Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Priya wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2024 3:39 am The ‘tower’ rather than the ‘garden’ sits better. It’s a more appropriate reflection of something Anglo-Saxon made long ago.

Priya is speaking of Tolkien's two images of Beowulf, as it appears in two distinct allegories of the making and reception of the Old English poem that Tolkien penned in the 1930s. On the 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' thread I have explained that the rock garden segs with the spatial criticsm of W.P. Ker to generate a map of the poem and a diagram of Tolkien's argument.

In addition, I reply to Priya above that the Anglo-Saxon poem was indeed made long ago, but the domestic and homely image of the rock garden reminds us that the Anglo-Saxons were modern in relation to the wilder ancient heathen world depicted in the poem. The 'friends' of the allegory believe the poem has descended out of this ancient past, and the rock garden serves to remind us that this wild past was already the long ago to the Anglo-Saxon poet and audience.

Finally, and turning that last upside-down, I observe that the homely and domestic suburban or Hobbit rock garden, pictured in representative form below, is hardly the only form of rock garden found in the British Isles.

Rock gardens have a very long tradition in the British Isles. This is the most famous of the ancient rock gardens.

Aiks, Stone Henge is an arrangement of stones, same as what the gardener makes in his story (though of a different pattern). Possibly you are having difficulties with the notion of one gardener making something as massive as Stonehenge? Most ancient British Rock Gardens were on a smaller scale. Here is Swinside in Cumbria, an arrangement that is akin to that of Beowulf in having an outer edge of stones, but with no stones visible in the center.

You are quite correct that these ancient rock gardens have nothing to do with Danes and other North Sea and Baltic peoples around 600AD. What they do have to do with is the British Isles and a native tradition of making patterns with stones. (I've been pondering the 'field' of the Tower allegory, since Priya brought it to my attention. Here in this image above we see a field.)

An ancient stone garden in Cornwall. This is the kind of thing that you could almost do alone. Really, a friend would be needed to move the bigger stones. This one seems to have the pattern of Beowulf.

Aiks, I am wondering if substituting stone for rock in the composite rock-garden might help? In this earlier story a gardener makes a rock garden from some old stones and some commonplace flowers. We could just as well say that the gardener makes a stone garden. Now we can turn to the usual Tolkien texts, where stones feature a lot.

You may recall that the older generation of philologists at Oxford deemed ond the aboriginal (pre-Celtic) word for stone? Or that Gondor first appeared in the drafts of The Lord of the Rings as the land of Ond, realm of the stone-men? And of course the city of seven towers has its own Seeing Stone, one of seven Elvish stones that figure in this story. So the idea of a Stone Garden - what the gardener in the earlier short story makes with the old stones - resonates quite deeply with Númenórean and Elvish elements of this other (longer) story of J.R.R. Tolkien. (Of course, this is even more the case once the old stones are gathered into a tower, in the second allegory.)

Here are a few quotations from 'On Fairy-stories'. (My emphasis)

Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give.

It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.

And I especially draw your attention to this long passage (divided into two parts), which seems to me to touch directly on the kind of considerations that attended the design of Tolkien's two short stories about Beowulf.

The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination.

Should the story say “he ate bread,” the dramatic producer or painter can only show ”a piece of bread” according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.