This is the lyric from Harley Manuscript no. 2253, now known generally as ‘The Man in the Moon’.9 It is perhaps the best medieval English lyric surviving, and certainly one of the hardest, prompting many learned articles and interpretations. However three points about it are clear, and all gave it especial charm for Tolkien. In the first place it is extremely bizarre; it is presented as a speech by an English villager about the Man in the Moon, asking why he doesn’t come down or move. It also has a very sharp and professional eye for English landscape; the villager concludes that the Man in the Moon is so stiff because he has been caught stealing thorns and carrying them home to mend his hedges with (an old image of the Moon’s markings is of a man with a lamp, a dog, and a thorn bush, see Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i). Finally, for all the poem’s thick dialect and involvement with peasant life, it is full of self-confidence. ‘Never mind if the hayward has caught you pinching thorns’, calls the narrator to the Man in the Moon, ‘we’ll deal with that. We’ll ask him home’:
‘Drynke to hym deorly of fol god bous,
Ant oure dame douse shal sitten hym by. When that he is dronke ase a dreynt mous, Thenne we schule borewe the wed ate bayly.’
‘We’ll drink to him like friends in excellent booze,
and our sweet lady will sit right next to him. When he’s as drunk as a drowned mouse, we’ll go to the bailiff and redeem your pledge.’
And without this evidence, clearly, the indictment will be quashed! It all sounds a most plausible way to work, and one which casts an unexpected light on the downtrodden serfs of medieval England – not as downtrodden as all that, obviously. Their good-natured resourcefulness seems to be an element in the make-up of Tolkien’s hobbits. More significantly, the poem makes one wonder about the unofficial elements of early literary culture. Were there other ‘Man in the Moon’ poems? Was there a whole genre of sophisticated play on folk-belief? There could have been. Tolkien’s 1923 poems attempt to revive it, or invent it, fitting into the gaps between modern doggerel and medieval lyric, creating something that might have existed and would, if it had, account for the jumble and litter of later periods – very like Gothic and ‘i-mutation’.
One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in AD 419, or after Harold died at Hastings in 1066. The post-Roman era produced ‘King Arthur’, to whose cycle King Lear and King Cole and the rest became eventual tributaries. Tolkien knew this tradition well and used it for Farmer Giles of Ham (published 1949, but written much earlier), the opening paragraphs of which play jokingly with the first few lines of Sir Gawain. However he also knew that whatever the author of Sir Gawain thought, the Arthurian tradition was originally non-English, indeed dedicated to the overthrow of England; its commemoration in English verse was merely a final consequence of the stamping-out of native culture after Hastings, a literary ‘defoliation’ which had also led to the meaninglessness of English names like ‘Fawler’ and the near-total loss of all Old English heroic tradition, apart from Beowulf. What, then, had happened to England and the English during those ‘Norman centuries’ when, it might be said, ‘language’ and ‘literature’ had first and lastingly separated?
Tolkien had been interested in that question for some time. Not much was known about Early Middle English, and indeed several of its major texts remain without satisfactory editions today. However, one important work was evidently the Ancrene Wisse, a ‘guide for anchoresses (or female hermits)’, existing in several manuscripts from different times and places, but one of few Middle English works to be translated into French rather than out of it. With this were associated several other texts with a ‘feminist’ bias, the tract on virginity Hali Meiðhad, the saints’ lives Seinte Juliene, Seinte Marherete, Seinte Katherine, the little allegory Sawles Warde. All looked similar in dialect, and in sophistication of phrase; on the other hand their subject-matter meant they were unlikely ever to take the ‘literature’ side by storm. What could be said about them?
Tolkien began with a review of F. J. Furnivall’s edition of Hali Meiðhad, in 1923; he went on to make ‘Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography’ in Review of English Studies (1925), most of them drawn from Ancrene Wisse, and some of them incidentally interesting, like the remark that medi wið wicchen must mean, not ‘meddle with witches’ but ‘bribe, purchase the service of witches’, apparently a known practice to the author of the ‘Rule’. In ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ in the same periodical that year he spent enormous effort on the single word eaueres from Hali Meiðhad, arguing that it did not mean ‘boars’ as the OED had said, but ‘heavy horses, draft horses’. Philologically this was interesting as showing a Germanic root *abra-z, meaning ‘work’ and connected with Latin opus. Mythologically it was interesting too as showing an image of the devil galloping away not on fire-breathing steeds, but on ‘heavy old dobbins’ – a contemptuous barnyard image of evil. All very well, but still, some would have said, distinctly peripheral.
The breakthrough came with Tolkien’s article for Essays and Studies (1929), ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, the most perfect though not the best-known of his academic pieces. This rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess. In Old English a distinction was regularly made between verbs like hé hiereð, híe híerað, ‘he hears, they hear’, and hé lócað, híe lóciað ‘he looks, they look’. An -að ending could be singular or plural, depending on what sort of a verb it was attached to. This clear but to outsiders utterly unmemorable distinction was, after Hastings, rapidly dropped. Two manuscripts, however, one of Ancrene Wisse, the other of its five associated texts, not only preserved the distinction but went on to make another new one, between verbs within the lócian class: they distinguished e.g. between ha polieð, ‘they endure’, O.E. híe poliað, and ha fondið, ‘they inquire’, O.E. híe fondiað. The distinction had a sound phonological basis and was not the result of mere whim. Furthermore the two manuscripts could not have been by the same man for they were in different handwriting. Evidently – I summarise the chain of logic – they were the product of a ‘school’; so were the works themselves, composed in the same dialect by another man or men; and this ‘school’ was one that operated in English, and in an English descended without interruption from Old English, owing words certainly to the Norse and the French but not affected by the confusion their invasions had caused. To put it Tolkien’s way:
There is an English older than Dan Michel’s and richer, as regular in spelling as Orm’s [these are two other relatively consistent writers of Middle English] but less queer; one that has preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England. (‘AW’, p. 106)
It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conqueror.
There are several signs here of Tolkien’s underlying preoccupations. One is the power of philology: the regularity and rigour of its observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts. These observations are incontestable. They are also suggestive, permitting us to make informed