A Sense of History

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), edited by Carl F. Hostetter, includes two texts under the title 'The Awaking of the Quendi' in which we find the following:

The Atani entered Beleriand in 310 Bel. That is in the 22nd Sun-year of VY 1498. Men had then existed for 448 VYs + 22 SYs: i.e., 64,534 Sun Years, which though doubtless insufficient scientifically, is adequate for purposes of the Silmarillion, etc. (p. 39)

A marginal note by Tolkien clarifies the scientifically insufficient time: "since that is only – we being in 1960 of the 7th Age – 16,000 years ago: total about 80,000)". (p. 40, note 30) An editorial comment by CFH, of which I quote the first part, illuminates this marginal note (pp. 402-403):

While many are familiar with the concept of named Ages of the World as found in classical mythology, e.g. the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc., it is far less well known that the Catholic Church has long espoused a system of numbered Ages of the World, extending through at least a Sixth Age. Throughout Tolkien’s life the Proclamation of the Birth of Christ, just before the start of the Christmas Vigil Mass, flatly stated that Christ was born “in the sixth age of the world”.

CFH goes on to give part of the text of the proclamation.

In a hasty post in Gondolin back in October I singled out this editorial comment as warranting criticism. I am happy to say that CFH, under the name of @Aelfwine, is for the present (and I hope the future) a member of the plaza. I therefore take this opportunity to clarify my problem with his editorial comment.

When I first read the editorial comment I had two responses. First, I was pleased to find that Tolkien's Catholicism was taken seriously. Second, I sighed because once again his scholarship was passed over.

The Catholic Church has indeed long espoused a system of numbered Ages of the World. And as a Catholic Tolkien obviously knew the Proclamation of the Birth of Christ. But what should also be noted, in my opinion, is that in England the most important work on the Ages of the World was penned by the Venerable Bede.

This is not an accidental fact, at least not to those who take seriously Tolkien's scholarship (few do). Anyone who knows anything about his British Academy lecture on Beowulf knows that Tolkien dates the poem to the age of Bede. Today Bede is best known for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and it is not far-fetched to identify a dawning of Anglo-Saxon historical consciousnesses as one of the basic characteristics of 'the age of Bede'.

Less well known about the British Academy lecture (for careful reading of it is rare) is that Tolkien deems Beowulf "an historical poem", that is to say, an Anglo-Saxon attempt to imagine an earlier age of history, an age that had a beginning and also its end. In other words, in both Bede and Beowulf we find notions of the ages of the world, and the obvious research question is how (if at all) the respective notions relate to one another. Bede's thought (I presume) is almost wholly derived from older Christian traditions (notably Augustine), while (according to Tolkien) Beowulf is evidence of a 'fusion' of Christian and northern pagan traditions. Given the centrality of Beowulf to Tolkien's thought it is imperative - if we wish to understand his 3 Ages - to attend to what we find in the Old English poem as well as to the (according to Tolkien) contemporary Latin writings of Bede.

So CFH's editorial commentary is indeed a statement of fact. But it provides only a partial view of the facts. The Catholicism is central. But the scholarship is also crucial, and the scholarship no less than the Catholicism is all too often passed over in the secondary literature. For me to be happy with the editorial comment all that would be required is the insertion of a clause mentioning Bede. Here is a revised version of the comment, with my addition in a different colour.

While many are familiar with the concept of named Ages of the World as found in classical mythology, e.g. the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc., it is far less well known that the Catholic Church has long espoused a system of numbered Ages of the World, extending through at least a Sixth Age, one important account of which was set out in Anglo-Saxon England by the Venerable Bede.

[Aelfwine]

Well, yes, I could have done that, if I had intended to argue, or appear to argue, that the specific division of the ages by Bede (and/or Augustine) had direct relevance to the events and demarcations of Tolkien's ages of Middle-earth. But that was not and is not an argument I wish to make. There is much more that I could have said about every topic I highlighted in App. I, had I meant it to be a treatise on any of them; which I did not. (As it is, some have criticized me for saying anything at all about them!) My purpose was simply to succinctly indicate, to those readers interested but not especially conversant in such metaphysical or theological matters, to what Tolkien was (or in this case may have been) alluding at various points, and which they might then explore further. Similarly, I didn't need to cite the literature on radioactive decay, name Becquerel and Curie, or specify decay paths to show that Tolkien was making an allusion to elemental transmutation when citing "the case of certain nassi that appear 'by nature' to be thus 'unstable', breaking up or changing their inner patterns normally under like conditions". Neither did I feel it was the right place in which to discuss the fact that among the post-Enlightenment criticisms of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is the claim that the theory of immutable forms ("patterns" in Tolkien's parlance) fails to account for the spontaneous change of one element into another (though I certainly could have). Highlighting the allusion as I did was, I felt, sufficient both for informing the immediate reading experience (the most important function of editorial notes, to my mind) and as a signpost to an area for further exploration.

Here's a suggestion: instead of constructing for me (us) your version of what you think I should have said (which even if I agreed I can now do nothing about), why don't you just say, "Hey, look at the interesting point Carl raised here. Here's some more info bearing on it!" and write up your own thoughts on the matter? That would in fact go a long way towards fulfilling one of my purposes in writing App. I in the first place, without diminishing what I did write.

— CFH

[Troelsfo]

Thank you, Carl (@Aelfwine) – it was good to have your thoughts on this

Looking into the Scull & Hammond Companion and Guide, I was actually surprised that there was so little mention of Bede. There is a mention that Tolkien, during his own studies, read “‘Account of the Poet Caedmon’ from Alfred's translation of the Ecclesiastical History by the Venerable Bede” (Chronology, entry after 17 April 1913, covering “Over the next seven terms”). The only other mention of the Venerable Bede in the Chronology is to G.E. Selby being “at the College of the Venerable Bede, Durham” (31 December 1949).

The Reader's Guide is equally sparing, only mentioning Tolkien's dating of Beowulf to “the age of Bede”, and there is nothing further in the addenda on their web-site.

This has actually surprised me quite a bit – I had imagined as a certain thing that Tolkien would have engaged professionally with the Venerable Bede, but this has, at least, not left any evidence that have been discovered by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond, which means that it would, at the very least, be very obscure evidence, indeed

While I still think it is more likely than not that Tolkien's knowledge of the writings of the Venerable Bede would extend beyond merely the text he was set during his own studies (my guess would be that he, at least, read all of Alfred's translations – the Venerable Bede wrote in Latin, his title being Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum – for me, a parallel to the later work of the Danish monk, Saxo Grammaticus, the Gesta Danorum), it is more difficult to start making any inferences from unattested readings.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Troelsfo, there is in the literature an entrenched way of identifying Tolkien's 'influences' in which it is presumed that evidence must be found that he read this or that text before we can consider its 'influence'. Possibly this has some merit when it comes to literature, but to my mind it is one of the factors that has held back understanding of Tolkien's scholarship. There are other, more fruitful ways to approach these questions, ones which point not to the nebulous possibility of an 'influence' but rather establish what Tolkien was actually thinking about.

A priori, I would say that it is inconceivable that Tolkien did not look at a whole range of Bede's writings, simply because he is the major intellectual powerhouse of the day in which (thought Tolkien) the Beowulf poet lived.

Close inspection of the 1936 British Academy lecture gives substance to this. The lecture is primarily directed at the literary criticism of Beowulf set out in 1904 by W.P. Ker and upheld by Ker's student R.W. Chambers. In 1936 Tolkien is fundamentally arguing with Chambers, who was still alive (and also a good friend of Tolkien). Tolkien delivered his lecture in November. That May Chambers had delivered a lecture on Bede to the British Academy. Chambers had argued that the meeting of Germanic pagan culture and Christianity had generated the first flowering of Anglo-Saxon literarature, and he used the term 'fusion' to describe the result. In this lecture (if I recall) Chambers includes Beowulf as one product of this fusion, but elsewhere he tended to dismiss the poem as rather confusion than fusion.

Tolkien shared Chambers' notion of an 'Anglo-Saxon Christian Spring' in the age of Bede and his own British Academy lecture is essentially an argument that Chambers has overlooked the deep fusion of Germanic tradition and Christian teaching that is the heart of the poem.

In this argument Bede stands on the margins. Bede's achievements are taken as given, as is his place at the center of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Spring. But that taken as given does not mean that Tolkien had not read much Bede nor thought about him. Rather, it presupposes the achievements of Bede, on which both Chambers and Tolkien (and actually everyone else) are in agreement.

[Troelsfo]

Ah, Simon – @Chrysophylax Dives, that may be where we hit upon the snag of my scientific mind

It may be good fun to speculate on what was before the Big Bang, or on the physical reality underlying quantum physics (Many worlds theory? Copenhagen interpretation? Objective-collapse theories? Pilot waves?), but such speculations are, in the end, not really physics† And thus, while they are certainly fun exercises for the curious (and somewhat philosophically bent) mind, such speculations do not in any way contribute to our knowledge of, or realisation of, our world.

There is, a priori just as much validity to the idea that it is inconceivable that Tolkien would have engaged so much with the writings of the Venerable Bede and yet leave no trace of it (other than as a dating mechanism – a reference to a certain epoch of, as you say, fusion of Anglo-Saxon heathenism and the associated traditons a new Christian faith with its own ideas and traditions.

As I said, I do think it is “more likely than not” (I could have used stronger terms such as “highly likely”) that Tolkien had read more, the trail stops there. Not knowing what else Tolkien actually did read, we cannot even begin to make guesses as to how this might shape his thinking. Of course it doesn't prevent us from seeking parallels, but you presented things in the langague of an influence.

In other words, and perhaps being a little blunt about it, I think you are, metaphorically speaking, standing on a very sketchy and unstable scaffold, and then you try to extrapolate from there. I know that this is common practice in literary analysis, but that doesn't mean that I must like it

It is, indeed, inconceivable that Tolkien would not have been very familiar with the contents of Chambers' lecture, but let's keep it at that, where our scaffold is still quite solid. Trying to bring Bede into it and use his works as a starting point for extrapolation becomes, for me with my training in scientific method & theory, merely unconvincing.



† I shall omit a longer discourse on this – both because it is utterly off-topic here, and because I am not up to the more current versions of the various theories. One could argue that the Copenhagen interpretation attempts to stick to the physical part, but only does so by shrugging off the unknown as unknowable maths

[Ephtariat]

@Troelsfo Hi, nice to see you here. I enter the conversation only to point out that recently I received the peer review of my next book on Tolkien, and the reviewer criticized me for interrupting the main discourse to bring up that we know for sure that Tolkien read Greek tragedies. The reviewer said that it goes by itself that a man of Tolkien's culture would know Greek tragedies, and that if I really want to give some thought on this I should say in the introduction that many references cited in my discourse were surely known to a man of wide culture like Tolkien, so I will not interrupt to point it out certifiedly every time. That being said, I think that Tolkien Societies worldwide should need to relax and take a broader approach to Tolkien's readings (the chief point of having a volume like "Tolkien's Library" by Oronzo Cilli should be to prove how wide and varied Tolkien's readings were), since their being stricter than peer-reviews is something that hinders Tolkien Studies, not helps them.

[Ephtariat]

@Troelsfo Yes, I always forget I'm under a nickname here. I'm Giovanni C. Costabile.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Your analogy is inexact. The proper analogy would be more like this: we have evidence that Erwin Schrödinger wrote on quantum mechanics but we possess no early notebooks from his school years and therefore it must remain in doubt whether or not he knew arithmetic.

(And if you say that the quantum mechanics presupposes the arithematic I reply that the argument about fusion presupposes knowledge of Bede - as well as the other literary monuments of the age.)

I suspect that your scientific training trips you up when it comes to considering research in the humanities (well, maybe not most of the research of today but the real stuff 100 years ago). When I read your post my basic response is 'but that is not how scholarship works.'

My training - or some of it - was in the history of science. The first lesson learned is that scientists write very bad history of science. Obviously, the scientists don't like to hear that. So I am content to leave an abyss between us. Some years ago I gave up on talking with the Tolkien studies community for just this kind of reason. If I have to set out the ABC of contextual intellectual history every time before I even get going it becomes a waste of my time. We can agree to go our separate ways.

However, just in case you do wish to read the ABC, one classic text is Quentin Skinner's Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. Skinner traces his methodology back to R. Collingwood, Tolkien's Pembroke colleague. To my mind, it is quite clear that Tolkien was employing the same sort of approach in his study of Beowulf. (Though I cannot imagine what Skinner would say were he to be informed that his practice of intellectual history has antecedents in Tolkien!)

[Ephtariat]

On pages 15-16 of "Tolkien's Library" there are listed eight volumes of Bede's Historia (in different editions), including the Anglo-Saxon translation.

[Ephtariat]

More precisely, the 1896 edition by Charles Plummer and the 1935 translation by Thomas Stapleton, plus the Old English version edited by Thomas Miller (Vol. I: 1890-1891; Vol. II: 1897). The sources for including them are Tolkien's "English and Welsh" and "Finn and Hengest" for Plummer, a private collection for Stapleton, and MS Tolkien A 21/13, fol. 119 for Miller.

[Troelsfo]

Hello Giovanni, @Ephtariat – good to see you here

To both of you, the frustration that I, as a scientist, often experience when reading in the humanities is the sense that there seems to be a wide-spread lack of any sense of the strength of one's evidence. It is a crucial aspect of all critical thinking to be able to assess the strength of evidence, no matter what the discipline in which it is applied. The humanities, though the evidence does not generally come in terms of data that can be subjected to statistical analysis to quantify their strength, is still a field of academic rigour and critical thinking, not a field of mere fanciful thinking.


This means that while we can speculate, we need to qualify speculations as such (such as when I expressly say that I think something would be correct as a subjective opinion based on my own reading of Tolkien) – and there needs to be a threshold of strength of evidence when publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

I would, however, agree with your reviewer, Giovanni, that the fact that Tolkien was widely read in Greek and Latin texts is not something that would need mention more than once, and even then only as a reminder to the reader. It has been established quite firmly (expecially, I think, by Tom Shippey) that Tolkien would have read and known a very wide range of both Greek and Latin texts (I cannot remember if it is in one of Tom's publications or in a lecture that he said that Tolkien had probably read more both Greek and Latin before shifting to philology than a modern M.A. in either).


Simon, your analogy is, I am afraid, completely off. Nothing you or anyone else has brought forward that Tolkien has said about the Venerable Bede would require a knowledge of the writings of Bede that would go beyond the mere fact of his living at a specific time in history. We do know that he knew more, such as the text he was set during his studies and (with a very high likelihood) the contents of Chambers' lecture, but these are quite limited.

Schrödinger, of course, actually uses arithmetic in his work on quantum physics in ways that are fundamentally different from Tolkien's references to Bede.


There is, in the use of numbered ages, nothing that suggest other than a parallel to Bede's work on the same – as Carl points out in the note, a reference to numbered ages was inherent in the Catholic liturgy during Tolkien's life (and thank you, Carl, for that very interesting piece of information, which was unknown to me before your book!).

While I would certainly also think it is likely that Tolkien read at least all those of Bede's texts that had been translated to Old English, it is the connecting of this causally with a very specific topic such as numbered ages that I think is climbing too far out.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Troels, your way of thinking reminds me of modern economics, in which an abstract agent is assumed to exist in an abstract world. But we are talking about real people in concrete situations, in this case a Professor at Oxford in the Interwar years. To be quite honest, I find it ridiculous that I am even arguing with someone - and a very intelligent and very well read person to boot - as to whether in the 1930s the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon read Bede's work.

I don't have time to engage properly right now. I would be willing to do so in the future if I felt there was a point. I don't intend to be rude here, but from my point of view, I know what I am talking about and you do not. I have no interest in having an argument about it - I like to argue on this site when I feel I have something to learn. You and others have much to teach me on many things. But not on this. So we can agree to differ. Or, if you wish to learn, I can attempt to explain what it means to think historically.

There is a reason that this thread is titled 'A Sense of History'.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

While I would certainly also think it is likely that Tolkien read at least all those of Bede's texts that had been translated to Old English, it is the connecting of this causally with a very specific topic such as numbered ages that I think is climbing too far out.

Gah! I really have to get on with my work. The problem with reading these posts in the morning is that they stick in my head.

1. Bede is the father of English history, marking the arising of a new kind of thought among the Anglo-Saxons - historical thought.
2. Tolkien reads Beowulf as an historical poem, an attempt by an Anglo-Saxon to recall an age that is now past.
3. Therefore Tolkien, himself being historically minded (unlike the Tolkien scholars of today) would - without any shadow of doubt - have considered the relationship between Bede's historical thought and what he found in Beowulf.

It then becomes a research question what relationship, if any, Tolkien discerned between Bede's historical thinking and that of the poet whose name is not known. Given the emphasis that Tolkien places on 'fusion' of Germanic and Christian traditions in the poem, and given that the numbered ages of Middle-earth do not fit readily into the Catholic 6 Ages, it seems quite likely that research would turn up something of worth here.

It takes a sense of history to comprehend Tolkien's sense of history.

[Troelsfo]

On pages 15-16 of "Tolkien's Library" there are listed eight volumes of Bede's Historia (in different editions), including the Anglo-Saxon translation.

Wonderful!

Thank you so very much for digging that out, Giovanni!

I should, of course, have checked Cilli's book, but I do not have it on my Kindle Cloud Reader, which is all I can access while at work, which was where I was when writing my previous posts.

This obviously does change things, and makes it possible to start discussing specifics as real possibilities (as opposed to generalities – the difference between a general knowledge of the Venerable Bede and the general thrust of his Historia ecclesiastica; and then a detailed knowledge of a specific element of the book.

[Ephtariat]

@Troelsfo Glad to help!

[Troelsfo]

To be quite honest, I find it ridiculous that I am even arguing with someone - and a very intelligent and very well read person to boot - as to whether in the 1930s the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon read Bede's work.

If that is what you have been discussing, then it would seem that we have been discussing different things here

What I have been discussing has been what kind of statements you can make given varying levels of evidence, which is a different, albeit related, discussion.


To some extent, I suppose that my training may again confusticate matters again.

When I say that I would (prior to @Ephtariat's kind intervention) consider it “likely” that Tolkien read Bede's work, it basically meant that I was willing to accept that it was certainly more likely than not that Tolkien read the majority or all of, at least, The Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English people.

If you asked me if it was possible for me to quantum tunnel to London from Denmark to visit a friend, I would say that it is “extremely unlikely” – we do tend to be rather careful in physics and express things about which we have no reasonable doubt in probabilistic terms (thus my quantum tunnelling becomes “very unlikely” rather than just "impossible – not in a trillion (a true trillion, mind – the cube of a million: 1,000,000³) lifetimes of the universe (currently estimated to about 13.8 millard years) ...


Obviously, with the help of Cilli's Tolkien's Library, including kind notes to tell us that Tolkien references both the Old English and Latin versions of Bede's ecclesiastical history in Finn and Hengest, the discussion of whether Tolkien did know that work becomes moot