Master of Middle Earth (24 page)

than yet we have
seen it, thou and I;

for virtue is in
hope and prayer.

So spake he
gravely seeming fair.

That virtue lies
in hope and prayer is indeed the Christian burden of the entire story. The
minstrel's putting it into the mouth of a man who has abandoned both is another
master stroke of irony to show up the knight for the hypocrite he is. The more
so because his intent at the time is to win his wife's confidence so that he
may slip the potion into her festive wine. And what is this "heart's
desire" of which he speaks but the flawed "hunger" which drew
him to the witch's den? The lady agrees happily to the feast. Superficially gay
but plangently sad with inner meaning, the fourth refrain now pictures the
innocent pairings of birds in Britain's springtime woods, against which the
unnatural guilt that the knight is about to smuggle into his union stands out
all the more grievously.

Very different
from the malicious laughter of the witch is the loving laughter with which his
wife pledges him happiness and long life as she drains the enchanted cup. By
his own fault he will be dead within a year. But before the scene darkens again
a bright interlude intervenes during which the lady becomes pregnant and the
lord dreams once more of those unborn children playing "on lawns of
sunlight without hedge/save a dark shadow at their edge." The poet never
lets that limiting shadow quite go away. When lovely twins are born the people
of the castle rejoice, thinking them the answer to "prayer," and even
envying their master and mistress, whose prayer they think has been
"answered twice." The wrongness of their interpretation is meant to
stab the audience with reminder of the knight's deceit. The story-teller now
proceeds to intensify this deceit as the knight, standing at his wife's bedside
still gay in manner, still hypocritical, assures her, "Now full . . . is
granted me/both hope and prayer," and asks her whether the fulfillment of
"heart's desire" is not sweet. In all purity she answers gaily that
it is sweet indeed

at last the
heart's desire to meet,

thus after
waiting, after prayer,

thus after hope
and nigh despair.

She has meant and
practiced the virtues to which he only pretends, though doing so has cost her
struggle. The difference between the genuine and the false is starkly drawn.

But the potion has
not yet ceased its appointed work. It causes the knight to promise fatuously to
get for his wife anything at all she may desire, even water from a well
"in any secret fount or dell," without thinking of the danger of
meeting the witch again. Indeed his mention of a secret fount suggests a
compulsion to seek her out. In his lady, too, the potion has implanted a sharp
longing for "water cool and clear" and for "deer no earthly
forests hold." To find these for her the lord rides into what the fifth
refrain now sinisterly calls "the forests pale," where he pursues a
white doe, heedless of "dim laughter" ringing through the trees. He
lusts feverishly for the impossible beast

whereon no mortal
hunt shall feast,

for waters
crystal-clear and cold

that never in holy
fountain rolled.

By his past
surrenders he has acquired a positive state for waters that are unholy in
preference to waters blest —the waters of baptism and the holy water commonly
used in churches to ward off evil.

Being a cunning
trapper of light and life, the witch (now called by Tolkien a
"Corrigan")
¹⁰
has woven the sun "into a snare."
Around her dell "the trees like shadows waiting stood/for night to come
upon the wood," as a shadow always edged the gardens of the knight's
desire. When the knight arrives at the cavern where she sits, "all green
is grey." He sees her hair as "pale" and hears her voice as
"cold/as echo from the world of old." Asking him how he intends to
repay her "here after waiting, after pain," she echoes mockingly his
wife's greeting to him after childbirth, "thus after waiting, after
prayer." The payment the witch finally demands is sexual "love,"
putting aside his lady and wedding her instead. Up to this point the knight has
trifled far with evil, but giving it his "love" entails an
irreversible transfer of allegiance which would be the end of him.

Here on the brink
what saves him is a surge of real love for his wife. "My love is
wed," he cries. It gives him strength to refuse the witch's demand, and to
deny her power to turn him to "stone/and wither lifeless and alone,"
as she angrily threatens to do. And he is right, as the harper's medieval
audience would well know. With the symbolic religious meanings which
stone,
lifeless,
and
alone
have acquired in the course of the story, the
witch's menace is to impose on the knight the barrenness and solitude of
spiritual death. She is bluffing. In the Catholicism of the Middle Ages,
spiritual choices lie only in the power of the human will, aided by divine
grace. Consequently the knight is able to ride off homeward toward his wife and
toward "the waters blest of Christendom" to which their love has
reconciled him. When the witch prophesies that she will kill him in three days
if he leaves, he retorts that he will die when God pleases, in old age or in
the Crusades.

It pleases God,
however, to let the witch's lethal spell work on his body, though not on his
soul. He has saved his soul; mercy will go so far. But he has sinned severely,
and justice must have its due. To allow him to live on to enjoy life with the
children he has begotten by the aid of black magic would be to reward sin. So,
as the knight rides home, the minstrel brings into his sixth refrain the sound
of a bell blown by the wind over the countryside. The bell turns out to be the
"sacring bell," rung when the priest elevates the host in saying
mass, heard by the dying knight next morning as he nears his castle from
"the hoar and houseless hills" of the witch's cave. His last thoughts
as he dies three days later are for the welfare of his wife.

The knight has won
the essential, but at terrible cost. The minstrel dwells on the growing
suspense and grief of his lady, which results in her death soon after she
discovers his body lying on its bier in the church. Returning to the early line
about the knight, "his pride was empty, vain his hoard," describing
the discontent with which the lack of children poisons all his other real
happiness, the singer repeats it with a single trenchant change: "his
pride was ended, vain his hoard." The
empty,
which reflected the
knight's wrongful and needless despair, turns into the
ended,
which puts
a period not only to pride but to all earthly passion and possession. And what
of the children left orphans, the children for whose sake the knight put
himself and his lady through the whole sordid ordeal? If they grew up to play
in that castle garden, adds the poet doubtfully, the dead father and mother
"saw it not, nor found it sweet/their heart's desire at last to
meet." Alas for the "heart's desire," he seems to say, it may
lead men along strange byways, and betray them in the end.

The seventh and
last refrain returns to virtually the same form as the first. In Britain's land
beyond the waves the elemental powers of sea and wind outlast the petty spans
of human life and desire. Sad is my tale, concludes the minstrel by way of
apology, but then so is life. Our consolation must come from religious hope.
Praying for the dead knight and lady of his song, for himself, and for all who
have listened to him, he skillfully picks up and repeats from earlier parts of
the narrative familiar phrases which carry its central lessons:

God help us all in
hope and prayer

from evil rede and
from despair,

by waters blest of
Christendom

to dwell, until at
last we come

to joy of Heaven
where is queen

the maiden Mary
pure and clean.

A prayer ending is
conventional for most Breton lays
¹¹
and for many another genre of
medieval literature, but few writers of the period use it with the artistic
skill and weight of summary meaning with which Tolkien endows his minstrel
surrogate. In fact, Tolkien's craft in handling image and symbol has been
learned from modern poets and is not medieval at all. His successful marriage
of medieval religious theme to present verse techniques in "The Lay of
Aotrou and Itroun" has a pre-Raphaelite flavor, but it produces a poem
with which it is hard to find any other of like kind to compare anywhere.

The publication
year, 1949, of this joyously mock-heroic tale gives us a clue to why it was
written. The prewar clouds which oppressed Tolkien in "Leaf by
Niggle" had passed away with victory in 1945, bringing "days less
dark" but "no less laborious" by reason of his final drive to
complete
The Lord of the Rings.
Though much revision was still in order,
the epic was finished at last in 1949 after eleven years of more or less steady
toil. Only an artist, scientist, or scholar who has suffered the happy bondage
of such years can imagine the relief of the shackles dropping away. There seems
to follow a need to celebrate the new freedom, which can take the form of
poking fun at the type of materials just mastered. Chaucer, caught in the mazes
of
The Canterbury Tales,
parodied the high chivalric ideals of his
"Knight's Tale" with their humorous opposite in the Sir Thopas
caricature in later years. Similarly in "Farmer Giles" Tolkien laughs
good-humoredly at much that is taken most seriously by his epic, and not only
there but also by his previous scholarship and literary criticism.

Few readers, save
professional editors of ancient manuscripts at least as old as the Middle Ages
who have wrestled in prefaces with problems of authorship, date, sources and
analogues, linguistics, and so on, know enough about such things to enjoy fully
the nonsense of Tolkien's Foreword to "Farmer Giles."
¹²
Tolkien pretends to be editor and translator (from "very insular
Latin") of an ancient manuscript recounting the origin of the Little
Kingdom in pre-Arthurian Britain. Solemnly he discusses the nature of the
document (a late compilation derived from popular lays contemporaneous with the
events), the author (an inhabitant of the Little Kingdom at a time when the
events were already long past, as shown by his intimate knowledge of the
geography of that region) and the boundaries of the Little Kingdom in time and
place. The latter, from internal evidence, is somewhere in the valley of the
Thames. But the date of its existence requires pro-founder analysis. Tolkien is
obliged to call upon the aid, though not by name, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's
popular and quite fictitious
Historia regum Britanniae
(published in
1139) for a chronology of the many divisions within the island after Brutus, of
which "the partition under Locrin, Camber, and Albanac was only the first
. . ,"
¹³
Somewhere between then and Arthur's time, "after
the days of King Coel maybe . . ."
¹⁴
occurred the rise to the
kingship of Farmer Giles of Ham, whose unabridged titles in the original Latin
march over most of the manuscript's first page, matching in resonance those of
Queen Victoria, or Aragorn at his proudest in
The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien as translator voices the usual pious hope of the scholar that the
document will throw light on a dark period of British history, as well as the
origin of "some difficult place names." Of this philological jest
more anon.

The compiler of
the manuscript under translation is evidently already, in some vague
post-Arthurian age, nostalgic about the greater simplicity of life in the old
days of which he writes. In a supiciously Tolkienish vein he looks back to the
happier past when "there was more time . . . and folk were fewer, so that
most men were distinguished"; "villages were proud and independent
still in those days." One hopes that Tolkien is smiling here at his
penchant for a pre-preindustrial society. He is certainly smiling at the
talking animals of fairy stories in describing the Farmer's dog, Garm, who
"could not even talk dog-latin; but . . . could use the vulgar tongue (as
could most dogs of his day) either to bully or to brag or to wheedle in."
And he is certainly smiling as he begins the portrayal of his mock-hero
"who could bully and brag better" than his dog could. Giles says he
is busy keeping the wolf from the door, "that is, keeping himself as fat
and comfortable as his father before him." He was "a slow sort of
fellow .... taken up with his own affairs," giving little thought to the
Wide World outside his village. In this he recalls the hobbits of the Shire.
And somewhat like them he is intruded upon by a giant from Wales, "larger
and more stupid than his fellows," who is no distant relative of Tolkien's
trolls.

Cowardly master,
roused by quaking dog, seizes his blunderbuss, runs out, pulls the trigger in a
spasm of terror when he sees the giant, and "by chance and by no choice of
the farmer's" spatters him in the face with scrap iron. Tolkien's
shameless introduction of a seventeenth-century blunderbuss into pre-Arthurian
England is funny enough in itself but he has another card to play with it. In
case anyone asks what a blunderbuss is, the compiler of the manuscript refers
him to the answer given by "the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford," who
reply: "A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls
or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact
aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)" This
quotation corresponds word for word with the definition of
blunderbuss
given in the
Oxford English Dictionary.
Of course "the Four Wise
Clerks of Oxenford" must then be the four editors of the Dictionary: James
A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie, and C. T. Onions. Since Tolkien was
Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, when the
Dictionary was first printed in 1933, and helped in its preparation, the
blunderbuss incident takes on the aspect of a private joke with his colleagues,
along the lines of his
Songs for the Philologists,
privately printed for
the Department of English at University College in 1936. Not exclusively so,
however, for Tolkien catches up the parenthetical remark about supersession of
the blunderbuss by other firearms "in civilized countries" to remark
ironically that this village of Ham was not yet civilized enough to use any
other weapons more lethal than bows and arrows—which rather turns the joke
against the Dictionary editors. One would like to know exactly who composed
that definition of
blunderbuss
for the
Oxford Dictionary.