Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

This is the kind of post that gets me into trouble. The reason trouble arises is because my readers do not respect that I am actually serious.

@Silky Gooseness, allow me please to mention you - for the third time in two days (I will cease and desist after this one, at least for a week). We appear to read the plaza DEI differently. I do not wish to get into those differences here. But we seem also to have common ground because we both accept the DEI itself. As I said, reading the DEI made me happy to join the nuplaza. Here are two of my reasons.

1. I feel that the DEI embodies the values underlying the fantasy art of J.R.R. Tolkien, and as such is well fitted for the fanatics plaza.

2. The DEI accords with my own own professional work ethic. Such as I have a 'professional identity', I am a student of history, one who reads the writings of the dead and attempts to glimpse their thoughts - to hear a whisper from the other side.

Actually, it seems to me that 1. and 2. merge in Lore, where living members of the plaza discuss the ideas and intentions, the desires and the imagination, of a man who died in 1973.

Now to a question, which is not asked to send the new admin team scurrying to the bylaws, nor to throw a grenade into Lore. The following question is asked to explain 1. and 2.

How does the DEI read to a member who is dead?

It is not a hypothetical question. We have above us halfir's archive, a project of the early days of the nuplaza directed by halfir's close friend, @Saranna. And the establishing of that archive ruffled beards and feathers back in the day. So the matter is clearly weighty, in terms of feelings of living members about their collective past. But I'm not here raising any question about the halfir archive, merely underlining that not all plaza members are alive.

What I would suggest - and I suggest that you'all try this for yourself at home - is reading the DEI while holding in mind the point of view of the dead. They are the members of this site whose good names are most vulnerable because they can no longer speak with their own voice.

I reckon the plaza DEI gives all the guidelines that one needs for how to include dead members in a manner that at least approaches equality, inclusion, and respect. By the same token, I reckon that one could employ these guidelines in criticism, to judge this or that statement as falling foul of the DEI with regard to the dead. As such, I reckon that the DEI, when read from a sufficiently broad perspective, gives a practical guide to necromancy and how to avoid it.

My intention with this thread is not to prompt close reading of the plaza DEI, which actually requires a little generosity if one is to recognize within it our obligations to the dead - members and also non-members, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien himself. I invoke the DEI because the DEI is invoked by other members of this site when they wish to refer to the spirit of the nuplaza, which all of us know because we dwell within it. All I am saying is that the case of necromancy is no different from any other case that admins might negotiate in the everyday, ordinary policing of the plaza.

And that entrenched nuplaza approach I am taking as common ground in holding up as an illustration of necromancy one chapter in this book, authored (I think) by a still living member of the old plaza who (I think) never joined the nuplaza (so complicated in terms of plaza-member-identity). And for full disclosure, this chapter was recently held up to me by a living, active, and highly valued member of the nuplaza, @Priya - and I would very much like to avoid falling out with Priya if possible.

The chapter by Fisher that I hold up bears the title: 'Tolkien and Source Criticism: Remarking and Remaking'.

I have yet to prepare the next post because I have yet to read the chapter properly. Everytime I open it my stomach is filled with a vast rage and I have to stop reading because I am snorting too much.

I will note for now that this source-hunting approach, while it received the stamp of Tolkien scholarship approval with a preface by Tom Shippey, was not in fact the ruling approach within Old Plaza Lore in the brief days when I participated. @Troelsfo and also Lord of the Rings both maintained a distance, and I took them (rightly or wrongly) to follow the way of halfir's reading of Verlyn Flieger. So my demonstration that this chapter is an exercise in necromancy is not a blanket condemnation of Old Plaza Lore by any means. It is, however, an attempt to appeal to Priya to escape this terrible method of source-hunting.

On the way to the chapter, which is the second of the book, I pass over the first chapter by E.L Risden, which begins:

Though "Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for 'sources"' {Road, 220; see also Letters, 418, 379), discussion of sources and influences has always played a significant role in Tolkien criticism.

One does not really need to read any further than to know to close this book now. Tolkien was a Professor of Literature so a first question here is: What kind of academic seeking with regard to a literary text did he sanction? Then we might ask why? And once we get our heads around this method we might then attempt this kind of scholarship on Tolkien's stories.

To employ on Tolkien a method that Tolkien disparaged seems, well, kind of wrong-headed. Like attempting to push the wrong key into the lock.

Why fight our author? Why not try to learn from him what he has to teach us about reading literature?

Opening Fisher's chapter, the first two pages set us on our way with the ubiquitous misreading of the 1936 allegory of the tower.

Tolkien... cautioned against approaching Beowulf by examining each stone for its individual value and ignoring the beauty of the tower which is constructed from them (MC, 7-8).

... there is no reason we cannot study the stones themselves while we admire the artistry of the tower... How else can we learn how the tower was made, and appreciate how the tower might be different had its materials and methods of assembly been different? (pp. 29-30)

So, the first thing when it comes to study of any text is reading it carefully. Tolkien in his story says nothing about the beauty of the tower but rather underlines the (unstated) significance of the view on the sea that the Anglo-Saxon author enjoyed from the top of the tower.

When this tale of the tower is read carefully in the context of the lecture/essay within which it is embedded we are reminded that from the top of his tower the author could also turn around, and gaze inland into the heart of the mythical darkness, where heathen heroes battled the monsters with courage but no hope. And when we consider what this image of the tower is, we comprehend that we have before us a metaphor for the literary effects of hearing this poem back in the days when it was composed - a Christian Anglo-Saxon audience in some little kingdom of the British Isles 'climb the stairs of the tower' to gaze out upon the world of the old homeland - a world in which the heathen heroes did not know heaven, but did know hell.

So the point of the allegory of the tower is to specify the proper use of Beowulf, back in the day. We have a picture of a working time-machine of song (one that does not work today because the astronomy has changed yet again).

'What is the use of a fairy-story?' asks Tolkien in OFS. And in 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' he draws a picture of the proper use of this Old English story. The poet's intention was to use the old stone to make a sort of time-machine.

And once we have a handle on Tolkien's intention, which was to gain a handle on the intention of the Anglo-Saxon poet, then we might consider (a) why the Anglo-Saxon poet used the old and ancient stones that we find in Beowulf, (b) what Tolkien made of the Anglo-Saxon poet's method of building and choice of material, (c) how Tolkien might have set about making his own tower, and what sources he might have looked to as he built it.

Intention. A person has intentions. We can never be sure of the intentions of another, and perhaps not even of our own. To pretend that someone has no intentions is to deny their personhood. Tolkien begins his study of Beowulf with the question of what the old poet was trying to do. We should pay the same courtesy to Tolkien.

The late-Elizabethan consensus misreading of the 1936 allegory falls, ultimately, because it fears to look Tolkien's intentions in the face.

For more elaborate argument on the 1936 allegory see the earlier posts in my SWG series, Seeing Stones.

Tolkien did indeed borrow from others — he has admitted as much himself— and consequently, his works may be compared to these sources. They should be, in fact; to be aware of sources acknowledged by Tolkien himself as having influenced his imagination, and not to examine them for what they might reveal, would be critically irresponsible.

Here the implicit denial of personhood pictures an author with no original intention of his own - external sources influence his imagination and he borrows from them. It is as if this author walked through literature in a dream - rather than professed on it at Oxford University.

Throw away this language of 'influence'! To frame Tolkien at work we must picture an active imagination roaming the shelves of old and ancient literature and stocking up on this 'source' and that - roaming these particular shelves because this man already has a plan.

Let us begin with the design, not the myriad sources used to realize the design. But in the pages of this chapter I find so far no hint of a design, no hint that Tolkien had a literary plan.

J.R.R. Tolkien is lobotimized before our eyes.

This is a crime against the good name of the dead, in this case the dead author whose writings we all love. Already I deem this chapter reportable on the nuplaza.

Gah! Throw this book to the dogs, I'll have no more of it. Well, I will pick it up again if any of this ever gains any traction and I have to defend my argument that this book warrants a strike from the admin crew. But I've reached the point where I know what I am dealing with and nothing wholesome is gained by further reading. Here is one last for now.

... in describing his works, Tolkien indicated that their proper vantage was "history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers" (LotR, xxiv), opening the door, at least a crack, to the search for historical moorings...

Shortly following the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden: "I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world"; rather, it is the "objectively real world... The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary.

This does not open the door a crack to the search for historical source so much as open it wide to the search for Tolkien's philosophy of history, that is, his conception of what history is so that it might be feigned and feel true.

What steps through this door is the idea of imagining an historical period - an entire age, three of them! This is what we might call Tolkien's awesome sense of history - a vision of a story over vast time, with an acute sense of how the many bits of time are distinguished. Where in the world today might one find a comparable sense of history? Nowhere.

Rather than welcome into the room the astonishing sense of history of J.R.R. Tolkien, this quest for sources vanishes that sense of history. Vanishing the past is not a good thing, and with regard to the art of Tolkien it is in effect to demolish the tower.

For more on this kind of reworking of the allegory see the Guide to Stairs, On Folly.

In conclusion, I charge the author of this chapter on source-hunting with an act of necromancy, by which I mean a distortion of the past that god-modes the dead, in this case our beloved author J.R.R. Tolkien.

The god-moding lobotomizes Tolkien, dehumanizing him by denying him a mind of his own and devoid of a literary design of his own. It embodies the very essence of necromancy because it vanishes any sense of history from before our eyes. And it is based on fear of the Other, implicitly denying the existence of Tolkien the scholar - the Tolkien's fan's knee-jerk anti-intellectual prejudice.

Tolkien was not a member of old or nuplaza, and yet I feel that he should be deemed an honoury member. But even were he not a member, there is no question that he is dead and as such unable at present to speak for himself. It is our duty, as living members of the plaza, to ally with those who can no longer speak for themselves (see the last bit of the DEI).

And the path of justice is in this rare case also the path to happiness. For rejecting source-hunting and turning instead to the methods that Tolkien himself employed in the study of fantastic literature will actually open the doors to illumination. Then we might step out of the fog of Lore that has never lifted from any plaza on this side of the sundering sea.

Drifa wrote: ↑Tue May 28, 2024 9:06 am Still, at the end of the day, it is our beloved Tolkien, and I would like to support anything that keeps his work/memory alive. And I must say, Khazad-dûm looked fantastic, even with all the silly hydroponics.

Dwarf. As stated, the very last thing I wish to do is get into an argument with you. However, please note that this entire thread has used a disagreement with Priya so that I could stand on a soap box and rail against your statement above.

The whole deal with Lore in Middle-earth over the long ages of Time is not only that it is forgotten but also that it is twisted. Twisting memory in the present is not keeping it alive, it is necromancy. Christopher Tolkien's words should be taken seriously.

___________

And to you @Priya, I wish to underline that I do not identify your actual practice with the theoretical sins of Fisher. As I have said, you are too good for that, and cannot help yourself. In your recent posts you talk of what Tolkien had in mind with later fairy-stories and his idea of two Fairies of Middle-earth. And I think you are on the right track. But the point here is that you are also going beyond this source-hunting method and approaching an argument about intention. You are actually talking the language that Tolkien employed when he writes on Beowulf. But this source-hunting literature will only hold you back, at best, because it pictures Tolkien as essentially mindless - it removes the scholar from the author, an act of vivisection performed on the memory of a dead man.

TLDR

In the first two pages this chapter on source hunting gives us this:

Tolkien... cautioned against approaching Beowulf by examining each stone for its individual value and ignoring the beauty of the tower which is constructed from them (MC, 7-8).

... there is no reason we cannot study the stones themselves while we admire the artistry of the tower... How else can we learn how the tower was made, and appreciate how the tower might be different had its materials and methods of assembly been different? (pp. 29-30)

This is to borrow Tolkien's metaphor to make the case for source hunting, but the metaphor is mangled in the borrowing because the original source (Tolkien's story) has not been read carefully.

We admire the aristry of the tower (that is Beowulf), explains Tolkien, by observing how an Anglo-Saxon poet arranged old stones (old stories, 'sources') in a particular design that achieved a definite effect. That effect is the use of the tower, and its use is to reveal a panoramic view on a world that has now vanished into the past.

We cannot understand Tolkien's metaphors of stones and tower unless we grasp Tolkien's foundational idea that in using the old stone the poet was attempting to do something - had a design in mind. Only once we comprehend the intention of the poet is there any point considering why this particular stone was placed here and that there.

Fisher's misuse of Tolkien's metaphors of stones and towers is a step into a no good fantasy. He begins by hiding from view what Tolkien actually has to say about the relationship between the work of art and the sources used to make it, replacing Tolkien's idea that the tower has a use with the false idea that Tolkien values the tower because it is beautiful.

Whatever follows has little bearing on anything that Tolkien did or thought. But this chapter seduces readers into the fantasy that they are on the road to better comprehending Middle-earth. This is a false fantasy.

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

Of course I’m not going to get upset if we have any disagreements.
Agreeing to disagree is always an option!



I think you are being a little harsh on the essay writers in one respect.

Here the implicit denial of personhood pictures an author with no original intention of his own - external sources influence his imagination and he borrows from them.

That being Tolkien’s work has no/little sub-creation of his own devising. Such learned scholars, as well as a lowly one such as myself, are inexorably drawn to:

gaining an understanding of the sources which Tolkien used to construct his novels - while acknowledging their manipulation and not losing sight that the majority of text was a result of his own creativity. - my comment from your Nuada of the Silver Arm thread, and my underlined emphasis

They are most surely aware that The Lord of the Rings is much, much more than just a conglomeration of disparate real-world sources neatly stitched into a stunning coherent tapestry. Denying them that is a tad naive, I would gently chide.

I do agree that Fisher is too loose in his interpretation of what Tolkien said about the Tower in Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Yes there was no assignation of ‘beauty’ to it. I’m kind of surprised by this - as Fisher has come across in the past as quite a meticulous scholar.

I don’t want to quibble too much over your Risden quote.

Though "Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for 'sources"' {Road, 220; see also Letters, 418, 379), discussion of sources and influences has always played a significant role in Tolkien criticism.

I do think he is essentially correct, but he could have added some caveats and further qualification. Yet I also think there’s enough said in the book that justifies source hunting. The point is made squarely enough.

I directed you to Tolkien and the Study of His Sources and in particular Fisher’s essay:

I think, if you have not already done so, it would be beneficial to read Jason Fisher’s article in Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. - my comment from your ‘Nuada of the Silver Arm’ thread

- because for the first time I see a set of guidelines produced by a Tolkien scholar at what potentially constitutes good sources and an approach to weeding the poor ones out. Fisher’s effort isn’t perfect or all-encompassing - but I view it as a decent start.

Tolkien, of course, hasn’t provided us a detailed method of how we should analyze his work. So I think we have some leeway. But I can see where one could get easily carried away. I can understand where you might feel that there’s been some overly-zealous enthusiasm where unjustifiable liberties have been taken.

@Priya, I am aware that I am flaming - from the very title of this thread onwards, and do very much appreciate your non-combative response, which gives me space to attempt calmer - and so possibly more helpful - articulations of the same point.

I appreciate that the chapter gave you practical guidelines, and don't doubt they are sensible in so far as they go. And I certainly approve the business of source hunting! And I think Fisher was on one level quite correct to react against the orthodoxy of the day that derived from Jane Chance, which deemed source hunting a sin.

What enrages me, causing me to fume and shower sparks, is the way that Fisher and others back then set out to justify the source hunting - they naturally turned to the 1936 allegory of the tower, and they took the erroneous reading of Chance and Shippey and argued with that! From the point of view of a reception of the 1936 allegory they added a new chapter whereby they argued with confusion to generate new confusion - a sad and sorry sight. A whole new generation of 'friends of the dead poet' destroying the tower all over again!!!

Metaphors. These critics did not read the short story carefully and they had not the wit or imagination to take a metaphor all the way, as did Tolkien.

All I am saying is that if one wants to understand how Tolkien thought about all this then Fisher and everyone are quite right that one should turn to the 1936 allegory of the tower. But one should then take the trouble to read it carefully!

On close inspection, all of these friends of Tolkien who talk with authority on the meaning of the 1936 allegory of the tower are discovered to be in the wrong story - they misread the original story, distort it. Substitute for it another story, one that fits their agenda.

If we read Tolkien's story carefully we will come to understand what he has to teach us about old stories, folktales, fairytales, historical legends, myths, and all.

Flaming?

What else should I expect from a fire-drake called Chrysophylax Dives?



Hmm … I had always thought of Tom Shippey’s explanation of the ‘Tower allegory’ (The Road to M-e) as quite convincing. I never really questioned it.

Do you have an alternate or deeper understanding of what Tolkien was trying to convey?


If so, I would love to read it.

O my, @Priya, you just wrote me my dream post. Be careful what you ask for...

The 'Seeing Stones' post that I was working on last week is no. 12 in a series the stated intention of which is to illuminate the 1936 allegory of the tower. So far the series is the size of a small book - and is nowhere near arriving at a clear reading of the 1936 allegory.

The January post, The Peaks of Taniquetil, takes apart Shippey's 1982 reading of the allegory (see footnote 4) while, in the main text, pointing to what I take to be a more helpful road to understanding the allegory.

Do I need to say that any questions, on footnote 4 or anything else, would be most welcome?

Hello @Priya,

I have started thinking now on post 13, and am turning over once again the significance of Jane Chance (1979) and Tom Shippey (1982). This was the pair who really performed the dark magic; not Fisher et al., who irk me the more because they uncritically accepted the bad magic handed to them by Shippey. I say Shippey because he was the winner in the battle between those two, the first battle of the new academic field of 'Tolkien scholarship' that kicked off in the decade after Tolkien's death (when he could no longer be asked his opinion). But one of the unexpected conclusions of several years close reading Chance and Shippey on the 1936 allegory is that Shippey actually repackages Chance's thesis. One would expect him to combat it, but actually he serves up her thesis in different dress.

The essence of what the two together perform is a restructuring of the original story. In the 1936 allegory, a man takes old stone and builds a tower, then friends destroy the tower to inspect the stones while descendants stand on the side complaing, one to another, about their ancestor's sense of proportion. Both Chance and Shippey vanish the descendants (I think the suggestion of blood descent made them uncomfortable) and so remove one of the three human agents of the story, leaving us with a binary of artist versus 'critics' (Chance) or, artist versus friends, where, as Shippey puts it:

The 'friends' looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history.

So it is Chance and Shippey who refashioned the original story to give us some nebulous and unspecified idea of art as something good and scholarship and critical thought the monstrous enemy of art. This is the foundation on which we get, e.g. Fisher's nonsense about Tolkien telling us with his story that we should gaze at the tower and admire its beauty. Fisher invents the idea of gazing at the tower (or forgets that what is gazed on is the sea, after climbing the stairs of the tower). But he just shows where the slippery path leads once you have reconstructed the original story and remade it into a moral tale whereby criticism is declared the enemy and some idea of art is invented to explain what criticism is the enemy of. The path to nonsense and more nonsense - it is really incredible to step back and watch how people build a tower of babel because they do not read closely the original source.

Reading the original story by Tolkien is - not surprisingly - far more helpful than reading any of these numbskulls. Because the division of the critics into two groups allows a dialectical relationship to be articulated such that each group may be seen to perceive something that the other group fails to see, and so the two together can show us the criticism that Tolkien himself performs.

The descendants know that 'Beowulf' is the work of an Anglo-Saxon writer, and they have great respect for his poetic skill. What they complain about is his choice for this poem, which they see as great artistic talent thrown away on a silly folktale about ogres and dragons.

The friends do not see an author. They see a later stitching together of originally distinct heathen tales. Hence, they believe that in reading, say, the account of Beowulf's funeral they access a window directly onto the heathen past. H.M. Chadwick, the Cambridge Prof. of Anglo-Saxon, declares that the burial of Beowulf is so in accord with the archeological evidence that it must reflect a living memory of heathen times.

Tolkien is with the descendants when it comes to situating the poem in history: 'Beowulf' is the work of a Christian Anglo-Saxon who wrote a poem about the heathen past. But he directs the descendants to the antics of the friends as a demonstration of the potency of the art of the poet - the Anglo-Saxon wrote 'historical fiction' about the heathen past and the Cambridge Professor of Anglo-Saxon has taken it for eye-witness history!

The friends of the allegory demonstrate the potency of the historical art of the Anglo-Saxon poet, which the descendants fail to appreciate.

The 'friends' looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history.
Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, 1982

A magic spell requires a willing audience. More important than Shippey's conjuring was the evident desire of everyone to nod their heads and believe they understood something. The error here is not what is interesting; what is fascinating, almost beyond measure, is the seduction and the effect. Of the effect, I can think of no better word than stupification, though it does tend to rub people up the wrong way.

The error I deal with in footnote 4 of my January 'Seeing Stones' post (linked above). Why did people wish to misread the allegory as Shippey (and Chance) were misdirecting them? This I find very difficult to answer, though it seems to me to have to do with the way that History became something to escape from over the course of the 20th century, and that goes as much for Shippey not wishing to deal with the contributions of Germanic philology to National Socialism as for plaza members just wanting to have fun and not talk about violence and the exclusionary nature of the power that they themselves appear happy to exercise, unless of course such discourses happen to be fashionable and do not threaten them personally. Basically, people don't like seeing the truth; they can deal with partial glimpses, but show them the whole image and they scream, turn away, and run.

The 'friends' looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history.

All I wish to point out in this post is how this error directs everyone in the opposite direction. What we learn from Shippey's equation is that it is bad to reconstruct history while reading Beowulf. What seems to be taken from it is that History and Historical Scholarship are somehow the Enemies of Art (a false division recreated on the Old Plaza with Lore the Enemy of Free Fun in the Kingdoms. And within Lore, the conviction is held that the Truth lies in Myth and Fantasy and 'Secondary Worlds' that are 'sub-created' while History has nothing to do with Middle-earth).

What results is a vicious cycle of reading because nobody who has come out of this environment is going to stand a chance of a sane and sober reading of the 1936 lecture, which is extremely allusive unless one has taken on board one simple fact, namely that what we are reading is a highpoint of historicism in the English universities, one of the most sophisticated instances of historical thinking you will ever find.

What Tolkien is saying in this lecture is that we should behold the Anglo-Saxon poet's sense of history, and be awed. What he is describing is the discovery of a sense of history, a discovery that follows in the wake of conversion to Christianity when, all at once and of a sudden, the past appears much different - darker, further away, heathen. The poem is evidence, says Tolkien, of a Christian poet reflecting on the old heathen tales as stories from another time, an inheritance already fragmenting and fading in the days of the poet, yet carrying all the more enchantment precisely because of this new sense of an ocean of time that separates the world of these stories and the world of the Anglo-Saxon poet.

Tolkien reads Beowulf as an attempt to take the now ancient stories of the heathen past and do with them something new - and that newness, the heart of the artistic design of the poet, is all about telling the old tales from a new point of view, a point of view that is unstatedly but self-consciously modern (Christian) and so situates the world of the past as a realm other than that of the poet and audience. In other words, Beowulf gives expression to a (new) Anglo-Saxon sense of history, and does so by drawing a secondary world - the world of the heathen heroes - before modern Anglo-Saxon eyes.

(That is not the end of the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics', only its first step. The next steps introduce mythical monsters, death, and elegy. But without this first step, without taking on board that everything that is being discussed involves varying senses of history, these subsequent steps cannot be climbed.)

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

O my, @Priya, you just wrote me my dream post. Be careful what you ask for..

I knew you would eventually drag me into discussing Beowulf

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

I read your ‘Passing Ships’ article today.

It was excellent. To me, you’ve done a great job of laying out a plausible link between the two towers (both Beowulfian and the one dreamt about in Crickhollow). The matter of Frodo’s dream has been a niggling matter for me for quite some time.

I hope you are going to find a way of addressing/reconciling the singular tower of the TLotR dream which is presumably elf-made, and the man-made one in Beowulf:M&C. If you can, it would significantly strengthen the claim.

There are other questions I want to pose - but they’re probably premature right now. I look forward to reading more first.

@Priya, thank you very much! In fact, you are the first person on the plaza to mention - let alone comment positively on - my 'Seeing Stones' series at all, so I am doubly appreciative.

The posts between February and June are readings of LotR that are centered on the 4-night series that begins in the Woody End - then we have: dream of tower in Crickhollow, dream of Orthanc in house of Bombadil, song-vision of Valinor on second night in house of Bombadil. So here my research intersects directly with yours. To spell out my thinking: on the one hand, I believe that the 3 consecutive far-seeing dream/visions are illuminated considerably once we begin with the meeting with Gildor in the Woody End because - Tolkien tells us in 'The Road Goes Ever On' - Gildor and the Elves are returning from Elostirion where they have gazed on Valinor in the Stone of Elendil. On the other hand, I am fully aware that half of this sequence occurs in the house of Bombadil, which - as you of all people are aware - is something else again. Basically, where this has got me so far is pondering once again that unpublished letter to the Polish Professor that you got me interested in. But I have not got beyond pondering it...

On the relationship of Beowulf tower and Elostirion: This is to invoke a whole other loop of my research, to go backwards from the 1936 allegory as opposed to forward into LotR.

Tolkien delivered his British Academy lecture in November 1936, and told the allegory of Beowulf as a tower. The lecture he delivered was worked out of material penned in 1933 and elaborated in 1935 (published by Drout as 'Beowulf and the Critics') and here we find the origin of the tower allegory, which involves a pile of old stones and destructive friends, but originally the man was a gardener who used the old stones and some commonplace flowers to make a rock garden.

We do not know when Tolkien substituted the tower for the rock garden - November 1936 is the first record of the allegory with the tower.

What we do know is that, according to John Rateliff, Tolkien worked on 'The Lost Road' and 'The Fall of Númenor' in early 1936. And towards the end of 'The Fall of Númenor', where it is told of the history of the exiles of Númenor in Middle-earth in the days of Elendil, we read:

many of the Númenóreans could see or half see the paths to the True West, and believed that at times from a high place they could descry the peaks of Taniquetil at the end of the straight road, high above the world. Therefore they built very high towers in those days.

As Christopher Tolkien notes in 'Return of the Shadow' these Númenórean towers become the three Elf-towers of Emyn Beraid ('Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' actually says that these towers are built by the Númenóreans before it goes on to describe them as a gift of the Elves to Elendil.)

So whatever relationship there may be between the Anglo-Saxon tower of the 1936 allegory and Elostirion, the tallest Elf-tower of Emyn Beraid, is to be discovered in 'The Fall of Númenor' and its relationship to 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. Basically, I deem 'The Fall of Númenor' the hidden intellectual scaffolding of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' - but that is a whole further argument...

Hello Chrysophylax Dives


So I was going to save these comments for later - but then I thought they might help you in the construction of your future articles.


(a) A matter that should be addressed is credibility. For me, a minimum match of 3 items is a necessity.

Meaning each of your proposed links is either true or false. Getting into the realm of probabilities with multiple hits, we then start to get away from mere coincidence being likely.

This is why ‘Nodens’ is not a good fit for ‘Bombadil’. There simply is too little known about him, and too few adequate comparables or direct pointers from Tolkien, for a ‘credible’ theory.

(b) We know Tolkien included real-world literary snippets into TLotR. That is beyond doubt. But the allegory of the tower in Beowulf: M&C is of his personal devising. What necessitated him to include it into TLotR requires an explanation, or some evidence beyond the circumstantial.

(c) Tolkien disliked ‘allegory’ or so he claims in the foreword to TLotR. Why he included his own academic-based one needs to be addressed.


These are some preliminary thoughts. There may be more to come. But I hope they get you thinking. Just as important, I hope they’re an aid in understanding how Tolkien fan critics might view your claimed insight from The Monsters and the Critics.

Priya, I do very much appreciate your taking the time to read and to comment. Your questions are good, and have got me thinking such that this is the third edit of this post (starting from scratch each time). Ultimately, the answers are bound together, but each takes us into different realms before we arrive at the same point.

About 18-months ago @onthetrail put my way (on email, not on the plaza) the 'cordial dislike' of allegory of the Foreword to the 2nd edition, and I bumped my head on it a lot. (Hence my interest in the rather different flavour of the Foreword to the 1st edition.) But I am not going to utter another word on this unless you explicitly request, because it takes us to the heart of the argument of B:M&C - and then back to a revised reading of the allegory of the tower within it. So it is a good road, but dark and difficult.

Your (a) and (b), though, are too engaging to avoid here and now.

Priya wrote: ↑Wed Jun 26, 2024 7:56 pm (a) A matter that should be addressed is credibility. For me, a minimum match of 3 items is a necessity.

Meaning each of your proposed links is either true or false. Getting into the realm of probabilities with multiple hits, we then start to get away from mere coincidence being likely.

(b) We know Tolkien included real-world literary snippets into TLotR. That is beyond doubt. But the allegory of the tower in Beowulf: M&C is of his personal devising. What necessitated him to include it into TLotR requires an explanation, or some evidence beyond the circumstantial.

Well, on (b) surely we wish for an explanation beyond the circumstantial of any and all literary snippets, unless we take the view that Tolkien was happy with a Farmer Giles blunderbuss approach of firing anything and everything he got his hands on? We are in all cases seeking the wider design of the author - or at least I think so.

But it is certainly a very good question what on earth Tolkien thought he was doing by planting on the north-western margins of The Lord of the Rings what looks like an Elvish variant of his Anglo-Saxon tower that is an image of the Old English poem known as 'Beowulf'.

That is a question I would be very happy to engage in, though I am not sure I have any answers beyond wild speculation. But I don't wish to spout such speculation if I have got the question wrong.

On (a) I do believe we are talking at cross-purposes. Or at least, from stepping into this series of posts (as I take it you have) on the one-year anniversary mark, the impression that this 'Passing Ships' post has given is a tad misleading.

I will be candid. Yes, I do myself believe that the tower of the 1936 allegory became a (key) 'source' of LotR. But I am not concerned or interested in demonstrating this. I regard it as something that will or will not come out in the wash. Granted, what will come out in the wash may (or may not) be very interesting, and indeed appear together with some resolution of (b) - what Tolkien thought he was doing by using this image in a new story. And yes I do spend too much time thinking about the relationship between these two stories, taking what you would - correctly - deem the perspective of the source-hunter. I don't at all deny my fascination with these questions.

But my procedure so far in this series of posts has been to discuss each tower on its own terms and not draw any comparison at all beyond the resemblance that Tom Shippey pointed to way back in 1982. Taking this resemblance as generally accepted, I inquire into each tower by way of the texts that open up to the pursuit of the Tolkien scholar - I mean, I read (over and over) everything Tolkien published on Beowulf, while combing HoMe and every other story for towers that also seem a bit like Anglo-Saxon tower.

And I don't actually see why I should be concerned at all with your terms.

(a) A matter that should be addressed is credibility. For me, a minimum match of 3 items is a necessity.

Meaning each of your proposed links is either true or false. Getting into the realm of probabilities with multiple hits, we then start to get away from mere coincidence being likely.

But what are my proposed links? I have not proposed any links, at least not if by 'links' you mean connections between the two towers. I have accepted with Shippey that the two towers share some resemblance, but where Shippey declared that this commonality = a private desire of Tolkien, I have been unpacking the meanings of each tower-with-view.

While I would be more than happy to end up with a 'source-hunting' thesis, what I am doing is interpretation not source-hunting. What I seek is a reading of the 1936 allegory of the tower that satisfies me. I have not got there yet. I am profoundly dissatisfied with consensus readings. I am prepared to read the whole of The Lord of the Rings anew if that will get me to a satisfactory reading of the 1936 story about the man who builds a tower out of some old stone. (I have not yet finished my reading of this long story and as yet remain unsure what relevance it will turn out to have for my reading of the short story.)

Does this make sense?

But Priya, I am aware that you have your own posts to write and a whole life of your own around them, and that these are deep waters and that you have resisted Beowulf until now. So please absolutely do not feel any pressure to reply. As I said, you are the first person on the plaza to even mention any of these posts that I have been writing for a year - and this despite dedicating posts to some plaza members in a forelorn hope that they might actually read the text above the dedication. So, please, please, please, do take on board that I am already very grateful to you.

If one takes the source-hunting approach, then we are happy if we discover that the Anglo-Saxon tower of 1936 is somehow a source of the western Elf-tower on the margins of The Lord of the Rings.

Well, I kind of think it obviously is; I guess by now I don't question this. And I've traced how the Elf-tower appears in the drafts of the story and how, by way of dream, Orthanc is imagined out of the Elf-tower and then the other towers of Middle-earth are erected and how, eventually, they receive Seeing Stones. So yes, I could at some point in the 'Seeing Stones' series take a source-hunting line and follow it.

But when we have two stories by Tolkien standing in this source-relationship, especially when the original story is the master-story for the Tolkien source-hunter (or should be), then we might do well to take also other perspectives on the relationship between stone and tower, old source and new story.

My inclination is to read Elostirion as commentary on the Anglo-Saxon tower.

Hello Chrysophylax Dives

Over the last few days, I’ve been pondering Tolkien’s tower allegory, and have wondered if perhaps we need to return to basics.

The allegory is, I would say, a carefully wrought comment or even chiding.

As Tolkien states, it is his reading of the state of scholarship by the academic community on Beowulf up till then:

“I would express the whole industry in yet another allegory.”

Yes, that was certainly the allegory’s purpose. But without going into detail, as to what represented what or who represented who - its overarching purpose can be discerned. To me, rightly or wrongly, I read Tolkien conveys that despite what other have tried to capture, the work is:

(a) a poem, and that should not be forgotten.
(b) artistry of that time period, and thus it should be appreciated.
(c) also a story. We should not lose sight of the poet was trying to say, or the storyline.
(d) full of interesting details for many types of study. And by all means delve into it. But quarrying from a work of fiction involves perils.

And in a broad encompassing sense, it perhaps could all be summed up through use of an old English idiom:





This was, in my opinion Tolkien’s eloquent and diplomatic way of gently reprimanding/correcting his peers, both present and departed. One could quite easily make the case that was all Tolkien had in mind. That there were no further links, however deeply submerged, to his very own mythology.

Extrapolation, we must bear in mind, is a dangerous business when you step out onto that road.

Hello Chrys

So adding to what I’ve just said, leads me to analytically contemplate the singular mention of the ‘sea’ at the end of the allegory. Was this merely equivalent to the proverbial ‘trees’ per my prior post? In other words: don’t lose sight of understanding the poem and the poet’s intent. Keep one’s focus on those as a priority even when investigating other arenas of interest. Was effectively that Tolkien’s advice?

To me, it’s notable Tolkien didn’t tell us why the man wanted to look at the ‘sea’. It could well have been, that Tolkien simply didn’t care and hadn’t consciously taken it further.

The sea was the man’s personal desire, and Tolkien used it in combination with the tower purely to make a point. The ‘sea’ was an appropriate pick because its longing dwelt in the hearts of many Englishmen.

It is kind of curious that there was no documented desire to look inland. Indeed there is no hint of it. Don’t you think that if one decides to try and climb into Tolkien’s skin, ascend that tower - yet do a 180 degree turn to check out a completely different vista - that would be a rather presumptuous step?

Nevertheless even though I have misgivings right now, your article is still highly compelling and appealing, and kind of lights an internal desire in me for it to be true. It advocates a lofty (pardon the pun) pseudo noble intent and one I think Tolkien could have found worthy.

I wish however - as probably many mainstream scholars will desire, that by the end of the series, some extra evidence will be supplied to firm up your theory.

Priya, thank you once again. I not only appreciate the engagement but find it extremely useful. Your reading of the allegory, if I may say so, is reminscent of Shippey, who deems 'the sea' a private image of Tolkien's for what is desirable in literature.

On your first post, which goes back to basics to make the case that all that Tolkien had in mind was to reprimand his peers, my response begins: 'OK, let's go back to basics - but do it properly'. Then I would qualify your (a)-(d) reading of the allegory. For example:

(b) artistry of that time period, and thus it should be appreciated.
(d) full of interesting details for many types of study. And by all means delve into it. But quarrying from a work of fiction involves perils.

The time period is the 8th century, the Age of Bede, who wrote with authority on the 6 Ages of the World and gave us a History of the English Church that is still read today. Tolkien in his lecture is pinpointing a specific moment that arises in the wake of conversion to Christianity when the stories descending from the heathen past immediately and suddenly look different - the old become objects of antiquarian interest, and this poet set out to recreate in a poem the vanished world of the heathen heroes. The art expresses a new consciousness about the relationship of past and present, the emergence of a sense of history.

This does not get us (yet) to Middle-earth, but elaborating (b) allows us to qualify (d). The foolish friends of the allegory are caught by a spell - the spell of the Anglo-Saxon artist. They lust after ancient heathen stones. But that lust arises, says Tolkien, in no small measure because the Anglo-Saxon poet has discovered how to conjure up a magical image of antiquity. And what these foolish scholars take to be ancient stones dug up fresh from the ground are really ancient stones that have been worked up into something appropriate for his purposes by the Anglo-Saxon artist.

(Feel free to demand quotations as evidence for any of this.)

Again, this does not get us to Middle-earth. But it gets us deeper into the allegory, and I believe - but will not argue here - that as we start to understand this allegory we do end up in Middle-earth.

If we do go back to basics, then in my opinion the base is the original allegory, as found in the 1933 and 1935 material edited by Michael Drout: A gardener takes old stones and makes a rock garden. I have suggested in my series that the rock garden is a really good allegory because it doubles as a design of the poem: three monstrous stones in the center and various historical legends and an ancient myth on the periphery or circumference of the rock garden. When the rock garden allegory is read in conjunction with the 2014 commentary, then it all becomes wonderfully clear because the commentary holds up various 'stones' - that is, we see Tolkien inspecting the stones! And that is extremely illuminating because there is no longer any question about quite a lot of the meanings of the elements of the allegory, and when we have in our mind this or that particular story then many of the rather abstract statements about history and doom and such like in B:M&C make sense.

I would say that the rock garden does get us to Middle-earth because, once the image of 'Beowulf' as a rock garden is understood, we better read the map of Middle-earth in the Third Age, which is in its way another rock garden. But again, the basics require quite a lot more study before this becomes clear.

Priya wrote: ↑Sat Jun 29, 2024 7:29 pm It is kind of curious that there was no documented desire to look inland. Indeed there is no hint of it. Don’t you think that if one decides to try and climb into Tolkien’s skin, ascend that tower - yet do a 180 degree turn to check out a completely different vista - that would be a rather presumptuous step?

Nevertheless even though I have misgivings right now, your article is still highly compelling and appealing, and kind of lights an internal desire in me for it to be true. It advocates a lofty (pardon the pun) pseudo noble intent and one I think Tolkien could have found worthy.

I wish however - as probably many mainstream scholars will desire, that by the end of the series, some extra evidence will be supplied to firm up your theory.

Priya, I love all this! I had just been complaining to @Saranna about readers, and suggesting that they should be banned from the Elostirion Library. But you have redeemed plaza readers, at least in my eyes. I love the challenge and demand for evidence, but most of all the confession of internal desire - because, yeah! It is really exciting.

You engage with me on this at a good moment, because one year into the series I am now about to make the great cross-over that I've been working towards. The two summer posts of July and August will achieve this (I hope!) by first delineating the critical apparatus around which the argument of B:M&C is built, then drawing the cosmos before and after Númenor fell, as told in the 1936 'Fall of Númenor', and finally pointing out that we have already encountered this drawing as the critical apparatus on which B:M&C is built.

'The Fall of Númenor' is my evidence, or rather a reading of this 1936 myth in relation to the 1936 lecture on 'Beowulf' will reveal the point where the scholarly and the fantasy writings meet and kiss - and more, there is conception, pregnancy, and birth down the line.

But as this is my work for the summer, I'll leave it for now and focus only on this:

It is kind of curious that there was no documented desire to look inland. Indeed there is no hint of it. Don’t you think that if one decides to try and climb into Tolkien’s skin, ascend that tower - yet do a 180 degree turn to check out a completely different vista - that would be a rather presumptuous step?

Yes, of course! But a 360 degree turn taken on the top of the tower is documented.

When we have read his poem, as a poem, rather than as a collection of episodes, we perceive that he who wrote hæleð under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms ‘heroes under heaven,’ or ‘mighty men upon earth,’ but he and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsceg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof; wherein, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. That even this ‘geography,’ once held as material fact, could now be classed as a mere folk-tale affects its value very little. It transcends astronomy. Not that astronomy has done anything to make the island seem more secure or the outer seas less formidable. ("Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 18.)

The sea that the poet gazes on from the top of the tower is garsceg, the shoreless sea. This is not the sea as might be seen from the ground, which is known - thanks to the new Greek astronomy introduced by the Church - to cover a round world, so if you sail on it you will, in theory, end up back where you started. On the ground of this little Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Straight-road was lost.

@Priya
@Chrysophylax Dives

I should love to dive deeply into this discussion this but am going to be very much embroiled in RL for the next three/four weeks. It's developing beautifully. Will, if I may, pick it up when free again.