Master of Middle Earth (2 page)

The heavens of
Middle-earth and Earth being not noticeably dissimilar, the lapse of time
between the two epochs is short by planetary standards ("the memory of the
Earth"), however long it may seem "in years and lives of men."
Middle-earth has the same seasons we have in the same length of year, which
means that it tilts its northern and southern hemispheres alternately toward
and away from the sun as does Earth today. And apparently its days and nights
are of the usual duration, which means that Middle-earth rotates on its axis in
our twenty-four-hour period. All these are comfortable touches designed not
only to show that Middle-earth could not possibly be another planet but also to
reassure the reader that fundamentally he is on home territory. I have
described the phenomena above in modern heliocentric terms, but they are
equally valid for a geocentric view, which there is reason to think the peoples
of the Third Age believed in, as will be discussed in a moment.

Strange but not
too strange. Further to offset the alienness of the large-scale topography of
Third Age Europe, Tolkien makes sure that on the small scale its local terrain,
climate, and dominant flora and fauna are much as we know them today. We feel
at ease with them at once. Spring in the Shire brings warm sun, a wind from the
south, new green "shimmering in the fields" and Sam clipping the
grass borders of Frodo's lawn. Tobacco grows in the more sheltered bottomland.
The fox that sees the hobbits sleeping out overnight as they leave the Shire
sniffs and marvels aloud in intelligent speech, but it is a fox, not a
Jabberwock. The travelers are later spied upon by birds but they are crows,
ordinary in everything except a heightened consciousness. When the Fellowship
depart from Lórien they hear "the high distant song of larks."
Fangorn Forest may be dire and mysterious but its trees are the same oaks,
chestnuts, beeches, and rowans that make up our woods. As for the day-by-day
scenery and climate through which his travelers move on their many journeys, no
writer was ever more constantly aware than Tolkien of all the details of
mountain, grassland, wood and swamp, of variations in temperature, wind or
calm, rain or cloud, the quality of sunlight and starlight, the hues of each
particular sunset. He keeps our senses wide awake. Picking out at random almost
any one day during Frodo's tramp to Rivendell or Aragorn's pursuit of the ores,
a reader is likelier than not to be told exactly what the weather was and what
their camping spot for the night looked like. Given this unbroken running
account of familiar homely things, he is buoyed by a psychological reassurance
that never fails him, and that allows him to absorb very large doses of the
marvelous without disbelieving it. This is one of the hallmarks of Tolkien's
personal style in fantasy.

As summarized in
Appendices A and B the formal history of Middle-earth begins with the
temptation and fall of the great elf leader Fëanor in Valinor and extends for
about ten thousand years into the start of the Fourth Age. But into
The Lord
of the Rings
Tolkien introduces the two oldest living beings on earth,
Bombadil and Treebeard, whose memories stretch much farther back, to the first
beginnings of life on the planet. Through them he is able to give his story
full chronological depth by opening up the longest possible vistas into the
past of its various races. Bombadil lived in unimaginable times before there was
any vegetation, before even the rains began to fall. He saw the coming of men,
"the Big People," and hobbits, "the little People." Before
that the elves, earliest of intelligent peoples, passed him on their way
westward from some unknown birthplace to the continent's edge, and thence
across the sea to Valinor. All this "before the seas were bent" or
Morgoth came to Middle-earth from Outside to breed his loathsome ores.

For his part,
Treebeard also antedated the elves, but ents did not know how to speak until
the first wandering elves taught them. Treebeard has seen the day when the
separate patches of forest surviving into the Third Age were joined in one
unending woodland that covered the face of primeval Europe. And, along with the
other ents, he has suffered the loss of the entwives, the females of his
species, who in some prehistoric time left the woods to practice agriculture in
the open fields and there taught their arts to primitive men. This is almost a
parable of how Earth's originally nomadic tribes settled down in one place when
they learned to till the soil.

All these are
glimpses into Middle-earth's prehistoric past. At the end of his epic Tolkien
inserts also some forebodings of its future which will make Earth what it is
today. Apart from gigantic geological upheavals still to come, he shows the
initial steps in a long process of retreat or disappearance by all other
intelligent species, which will leave man effectually alone on earth. The
greater elves are already going home to Eldamar, from which they will not
return, while the lesser ones who remain sink into oblivion. Ores shut
themselves into their caverns under the mountains. After an estrangement from
mankind, as remarked in the Prologue, hobbits will retire from all
communication with us, reduced in size, numbers, and importance. The slow
reproductive rate of the dwarves foreshadows their gradual extinction, leaving
behind them imperishable monuments of stone. Ents may still be there in our
forests, but what forests have we left? The process of extermination is already
well under way in the Third Age, and in works outside the epic Tolkien bitterly
deplores its climax today. The hunger men still feel to converse with birds and
animals is a residual trace of the free intercourse between the species
prevailing on Middle-earth, and since lost.
⁷

Tolkien is sure
that modern man's belief that he is the only intelligent species on Earth has
not been good for him. Cut off from nature and its multitudes of living beings,
mankind has developed a hard artificial industrialism stifling to that side of
him which is sympathetic, imaginative, free. One symptom of our loss is the
trivializing in contemporary folklore and fairy tales of the lordly elves and
formidable dwarves traditional to them. In Appendix F of his epic Tolkien
condemns with angry sadness the "fancies either pretty or silly"
which now dishonor those and other great races of Middle-earth. "Smith of
Wootton Major," written later, is a short story dealing in part with the
scorn of our skeptics for a charming world of fancy that their imaginations are
no longer flexible enough to enter. According to the essay "On
Fairy-stories," creative fantasy has the power to heal this blindness by
"recovery" of fresh knowledge of ourselves and the world about us,
and of the kindly insight we once had into other species, other minds.

But to return to
Middle-earth. One region of it is so far outside our experience that Tolkien
can only ask us to take it completely on faith. This region contains the
Undying Lands situated far out in the ocean west of the continental land mass,
home of the Guardian Valar and their pupils, the immortal elves. Eldamar of the
elves is definitely an island, but nearby Valinor seems to be attached to a
"mighty Mountain Wall" encircling the whole of Middle-earth. Both
places are therefore at World's End, the Uttermost West, beyond which living
beings cannot go. Early in the First Age and before, access to the Undying
Lands was by an arduous though otherwise ordinary sea voyage, but elves were
the only race permitted to make it. After their rebellion and self-exile in
that Age, Elbereth Starkindler, Queen of the Valar, cast a deep belt of shadow
across its ocean approaches, through which the exiles could return only when
forgiven, as most of them were after Morgoth's defeat at the end of the Age.
⁸
When this barrier proved insufficient in the Second Age to keep out the
armadas of Númenor sailing in to seize immortality by force, the One made the
Undying Lands forever inaccessible to men.

Because of the
integral place these lands have in the geography and spiritual history of
Middle-earth they are not strictly an other-world. Their closest counterpart in
literature is in those early medieval Celtic tales known as
imrama,
about voyages made by Irish explorers to the western Atlantic in search of the
Land of Promise. That Tolkien knew these tales is clear, for he wrote a poem
which he entitled "Imram" narrating such a voyage by St. Brendan,
which takes him after seven years of adventure to an island of refuge set aside
by God for his Saints. In the Latin prose version of the Brendan search, almost
certainly read and used by Tolkien for his poem,
⁹
the Land of
Promise has many elements in common with the Undying Lands of
The Lord of
the Rings,
raising the possibility that it also provided Tolkien with ideas
for his epic.

For instance,
Brendan's Land of Promise is screened by a miraculous circle of darkness
through which all comers must pass, as the Undying Lands are walled off by
Elbereth's belt of shadow. The saint and his monks are allowed to walk only to
a river where an angel in the form of a shining man forbids them to advance
farther and sends them back to Ireland. Similarly, the Valar are demiurgic
spirits in human or elfin form, radiant in appearance, and they not only exile
the elves at one time but also impose the Ban against all mankind which
precipitates so much tragedy in the epic. The angel tells Brendan that the Land
of Promises is being reserved by God for a refuge at a future time when Christians
will be persecuted. Likewise, the Valar have occupied the Undying Lands
"because of their love and desire for the Children of God (
Erusén)
for
whom they were to prepare the 'realm'" against the day when elves and men
shall have attained "their future forms."
¹⁰
Most important
for our present purposes, both lands are at the extreme western limit of the
physical world but still a geographical part of it.

If the navigable
sea has any such boundaries Middle-earth cannot be a rounded sphere as we now
conceive Earth. In the
imrama
tales this point posed no difficulty to
the wonder-oriented Celtic mind of the Dark Ages, which popularly accepted the
world as bounded and flat anyway, or, when it did not, was quite willing to
forget roundness under the spell of a good story. But is such a prescientific
cosmology intended by Tolkien for Middle-earth? He never discusses the question
explicitly one way or the other. He leaves us to survey the text of the epic
and its Appendices for ourselves. Quite possibly he considers the question to
be of no real importance to the story, and so is indifferent whether it is
raised or not. Those who wish to raise it will find, I think, that none of the
astronomical passages are incompatible with a geocentric view of a flat, saucerlike
Middle-earth. Since such a view is implicit in the conception of Valinor as
being at World's End, consistency would require its acceptance as representing
the beliefs of the inhabitants of Middle-earth.

But does the
divine act of the One in removing the Undying Lands "for ever from the
circles of the world" at the end of the Second Age signal a change to a
more advanced astronomy? Possibly so, if that cryptic phrase means that they
were taken out of the physical continuum of Middle-earth, which then becomes
free to be spherical. However, one difficulty is that the encircling mountains
may still be there (the text is silent). Also, Tolkien continues to allow the
elves still on Middle-earth during the Third Age to act as if the Undying Lands
are visible and reachable. In the
Palantír
at the Grey Havens Gildor and
his company still can see Valinor, where the white figure of Elbereth stands
gazing out and listening to their prayers. And, returning home when the Fourth
Age begins, the great elves have only to take ships from the Havens, though
these have been specially built by Cfrdan for the journey, to be sure. On the
whole it seems wise not to inquire too curiously into a question that Tolkien
himself chooses to ignore.

The Appendices are
not mere barnacles on the epic as some critical opinion would have them. For
example, Appendix D on the Calendars of Middle-earth and Appendices E and F on
its languages so orient their specialized topics as to become facets of the
cultural history of all the major races. By this method the basic traits of
each are revealed. Elvish empathy for the gradations of growth and dormancy in
vegetation is reflected in their division of the year into six, rather than
four, seasons, and of unequal lengths. The Númenoreans' insensitivity to such
gradations, and preoccupation rather with practical affairs, lead to their
abandonment of those divisions and substitution of twelve mathematically equal
months. The hobbit love of holidays and feasting multiples Lithedays in the
summer and Yuledays in the winter, all given over to parties. That the elves
are indeed "People of the Stars" and worshipers of the Valar could be
known, if from no other source, from the objects and persons determining the
names they give to the six days of their week: Stars, Sun, Moon, the Two Trees
(of Valinor), the Heavens, and the Valar. They also have many special names for
the hours of star-opening and star-fading. The experience of Númenoreans
exclusively with the White Tree causes them to substitute its name for that of
Two Trees and, being great mariners, they insert a Sea-day after Heavens' Day.
Conservative by nature, the hobbits take over the Númenorean week but soon
forget its meaning.

Nothing tells more
about a people than the language it speaks and writes. This is bound to be a
product of its psychological peculiarities, its traditions, its institutions,
its whole outlook on life. Well aware of this truth, Tolkien as a professional
philologist makes of his Appendices E and F on the languages he has invented for
the several races of Middle-earth not only a tour de force of philological
analytic imagination but also one more revelation of the races themselves from
a new direction. These Appendices have the added interest of being the adult
equivalent of Tolkien's boyhood games with invented tongues. Aimed first at
demonstrating the written alphabets, oral pronunciation, and to some extent the
grammar of the two inflected, superbly melodious Elvish dialects, Quenya and
Sindarin, their material evidently comes straight out of that "history of
Elvish tongues" which Tolkien prepared in the 1930s before he came to
write
The Lord of the Rings.
When this history proved unpublishable he
set it aside in order to proceed with a narrative about the races who spoke
these languages. So the epic was born.