered in four directions,

disunited, in search of land.”76 From this Biblical elaboration and interpretation, Liuzza

concludes that, “The sign of a ruined tower and the isolation of linguistic diversity are here

joined to the story of migration that is, as Nicholas Howe has persuasively argued, part of the

infrastructure of Anglo-Saxon cultural identity.”77 The reader finds in this example that, if he

takes the confusion of tongues at Babel as analogous with the splintering of unified meaning,

75 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Translating Beowulf,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher

Tolkien (Hammersmith: Harper Collin Publishers, 2006), 62-63. 76 R.M. Liuzza. “The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History,” Studies in the Literary Imagination

36.1 (2003): 3. 77 Ibid, 4.

Kilgore 31

then Liuzza’s statement neatly links the Old English elegy’s hallmarks of separation and union

with Anglo-Saxon thoughts on language’s nature and history.

The crux of the poetic issue then lies in a joining between Tolkien’s emulation of

undivided meaning and the Anglo-Saxon awareness of the same. The professor sought to edify

his readers by using words in a way that surpassed their fragmented definitions. In this

endeavor, Tolkien encourages the anticipation of the eternal, and he further compels his reader to

take notice: something greater than himself exists beyond the boundaries both of the ephemeral

and of language, and so he must consider how he participates in it.

CONCLUSION

As demonstrated by the Old English corpus, the Anglo-Saxon elegy holds a poetic focus

upon the wandering of one whose lot has changed on account of life’s transience, and who then

finds the consolation of the eternal when exile strips him of the things which would otherwise

occupy his sight. Tolkien’s legendarium reveals its connection with this elegiac mood in both its

attitude and its manifestation of the same in the poetic portions of The Lord of the Rings. The

broad thematic similarities of loss and consolation, so central to both literary collections, alone

suggest an awareness of this fact. In this light, Tolkien’s exploration of elegy—using his various

races to approach the motif from different directions—proves the point of this connection by

taking the reader from the depths of sorrow to the heights of hope for future fulfillment, and he

builds this road in order to exhort his readers concerning their reception of the endless.

Underlying all this is Tolkien’s reason for doing so in verse: his consideration for the nature of

language led him to regard poetry as a way of approaching undivided meaning in a world which

had passed it by. Likewise, the professor’s view of language fits neatly with the demonstrated

Kilgore 32

Anglo-Saxon mindfulness of fractured meaning in words, which ties back into both that culture’s

motif of separation and its promise of completion.

In all this, the evidence testifies that the literary legacy of the Anglo-Saxons indeed

inspired the thread of separation and reunification weaving through Middle-earth’s history and

culture. The elegiac attitude resounds like surf breaking upon the shore as Tolkien spins out his

tale with an eye to such mournful yet expectant poems and songs, recalling his predecessors

upon English soil. Whether in the musings of an exile, the pondering of ruins and the passage of

time, or the simple remembrance of the hearth waiting at the end of the road, poetry in The Lord

of the Rings turns upon the framework of loss and consolation. To the critic who asks why the

worlds of the Anglo-Saxon and of the Oxford professor must intersect in this manner, Tolkien

himself might respond, “You say their words are separate and mean nothing to each other. I say

that there is one theme to fulfill them all, and in the wilderness join them.”

Kilgore 33

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