Tolkien Reading Day: the hope of hobbits

25 Sunday Mar 2018

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.

Tolkien Reading Day: 2 poems to memorize

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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 Smol Now, 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

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.

Tolkien Reading Day 2016

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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.”

Life, Death, and Immortality in two authors

29 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Anna Smol in Publications, Tolkien

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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.

International Tolkien Reading Day: Theme of Friendship

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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!