The Mirror of Desire Unbidden

Abbreviations

Note: In the present volume one finds The Lord of the Rings cited as LotR, using a capitalized Roman numeration of I to VI for books and a Roman numeration for chapters, so that, for example, Chapter 7, Book II of The Two Towers is cited as: LotR IV, vii. Page numbers are not included because of the existence of several editions. For the same reason, the same criteria apply to The Hobbit (H) and The Silmarillion (S), specifying chapter number only, in Roman letters. Examples are Chapter 10 of The Hobbit, cited as: H x, and Chapter 19 of The Silmarillion, cited as: S xix. In the latter’s case, “Ainulindalë” is cited by name, as: S, “Ainulindalë,” while “Akallabêth” is numbered xxv, and “Of the Rings of Power” is numbered xxvi.

Whenever a translation is not cited, the translation of works cited in other languages is by the author of the present volume. “Author’s emphasis” indicates the author of the present volume. “Emphasis original” indicates the original text.

Preface

The present work is animated by a conviction: to understand Tolkien’s literature it is necessary to tell the history of Western imagination and fantasy. Once we trace it to its beginning in Homer and the Old Testament and follow it through to the end of the Middle Ages, we see how there are three omissions in Tolkien’s narrative and biographical/literary self-portrait. The first omission is precisely the role that Tolkien means to play in the tradition of Western fantasy. The second is the omission of the importance of late Middle English literature in particular as a source for his fiction¹. The third omission is the removal of the co-related elements of woman, body, and sexuality from Tolkien’s narrative. To these three omissions there could be added a fourth that coincides with the absence of religion².

The aim of the present work is then to look into these three omissions and the reasons thereof in order to point out their interrelation in a purposeful design to achieve a peculiar literary effect as well as to thematize a theological gender dimension that, while still aligned to the main currents in the Christian theology of Tolkien’s time, is highly original, anticipates future developments and even surpasses them. The role played by late Middle English literature in prompting such ideas is evidenced in detail with particular reference to Chaucer, Langland, the author of Sir Orfeo, and especially the Gawain-Poet.

As Elizabeth Zuckert reports: “according to both Strauss and Derrida, what an author does not say can be more important than what is said” (Zuckert 1996: 202), or, to phrase it differently, in their philosophy “the ‘subtext’ is more meaningful than the text” (Beiner 2004: 150). Clearly from such an assumption it is not evident that it should be applied to Tolkien as well, nor how, and on the contrary it could be argued that Tolkien repeatedly warns against applying to his texts categories that are foreign to their letter, as though it was an allegory. It is not necessary to quote all instances of such warnings, but one is especially revealing, distinguishing Allegory from Story:

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends (Letters 121)

It does not especially matter whether the allegorized of the allegory is religion, sex, adultery, or the image of God. The point is that, however Tolkien may say that he came up with full-fledged stories out of the blue, this is simply unbelievable, as everybody as well as he himself agrees that he was inspired by Germanic and, to a lesser extent, Celtic mythology. Subtext is then acknowledged by him, at least as the analogy of the soup of story in his essay On Fairy-stories (OFS 39–40). It only takes to consider the range of his knowledge of the Classics and the Bible to understand the first omission, and it is his expertise in Middle English that is key to the second, while the third results from both the arguments advanced for the previous two. Besides, as he says, there is allegory in any story, and allegory is a mode of Truth, which means that, even if Tolkien’s authorial intent was not allegorical, the texts he wrote can signify meanings not intended by the author and yet belonging to him, not only to the reader. Indeed, it is precisely Tolkien’s warning against allegory that begs the question of what is concealed behind the text and is yet revealed through the text itself, by way of ellipsis, and truly the motivating challenge for the scholar of Tolkien’s literature is understanding the reasons for, and modalities of, such a concealment.

What follows is an attempt to undertake such a challenge.

1 Indeed the influence on Tolkien of Middle English literature on Tolkien has been studied, for example by Barbara Kowalik (2013a, 2020), Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz (2020), and Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova (2015). Nonetheless, the general perception of Tolkien’s academic and literary output tends to picture him as chiefly interested in Old English.

2 There is of course a wealth of scholarship studying religion in Tolkien’s works, and yet one may observe how there is still a tendency to downplay these aspects, even in scholarship. See Emanuel (2023).

General Introduction

For ther cam doun from the highe hevene,

By Pliades and the sterris sevene

And thorugh the eyr holdyng his passage,

Like a Fairy a merveillous ymage

That in this world, though men hadde sought,

Ne was ther noon halfe so wel ywrought.

(John Lydgate, Troy Book IV.5583–5588)

Tolkien is often considered a scholar of Old English, especially due to a lecture and related essay on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, entitled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, still an essential reference for studies in the field.

However, Tolkien was essentially a scholar of Middle English, co-editor with Eric Valentine Gordon of the main critical edition of the alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His other major accomplishments were the Middle English Vocabulary of 1922, associated with the Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose volume by Kenneth Sisam, further works on Sir Gawain such as the W. P. Ker lecture of 1953 or the posthumous translation of 1975, and the epochal identification of the so-called AB language, a dialect of Middle English spoken in an area of North-West Midlands for two hundred years after the Norman invasion. Still, his output on Middle English language and literature includes much more, for example a remarkable proof of translation skills such as the translation, in 1923, of a passage from the works of Gerald of Wales, a Welsh historian of the twelfth century, from ecclesiastical Latin into the Middle English dialect of the South-West Midlands of that time.

If for every Tolkien publication on Old English there are statistically about three on Middle English, one cannot object at all to the statement according to which Middle English was Tolkien’s main object of research throughout his life. It is of course true that the main feature that distinguishes Middle English from the Old English that precedes it is precisely that preponderant French influence from the Norman language that Tolkien deplored. However, Scandinavian influences must be added to this influence, operating with particular intensity precisely in the areas that originate the literary documents that Tolkien mainly studied (North-West Midlands).

For example, in the first stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the incipit of which recalls the fall of Troy as the first origin of the story that the narrator is about to tell, the second verse reads:

Þe burƺ brittened and brent to brondez and askez (SGGK 2)

[The city destroyed and burned to embers and ashes]

The word for “burned,” brent, is the past participle of the Middle English verb brenne(n), which comes not from Old English, where the verb to burn was bærnan, but from Old Norse brenna, which in turn resulted in the past participle brent. For students of German, note the familiarity with German gebrennt, from brennen, a completely casual resemblance since, apart from Old English and Modern English, where the metathesis of the phonemes of the syllable -re- in -er- takes place, all other Germanic languages bear a strong resemblance to the original Proto-Germanic form *brannidaz < *brannijana, see e.g. Gothic *brannjþs < *brannjan or, to move to a field where there are attestations, the Old High German gibrannt < brinnan.

Tolkien must have been struck by the particular Middle English and Norse form, if among the words attested in the Gnomish Lexicon, the dictionary of the gnomic language from which he later developed the more famous Sindarin, the language commonly spoken by the Elves of Middle-earth at the time of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, figure the brant form, meaning “cooked, ready.” Particularly significance of a link with Middle English is attested if one considers that the further attestation of the verb brenne(n) in Sir Gawain reads:

He…/Braydeʒ out þe boweles, brenneʒ hom on glede,/With bred blent þerwith his braches rewardeʒ (SGGK 1608–10)

[He …/took out the innards, roasted them on coals,/With blood seasoned his hounds he compensated]

That burning is associated with cooking seems to be an ancient nexus, and no need is found in the present context to extend the search to the frequency of the association in the wider range of Germanic literature, for certainly this particularity, which associates the past participle of the variant brenne(n) influenced from the Old Norse with the derived meaning of “cook,” seems to attest that the association of sound and meaning in Gnomish is particularly connected with the specific use of the verb in Sir Gawain, with which Tolkien was perhaps more familiar than anyone else.

To consider Tolkien’s other youthly linguistic invention, and to find an example of how the languages invented by Tolkien followed a philological criterion, in the Qenya Lexicon we find a root M(B)ASA, “cook, bake,” from which Gnomish bas, “to bake” (PE 12:59). The root also yields Qenya maswa, “soft, cooked, ready,” replacing an earlier gloss maksa, “soft, cooked, ready.” Also found in Etymologies is MBAS-(Ety 372), while Parma Eldalamberon 18 attests Primitive Elvish mazgā, “soft, ready” (PE 18:43, 66, 93).

Primitive Elvish plays the role that Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic unfolds with respect to the Germanic languages, or that Proto-Indo-European unfolds with respect to all Indo-European languages. In the evolutions of the Elvish languages, after the Gnomish Lexicon, no further attestations of brant appear, but a Noldorin stem BARAS- appears in the Etymologies (Ety. 351), producing Noldorin *barasa, “hot, burning,” Old Noldorin baraha, barasa, same meaning, and Exile Noldorin bara, “fiery.” This root seems to be involved in the formation of The Silmarillion names such as Baragund, “Burning Prince,” and Barahir, “Burning Lord,” while a Sindarin cognate, attested in Letter 357, produces Borgil, “Red Star,” Sindarin name mentioned in The Lord of the Rings that Professor Kristina Larsen has shown to refer to Aldebaran³. The dropping of the early Elvish stem-vowel is attested in Old Noldorin, Exilic Noldorin and Sindarin by such words as Sindarin brass, “white heat.”

Similar studies can be conducted on other cases of similarity in form and meaning between Middle English words on the one hand and Gnomish or Qenya on the other, always where Old English does not constitute a more satisfactory alternative. Consider for example Middle English flat, “meadow,” and Gnomish flad, “grass”; Middle English rynk, “ring,” and Gnomish rinc, “circular, disk”; Middle English tulk, “man, knight” and Qenya Tulkas, proper name of a Vala, the latter connection first identified by the great philologist and Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey⁴.

Curiously, in the poetic translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to which Tolkien dedicated himself throughout his life, the line “Þe burƺ brittened and brent to brondez and askez” is translated: “and the fortress fell in flames to firebrands and ashes” (GPO 17). Compare Tolkien’s translation with a few alternatives, starting with Marie Borroff:

Marie Borroff: “The walls breached and burned down to brands and ashes” (Borroff 1967: 1). James Winny: “The city laid waste and burnt into ashes” (Winny 1992: 3)Simon Armitage: “with the city a smoke-heap of cinders and ash” (Armitage 2007: 5)

While all other translations, except Armitage, retain the immediate equivalent of brent, “burnt,” only Tolkien is actually faithful to the original text in what matters most: alliteration. In fact we have in the original *bb*b*b**, in Tolkien **ff*f*f**, while Borroff, who also keeps “brands” like Tolkien as a reminder of the original alliteration, had to sacrifice alliteration in the translating burƺ into “walls.” Nonetheless, she remains remarkably faithful to the original text when compared to Winny, who does not really opt for a poetical version, and Armitage, who takes considerable freedom. Further examples taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can further illustrate the specificity of Tolkien’s translation.

Despite, then, the evident fecundity of explorations of Middle English language and literature as related to Tolkien, both in order to reconstruct the views of an esteemed scholar of the field on relevant matters, and as a tool to read his Middle-earth narratives and other works, only recently a monograph was entirely dedicated to Tolkien and Middle English, especially Geoffrey Chaucer. It is John Bowers’s 2019 Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer, an outstanding work of scholarship published by Oxford University Press that was based on the close study of Tolkien’s unpublished works on Chaucer. The present volume owes much to Professor Bowers’s research as well as to the author’s own authorized research on Tolkien’s unpublished manuscripts on Middle English literature, with a special focus on the Gawain-poet and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The originality of the present work lies in its historical-critical approach, for the first time applied to Tolkien in a broad perspective of Western literature, philosophy, and theology. Historical criticism is applied in a non-linear mode, to point out discontinuities as well as progress in the evolution or devolution of cultural and literary phenomena. In order to understand Tolkien in his indebtedness towards Middle English, in fact, it is necessary to grasp the foundations of Medieval English literature in Biblical and Classical culture as much as in Germanic and Celtic. In this sense, with the Gawain-poet, we have to get back to Troy, and to Eden. What we are looking for is the lost image of God that Tolkien claims to be retrievable in Fantasy and Sub-creation, and that biblically and classically can be identified with woman, corporeality, sexuality, and procreation, a close relative of sub-creation.

In this sense, the present work is an attempt at a Theology of Fantasy that may expand the scope of previous works in the field, such as Malcolm Guite’s 2021 Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God, and Francis Nekrosius’s 2020 The Theological Landscape of Middle-earth: On Theology in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fantasy. In this field the importance of Tolkien is finally being recognized, compared to previous works such as Amos N. Wilder’s 1976 Theopoetics: Theology and the Religious Imagination, and Nicolas Steeves’s 2016 Grâce à l’imagination. Intégrer l’imagination en théologie fondamentale. The theological role of fantasy is of course understandable through a philosophical history of imagination, but the present work departs considerably from Richard Kearney’s 1984 The Wake of the Imagination, not least because it asks the fundamental question of the origin of the depreciation of phantasia. Since an important reference in the respect of the history of fantasy is Saint Thomas Aquinas, both in his relevance for the late Middle Ages and to Tolkien, two other studies that may be considered as precedents are Jonathan McIntosh’s 2017 The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas and the Metaphysics of Faërie, and Yannick Imbert’s 2022 From Imagination to Faërie: Tolkien’s Thomist Fantasy. However, the present work is unique in setting Aquinas in the broader context of Christian theology related to the faculty of phantasia through a comparison with Augustine, and in tracing Aquinas’s influence in the late Middle Ages through the Gawain-poet. This way, the influence of the Angelic Doctor on Tolkien may be better appreciated. While the present work does not propose any confessional view, it is advisable to ponder the subject of Tolkien’s Christianity in relation to the most relevant contribution to the discussion of Tolkien and Christianity, meaning Paul Kerry’s 2013 The Ring and the Cross.

Concerning Tolkien and Woman, the most relevant contribution to the field is the collection edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. An essay by Cami Agan in this collection was especially influential on the understanding of sex in Tolkien’s works that is here advanced, and the author thanks her for her correspondence on the subject. Lisa Coutras’s work was also important. While a monograph on Tolkien and sexuality is lacking, the subject of corporeality is studied in Christopher Vaccaro’s edited collection The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium. The author also thanks the latter scholar for his correspondence. Finally, a major contribution to the field of studies on Tolkien, Woman, sexuality and corporeality is found in Marjorie Burns’s Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. On the subject of adultery in particular and its refusal by Tolkien and the Gawain-poet no dedicated study was extant, and this is an accomplishment fulfilled by the present contribution. Nor was there a specific study on the subject of Tolkien and adultery, perhaps because critics thought, as Basney put it, that “‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ does not apply at all in a world where women and marriage hardly exist” (Basney 1980: 31), a view that is going to be seriously challenged in the present volume.

An earlier attempt to contextualize Tolkien more broadly in Western cultural history was indeed carried out by Martin Simonson in his 2008 outstanding volume The Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition, but Simonson’s approach was dedicated to the study of genre in Tolkien’s work. In the present volume for the first time it is Tolkien’s theory and practice of Fantasy to receive attention in this respect. Simonson’s volume still remains one of the most thorough and well-researched studies on The Lord of the Rings, while on The Hobbit an essential reference is Mark Atherton’s 2014 There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit, and on The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth series one should consult Elizabeth Whittingham’s The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology as well as Douglas Kane’s Arda Reconstructed.

The first part of the volume is dedicated to the history of phantasia in the West until the fourteenth century in relation to Tolkien. Chapter 1 traces the evolution of the Biblical concept of image and likeness of God from the origins in Hebrew tselem and yetzer, also in their connection with the female Presence or Shekhinah, to the twentieth century, placing Tolkien’s notion of Man as Sub-creator in the context of the tradition. Whereas the image was usually identified with reason, Tolkien is an active, original contributor to the debate on its nature, fully aware of the import of his proposal and the development of the notion of the imago as including woman and even glorifying her through Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius Agrippa, and Martin Luther, thus resulting as a precursor of subsequent developments such as Karl Barth’s and Emil Brunner’s relational model of the imago Dei. The inevitable though never stated association of sub-creativity with pro-creativity leads one to consider Tolkien also in the light of the thought of John Henry Newman, Fulton Sheen and John Paul II, as all three thinkers underlined the importance of creativity and motherhood as well as the cooperation between man and woman as constitutive of the imago Dei.

In Chapter 2 there follows the development of the notion of phantasia in Ancient Poetry and Philosophy since its etymological precursor in the term phasma, phantasm, in archaic poets such as Homer and Hesiod, then to reach the fifth century BCE when the word phantasia first occurs in Pre-Socratic philosophers and in Plato. The devaluation of phantasia that emerges since the earliest occurrence of the word is referred to the eastern influence enacted upon early Philosophy, the same influence that brought about the notion that the evil yetzer was only evil in Judaism. Aristotle’s theory of phantasia is much more balanced, but still only a theoretical account lacking the earlier godly status of what used to be considered a divine epiphany and is now only taken as a trivial matter, even by Stoics. Tolkien, who was attestedly a reader of Homer, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle, is then shown to be indebted to the embodied phantasms of early Greek literature but also to later notions of phantasmata.

Augustine of Hippo is studied as the turning point in Western devaluation of phantasia in Chapter 3. His idea of devoting oneself completely to God entails a scarce valorization of woman, body, and sex that even questions the ultimate legitimacy of procreation. Although a profound thinker in matters of pure theology such as the nature of evil (his notions on the topic will influence Tolkien), as well as a great philosopher in the Platonic tradition, Augustine was influenced by Manichaeism even in his dispute against it, and from it inherited the idea that phantasia was intrinsically despicable, related to sex, and as such ultimately evil. As a consequence, however he may admit that on the path towards God one should use phantasmata as a step on the ladder, such a ladder should be subsequently thrown away as soon as one reaches the above level. His double account of the Fall in Eden as motivated by vision or sight of the forbidden fruit entails a negative connotation of both woman and phantasia as visual representation that was going to be widespread in centuries to come. Through his interpretation of Matthew 5:27, fantasy was considered to be adultery of the heart throughout the Middle Ages.

Despite the general negative connotation of phantasia in Neo-Platonic thought, in Chapter 4 one sees how there were more balanced accounts by such thinkers as Plotinus, as well as positive commentary on a faculty that might be identified with the soul-vehicle (ochema) leading the ascent of the individual to the realm above the sky. Thus it has been stated that in Synesius of Cyrene’s philosophy it is good to see God by one’s own eyes, but it is even better to see Him in phantasia. The fourth century bishop is important because he offers us a counter-picture of what Christianity might have been but for following Augustine in his depreciative consideration of fantasy. Tolkien has been considered to be indebted to Neo-Platonism, but, even though Synesius’s philosophy in particular might not have been known to Tolkien, it is still an important parallel as well as an historical reference to keep in mind as one studies the history of fantasy in the West.

In Chapter 5 one sees what Alberto Varvaro called the emergence of the fantastic between the eleventh and the thirteenth century, coeval with the development of the Arthurian Legend in the form today known and with the affirmation of what has been aptly termed Courtly Love. Special focus on the figure of the incubus/succubus allows an explanation of the origin of Hobbits that is founded on Tolkien’s own indications. An investigation into fairies and Fairy marriages then affords an analysis of the Elves in Tolkien’s Legendarium, especially as far as Elf/Man romantic relationships are concerned. It is also explained how Courtly Love, evidenced in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, depends on Augustine’s three steps of sin in sight, excessive meditation (propassio), and consent (passio), being reworked as related to love by Andreas Capellanus, as Robertson aptly pointed out in 1969.

In Chapter 6 it is evidenced how in Thomas Aquinas’s thought phantasia was conceived as the faculty mediating between sense and the intellect, after common sense but before estimative power and memory. In combinative and dissociative phantasia, one has the ability to create phantasms of things not only absent but non-existing, such as a centaur or a mermaid. In particular, Aquinas provides the example of a gold mountain made from one’s image of gold and one’s image of a mountain. This is a perfect parallel to Tolkien’s Green Sun, made from one’s images of the green grass and the sun, and we know that Tolkien was a reader of Aquinas’s Summa. Aquinas’s more positive view of phantasia makes a pair with his considering woman an image of God too, differently from Augustine. In Dante, who was influenced by Aquinas, we find the idea that God transcends even the “high fantasy” through which the Poet was able to experience Paradise, so anticipating Tolkien’s idea of Sub-creation. Tolkien was for ten years a member of the Oxford Dante Society.

The second part of the volume treats Middle English literature in relation to Tolkien. In Chapter 7, an historical survey of the interpretations of the Song of Songs starts from the traditional Jewish reading of the Sulamite as Israel to arrive to medieval ecclesiological, mystical and mariological views. While Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis seem to embrace a more concrete view of the Song as a love poem endowed with mystical readings, Tolkien echoes medieval Mariology, as embraced by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Book of the Duchess. In interpreting Marian virginity as a prescription against actual adultery, and adultery of the heart as the intention to commit actual adultery, but not a condemnation of the sexual instinct per se, Tolkien develops a full commitment to marriage blessed by Mary that is key to his devotion as well as to his fictional tale of Beren and Lúthien. This way, he prefigures a retrieval of the imago Dei in the full acceptance of woman instead than in refusing sexual difference and sexuality.