if a young poet seldom does well in his examinations. If he does, then either he is also a scholar in the making, or he is a very good boy indeed. … But there is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment. … His immediate desire can even be to attend a lecture. I remember one I attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien. I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish. [pp. 13–14]
Undergraduates in the audience who objected to the inclusion of Old English in the Oxford syllabus were shocked, but Tolkien was greatly pleased.
In December 1965 Auden gave an impromptu talk at a gathering of the recently formed Tolkien Society of America in New York (*Fandom and popularity). According to newspaper reports, he said that Tolkien lived in ‘a hideous house’, and otherwise made remarks which Tolkien thought ‘so fantastically wide of the mark that I should have to enter into a long correspondence in order to correct your notions of me sufficiently for the purpose’ (letter to Auden, 8 April 1966, Letters, p. 368). Tolkien and his wife felt ridiculed, though he allowed that the press reports (of an account published in the New Yorker for 15 January 1966) might have been garbled.
Nor was he pleased to learn that Auden had agreed to collaborate on a book about him for the Wm. B. Eerdmans series Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective. This project did not proceed in the face of Tolkien’s strong disapproval. ‘I regard such things as premature impertinences’, Tolkien wrote, ‘and unless undertaken by an intimate friend, or with consultation of the subject … I cannot believe that they have a usefulness to justify the distaste and irritation given to the victim. I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the *Silmarillion’ (Letters, p. 367; see also *Biographies).
Although Tolkien sometimes disagreed with Auden’s assessment of his works, the two remained on friendly terms. Auden sent his books to Tolkien, contributed a poem, ‘A Short Ode to a Philologist’, to the Festschrift *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), and dedicated to Tolkien the Auden–Paul B. Taylor translation of the Elder Edda (1969). Tolkien in turn wrote an alliterative poem in Old and Modern English (*Languages), *For W.H.A., for a special number of the journal Shenandoah (Winter 1967) in honour of Auden. On 25 August 1971 Tolkien wrote to Robert H. Boyer that in recent years Auden’s
support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.
I regard him as one of my great friends although we have so seldom met except through letters and gifts of his work. [Letters, p. 411]
Two standard references for Auden’s life and works are W.H. Auden: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (1981) and W.H. Auden: A Commentary by John Fuller (1998). The standard bibliography is W.H. Auden: A Bibliography: 1924–1969 by B.C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson (1972).
‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’. The second chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’, published in *The Silmarillion (1977), pp. 43–6.
SYNOPSIS
Aulë, the great smith of the Valar, is eager to have pupils to whom he can teach his craft. Unwilling to wait until the Elves awake, he secretly fashions the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves. When Ilúvatar (Eru, the One) rebukes him, Aulë is prepared to destroy his creation, but because of his humility Ilúvatar gives the Dwarves life of their own, and Aulë stays his hand. The Dwarves, however, must sleep until the awakening of the Elves, who are to be the First-born of the Children of Ilúvatar. When Yavanna, the spouse of Aulë, learns of this, she fears that the Dwarves, and even the Children (Elves and Men), will harm the plants and trees that she loves. From Manwë, chief of the Valar, she seeks protection for what she holds dear, especially the trees: ‘Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon bough little mourned in their passing. … Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!’ (The Silmarillion, p. 45).
Manwë has a vision of the Song of Creation, in which he perceives things he had not seen before. Eru speaks to him, saying: ‘When the Children awake, then the thought of Yavanna will awake also, and it will summon spirits from afar, and they will go among the kelvar [animals, living things that move] and the olvar [growing things with roots in the earth], and some will dwell therein, and be held in reverence, and their just anger shall be feared’ (p. 46). Some who enter the kelvar will become the great Eagles of the Lords of the West and others will walk in the forests as the Shepherds of the Trees (the Ents).
HISTORY
Aulë’s creation of the Dwarves first appeared in the ‘later’ *Annals of Beleriand of the mid-1930s, as reported by some of the wise in Valinor. But there is no intervention by Ilúvatar, and it is said that the Dwarves have ‘no spirit indwelling, as have the Children of the Creator, and they have skill but not art; and they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made’ (*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 129). An early addition says that some believed ‘that Aulë cares for them and that Ilúvatar will accept from him the work of his desire, so that the Dwarves shall not perish’ (p. 146). Similar accounts are given in the *Lhammas and the *Quenta Silmarillion, written soon after the Annals.
In the earliest *‘Silmarillion’ narratives the Dwarves are portrayed as treacherous and unreliable. From the mid-1930s Tolkien began to take a less severe view; in this period he also completed *The Hobbit, in which the Dwarves become sympathetic characters as the story progresses. Although The Hobbit did not become demonstrably incorporated into the greater legendarium until Tolkien began to write *The Lord of the Rings, nevertheless Thorin’s dying words look forward to later writings: ‘I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed’ (The Hobbit, ch. 18). The Annals of Aman (see *Annals of Valinor), published in *Morgoth’s Ring (1993), and the Grey Annals (see *Annals of Beleriand), published in *The War of the Jewels (1994), both written c. 1950–1, repeat the original story. But the relevant part of the Quenta Silmarillion, as rewritten c. 1951, states that according to the traditions of the Dwarves, Aulë told their Fathers that Ilúvatar had accepted his work and ‘will hallow them and give them a place among the Children in the End’ (The War of the Jewels, p. 204). The Dwarves believed that when they died Aulë gathered them in special halls in Mandos where they practiced their crafts, and that after the Last Battle they would aid him in the re-making of Arda.
Probably towards the end of 1958, and perhaps in response to a query from his correspondent Rhona Beare (see Letters, p. 287), Tolkien decided that the story of the Dwarves needed expansion. He tried out various ideas before writing a two-page manuscript, followed by a fair copy, to replace most of the relevant section in the Quenta Silmarillion, and making emendations to the rest. This text provides the first part of ‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’ in The Silmarillion, with editorial changes noted in The War of the Jewels, p. 210.
The second part of ‘Of Aulë and Yavanna’, in which ‘the Shepherds of the Trees’ are mentioned, derives from a text of c. 1958–9 or later. See further, *Of the Ents and the Eagles.
Authorial presence. Tolkien’s presence, or voice, in his fiction varied and evolved in the course of his career as a writer and according to his audience. In the 1920s and 1930s he told many stories to his children. Those that were written down often preserve the feeling of an oral tale and include the author’s voice in comments made by the narrator.
One of Tolkien’s most elaborate ‘stories’ began simply at Christmas 1920 when he wrote an illustrated letter to his son *John in the guise of Father Christmas (*The ‘Father