Personally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and B before us and silently point to these forms, they would thank us, pick up a pen, and immediately substitute the -in forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it was pointed to.
The ghosts would be gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them.
This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse we might find them difficult people. There is a streak of wishful thinking in Tolkien’s remark near the beginning of this article that if his argument was sound, English in the west at that time must have been ‘at once more alive, and more traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else’. He was used to having ‘traditional’ literature viewed as dead: it was nice to think of a time when tradition was rated higher than modern fashion. Still, it is hard to say his sentiment was wrong. It was based on rational argument, and the whole theory integrated (as theories should) many thousands of separate facts which had been needing explanation already. With hindsight one can see that this philological vision of ancient Herefordshire was a strong component of Tolkien’s later conception of the hobbits’ ‘Shire’, also cut-off, dimly remembering former empires, but effectively turned in on itself to preserve an idealised ‘English’ way of life. But ‘the Shire’ is fiction, and philology fact. The questions which begin to show themselves in Tolkien’s work from about this time on are: how far did he distinguish the two states? And how much of his later success was caused by reluctance to admit a distinction?
Connections are exemplified in Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara land’, published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, ‘Ethiopian’, but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’, (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’, (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly ‘guess-work’, admittedly ‘inconclusive’? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something ‘which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems’.10 A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the ‘Balrog’ in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not ‘put-on’, but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends.
Allegories, Potatoes, Fantasy and Glamour
One may now see in rather a different light the four minor prose works written by Tolkien in the late 1930s and early 1940s, those years in which The Hobbit came to term and The Lord of the Rings began to get under way – the years, one may say, when Tolkien turned away from pursuing his trade and began instead to use it. He knew he was doing this, as one can see from the little allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (published 1945, but written c. 1943). Since Tolkien said in later years that he ‘cordially disliked’ allegory, it is perhaps worth repeating that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly is one.11 The story’s first words are, ‘There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make’, and to any Anglo-Saxonist this is bound to recall the Old Northumbrian poem known as Bede’s Death-Song, memorable (a) for being in Old Northumbrian, (b) for being so clearly the true, last words of the Venerable Bede, England’s greatest churchman, all of whose other works are in Latin. This goes: ‘Before that compelled journey (néidfáerae) no man is wiser than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be judged to his soul after his deathday, good or evil.’ Obviously someone should have said this to Niggle! But the lines also give a good and ancient reason for carrying out the basic operation of allegory, which is to start making equations.
Thus journey = death. Niggle the painter further = Tolkien the writer. One can see as much from the accusation of being ‘just idle’, softened later to being ‘the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees’, or to being unable to organise his time; Tolkien was sensitive to accusations of laziness, but it is clear enough that he was a perfectionist, and also easily distracted.12 Niggle’s ‘leaf = The Hobbit, his ‘Tree’ = The Lord of the Rings, the ‘country’ that opens from it = Middle-earth, and the ‘other pictures … tacked on to the edges of his great picture’ = the poems and other works which Tolkien kept on fitting into his own greater one.13 Meanwhile the garden which Niggle does not keep up looks ominously like Tolkien’s professorial duties; the visitors who hinted ‘that he might get a visit from an Inspector’ remind one of that discourteous colleague of Tolkien’s, who even after The Lord of the Rings came out snapped ungraciously ‘He ought to have been teaching!’14 One can go on making these equations, and one is supposed to; the essence of an allegory, Tolkien thought, was that it should be ‘just’, i.e. that all the bits should fit exactly together, compelling assent (and amusement) by their minuteness. If one realises that, there is a certain bite in the place where Niggle does his painting. He keeps his great canvas ‘in the tall shed that had been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown potatoes)’. Niggle sacrificed potatoes to paint. What did Tolkien sacrifice to The Lord of the Rings? The real answer is, articles like those on Ancrene Wisse and the Sigelware; after 1940 (when he was only 48) Tolkien wrote only five more, and two of these were collaborations and two others not entirely academic in style. Still, Tolkien never went over to despising the advancement of learning. It is Niggle’s expressed gratitude for Parish’s ‘excellent potatoes’ which persuades the First Voice to let him out of the Workhouse (= Purgatory). One could say that the whole tale expresses both Tolkien’s self-accusation and self-justification, and that its solution in Heaven lies in Niggle and Parish, the creative and the practical aspects of Tolkien himself, learning to work together – though what they work on, you notice, is very definitely Niggle’s Tree and Country, not Parish’s potatoes at all.
Tolkien was giving up the academic cursus honorum in the late 1930s, and he knew it. How did he justify this to himself, and how far could he reconcile