Great Tales Never End: The Reality of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth

You would be hard-pressed to find a reader of Tolkien who does not describe Middle Earth as ‘alive,’ in some way or other. When we, as readers, travel through Middle Earth alongside the Fellowship, or Bilbo and the dwarves, we cannot help but feel a sense that we are beholding a real, definite world that exists outside of us – not merely as a fragment of our imagination. Indeed, the places we encounter in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (which doubtlessly are the reason so many of us fell in love with Tolkien’s work) seem to be steeped in history, the languages of the Elves and other species of Middle Earth work through internally consistent linguistic structures, even the geographies and biological compositions of various regions – from the Shire to Lorien to Rohan – are carefully examined.

Tolkien himself agreed with this ‘realness’. In fact, in a letter to Milton Waldman (about the matter of publishing The Lord of the Rings) from 1951, Tolkien claims that he has “the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (Letters, 204). However, this perspective does not suffice to explain the reality of his work. Goethe, in his dedication for Faust, Part One, addresses the characters he created as if they were real people:

Ye wavering shapes, again ye do enfold me,

As rest upon my troubled ye stole;

Shall I this time attempt to clasp, to hold ye?

Still for the fond illusion yearns my soul?

Ye press around! Come then, your captive hold me,

As upward from the vapoury mist ye roll;

Within my breast youth’s throbbing pulse is bounding,

Fann’d by the magic breath your march surrounding.

 

To Goethe, it too seemed as though his epic creation took on a life, a reality of its own. Mephistopheles and Faust do not act on Goethe’s whim, but in accordance with their own motives and reasons. In fact, one might even argue that all great novels possess some sort of ‘reality’ – perhaps in the character’s psychology, in the story’s plot, in the overarching themes. What, then, makes Middle Earth different? Tolkien’s sentiment, just like ours, reaches further than great characters. Answering this question wholly is almost impossible. There have been many posts that touch on language, geography, and many other elements (much more eloquently than I could), all of which contribute to this reality. Thus, I wanted to think about the ‘layering of stories’, as we discussed in class.

 Before even finishing The Fellowship of the Ring, we feel that there exists a lot more in this strange world than the tale we are reading. On the very first page, we feel the history Middle Earth is imbued with – The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are but sections in the larger Red Book of Westmarch (LotR, Prologue), and various pieces of information about Hobbits and the Shire are relayed to us in a manner almost resembling a textbook. Thus, we begin to understand larger structures, social, political, historical, geographic, that precede the story we are reading and in which our beloved heroes exist. This feeling is amplified by the fragments of other, older stories that Aragorn, Bilbo and other tell us of. By Weathertop (which itself carries history, as Aragorn explains to the hobbits), Aragorn tells the hobbits about “the tale of Tinúviel” (LotR bk. I, Ch. XI), an age-old love story of Beren and Lúthien; Gandalf’s account of the One Ring’s history (LotR bk. I, Ch. II) reveals that the scope of this struggle supersedes that of Frodo’s journey; Frodo exclaims that “We are forgetting our family history!” (LotR bk. I, Ch. XII) when the company travels past the stone trolls (which readers would recall from The Hobbit).

However, this history does not merely aesthetically exist to enhance the world of Lord of the Rings – the story is rather a manifestation of and continuation of a much grander tale, in which everything fits. Readers have an intuitive sense of this during Lord of the Rings, later made explicit in The Silmarillion – the War of the Ring is but a minute section of the cosmological story of Middle Earth and its creation. Sam makes this pivotal realization on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, exclaiming that they ultimately in the same tale as that of Beren: “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” (LotR bk. IV, Ch. VIII) Tolkien thus situates the story in a much larger history, in which greater forces are at play. Here again, the reader subconsciously feels that acute sense of reality, for we in our primary world are participants in grand workings that overshadow us ourselves.

Tolkien takes the reality of Middle Earth’s history and the cosmological forces driving it one step further. As a philologist and a scholar of medieval history, Tolkien is able to replicate much the same techniques we use for studying medieval history onto Middle Earth. Thus, the world is steeped in its own history – even the chronicle of the Lord of the Rings is given to us by way of Bilbo’s translations and transcriptions. This mirrors the transmission of our understanding of medieval history through manuscripts and the transcriptions thereof. The Red Book of Westmarch – a compilation of manuscripts about histories of the Shire and Middle Earth – itself is modelled on the Red Book of Hergest, a medieval manuscript Tolkien was familiar with. As we widen our vision from the adventures of The Hobbit to the cosmological scope of The Silmarillion, we see Tolkien’s vision: “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths” (Letters, 203).

If we expand our vision even further, we find the root of Middle Earth’s reality. Although not allegorical, Middle Earth’s existential trajectory, from its creation to the later tales and happenings, is very familiar to us through Christian beliefs. We feel a reality that mirrors the path of our world, replete with its methods for history, its languages, its mythologies. This beckons the question – are we part of this tale? We know how Lord of the Rings ends, but Frodo reminds us: “No, they never end as tales, (…) but the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended.” (LotR bk. IV, Ch. VIII) Tolkien connects our primary world to the secondary world not through allegory, but by understanding the substance of reality. He understood how histories and stories intertwine, how they shape each other, how this creates the framework of reality. The great tales never end, and Middle Earth’s reality can be found between the lines of the stories that inhabit it, just as ours can be.

—EP

The Same Tale Still: What We Gain From Imagining Tolkien as History

Today, the Lord of the Rings is widely heralded as one of the greatest fantasy stories of all time, an incredible feat of creativity and imagination. It’s widely accepted that although Tolkien’s world is masterfully detailed and believable, the events of his stories aren’t “real” in the typical sense: being the inventions of a single man, they obviously are not reflective of true world history. What I therefore found most interesting in the process of learning more about Tolkien, especially in reading through his letters, were the ways in which Tolkien did in fact believe his stories to be real.

In his letter to his publisher Milton Waldman (Letter 131), Tolkien lays out his mission statement: inspired by the mythologies of other cultures (e.g. Norse, Greek), and the lack of a corresponding canon for England, Tolkien expressed a desire to construct a national mythology for England, based on his extensive research as a professor at Oxford. If Tolkien’s words are to be taken completely at face value, then the entire world of LOTR, indeed everything he ever wrote, is his conjecture of England’s distant past, just as much a scholarly endeavour as a creative one. Just as the LOTR trilogy takes place during the “Third Age” of Middle Earth, his and our modern era, the 20th and 21st centuries, would be the “Seventh Age” of this world. Therefore (outlandish as the notion may seem!), we too are a part of the story of the LOTR—entering into the same world as the Elves and Hobbits and Wizards, only doing so long after they have departed.

There is a scene in the LOTR (chapter 8, Book IV) where Sam and Frodo come to this same exact conclusion. Huddled in the dark in the mountains of Cirith Urgol, Sam recounts the tale of the Silmaril, detailed in the Silmarillion, paralleling Beren’s plight in Thangorodrim to his and Frodo’s present situation. Upon realizing that the star-glass around Frodo’s neck contains the same light as the Silmaril, Sam has an epiphany: he too is living within the story that he is telling. This astounds Sam: the Silmarillion, to these Hobbits from the Shire, probably feels as distant and fantastical as LOTR feels to us.“Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still!” Sam exclaims. “It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” Frodo’s response to this is profound: “No, they never end as tales,” he says. “But the people in them come and go when their part’s ended.” (Lord of the Rings, 697).

The emotional response I had reading this chapter, and the emotions Sam and Frodo must have felt coming to that realization, are similar to what I experienced reading Tolkien’s letter. I know that his novels are works of fiction, originating from his imagination; but in shifting my perspective to go along with Tolkien, in fully understanding the implications of his argument ("this is real"), I nonetheless felt wonder and awe at the possibility. Because what if we do all exist in the same story as these characters, these kings and heroes and villains and wars? How vast it would feel, how much more monumental our small roles, knowing what company we'd be in.

On a craft level, Tolkien the philologist’s natural path into this highly ambitious project was through language. Throughout all of his writing, he maintains an internal consistency of logic in the names of places, people, objects, and more. Every original Tolkienian word is connected to a wider web of etymology that grounds his world in a sense of very real history. For example, in the existing fragments from “The Lost Road,” the origin of the land of Númenor, many characters’ names (e.g. Alboin, Audoin) were taken from Lombardic kings in English history. There are also songs in the LOTR that seem to echo into our modern world: a longer version of the children’s nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle, for example, appears in chapter 9 of Book 1, sung by Frodo at the Prancing Pony inn. Finally, Tolkien’s use of a frame tale, the Red Book of Westmarch, does much to make LOTR feel like real history. By positioning the LOTR novels as a translation/transcription of a manuscript Tolkien happened to find, originally written by the very characters in the story, the entire chronicle becomes a discovery rather than a novel creation. This also parallels the scholarly process of many historians. All of these details lend credence to the idea that our world and Tolkien’s are, secretly, one and the same.

It makes me wonder: someday, far down the line, after all of our parts in the story have ended, if a future society of humans were to rediscover Tolkien’s works, could they believe it to be some version of true history? It might seem far-fetched, but I think Tolkien’s care in grounding LOTR in reality places it just far enough into that gray area between reality and fantasy that it could happen. Even when discussing Tolkien's belief in his story's reality during class, I had moments of maybe, where this world seemed to transcend a fantasy novel created by a man in the 20th century and rather became a plausible origin story for England. "Secondary World" fantasy typically refers to stories existing in an entirely alternate world to our own, but Tolkien's trick of linking the world of LOTR to our modern one means that LOTR is neither strictly Secondary World nor Primary/Real World history. We are both inside the story and outside of it, participants and spectators to this tale.

This role we fill, through reading and discussing and even creating within the realm of LOTR, potentially transforms us into Elf-Friends. An Elf-Friend, in relation to Tolkien, is defined as one who acts as a bridge between worlds: an insider and outsider at once, both a participant in and the Teller of the tale. Characters like Sam, Frodo, and Bilbo are all Elf-Friends. Outside of the books, Tolkien is definitely an Elf-Friend; and I'd argue his son Christopher, who dedicated long hours to excavating and preserving his father’s work, compiling all he could to give to the world, is an Elf-Friend as well. Christopher exists both inside the story of his father (as Tolkien’s son) and also outside of it (as the compiler of his notes and, in the words of Verlyn Flieger, the “Teller to the Tale” (The Footsteps of Aelfwine, 185)). Acting as a Teller to a Tale is also an act of Love; you only revisit a story, especially after losing parts of it, if you love it enough to want to preserve it. In daring to make sure it is remembered, an Elf-Friend keeps the story alive, so that more can experience—as Frodo and Sam did in the dark, and as so many of us have throughout our lives—what it is like to be "in the same tale still."

- AXY

Tolkien's Foundations through Philology & Perspective

I find it most interesting to examine Tolkien's creative process through the lens of him as a linguist who happens to be a good writer, rather than the reverse. In most other fantasy, there may be some varying level of capability applied in the creation of languages, but it is for the most part applied after the worldbuilding and even writing process, translating songs or texts originally written in the author's native language into the target artificial language. Tolkien's process of creating a legendarium that is not only translated into english, but one built on being translated from several unrelated texts in different languages (Those of the Elves, Westron of the Men, various Dwarvish tongues, and all their various dialects). The main narrative of Lord of the Rings for example is held within the Red Book of Westmarch and was handed down from Bilbo, to Frodo, to Sam, and then through many unnamed hands and survived into the modern day to be translated from Westron into English. It is important therefore to emphasize that Lord of the Rings is meant to be read as a historical account that is as limited in scope and scale as its authors own perception. This was immediately clear when returning to the map in the beginning of the book: Besides vague place names and the occasional mention of specific cities, the maps omit the vast majority of any detail that is not directly interacted with by the characters that contribute to the Red Book. This is of course a generalization, and Lord of the Rings does include in it's appendices various elements from outside of the Hobbit's direct experience, but for the most part things that they did not see are omitted from the story. We can assume to some extent that the additional material from Frodo, Sam, and possibly(?) later authors may have added these, and that the accounts of non-hobbit characters in the fellowship was likely still penned by the Hobbits after oral recount of their experiences. 

But why the trouble? What does it matter to the casual reader that Lord of the Rings was supposedly not a novel but supposedly a translation of an 'original' text? What does it change to those that simply skip the introduction and never even know? It matters because it determined every subsequent creative decision that Tolkien made in his process. On the road to creating an artificial mythology to replace what was stripped by the Norman conquest, Tolkien had to first build the linguistic substrate from which the mythology could emerge organically, as opposed to a post hoc translation. The languages Tolkien created preceded legend, grows to explain the language in retrospect, the opposite of what many other fantasy authors do. This is most visible in the philology of the Elvish languages. Quenya and Sindarin where not exclusively developed for the purposes of Lord of the Rings. They where projects that he had began years before writing - systems developed for their own sake, and the mythology grew around the questions they raised. Why do these languages exist? Who spoke them? What happened to the speakers? Tolkien's subsequent works are in some regards (as reference in Letter 131) an attempt to create a world for these languages rather than the reverse. This is absolutely not a minor distinction in method either, it means that the internal structure of mythology is is linguistic rather than narrative. It turns the way I read 'plot holes' and such into philological, instead of writing problems.

The Lost Road makes this process legible because it is intentionally incomplete, whereas Lord of the Rings is specifically a finished, translated, and edited text presented to an audience. HME 5's text is layered, a narrative from many voices across different timeframes, without ultimate resolution. The project ultimately collapsed because the legendarium was not yet stable enough to support the transmission structure Tolkien was building on top of... What survives is the scaffolding that HME 5 leaves behind. Tolkien works out how myth travels across centuries, degrades, transforms, etc, and how a modern receiver would interpret it. This is the same problem that Tolkien had during the creative process for framing Lord of the Rings that was saved by the Red Book of Westmarch concept, except that the Red Book was mostly one narrative as opposed to a collection of stories, making the final narrative much more coherent and consistent. This is why Lord of the Rings has the atmosphere of of a historical document, even though those that skip the pretext may be ignorant of the fact that it is intentionally written to be one.

This is most directly visible in the Lord of the Rings prologue, were Tolkien lays out the chain of transmission for the Red Book, including it's various alterations and losses over time. As already discussed, the casual reader will likely skip this section (as I did in my haste to re-read the book over spring break), but it's presence is important for setting the lens through which the book must be read. The fact that the original Red Book is entirely written from the perspective of Hobbits, and as such is limited to their perspective or those they encountered, is crucial to the way in which we perceieve Middle Earth. This was discussed earlier in regards to the map, but in the actual text becomes even more clear. For example what comes to mind are scenes were Sam writes about his own uncertainty and fear of the future during the tenure of their journey, but only writes so after the conclusion of their greater journey, with the benefit of hindsight. Simply put, the account is not omniscient because the Red Book never was. Shippey in his own writing identifies this as one of Tolkien's central achievements in Lord of the Rings: The creation of thematic and linguistic depth through omission. 

"I wonder if you will ever read this ??"
-JRR Tolkien
I aim to include this in a future email someday

-LR

Elf-Friends of All Kinds

  One of the defining characteristics of Tolkien’s Fairy Stories is that they must maintain an “inner consistency of reality”, that is, not rely on a suspension of disbelief in the reader. A natural question that thereby poses itself is: how does one achieve that sense of reality within a story? Perhaps the first answer ought to be language, or, more specifically, adjectives, which others in this blog have discussed more deeply than I will do here. My main concern lies with another mechanism that Tolkien uses consistently throughout his stories, which is that of the “Elf-Friend.”

    In her essay “The Footsteps of Ælfwine”, Flieger presents the Elf-friend as, “the link, the connector or mediator between the ‘real’ or natural world and the world of Faërie–the supernatural world of myth and the imagination.” The importance of this figure, as we will see, is that elf friends  serve as a vessel through which the reader is able to navigate the world of Faërie without experiencing it as wholly foreign. In many cases the elf-friend will take on the role of storyteller, through which descriptions of the realm of Faërie are told and retold for the benefit of the reader. As we discussed in class and as Flieger notes, “the tale exists only in its telling.” What interests me, however, is the range of elf-friends that we encounter throughout Tolkien’s works. 

The first and perhaps salient example we shall treat is Aelfwine, whose name translates exactly to “elf-friend”. He was a bard of some renown, which already reinforces the idea of the elf-friend both experiencing the unknown and relaying such experiences to us. Moreover, he is stated to have traveled “the straight road” of the Elves and returned to tell the tale; he is the bridge between the reader and Faërie, without which we would be unable to properly understand or receive tell of such a world. 

Another major example is present in two of Tolkien’s major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both are largely concerned with, well, hobbits, as Tolkien describes in his not-so-brief sketch of his works to Milton Waldman: “...the tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale (LotR) blends them” (Letters, p. 204). It’s important to note that while The Lord of the Rings does have a larger narrative focus than The Hobbit, the story is told from the point of view of hobbits whenever possible. This is in large part because hobbits are the characters we are likely to feel closest to, being largely unfamiliar and unacquainted with the wide, complex world of Middle-Earth. It’s also an important reason why these works are more approachable to many than that of The Silmarillion, which is concerned primarily with elves, and thus feels more remote and ancient (though not necessarily a bad thing). It should be noted that hobbits also play a fundamental role in how the narrative is told, in that the story is canonically written by Bilbo and Frodo, which eventually becomes The Red Book of Westmarch. However, I will not go further into detail on this idea here, as we have other things to discuss.

These first two examples of elf-friends have been more typical, or middle of the road. The next few we will see will either drift too far into the world of Faërie, or stray too far away from it. The former is represented largely through The Silmarillion, whose elvish accounts allow us to step back in time and glimpse many of the stories that were mere legends and myths referenced within The Lord of the Rings. However, in doing so, they lose some of the familiarity that we grew used to in Middle-Earth. Arda and the Valar are far above what we could ever experience as mortals, and there is no character who serves as the bridge between reader and story that we are able to relate to (although it does progressively become more concerned with Men as it approaches the Third Age). 

To go in the other direction is to lose some of our connection with Faërie and elves. The first step this way is through Smith in “Smith of Wotten-Major”, who gains temporary access to the world of Faërie. The fay star on his forehead acts as his passport throughout his adventures, which seem more remote and foreign in a different way than those in The Silmarillion. Those tales, while distant, were so because of the person through which we received them. We are not elves, and are thus removed from their experiences. Smith, however, is human, and we feel a closer kinship with him. The foreign nature of his adventures stems from the lack of description that we receive on the land of Faërie. Whether it be elven mariners returning from the Dark Marches, the birch that saved him from “wild Wind”, or the elf-maiden that he danced with, we receive no further elaboration aside from that which describes his experiences alone. All we can glean is that Faërie is a land both mysterious and perilous, and one in which Smith is consciously and painfully a stranger. Importantly, Smith fails to recount his experiences properly, either because he cannot remember them or he is unable to put them into words. In any case, this is not his main objective, and he remains a traveler in those lands until he returns the fay-star at the request of Alf-prentice, the King of Elves. 

The final example I will use, and to me the most poignant, is that of the narrator in “Sea-Bell”. This is by far the furthest removed we have seen any kind of elf-friend, if we can name him as such. The call to Faërie is similar to Smith in that they both receive an object which serves as a bridge to the other world (in this case, a shell). In Sea-Bell, however, the narrator catches only glimpses of the elvish inhabitants, who seem to be avoiding him. All he witnesses are fleeting echoes of their presence in this land: 

“I heard dancing there, music in the air,

feet going quick on the green floors.

But wherever I came it was ever the same:

the feet fled, and all was still;

never a greeting, only the fleeting

pipes, voices, horns on the hill.”

Unlike Smith, who, while clearly a stranger in Faërie, at least is able to have some kind of relationship with elves, this speaker is bereft of any connection. The land he inhabits, like Smith, is foreign and perilous, but further, it is more actively malevolent towards him. This is provoked primarily once the speaker declares himself as king of the land (as he has seen no challengers to this claim), after which a dark cloud arises and chases him into hiding. While the speaker eventually returns to his home, the price he pays is severe; he is old, beaten, and bent, and no one has ears to listen to his strange tales:

“To myself I talk;

For still they speak not, men that meet.”

Smith is able to end his adventures to Faërie with some modicum of autonomy, even if it is bittersweet. Moreover, he is able to return home in peace, that is, in good standing with the elvish kingdom. While he does have to give up the key to entry to Faërie, he is given some choice in the matter. In "Sea-Bell", the narrator has no such choice; he is forced from Faërie, never to return again, and finds his key into Faërie “silent and dead”. 

I would wager to say that, along with some other allegorical implications that Flieger and Shippey propose (i.e. Smith represents Tolkien, Nokes as the critic lacking imagination), “Sea-Bell” provides the most severe condemnation of those who venture into Faërie in arrogance and ignorance. In opposition to Smith, who attempts to treat Faërie with respect and displays some sense about where he is to go and the powers above him, this narrator rushes with no knowledge of the land he wanders through and little respect for its inhabitants. He abuses the rare chance at entrance into Faërie and is driven out and suffers heavily because of it. This narrator embodies the literary critic who approaches fairy stories with disdain, and leaves with the misconstrued idea that there is nothing of substance there. I’m sure they perceived nothing of substance, or thought they did; but that is because they ventured into Faërie without the willingness or Sight to perceive and experience another world. Faërie rejected the critics just as much as the critics rejected Faërie from the realm of significance. 

The larger concern I hold, though, is not a criticism of critics, but to rue their relationship, or lack thereof, with Faërie. Like the narrator of “Sea-Bell”, they are at most able to catch memories of wonder or enchantment, not directly participate in them. Instead of experiencing the joy of eucatastrophe, they are left haunted and troubled by the feeling that a Mystery has passed them by, not to return again. 

— GTB

Words, wine, and wafers: Eucharistic reflections

"Take this, all of you, and eat of it:

for this is my body which will be given up for you.

Take this, all of you, and drink from it:

for this is the chalice of my blood,

the blood of the new and eternal covenant.

which will be poured out for you and for many

for the forgiveness of sins.

Do this in memory of me.”

– Words of Institution in the Roman Catholic Church

Throughout many mythic traditions, we have countless stories of cultures eating their gods. Sometimes this consumption is violent, as with the omophagia in the Dionysiac cult. Sometimes, it is controlled and metaphorical, like the kykeon in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Always, the participants are changed somehow; they are given a better afterlife, more power, a closer connection with the divine.

At the Catholic mass, the wafers and wine (grain and grapes like the Greeks!) turn into the literal body and blood of Christ. Like Tolkien’s work, it refers to something greater – a moment in the Gospel, the eucatastrophe – but importantly, it is not an allegory. The Eucharistic consecration is not a lovely falsehood or noble lie, but an absolute state of reality. 

Along with being the most true (on a higher plane of truth, really), the Eucharist is also fundamentally mysterious. Mystery in the Christian tradition means something that can only be shown by the revelation of God, not through human reason. Though the framework we usually use to describe Eucharistic theology is pre-revelation (Aristotelian), the substance/accidents concept confounds natural reason. It is only through Christ revealing this truth at the Last Supper that this understanding becomes possible.

At the moment of consecration, so that the bread and wine may become body and blood, the priest says these Words of Institution (above, required words bolded). As we discussed, language begins with incarnation, but language also becomes incarnation. As the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, so too do the words make flesh again at every (valid) mass. Perhaps another reason that ghosts don’t have language is that they are no longer in need of this incarnation; they have either been saved or not. If God became man to teach us, as Augustine said, maybe the ghosts have learned all they can. 

As Tolkien further pointed out in our reading last week, these words are also an act of creation. The priest in persona Christi names the food and drink as the body and blood, thereby creating a new substance through speech. Christ is the new Adam (Romans 5:12-21) and the priest is both Adam and Christ. The priest participates in creation not only like God but also with and through God. This also makes Christ the truest of the Elf-Friends, as He is both “inside and outside the story… both a character in the drama [the body and blood] and a frame for the narrative [the one instituting]” (The Footsteps of Aelfwine, 184). In this way, He is not just a mediator, but the mediator (1 Timothy 2:5) and he mediates during not just any fairy-story, but “a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories” (On Fairy-Stories, 88).

As we discussed in class, language also has a way of transporting us across time. Though this has the anthropological/philological/social explanation we outlined, I also want to highlight the fact that these Words of Institution also have a very literal time-traveling effect in that the mystery of the Eucharist makes each mass also contemporaneous with the Last Supper (and possibly the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, I am not sure). 

There’s also something fundamentally important about the fact that the Eucharist is food. As with Tolkien’s linguistic cellar, language is like wine and language makes wine – both in the consecration and echoing all the way back to Cana. Tolkien’s representation of a priest, as addressed briefly in Shippey, is a cook. In The Lord of the Rings, there’s the very literal sign of the Eucharist in the lembas bread, a wafer that will renew the strength of a man on their journey as they seek the way (John 14:6). However, I feel as if that has been thoroughly covered and I rather want to think about what it means for something salvific to come from food.

As Christ is the new Adam, the redemption of man comes through a feast as the Fall came through one too. Feasting shows the bounty of God’s creation (“the green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,” Mythopoeia) and yet also the creativity of our industry (so many are involved in even the seeming simpleness of a food like bread). Wine, too, remains an important symbol. First, it shows the work of patient cultivation, for the “well-aged wines” of Isaiah 25:6 take many years to make. Likewise, the wine of language in the linguistic cellar combines a mastery of time travel in learning from the past as well as a command of present time in the commitment that is made to learn these languages. Additionally, wine exemplifies the joy of celebration in that abundance and the corporeal pleasure that can be directed to spiritual things: worshiping the Creator through His creation. Finally, eating with others at a feast both fulfills God’s commandment that man not be alone (Genesis 2:8) and, in another way, illustrates Tolkien’s insistence that a value of a story also comes from its transmission (Footsteps, 185). As there is a link between the event and the listener or reader, there is a link between the food and the diner. In the case of the Gospel and the Eucharist, this link is the most important relationship, a salvific relationship between God and man.

I know this was a lot of topics to cover, but I hope this even gestured at some of the thoughts I had after class today. I haven’t read nearly enough Eucharistic theology, but this is super interesting to me and I really hope to learn more about it! — KW

Helpful in the writing of this topic:

The Hungry Soul by Leon Kass

Euripides’ Bacchae

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Talking to a bunch of Catholic priests about the Eucharist

A bit of a funny aside: I am not the best at understanding spoken Latin, but I did RCIA at a church that does Latin masses (St. John Cantius) and the way they pronounce Latin is so different than I usually hear it pronounced. I know we talked about how English can be overwritten by Latin and thus gains the character of Latin (especially in the Our Father), but often in ecclesiastical situations, English is overwriting Latin in intonation. This means that the church-spoken Latin gains a character of its own and is recognizable as a dialect or even a separate language from Classical Latin. The most noticeable time to me is when people say “Deo gracias” after the readings.

What Makes a Myth-Maker?

 “Blessed are the myth-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.” - J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia

In class, we discussed the question of English mythology and what Tolkien was trying to achieve through his writing.  In his letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes that his many stories developed separately, and ultimately the links between them emerged and created the world we know today.  In particular, he wrote that “always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (Letters, 145).  This idea that his stories are not truly original and rather were recordings of a mythology that was already out there made me want to take a closer look at some of the many storytellers Tolkien has given us.  I believe that they are, in some ways, reflections of himself and may grant us some insight into his own aims as a storyteller himself.  

Let us take Tom Bombadil, for example.  His stories hold a great power over the hobbits.  His manner of storytelling is manic, “sometimes half as if speaking to himself, sometimes looking at them suddenly with a bright blue eye under his deep brows.  Often his voice would turn to song, and he would get out of his chair and dance about” (Lord of the Rings, 161).  In particular, this style of speaking to himself, as if in a daze, is curious.  It seems as though he is not telling his stories for the entertainment of the hobbits, as he sometimes appears to forget that they are there altogether.  His stories are instead a way to answer the hobbits’ many questions and “as they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home” (Lord of the Rings, 161).  Tom, great myth-maker that he is, draws the hobbits into his tale and places where they are strangers, but simultaneously tells them of the things they are to encounter on their journey and helps them understand the world they are about to enter.  

This is what Tolkien does for us.  We become absorbed into his world of Middle-Earth, a world in which we do not belong, and yet somehow we emerge with a greater understanding of our own journeys.  This is, after all, a history course.  We can see it in our discussion of how we each found Middle-Earth.  YPL studied medieval history and emerged with a greater understanding of not only Tolkien’s work, but why it calls to him.  Tolkien’s invention of Elvish inspired LN to study linguistics.  As a writer and prospective Creative Writing major, GE is inspired by Tolkien and the world he recorded for us.  We are all a testament to the fact that great storytellers are not just those who spin fantastic tales, but spin those tales so that we, the audience, might better understand the world around us and our place in it.

Finally, I want to conclude with a discussion of the concept of the elf-friend and how it relates to great storytelling.  The elf-friend draws the connection between our primary world and the Faërie world.  We see many elf-friends in the Lord of the Rings, from Sam, Frodo, and Tom Bombadil to Tolkien himself.  However, I was most fascinated by the one Tolkien introduces to us in Smith of Wootton Major, which I had never read.  It tells the tale of a smith who swallows a fay-star as a child, which eventually appears on his forehead, though it is written that few people in the village notice it.  Instead, “some of its light passed into his eyes; and his voice, which had begun to grow beautiful as soon as the star came to him, became ever more beautiful as he grew up.  People liked to hear him speak, even if it was no more than a ‘good morning’” (Smith of Wootton Major, 22).  However, while the most important effect of the fay-star was that it granted the smith access to the Faery world, he only ever told few people of his adventures, except his family.  Similarly, when he decides to give the fay-star away, Alf reveals that it was the smith’s grandfather who first brought it from Faery and Alf was the only person who knew that truth.  The secrecy around and impact of the fay-star emphasizes the link between great storytelling and world connecting.  Ignorant of the presence of the star, the villagers loved to hear the smith speak.  We can imagine how he would have captivated an audience if he ever shared his stories, given the effect the fay-star had on his voice over time.  It is reminiscent of the impact of Tom Bombadil’s storytelling, which leaves the hobbits in a daze, with no concept of how much time has passed.  

This exploration leads me to the same conclusion we reached in class: that Tolkien himself is the ultimate elf-friend, mythmaker, storyteller, whatever term suits your fancy.  In his writing, he bridges the gap between Middle-Earth and our own world, just as Tom Bombadil spins tales to inform the hobbits of world far away and yet very near, just as the smith probably would if he had chosen to share his stories with the villagers.  Anyone who doubts this, has only to revisit our discussion of how we all found Middle-Earth and ourselves in it.  - JMR

Can one simply walk into Faërie?

"Here is the clue that solves the great Tolkien puzzle. The puzzle is why, of all humans who ever took pen to paper, Tolkien has produced by far the most convincing, desirable, beautiful, believable, and awesome Elves. And the answer is that he must have been an Elf. Or at least he had Elf blood somewhere in his ancestry. For if any work of literature in the history of the world is a 'Faërian drama,' it is the Lord of the Rings."

- Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The worldview behind the Lord of the Rings, p.79

              It seems clear that the main topic of debate of our last class was: what to make of Tolkien’s seemingly obnoxious claim that “the mere stories […] arose in my mind as ‘given things’ […] I always had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (Letters, p. 145)? Tolkien’s Legendarium is widely regarded as one of the most intricate, vast and incredibly consistent bodies of literature ever written. As a friend of mine once put it, there is nowhere on the map of Middle-Earth that you could point to and not have a lot to say about it – from vegetation, to genealogy, to linguistic traditions (including flaws deliberately carved into linguistic systems that Tolkien invented to convey organicity to the whole). Evidently, a great deal of Tolkien’s “body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story” was inspired by previous works, cultures and myths – just think how Melkor’s fall resembles the Christian myth of Lucifer’s fall, or how Beren and Lúthien remind us of Tristan and Iseult and, why not, Romeo and Juliet. However, it is equally true that a lot of it can be considered original work: as some students pointed out in class, Tolkien de facto invented what we now know as the Fantasy genre. It is intriguing, then, that Tolkien seems to want to distance himself from his majestic work (I am cautiously avoiding the word “creation” here for reasons I address below) and place himself simply a translator of the Red Book of Westmarch.

To try to understand what Tolkien is doing, we need to understand three core concepts that undergird his work and, to a large extent, his worldview: the existence of “Faërie,” the notion of “sub-creation,” and the idea of an “elf-friend.” In his seminal On Fairy Stories, Tolkien defines a fairy-story as “one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purposes may be” (Tolkien Reader, p. 39), with Faërie being “the real or state [that] contains many things beside elves and fays, and beside dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants and dragons […] all things are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” (TR, p. 38). More importantly, to Tolkien it is vital that any “genuine fairy-story […] should be presented as “true” (TR, p. 42), and this notion is central to understanding his approach to the Legendarium. For Tolkien, a good story is one that has its readers enter into a state of “secondary belief” – that is, create a “Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he [the story-maker] relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.” (TR, p. 60). Indeed, that is why Tolkien strives so hard to make the Legendarium so believable, to make sure that we seamlessly enter the realm of Faërie (as the hobbits felt when they entered Tom Bombadil’s house); so much so that a willing state of “suspension of disbelief” is not even necessary for enjoying the story, because we actually believe it. But how is this possible?

As we discussed in class, Tolkien operates masterfully at the edge between our Primary World and the Secondary World he wrote about. All of the small details that define his “world-building” process are meant to reinforce the veracity of the story that the characters find themselves into. For instance, when Sam realizes, looking at the star-glass Galadriel had given the hobbits, that his tale took place in the same world in which the old tales of Beren, Lúthien and Eärendil took place (LOTR, book IV, p. 712), and who in turn are the very fabled people that Strider sung about at Weathertop (LOTR, book I, p. 191). Don’t we have the same feeling when we discover an ancient family heirloom with a history that goes way back, and we are suddenly forced to realize that we still live in the same world that people lived way in the past? There are many other such examples that we touched upon in class, like how Tolkien deliberately evoked King Sheave from Beowulf in his writings (Lost Road, p. 101), blurring the lines between Primary World literature and his own universe. But beyond these literary devices, the themes developed in Tolkien's Legendarium reverberate greatly with the questions we face in our primary reality, as he puts it in letter 131: "all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality and the Machine" (Letters, p.145). All of these mechanisms, both small and large, weave beautifully Tolkien’s secondary world with our primary reality make him a “successful sub-creator” (TR, p. 60) in his own words. 

Tolkien uses the idea of “sub-creation” to represent a form of art, in which one takes something that already exists (“creation”) and shapes it in a way as to take it in a new direction, add to it and, in doing so, also honor it. As he puts it: “the achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) ‘the inner consistency of reality,’ is indeed another thing, or aspect, needing another name: Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation” (TR, p. 68). To Tolkien, the Elves are the “representatives of sub-creation par excellence” (Letters, p.146), in that their “magic is Art” that seeks to further creation, honor it, instead of owning it, or claiming power over it (which does not mean they cannot be corrupted, as the story of Fëanor shows us). That concept is what confers a certain duality upon Tolkien’s Legendarium: his works are, in our primary reality, sub-creations of his, but to the characters living in them (and to us, readers, when we are immersed in them), they are taken to be the creation themselves – which is why Tolkien wants to be seen as the mere translator of the Red Book of Westmarch, a book that narrates a (secondary) world that exists and that he is introducing us to.

Finally, this brings us to the concept of “elf-friend.” As Flieger points out, the concept of an elf-friend, the one that can bridge the gap between our primary reality and Faërie, is a recurring theme in Tolkien’s works: “the many marks left by AElfwine are the foorprints of one who never completely vanished from Tolkien’s mythology, a witness and participant who observes, often experiences, and in some fashion transmits to others the stories in which he appears” (The Footsteps of AElfwine, p. 189). In this sense, the tale of the Smith of Wootton Major is a great example of the role that elf-friends play in Tolkien’s works. The major elf-friend, the grandfather Master Cook plays a vital role in bringing Alf – who we later discover is actually the King of Faërie, but whom people take for granted – to Woottom Major and making sure that the magic star ends up with his grandson. Having received the star, Starbrow is granted passport into Faërie, a mysterious and somewhat perilous realm that inspires him to become a quirky, singing figure but ultimately a great artisan-smith (sub-creating many beautiful things). The elf-friend plays a vital role in introducing Smith to Faërie, a world that skeptics and narrow-minded people in the story take for granted but that ultimately houses great adventures. Without his grandfather and Alf, Starbrow would not have been able to explore it, and it is thanks to him (by passing along the star) that this gift will be enjoyed by others. In the end, as Flieger argues, this concept that Tolkien developed through so many characters (including Frodo, Sam, Bilbo, Strider, and many others across the Legendarium) reflects the role that Tolkien consciously or not, ascribes to himself: Tolkien is “the ultimate, the overarching elf-friend […] he is the bridge between the worlds” (The Footsteps of AElfwine, p. 197). 
With all that in mind, we can find an answer to the question posed initially: Tolkien distances himself from the position of “creator” and adopts the role of Elf-Friend, the mediator that invites us to the magical universe of the Legendarium because he wants us to transport us into Faërie along with him. Most importantly, as he puts it: "if you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think you are, bodily inside its Secondary World [...] Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their sense while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose." (TR, p. 74-75). 

- LR

Growing roots and Springs to come

When one gets done reading LoTR and decides to further explore Tolkien's works, the work done about Tolkien and his own perception of his work, one has to make a choice: to believe in Tolkien or not. More specifically, it is very important what one makes of the fact that Tolkien answered in the affirmative to the following question

' “You broke the veil, didn’t you, and passed through?” She [d'Ardenne in The Man and the Scholar] adds that he “readily admitted” that he had done so ... Both question and answer betoken an awareness of and an acceptance of the word as one avenue into perception of the super-natural, the super-real.'  (Splintered Light, p.32)

or, if one rather see an unprompted expression of this view,

'I have long ceased to invent . . . . I wait till I seem to know what really happened' (Letters, 231)

Letter 131 should dispel any remaining doubt. If Tolkien is not being true is at best quirky at worse a lunatic who is giving a grandeur to his work and myths in general that is uncalled for, which could be enough reason not to read him for more than what one gets from a novel. For Tolkien's take on this, I point to the similarity this view has with Nokes' towards Alf and Faërie.

Whilst I don't fully understand him, I believe Tolkien and I think he is onto something. Thus, I intend to investigate what that entails mainly in the two following senses: how Tolkien approaches his sources and who is his work for. Finally, I will take a quick guess at - as many have - why Tolkien insists on this super-natural (which he might just call natural as he called fairies) reality of myths.

Tolkien's view of myth as real informs the way he appreciates and approaches his sources. Tolkien as a wanderer in Faërie who records what's there, does not invent, is not an academic. (On Fairy Stories, p.33) If he were constructing a point supporting himself on previous literature, he would be indebted to these predecessors of his and would need to cite them. (Letters, 131) Tolkien is instead partaking in the boiling Cauldron of Story that accumulated over time new motifs and bits of history. Tolkien is a cook selecting from the Cauldron, adjusting the salt and the richness of the soup he will serve. In his tale Smith of Wootton Major, Tolkien himself elaborates on the role of the cook and on whose soup it's. With the fay star in his brow, Smith wandered into Faërie and brought it back with him to his day-to-day life as a smith. Through his craft, he created the useful with special grace and also the delightful. But the day came where he had to part with the fay-star for it was not his:

"Some things ... They cannot belong to a man for ever, nor be treasured as heirlooms. They are lent." (Smith Wootton Major, p.41)

This gift to cook, and thus the soup, are not the cook's. It's under this light that one better understands Tolkien's approach towards the elements in the Cauldron... his sources. Tolkien seems less than thrilled with a genealogical approach to sources and origins of stories as seen throughout On Fairy Stories and in comments like: ''Túrin is the hero: a figure that might be said (by the people that like that sort of thing, although it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung." (Letters, 132) Although elements taken from the Cauldron might be found in other tales, a new story teller composes with it a new tale. Furthermore, take Tolkien's time travel tale, The Lost Road, in it Aelfwine tells (or would have told) the story of King Sheave as tampered with by Tolkien, one could say, since he adds Frothi's mill not elsewhere associated with Sheave. (The Lost Road, p.95, 107) For Tolkien this is a new tale not a derivative story. As a myth, Sheave and Frothi are alive and are as much and like they are told. The existence of myths is what informs this unapologetic mixing of myths, a better way to look at it would probably be: Tolkien's adds to the Tree of Tales not by planting a new tree altogether or even one that points to the first one, but by grafts from one branch in that most majestic Tree to another.

A related question then comes, who are the flowers in this Tree for and who else should be grafting onto the Tree? It's clear, if not from the breadth of his own work, from the essay On Fairy Tales that Tolkien doesn't think these stories are either pointless or have no bearing in people's lives. He is quick to point to these as sources of escape, consolation and healing. But more importantly, the higher art form of Fantasy is more sub-creative, which for Tolkien is what we are to be all about:

'Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Disgraced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light ' (Mythopoeia, Tolkien)

In Tolkien's own desire to build a majestic whole he would leave 'scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.' (Letters, 131) Then, grafting onto the Tree and telling the tales that constitute the sap that sustains it should be a Human enterprise. One interesting process at play is that of this sustenance. If Tolkien intends to incite us to preserve myths 'wielding paint and music and drama,' what does he do to that end? He gives us elf-friends and he wants to make us understand - not fool us; remember, I chose to believe in Tolkien - that we live in One grand story. 

Since stories exist as much as they are told, story telling and 'recording' stories from Faërie are more than two sides of one coin, but they converge when the story teller is successful in commanding belief from the reader. Flieger has an interesting point concerning the relationship between 'elf-friends' and the life of the myth. Elf-friends experience and transmit to us a portion of the mythology as alive in their experience. (Tolkien's Legendarium, p.188) In Tolkien's, elf-friends are giving the newly recorded myths life - the first sap flowing into that graft. Moreover, the Prose Edda was meant to a christian audience that was being reintroduced to Norse myths. Gangleri was Snorri's 'engaged outsider' through whom he links 'the "outside" reader or hearer to the "inside" culture that generates the myths.' (Tolkien's Legendarium, p.188) Gangleri is the 'elf-friend' that promotes sap to flow again into that branch of the Tree.

What about his attempts to link all in One grand story? For the skeptic, think about how he provides origins for the game of golf and nursery rimes in the Shire and, more substantively, links Númenor with other mythological worlds neighboring history - Queen Elizabeth II being a descendant of Sheaf - and connects Aelfwine with historical viking invasions. (The Lost Road, p.8,) Given that our sub-creativity is our God-given rag of lordship and Christ's story is the ultimate myth, I don't think it's a stretch to point in this direction to explain Tolkien's weaving worlds into One grand story. (On Fairy Tales, p.88; Letters, 131) I believe that he wants to reaffirm the unity of Creation; we have been, together with the sub-created, grafted onto the one Tree of Life and thus given life.

"In Paradise perchance the eye may stray

from gazing upon everlasting Day

to see the day-illumined, and renew

from mirrored truth the likeness of the True." (Mythopoeia, Tolkien) 

PT

Sources:
Flieger, Verlyn. Splintered Light : Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, The Kent State University Press, 2012.
Tolkien, J.R.R. Smith of Wootton Major : Farmer Giles of Ham, New York : Ballantine Books, 1988 Flieger, Verlyn, and Carl F. Hostetter. Tolkien's legendarium : essays on The history of Middle-earth. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Tolkien, J. R. R., Humphrey Carpenter, and Christopher Tolkien. The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Tolkien, J. R. R., and Christopher Tolkien. The lost road and other writings : language and legend before "The lord of the rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Tolkien, J. R. R., The Tolkien Reader. New York: Del Rey, 1966.