Master of Middle Earth (22 page)

Aragorn the man
recedes from us into Aragorn the King. But there are still times when the regal
robes are off. One such moment is the morning when Gandalf and he climb
together on the slopes of Mount Min-dolluin behind the city. Oppressed by the
long prospects of responsibility stretching ahead and aware of Gandalf's
imminent departure, Aragorn feels his loneliness: "I would still have your
counsel," he confesses. It does not comfort him to know that Gandalf's
work is done and his own only begun. He looks ahead, too, to the time of his
own death and wonders who will rule after him if he has no children.
Symbolically, the Tree in the courtyard at Minas Tirith still stands withered
and barren. Gandalf then finds for him near the snowline the sapling of the
White Tree, which, transplanted to the courtyard, will grow and bloom and bear
other saplings in other years. As if to seal this promise of continuance, Arwen
comes to be Aragorn's Queen, the future mother of sons and daughters.

Aragorn's first
public acts justify confidence that he will be a strong, just, and far-sighted
ruler. His foreign policy is designed to make friends of the Easterlings and
Southrons, who have been traditional enemies of the West. He spares those
captured in the War and sends them home free men. With their countries he signs
equitable treaties of amity and commerce. Sauron's slaves he manumits and
settles on fertile land of which he makes them owners. To the primitive woses
he gives in perpetuity the Druadan Forest in which they live. Ithilien is to be
resettled by Faramir as Prince, and restored to loveliness. Mordor is razed.
The ents are to reforest the rubble of Isengard. Aragorn himself will rebuild
the former capital of the North Kingdom at Fornost. Roads will be cleared,
communications restored, and the societies of hobbits, dwarves, men, ents, and
other beings, which Sauron's policy estranged from one another, will be knit
together again as they should be. In token of this reunion elves, dwarves, and
men join to refurbish and expand the capital city of Minas Tirith. All is not
joyful in the new dispensation, for the elves are going. Other Saurons, other
wars, he somewhere ahead. But Aragorn's friendship for all races of good will
fit him well to inaugurate the Age of Men in a world still populous with many
species of intelligent life.

It is easy for the
student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves,
many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of
Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted. It seems vain to add to the
litter . . . But that is not true . . . Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is
a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be
the
embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth
leaves for countless generations of men.

"On
Fairy-stories," p. 56

This short tale
(written about 1939, published in 1945)
¹
is an apparently simple but
actually quite intricate vision of the struggles of an artist to create a
fantasy world and of what happens to him and his work after death. The artist,
in this case a painter named Niggle (he might equally well have been a writer),
is racing against the summons of death to complete his one great canvas, a
picture of a Tree with a background of forest and distant mountains. Because of
outside distractions and his own weaknesses he dies leaving it unfinished.
After death he goes through a period of discipline in Purgatory and thereafter
finds himself inside the landscape depicted by his painting, which he is now
able to complete with the aid of a neighbor, Parish, who was a prime hindrance
to his work during life. He is then free to travel toward the mountains, which
represent the next highest stage in his spiritual growth.

This little plot,
so bald in summary, is in fact crowded with allegories, which give literary
form to views about fantasy writing expounded by Tolkien in his lecture,
"On Fairy-stories," delivered at the University of St. Andrews only a
year before. The close connections between the tale and the lecture were
pointed out by Tolkien himself when he printed them together under the newly
devised joint title
Tree and Leaf
in 1964. "Though one is an
'essay' and the other a 'story,'" he wrote in the Introductory Note,
"they are related: by the symbols of Tree and Leaf, and by both touching
in different ways on what is called in the essay 'subcreation.' "
²

First as to the
symbols. "Leaf" of course refers literally to any leaf in the foliage
of Niggle's Tree, and also more specifically to the particular painted Leaf
rescued from the destruction of the picture as a whole and hung in the Museum
under the caption "Leaf: by Niggle." Figuratively, it stands for any
single story taken out of a greater connected body of narratives; and also for this
one story of Tolkien's, "Leaf by Niggle," seen in detachment from the
whole body of his writing. The other symbol, "Tree," stands sometimes
for that same whole body of Tolkien writing, but more often for the living,
growing tradition of fairy stories in general, which the essay "On
Fairy-stories" calls the "Tree of Tales." In the essay the
collective literary productions of human wonder are centrally visualized as a
tree with many branches having an "intricately knotted and ramified
history." Some pages farther on Tolkien develops the image in great
detail.

The student of
history, he writes, may feel that "he is collecting only a few leaves,
many of them torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales,
with which the Forest of Days is carpeted." It may seem impossible for
anyone now to contribute a new Leaf, a new individual story, to this ancient
marvel. But "the seed of the tree can be replanted in any soil," even
that polluted by modern industrialism, and "each leaf, of oak and ash and
thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern." In that final phrase,
particularly, lies one germ of the story concerning Niggle's Tree, which
Tolkien praises as "quite unique in its way," and of his Leaf, about
which the Second Voice says, "a Leaf by Niggle has a charm of its
own."

Another germ of
the story was a large poplar free outside Tolkien's window, which he often
watched while lying in bed before, it was first mutilated and later chopped
down. He confides as much in the Introductory Note to
Tree and Leaf.
³
But this is not the only, or the most significant, piece of autobiography he
reveals in the Note. Both the essay and the story, he writes there, were
composed during the same period (1938-1939) when he was writing the first nine
chapters of
The Lord of the Rings,
which brought Frodo and his hobbit
friends as far as the inn at Bree. There Tolkien's invention failed him:
"I had then no more notion than they of what had become of Gandalf or who
Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to find out." The
latter part of the sentence is eloquent of his state of mind at the time.
Having barely survived the First World War, he feared that he would not survive
the Second, which then loomed more and more ominously. He felt a sense of urgency
and despair at the prospect of not living to complete not only
The Lord of
the Rings
but the still vaster history of the early Ages of Middle-earth,
which lay in fragments in his workshop. When we find Niggle in the same
situation it is only natural to see a good dead of Tolkien in his story. In
fact, allowing for artistic differences, the story may well be looked at as an
effort on Tolkien's part to find some underlying meaning for all his labors, if
not in this life then in the next.

Along this line of
interpretation we notice that Nig-gle's world, like Tolkien's, is unmistakably
Christian. It is governed by very strict laws (moral and religious in nature)
requiring each man to help his needy neighbor, even at painful cost to himself
and even in the absence of both gratitude and desert. These laws are enforced
externally by an inspector. Internally their sanction lies in Niggle's own
conscience and his imperfectly generous heart. He was "kind-hearted in a
way. You know the sort of kind heart: it made him uncomfortable more often than
it made him do anything; and even when he did anything it did not prevent him
from grumbling, losing his temper, and swearing . . . All the same it did land
him in a good many odd jobs for his neighbor, Mr. Parish, a man with a lame
leg." Other interruptions to Niggle's painting, however, come from his own
idleness, failure of concentration, and lack of firmness. Meantime he neglects
to prepare for the long journey he has been told is imminent, and he is taken
unawares by the coming of the Black Driver to take him through the dark tunnel.
This situation inevitably recalls that in the medieval drama
Everyman,
to which Tolkien is giving a modern adaptation.

In the workhouse
on the other side (an updated version of Dante's
Purgatorio
) Niggle is
assigned hard labors aimed at correcting his sins and weaknesses. He learns to
work at set intervals, to be prompt, to finish every task, to plan, to think in
orderly fashion, to serve without grumbling. He is then ready to hear a
dialogue between two voices, discussing what is to be done with him, one voice
insisting on justice, the other pleading for mercy. Here the resemblance is to
the debate between the four daughters of God—Righteousness and Truth against
Mercy and Peace—at the judging of souls, a favorite theme in medieval drama and
poetry. One prominent instance of it con-eludes the famous
Castle of
Perseverance.
That Tolkien should employ techniques and ideas drawn from
the literature of a period he knew so well is not surprising.
⁴
But his
success in acclimatizing them to our times is remarkable. Again we are
justified in stressing that they were, and still are, Catholic.

The other half of
the connection between Niggle's story and the essay, mentioned in the
Introductory Note to
Tree and Leaf,
is that they both touch "in
different ways on what is called in the essay 'sub-creation.' " What
different ways, and what is this thing called subcreation? The essay defines
and analyzes subcreation as the process by which human imagination invents secondary
worlds strange to the everyday primary world in which we live and move, but
nevertheless possessed of an internal consistency of their own. Furthermore,
and most-significant for the Niggle story, the best of these imagined worlds
reflect dimly a higher reality lying behind the appearances of the primary
world: "Probably every writer making a secondary world . . . hopes that
the peculiar qualities of this secondary world (if not all the details) are
derived from reality or are flowing into it . . . The peculiar quality of the
'joy' in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the
underlying reality or truth."
³

Tolkien means
Niggle's fate to be a literary embodiment of this doctrine. For, when the Voice
of mercy wins its traditionally required victory he finds himself standing in
the middle of the very landscape in his painting, left unfinished at his death,
and looking right at the Tree, which was its main feature. The Tree is now
finished, he sees. But its leaves are "as he imagined them rather than as
he made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many
that might have budded, if only he had time." In short, Niggle is now
seeing clearly the reality of which he had only a partial vision while on earth.
That this is Tolkien's meaning is made plain by a dialogue between a shepherd
and Niggle's neighbor Parish, who joins him in the same landscape and is amazed
that it should have been represented by the despised painting: "But it did
not look like this then, not
real,"
he exclaims in wonder. He is
rebuked by the shepherd: "No, it was only a glimpse then . . . but you
might have caught the glimpse, if ever you had thought it worth while to
try." This key word
glimpse,
here twice written, is used several
times in the essay in the same context to characterize the brief clouded
insight into permanence which is all that a writer of tales can hope to catch.
⁸

Such insight is
never earned but is a power gratuitously bestowed. "It's a gift!"
declares Niggle as he looks around him at the Tree and the woods. And Tolkien
comments, "He was referring to his art, and also to the result, but he was
using the word quite literally." Translate painting into verbal narrative.
Broaden the reference from the single story about Niggle (Leaf) to the full
panorama of Tolkien's legendary history of Middle-earth (Tree), which was in
his thoughts when he wrote both story and essay. Then emerges Tolkien's faith
that his own incomplete life's work images in some sense ultimate truths that are
not bounded by the particular details it narrates. Even if he never survives to
finish it, it will always have the eternal validity of shadowing forth in human
words a portion of the great Tree of Tales, which soars always just at the edge
of man's vision.

There is more. The
Tree itself may be finished but Niggle discovers that other scenes of the
forest landscape, only roughly sketched in his painting, are likewise still
shadowy in the reality he now inhabits: ". . . in the Forest there were a
number of inconclusive regions that still needed work and thought." He
sees what needs doing, but to his surprise is unable to accomplish it without
the aid of his neighbor Parish, whom he had always considered the worst of
pests and the bane of his art. Looking more precisely at the Tree, he has also
become aware that its best leaves have been painted "in collaboration with
Mr. Parish." When Parish is sent to help him it is the combined work and
thought of the two men that gives the forest its final elaboration of substance.