So, to take the last piece first, the ‘Clark Hall’ introduction has only one main point to make, and that is that words mean more than their dictionary entries. What happens if you look up Sigelware in the standard Old English dictionary of J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller? It says ‘the Ethiopians’, and that’s all. What of éacen, a word in Beowulf? The dictionary says ‘Increased, great, vast, powerful’. To ‘the enquirer into ancient beliefs’, wrote Tolkien, only the first was right, for éacen meant not ‘large’ but ‘enlarged’ and denoted a supernatural addition of power. As for runes, Bosworth-Toller translated the Beowulfian phrase onband bead-urúne (meaninglessly) as ‘unbound the war-secret’, while Clark Hall tried ‘gave vent to secret thoughts of strife’. ‘It means “unbound a battle rune”’, declared Tolkien. ‘What exactly is implied is not clear. The expression has an antique air, as if it had descended from an older time to our poet: a suggestion lingers of the spells by which men of wizardry could stir up storms in a clear sky’ (pp. xiii-xiv). Fanciful, the shades of Bosworth and Toller might have said. If the facts point to fantasy, Tolkien could have retorted, fantasy is what we must have! The ‘Preface’ is in a wider sense a protest against translating Beowulf only into polite modern English, a plea for listening to the vision contained, not in plots, but in words – words like flæsc-homa, bán-hús, hreðer-loca, ellor-síð (‘flesh-raiment’, ‘bone-house’, ‘heart-prison’, ‘elsewhere-journey’). The poet who used these words, Tolkien wrote, did not see the world like us, but:
saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth (middangeard) beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas (gársecg) and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life (læne líf), until the hour of fate (metodsceaft), when all things should perish, léoht ond lif samod [light and life together]. (p. xxvii)
He ‘did not say all this fully or explicitly’. Nevertheless, the insistence ran, it was there. You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words; like place-names or Roman roads or Gothic vowels, they carried quite enough information all by themselves.
The same insistence on ‘the reality of language’ permeates the British Academy lecture of 1936. There, however, it is further intertwined with beliefs about ‘the reality of history’ – rather curious beliefs which Tolkien does not seem to have wanted to express directly. The general flow of the lecture is in fact extremely sinuous, causing great trouble to the many later Beowulfians who have tried to paraphrase it; it abounds in asides, in hilarious images like the Babel of conflicting critics and the ‘jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research’, in wildernesses of dragons and shrewdnesses of apes. However a vital point about it, never directly stated or defended, is Tolkien’s conviction that he knew exactly when and under what circumstances the poem was written. ‘At a given point’, he says (his italics, p. 262), there was a fusion, reflected in the poem; at this ‘precise point’ (p. 269) an imagination was kindled. Since there is no unquestioned evidence at all for the date and place when Beowulf was composed (it could be anywhere from Tyne to Severn, from AD 650 to 1000), one wonders what Tolkien meant. But the nearest he approaches to an answer is via allegory once more, in his little story of the man and the tower, on pp. 248–9.
This runs as follows:
A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings … They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old home? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.
Now, as with ‘Leaf by Niggle’, everything in this story can be ‘equated’. ‘The man’ = the Beowulf-poet. The ‘friends’ looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history. The ‘tower’ with its view on the sea = Beowulf itself, with its non-scholarly impulse towards pure poetry. More difficult are ‘the accumulation of old stone’, the ‘older hall’ (also ‘the old house of his fathers’), and ‘the house in which he actually lived’. From this one can deduce that Tolkien thought that there had been older poems than Beowulf, pagan ones, in the time of the Christian past already abandoned; they are the ‘older hall’. However debris from them remained available, poetic formulas and indeed stray pagan concepts like the Sigelware; that is the ‘accumulation of old stone’. Some indeed of this was used for Biblical poems like Exodus, in which the Sigelware figure, part of the new civilisation of Christian Northumbria (or Mercia), the new civilisation being ‘the house’ in which the man ‘actually lived’. Rejected bits were nevertheless used by the poet to build his poem or ‘tower’; and they are pre-eminently the monsters, the dragon, the eotenas and ylfe, ‘elves’ and ‘giants’, words once common but used either not at all or very rarely in the rest of Old English literature.
The gist of this is that no one, friends or descendants or maybe even contemporaries, had understood Beowulf except Tolkien. The work had always been something personal, even freakish, and it took someone with the same instincts to explain it. Sympathy furthermore depended on being a descendant, on living in the same country and beneath the same sky, on speaking the same language – being ‘native to that tongue and land’. This is not the terminology of strict scholarship, though that does not prove the opinion wrong. What it does prove is that Tolkien felt more than continuity with the Beowulf-poet, he felt a virtual identity of motive and of technique.* Nowhere was the identity stronger than over ‘the monsters and the critics’, the latter deeply antipathetic to both of them as Tolkien thought he had proved – the former deeply interesting. But what did the dragon, for instance, mean to the Beowulf-poet? For him, Tolkien argued, dragons might have been very close to the edge of reality; certainly the poet’s pagan ancestors could have thought of dragons as things they might one day have to face. Equally certainly dragons had to the poet not yet become allegorical, as they would to his descendants – the dragon as Leviathan, the devil, ‘that old serpent underground’, etc. Yet even to the poet a dragon could not be mere matter-of-fact. He was indeed phenomenally lucky in his freedom to balance exactly between ‘dragon-as-simple-beast’ and ‘dragon-as-just-allegory’, between pagan and Christian worlds, on a pinpoint of literary artifice and mythic suggestion. One sees why Tolkien insisted on a ‘precise’ kindling point of imagination, a ‘given point’ of ‘fusion’, a ‘pregnant moment of poise’. Knowing exactly when the poem was written was part of knowing its exact literary mode, and that literary mode was the one he himself wanted! But the circumstances of the modern literary world made things much harder for him than for his mighty predecessor and kindred spirit.
‘A dragon is no idle fancy’, wrote Tolkien. ‘Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even to-day (despite the critics) you may find men … who yet have been caught by the fascination of the worm’ (pp. 257–8). This last