Master of Middle Earth (28 page)

Such, at least in
outline, is the case for holding that in "Smith of Wootton Major"
Tolkien broke his wand and drowned his magic books. We are not required to go
all the way toward autobiography, however. Smith can be any practitioner of the
White Art who travels far "from Daybreak to Evening" and in his old
age comes home, tired, to hand on his passport to his successors. There is no
denying the elegiac tone of the ending, with its falling leaves and sunset, its
pain, its attempt to find in homely things comfort for a youthful intensity of
life never to be reached again. This melancholy is enhanced by the departure of
the Fairy Kong from the village, sneered at by Nokes and unregretted by all
save a few of its inhabitants: "Most people . . . were content. They had
had him for a very long time and were not sorry to have a change." The
indirect reference to us of the twentieth century is clear enough. Tolkien is
not hopeful about our age. The elves have left us, and we have not mourned to
see them go.

By this title
(Celtic for "voyage") Tolkien purposely associates his poem with that
group of tales of early Irish seafaring into the western Atlantic which were
popular throughout Europe from about the eighth century on and are now called
imrama
by modern scholars. By selecting Saint Brendan's voyage as his
subject he also almost inevitably turns our eyes to that example of the type
much more widely circulated than any other, the Latin prose
Navigatio Sancti
Brendani Abbatis,
surviving today in at least 120 manuscripts and
translated during the Middle Ages into nearly every European vernacular.
²⁵
Since "Imram" is a short poem of 132 lines and the
Navigatio
is
35 pages long in its most recent English translation, Tolkien obviously has to
select what he regards as a few central incidents from the welter of marvelous
events which the Latin prose narrates with so much gusto. On the other hand, it
is fair to say that almost everything in the poem exists in some form or other
in the
Navigatio.
Watching how Tolkien selects, omits, and alters gives
an unparalleled view of the artist at work.

Both the poem and
the prose tale begin at Brendan's monastery of Clonfert in Galway, his
"Meadow of miracles," whose Celtic name is
Cluain-ferta.
Tolkien uses the Celtic form, which modern translations of the Latin prose
likewise call attention to.
²⁶
Both versions describe the voyage as
taking seven years. In both, the Saint and his crew of monks sail westward for
a very long time (forty days in the
Navigatio,
over a year in
"Imram")
²⁷
before they see anything but ocean. A
divergence between the poem and the prose begins, however, in the account of
the first unusual phenomenon the travelers meet with. In the
Navigatio
it
is an island where they are fed by unseen hands and one monk succumbs to
demonic possession. In "Imram" their currach sails under a dark cloud
covering the sky overhead, which they find is being spewed out by a volcano in
eruption. Now the cloud and the volcano are both in the
Navigatio,
but
there Brendan encounters them at different times and only near the end of his
quest. There the cloud, in fact, is not volcanic smoke but a supernatural
barrier across the surface of the sea protecting the Land of Promise of the
Saints, so thickly that the monks can scarcely see one another while in it.

Tolkien's
combining the two episodes and bringing them forward early into the voyage have
the effect of giving the cloud a physical cause and a more inclusive function
in "Imram." It is no longer a screen around the single island of the
saints but a boundary between the normal Atlantic and that paranormal area of
it in which the ensuing strangeness of the poem occurs. The
Navigatio
needs no such boundary. There the entire Atlantic from Ireland westward is
dotted with islands no one of which is ordinary. Its marvels have no
geographical beginning. At least to the modern mind, Tolkien's repositioning of
the cloud and his giving it a natural volcanic origin enhance the voyage's
credibility, as well as its orderly structure.

The volcanoes in
"Imram" and the
Navigatio
are unmistakably the same volcano.
As the poem pictures it,

Upreared from sea
to cloud then sheer

a shoreless
mountain stood;

its sides were
black from the sullen tide

up to its smoking
hood,

but its spire was
lit by a living fire

that ever rose and
fell:

tall as a column
in High Heaven's hall,

its roots were
deep as Hell.

In the
Navigatio,
too, the peak is towering, steep, and black: "The cliffs at
the water's edge were so high that the summit was obscured; they were as black
as coal and wonderfully sheer, like a wall." Besides, the monks see the
flames rising and subsiding periodically just as in the poem: "they saw
the mountain . . . vomiting forth flames sky-high and then sucking them back
upon itself." One of their number is trapped by demons there. Tolkien
prefers to suppress the demons, but their presence may have contributed to his
phrase about the roots of the volcano being "deep as Hell." For his
additional idea that the peak rises from drowned lands "where the kings of
kings lie low" there are suggestions in the
Navigatio
of
transparent waters through which Brendan and his companions discern undersea
landscapes,
²⁸
but more probably Tolkien is thinking of kingdoms
overrun by the ocean in
The Lord of the Rings,
specifically Númenor.

The second
landfall of the monks in "Imram" corresponds basically to the
Navigation
"Paradise of Birds," but with many significant
changes. Most obvious of these is in the topography of the island. In the prose
it is green and pleasant, easy of access, sunlit. To make Brendan's landing
excitingly hazardous Tolkien surrounds it with "cliffs no man could
climb." Nor can any boat find harbor except in one very narrow rockbound
inlet, which his crew does not discover until they have almost despaired of
their lives. This is precisely the monks' experience at a rocky island in the
Navigatio,
which does not connect with the Paradise of Birds at all.
Moreover, Tolkien transfers to the latter's beaches gems which in the
Navigatio
belong to the Land of Promise. But the monks in "Imram"
show no interest in taking home a boatload of precious stones, as they do in
the prose account. In this way Tolkien keeps their monastic vow of poverty
unbroken and preserves the ascetic tone of his poem.

This care is in
keeping with his effort in the poem to present the island as a holy place, both
explicitly and by use of Grail imagery. On landing, Brendan's party senses an
atmosphere of sanctity "and holy it seemed to be"—even before it
arrives at the White Tree standing in a dale, which is "like a silver
grail, with craven hills for rim." The Tree itself, "more fair than
ever I deemed, in Paradise might grow," is as thick as a tower and
immeasurably tall, and is covered with white "leaves" growing
"more close than swan-wing plumes." When the monks chant their
prayers a sound of trumpets rings out overhead:

The Tree then
shook, and flying free

from its limbs the
leaves in air

as white birds
rose in wheeling flight

and the lifting
boughs were bare.

By twice calling
the white objects covering the boughs "leaves" Tolkien is plainly
saying that, although they look like plumes of swans and wheel in the air like
birds, they are in fact not birds but birdlike leaves of a mysteriously
responsive kind. This point explains why he never calls the island the Paradise
of Birds as does the
Navigatio.
There are no birds on Tolkien's island.
For him it is, if anything, the island of the Tree.

Nevertheless, a
comparison of Tolkien's passages with those in the
Navigatio'
s
description of the Paradise of Birds shows that he took many elements from it,
while rejecting others. Thus the Paradise of Birds, too, is holy but for
different reasons. It is blessed because it is the sanctuary of fallen angels,
not allied to Lucifer, who are permitted to come there on holy days in the form
of white birds to sing the praises of God.
²⁹
During the whole stay
of the monks on the island from Easter to Pentecost these expiatory spirits
join them daily in chanting the divine offices. They perch so thickly on
"an exceptionally tall tree . . . with a trunk of colossal girth" as
almost to cover it: "This tree was full of pure white birds; so thickly
had they settled on it that there was hardly a branch, or even a leaf, to be
seen." They never fly off from the tree like Tolkien's leaves but, unlike
them, they are definitely birds, not leaves. Why has Tolkien changed the
identity of the white objects covering the Tree in his poem? Because he wants to
summon up once more one of the master images of all his work, the Tree of
Tales, which is the symbol of Faery. As noticed often before,
³⁰
-
every leaf on that Tree is a tale organically linked to all other tales of
secondary worlds to form the Tree which symbolizes the whole. Neither birds nor
fallen angels fits in with that well-established symbolism. Yet the beauty and
airiness of birds in flight, suggested by the
Navigatio,
have moved
Tolkien in "Imram" to incorporate them into his Tree metaphorically
for this occasion.

But Tolkien has
still another meaning to add to the Tree and its island. In the poem he
specifies that after the leaves have whirled up from the Tree, the song which
the monks hear coming down from the "star-lit sky" is "not of
bird:/neither noise of man nor angel's voice . . ." Rather, he says, it
may be sung "by a third fair kindred in the world" yet lingering
"beyond the foundered land." Remembering Tolkien's predilection for
elves, we are driven to conclude that the singers here are indeed elves, whose
delight is always in singing. This conclusion is reinforced by Tolkien's
repeated description of the island as lit by stars or "moonlight
dim," never by the sun. In
The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien called
elves "the People of the stars" and assigned to them in the Undying
Lands of the far West the island of Eressea, also known as Evereve, where no
sun shone. Things begin to fall into place. The island to which the monks have
come is this homeland of the elves. And the Tree, besides being the Tree of
Tales, is also a seedling of Telperion, the White Tree of the Valar,
transplanted to grow in Eressea before being taken on to Númenor and thence to
Middle-earth to grow in the courtyard of the kings of Gondor.

The cluster of
associations around the image of the Tree in "Imram" is therefore
very rich. Nor do they jar with the religious theme of Brendan's search for
salvation. The White Tree of the Guardian Valar has a religious penumbra in
The Lord of the Rings.
And in his essay "On Fairy-stories" Tolkien
invests the Tree of Tales with an aura of holiness as an emblem of man's
cooperation with God in the work of continuing creation. As for elves, their
adoption by the half-divine Valar as neighbors and disciples endows them with
many attributes not granted to men. Compared with his first stop at the volcano
of raw fire, Brendan's experience of the sacred Tree and the elves ethereally
singing marks a stage forward in his spiritual odyssey.

In
"Imram" what happens to the little band after they leave the island
of the Tree is veiled in indistinct allusion. Brendan speaks of seeing a single
great Star,

a light on the
edge of the Outer Night

beyond the Doors
of Days,

where the round
world plunges steeply down,

but on the old
road goes,

as an unseen
bridge that on arches runs

to coasts that no
man knows.

At this edge of
the created universe he has smelled, he says, the sweet odor of flowers
"as keen as death" and heard "words beyond this world,"
both, it would seem, coming from the Land of Promise he set out to seek. The
implication is that Brendan has been allowed to reach it somehow and to
disembark there, but he refuses to tell his questioning disciple anything more
about it. Let the discipline go labor on the sea and find out the answers for
himself. Of that kind of knowledge each man must earn his own.

Here again the
"Imram" account both resembles and differs from that in the
Navigatio.
In the latter, two landings on the Land of Promise, an earlier
one by the monk Barinthus and a later by Brendan, are explicitly related, and
many details about the features of the Land itself are supplied. Among them,
according to Barinthus, "All the plants we saw were flowering plants . .
." so that he was able to ask his brethren on his return home: "Can
you not smell by our garments that we have been in Paradise?" This is the
odor the poem refers to. Both voyagers on landings are greeted by a shining man
(called an "angel" by Barinthus) who informs them that they are
indeed walking on the island God "intended for His saints," which
"will be revealed to your successors at the time when Christians will be
undergoing persecution." These presumably are among the "words beyond
the world" heard by Brendan in "Imram," but Tolkien refuses to
come out and say so. Tolkien also omits the angel's direction to Brendan to
"return to the land of your birth" because his time has come to die
and he is to be buried with his predecessors: ". . . you shall soon be
laid to rest with your fathers." However, the poem shows Brendan carrying
out the command by returning to Galway and dying in his own monastery of
Cluainferta.
And what of the Star, which in "Imram" Brendan sees
"high and far ... a fight on the edge of the Outer Night"? It stems,
apparently, from the light which everlastingly brightens the Land of Promise in
the
Navigatio,
its source being Christ Himself: "for Christ Himself
is our light." Tolkien lifts it into the sky and concentrates it
symbolically in a Star, in which, however, any Christian reference is left
covert. We are reminded of the one star seen by Sam shining high above Mordor
as the sign of a transcendent beauty that its shadow can never darken.