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Anna Smol

~ Department of English, Mount Saint Vincent University

Anna Smol

Tag Archives: Tolkien Reading Day

Tolkien Reading Day 2022: Love & Friendship

25 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by Anna Smol in Medieval, Research, Tolkien

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death of friends, Love and Friendship, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Reading Day 2022, Tolkien Society

Every year to mark the downfall of Sauron on March 25, the Tolkien Society announces a theme for reading, discussion, and celebration. Let’s hope that this year’s theme, Love and Friendship, will lead to positive appreciations of the variety of loving relationships that Tolkien represents in his fiction.

I’ve written some articles on male relationships, mainly in The Lord of the Rings, and particularly how experiences in the First World War pushed male friendships beyond what contemporary heteronormative society might consider conventional behaviours. For example, in looking at Frodo and Sam’s relationship in a 2004 article (available below), I found that their gentle hand-holding and caring gestures could be seen in the context of what historian Santanu Das has described as sometimes occurring among WWI soldiers. The love and friendship in such relationships could exist on a continuum that would be difficult to pinpoint as one clearly-defined identity. As Das puts it: “A new world of largely nongenital tactile tenderness was opening up in which pity, thrill, affection, and eroticism are fused and confused depending on the circumstances, degrees of knowledge, normative practices, and sexual orientations, as well as the available models of male-male relationships” (Das 52–53).

For this year’s theme, though, I would like to pick up on some thoughts that I presented at a Tolkien conference in 2013 at Valparaiso University. I had previously written about friendships in war, but I wanted to explore what happens to friends after the war, after lives lived in peace with wives and children. How does Tolkien represent the death of friends?

Tolkien fans will recognize the gravesite of John Ronald and Edith, marked by a shared headstone over the place where husband and wife are laid together. As we know, Tolkien arranged to have the names “Beren” and “Lúthien” carved there under their names, thus associating himself and his wife with this romantic couple. They are buried together in Wolvercote Cemetery, which shouldn’t be surprising to us, given that husbands and wives are frequently buried together in western culture.

One might very well wonder, then, why another couple patterned after Beren and Lúthien — Aragorn and Arwen — do not end their days in the same place, in the same tomb. In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn’s death is described: he says farewell to Arwen and tells her not to despair as he falls asleep. The story tells us “And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world” (RotK, App. A). Arwen, though, does not choose to die by his side. She says farewell to her loved ones and leaves Minas Tirith for silent and lonely Lórien, where Galadriel and Celeborn no longer live. Her last resting place is there:  “There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea” (RotK, App. A). 

Aragorn, however, does not lie in his tomb alone in Minas Tirith. In Appendix B, we are told that at the passing of King Elessar, the resting places of Merry and Pippin are moved beside the king’s. In fact, Merry and Pippin had previously left their homes – as the chronicle tells us, “they handed over their goods and offices to their sons and rode away over the Sarn Ford, and they were not seen again in the Shire” (RotK, App. B). Merry travels to be with Éomer before he dies, and then he and Pippin spend their last few years in Gondor, “until they died and were laid in Rath Dínen among the great of Gondor” (RotK, App. B). Later, they are moved to rest beside Aragorn. The death of the king also prompts Legolas to sail over the Sea, “and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf” (RotK, App. B). And of course, Samwise Gamgee, after the death of his wife Rose, leaves his children and his home and, according to his family tradition, goes to the Grey Havens and passes over the Sea – this final reunion with Frodo being what was hinted at near the end of the Return of the King by Frodo himself, the possibility discussed in the unpublished epilogue to the book, and also stated in Appendix B.

In other words, Merry and Pippin leave their families and are finally laid to rest together, then moved to lie beside Aragorn; Legolas and Gimli pass out of this world together, and Sam leaves his family to end his days with Frodo – or so we are led to believe. In the cases of Legolas and Gimli and Sam and Frodo, Tolkien won’t confirm with any certainty in the story that they ended their days in one place, but Tolkien’s unmistakable desire to have them together in death leads him to give us very strong hints that this is what might have happened. 

We have examples of the desire of friends to be together in death, in some cases even leaving families to do so, not only in Tolkien’s fiction but also in historical facts. Many of the following examples come from a book by Alan Bray called The Friend, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, which has made me look at the concept of friendship, especially the death of friends, in Tolkien’s work in a new light.

Ancient and medieval texts describe the close bonds between men, sometimes as sworn brothers. In Homer’s The Iliad, the ghost of Patroclus visits his dear friend Achilles in a dream and says to him  – and here I give you Stephen Mitchell’s translation:

But there is one more
thing that I have to ask, and I hope you will do it. 
May my bones not be buried apart from your bones, Achilles.
May they lie together, just as we grew up together
when my father brought me from Opois to your house 
....
It was then that Lord Peleus welcomed me in his home, 
and he brought me up kindly and let me be your attendant. 
So may one urn hold the bones of us both together. (23.80-90) 

Here is a representation of lifelong companions and friends and one’s desire for burial together after death – to mingle their very bones in the same place.

We can find other examples in medieval literature. Take the Middle English romance about two friends, Amis and Amiloun. These two young men pledge their fidelity to each other as sworn brothers, a pledge that is tested severely in later life in this romance, when one of them sacrifices his own children to save his “trewe” brother (don’t worry — the children are miraculously brought back to life afterwards). The two sworn brothers die together on the same day and are laid in the same grave:

Both on oo day were they dede
And in oo grave were they leide,
The knyghtes both twoo;
And for her treth and her godhede (goodness; virtue)
The blisse of hevyn they have to mede, (as their reward)
That lasteth ever moo.

In the ballad of Bewick and Graham, collected a few centuries later, we have again two sworn brothers. They are forced to fight each other, but they vow that if one of them dies in the fight, the other will kill himself, which is exactly what happens. After the death of Graham the last words from Bewick are : “Nay, dig a grave both low and wide, / And in it us two pray bury;”

In these fictional examples, the claims of one’s sworn brother are often set in conflict with kinship claims but nevertheless surpass them.

But it’s not just in fictional texts that we – and Tolkien – could find representations of men closely bound in ties of friendship, often with the wish to be buried together. Alan Bray examines several examples, mainly in pre-18th century traditional society, of gravestones or memorials commemorating two friends together, usually with the same iconography one would expect in tombs of married couples, and he discusses the evidence for ceremonial pledges of friendship between men (and in one interesting instance between two women in the nineteenth century). These rituals occurred in public, in church usually, before witnesses and with the two friends taking communion together to seal their pledge of fidelity to each other. The public countenance of friendship could be visible in various practices in the course of a friendship: exchanging the kiss of peace, the giving of gifts, the sharing of food, and the sharing of beds (in life and in death).

For example, Tolkien would have seen the 14th-century brass memorial in the chapel of Merton College in Oxford for John Bloxham and John Whytton arranged in the familiar iconography of a married couple, side by side with hands in prayer. The tomb was designed by Whytton after Bloxham’s death for the both of them, commemorating their friendship of more than 20 years.

Memorial brass for John Bloxham and John Whytton, Merton College, Oxford

Or, I wonder if Tolkien ever noticed this gravesite when as a young boy he and his mother and brother rented rooms in a postman’s cottage in Rednal that sat at the edge of the grounds belonging to the Birmingham Oratory. According to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, “The cottage lay on the corner of quiet country lane, and behind it were the wooded grounds of the Oratory House with the little cemetery adjoining the chapel where the Oratory fathers and Newman himself were buried. The boys had the freedom of these grounds, and further afield they could roam the steep paths that led through the trees to the high Lickey Hill.” (37). In that cemetery through which Tolkien and his brother roamed lies the shared grave of John Henry Cardinal Newman and Ambrose St John, an arrangement that Newman had been careful to insist on. These two friends are flanked in their final resting place by two others: Joseph Gordon and Edward Caswall. These three friends Newman referred to as “three great and loyal friends of mine” (Bray 294) who died before Newman and whose pictures he kept beside his altar in his room, an arrangement that was replicated in their final resting places.

Burial place of Cardinal Newman and Ambrose St. John

Recognizing the importance of friendship in these past examples adds insight to the significance of friendship in Tolkien’s work. In The Silmarillion, for example, we have the story of Maedhros and Fingon. After Maedhros is captured by Morgoth, his lifelong friend Fingon set out to search for him. We are told that Fingon had been “close in friendship with Maedhros” and that “the thought of their ancient friendship stung his heart” (Sil. 124). In a rescue scene that is a precursor to Sam’s rescue of Frodo in the tower, Fingon begins to sing, and Maedhros answers. Fingon manages to find and to save his friend Maedhros, who waives his claim to kingship over the Noldor, to the disapproval of his brothers.

A similar bond of friendship can be seen in The Children of Húrin in the characters of Beleg and Túrin. Beleg is devoted to Túrin’s welfare, searching alone for him in the wilderness, leaving his own people to be with Túrin. At his death, he is called “truest of friends” (CH 156) and Túrin’s grief over Beleg’s death “was graven on the face of Túrin and never faded” (CH 156).

A couple of the friendships Tolkien describes involve not only this kind of lifelong loyalty in the face of peril, but also some kind of ritual or oath to mark the friendship. Take the example of Felagund and Barahir in The Silmarillion. Barahir comes to King Finrod Felagund’s aid in battle. In return, Felagund “swore an oath of abiding friendship and aid in every need to Barahir and all his kin, and in token of his vow he gave to Barahir his ring” (Sil. 176). Oaths can be problematic in Tolkien’s fiction, as we well know from Fëanor’s oath, but Felagund nevertheless makes a vow of friendship. This kind of sworn relationship creates a new, voluntary kinship, the outward sign of which is the ring that is given to Barahir. The oath of friendship extends to Barahir and all his kin, one of whom, Beren, will make a claim on that bond, with the result that Felagund will leave behind his family, renounce his kingship, and sacrifice his own life to save Beren from certain death.

A formal vow and the giving of a gift as its token marks the covenant of friendship between Felagund and Barahir that creates new relations between their families. In The Lord of the Rings, the nine members of the Fellowship do not swear any formal vows to support each other or to accomplish their tasks – Elrond allows for the operation of free will in this momentous matter – but I do think that Tolkien adapts an old ritual of fidelity in the story of Frodo and Sam that is a mark of their unique friendship and, seen in the light of other practices of sworn friendship, helps to explain events once they return home. I’ve described that pledge in a previous post. Suffice it to say that it involves another scene of tender hand-holding on Mount Doom in which Frodo and Sam reenact the medieval ritual of homage.

I think that that scene marks a private pledge of loyalty and love – the friendship that we see in so many other examples – that has a bearing on the lives of Frodo and Sam when they return home. Frodo assumes that their bond will continue to keep them together, never questioning the possibility that Sam would not want to move into Bag End with him. When Sam expresses his concerns over being “torn in two” (RotK, VI, 9) by his relationship with Rosie and with Frodo, we glimpse how the strength of the bond of friendship can be perceived as equivalent to that of marriage. And when Frodo bequeaths “all that I had and might have had” (RotK, VI, 9) to Sam, making him his heir, we see the workings of the voluntary kinship ties that the institution of friendship could create. Sam becomes like kin to Frodo, who gives him everything as a token of their friendship. 

Lastly, we see the desire of friends to end their lives together. Although Frodo knows that Sam cannot sail west with him (at least not right away), he does ask Sam to arrange for some time to go with him to the Grey Havens. Finally, Sam understands the reason why:

Where are you going, Master?” cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.
“To the Havens, Sam,” said Frodo.
“And I can’t come.”
“No, Sam. Not yet anyway, not further than the Havens……


“Come now, ride with me!”

(RotK, VI. 9.)

I think that when Frodo says to Sam,  “Come now, ride with me!” he is in effect saying that he wants to have his friend by his side in what will be equivalent to Frodo’s death scene, his passing out of his world and into a new one.

The bond that spurs one friend to leave behind home and family to sacrifice everything for the sake of the other, the creation of new relationships that establish a different kind of kinship, sometimes marked by vows or rituals, and the desire to face eternity together, sometimes side by side in the same grave —  these are elements of friendship that we can find in Tolkien’s fiction as we can in other texts and historical examples. These practices and rituals of love and friendship are old and varied, and could have a deep significance for the generations that have come before us.

More Readings

Some of the texts I’ve cited:

  • Alan Bray, The Friend. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
  • Amis and Amiloun can be found here: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/foster-amis-and-amiloun-introduction
  • Bewick and Graham can be read here: https://sacred-texts.com/neu/eng//child/ch211.htm
  • Homer’s The Iliad can be found in numerous translations.
  • Santanu Das, “‘Kiss me, Hardy’: Intimacy, Gender, and Gesture in World War I Trench Literature.” Modernism / Modernity, vol. 9, 2002, pp. 51-74.

My articles on friendship in The Lord of the Rings:

  • Anna Smol, “‘Oh…Oh…Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings.” [pdf] Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 949-979. Also available in Project Muse.
  • Anna Smol, “Male Friendship in The Lord of the Rings: Medievalism, the First World War, and Contemporary Rewritings.” The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 conference: 50 years of The Lord of the Rings. Vol. 1, edited by Sarah Wells, Coventry:UK, 2008, pp. 320-326. Mount Saint Vincent University’s E-Commons.
  • Anna Smol, “Tolkien’s Nod to the Medieval Homage Ritual in LotR.” 17 Nov. 2015. https://annasmol.net/2015/11/27/tolkiens-nod-to-the-medieval-homage-ritual-in-lotr/.

And even further reading:

Here is a wonderful book, beautifully written, by Amy Amendt-Raduege: “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Kent State UP, 2018. Winner of the 2020 Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies. This book doesn’t deal with the death of friends in the same way I’ve outlined above, but it does discuss the topic of death and dying in far broader terms, examining the manner of death, memorials of the dead, and ideas about what happens after death throughout The Lord of the Rings.

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Tolkien Reading Day: Online Get-togethers

23 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

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conference cancellations, Lockdown Instadrabbling, Tolkien Guide, Tolkien Reading Day, Unofficial Online Gathering

As we’re all getting accustomed to new ways of living through this pandemic — working from home; or going to work with, hopefully, new safety procedures; or sadly for many, losing jobs completely because of shut-downs and layoffs — we need some cheering up and sense of community. Tolkien Reading Day, held every March 25, is often a time when local Tolkien groups get together to read, discuss, and party, though that is unlikely to happen — should not happen!– in these self-isolating times.

A lot of Tolkienists have also felt bereft of their usual conference get-togethers. Cancellations so far include the Tolkien at Vermont conference, Popular Culture Association conference, and Tolkien at Kalamazoo events. We’re still waiting to see what will happen with the Leeds get-togethers, where both the International Medieval Congress and the Tolkien Society Seminar are scheduled for early July.

Tolkien Reading Day Unofficial Online Gathering

But we do have an online community that can celebrate Tolkien Reading Day. Jeremy Edmonds, over at TolkienGuide.com, has decided to organize an unofficial online gathering for Tolkien Reading Day. You will be able to pop into a livestream event all day long to chat, or to read if you like, or to listen to the scheduled readers. You will need a free account on Discord, or you will be able to access the livestream on YouTube. Go to TolkienGuide.com for the full details on how and where to get connected and to see the impressive schedule of readers.

Silmarillion Writers’ Guild Lockdown Instadrabbling

Dawn Walls-Thumma, over at the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, is hosting an online celebration of fanworks for Tolkien Reading Day in order to, as she says, “spend time with fellow fans (while practicing social distancing!) and bring art and joy to the world at a time when it very much needs it.” The event will take place on the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild Discord server; to join, you will need to send an email to moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org. For more details, go to the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild Lockdown Instadrabbling site.

I’d be happy to hear about other online gatherings in the comments. And remember:

hand washing technique with Ring verse

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Tolkien & the Mysterious: The Homecoming

25 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by Anna Smol in Old English, Research, Tolkien

≈ 5 Comments

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Battle of Maldon, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Tolkien and the mysterious, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society

“Before” by J.R.R. Tolkien

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.

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Tolkien Reading Day: the hope of hobbits

25 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Downfall of Sauron, Home and Hearth, In western lands, March 25, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien Ensemble, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society

March 25, the downfall of Sauron, is the date chosen by the Tolkien Society to celebrate Tolkien Reading Day.  This year’s theme is “Home and Hearth: the many ways of being a Hobbit.”  Around the world different groups will be holding events celebrating Tolkien’s work — see the Tolkien Society page for reports from some of them — or individuals will simply be reading their favorite passages at home. Check out the #TolkienReadingDay hashtag on Twitter or Instagram to see what people are reading today.

One of the ways of being a hobbit is to love songs, often songs celebrating simple homely pleasures:  “Sing hey! for the bath at close of day,” “Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go,” “Upon the hearth the fire is red,” or songs that are just meant to be fun, such as the “ridiculous song” Frodo sings at the Prancing Pony, “There is an inn,” or that Sam recites as “just a bit of nonsense,” his song about trolls.

There is one song that Sam sings, however, that is much more serious and that shows another side of being a hobbit:  the ability to find hope in the face of overwhelming odds. That song is “In western lands.” I’ve always loved this poem and especially one beautiful image in it.

The song occurs in The Return of the King in “The Tower of Cirith Ungol” chapter. Frodo has been captured by orcs, and Sam is feeling defeated, unable to find him. Suddenly, he starts singing, and gradually his voice rises and the words of the poem come to him “unbidden.” The song calls forth a response from Frodo, allowing Sam to locate him in the Tower.

In the song, the speaker situates himself in the farthest reaches of despair: “Though here at journey’s end I lie/ in darkness buried deep,/ beyond all towers strong and high,/ beyond all mountains steep” — and yet, he can imagine that this is not the entire world. “In western lands, beneath the Sun/ the flowers may rise in Spring…” He imagines a blooming world that “may” be alive, and by the end of the poem, he is certain that there is an eternal world elsewhere that is not affected by his seemingly hopeless situation: “above all shadows rides the Sun/ and Stars for ever dwell….” The final lines express his resolve: “I will not say the Day is done, / nor bid the Stars farewell.”

Elvenking's gate from across the river (detail) by Tolkien

Detail from Tolkien’s “The Elvenking’s gate from across the river,” fig. 50,  The Art of The Hobbit

My favorite lines come in the first stanza: “Or there maybe ’tis cloudless night / and swaying beeches bear / the Elven-stars as jewels white / amid their branching hair.”  Tolkien’s landscapes are usually alive and active; here, the trees and stars, two recurring and significant images for Tolkien, are connected in one image of softly dancing trees whose branches seem to be wearing the jewellery of starlight as if in their hair. By the end of that first stanza, the poet’s gaze is already moving from the flowers rising from the ground up to the stars in the sky, as if getting ready for the ideas that conclude the second stanza. I remember one summer night sitting outside, looking up through tree branches at a few stars, when these lines came immediately to mind as the perfect expression of that sight.

Donald Swann set this poem to music, although I think I prefer the Tolkien Ensemble version of it. You can listen to it here:

The hope of hobbits — little people who did not think they could change the world — is a valuable thought to hold on to.

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Tolkien Reading Day: 2 poems to memorize

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

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Brad Leithauser, Eilmann and Turner, Geoffrey Russom, In western lands, Lynn Forest-Hill, Petra Zimmermann, Poetry and Songs in Tolkien's Fiction, The New Yorker, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society, Tolkien's poetry, Upon the hearth, Why We Should Memorize

March 25th is a significant date in Tolkien’s secondary world, the downfall of Sauron. Since 2003, the Tolkien Society has celebrated by naming March 25  Tolkien Reading Day. This year’s theme is Poetry and Songs in Tolkien’s Fiction. You can check out the Tolkien Society website to see what various individuals, groups, libraries, and museums around the world are planning for this day, or look for #TolkienReadingDay on Twitter, Instagram, or any number of other sites such as Facebook.

In honour of Tolkien Reading Day, I’d like to present two of my favourite poems from The Lord of the Rings to try to convince you that these are great poems to memorize: “Upon the hearth the fire is red” and “In western lands.”

Walking in Nova Scotia. copyright Anna Smol

Some of you may be wondering why you would want to memorize a poem when you can have it at your fingertips in a book or online. A number of reasons come to mind, but I think that the best one was summarized a few years ago in a New Yorker article, “Why We Should Memorize” by Brad Leithauser:

…you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen.

A good example of a poem that you can know in both your brain and your body is the walking poem “Upon the hearth the fire is red” (in “Three is Company” in The Fellowship of the Ring ) — especially if you recite it while walking!

I find that the 4-beat lines make the perfect rhythm for a walk. Look at the first few lines, where I’ve put the stressed syllables in caps:

UpON the HEARTH the FIRE is RED

or

Still ROUND the CORner WE may MEET

a SUDden TREE or STANDing STONE

that NONE have SEEN but WE aLONE

If you lift and advance your foot on the unstressed syllable and place it down on the ground on the stressed syllable, you’ll feel the rhythm. Stand up and try it! The poem can adapt to your pace. Say it faster for a brisk walk; slow it down if you’re tired or would like to take in the scenery.

If we’re being technical, not all of the lines fit as neatly into this stress pattern. For example,

beNEATH the ROOF there is a BED

If you want to exaggerate the stress pattern and keep it consistent, you’d put more stress on “IS”  than it typically would hold. But if it feels right, go ahead. (Geoffrey Russom, in his article “Tolkien’s Versecraft,” identifies this replacement of a weak syllable where a strongly stressed one should be as fairly common practice in English poems. Read his article if you want to know about “pyrrhic substitution”).

Walking in Nova Scotia copyright Anna SmolNow, to walk and recite while looking about you, you’ll need to memorize the poem. I always find that writing out the poem by hand — not typing it — is the best way to start connecting the words to the body and the mind. Then it will require repetition. Saying the lines aloud helps. Let the rhymes remind you of what comes next. Repeat, repeat, repeat until you’ve made it your own. I admit that when I was memorizing this poem, I could be seen walking around town with a little card in my hand that contained the written poem, a memory aid for my repetitions until I could recite it confidently without props.

If you’re reading the poem aloud, you’ll notice that some lines are shorter than the opening lines in each stanza. For example, “Let them pass! Let then pass!” I find this just makes me pick up the pace a bit and fuels my energy.

It also helps to think about the structure of the poem when trying to remember what comes next. We start at home — “Upon the hearth the fire is red, / Beneath the roof there is a bed” (lines 1-2) but then we leave this comfortable place pretty quickly on a walking trip in the first stanza, heading out into the world. In the middle stanza, we realize that there are other paths that could be taken some day — “Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or a secret gate” (lines 11-12), and in the final stanza we return home to food and a good night’s sleep, “Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, / And then to bed! And then to bed!” (lines 29-30).

Elvenking's gate from across the river (detail) by Tolkien

Elvenking’s gate from across the river (detail) by Tolkien

Another reason to memorize a poem would be to have some beautiful words or images ready at hand to describe what you’re seeing or doing, or just because something reminds you of a line.  For me, “In western lands” (in “The Tower of Cirith Ungol” chapter in Return of the King) contains this beautiful image:

Or there maybe ’tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair. (lines 5-8)

[the second and fourth lines above should be indented; my program is not co-operating]

I love the way the branches of the trees are seen as strands of hair — reinforced by the image of the trees as “swaying” — and the stars that you can see through the branches become the jewels in their hair. I remember sitting out in the backyard one summer evening and looking up to see exactly what Tolkien is describing in this passage, a beautiful sight that needed his words to complete the scene.

Of course, there’s more to this poem than just one striking image. This is a poem about hope; it goes from normal life to despair and then finds a reason for going on. Sam sings this song as he despairs of finding Frodo in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, and it leads to his discovery of his friend.

I like the movement of the poem. It starts by having us look down to the earth, “beneath the Sun” to see a world starting to grow and bloom. Then we look up through the trees to the stars. In the second stanza, we’re buried deep and far from all this loveliness — “Though here at journey’s end I lie / in darkness buried deep” (lines 9-10). But even so, we know that “above all shadows rides the Sun/ and Stars for ever dwell” (lines 13-14).  The poem ends with an affirmation that no matter how deeply buried in darkness we might be, we can find hope: “I will not say the Day is done, / nor bid the Stars farewell” (lines 15-16).

You can spend a lot of time contemplating a good poem, and there is much to say about this one that won’t fit into a blog post. If you’d like some good ideas to spur your thinking, you can try a couple of essays in the book, Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner (Walking Tree Publishers, 2013).  In that book, Petra Zimmermann’s essay explores the development of “In western lands” through several drafts and discusses Sam’s creative process. And Lynn Forest-Hill’s essay looks at the connection of earthly and spiritual imagery in the poem.

If you have your own favourite poems for memorizing, let me know in the comments!

***

Works Cited

“Upon the hearth” can be found in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring and “In western lands” is in The Return of the King.

Tolkien’s artwork, “Elvenking’s gate from across the river,” can be found in The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, HarperCollins, 2011, fig. 50, p. 79.

The other photos are copyright Anna Smol. They were taken in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Secondary sources:

Forest-Hill, Lynn. “Poetic Form and Spiritual Function: Praise, Invocation and Prayer in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner. Walking Tree Publishers, 2013, pp. 91-116.

Leithauser, Brad. “Why We Should Memorize” The New Yorker  25 Jan. 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-should-memorize

Russom, Geoffrey. “Tolkien’s Versecraft in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 53-69.

Zimmermann, Petra. “‘The glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space’: The Function of Poems in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner. Walking Tree Publishers, 2013, pp. 59-89.

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Tolkien Reading Day 2016

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

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Aragorn Arwen, Life Death Immortality, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society

In the calendar of Middle-earth, March 25 marks the fall of Sauron; it’s also the date chosen by the Tolkien Society to celebrate an annual Tolkien Reading Day.  Not that I need a special day to ensure I’m reading Tolkien —  I think I must read something by Tolkien on many days in any given week. But still, I like to mark the occasion and to think about the special theme chosen each year by the Tolkien Society. This year’s theme is “Life, Death, and Immortality.”

Most of my published research deals with this theme by looking at how Tolkien writes about war experiences  — the friendships, the trauma, the impairment — but today I sought out something different: Appendix A in The Lord of the Rings, the tale of Aragorn and Arwen. It’s the passage in which Aragorn tells Arwen that the hard hour has arrived in which he will use “the grace” he’s been given as the last of the Númenoreans “to go at my will.”

‘I will speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.’

‘Nay, dear lord,” she said, ‘that choice is long over. There is now no ship that would bear me hence, and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Númenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.’

‘So it seems,’ he said. ‘But let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’

….And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.

But Arwen went forth from the House, and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Then she said farewell to Eldarion, and to her daughters, and to all whom she had loved; and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of Lórien and dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came….

There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth, and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea.

The Lord of the Rings. Return of the King. Appendix A (v)

The end of this glorious love story is uncompromising. Although Aragorn asks Arwen not to despair, he knows there is “no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world.”  And although Arwen knows the stories and the beliefs about the “Gift of Men,”  — she made her choice knowing all this full well — when the moment comes she also realizes just how  “bitter” it is.  Although they hold to the hope of an unknown after-life, she finds the personal experience of death an unprecedented sorrow — “the loss and the silence” afflict her, in spite of the fact that Aragorn had led a long and successful life and could even choose the time of his going.

And the sorrow of the passage extends further, locating Arwen in a long span of time in which even she is “utterly forgotten” and the world changed. The littleness of our lives in the course of time and the way in which all trace of our existence is eventually obliterated is something Tolkien does not shy away from.

Their story is one that illustrates well what Tolkien believes can be found in fairy-stories: “both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords” (“On Fairy-Stories”).

This post is written with my stepfather-in-law Gordon in mind, who at the age of 99, on this very day is hoping finally to “go at his will” outside the “circles of the world.”

 

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Life, Death, and Immortality in two authors

29 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Anna Smol in Publications, Tolkien

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An Apologue, Andre Alexis, Fifteen Dogs, Giller Prize, Life Death Immortality, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society, Writer's Trust

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

During the holiday break I can usually enjoy the leisurely reading of a novel or two other than the ones I need for my teaching and research. Fifteen Dogs, by André Alexis, is one of those books I’ve read for sheer pleasure, although I initially picked it up because I thought it might suit my Classical Traditions in English Literature course, where we read works from Greek and Latin antiquity alongside later adaptations. A review I had seen mentioned that the story begins with the gods Apollo and Hermes in a Toronto bar, an intriguing enough idea to make me take a further look. I wasn’t the only one – the book has received a lot of attention lately, as it was named the winner of Canada’s largest literary award, the Giller Prize, as well as the Writers’ Trust Prize.

I enjoyed the book immensely – it’s imaginative, thought-provoking, surprising, brutal, tender, moving. The action begins with Apollo and Hermes betting on whether bestowing human intelligence on animals would make the creatures even more unhappy than humans already are, or whether even one of the animals could live a happy life. On a whim, the gods decide to give some dogs human consciousness and a language.

It’s a little like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, except that Ovid usually represents humans who are metamorphosed into animals or plants while retaining their human minds. Alexis starts with the animals as animals; his dogs retain their essential “dogginess,” though their canine nature is modified by language and the consciousness that goes with it. It’s as if Alexis has reversed the Ovidian transformation by having the animals metamorphose into almost-humans. (Although I’m drawn to comparisons with Metamorphoses, probably because I’ve just finished teaching it, Alexis identifies another genre, subtitling the book An Apologue, a type of story derived from classical literature in which animals are used to point a moral or satirize humankind). Throughout the story, the dogs interact with their own kind, with various humans, and with the gods who, as in classical stories, watch, argue, and intervene, capriciously helping or harming earthly creatures.

As I was reading, I was struck by the following passage (on page 170) in which Hermes contemplates the difference between gods and mortals:

And yet, a divide existed between them, one that the god could not breach, despite his power, knowledge and subtlety: death. On one side, the immortals. On the other, these beings. He could no more understand what it was to live with death than they could what it was to exist without it. It was this difference that fascinated him and kept him coming back to earth. It was at the heart of the gods’ secret love for mortals. Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair. Being one of those who longed for death, Hermes found the earth and all its mortals fascinating, perhaps even at times worthy of the depths he allowed himself to feel for them.

As any Tolkienist would recognize, this is a central idea in Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories as well; death is the “Gift of Ilúvatar” to human beings, who come to fear the gift, in contrast to the deathless elves who sometimes envy the human ability to escape the created world through death. The Silmarillion legends contain many instances in which this difference plays out in the stories. Tolkien identified this theme precisely in The Lord of the Rings: “The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave it until its whole evil-aroused story is complete” (Letter 186).

Tolkien also identified “death” as the “key-spring” to The Lord of the Rings in a 1968 BBC interview:

In fact, the Tolkien Society has chosen “Life, Death, and Immortality” as the theme for the 2016 Tolkien Reading Day on March 25.

Fifteen Dogs is a very different kind of book from, say, The Lord of the Rings; for one thing, Alexis does not create a complete Secondary World with its own inhabitants. But he does write a mythical story. Of course, authors in all genres can write about themes of life, death, and immortality, but the fact that both Alexis and Tolkien do so by contrasting death-full and death-less characters makes me think that mythopoeic fantasies are particularly well suited to an exploration of these themes.

There are a lot of other fascinating elements in Fifteen Dogs, such as meditations on love, power, language, the desire to communicate with other beings, the experience of time — ideas that Tolkien readers will find familiar. But read it for yourself and let me know what you think! To whet your appetite, here is André Alexis with a preview of his story:

André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs : An Apologue. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2015. The book is available from Amazon as a paperback and ebook in Canada, the US, and the UK.

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International Tolkien Reading Day: Theme of Friendship

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Anna Smol in Medievalisms, Publications, Research, Tolkien

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fan fiction, friendship, Frodo's Body: Liminality and the Experience of War, Male Friendship in LOTR, Oh Oh Frodo: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings, The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, The First World War, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society, World War I writers

Today, March 25 (the date of Sauron’s downfall) is Tolkien Reading Day, which originated with the Tolkien Society and finds readers around the world. The Tolkien Society has chosen “friendship” as the theme for 2015.

I hope you will read some Tolkien today. The theme of friendship can be explored in many ways in Tolkien, but if you’re interested in reading more about Tolkien’s handling of male friendships, you can take a look at a couple of articles I’ve written about the subject. The first is titled “ ‘Oh…Oh…Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings” which was published in the scholarly journal Modern Fiction Studies in 2004. If you have a library subscription to Project Muse you can get it that way, but it’s also available on my Research webpage, or as a pdf download from the link above.

Another essay on the theme is the paper I delivered at the Tolkien 2005 conference in Birmingham, which was published in the Proceedings, The Ring Goes Ever On. A slightly expanded and revised version of that paper is available from my university’s digital repository (the Mount e-Commons) here: “Male Friendship in The Lord of the Rings: Medievalism, The First World War, and Contemporary Rewritings”.

Both of these articles place Tolkien’s representation of friendship in the context of World War I writers and include a look at contemporary fan fiction as an extension of some aspects of that.

A more recent piece has been published in a book edited by Christopher Vaccaro titled The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality (McFarland, 2013). My essay, “Frodo’s Body: Liminality and the Experience of War” focuses on the psychological and physical state of Frodo, once again in the context of war writing, but it also includes a look at the role of his friend Sam. The link above will take you to the pre-publication version of the essay.

Happy Reading Day!

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Dr. Anna Smol

This site includes my blog, "A Single Leaf," and webpages about my research and teaching in Tolkien studies, medievalism, Old English, and higher education pedagogy. Creative Commons License: <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>.

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