I’m pleased to announce that my co-author, Rebecca Foster, and I have recently published our study of Tolkien’s alliterative verse in his play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” in the free and open access Journal of Tolkien Research. In case you’re curious about its contents, here is the abstract:
“J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Homecoming’ and Modern Alliterative Metre”
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” is a modern English alliterative verse drama written in the metre of Old English poetry and demonstrating his interest in versification and his skill in writing original alliterative verse in new and versatile ways. Tolkien’s originality also lies in his use of alliterative metre in a play, a genre not written by the early English; in fact, “The Homecoming” is Tolkien’s only published drama as well as historical fiction. While Tolkien bases this work on historical events recounted in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” he also uses his drama to illustrate some of his scholarly theories about Old English alliterative poetry and poetic tradition and to imagine how “The Battle of Maldon” came to be written. Our examination of his careful handling of the play’s verses as well as his detailed study of alliterative metre, evident in his unpublished manuscripts and in his essay on the topic, shows how he creates various styles in modern English alliterative verse, from colloquial and conversational passages to highly styled set pieces. Our discussion includes consideration of the two characters in the play and their views on and use of alliterative poetry.
This article enabled me to draw on my readings in Tolkien’s unpublished manuscripts held at the Bodleian Library. I included only a few quotations from Tolkien’s lectures and essays, but they represent many happy research trips devouring this information in the special collections reading room in Oxford.
I’ve also written about “The Homecoming” in the volume titled “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger. My essay in that book, “Bodies in War: Medieval and Modern Tensions in ‘The Homecoming'” talks about the play as a piece that explores Tolkien’s views on heroic poetry and war. You can find out more about my views on “The Homecoming” here and here. As you can see, I have a lot to say about “The Homecoming” and think it should become better known among Tolkien readers.
For this recent JTR piece, I was grateful to be working with Rebecca Foster, especially for her patience and discriminating ear, which contributed significantly to the metrical analysis. Look for more work in the future by Rebecca on Tolkien and medieval and contemporary poetry.
We don’t often think of Tolkien as a playwright. Fantasy novelist — of course. Poet, scholar, artist – yes. But we shouldn’t forget that Tolkien also wrote one published play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” – let’s call it “The Homecoming” for short – which was produced by BBC Radio and has been read or performed at various times.
Tolkien wrote other plays, though we don’t have the manuscripts any more, to my knowledge. As a young man, he wrote plays as holiday entertainments when spending time with his Incledon relatives; he probably wrote a farce, Cherry Farm, in 1911 and in the following year, The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette (also playing one of the parts). He performed in plays while at school: in 1910 acting as the Inspector in Aristophanes’ play The Birds – in Greek! and also in Greek the following year, taking the role of Hermes in Aristophanes’ Peace. Near the end of 1911, his performance as Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals was praised as “excellent in every way” (Scull and Hammond, Reader’s Guide 313-17).
Tolkien (centre) as Hermes in Aristophanes’ Peace, 1911. Photo from the cover of Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014. The full photograph is reproduced on page 9 in John Garth’s article in that volume.
And of course, all of his debating experience, often in humourous speeches, during his years at King Edward’s and then at Oxford would require a sense of the dramatic in taking up a persona and a position in argument (See the Scull and Hammond Chronology for reports of these debates). John Garth surveys these and other of Tolkien’s early comedic and parodic compositions, pointing out:
By thus limbering up in his early exercises as a writer, he was later able to apply the same skills—more finely tuned, of course—to the most serious topics and with the utmost gravity.”
(Garth 11)
Even later in life, Tolkien had a flair for the dramatic. Picture him at the Oxford Summer Diversions in 1938 reciting from memory Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. John Bowers, in his recently published book Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer, imagines the scene:
On the merrymaking occasion in summer 1938, Tolkien strode upon the stage costumed as Chaucer in a green robe, a turban, and fake whiskers parted in the middle like the forked beard shown in early portraits like Ellesmere’s.”
(Bowers 208)
The performance received good reviews in the Oxford Mail, and in the following year, Tolkien returned to perform Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, this time producing a shortened and bowdlerized version of the tale for his performance (Bowers 208-211). The poet John Masefield, one of the organizers of the event, described Tolkien’s dramatic abilities:
Professor Tolkien knows more about Chaucer than any living man and sometimes tells the Tales superbly, inimitably, just as though he were Chaucer returned.”
(quoted in Bowers 209)
Above: Geoffrey Chaucer portrait and Tolkien in the 1940s (as close as I could get to the actual date of his performance). You’ll have to imagine Tolkien’s Chaucer costume! Tolkien image from The Guardian, 22 March 2014.
Tolkien’s recitations of Chaucer aren’t the only performances that his audiences remember. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter reports how he used to start his lectures declaiming the opening lines of Beowulf in Old English (137-38). Although students complained that during lectures he mumbled and was hard to follow, these moments of dramatic performance left striking impressions.
In other words, Tolkien had experience in writing and performing dramatic pieces, and I think that he put those skills to good use in “The Homecoming.”
So why don’t we usually think of Tolkien as a playwright? I can think of several reasons. For one, we only have one publication of his in this genre, easily overlooked in the volume of fiction, poetry, letters, and essays that he wrote.
I also think that there’s a tendency to view “The Homecoming” as alliterative poetry for two voices – more like a poetic dialogue not meant for performance on a stage. I would disagree based on the manuscript evidence, but my reasons will have to wait for another time.
Maybe another reason is that “The Homecoming,” inspired by the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” first appeared in a scholarly journal, Essays and Studies, in 1953. Medievalists have been interested mainly in the short essay titled “Ofermod” that Tolkien appended to the play, which deals with “The Battle of Maldon,” and compares it to two other medieval texts, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But medieval scholars have not, in general, examined the play as a play.
Finally, we might not think of Tolkien as a playwright because of the negative comments that he made about drama in various letters and in his appendix to “On Fairy-Stories.” In that essay, for example, he claims that drama cannot adequately represent a fantasy world, but whether we agree or not, we should note that “The Homecoming” is different from Tolkien’s other writing. It’s not part of his Middle-earth Secondary World but is based on the aftermath of a battle that took place in 991 according to early English historical chronicles. “The Homecoming” is a work of historical fiction as well as being a play.
The play is now most readily available in the volume Tree and Leaf, tucked in after “On Fairy-Stories,” “Mythopoeia,” and “Leaf by Niggle.”
Tolkien certainly had definite ideas about how the play should be performed on BBC Radio, as his letters tell us, though he was dissatisfied with the BBC production that aired in 1954, with a rebroadcast in 1955. He recorded his own version at home in his study, distinguishing between the two characters’ voices and adding in his own sound effects. A copy of that recording was given out at the Tolkien Centenary Conference in 1992 (Scull & Hammond, Reader’s Guide 547). But you don’t need a copy of that tape to experience Tolkien’s voice dramatizations. Just listen to his reading of the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit. He does a pretty good job of performing the roles of Bilbo and especially Gollum.
Above: listen to Tolkien’s voicing of Gollum in his reading of “Riddles in the Dark”
“Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger, Walking Tree Publishers, 2019.
It must be pretty clear that I find Tolkien’s play very interesting; in fact, it’s the topic of my current research. I’ve written about “The Homecoming” as a World War One work in my recently published essay, “Bodies in War: Medieval and Modern Tensions in ‘The Homecoming’” in the collection “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War. There, my thesis can be summarized in this way:
Like Tolkien’s better-known works of fiction, HBBS addresses issues of war and heroism that are relevant to a modern writer who is transforming his past experiences into fiction, and as is not uncommon with Tolkien, doing so through the lens of medieval literature.”
(Smol 264)
What currently interests me in “The Homecoming” is the skilful handling of alliterative metre in the play. Yes, this is a play in alliterative verses, which may sound old-fashioned and stilted, but Tolkien’s knowledge of and handling of alliterative verses is, I think, a tour de force in his creation of different styles in a demanding medium. If you’re able to attend the International Medieval Congress in Leeds , you can hear me talking about “Tolkien’s Alliterative Styles in The Homecoming” on Monday, July 6, 11:15, session 104. Look for an article as well, coming soon, I hope!
“Tolkien’s Alliterative Styles in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” Session 104, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 6, 2020.
I’d love to know in the comments if you’ve read “The Homecoming” and what you think of it. Have you ever heard or seen it performed?
Works Cited
Bowers, John M. Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer. Oxford UP, 2019.
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Garth, John. “’The road from adaptation to invention’: How Tolkien Came to the Brink of Middle-earth in 1914.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014, pp. 1-44.
Scull, Christina and Wayne Hammond. J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.Reader’s Guide and Chronology. Revised and Expanded Edition. HarperCollins, 2017.
Smol, Anna. “Bodies in War: Medieval and Modern Tensions in ‘The Homecoming’.” “Something Has Gone Crack”: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Annika Röttinger, Walking Tree Publishers, 2019, pp. 263-83.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” Tree and Leaf, HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 121-150.
As always, if you are an independent scholar (i.e. you do not have an institutional affiliation) and do not have access to some of these resources, please send me an email and I will try to provide private research copies if possible.
March 25, designated by the Tolkien Society as Tolkien Reading Day, is meant to encourage the reading of Tolkien’s works individually or in group events. A new theme is announced every year, and for 2019 it’s “Tolkien and the mysterious.”
My current reading focuses on Tolkien’s
verse drama, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
Beorhthelm’s Son – let’s call it The
Homecoming for short – and a specific moment in the play in which one of
the characters experiences a mysterious vision.
It’s not one of Tolkien’s best-known works, so first a quick summary: The Homecoming is a short drama for two voices based on the events recounted in the Old English poem, “The Battle of Maldon,” which describes an English defeat at the hands of Viking invaders in the year 991. Beorhtnoth is the English lord who is killed in the battle, but his loyal followers fight on against hopeless odds. Often-quoted lines from the poem are spoken by an old warrior, here in Old English, then followed by Tolkien’s translation:
Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, Mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað.
“Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.” (124)
Tolkien wrote that he thought these Old
English lines weren’t original in this poem but instead “an ancient and
honoured expression of heroic will” (124).
The events of Tolkien’s play The Homecoming occur after the battle is over, when two servants are sent by the local Abbot to find and bring back Beorhtnoth’s body for burial. They are out on a gruesome battlefield in the dark of night, surrounded by mangled corpses, trying to understand what happened in the fighting. They think of ghosts, are startled by a hooting owl, and face sudden danger when they come upon and fight some corpse robbers. After they identify a few of the dead who were closest to Beorhtnoth, they make their way to where they discover what remains of their lord. One of the servants is a young poet who shows several times that he is capable of composing verses in moments when the two men honour their dead lord. Eventually they carry his body to their wagon and start on the way home. That’s where the young poet, lying in their cart, starts nodding off and speaks “drowsily and half dreaming” (140):
There are candles in the dark and cold voices. I hear mass chanted for master’s soul in Ely isle. Thus ages pass, and men after men. Mourning voices of women weeping. So the world passes; day follows day, and the dust gathers, his tomb crumbles, as time gnaws it, and his kith and kindred out of ken dwindle. So men flicker and in the mirk go out. The world withers and the wind rises; the candles are quenched. Cold falls the night.
(Homecoming 140)
This young man, whose name is Torhthelm or Totta for short, seems to be seeing into the future – the present or near future in hearing mass chanted for Beorhtnoth among the monks in Ely — but then followed by a sweeping view of ages in the future until the “world withers” and all seems to die out.
This view intensifies in the next few moments. The stage directions state that Totta continues with “the voice of one speaking in a dream,” and he seems to enter into a mysterious vision, recounted in the present tense, as if he is partaking urgently of some other reality:
It’s dark! It’s dark, and doom coming! Is no light left us? A light kindle, and fan the flame! Lo! Fire now wakens, hearth is burning, house is lighted, men there gather. Out of the mists they come through darkling doors whereat doom waiteth. Hark! I hear them in the hall chanting: stern words they sing with strong voices. (He chants) Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, more proud the spirit as our power lessens! Mind shall not falter nor mood waver, though doom shall come and dark conquer
(Homecoming 141)
At that moment, the cart goes over a bump
and jolts Totta out of his dream, back to the reality of his companion who
disapproves of the young poet’s words. The play ends shortly afterwards.
You’ll notice that in this intense
visionary experience, Totta hears men chanting the lines that will become part
of “The Battle of Maldon” – “Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, / more
proud the spirit as our power lessens!” – although he adds two further lines
that don’t appear in the Old English poem.
Who are these ghostly men that Totta sees
gathering in the hall “out of the mists” and that he hears chanting? Where is
Totta in this dream-vision? He seems to
be participating in the experience in the present moment, but is he
imaginatively partaking of a past event or a future one? The mystery of where
this dream comes from and what kind of experience Totta is having as he speaks
it out loud in a dream-like voice contributes to the significance of this climactic
moment in the play.
I’ve written about this mysterious event (and other aspects of the play) in a forthcoming essay on The Homecoming,* where I conclude that Totta is “penetrating to the heart of heroic tradition,” accessing what Tolkien called that ancient expression of heroic will, which lives in poetic tradition. I also think that Totta’s experience is similar to other mysterious instances in Tolkien’s fiction where the power of a story or poem leads people into a dream-like state in which they experience other times and places — for example, the hobbits listening to Tom Bombadil’s stories, or Frodo enchanted by poetry in Rivendell, or the Notion Club members following Lowdham and Jeremy’s adventures in an Anglo-Saxon hall.
These visionary experiences are mysterious
in the sense that they are puzzling, obscure, hard to understand. They may also
resonate with the sense of “mystery” as denoting something mystical or beyond
human reason.
What’s your interpretation of these mysterious
visionary moments?
*My essay is forthcoming in a new book from Walking Tree Press, “Something has gone crack”: New Perspectives on Tolkien in the Great War, edited by Annika Röttinger and Janet Brennan Croft. I’ll post more when I have information about a definite publication date!
The image used above is “Before” by Tolkien, one of his early drawings estimated to have been made around 1911-1912 (Hammond and Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illustrator, page 65, footnote 12. The drawing is fig. 30 in their book.)
My quotations from Tolkien’s Homecoming are taken from the play published
in Tree and Leaf, HarperCollins,
2001. The play was originally published in the scholarly journal Essays and Studies, vol. 6, 1953, pp.
1-18.
I’ve filed away my course notes and given out the final grades. ENGL 4475: Tolkien & Myth-making is officially over for the 2016-17 academic year. The project proposals, annotated bibliographies, abstracts, research papers, and exams are all done now. What’s left is my delight at the many ways my students found to explore Tolkien’s fiction in relation to adaptation, medievalism, and fandom.
Gift of lembas by a student from ENGL 4475
Our last class of the year is a celebration of the work students have done. We set up in a party room with snacks and drinks and read excerpts from each other’s essays. After all, it’s more interesting if you’re writing for your peers and not just for your teacher. My students then present their research projects to the rest of the seminar. I give them a range of general options for these projects, from studying Tolkien’s adaptations of texts such as Beowulf to producing their own adaptations based on Tolkien’s fiction. Because this is a senior-level English course, all of the projects require a written researched analysis of the texts and, if relevant, of the students’ process of adaptation or their participation in fandom.
On presentation day, the class had assembled around the seminar table but for one student, who at the last moment made quite an entrance in full costume, much to our delight. Gavin Rollins’ project was about cosplay, but he didn’t just write about it; he arrived as a living example of his research. (He also brought us some delicious lembas).
Part of Gavin Rollins’ cosplay project
Gavin’s paper dealt with the immersive, communal experience of cosplay and the intertextuality of Tolkien’s fiction and Jackson’s films.
A couple of other students were thinking along the same lines when they conducted their study of Dungeons and Dragons gaming. Andrew Potter used his and his friends’ experiences to investigate the question, can a D&D adventure feel like a “faerian drama“? Andrew’s answer is maybe, and certainly more likely than the experience of playing a video game or watching a film.
Luke Hammond (centre) and his D&D research team
Luke Hammond created his own D&D-style adventure based on Tolkien’s Mines of Moria episode and experimented with his friends in a campaign lasting several hours to see how Tolkien’s place descriptions worked (they worked well) and what kind of choices would be made by players who didn’t know the books or the movies. (Turns out the Frodo-character put on the Ring every chance he could get!). Luke’s analysis also considered how the role-playing genre could fulfill Tolkien’s ideas expressed in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” about fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation.
Image from diceaholic.wordpress.com
It would take too long to summarize every student’s project, but at least I can give you a taste of the variety we enjoyed. Courtney Francis wrote about Legolas/Gimli fanfiction; Megan Bruce about surveillance in The Lord of the Rings, including her poem about Galadriel’s mirror as a surveillance tool. Nicole Martina tackled Tolkien’s descriptive landscapes and his artistic style. And Allyson Roussy adapted the Old English poem “Widsith,” in which a widely-travelled poet recounts all the great rulers and places he has been, thus recording legends and histories in his verse. Allyson transposed the style of “Widsith” to the history of Middle-earth, beginning with Silmarillion tales and ending with The Lord of the Rings. Her speaker is Gandalf, someone who has travelled widely and seen a great deal in Middle-earth. Although she does not attempt to write consistently in alliterative verse, she typically captures the four-beat style of her Old English model. Here is a passage spoken by Gandalf:
…I acted as guide in the war against Sauron. I counselled men and elves and exiles, sought those who desired to aid our cause, who strengthened the armies of Middle-earth. I was with Aragorn, of the House of Isildur, Beren’s mirror, with Barahir’s ring, last heir to the throne of Gondor and Arnor, A true leader with patience and humility, The hands of a healer and the hands of a king….
Film adaptations of Tolkien’s work also provided fertile ground for analysis. Kimia Nejat studied Jackson’s film representations of Frodo and Sam. Samantha VanNorden, starting with the premise that Middle-earth is a character in The Lord of the Rings, analyzed Jackson’s representations of certain landscapes. And Alexandra Rudderham examined Tolkien’s representation of Galadriel along with the film adaptations by Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson. Tolkien’s handling of gender and women has long been a topic of debate, and Alex further asked, have filmmakers captured all of Galadriel’s qualities as a beautiful, perilous, powerful queen? Compare for yourself; first, Bakshi’s animated 1978 version:
and then Peter Jackson’s 2001 Fellowship of the Ring:
Fan Studies in the Classroom
I’ve had an opportunity to write about the kind of work I ask my students to do in this course. My essay “Adaptation as Analysis: Creative Work in an English Classroom” is forthcoming in the book Fan Studies in the Classroom, edited by Katherine Howell, to be published by the University of Iowa Press. In this essay I discuss the theory behind my ENGL 4475 assignments, the practical details of how they’re done, and why I think the assignments encourage intertextual engagement, creativity, and textual analyses. I’ll post more when the book is published. In the meantime, some of my former students’ assignments can be seen on the ENGL 4475: Studies in Medievalism – Tolkien & Myth-making course page.
Selected Bibliography
This is not meant to be a complete bibliography by any means, but I thought that a few readers might like to sample some of the sources, especially those dealing with fandom and adaptation, that my students have read as part of their research. I’ve culled one or two sources from each essay in case anyone wants to look further into some of the topics my students have written about.
Abrahamson, M.B. “J.R.R. Tolkien, Fanfiction, and the Freedom of the Reader.” Mythlore, vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, pp. 53- 72.
Allington, Daniel. “‘How Come Most People Don’t See It?’: Slashing The Lord of the Rings.” Social Semiotics, vol. 17, no. 1, Mar. 2007, pp. 43–62.
Amendt-Raduege, Amy. “Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 3, 2006, pp. 45-55.
Barker, Martin. “Envisaging ‘Visualisation’: Some challenges from the international Lord of the Rings audience project.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1-25.
Battis, Jes. “Gazing upon Sauron: Hobbits, Elves, and the Queering of the Postcolonial optic.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, 2004, pp. 908-26.
Clark, George. “J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-Earth, Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 39–52.
Cohen, Cynthia M. “The Unique Representation of Trees in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 6, 2009, pp. 91-125.
Croft, Janet Brennan and Leslie Donovan, editors. Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. Mythopoeic Press, 2015.
Enright, Nancy. “Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power.” Renascence, vol. 59, Issue 2, 2007, 93-108.
Ewalt, David M. Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It. Scribner, 2013.
Gygax, Gary. “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games.” Dragon, vol. 95. March 1985. pp. 12-13.
Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. HarperCollins, 2004.
Haydock, Nickolas. The Imaginary Middle Ages: Movie Medievalism. McFarland, 2008.
Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, editors. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. McFarland, 2006.
Hutcheon, L. with S. O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed, Routledge, London and New York.
Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend, Seren, 2005.
Rahman, Osmud, Liu Wing-Sun, and Brittany Hei-Man Cheung. “’Cosplay’: Imaginative Self and Performing Identity.” Fashion Theory-The Journal Of Dress Body & Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, Sep 2012, pp. 317-342.
Rateliff, John. “Tolkien Moot 2008 MerpCon IV John D. Rateliff solo speech History of the Hobbit author.” YouTube, 28 Jun 2012.
Reid, Robin Anne. “Thrusts in the Dark: Slashers’ Queer Practices.” Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 3, 2009, pp. 463–483.
_________. “Tree and flower, leaf and grass: The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings.” Fantasy Fiction into Film. Edited by Stratyner, Leslie and James R. Keller. McFarland, 2007.
Russell, Gary. The Lord of the Rings: Art of the Fellowship of the Ring. HarperCollins, 2002.
Shank, Nathan. “Productive Violence and Poststructural Play in the Dungeons and Dragons Narrative.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol 48, no.1, 2015.
I’m finding Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers* a fascinating and deep well of ideas. Last summer at the New York Tolkien Conference, I commented on the sub-creators who appear in the story; this year, for my conference presentation at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, I talked about another part of Notion Club, the embedded legend of King Sheave (which was also part of the Tolkien’s plan for the earlier and unfinished The Lost Road).
According to Christopher, his father called the King Sheave legends “an astonishing tangle.” My presentation was an attempt to untangle at least one or two threads, but I had to ignore how tightly woven into the picture are texts such as “The Seafarer” and “The Death of St. Brendan.” There’s only so much you can do in a 15-minute presentation.
I started with what is likely to be the most recognizable appearance of Sheave in English literature: the Scyld Scefing story that opens the Old English poem Beowulf. The Beowulf-poet merges two mythical or legendary figures. The first is the warlike Scyld, the eponymous founder of the Scyldings, another name for the Danes in the poem; (“sc” is pronounced like “sh” in Old English). The other figure is Scef (or Scéaf / Scéafa): Sheaf, who is an ancient culture-hero or corn-god. In numerous sources, this Sheaf is said to arrive from an unknown land as a child sleeping on a boat with a sheaf of grain by his head. In his Beowulf commentary, Tolkien finds this Sheaf figure “the more mysterious, far older and more poetical myth” of the two.
Other medieval sources also mention one or both of these figures. Alexander Bruce, in his book Scyld and Scef, publishes and discusses 43 references from English, Danish, and Icelandic sources, in chronicles, poems, and genealogies, covering several centuries — in other words, the legends must have been well known in early Germanic cultures. In my talk, I enumerated a few sources that Tolkien used and reshaped in his own version of Sheaf / Sheave (Tolkien spells it differently in different places), including the one unique version of the legend, the Beowulf story in which Scyld Scefing is given a ship burial at the end of his life, sent back out to an unknown destination with treasures piled around his body.
But what is even more interesting to me are the ways in which Tolkien’s version is different from his medieval sources. For one thing, Tolkien’s story is remarkable for its vivid visualization of details added to the legend. Here you can see Tolkien’s characteristic descriptive style, with an attention to the visual qualities of light: “a ship came sailing, shining-timbered, without oar or mast, eastward floating. The sun behind it sinking westward with flame kindled the fallow water.” (NCP 273-74).
Tolkien adds other elements to the story, such as the harp that comes with the child, and how Sceaf reveals his extraordinary powers through song. In most legends, Sheaf is meant to bring agricultural fertility; in Tolkien’s version, he also brings linguistic and artistic ripeness to the people. Tolkien’s version brings us right into the events of the story imaginatively and vividly, as if we too are there witnessing the scene along with the other marvelling people who rush out of their houses to gaze on and listen to Sheaf.
Finally, Tolkien adds hints or glimpses of how his King Sheave is tied to his own mythology of Númenor and the Blessed Lands to the West. For example, Sheaf’s ship sails in from the West to a dark, shadowed, deprived Middle-earth. There are also premonitions of the Eagles of the Lords of the West, a repeated refrain in NCP deriving from the story of Númenor as several characters experience or see it.
As interesting as I find Tolkien’s version of King Sheave, the full meaning of the story has to take into account not only what Tolkien makes of the legend but where he puts it. For Tolkien’s story of Sheaf is only one layer, deeply embedded, in a narrative about envisioning the past and about sea-longing. The Sheaf story is told in an Anglo-Saxon hall in King Éadweard’s reign, recited by Tréowine and concluded by his friend Ælfwine. This layer comprising of Ælfwine and Tréowine is in turn framed by the 20th-century story of Lowdham and Jeremy, two members of the Notion Club who are experimenting with time travel and are telling the story of Ælfwine and Tréowine to their friends.
Layer upon layer upon layer, with connections in word and image between layers “coming through” or “glimpsed” as the characters frequently say — the layers create a palimpsest or a pattern of recurring elements, made up of history and myth, including Tolkien’s own mythology. Verlyn Flieger has pointed out that framing has thematic significance in NCP, and the framing of the King Sheave story in several layers of time creates a tightly woven pattern that is impossible to unravel completely in this short summary. Obviously, I have more untangling work to do this summer.
* NCP is an unfinished text published by Christopher Tolkien in Sauron Defeated, volume 9 of The History of Middle-earth.
I was glad to contribute the essay to the festschrift for George Clark* titled The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark, edited by Robin Waugh and James Weldon, and published by Medieval Institute Publications in 2010. But as an expensive scholarly book, The Hero Recovered has limited circulation, and so I am posting a pdf of my essay here for anyone interested in the subject of children’s literature and medievalism.
S. Lanier. 1880
My essay focuses on the period between approximately 1875 and 1914 which saw many publications for young readers featuring King Arthur, Beowulf, King Alfred and other medieval heroes. Although children had been given medieval folktales, myths, and legends to read before this time — usually in drastically reduced, inexpensive chapbook versions — these tales were not generally seen as meriting serious attention. Samuel Johnson’s attitude in the 18th century is typical when he comments on the Middle Ages: “at the time when very wild and improbable tales were well received, the people were in a barbarous state, and so on the footing of children” (see essay, p. 210). In other words, the idea of an uncivilized, child-like medieval era has a long history.
…at the time when very wild and improbable tales were well received, the people were in a barbarous state, and so on the footing of children.
(Samuel Johnson)
H.E. Marshall. 1908
What changed in the 19th century, however, was the value and interest that the medieval period held for scholars and general readers. In my essay, I discuss how imperial interests and racial politics, along with the study of national origins in Indo-European languages and in evolutionary anthropology, combine to create a widespread interest in the idea of progress from medieval and/or primitive origins. The evolutionary theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (i.e. the stages of development in the individual recapitulate or repeat phylogeny, the states of evolutionary development of the human) meant that children could stand in for cultural “primitives” as objects of study. Andrew Lang in his series of fairy tale books did much to popularize this notion of the child as a representative of an earlier stage of human development.
The children to whom and for whom [fairy tales] are told represent the young age of man.
(Andrew Lang, Introduction, Blue Fairy Book)
To illustrate how a child could represent the evolutionary progress of a nation, I comment on a serialized story, “Progress of the British Boy: Past and Present,” published in the periodical Boys of the Empire in 1888. The illustration accompanying the article wasn’t published with my essay, so I provide it here:
…as the ‘boy is the father of the man,’ it may not be amiss to draw the attention of our young readers to the boyhood, if we may so term it, of England…
(Edwin J. Brett, “Progress of the British Boy” Boys of the Empire no. 1, p. 12)
As I state in my essay: “These children’s periodicals, schoolbooks, and anthologies demonstrate a conflation of ideas about the child and the medieval through a primitivist and evolutionary discourse, which often determined the kind of reading material that would be given to children” (218). You can read the entire essay if you’re interested in the details of my discussion and in my examples of various texts. I’ll just reprint here part of my concluding paragraph:
…one may well question what effect the persistent association of the child and the primitive with the medieval has had on the contemporary status of medieval literature. Even today, if someone were to ask for stories of King Arthur or Robin Hood, it is likely that most people would assume that simple children’s stories or at least stories that appealed to adolescent tastes were being requested — in other words, literature that is not as complex or as serious as that typically defined as modern, adult literature. Medievalists, of course, know better, but in order to understand clearly how medieval studies developed to this point, it is important to recognize the conflation of the child, the primitive, and the medieval in the disciplinary formations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That intersection is perhaps most evident to us when we examine the particular kind of medieval hero presented to us in texts from this time, an exemplar of the nation and the race, who reveals to us quite sharply the primitivist and evolutionary foundations on which he was constructed.
from Chaucer for Children. A Golden Key by Mrs. Haweis (1907; 1st ed 1887)
*Medievalists will know George Clark mainly from his work on the Old English poems The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf. Tolkienists might recognize him as the author of “J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero” published in the book that he co-edited with Daniel Timmons, J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances, Greenwood Press. The Hero Recovered includes an interview conducted by Daniel Timmons with George Clark on heroism in Tolkien’s work and in Old Norse literature.
The preview of the conference program for the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies has now been posted. Although there may still be changes made to the program before the final version is published in February, I’m always eager to see what sessions have been accepted and to plan how I’m going to spend my days in Kalamazoo this year.
The conference runs from May 12 – 15 at Western Michigan University. Keep in mind that the following are excerpts from a preliminary program; for the final version and most accurate information, check out the published schedule when it comes online here.
I’ve highlighted sessions on Tolkien and on medievalism. Even with this narrowing down, you can see that it’s impossible to attend every panel that might be of interest.
Sessions on Tolkien
The conference always features two plenary addresses. This year, one of those lectures will be delivered by Jane Chance, speaking on Tolkien.
Friday 8:30 a.m. Plenary Lecture:
How We Read J. R. R. Tolkien Reading Grendel’s Mother. Jane Chance (Rice Univ.)
Other sessions focusing on Tolkien:
Thursday 10:00 a.m. Fathering, Fostering, Translating, and Creating in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien Session 11 Fetzer 1040
Sponsor: Organizer: History Dept., Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Judy Ann Ford, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce; Presider: Anne Reaves, Marian Univ.
Medieval Fostering in the First and Third Ages of Middle-earth: Elrond as Fóstri and Fóstr-son. Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ.
A Stylistic Analysis of Fatherhood and Fostering in The Silmarillion. Robin Anne Reid, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce
Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation of Scholar and Poet. Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College
Imagined: Tolkien in the Mind of God. Skyler King, College of the Desert
Thursday 1:30 p.m. Tolkien and Beowulf
Session 58; Fetzer 1040
Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo . Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ. Presider: Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar
“A Tight Fitt”: Strategies of Condensation in The Lay of Beowulf. John R. Holmes, Franciscan Univ. of Steubenville
Tolkien’s “Freawaru and Ingeld”: A Love Story? Christopher T. Vaccaro, Univ. of Vermont
The Christian Singer in Tolkien’s Beowulf. Michael D. Miller, Aquinas College
Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary as a Teaching Text. James L. Baugher, East Tennessee State Univ.
Thursday 3:30 p.m. In Honor of Verlyn Flieger (A Roundtable) Session 107; Fetzer 1040 Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo. Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ. Presider: John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar
Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” as a theory of literature. Curtis Gruenler, Hope College
The Well and the Book: Flieger and Tolkien on “the Past in the Past”. Deborah Sabo, Univ. of Arkansas–Fayetteville/Arkansas Archeological Survey
So Many Wonders: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight according to Tolkien and Flieger. Amy Amendt-Raduege, Whatcom Community College
“Linguistic Ghosts”: Anglo-Saxon Poetry as Tolkien’s Tether between Past and Present. Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ.
An Elf by Any Other Name: Naming, Language, and Loss in Tolkien’s Legendarium. Benjamin S. W. Barootes, McGill Univ.
Friday 10:00 a.m. Tolkien and Invented Languages Session 219; Bernhard 209 Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo. Organizer & Presider: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ.
From Goldogrin to Sindarin, or, How Ilkorin Supplanted the “Sweet Tongue of the Gnomes”. Eileen Marie Moore, Cleveland State Univ.
Early Explorers and Practicioners of a Shared “Secret Vice”. Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar
“Art Words”: Tolkien’s “Secret Vice” Manuscripts and Radical Linguistic Experimentation. Dimitra Fimi, Cardiff Metropolitan Univ.
Tolkien’s Concept of “Native Language” and the English and Welsh Papers at the Bodleian Library. Yoko Hemmi, Keio Univ.
Saturday 10:00 a.m. Asterisk Tolkien: Filling Medieval Lacunae Session 345; Fetzer 1060 Sponsor: Dept. of Religious Studies and Philosophy, The Hill School. Organizer and Presider: John Wm. Houghton, Hill School
The “Lost” Language of the Hobbits. Deidre Dawson, Independent Scholar
“To Recall Forgotten Gods from Their Twilight”: Tolkien, Machen, and Lovecraft. John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar
“Backdreaming” Beowulf’s Scyld Scefing Legend. Anna Smol, Mount Saint Vincent Univ.
Bred in Mockery. Michael Wodzak, Viterbo Univ.
Saturday noon Tolkien at Kalamazoo business meeting. Bernhard 212.
Saturday 2:00 – 5:00 p.m. Off-campus session sponsored by Tolkien at Kalamazoo:
Tolkien Unbound Kalamazoo College, music recital hall, 2-5 p.m. (Come to the business meeting to arrange transportation)
Readers’ theater performance of Tolkien’s Kalevala
Eileen Moore, Maidens of Middle-earth 6.
Other sessions on medievalism
Thursday 10 a.m. Looking Back at the Middle Ages. Presider: Audrey Becker, Marygrove College. Session 35.
Discovering and Inventing Early Medieval Lincolnshire, 1710–1755. Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Bethany College
A Corruptly Nostalgic Crusade: Horace Walpole’s Medievalism of the Crusades in The Castle of Otranto. Rachel Landers, Univ. of Alabama–Birmingham
“Better than Anything Ancient”: Artifce, Authenticity, and William Morris’s Created Scandinavian Past. Mimi Ensley, Univ. of Notre Dame
Thursday 3:30 p.m. Digitally Teaching the Middle Ages: Case Studies (A Poster Session) Sponsor: Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO). Organizer: Carol L. Robinson, Kent State Univ.–Trumbull . Presider:Pamela Clements, Siena College. Session 138.
Teaching with King’s Quest Part I . Kevin A. Moberly, Old Dominion Univ.
Teaching with King’s Quest Part II . Jessica Dambruch, Old Dominion Univ.
Game Theories and Teaching Medieval Literature. John McLaughlin, East Stroudsburg Univ.
Teaching with Lord of the Rings Online. Carol L. Robinson
Role-Playing Games and the Multimedia Wife of Bath Project. Daniel-Raymond Nadon, Kent State Univ.
Friday 1:30 p.m. Medievalism and Labor (A Roundtable) Sponsor: International Society for the Study of Medievalism. Organizer and Presider: Amy S. Kaufman, Middle Tennessee State Univ. Session 276.
Adjunct Serfs in a Feudal Academy?. Michael R. Evans, Delta College
Life in Another Castle: Medieval Studies and Game Design. Serina Patterson, Univ. of British Columbia
King’s Scab: Economic Chivalry and Immaterial Labor in the Age of the Sharing Economy. Brent Addison Moberly, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington, and Kevin A. Moberly, Old Dominion Univ.
Should I Put This on My C.V.? Medievalism and Academic Labor in Graduate School. Usha Vishnuvajjala, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
Contractions and Expulsions of the Retro-medieval toward the Female Body. Carol L. Robinson, Kent State Univ.–Trumbull
Friday 3:30 p.m. Medievalism and Anti-Semitism Sponsor: International Society for the Study of Medievalism. Organizer: Amy S. Kaufman, Middle Tennessee State Univ. Presider:Martin B. Shichtman, Eastern Michigan Univ. Session 328.
Medieval Heritage and Nazi Rituals: Historical Pageants in the Upper Palatinate. Richard Utz, Georgia Institute of Technology
William Dudley Pelley: An American Nazi in King Arthur’s Court. Kevin J. Harty, La Salle Univ.
Medievalism in Contemporary American Anti-Semitism. Paul B. Sturtevant, Smithsonian Institution
Friday 3:30 p.m. Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers: Gender and Sex in Medieval Film and Television
Sponsor: Royal Studies Journal. Organizer and Presider: Janice North, Univ of Arkansas-Fayetteville. Session 313.
Melusine, Magic, and Maternal Blood in The White Queen. Misty Urban, Muscatine Community College
“Men go to battle, women wage war”: Gender Politics in The White Queen (2013). Kavita Mudan Finn, Independent Scholar
A New Isabel for the Twenty-First Century. Emily S. Beck, College of Charleston
Queering Isabella: The “She-Wolf of France” in Film and Television. Michael R. Evans, Delta College
Friday 3:30 p.m. Medieval Studies and Medievalism, Past and Present Organizer: Christina M. Heckman, Augusta Univ. Presider: Christina Heckman. Session 295. [updated listing]
Gower among the Protestants: A Medieval Poet, Post-reform. F. Yeager, Univ. of West Florida
Church History and the Sound of Words in N. S. F. Grundtvig’s Brunanburh and Phoenix Ballads. Robert E. Bjork, Arizona State Univ.
Saturday 1:30 p.m. A Session of Ice and Fire: Medievalism in the Game of Thrones Franchise Sponsor: Tales after Tolkien Society Organizer: Helen Young, La Trobe Univ. Presider: Geoffrey B. Elliott, Oklahoma State Univ.–Stillwell. Session 417.
Forging and Reforging Valyrian Steel: The Role of Arthurian Sword Motifs in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Alexandra Garner, Bowling Green State Univ.
Peaceweaving in Westeros. Carol Parrish Jamison, Armstrong State Univ.
Dragons, Alliances, Power, and Gold: Disruptor Beam’s Game of Thrones Ascent. Shiloh R. Carroll, Tennessee State Univ.
Saturday 1:30p.m.
Childhood/Innocence in Victorian Medievalism Organizer: Daniel Najork, Arizona State Univ.; Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group Presider: Daniel Najork. Session 386.
Alice, Dream Visions, and Victorian Childhood. William Racicot, Independent Scholar
Victorian Medievalism and the Construction of the Innocent Male Body in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Cheryl Jaworski, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
Medieval Fantasy and the Neo-Victorian Child in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia Heather L. N. Hess, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville
Saturday 3:30 p.m. In Fashions Reminiscent: The Overlapping Objects, Discourses, and Ideas of the Sixties and the Middle Ages Sponsor: punctum books. Organizers & presiders: Geoffrey W. Gust, Stockton Univ.; John F. O’Hara, Stockton Univ.; Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group Geoffrey W. Gust, John F. O’Hara, and Eileen A. Joy. Session 465.
Chaucer in the Stoned Age. Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State Univ.
Trees Again: Time Travel with Plants. Lara Farina, West Virginia Univ.
Medievalism and the End(s) of Empire in 1960s Science Fiction: Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Scott Wells, California State Univ.–Los Angeles
Sounds of Silence: Popular Existentialism and Medieval Autofiction. Christopher Jensen, Florida State Univ.
Sunday 10:30 a.m. Fanfiction in Medieval Studies Organizer: Anna Wilson, Univ. of Toronto Presider: Anna Wilson. Session 524.
Strange Attraction to Sacred Places: Reading Fannish Fantasies in a Copy of Mandevilles’s Travels. Alison Harper, Univ. of Rochester
Choose Your Own Arthur: Canon and Agency in Choice of Games’ Pendragon. Rebecca Slitt, Choice of Games, LLC
Code-Switching Media: Vernacular Medievalisms and the Queer Lives of Mulan. Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.
Charlemagne Fanfiction and Collective Identity in Fourteenth-Century England. Elizabeth Williamsen, Minnesota State Univ.–Mankato
Let me know if I’ve missed any sessions on Tolkien or medievalism.
A couple of weeks ago, my department held a reception for our students, and the event included a series of brief talks called “What I Did Last Summer.” Our intention was to introduce our work to our students and also to combat the popular misconception that professors have the summer “off.”
We wanted to give students a glimpse of what their professors do when they’re not teaching. The talks — which had to be under 10 minutes — described various tasks that we performed over the summer, from collective bargaining on behalf of the faculty union, to the writing of short stories, to doing research for articles and conference papers. I offered to talk about my research and conference trips to Oxford and New York, but the time limit was a challenge!
I’ve already written in this blog about my research trip to Oxford and my conference trip to New York, but in case you’re still interested, here is another version of the story; I’ve recorded the talk that goes with my slides. I hope this presentation gives some insight into the main ideas that are fuelling my work these days.
I’ve just heard about a new project, the journal Eala, which will publish compositions in Old English and other medieval Germanic languages. The founding editor and editor-in-chief of Word Hoard Press, Richard Littauer, plans to publish the journal online and include original compositions in Old English, Old Norse, and the like, as well as translations.
I can’t help thinking that Tolkien would be pleased to see this kind of venture, as he was a proponent of writing in the alliterative verse styles of Old English and Old Norse, either in the original languages or in modern English. As readers of his recently published Beowulf know, Tolkien was adept at composing in Old English – see his prose story “Sellic Spell” in that volume as an example. Tom Shippey has written about the difficulties of counting just how many poems and fragments Tolkien wrote in alliterative meter in both modern and Old English; in his essay “Tolkien as a Writer of Alliterative Poetry” in the book Tolkien’s Poetry, Shippey counts 22 compositions in modern English alliterative meter plus “The Homecoming”; another nine complete poems and five fragments in Old English, and that’s not including modern English poems imitating Old Norse alliterative style. In other words, Tolkien wrote a lot of alliterative verse.
Although Tolkien did write in other verse forms besides alliterative meter, he believed that alliterative verse was a natural form for English speakers and advocated its use – but who was listening? Lately, though, I’ve seen signs of interest in bringing medieval poetry more in contact with modern writers. Jane Chance, for example, is hosting an “Original Medievalistic Poetry Reading and Open Mic” at next year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ll have to check it out next May in the hopes of hearing some alliterative compositions. And here’s another sign of interest from a couple of years ago: Modern Poets on Viking Poetry: A Cultural Translation Project resulted in the publication of poems in modern English, which can be downloaded here.
These last two are projects that highlight the influence of medieval poetry on modern writers, but to write “correct” alliterative verse in a medieval language like Old English is another matter entirely. I’m looking forward to seeing what shows up in Eala.
The 12th Annual Tolkien at University of Vermont conference is just days away. The conference is free and open to the public. It starts with a Friday night Fireside reading at which participants can get up and read their favorite passages, and continues on Saturday with a day of conference presentations. On Sunday afternoon, the University Tolkien Club organizes a “Springle-Ring Shire Festival” with all kinds of fun activities.
This year’s conference theme is Medieval Verse Narratives, and the keynote speaker is Dr. Michael D.C. Drout, who will be speaking about “Scholarship as Art, Art as Scholarship: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf.”
The other presentations are:
Gerry Blair (Independent Scholar). “J.R.R. Tolkien, Performance Artist and Modern Medievalist.”
Jamie Williamson (University of Vermont). “Verses and Prose: Medieval Narrative, Nineteenth Century Medievalism, and Tolkien.”
Andrew Liptak (Independent Scholar/Norwich University). “Modern Fantasy’s Roots in Medieval Verse.”
Kristine Larsen (Central Connecticut State University). “Guinevere, Grimhild, and the Corrigan: Witches and Bitches in Tolkien’s Medieval Narrative Verse, or, Good Girls Don’t Use Magic (Except if You’re Galadriel, but Elf Magic is Diff erent, and Who Ever Said Galadriel was a Good Girl?)”
Andrew C. Peterson (Harvard). “A Brief Exploration of Tolkien’s Alliterative Verse and Echoes of The Fall of Arthur Heard in Middle-earth”
Christopher Vaccaro (University of Vermont). “’Dyrne langað’: Secret Longing in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings.”
Anna Smol (Mount Saint Vincent University). “Poetic Time-Travel in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”
Cheryl Hunter (Independent Scholar). “Beowulf and Thorin as Ancestral Heroes: Their Choices, and the Dragons They Face.”
and Undergraduate Voices
For more information and to view past programs, you can go to the conference website.
