Master of Middle Earth (23 page)

This episode of
recognition and reconciliation has its Purgatorial function, of course, but it
also introduces two associated literary meanings previously presented by
Tolkien in the essay. One of these is Tolkien's belief that a subcreator of tales,
besides "glimpsing" existing reality, is allowed by God's grace to
contribute to the ongoing process of divine creation. In Tolkien's words, the
quality of a writer's secondary worlds is "derived from Reality
or
flowing into it"
(italics mine). More explicitly, Tolkien continues,
"So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now,
perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the
affoliation and multiple enrichment of creation." Niggle begins by
painting as well as he can a dimly discerned ideal world existing in the mind
of God (the notion verges on the Platonic). He ends by bringing into being
aspects of that world that were inchoate when he arrived. So, when he departs
for the mountains, he leaves behind "the house ... the garden, the grass,
the forest, the lake, and all the country," each complete "in its own
proper fashion." Not that Niggle or Parish or any other subcreator can
scheme such completions helter-skelter out of his own head. They have a
"proper fashion," a law of their own, which must be observed.
Nevertheless, the human contribution is genuine and original. Niggle's and
Parish's contributions are so vital that the country they have helped to create
is forever after known to the Two Voices as "Niggle's Parish." They
find it "very useful indeed" in rehabilitating newcomers to the
afterlife. It is not only "splendid for convalescence" but "for
many it is the best introduction to the Mountains." This sounds like an
application of the doctrine, defended in Tolkien's essay, that one prime
function of fantasy is Recovery from physical and spiritual blindness to the
astounding world we live in: "Recovery (which includes return and renewal
of health) is a re-gaining—re-gaining of a clear view."
⁷

Niggle's astounded
perception that his best painting has been done in collaboration with Parish
exemplifies a further doctrine of Tolkien's, that no writer can subcreate a
secondary world successfully without first having a clear-eyed knowledge of
life in our primary world. The only contribution which could possibly have been
made to Niggle's painting by this lame, whining neighbor with his endless
demands on Niggle's time and energy must consist in these very demands. Without
them Niggle would not have been forced daily to grapple so closely with the
hard facts of actual existence. Morally, this is his salvation. Artistically,
it gives him a strong sense of fact essential to fantasy. Over and over the
essay "On Fairy-stories," insists: "Fantasy does not blur the sharp
outlines of the real world; for it depends on them." Tolkien's very
definition of a fairy story requires it to construct an imaginary world that is
recognizably different in content and tone from the workaday one. It must
contain "images of things that are not only 'not actually present' but
which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all." A firm
knowledge of the difference is the
sine qua non
of sanity. It is also
necessary to the craft of writing a tale (or painting a picture) which allows
us Escape from the humdrum in order that we may return to it with fresh eyes,
able to see that it is not really humdrum at all. Parish's gift to Niggle,
then, was to provide the frustrating dreariness that prickled his imagination
to frame ("glimpse") a greener, more spacious world for the
refreshment of himself and others.

Perhaps mirroring
his pessimism in 1939 as to the reception of his own work, Tolkien ends the
story by showing how few people have the slightest appreciation of Niggle's
painting. Typically, Parish and the Inspector value it only as a bit of canvas
handy for patching leaks in the roof. After Niggle's death it is in fact used
for that purpose. Only the mild little schoolmaster, Atkins, troubles to rescue
a scrap bearing a single leaf, which is hung in the town Museum and seen by
"a few eyes" before it is destroyed when the building burns down. At
a meeting of the Town Council, which drifts into a discussion of whether
Niggle's painting was of any "use" at all, the few words Atkins speaks
in defense are loudly overborne by Tompkins, a gross man who says all the
stupid things Tolkien's enemies were to parade later on. He considers Niggle's
world "old-fashioned stuff" and "private daydreaming."
Tompkins' idea of useful art is "a telling poster" and he is one of
those reductionists for whom flowers are "digestive and genital organs of
plants." This bitter little scene closes aptly with the remark of Perkins,
another councilor: "Never knew he painted." Tolkien cannot long
remain "bitter or despairing, however. The last words spoken are those of
the Two Voices, whose idea of the "use" of Niggle's labors is not
that of careless or wrong-headed humanity.

Tolkien has fought
through to a meaning for his work. Unheeded except by a few it may be, perish
in the end with all man's other artifacts it certainly will, but it is a
glimpse of ultimate reality, and there is a safe and continuing usefulness for
it somewhere beyond "the walls of the world."

Published in December
1945,
⁸
this fairy-tale tragedy in octosyllabic couplets was the
second of Tolkien's short pieces to reach print, "Leaf by Niggle"
having appeared earlier in the same year. Tolkien is predominantly a prose
writer, but every reader of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
is aware from their many inset poems that his prose easily spills over into
verse. It was predictable that he would one day experiment with independent,
longer narrative poems like "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" and
"The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth." And, given Tolkien's interest in
ancient genres, it is also natural that the one should have a medieval model,
the other an Anglo-Saxon. The "Lay" looks back to the Breton lays of
the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, sung by minstrels mainly to audiences in
northern France but based on old Celtic tales from Britain.
⁹
True to
type, it tells a story of love and magic. But Tolkien has chosen to give his
poem an unusually strong religious cast, which transforms the customary series
of knightly exploits and amours into a story of temptation and fall. He has
also built into it image patterns and variant refrains of more than medieval
sophistication to deepen and darken the grim flow of its tragedy.

Tolkien loves to
wrap a past inside a past. The minstrel who is reciting the "Lay"
says at the outset that the story he is about to tell happened in Britain long
before his time. He has picked it up from "Briton harpers." The
ruined castle by the sea described in the opening stanzas was once populous and
prosperous. He will relate how the "dark doom" of its lord caused it
to fall into its present decay. The cause began in the lord's own discontent.
Failing to count the blessings of a loving wife and a rich demesne, he brooded
on his wife's childnessness until he disprized what he had: "his pride was
empty, vain his hoard." In a medieval setting the word
pride
immediately evokes the idea of selfish arrogance bordering on sin. And the word
hoard,
in Tolkien's vocabulary, sounds the alarm against
"possessiveness," the greed of ownership which lusts to make
everything its own. The poet carries forward stress on this trait of the
knight's by speaking of his repugnant visions of strangers taking over his
property after his death if he has no heirs. He forgets prayer, abandons the
"hope" he should repose in God, and falls into the mortal sin of
despair. In consequence, without telling his wife or anybody else, he all alone
adopts the "counsel cold," (later termed by the minstrel "evil
rede") to seek the aid of a witch.

This resolve is
summed up in the minstrel's comment, "his hope from light to darkness
passed." The significance of such a course would be immediately apparent
to a medieval audience. To lose hope is to turn away from the second of the
three cardinal theological virtues proclaimed by the Church: faith, hope, and
charity—no one of which can long endure without the other two. The knight's
faith and charity are as imperiled as his hope. By this comment the minstrel
has begun in the mind of his audience an association of the words
cold
and
darkness
with evil despair,
hope
and
light
with good.
He proceeds to build upon them.

The witch whom the
knight visits lives in a "cave" in the "homeless hills," a
cunning weaver of spells to entangle heart and wits. The sunlight striking the
upper edge of her "hollow dale" is "pale," but darkness
fills the bottom of the bowl, where she sits waiting on her "seat of
stone." At this strategic point the minstrel suddenly stops to insert his
second four-line refrain. It is strategic because this refrain immediately
strikes the hearer as being slightly different from the first four-line refrain
which stands at the head of the "Lay," and moves him to think back to
isolate the difference as well as the sameness. This comparison leads to the
discovery that whereas the first refrain alluded only to wind ("blowing
ever through the trees") and caves ("stoney shores and stony
caves"), the second keeps these but adds other features:

In Britain's land
beyond the waves

are stony hills
and stony caves;

the wind blows
ever over hills

and hollow caves
with wailing fills.

The additions are
the witch's "stony hills" over which the wind is now blowing, and her
"hollow cave" in which it is wailing ominously. By association
through her stony hills and stony seat, "stone" has been sucked into
the imaginative connection with evil, as have "cave,"
"pale," "hollow," and "hills," which are not only
stony but "homeless" as distinguished from the warm home which the
knight has left behind. Indeed this insight into the poet's method of
establishing mood associations tends to hark back to the first refrain and to
give to its "stony caves and stony shores" a retroactive quality of
warning.

The knight arrives
at sunset "alone between the dark and light" and rides "into the
mouth of night." The "alone" begins to take on a sinister
urgency, which increases as the poem proceeds. The other references are
literally to times of day, but they are also signs of the spiritual darkness
into which the fight of the knight's "hope" was earlier said by the
poet to have passed. The knight advances "halting to the stony seat"
of the witch and meets her eyes, "dark and piercing, filled with
lies," as the eyes of the minions of the Father of Lies always are. He
need not tell her his errand. She knows "the hunger that thithet him had
brought," because it is what gives her power over him. From her
"darkening cave" she brings him

a phial of glass
so fairly made

'twas a wonder in
that houseless place

to see its cold
and gleaming grace;

and therewithin a
philter lay

as pale as water
thin and grey

that spills from
stony fountains frore

in hollow pools in
caverns hoar.

In powerful
combination here they all are again, the things and sensations already attached
by the poet to evil: the "houseless," homeless place, the barren
"stone" of seat and cave and fountain, the "cold" of phial
and "fountains frore" (cognate with the "counsel cold" that
drove the knight there), the "hollowness" of the pools from which the
accursed potion comes, its liquid as "pale" and "grey" as
the sun setting on the lip of the witch's dale, or the light of his hope fading
into the night of despair. Additionally, the harper is preparing an antagonism
between the accursed water of the witch and the "waters blest of Christendom,"
which are to redeem the knight later in the tale. An extra touch of irony
enters with the use of the word
grace
to denote the phial's lovely
outward shape and at the same time connote the fatal absence of divine grace as
a spiritual component of its contents.

Acceptance of such
a potion is a mortal sin, which the knight tries to slough away by offering to
pay for it in gold, the stuff that his greed considers irresistible. But the
witch wants him to commit himself more deeply before she sets her price by
actually using the phial on his wife, which will further endanger his soul. In
good fairy-tale fashion she postpones naming the payment until after it has
worked, on the suf-ficently sardonic pretext that she, the mistress of lies,
will have no "lies" told about the efficacy of her product. Another
major milestone in the story having passed with the knight's agreement to the
bargain, the minstrel sings the third refrain. This keeps up the same unbroken
roar of seas pounding and winds blowing, but adds suggestively that in Britain
"woods are dark with danger strong," in reference to the knight's
growing peril.

The polarity of
dark-death as against light-life appears again when the knight emerges from
these woods to see the "living hght" in his castle windows where his
wife waits. Sleeping beside her, he dreams that night of children playing in
the "gardens fair" of his home. The audience will have opportunity to
watch the minstrel's art make these gardens alive with children, the symbol of the
"heart's desire" of the childless pair. A sunny morning greets the
lord at his awakening, but it cannot win him back from his purpose. Deceitfully
he proposes to his lady that on their coming wedding anniversary they hold a
merry feast to pray for the birth of children:

we'll pray that
this year we may see

our heart's desire
more quick draw nigh