Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. John Garth

hoarded sparks of orient fire

      That divers won in waters of the unknown sun:

      And, maybe, ‘tis a throbbing silver lyre

      Or voices of grey sailors echo up,

      Afloat among the shadows of the world

      In oarless shallop and with canvas furled,

      For often seems there ring of feet, or song,

      Or twilit twinkle of a trembling gong.—

      O! happy mariners upon a journey long

      To those great portals on the Western shores

      Where, far away, constellate fountains leap,

      And dashed against Night’s dragon-headed doors

      In foam of stars fall sparkling in the deep.

      While I, alone, look out behind the moon

      From in my white and windy tower,

      Ye bide no moment and await no hour,

      But chanting snatches of a secret tune

      Go through the shadows and the dangerous seas

      Past sunless lands to fairy leas,

      Where stars upon the jacinth wall of space

      Do tangle, burst, and interlace.

      Ye follow Eärendel through the West –

      The Shining Mariner – to islands blest,

      While only from beyond that sombre rim

      A wind returns to stir these crystal panes,

      And murmur magically of golden rains

      That fall for ever in those spaces dim.

      These last lines, in which a hint of paradise is borne on the air through intervening rains, read almost like a premonition of Elvenhome as it is seen at the end of The Lord of the Rings:

      And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

      It is remarkable to see such a moment of vision, or partial vision, established decades before Tolkien’s epic romance was written.

      On the other hand, in the context of what he had put in writing by July 1915, ‘The Happy Mariners’ contains many apparent enigmas. Some of these are only explicable with the help of the first fully-fledged prose form of Tolkien’s mythology, ‘The Book of Lost Tales’. Its introductory narrative, written in the winter of 1916-17, mentions ‘the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl that stands far out to west in the Twilit Isles’, who was awoken when one of Eärendel’s companions in the voyage to Kôr sounded a great gong. Further details resurface in a passage written during the two years after the Great War. Then, the world would be visualized as a flat disc surrounded by the deep blue ‘Wall of Things’. The Moon and Sun would pass this wall in their diurnal courses through the basalt Door of Night, carved with great dragon-shapes. The ‘sparks of orient fire’ won by divers ‘in waters of the unknown sun’ would be explained as the ancient sunlight scattered during attempts to pilot the new-born Sun beneath the roots of the world at night. As Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘The Happy Mariners’ was apparently the song of the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl mentioned in the same passage.