The Works of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) can be defined as an effort to create a national epic. — Tommy Kuusela, “In Search of a National Epic: The Use of Old Norse Myths in Tolkien’s Vision of Middle-earth, ” Approaching Religion, 4, No. 1 (May 2014) p. 25.
Kuusela’s observation is unremarkable to anyone having a passing familiarity with Tolkien’s voluminous posthumous oeuvre. Kuusela remarks on the fact of Tolkien’s quest to (re)create an English mythology to provide context for his discussion of the manner in which Tolkien used Norse mythology and folklore as material with which to attempt the (re)construction of England’s foundational epic and mythology. Kuusala also remarks “ . . . Tolkien managed to popularise folklore material while his efforts to make his work exclusively English failed; for a contemporary audience, it is rather cross-cultural.” (p.25. cf. p. 35) Indeed, as I have remarked elsewhere, imagine a guy spending his whole life trying to create a mythology for his beloved England only to have that mythology embraced, half a century after his death, by New Zealand, of all places. Then again, Old Zealand isn’t too terribly far from the homeland of Hengist and Horsa, the quasi-historical founding brothers of Old England. So, the ongoing Kiwi-Hobbit love-affair may not be as odd, philologically speaking, as it might first seem.
But, whence this desire to create a national foundational epic for England? Many of Tolkien’s fellow English philologists had already clung (and many still cling) to Beowulf as just that epic. I must remark, as someone who has spent close to half a century studying and translating Beowulf, that, while it is a powerful poem in it’s way, Beowulf is in no way a national foundational epic for England in the way the Homeric poems are for Greece, or The Song of Roland or The Poem of the Cid might be claimed to be for France and Spain respectively.
A young friend asked my recently, after beginning to read a translation of the Old English poem, “What’s the big thing about Beowulf?” I replied without much (any) thought “English scholars where desperate for their own Homer.” When I consider that moment of snark, I realize that that is exactly why Virgil wrote the Aeneid, and why Milton wrote Paradise Lost, and Tennyson The Idyls of the King. There are three works that tower over European literature: The Bible, the foundational national epic of Judaism and Christianity, which is obviously cobbled together from disparate texts, and the two Homeric Poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which are in some much more challenging sense cobbled together from deeper source material. As national consciousness and the great Age of Philology rose up simultaneously in the 18th century and later, newly self-identifying nations found themselves driven by the happy example of Ancient Greece and the Homeric Poems to seek out, or create, their own national epics. The Germans, notably Wagner, turned to the Norse Sagas, with which the Icelanders where already well satisfied, and to the Old High German Nibelungenlied. Newly united Italy already had Virgil’s Aeneid (itself a product of an early Age of Philology and nationalism) and Dante’s Comedia to claim as its own. The Spanish and French could each claim one of the two poems already mentioned as theirs. When the time would finally come, Pushkin, working with a remarkable lack of historical depth, would make himself Russia’s Homer. And the English, a little desperately, could bravely clutch at Beowulf, like Grendel with his claw. But the story of a Swede’s adventures in Denmark is a bit of a feeble national epic for England. I am sometimes surprised that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight never seemed to be in the running, but that’s a debate for another day, or paragraph, perhaps.
The Kalevala: Elias Lönnrot and the Finnish Homeric Question
One repeatedly hears the ‘Land of Heroes’ described as the ‘national Finnish Epic’” as if a nation, besides if possible a national bank theatre and government, out also automatically to possess a national epic. Finland does not. The K[alevala] is certainly not one. It is a mass of conceivably epic material: but, and I think this is the main point, it would lose nearly all that which is its greatest delight if it were ever to be epically handled. – J. R. R. Tolkien, “On ‘The Kalevala’ or Land of Heroes,” reprinted in The Story of Kullervo, ed. By Verlyn Fleiger (London: Harper Collins, 2015) p. 70.
In the heart of the Nineteen Hundreds, a little more than half a century before Tolkien started his personal quest to recreate an English national epic – which led to The Lord of the Rings and a never ending catalogue of posthumous rehashings of every scribble he ever made – stands the only reconstructed, pieced-together, synthetic national epic after Homer’s that may justly be called successful: Elias Lönnrot’s deeply rooted Finnish pastiche, The Kalevala. Before the middle of the 20th Century, a large part of what had been called “The Homeric Question” for generations of scholars was “how were the Iliad and the Odyssey actually composed?” Some variation of “a Redactor must have cobbled the poems together from pre-existing short songs and verse stories” was an easy and popular answer for many centuries. When Elias Lönnrot was completing his Masters degree at Turku in 1827, the ideas of, on the one hand, the Italian Vico that the Homeric poems were the product of a long oral tradition, and, on the other, of Wolf, that the Homeric poems as we have them are the product of redactors who had tinkered with the text over generations, were well established in scholarship. And the fight between the Unitarians (“Homer wrote the poems and we have his poems”) and the Analysts (“the poems were pieced together from pre-existing bits and it’s our job to take the bits apart”) was in full swing. Indeed, just ten years before Lönnrot’s thesis examination, Kaarle Akseli Gottlund wrote
. . . if one should desire to collect the old traditional songs and from these make a systematic whole, there might come from them an epic, a drama, or whatever, so that from this a new Homer, Ossian, or Nibelungenlied might come into being (Svensek Literature-tidning, No. 25, 21 June 1817, p. 394, quoted and translated by Francis P. Magoun in his translation The Kalevala or Poems of the Kaleva District [Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963] p. 350.
Clearly, the Analysts were abroad in Nordic scholarship.
In 1828, a year after defending his thesis on the subject of a goddess of the ancient Finns, Lönnrot set out on a walking tour of various areas, including Finnish Karelia. This walking tour was the beginning of what would become The Kalevala. In the forward to his translation of The Kalevala (The Kalevala or Poems of the Kaleva District [Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963] p. xiii) Francis P. Magoun, Jr. writes:
Again and again the Kalevala has been described as the national heroic epic of the Finnish people, a description which, at least outside Finland, has tended to do the work a certain disservice by raising expectations that the reader is not likely to find fulfilled, regardless of what else he may find that is richly rewarding at a poetical, folkloristic, or ethnographical level. Any talk about a national heroic epic is bound to evoke thoughts of the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the Old French Chanson de Roland, or the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, all of which possess a more or less unified and continuously moving plot with actors who are wealthy aristocratic warriors performing deeds of valor and displaying great personal resourcefulness andd initiative, often, too, on a rather large stage. The Kalevala is really nothing like these. It is essentially a conflation and concatenation of a considerable number and variety of traditional songs, narrative, lyric, and magic, sung by unlettered singers, male and female, living to a great extent in northern Karelia in the general vicinity of Archangel.
It was in Karelia that, according to Aarne A Antila Lönnrot “met at least one man especially expert in the old songs . . . and . . . a couple of composers of newer songs . . . .”(in Iso Tietosanakirja, 2nd ed., vol.VII [Helsinki, 1935], translated by Francis P. Magoun, Jr. in The Kalevala or Poems of the Kaleva District [Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963] p. 342) This description inevitably brings to mind the experiences of Milman Parry (as described by his student and colleague Albert Lord) in Yugoslavia which led to major breakthroughs in the understanding of how the Homeric poems were likely composed:
During the summer of 1935, while collecting at Bijelo Plje, Parry came across a singer named Avdo Međedović, one of those who had heard Ćor Huso in their youth, whose powers of invention and story-telling were far above the ordinary . . .” (The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. By Adam Parry, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971] p. 476.)
Only slightly more than a century after Lönnrot, Parry was among the South Slavs gathering material in very much the manner Lönnrot had done in that summer of 1828. But, where Parry, with the advantage of more modern audio recording technology, came to see and hear that traditional oral poetry was a common stock inherited and remodeled by each singer in the tradition, and so, the idea of a single “text” was foreign and useless to understanding, Lönnrot, with pencil, paper, and perhaps shorthand, was predisposed to see the material of each song as unitary. And so, perhaps, Lönnrot was destined to be an analyst, and, when it came time to consider the poems of the Kaleva District, Lönnrot could be nothing other than a synthesist. Lönnrot collected material and worked and worked to find the keys to fit it all together. Lönnrot was not the author or composer of a Finnish national epic, he was the virtuoso tailor who stitched the largely unknown materials of Karelian folklore into The Kalevala, a single, strange, coherent work worthy of being claimed by the Finnish people.
It is against Lönnrot’s masterful tailoring that all other attempts at a national epic must perhaps be judged. Only Homer’s poems, in their organic naturalness, rise above The Kalevala. Virgil’s personality overshadows his patriotism (if that may be possible), Milton’s Puritan Catholicism erases the national, and Tennyson’s choice of an Arthurian theme was doomed (as is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, perhaps,) as an English epic: Arthur fought the ancestors of the English, is a hero of the Welsh, and is largely a creation of a French and German poets. And Beowulf, as mentioned, despite its language, has nothing to do with England. And Tolkien, the most recent, has roots spread far too widely, and, in the unfinished state it forever was during the author’s life and after, it grew too diffuse and unreadable, save by the extreme specialist.
But, to paraphrase Yoda, there is another . . .
The Poems of Ossian: A case-study in ill-referenced source material and modern scholarship
James Macpherson was a child of the rural, Gaelic-speaking Highlands whose life began shortly before the disaster of Culloden and grew to be educated in English at Scottish Universities. While at university he was a prolific producer of original poetry. After his schooling, he returned to his home village and, in 1760 he published a wee book titled Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, etc. This was the period of the Scottish Renaissance when thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith dominated the intellectual discourse of Scottish coffee-houses, Europe, and beyond. Hume and Smith and Co. were trained in the Classics, they knew Homer and Virgil well, and they also knew that if Scotland were ever truly to stand on the world stage, it needed its own ancient epic anchored in equally ancient roots. More than simply a collector, Macpherson was a native who was able to communicate to the wider world some of what he knew of his people’s traditional poetry and lore. Macpherson was embraced by the Scottish intelligentsia and went home to the Highlands to find and bring back more of Scotland’s ancient epic heritage. The early result was an epic “poem” – curiously, despite the masses of verse he wrote at university, the Ossian poems are all prose – titled Fingal, published in 1761. A second epic, Temora, shortly appeared, and the rest is rather disputed history. Macpherson was almost universally lionized. But Dr. Samuel Johnson suggested, in his forceful way, that both the poems, now attributed to an ancient bard named Ossian, and Macpherson were giant frauds.
Dr. Johnson’s view eventually came to hold the stage and largely holds it still, but for a number of generations, Ossian dominated the European intellectual and artistic world, inspiring plays and operas, shaping the thought of the German Sturm und Drang movement, including a young Goethe. Gauti Kristmannsson has written that “Macpherson’s works had effectually helped to change the perspective on the folk ballad and poetry tradition” (Ossian, the European National Epic [1760-1810], in: European History Online [Mainz: Leibniz Institute of European History], 2015-11-09 ) because of their influence on Thomas Percy and his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, itself an early attempt to find that foundational English mythology-in-poetry that the Scots seemed to have just discovered. As Kristmannson writes: “Part of the poem’s appeal is the fact that they were received by most intellectuals and poets in Europe as a kind of prototype or model for their own budding national literatures at the time.” Kristmannson offers up a cornucopia of Ossian-inspired European literature, art, and music for consideration. Clearly, Ossian dominated the creative world of generations of Europeans. For a moment, Macpherson’s Ossian became “the European National Epic”, as Kristmannsson says in his title. Then, after Ossian had pretty much created Romanticism and almost everything that lead to Modernism, Johnson’s argument of fraud came back to life. Macpherson documented few sources. His oral informants were apparently unknown. His manuscript sources seemed invisible. Ossian’s roots are severed. In short, Macpherson was not careful to show his work, and the new scientific philology rising up in Germany was not impressed. Ossian, once the toast of polite society across Europe, was banished to the Academy to be studied by dusty scholars sporadically, if at all. And, with an unfortunate irony, the philology that banished Macpherson and Ossian was actually in large part inspired by Ossian and in significant part created by Macpherson’s pioneering work in field-collection of folk poetry and neglected manuscripts.
The great Gaelic poet and scholar Derick Thomson turned much of the argument of Johnson and his followers on its head with his 1952 book The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s “Ossian” (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd) in which he identified fourteen Gaelic ballads that Macpherson had used as sources and exactly how he had used each in constructing Fingal. In a much later essay (“James Macpherson: The Gaelic Dimension,” in From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations, Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill, eds. [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998], p. 20-21) Thomson demonstrates from contemporary letters that Macpherson indeed had important Gaelic manuscripts with him on his collecting trip to the Hebrides and that
. . . the work of creating Fingal was taking place in Badenoch in early 1761, with the active collaboration of a Gaelic poet who seems to have been making a fairly accurate translation of passages from Fingal, while various authentic Gaelic manuscripts and orally-delivered versions were floating about . . .
In her September 2020 article, Petra Johana Poncarová sums up Thomson’s career-spanning argument:
Gaelic Scotland as an old and rich literary tradition; the Ossianic tradition is genuine and existed long before Macpherson; it is well-attested in manuscripts and by later collectors; Macpherson was a native Gaelic speaker, he knew Gaelic traditions from is childhood in Badenoch and drew on existing ballads, but in his publications, he altered them to suit his own purposes and added his own writing to them. He had in his possession genuine old Gaelic manuscripts, some of which have been preserved to our times (and many thanks to his activities, as the Ossianic craze fired by Macpherson’s publications persuaded people that old manuscripts had value) and some of which have been lost, so we will probably never get to know their actual contents. – “Derek Thomson and the Ossian Controversy”, Anglica, 29/3 2020, p. 131.
So, in a nutshell, Macpherson was not a fraud: Johnson and those who followed Johnson’s path had no understanding of what exactly Macpherson was doing with his source materials; and it has taken two centuries and more for scholars and philological techniques to catch up to Macpherson.
“I seize the tales as they pass, and pour them forth in song” writes Macpherson/ sings Ossian at the beginning of the beautiful short piece Oina-Morul (page 187, in the 1926 William Sharp edition I have beside me). This line could easily be a scratchy recording of one of Milman Parry’s subjects in Yugoslavia, or some words of Demodocus in The Odyssey. And it is most certainly a description of Macpherson’s method.
In her Introduction to Howard Gaskill’s edition of The Poems of Ossian and related works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) Fiona J. Stafford writes:
As literary studies have diversified and texts traditionally marginalised have begun to demand academic attention, Macpherson’s Ossian has re-emerged from the mist. It is, after all, pre-eminently a text of the margins – not in the sense that it is peripheral to serious literary study, but because it inhabits the margins of contrasting, oppositional cultures. For Macpherson’s “translations” involved acts of interpretation not only between Gaelic and English, but also between the oral culture of the depressed rural communities of the Scottish Highlands, and the prosperous urban centres of Lowland Britain, where the printed word was increasingly dominant. Once seen in the context of eighteenth century Scottish history, The Poems of Ossian seem less the work of an inexpert linguist, or an unscrupulous “Scotsman on the make” than a sophisticated attempt to mediate between two apparently irreconcilable cultures. (p. viii)
This scholarly turn-around is certainly welcome, but even in the most anti-Macpherson periods, there have been voices crying in the Gaelic wilderness that Dr. Johnson had no actual clothes on when he called Ossian a fraud. In his Introductory Note to a 1926 publication of The Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: John Grant), William Sharp writes, making reference to John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1860-62)
The ordinary English opinion, which blindly and unreasoningly follows the lead of a great authority on many literary matters, though one whose dicta on Ossianic literature were next to valueless, Dr Johnson, is: that “The Poems of Ossian,” which were published in 1760, and have since become familiar throughout the whole world, were composed in English prose by James Macpherson, and that he was the inventor of the characters and incidents: in a word, that the poems had no previous existence in any shape.
This, of course, as all our leading specialists are now agreed, is wholly untenable. As Mr Campbell states, in the already alluded to essay in his “Popular Tales of the West Highlands,” the groundwork of much that is in “Ossian” certainly existed in Gaelic in Scotland long before Macpherson was born. The chief characters figured in Gaelic compositions centuries ago, and in Gaelic songs by well-known ancient bards there are so many allusions to Fionn, the Feinne, Oisin (Ossian), and the heroes of the Ossianic cycle, that there is absolutely no standing ground left for this theory. – p. xv
The truth was known, from the beginning, but even now, two and a half centuries later, the truth of the Ossian poems and their huge historical influence is still not widely known and so terribly rarely taught.
An Illustrative Digression
. . . not for one moment suggesting that Star Wars(: A New Hope) actually has any redeeming qualities . . .
Imagine for a moment that, after a single student film spinoff (THX 1138) and a surprising little coming of age piece (American Graffiti), George Lucas had written (badly) and directed (competently) a little space opera (Star Wars) which somehow became not just the toast of the town but a cultural phenomenon. Imagine that everyone from Francis Ford Coppola (no surprise there) through Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Peter Jackson (Meet the Feebles, anyone?), to Stanley Kubrick raved about Lucas and Star Wars as being the best thing since sliced bread and the bee’s knees all around! And imagine that the lone voice of an unnaturally long lived Orson Wells continually cried “nay” and conducted a public feud with Lucas to the end of the days of one of them, claiming that Lucas was nothing more than a hack and Star Wars was a hopelessly unoriginal pastiche of the worst kind and of the worst sort of source material, that the film was of no importance and should be dismissed and forgotten and certainly not become the educational basis of future generations of filmmakers who will grow up believing that a fine film involves ever bigger explosions made with ever more vivid computer driven effects and a great deal of ancillary merchandise leading to endlessly multiplying derivative films in the “franchise”. (Like that could ever happen.)
And imagine that Leonard Bernstein then composed a Star Wars Symphony, and Glen Gould came out of recording retirement (and the afterlife) to play the solo piano bits. And imagine that both Andy Warhol and David Rauschenberg produced major visual works inspired by Star Wars. And imagine that the Beatles got back together and recorded a collaborative two record concept album with the Rolling Stones and The Who, produced by Alan Parsons and Rick Wakeman inspired by Star Wars.
And then imagine that Orson Wells had been right all along. Imagine that Lucas were vilified and Star Wars were wiped away, ignored, disappeared as the unfashionable tinkerings of an incompetent hack. Well, sure, you could still find an obscure scholarly copy on VHS, but no one actually watched the thing any more. Sure, opera fans still raved about Kiri Te Kenawa’s rendition of Princess Leia’s slave-girl aria, and visual artists still went to school on Warhol’s Skywalker Triptych, and actors still longed for a chance to perform Tom Stoppard’s Darth Vader’s Fatherhood Soliloquy . . .
. . . but no one actually watched Star Wars.
This is exactly what happened to Macpherson and the Ossian poems. For decades, much of a century, the Ossian poems were at the centre of European intellectual culture. They inspired poets, philosophers, writers, politicians, painters, and budding nationalists. It could be and has been argued that the poems of Ossian made Romanticism possible. And, of course, out of Romanticism comes Liberalism, Socialism, and, it might be argued, the American and French Revolutions and Marxism. But, Ossian and Macpherson take a back seat (they aren’t even in the car!) to . . . . what? Whence this revolution, according to the Now? It is said that Napoleon, of all people, slept with a copy of Ossian under his pillow. What did Wellington have under his pillow?
Ossian created our modern world! All of our modern attitudes apparently derive from what Samuel Johnson would describe as James Macpherson’s whims.
And then, imagine that Orson Wells was actually wrong about Star Wars in my baroque thought experiment above.
Macpherson wasn’t a forger any more than was Elias Lönnrot. But Lönnrot benefited from the philology that Macpherson helped to create. Lönnrot was a little more clear about his sources than was Macpherson, but modern scholars – modern philologists – have begun to retrace and recover the sources from which Macpherson worked. Keith Bosley writes, in his introduction to his translation of The Kalevala (p.xv) “Modern research has shown that the texts are based on genuine material, but that Macpherson lacked the scholarship to do it justice.” Macpherson didn’t create the works of Ossian from whole cloth, and he seems to have worked with a certain measure of good faith. Kristmannsson writes in closing Ossian, the European National Epic (1760-1810):
That Macpherson’s works were removed from the canon of the most important works of European, and, indeed, world literature, might . . . be regarded as a matter of nationalist narrow-mindedness and dogmatic notions on translation and textual criticism.
I regard that removal as a tragedy. Macpherson had such a profound affect on the sensibilities of generations! And for those generations, Ossian’s poems constituted nothing other than the foundational epic of a nation which was larger than just the English: these poems which claimed roots in the depth of pre-Roman Celtic Britain were embraced as the national epic of a United Kingdom rooted in the British Isles, contrasted to the continent, distinct from the Germanic North of the Sagas and the Nibelungen, and from the Romance South of Roland, the Cid, and Dante’s starkly formal urbanity. And, somehow, Ossian’s poems became the national epic of a momentary Greater Europe – until the epic was cast aside and Europe was dragged and pushed through two centuries of horrific warfare and revolution.
By the time Lönnrot was making like Macpherson’s in Karelia, Macpherson’s Ossian had been discarded, very largely due to lack of citation of sources. At the end of the 19th century as young J. R. R. Tolkien began his truly epic and perpetually unfinished-yet-still-growing philological fantasy, England still had no foundational epic.
Unless it were Beowulf.
What has Bilbo Baggins to do with Christ?
Very early in his creative life, before he had invented much of anything of what would become the life’s work for which he is remembered, J. R. R. Tolkien was struck by a single word in line 104 of the Exeter Book poem Christ: earendil. Much later, in August of 1967, Tolkien wrote of this word in a footnote in a draft for a letter to ‘Mr Rang’ from August 1967 (yes, Tolkien footnoted his letters):
Its earliest recorded A-S form is earendil (oer-), later earendel, eorendel. Mostly in glosses on jubar=leoma; also on aurora. But also in Blick Hom 163, se níwa éorendel appl. To St John the Baptist; and most notably Crist 104, éala! Éarendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended. Often supposed to refer to Christ (or Mary), but comparison with Bl. Homs. suggests that it refers to the Baptist. – The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) p. 385.
Yes, Tolkien seems to be correct that, in the Exeter Book poem, the word earendel refers to John the Baptist, but there’s much more to unpack from this word. Earendel explicitly identifies in the above line of Christ with “the brightest of angels” who in most Medieval (and later) contexts is none other than Lucifer, First of the Rebel Angels, also known as Satan. In Germanic myth, Earendel is a widespread figure whose name goes through various sound changes, but he remains broadly similar whether named Aurvandill, Aurandil, Auriwandalo, or the Horwendillus/Ørvendil complex given to Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s source, the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. And so, Earendil the Mariner brings us back to the shores of Denmark, like Beowulf’s ship in England’s national epic.
Tolkien mourned in a letter to Milton Waldman, probably in 1951:
. . . here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. – The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) p. 144.
The “Celtic” material that Tolkien refers to probably did not include Ossian, but almost certainly included the Mabinogion, an assemblage of older tales that was gathered together by some 11th or 12th century Welsh soulmate of Lönrott. At the end of the 11th century there was a rebellion of the various Welsh kingdoms against the Norman rulers of England and, one would presume, a resurgence of general Welsh nationalism. For most of a century the Welsh were in the ascendancy in their own lands. In 1171, Rhys ap Gruffydd (not to be confused with his father, Gruffydd ap Rhys), ruler of Deheubarth made peace and a deal with King Henry II of England that he (Rhys) keep all his reconquered (from the English) lands and be named Justiciar of South Wales (in exchange for payments of tribute to Henry). Five years later, at Christmas in 1176, Rhys held a festival at Cardigan of Welsh poetry. One might imagine the Mabinogion being assembled in preparation or commemoration of that very festival by some 12th century philologist. In the 19th century, again around the time Lönrott ventured into Karelia, linguist and philologist Lady Charlotte Guest edited, translated, and published a bilingual edition of the Mabinogion and it exploded on the scene as Ossian had a century before. But, unlike Macpherson, Lady Guest had the techniques and machinery of modern philology behind her. She was able to show her work.
A little later, around the time Tolkien was in diapers in Bloemfontein, the Orange Free State, an American fellow named Francis James Child sat in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts and collected ballads published around England and Scotland, writing letters to other philologists in Europe and America requesting information. The result of this library research was the wonderful and influential five volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, [1882–98]). The collection is more commonly referred to as “The Child Ballads”. It is to Child’s collection, I am absolutely certain, that Tolkien refers in the 1951 (he should have known better by then) letter quoted above as “impoverished chap-book stuff”. Child’s material is absolutely “ bound up with [England’s and Scotland’s] tongue and soil”, but by 1951, Tolkien had long ago gone down a different path, and whatever his wishes might have been, his national epic for England was no longer part of the plan.
In a letter to Rhona Beare dated October 14, 1958, Tolkien writes that the “gap in time between the Fall of Barad-dûr and our Days is sufficient for ‘literary credibility’, even for readers acquainted with what is known or surmised of ‘pre-history’.” Tolkien adds in a footnote:
I imagine the gap to be about 6000 years: that is we are now at the end of the Fifth Age, if the Ages were of about the same length as S.A. and T.A. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh.– The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) p. 283.
Tolkien’s legendarium had expanded to become a fictional pre-history of Europe and the world. Superficially, Middle-earth has more in common with the Hyborean Age of Robert E. Howard’s Conan mythos – if one is willing to ignore at once Howard’s turgid writing and Tolkien’s breathtaking depth of imagination. But neither Howard nor Tolkien forge anything but the most fragile of links to the real history of Asia, or of Europe, or of England.
In his commentary on The Cottage of Lost Play, – The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. 1, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 23-24, Christopher Tolkien describes the contents of a small notebook his father kept around the end of the First World War. These contents are notes on “The Story of Eriol’s Life.” Eriol is a Mariner, a “son of Earendel” because he was born under the light of that star, although his “real” father is named Eoh (Old English for “Horse”). Eriol marries a woman named Cwen (the Old English word for “woman” and our modern word queen) and they have two sons, Hengest and Horsa, the traditional leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.
Tolkien never made any attempt to follow Lönnrot example, to go out into the field and collect actual English traditional poems and stories. And he never bothered with Child’s “ impoverished chap-book stuff”, despite the magical wonders of “Twa Magicians” and “Thomas Rhymer”, the human earthiness of “King Henry” and “Alison Gross”, the nobility of Lord Randal” and “Edward”. Imagine the magic-filled history of England that could be assembled from this legitimate material by an English Lönnrot!
In his introduction to his translation of The Kalevala (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989) Keith Bosley writes: “It is as though English literature had begun with Percy’s Reliques, and everything before had been written in French.” (p. xlvi) And here is the stumbling block Tolkien faced: English literature did not begin with the great Age of Philology. The English Age of Oral Literature ended, in its most pure state, long before the Norman Conquest. Tolkien longed for a national epic based on the first literary records of the surface of the unfathomable depths of English oral tradition, but such first literary record, where it may be found, is “involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.” And so, despite his own deep Catholicism, which he himself stated is fundamental to his works, Tolkien could not bring himself to assemble an explicitly Christian English mythos.
And so, Tolkien rejected or ignored legitimate poetic material and made all his stories, poems and even languages up and roughly grafted them onto a single line of an Old English poem and onto a misty tradition about the founding of England. And later he abandoned any explicit connection between his stories and the language and soil for which he once wanted to create a national epic. What little such connections left in his works published during his lifetime are little more than three: a sentence in the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring “Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger; the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea.” The Fellowship of the Ring (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966) p. 11; the poem “Fastiticalon” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which is actually an adaptation of a fragment from the very real Exeter Book rather than one of the “verses from the Red Book” mentioned in the subtitle of Tolkien’s little book; and the name Eärendil, also borrowed from The Exeter Book in the poem Eärendillinwë which appears in The Fellowship of the Ring on pages 246-249.
And so, New Zealand has The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
And England is left with Beowulf.
And Ossian waits in the wings for his Second Act.
Behind the Hedge 