Þess galt hon gedda fyrir Grafár ósi, er Heiðrekr var veginn undir Harvaða fjöllum.
So writes the forgotten poet: ‘The pike has paid/by the pools of Grafá/for Heidrek’s slaying/under Harvad-fells’. But, Christopher Tolkien comments, ‘the view is not challenged … that Harvaða is the same name in origin as “Carpathians”. Since this name in its Germanic form is found nowhere else at all, and must be a relic of extremely ancient tradition, one can hardly conclude otherwise than that these few lines are a fragment of a lost poem … that preserved names at least going back to poetry sung in the halls of Germanic peoples in central or south-eastern Europe’. One could hardly have a more romantically suggestive comment, or a more rigorously philological one, for as Christopher Tolkien footnotes, ‘The stem karpat- was regularly transformed into xarfap- by the operation of the Germanic Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law)’.17 ‘Glamour’, ‘gramarye’, grammar, philology – these were on several levels much the same thing.
One can see now why Tolkien used the same word for both the characteristic literary quality of Beowulf, a ‘glamour of Poesis’ (‘Monsters’, p. 248), and for the characteristic but maybe not literary quality of ‘fairy-stories’, the ‘glamour of Elfland’ (‘OFS’, Tree p. 6). He did not know quite what he was detecting, but he was in no doubt that he felt something consistent in many stories and poems which could not all be the work of the same man. It might after all only be the result of age and distance, the ‘elvish hone of antiquity’, or we might think the distorting glass of philology; it might point to some great lost truth in the areas of utter historical darkness of which he was so conscious; it might be a memory, or a prophecy, of Paradise, as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’; or, again as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’, it might be mankind’s one chance to create a vision of Paradise which would be true in the future if never in the past. Tolkien’s theories on all this never coalesced. Still, we can say that the quality he evidently valued more than anything in literature was that shimmer of suggestion which never quite becomes clear sight but always hints at something deeper further on, a quality shared by Beowulf, Hervarar saga, ‘Fawler’, ‘The Man in the Moon’, ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, and so much else. This was ‘glamour’, the opposite one may say of ‘shrewdness’ – for as the one had climbed into favour the other had been debased, in simultaneous proof of the superiority of ancient over modern world views. If Tolkien took ‘glamour’ too seriously, translating it into an entirely personal concept of fantasy, he had at any rate precedent and reason. As Jacob Grimm wrote (it is quoted under the definition of philologie in the Deutsches Wörterbuch):
You can divide all philologists into these groups, those who study words only for the sake of the things, or those who study things only for the sake of the words.
Grimm had no doubt that the former class was superior, the latter falling away into pedantry and dictionaries. Of that former class Tolkien was the preeminent example.
* The tower looking out over the sea, for instance, is a strong and private image of Tolkien’s own for what he desired in literature. The 1920 poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ begins ‘I know a window in a western tower/That opens on celestial seas …’ In The Lord of the Rings (p. 7) the hobbits believe that you can see the sea from the top of the tallest elvish tower on the Tower Hills; but none of them has ever tried to climb it.
CHAPTER 3 THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR
The word and the thing: elves and dwarves
Sigelhearwan, Nodens, Fawler, fancy, glamour: stripped of its layers of scholarly guardedness, the essence of Tolkien’s belief was that ‘the word authenticates the thing’. This was a belief grounded on philology. Tolkien thought, indeed he knew, that he could distinguish many words and word-forms into two classes, one ‘old-traditional-genuine’, the other ‘new-unhistorical-mistaken’. From this he went on to form the opinion, less certain but still highly plausible, that the first group was not only more correct but also more interesting than the second; it had compelled assent over the millennia, it had a definite ‘inner consistency’, whether or not that was the ‘inner consistency of reality’ or merely of Secondary Art.
These beliefs go a long way towards explaining Tolkien’s sudden displays of scrupulosity. In 1954 he was ‘infuriated’ to find that the printers of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings had gone through it, with the best will in the world and in conformity with standard English practice, changing ‘dwarves’ to ‘dwarfs’, ‘dwarvish’ to ‘dwarfish’, ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, and so on. Considering the hundreds of changes involved (and the cost of proof correction) many authors might have let the matter ride; but Tolkien had all the original forms restored (see Biography, p. 290). In 1961 Puffin Books did much the same thing to a reprint of The Hobbit, and Tolkien complained to his publishers (Letters, p. 313) at greater length. His point was that even in modern English many old words ending in -f can still be told from new ones by their plural forms: old words (or at least old words of one particular class in Old English) behave like ‘hoof’ or ‘loaf’ and become ‘hooves’, ‘loaves’, while new ones (unaffected by sound-changes in the Old English period) simply add -s, as in ‘proofs’, ‘tiffs’, ‘rebuffs’. Writing ‘dwarfs’ was then, to Tolkien’s acute and trained sensibility, the equivalent of denying the word its age and its roots. Much the same reasoning had led Jacob Grimm, many years before, to leave the word Elfen out of his dictionary altogether, as an English import, replacing it with the native form Elben (which no one actually used any more) – his argument is repeated almost verbatim in the advice to German translators in Tolkien’s ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, p. 164. Even more than ‘dwarfs’ Tolkien disliked the word ‘elfin’, since this was a personal and pseudo-medieval coinage by Edmund Spenser – the poet hailed by the OED’s citations as the dawn of modern literature, and also the man whose first poem, The Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, was ornamented by the most offensive gloss that Tolkien probably ever encountered. In quick succession this declared that for all its age ‘that rancke opinion of Elfes’ [sic] should be rooted ‘oute of mens hearts’ as being a mistaken form of the Italian faction the ‘Guelfes’, and was in any case a Papistical notion spread by ‘bald Friers and knauish shauelings’.1 Tolkien would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot, or as Roman Catholic! All round, the gloss no doubt confirmed him in the belief that modern and erroneous spellings went with stupid and self-opinionated people.
Belief was reinforced further by the history of the word ‘fairy’. The OED, true to form, said that this was the word that should be used: ‘In mod. literature, elf is a mere synonym of FAIRY, which has to a great extent superseded it even in dialects.’ But whether this particular fact was true or not, Tolkien knew that much else of the OED’s information on such points was wrong. Its first citation for ‘fairy’ in its present sense is from John Gower,