Allegory of the Tower

[Chrysophylax Dives]

If there is an answer to the starting setup of the dissertation, you may find it on page 15:

"The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allergory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected."

Yes! This is the key paragraph to line up with Tolkien's intentions in telling his allegory of the tower. But on this thread the discussion has not yet arrived at a position to line it up because we have not yet worked through the 'equations' of the allegory. From Shippey (1982), the secondary literature has generally assumed that the allegory of the tower is mechanical, that is, a set of 'equations' to be solved - and that is the end of it; an approach that ensures an allegory does not work! Shippey is the Beowulf authority, so his lead has been followed, but actually Verlyn Flieger (1983) observed that Shippey provided no solution to the sea-view and herself claimed that the sea has no allegorical solution. But nobody took the next step - the utterly obvious step - of identifying the sea as mythical. The sea seen from the top of the tower is the same sea that we find in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

It is astonishing. What everyone is after is understanding the stories of Tolkien. They read a short story, presented as an allegory, and because it is told in an academic lecture nobody reads it as one of the stories they are seeking to understand - readers refuse to recognize that we are in the same world of the same stories!

Do you remember a year ago my pushing you on the question of who sent the mythical king of the exordium of Beowulf to his people? You had no idea of what I was talking about, until I linked you to Tolkien's poem 'King Sheave', where we see very clearly how the exordium segs with Tolkien's legendarium, with the answer obviously the Elves.

This thread began with my posting a link to one of my SWG posts. This post deals with the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. But it is part of a series that began with the exordium to Beowulf and explained how it inspired 'The Fall of Númenor', which embodies Tolkien's reading of this exordium. Once this is taken on board the sea-view of the allegory comes into view as the mythical sea over which Elendil sails (to Middle-earth) and Frodo sails (to Valinor).

I am completely OK with discussing the allegory, which after all gives us the tower that reappears in The Lord of the Rings as Elostirion. But the primary thesis of my last four SWG posts is that 'The Fall of Númenor' is at the very heart of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism and, therefore, The Lord of the Rings is a product of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism (and continues it by other means).

[Priya]

Hello Aiks

I guess we are all brought up and taught differently. Per my High School English class lessons, tutorials and examinations - paragraph summarization is always meant to be done in your own words. Repeating sentences from an extract would result in marks being deducted.

Summarization is somewhat different from an exercise of picking out a key sentence in a paragraph. In school, we practiced that too.

In any case, I read about that ‘well man’. It was fascinating! Your thoughts are spot on - there is always some truth behind a legend.

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

your summaries are too crude and overlook what Tolkien is setting up in his first 7 paragraphs

I already knew, as hinted, my summary would differ from others. That does not bother me in the slightest. If you gave a class of 30 the same exercise, no two summaries would be the same. And no doubt some would complain that only their production is a worthy one.

My aim with brevity (1 or 2 summary sentences per paragraph) was to bring out each paragraph’s most salient feature so that one can easily see, at a glance, how Tolkien is constructing his case. Such succinctness highlights in a methodical fashion:

(a) That Tolkien is already criticizing ‘the industry’ before The Tower Allegory is brought up.
(b) The Tower Allegory is a reflection of that.
(c) The Tower Allegory also includes Tolkien’s desired direction.

So I think we are in agreement per:

You are correct that the seventh paragraph, the allegory, builds on what has come before.

Hallelujah !!!

Now on to some of your other remarks:

This is the first sentence after the allegory and establishes that the justice of the allegory is to be shown in what follows.

Well, having already said that it “builds on what has come before” - wasn’t the allegory just in terms of what preceded it?

All Tolkien is saying here, with:

I hope I shall show that that allegory is just - even when we consider the more recent and more perceptive critics (whose concern is in intention with literature).

is that I’ve only yet accounted for some critics (Paragraphs 1-6), however there are others that need to be addressed. There is a caveat imposed by the hyphen and the long string of words after it. For me, those additional words in the sentence are of great significance. It is highly important to note that Tolkien did not place a full stop after the “just” and discard the hyphenated matter. Yes, every word is to be heeded - my position hasn’t changed. But context is of equal and absolutely fundamental importance too. In my opinion, one must acknowledge the context behind “I hope I shall show that that allegory is just”.

Are you ready to do that?

Your odd idea that the allegory only looks backward

When did I say that? I can’t find it.

The criticism of the ‘industry’ of course continues beyond the Tower Allegory. And as such the later stuff is aligned with that already made and thus the allegory.

The Tower Allegory was not meant to reflect his own analysis of the poem or get into a discussion of its details. It’s too early in the essay for him to go there.

Please look at the essay carefully, and digest the structure Tolkien has provided.

Too early by whose lights? Yours alone.

No - by Tolkien’s.

The Professor continues to address the critics for many paragraphs after the Tower Allegory. Towards the middle of the essay, is when he starts interjecting more forcefully his ideas behind authorial intent, structural considerations and his own views about the monsters.



I am still of the opinion that the Tower Allegory was deliberately kept at a high and let’s say generalized level. It is vague enough not to outright belittle and possibly upset ‘descendants’ attending the lecture. Yet it still gets his message across. And that message has some equivalence to the old English idiom: ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi Priya,

We agree that every word is carefully considered when it comes to Tolkien, and also of the supreme importance of context. I will add also the value of precision in reading (and reporting on) his words. For example.

The Professor continues to address the critics for many paragraphs after the Tower Allegory. Towards the middle of the essay, is when he starts interjecting more forcefully his ideas behind authorial intent, structural considerations and his own views about the monsters.

Following the allegory of the tower many paragraphs indeed address the critics. But it is more precise - and so more useful - to say that after passing rapidly over the babel of friendly critical voices the great part of these paragraphs are dedicated to 3 descendants - Ker, Chambers, and Girvan (of Glasgow University), each of whom is quoted and their criticism discussed at length. One cumulative result of these three engagements with the descendants is that by the end of this section the term of art of the descendants, folklore, has been replaced by Tolkien's preferred term, myth. This sets up the specific argument about the monsters and fusion, wherein fusion is discovered in the realm of mythology.

Precise reading of the text unearths its structure. The criticism of the critics that follows the tower allegory on pp. 7-8 continues to p. 18, where Tolkien proclaims an initital refutation ("The particular is on the outer edge, the essential in the centre") and then provides a panoramic view of the world of the story that takes in the Shoreless Sea but turns us now to Doom at the center. This vital paragraph returns us to the view from the tower of the allegory, albeit we now stand on the top of the tower and are shown the view.

After this panoramic view from the tower, and a follow up paragraph that underlines that at the center of this poem is Doom = death, the argument about the monsters and fusion begins...

***

So we know where we are, would you mind giving anew your solutions to the 'equations' of the allegory?

field
accumalation of old stone
older hall
house where he now lives
tower
friends
descendants
sea

I am not sure if you have revised your account of any of these (and possibly you never gave a solution to the sea?).

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives


Per your request - see below for my views copied and pasted from some earlier posts. Though I’ve thought much about it in the intervening period - I haven’t yet had a change of heart.


The ‘man’ = The Beowulf poet.

The ‘tower’ = The Beowulf poem, as recorded per The Cotton MS. The story of Beowulf put into poetic form harmonized into a coherent whole, and wrought to a high finish in the poet’s native tongue.

The ‘field’ = The milieu of England and a sector of Northern Europe from which the Beowulf poem originally came and traveled to in eventually reaching our poet’s ear. Essentially it constitutes the poet’s European heritage.

The ‘man’s house’ = A locale of England where the poet grew up and traveled, and where existed a plethora of tales (both oral and written); being the ones he had been exposed to and absorbed. Essentially it constitutes the man’s knowledge base.

The ‘old hall’ = A sector of Northern Europe (equivalent to Geatland and the territory of the Scyldings). The ultimate source of the poet’s Beowulf knowledge. Essentially it is the poem’s ancestral root.

The stones lying in ruin = the tale of Beowulf, migrated from its source. Lying in a pile - the story might well have been deemed to have been in a bit of a muddled state with much extraneous information that needed sorting. That is before the poet assembled it into a coherent masterpiece.

The left over stones after building the tower, symbolize that there was more to the story, which there always is, which the poet was unaware of.

Stones of the tower = Gathered information by the poet behind the wrought poem, which actually made it into the poem in poetic form.

Stones of the man’s house = The man’s knowledge base, comprising:

(a) The migrated tale of Beowulf.
(b) Other unknown/unidentified tales the poet was exposed to prior to assembling/composing Beowulf. The poet, after all, was a learned man.

The stones of the hall = the true and original tale of Beowulf undiffused.

The steps of the tower = a journey into understanding the tale of Beowulf. The further up the stair, the greater one’s understanding of the poem.

The roof = the attainment of a full understanding of the details making up the poem.

The sea = An arrival at an appreciation of the poem beyond the details. Understanding the poem from the poet’s point of view and thus the poet’s purpose.

The desire to restore the old house in the view of his descendants = to put the outsized very long tale into proportion in their point of view; to knock out the monsters from the poem - in their opinion, stuff of irrelevance.

The friends = those academics who had purely used the poem to quarry information.

The descendants = Modern day English critics





Now I have a question for you. What do you think are absolutely the minimum elements to Tolkien’s little story that can successfully convey an equivalent allegorical intent?

In other words, I would like to condense the Tower Allegory to core details. Then try and work out and debate what the ‘extras’ meant to Tolkien and try and fathom why he wanted to include them.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Though I’ve thought much about it in the intervening period - I haven’t yet had a change of heart.

The sea = An arrival at an appreciation of the poem beyond the details. Understanding the poem from the poet’s point of view and thus the poet’s purpose.

The friends = those academics who had purely used the poem to quarry information.

The descendants = Modern day English critics

I am happy that you have thought much on this, and could not ask for more. Your heart is your own. On the Sea: I had forgotten the one that I liked. The friends and descendants is where I would suggest you dig and quarry and do your source hunting, because they may be named and their words considered.

Now I consider your question...

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Now I have a question for you. What do you think are absolutely the minimum elements to Tolkien’s little story that can successfully convey an equivalent allegorical intent?

In other words, I would like to condense the Tower Allegory to core details. Then try and work out and debate what the ‘extras’ meant to Tolkien and try and fathom why he wanted to include them.

You are not going to like my answer. In summer 1933 Tolkien composed his lecture material for an Oxford course on Beowulf and the critics, and told an allegory of a heap of old stones in an unused patch made by a gardener into a rock garden. In summer 1935 he embelleshed a little, introducing an old wall at the start. This tale of the rock garden is an allegory and I would be happy to conduct an inquiry into the core elements of the allegory of the rock garden.

But as I suggested to Aiks above, when Tolkien introduces his story of the tower as 'allegory' he invites us to walk into a trap. Most of the elements of the tale are allegorical, but it is designed to tip us into the poem with its conclusion as to the sea - a tip of which Tolkien reminds us when he silently returns us to the tower and places us on the top to show us the panoramic view some 10 pages later.

But here is the key passage that both Aiks and I appear to discern in the essay for comprehending the 'allegory of the tower'; found between allegory of tower and panoramic view. The upshot of the suggestion of a defence of myth, as I see it, is that Tolkien can be seen, in telling his story of the man and the tower, to step from the allegorical to arrive at his end with a view on a still living ancient myth, which he hears in this Anglo-Saxon poem.

If there is an answer to the starting setup of the dissertation, you may find it on page 15:

"The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allergory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected."

I do appreciate that this is where you (Priya) see that I cannot see the wood from the trees. But while I concur that many elements of the short story of the tower may be 'solved' as per allegory, at its core I think it is desgiend to take us out of allegory and situate us within the world of the story of the heathen hero Beowulf. That is, this story is certainly presented to us as 'allegory', but actually it is not, at least not at its core.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hello Priya,

Maybe the 1933 allegory of the rock garden gives a good first answer to your question? At least, it gives us an allegory, unadorned of the embellishments added first in the 1935 revision and more substantially with the 1936 reimagination of rock garden as tower (from heap of stones to stones from an old wall to old hall). So the original (as we know it) story may be said to contain the core? From Beowulf and the Critics, p. 32.

I would present you with the following allegory, and would have it borne in mind. A man found a mass of old stone in a unused patch, and made of it a rock garden; but his friends coming perceived that the stones had once been part of a more ancient building, and they turned them upsidedown to look for hidden inscriptions; some suspected a deposit of coal under the soil and proceeded to dig for it. They all said "this garden is most interesting," but they said also "what a jumble and confusion it is in!" — and even the gardener's best friend, who might have been expected to understand what he had been about, was heard to say: "he's such a tiresome fellow — fancy using those beautiful stones just to set off commonplace flowers that are found in every garden: he has no sense of proportion, poor man."

And of course, the less friendly, when they were told the gardener was an Anglo-Saxon and often attended to beer, understood at once: a love of freedom may go with beer and blue eyes, but that yellow hair unfortunately grows always on a muddled head.

The elements here are:
(a) i. stones in a ii. unused patch, once part of a iii. more ancient building, now made into a iv. rock garden, which is composed not only of the old stones but also v. commonplace flowers.
(b) i. friends who turn the garden upsidedown as they inspect individual stones, ii. one best friend who complains that the gardener lacks a sense of proportion, and iii. unfriendly critics of the Anglo-Saxon race, who turns out to be a Frenchman named Jusserand against whom Tolkien rails over several pages fairly early on in his Oxford lectures.
And we have no sea-view.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Priya: Yes, indeed we are all brought up differently. The wellman just popped up in the news that day, so I thought to add it to my post. Thanks!

Chrys: I read your replies to my posts of Thursday, up to Priya's answer. Oh is Tolkien rejecting the older literature? That is a shame. Oh yeah we studied King Sheave, I do remember. I have not forgotten that. The key passage is what the reader/listener should do with the myth, Tolkien is telling that. It stands out and certainly speak to me, that brings up an emotion.

The analytical use of the language is something of the last 300 years or so, when rules were introduced to standardise how we should read and write it. Before that is 'what you speak is what you write" plainly. So a 'sock' is a 'soc' or 'sok' back in the day. And if you speak a 'j' somewhere, it is added between the fonts. That is what the original Beowulf text makes it difficult to read, it is spoken language. All texts are from these timeperiods... 1000AD - 1600AD.

I don't find that last quote in the 1983 Harper & Collins edition on page 32. But it is very much the same as that allergory from page 7 and 8.

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

Forgive me, if I am a tad dismissive of the Rock Garden allegory. I do appreciate the effort you have put into studying it. Unfortunately I am always a little leery of an early construction which has ultimately been discarded, except in a few elements. The usefulness is limited in my opinion - but this preliminary stage does show how much thought Tolkien put into his final product.

Hmm … rock gardens … and Anglo-Saxons don’t really gel that well. I know Tolkien was a keen gardener, but was that activity popular among his colleagues? That’s something Tolkien might have pondered upon.

However, … a tower and a hall … and Anglo-Saxons, well that is a major improvement. One can see how much easier it would have been for the audience to appreciate his allegory. Especially given the considerable number of tower ruins dotted across England dating back to those historical times.

And so on to my thoughts on what is essential to the Tower Allegory.

The ‘man’, the ‘tower’, the ‘sea’ and the ‘friends/descendants’ are a bare minimum - I think you’ll agree. We definitely need the poet, the poem, the poet’s purpose and the critics to be represented. But I think that Tolkien could even have gone leaner by categorizing the ‘friends/descendants’ under just one grouping.

But he didn’t - and purposely so. Why Tolkien decided to use the term ‘friends’ for critics living in a different era and who had never been actually acquainted with the ‘man’ - seems a bit strange to me. A ‘friend’ doesn’t usually dismantle bits of one’s property (work). Perhaps another term would been a little more appropriate - though I haven’t figured out what without being derogatory (e.g. fools, imbeciles, etc.). Perhaps Tolkien struggled too? But in any case, where I’m heading is that I’m reasonably sure the Professor created other elements to the allegory and thus intentionally included other pieces.

Why did Tolkien make it a little more complex?

What Aiks and you have brought into focus, I think is key. And I’ve dwelt upon Tolkien’s words.


"The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.”


I think the ‘stones’ of the Tower Allegory had a mythical component to them in Tolkien’s mind. The tale of Beowulf certainly has its fairy tale side. We can then say, with reasonable certainty, that the tower which was built must then have had a mythical side too. Passed down legends and fairytales were then part of the poet’s ‘inheritance’.

But as I’ve already communicated.

I reject the old stones (of which the tower was built) being anything else other than directly and symbolically related to the poem itself. Unrelated heathen/Christian stories have no place.

How can something unrelated to Beowulf, and not used within the poem, even in the most tangential way, have conceptually been a stone to build the tower?

I’m at a loss to understand:

Unrelated heathen stories have a place in the allegory because they have a place in the poem itself!

Perhaps we are getting mixed-up?

By ‘unrelated’ - I mean something which did not make it into the poem, either explicitly or implicitly.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I don't find that last quote in the 1983 Harper & Collins edition on page 32. But it is very much the same as that allergory from page 7 and 8.

Aiks, apologies for not being clear on the different material. In the autumn semesters of 1933, 1934, and 1936 Tolkien delivered in Oxford a series of lectures titled 'Beowulf: General Criticism'. Two manuscripts contain this lecture material, dated to the summers of 1933 and 1935, and published in 2002 under the title 'Beowulf and the Critics'. This material was then reduced and tidied and given a new allegory for the single lecture that Tolkien delivered in London in November 1936, 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. The allegory of the rock garden is found in this earlier Oxford material.
Someone asked me to identify the relationship between the Oxford lectures and the famous London lecture and so over the weekend I put together 4 posts under the title 'Beowulf and the Critics' that argue that there is no substantial difference in the argument.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hello Priya,
I do like your new icon :)

I am always a little leery of an early construction which has ultimately been discarded, except in a few elements. The usefulness is limited in my opinion - but this preliminary stage does show how much thought Tolkien put into his final product.

You presume too much. Were it the case that, working on one text, allegory A was replaced by allegory B, I would still argue that the discarded allegory has much to teach us. But we have two texts, a set of lectures delivered to Oxford undergraduates and a single lecture delivered to a room of distinguished Professors. You cannot assume that the change of allegory reflects solely an internal development of thought with regard to the allegory. Before making that assumption you have to consider whether the two allegories were deemed correct for their respective audiences.

Hmm … rock gardens … and Anglo-Saxons don’t really gel that well. I know Tolkien was a keen gardener, but was that activity popular among his colleagues? That’s something Tolkien might have pondered upon.

Apparently rock gardens were popular among Edwardian gardeners. But one main point of this allegory, so far as I can see, is to prompt precisely the kind of reaction that you give. The point is historical and it serves to place the Anglo-Saxon author as a modern in contrast to the wild ancient heathenism found in the poem itself. Presenting the poem as a rock garden serves to underline that the poem was made on our side of the great historical divide of the English peoples (migration and conversion).

The ‘man’, the ‘tower’, the ‘sea’ and the ‘friends/descendants’ are a bare minimum - I think you’ll agree.

Well obviously I do not agree. Ultimately, I might agree but whilst I appreciate that the rock garden allegory does not do it for you, the fact is that in this original version of the allegory there is no view on the sea. I think you need to account for that before including the 'sea' in your core.

Also, I place the 'stones' within any bare minimum.

But I think that Tolkien could even have gone leaner by categorizing the ‘friends/descendants’ under just one grouping.

The secondary literature that begins with Chance and Shippey vanishes the descendants and thereby reconstructs the allegory as a simple parable of an artist 'the man' and the critics 'the friends', and as a result completely fails to grasp the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. My work on the allegory begins by identifying key friends (Strong, Chadwick) and descendants (Ker, Chambers), thereby relating the allegory to the argument of the essay - in which the friends appear as clueless idiots beyond the pale of argument while Tolkien conducts an argument with the descendants. So I absolutely resist any reduction of friends and descendants into a single group of critics, as per Chance and Shippey.

Why Tolkien decided to use the term ‘friends’ for critics living in a different era and who had never been actually acquainted with the ‘man’ - seems a bit strange to me. A ‘friend’ doesn’t usually dismantle bits of one’s property (work).

You are perhaps luckier in your friends than most of us. However, even you have surely experienced the posting of a nifty bit of research on the plaza, or elsewhere, and then watching your online friends gut your idea as they pick up the wrong end of the stick and miss what you were trying to say?

It is worth noting that the rock garden allegory comprises three groups of critics: friends, best-friend (Chambers), and unfriend (Jusserand). Even the best-friend fails to get what the poet was trying to do; the friends are enthusiastic about the poem, but unfortunately have no clue what it is; the un-friend does not like the poem, nor Anglo-Saxons in general. I suggest that substituting Hobbits for Professors helps picture the friends of the allegory - Pippin stealing a look in the Orthanc stone is not an enemy, he is a foolish friend.

I reject the old stones (of which the tower was built) being anything else other than directly and symbolically related to the poem itself. Unrelated heathen/Christian stories have no place.

How can something unrelated to Beowulf, and not used within the poem, even in the most tangential way, have conceptually been a stone to build the tower?

I’m at a loss to understand:

Unrelated heathen stories have a place in the allegory because they have a place in the poem itself!

Perhaps we are getting mixed-up?

By ‘unrelated’ - I mean something which did not make it into the poem, either explicitly or implicitly.

The mix-up arises because of your notion of a 'undiffused and original Beowulf story', which is something distinct from the poem. This folktale has been worked up by the Anglo-Saxon poet together with a load of historical, legendary tales. So long as we are talking of Beowulf the poem, then all the stones used to make the tower are found in the poem, just as you say. My point was only that many of these stones are unrelated to the 'undiffused and original' folktale about the bear-boy and the monster.

I think the ‘stones’ of the Tower Allegory had a mythical component to them in Tolkien’s mind. The tale of Beowulf certainly has its fairy tale side. We can then say, with reasonable certainty, that the tower which was built must then have had a mythical side too. Passed down legends and fairytales were then part of the poet’s ‘inheritance’.

Wow! We have a possible point of convergence - though it remains some way off. We have yet to discuss the sea. In my reading, the mythical dimension of the allegory is given by the sea, which later in the essay is dubbed the Shoreless Sea, and which the exordium tells us is what the ancient mythical king came out of - just as did Elendil in Tolkien's fantasies. In my view, we discover myth in the allegory by considering the sea, just as we discover myth in the rest of the essay by examining the monsters.

So read, some of the old stones are myths. The stones that are the monsters are mythical stones, as also is the tale of Scyld Scefing, the king who came over the sea. On the other hand, the legend of, e.g., Finn and Hengest is not mythical - it is a historical legend placed by the poet on the outer edges of the poem. Beowulf himself steps out of a folktale, but Tolkien argues that his juxtaposition with the mythical monsters transforms folktale hero into (almost) mythical hero.

All of this is easier to see with the rock garden allegory: the mythical stones are at the center, on the outer edges are historical legends - except for the stone at the entrance to the rock garden, which is also mythical. When all the stones are gathered into the form of a tower this differentation of stones is lost. The only mythical dimension that is visible in this allegory is the sea-view.

Returning to your notion of a progression of thought that develops the allegory, however, I would say that its next incarnation - as a fairy-element in LotR - draws the point explicitly by placing, within the tower, a palantír, a mythical stone.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Oh is Tolkien rejecting the older literature? That is a shame.

19th-century German scholars had the idea that Beowulf was an epic poem made by adding together a load of short heroic lays. These scholars (and others like them) appear in the allegories as the friends - they are interested only in individual elements of the poem rather than the poem itself, which they destroy so to inspect the individual stones.

From this perspective, the primary force of the allegory (both of them) is to draw attention to the poem that is made by the poet out of these raw materials. The image of rock garden or tower underlines that this work is something new and distinct, not reducible to the individual stones.

What follows from Tolkien's point of view is that the poet has reworked as well as arranged these various stones, so when we discover them in Beowulf we are not in fact looking upon the original heathen tale but a version of it that has been worked up to make the tower/rock garden. Hence, the friends are doubly guilty of error (says Tolkien): not only do they fail to see the work of art itself, but because they fail to see the work of art into which the stones have been placed they mistake the poet's refashioning of ancient heathen history for genuine ancient heathen history.

There is a wider perspective to all of this, namely changing philological fashions. The 19th century witnessed great changes in the way that ancient stories were read, both with regard to Homer and also the Bible, and these changes are reflected in the changing approaches to Beowulf. In a sense, Tolkien's allegories parody and subvert the orthodoxy of a few decades earlier, whereby the texts that have come down to us had now been read anew as compiled much later by some scribal editor who put together - not always seamlessly - a number of diverse stories. For example, in the Book of Genesis there are two different stories of the creation of Adam and Eve, and they do not quite fit together. By the later 19th century it was generally accepted that the two different accounts reflect two distinct texts that the Hebrew scribal editor sowed together to give us the text that we now have. Tolkien's allegories reveal a sophisticated response to this kind of 'higher criticism' (as it was then called). His image of older material worked up into a new text is applied to Beowulf but could as easily be applied to the editor who gave us the Book of Genesis, but where the older scholars dismissed the work of the editor, Tolkien pictures him as an inspired artist.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

"The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.”

I think the ‘stones’ of the Tower Allegory had a mythical component to them in Tolkien’s mind. The tale of Beowulf certainly has its fairy tale side. We can then say, with reasonable certainty, that the tower which was built must then have had a mythical side too. Passed down legends and fairytales were then part of the poet’s ‘inheritance’.

Priya,
You are getting to the heart of things here. But terminology is tricky. In his Beowulf material of the 1930s, Tolkien hardly ever uses the term 'fairy-story'. Ker and Chambers and others refer to the monsters as 'folklore' and 'folktale' and Tolkien counters with 'myth'. You may be right to talk of the 'fairy-tale' side of Beowulf, in fact you almost certainly are right to do so. But just what such language means as we read the 1936 lecture is not completely obvious, at least not to me.

It is possibly worth bearing in mind that 'On Fairy-stories' is composed after 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' and, in the first instance at least, takes its key-term 'fairy-story' from Andew Lang, in whose honour the annual Lang lectures were given, and editor of the famous series of coloured fairy-tale volumes. Still, Tolkien embraces the term, and uses it in a way that we do not find in the 1936 lecture.

Overall, the cumulative movement of the two essays is to discard the term 'folklore' and replace it with 'myth' - but also 'fairy-story', which is not quite the same thing. I hesitate to step between these two terms of these two essays without some consideration of the treatment of Beowulf in 'On Fairy-stories'.

I fear that you are too likely to feel that too much of your time has already been dedicated to Beowulf and so may not be amenable to continuation into 'On Fairy-stories'. By my count, however, no individual story receives commentary in OFS as intense as that accorded to the tragic love-story of Ingeld and Freawaru, the stone of Beowulf that R.W. Chambers infamously declared of greater value than a wilderness of dragons. I propose a new thread, in addition to this one, dedicated to the OFS discussion of this story on the outer edges of Beowulf.

Hmm. I've copied the two paragraphs of OFS into a new thread here. I had forgotten that it is so fiendishly difficult! Feel free to engage - anyone; but these two paragraphs are not likely to illuminate so much as draw us into deep tangles and thorns.

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

You presume too much. Were it the case that, working on one text, allegory A was replaced by allegory B, I would still argue that the discarded allegory has much to teach us. But we have two texts, a set of lectures delivered to Oxford undergraduates and a single lecture delivered to a room of distinguished Professors. You cannot assume that the change of allegory reflects solely an internal development of thought with regard to the allegory. Before making that assumption you have to consider whether the two allegories were deemed correct for their respective audiences.

Hmm … “presume too much”? I don’t think I’ve said anything that warrants that. I called the Rock Garden Allegory an “early stage”- which it clearly was is in some of its bones being used for the more sophisticated Tower Allegory. Is there some inconsistency or confusion on your part? Because you later state (or truly believe) that the Rock Garden Allegory is the:

original version of the allegory

Hmm … original version, eh??

Look, Tolkien clearly could have pulled on something he had in his hip pocket. But he discarded the possibility of its use, as is, for the 1936 lecture. Although he did, let’s say, use some bits for something fresh, and more than just a small remodel.

Unfortunately you are losing focus. Please reread the title of your thread. I’m really only interested in the Israel Gollancz lecture. Respectfully, unless you can point out a revelation in the 1933 Rock Garden Allegory that definitively (e.g. with some Tolkien side notes) gives us a new insight into aspects of the 1936 lecture itself, I’m not that interested or excited about it - at least, for this thread. Sorry about that!

Apparently rock gardens were popular among Edwardian gardeners. But one main point of this allegory, so far as I can see, is to prompt precisely the kind of reaction that you give. The point is historical and it serves to place the Anglo-Saxon author as a modern in contrast to the wild ancient heathenism found in the poem itself. Presenting the poem as a rock garden serves to underline that the poem was made on our side of the great historical divide of the English peoples (migration and conversion).

The ‘tower’ rather than the ‘garden’ sits better. It’s a more appropriate reflection of something Anglo-Saxon made long ago.

The ‘man’, the ‘tower’, the ‘sea’ and the ‘friends/descendants’ are a bare minimum - I think you’ll agree.

Well obviously I do not agree. Ultimately, I might agree but whilst I appreciate that the rock garden allegory does not do it for you, the fact is that in this original version of the allegory there is no view on the sea. I think you need to account for that before including the 'sea' in your core.

Also, I place the 'stones' within any bare minimum.

Why?

Again, my attention is on the Tower Allegory not the Rock Garden Allegory. Why do the building blocks of the tower need to be mentioned at all to get Tolkien’s point across?


Why did Tolkien make it a little more complex?

My opinion is that a bare bones allegory would have been too brief and bland to leave a memorable impression. Tolkien’s Tower Allegory is of perfect length and not overly sophisticated to readily absorb among academics in the lecture room. The more astute and knowledgeable among them probably had a good idea who some of the ‘friends’ and ‘descendants’ were.

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

You are perhaps luckier in your friends than most of us. However, even you have surely experienced the posting of a nifty bit of research on the plaza, or elsewhere, and then watching your online friends gut your idea as they pick up the wrong end of the stick and miss what you were trying to say?

The point is in that sort of instance there is communication/contact however tenuous and vague that connection/relationship may be. The ‘friends’ Tolkien is talking about live in an entirely different era. But this impression does not come across in the short story - as it does with the ‘descendants’. Yes - I know this is an allegory, and such a match is not strictly necessary. But, imo, it would have made things neater. So to be honest, your TLotR analogy does not help.

Tolkien appears to have wanted to communicate that those so-called ‘friends’ were ‘sympathizers interested in the poem’; more particularly - various aspects of it. I personally would have toned down ‘friends’ to admirers. And perhaps qualified it adjectivally with overly-enthusiastic. But I show deference to the Professor and respect his choice.

As you have mentioned the Plaza and gutting research, how do you think I should classify these two? As my friends?

From thread: Secondary literature?

Boromir88 Thu Oct 29, 2020 2:36 pm

There is another person that I would put in the 'abysmal' and that is Priya Seth.

Chrysophylax Dives Fri Oct 30, 2020 7:49 am

@Boromir88, your Priya Seth 'Dan Brown Middle-earth code' sounds truly terrible. On the challenge of naming decent Tolkien scholarship I think you hit a nail ….

[Chrysophylax Dives]

As you have mentioned the Plaza and gutting research, how do you think I should classify these two? As my friends?

From thread: Secondary literature?

Boromir88 Thu Oct 29, 2020 2:36 pm

There is another person that I would put in the 'abysmal' and that is Priya Seth.

Chrysophylax Dives Fri Oct 30, 2020 7:49 am

@Boromir88, your Priya Seth 'Dan Brown Middle-earth code' sounds truly terrible. On the challenge of naming decent Tolkien scholarship I think you hit a nail ….

These are not friends! The point about the friends is that they are enthusiastic and yet still destroy what you have done. This is one outright enemy, and one jerk who condemns based on hearsay.

(I stand convicted of wrong. I quite see, from my own point of view as an author, how this dismissal on hearsay is the real problem. Someone who states outright disagreement is helpful to an author, even if they are insanely critical. Someone who dismisses without reading is a literary criminal. Sorry.

That was 4 years ago, Priya. I seem to recall that in this thread I also gave conventional praise to Shippey's 'Road', a book which I now deem a travesty. Maybe Boromir88 has changed his mind?)

But to be clear, friends are something else. They are the ones who genuinely believe that they are praising and helping when they quite fail to see what you actually have done.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I’m really only interested in the Israel Gollancz lecture. Respectfully, unless you can point out a revelation in the 1933 Rock Garden Allegory that definitively (e.g. with some Tolkien side notes) gives us a new insight into aspects of the 1936 lecture itself, I’m not that interested or excited about it - at least, for this thread. Sorry about that!

The 1933 Rock Garden image combines with the criticism of W.P. Ker about the center and the periphery of the poem to draw a map of the argument that Tolkien conducts with and in relation to the critics. The same argument is conducted in London in 1936 as in Oxford in 1933. In all cases, Tolkien argues that the center of the poem is not wild folktale but mythical fusion and that this mythical center is in part responsible for the critics' wrong-headed readings of the historical stones on the outer edges.

Such a map is of supreme value because without it the British Academy lecture is extremely difficult to navigate. I arrived at comprehension of the argument of this lecture by way of an image of the circular rock garden, and Tolkien in Oxford suggested that his audience so picture it. He did not make that suggestion in London, and without the rock garden Chance, Shippey, and Flieger all failed to register the argument.

In short, the image of the rock garden illuminates the argument of the 1936 lecture.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Priya: I did read a few replies of you over a bowl of blueberries, cereals and kefir.

I reject the old stones (of which the tower was built) being anything else other than directly and symbolically related to the poem itself. Unrelated heathen/Christian stories have no place.

I don't know really. I think Tolkien made it rather quite difficult to understand what he liked to tell with it. The problematical side of it is that the lay is build from older songs of separate events and got a dogmatic flavour over the entire lay, where I am not a supporter off. I do certainly not elevate the poem to the status of a work of art, it is not. The poet is nothing else than who we are, interpreters of elements that were told orally in another age and time. You could be right the stones are symbolic to the poem, but not more.

Chrys: Different materials? Hmm, what would your interest be in three slightly different versions of the same text? Anyhow...

19th-century German scholars had the idea that Beowulf was an epic poem made by adding together a load of short heroic lays. These scholars (and others like them) appear in the allegories as the friends - they are interested only in individual elements of the poem rather than the poem itself, which they destroy so to inspect the individual stones.

Their ideas were not wrong. It is what you would practically do after an eventful adventure, journey or war. To remember you tell it into a tale or you put it into a song or a poem. That is how this poem came together in the twelve century, interpreted and reworked in Christian dogmas. To understand the essentials you must take it apart, before assembling it again. If you return to that allergory, the way old halls were build, teaches us about the ground quality and how sturdy you can build your own new hall. Know these older stones by reusing them. Ask yourself what tools and levers they used, so it was not backbreaking work?

Myth and reality to us today, were not the same in the experience of pre-Christians, they were part of the same reality, myth and real, interwoven. Magic was normal. What is superstition to us today, was normal reality to them. The Genesis Book I guess is the Old Testament.

Hmm I would put that the rockgarden allergory underlines the six earlier alineas, but it is not illuminating them to me. I feel in relation to the six alineas, it could have been left out of the essay and continued further with the eighth alinea. Some stuff in the essay is extra baggage, but is it really necessary to be in it? Writer from the first half of the 20th century were pretty extensive arguers.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Different materials? Hmm, what would your interest be in three slightly different versions of the same text?

Aiks - I got lost with this question. Could you expand or explain please?

Also, I place the 'stones' within any bare minimum.

Why?

Again, my attention is on the Tower Allegory not the Rock Garden Allegory. Why do the building blocks of the tower need to be mentioned at all to get Tolkien’s point across?

Hello Priya,

The allegory has two 'acts', in the first a man makes a tower out of raw materials (the stones); the second gives 'friends' who take apart this finished product to inspect the raw materials, and 'descendants' who wish that the man had done something else with them (restored the old hall).

Juxtaposition of old stones and new poetic product in the first act generates three critical positions in the second: (a) friends - who fail to see the design of the poet; (b) descendants - who fail to see the purpose of the design of the poet; (c) Tolkien - who in what follows of his lecture/essay explains the design of the poet.

Does that answer your question of why the stones belong in the core of the allegory? The old stones descend out of the ancient heathen past. The relationship of these heathen traditions to the text of Beowulf, which was made on the modern side of English history, is what is at stake.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: You do know. That new thread of yours, you pointed Priya too. You said to me about the same subject in three different years at the start of the week. Indeed different materials. So what would your interest be in three slightly different versions of the same text?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, I am still puzzling out the question. You refer to this thread on Freawaru?

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: No, the one almost similar after this one named, I click accidental sometimes on it. Beowulf and the criticism of the monsters. So what is your interest in de same slightly others versions of 1934 and 1935 to 1939? It is all about the same subject, yet adapted to the age of audience?

I don't know of the Freawaru thread.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Ah!

Between 1933 and 1936, Tolkien three times delivered a course of lectures in Oxford on General Beowulf Criticism. He left two sets of his lecture notes, and it is these that are now published as 'Beowulf and the Critics'. In November 1936 Tolkien travelled to London and delivered 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' before the British Academy. The talk was published by the British Academy the following year.

Comparing the Oxford material with the London lecture it is clear that 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' was derived from the Oxford material, with Tolkien leaving out the first half and condensing the rest of it, and also changing the allegory (from rock garden to tower).

Now, my interest in all this arises because I regard 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' as the key to The Lord of the Rings. How it is the key, I here pass over. But if it is the key then why has nobody noticed before? The answer is that nobody understands 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. The argument of this lecture has defeated all previous Tolkien scholars!

So my interest in the earlier Oxford material arises because it is an aid to reading 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. The British Academy is an institution that selects for membership only the cream of the nation's professors, so Tolkien's audience was very learned and very clever. An audience of Oxford undergraduates, however, are a different kettle of fish. Tolkien assumes they know almost nothing and so explains things more carefully and sets things out more clearly. Again and again, an obscure sentence in the London lecture is illuminated by discovering it in the older material, where it invariably sits with some explanatory material that was cut from the London lecture.

The allegory is the most extreme example. The allegory of the rock garden is an amazingly helpful diagram of the old poem and of Tolkien's argument with the critics. The allegory basically provided students with a map of Tolkien's argument. For the professors in London, however, Tolkien discarded this helpful diagram and introduced the allegory of the tower - which is an enigma that baffles everyone (naturally, I claim to have solved it: but I only do so by showing how it develops out of the earlier allegory).

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Ah alright, I see, thanks for the enlightening answer of your interest. Yeah true, what I thought, adaptation to the situation of what the audience is, professors or students. That is natural thing to do. Students need more explanation to understand and see all the threads, where professors don't need that anymore and do get a different adressing of the material.

[Priya]

Hello Aiks

I did read a few replies of you over a bowl of blueberries, cereals and kefir.

Sounds healthy and delicious!!!
Bet it tastes better than the oatmeal I eat!

The poet is nothing else than who we are, interpreters of elements that were told orally in another age and time.

You are probably spot on in my opinion. But can such intelligent speculation ever be proved?

You could be right the stones are symbolic to the poem, but not more.

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

Of course the ‘stones’ were essential to Tolkien himself in constructing his Tower Allegory. As equally were the man’s ‘house’, ‘old hall’, ‘steps’,‘inheritance’, ‘field’ etc. But I’m looking at matters from a clinical point of view.

One could condense such a story down to as little as: “a man built a tower, some fools came along and in their inspection knocked it over without realizing the builder had a purpose for it.”

The building blocks of the tower are technically an unnecessary ingredient. The message is the same.

But as I’ve said before - such a reduction would have left something far too simple, bland and uninspiring to have any decent sort of impact on the lecture audience/future readers. So Tolkien fleshed it out with more meaning.

I regard 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' as the key to The Lord of the Rings. How it is the key, I here pass over. But if it is the key then why has nobody noticed before? The answer is that nobody understands 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. The argument of this lecture has defeated all previous Tolkien scholars!

This matter of you being the only one to see the key - is something I sympathize with.

I too have tried to overturn existing scholarship - but without much success. It’s extremely difficult, when so many books and websites consistently have stated over many decades much the same position that for:

The Hobbit

a) The Stone-giants have no mythological source or are an allegory of nature (Shippey).

b) Tom, Bert & Bill are just names which Tolkien idly chose.

c) There is no source to the name Bilbo.

d) The Carrock has no real-world counterpart.

e) The plot/quest storyline is completely Tolkien’s own and has no known basis.


The Lord of the Rings

a) Tom Bombadil and Goldberry are unsolvable enigmas.

b) The storyline for the Barrow-downs episode is just mysterious, and leave it at that.

c) The vital scene at the Cracks of Doom is just that (i.e. no comprehension that a fairy tale antecedent exists).

d) The text relating to the Book of Mazarbul and the associated facsimiles are of non-devious construction (i.e. no comprehension that Tolkien hid ‘stuff’ in them exists).


But I live in hope - as I guess you do. We have to just get on with the task of education/elucidation and ignore the enemies/ignoramuses/fools from knocking our own towers down. All we can do is strengthen the mortar holding our stones together by engaging with decent critics, acknowledging faults, making amendments and also improve our articles with whatever relevant evidence we can gather.

In any case, in getting back to Tolkien’s Beowulf lecture, tbh - I don’t have a lot more to say on the Tower Allegory. The Rock Garden Allegory does not cast an illuminating light on it yet for me. However, in time I might get to see the ‘diagram’ from your angle. As I previously intimated - Beowulfian matters have not, until perhaps recently, been high on my investigation list. I’m happy to dwell on your lengthy posts - and try to absorb your ideas, but I’m also content to discuss deeper or move on from the allegories to other pastures.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This post has been postponed following a 'Hmmm' from @Arnyn.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

The poet is nothing else than who we are, interpreters of elements that were told orally in another age and time.

You are probably spot on in my opinion. But can such intelligent speculation ever be proved?

Hi Priya! Today we have a concession that everything should be proven to certain (scientific) rules. But before the scientific revolution it was just the way of the fact as it presented itself, often with a religious fundament of some kind. From those times, before 1700 or so, matters were approached by old rules, regulations and laws or better known as customary law. This has been replaced by statute law, as we know it today. The Trias Politica is a part of this change, that came from France by the philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, as answer to French royal absolutism. The Greek and Romans did have already a formal law tradition, but in the German lands was customary law the practise. Our poet lived in such a time, in lands when this customary law was in practise. He interpreted the Beowulf texts according these laws of 12th century England.

But if you put the accent on the biological intelligence of this man, it is scientifically known that the brainspace in the skull of the modern human species is as good the same as our ancestors who walked out of Africa. The brainspace of our Neanderthaler brothers and sisters was even a bit bigger. For the 12th century a monk needed to speak the local Anglo-Saxon dialect. He needed being able to read and understand Latin. If he was pretty well travelled, he spoke also the languages from the European mainland, or knew people who could tell the Beowulf tale to him in Anglo-Saxon. He was a literate man, and could read, write and count. He is a monk, and thus is well versed into the (customary) Christian customs and laws of that time, and lives by them in the daily rhythm in the monestary.

You have to ask yourself today certain questions along the line, as what would you need to write an Anglo-Saxon text as Beowulf? Try to put your imagination to it. So yes, that is where my thought comes in, that our poet is nothing else than who we are, interpreters of elements that were orally told in another age and time. Only he interpreted along the customary law of his time so it was proven, and we do the interpretation by the scientific rules of our time, so it is proven. But the element of interpretation is still the same. How the interpretation works out, that is different. I never took the thought up we can paste our scientific thought over times, when that didn't exist. This requires an ability to look over your own fences and see what these people were up to and made it work.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi @VelvetineZone,

Just to observe the archeological dimension of the allegory of Beowulf as a tower. From this perspective, Tolkien's allegory reworks a passage from Matthew Arnold's The Study Of Celtic Literature (1867). (Unfortunately, I fear Arnold's words will irk you.)

The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;—stones ‘not of this building,’ but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.

The Anglo-Saxon poet celebrated by Tolkien, by contrast, understands the old stones better than do we today.

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... from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

[VelvetineZone]

Evening @Chrysophylax Dives, ha, that's not in the least biased on the part of the author. As far as I know from reading bits of versions of the Mabinogion, and various other old tales, stories, myths, poems, etc, I can't see that it's built on unknown old histories, funny thing to say, it's like most stuff, over the years the oral stuff gets turned into written versions and then embellished or altered and reshaped over the retellings.
We did an Arthurian topic in home ed years ago, and that was when I discovered that the original Arthur stories root back to the Mabinogion.

[VelvetineZone]

P.s. There's a chip shop called Y Mabinogion in a village in North Wales.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@VelvetineZone, I started looking at Arnold's account of the Mabinogion so to reply to you above. But life is short and Victorian prose can be extremely tedious. So could we return to Beowulf please?

@Priya, thank you very much for all your engagement. It has been much appreciated. I wrote a whole post above in response to your talk of the difficulties that we have with our critics, but deleted it following a disapproving growl from @Arnyn.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hello everyone, discussion of the allegory of the tower qua allegory has been fun but seems for now to have exhausted itself. Nor was it the point of this thread, which is rather concerned with the relationship between 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' and The Lord of the Rings.

Basically, my claim is that the journey of Elendil in 'The Fall of Númenor' draws a straight line out of (now vanished) myth, over the sea, past the tower, and all the way to the mythical Doom at the center of the rock garden. Elendil travels the road that in Beowulf is traversed by two people, first by the mythical king Scyld Scefing (over the sea) and then by Beowulf himself (to doom inland). In other words, 'The Fall of Númenor' arose as part of Tolkien's Beowulf studies and is the ground of Tolkien's reading of the poem.

(There is of course more to it than this. 'The Fall of Númenor' describes a transformation of flat into round world, thereby establishing the nature of the 'fusion' of ancient myth and the modern science of the 8th century. As such, this final tale of the Elves is the foundation of Tolkien's argument about fusion in his British Academy lecture.)

So, the drawing above reveals both Tolkien's Beowulf criticism and the embryonic map of Middle-earth in the 3rd Age (the first age of a rounded world) that would become the map of The Lord of the Rings.

Beowulf is an elegy. It is about the reward of heroism, which is death. The road travelled in this old poem is a straight road to death. Beowulf walks the same road as did Elendil before him - the straight road of the ancient northern mythology as it appears (to one with eyes to see) in a modern (round) world; only Elendil was of an earlier moment of this modern age than was Beowulf, when some residual light of the Valar lingered, and he walked to his doom with an Elf. Today we walk alone.

Lord of the Rings, by contrast, is a Hobbit fairy-tale, a story of 'there and back again'. It is situated in the time after Elendil but before Beowulf - it is a picture of our world at the very last moment before the light of the Valar utterly disappears. Hence we still meet Elves, but they do not walk with Frodo to Mount Doom as Gil-galad walked with Elendil to Mordor.

I could go on (and on). But that is the basics. You read it here first.

@Drifa, @Saranna

[VelvetineZone]

@Chrysophylax Dives yes that's fine you return to your beerwolves. I'm quite busy analysing the hidden meanings of the ancient poem Winefox anyway, and how it relates to the fox scene and elven wine in LOTR.

[Drífa]

Hi, dragon! All I can think of right now is Stairway to Heaven. I will catch up eventually. Bye!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Of course the ‘stones’ were essential to Tolkien himself in constructing his Tower Allegory. As equally were the man’s ‘house’, ‘old hall’, ‘steps’,‘inheritance’, ‘field’ etc. But I’m looking at matters from a clinical point of view.

One could condense such a story down to as little as: “a man built a tower, some fools came along and in their inspection knocked it over without realizing the builder had a purpose for it.”

The building blocks of the tower are technically an unnecessary ingredient. The message is the same.

Hi Priya, I was feeling the allegory discussion was exhausted and attempted to move on to my wider thesis. But then there were the two posts above, and I gave up on discussion from anyone else but you and Aiks. Also, this from you above kept niggling me. So I'll try one last time.

With all respect, there is something neither you nor Aiks are getting about Tolkien on Beowulf. You both see that this is all about the past, but you do not appreciate the subtlety and the sophistication of the historical vision that Tolkien brings to bear on the poem and its effect on modern critics.

Even in the 1920s many reputable scholars maintained that Beowulf came out of the heathen past, subject to some later Christian editing. Such scholars were enchanted by a glimpse into the ancient northern world of the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus. They naturally seized on this or that bit of the poem as illustrating some element of the lost ancient North. In the allegory, these scholars are the 'friends' who do not see the poem as a work of art but are rather caught in a spell by that art and believe they are looking directly onto the ancient heathen past.

But in the 1920s a consensus began to emerge that the poem was the work of a Christian Anglo-Saxon. Tolkien does not argue this, he simply accepts this dating from R.W. Chambers.

Once the poem is recognized as a work of 'historical fiction', that is, a picture, drawn by a Christian of the British Isles, of the old homeland and the ancestors who were heathen, everything about the poem appears differently - as do the earlier critics, who are revealed in a curious historical error.

Your condensed allegory is absent any sense of history. The message is now different because you discard the historical juxtaposition of ancient and modern in the contrast of (respectively) stones and tower, leaving merely the notion of a story that the critics do not get.

[Arnyn]

This post has been postponed following a 'Hmmm' from @Arnyn.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This post has been postponed following a 'Hmmm' from @Arnyn.

When the Mother of Dragons says 'Hmmmm' the Dragon gotta jump!

But seriously, thank you. The 'Hmmm' nudged that bit of my brain that already thought this was not the way to go.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So, I changed the title of this thread to reflect its contents to date. The title was 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' but @Priya suggested a discussion of the 1936 allegory of the old poem as a tower, which was welcome and instructive - and has so far witnessed an almost total lack of agreement between the two of us.

That is kind of interesting in itself, no? Aiks, Priya?

Meanwhile, I am going to try a new 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' thread under another name.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hello everyone, discussion of the allegory of the tower qua allegory has been fun but seems for now to have exhausted itself. Nor was it the point of this thread, which is rather concerned with the relationship between Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics and The Lord of the Rings.

Chrys: Hmm, I am back after a while in here. You did in this earlier post highlight what the thread ought to be about. And is it not then? The old title resides in my memory to where the discussion is around Lotr and Beowulf, and the criticism around it all. Thread titles are usually a pointer where to be on the forum. I was waiting on Priya's reply to my last post. It is a natural thing that discussions evolve around the subject and eventually return to the original subject. I can't tell if it it is interesting to change it....? I am not that much knowledgeable on this ground.

Hi Priya, I was feeling the allegory discussion was exhausted and attempted to move on to my wider thesis. But then there were the two posts above, and I gave up on discussion from anyone else but you and Aiks. Also, this from you above kept niggling me. So I'll try one last time.

With all respect, there is something neither you nor Aiks are getting about Tolkien on Beowulf. You both see that this is all about the past, but you do not appreciate the subtlety and the sophistication of the historical vision that Tolkien brings to bear on the poem and its effect on modern critics.

Hmm, I do agree how some scholars see and feel what the respective history is, without all the romanticism around it. I do understand Tolkien's argument, but it doesn't necessarily mean I should agree with him. For thousands of years there were human civilisations without any knowledge of either Christianity, Islam, Buddism or Jewism. Those times are interesting as well, without an extra religious saus thrown over these times. Tacitus is quite a good starting point. But even more is what can be found with archeology. The critics are not wrong in essence, but they do take other approaches than you either not agree with or like. I primarily think nobody is wrong in reason, it just depends on which spectacles stand on your nose and how you look through them, to use an allergory about this matter at hand.

[Priya]

Hello Aiks

You have to ask yourself today certain questions along the line, as what would you need to write an Anglo-Saxon text as Beowulf? Try to put your imagination to it. So yes, that is where my thought comes in, that our poet is nothing else than who we are, interpreters of elements that were orally told in another age and time. Only he interpreted along the customary law of his time so it was proven, and we do the interpretation by the scientific rules of our time, so it is proven.

I feel you’ve put yourself in the shoes of Tolkien. This is probably precisely how he felt. The poet’s grasp of a plethora of Anglo-Saxon words is sufficient to prove he was indeed learned.

Unfortunately yes, the scientific minds of today ask for evidence beyond logic. Still, we have to work with the little we have. But we shouldn’t be afraid to admit conjecture has a big place in Beowulf scholarship.

I did read Chrysophylax Dives’s post which Arnyn ‘postponed’ - I’m not sure if you did. I will say I am not at all upset. However, continuing in-depth discussion with CD on Beowulf in general appears rather pointless from my viewpoint. Which is a bit of a shame.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Priya: That hidden/deleted post I had not the chance to read, but the variety of others make it clear. I agree about what you say. For a while we can talk in depth about a topic, but there is a moment, time to move on. I loose my interest after and above all, I don't take my opinion as granted and right all along. Talks with Chrys takes effort and patience to understand and for me I am not always able to, which I express just as Saranna usually do, outside my field of expertise. Thanks for your reply, I leave the discussion as it was.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I did read Chrysophylax Dives’s post which Arnyn ‘postponed’ - I’m not sure if you did. I will say I am not at all upset. However, continuing in-depth discussion with CD on Beowulf in general appears rather pointless from my viewpoint. Which is a bit of a shame.

Hold on. That post was postponed because I was talking about the wider world of Tolkien scholarship outside the plaza, and not very politely. What was postponed had nothing to do with you, Priya, beyond a recognition of the difficulties of breaking through in the wider world of Tolkien scholars.

[Priya]

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

I think the time maybe ripe to revisit this thread - in a polite and constructive manner of course!

Over the past few months, on and off I’ve been pondering on some of your past posts as well as rereading that series of eloquently written and persuasive articles in SWG on Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf’ essay. I would like to reengage if that’s good with you?