Different Chiastic Readings of That Hideous Strength

Intro

The point of this post is to examine two (hopefully not, but unfortunately probably) competing chiastic structures that can be made of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and the different effects that they have on the meaning that can be drawn from the work. I will leave it up to the reader to familiarize themselves with what chiasm is either in my base post on chiasm or the Wikipedia page on it.

The two competing chiasms are my own seventeen-element Chiasm done based on Lewis’s original seventeen-chapter structure and a seven-element chiasm done by Sanford Schwartz in C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy (p. 98 is the actual diagram of his chiasm). It is important to me to note that I do not see these as necessarily mutually exclusive. I think that they both are at work and that they compliment each other. The only reservation I have with somebody like Schwartz is if the chiasm he outlines is taken as the definitive chiasm of the work to the exclusion of the chiasm I make out of Lewis’s original chapter structuring. In reality, I would argue that the chiasm using the original chapter structure is the primary one, as the chapter structure is done by Lewis himself, and that Schwartz’s has to be added on top (although I think it is entirely legitimate to do so as exegeting the objective content of the work, especially given Lewis’s known erudition in classical literature and the undeniable place of the numerological value of the number 7, which, for the uninitiated to numerological thinking, is not a mathematical quality). But in the present climate, I will settle for at least seeing them as equal.

My Chiasm

This pretty much goes straight on the original chapters structure, “by the book” quite literally.

A = (ch. 1) Sale of College Property

    B = (ch. 2) Dinner with the Subwarden

        C = (ch. 3) Belbury and St Anne’s

           D = (ch. 4) Liquidation of Anachronisms

              E = (ch. 5) Elasticity

                 F = (ch. 6) Fog

                    G = (ch. 7) The Pendragon

                       H = (ch. 8) Moonligh at Belbury

                           I =  (ch. 9)The Saracen’s Head

                       H1 = (ch. 10) Conquered City

                    G1 = (ch. 11) Battle Begun

                 F1 = (ch. 12) Wet and Windy Night

              E1 = (ch. 13) Pulled Down Deep Heaven

           D1 = (ch. 14) Real Life is Meeting

        C1 = (ch. 15) Descent of the Gods

    B1 = (ch. 16) Banquet at Belbury

A1 =  (ch. 17)Venus at St. Anne’s

So, that is one big ole chiasm, yes? I’m going to rely on the reader having read (or going to read) the book, and I am going to go ahead and draw out chiastic elements in support of seeing these more numerous elements. A first really obvious one is that B (Dinner with the Subwarden) and B1 (Banquet at Belbury) are both what I call “ideology meals” at which the real workings of “inner circles” are going on, although in the first, it is Mark’s initiation to the progressive element and in the second it is the defeat of the bigger and more powerful “inner circle” within England, the NICE. But even on the outside of this, it cannot be missed that the that chapter 1opening with Jane’s contemplation of marriage is paired off against the real guide of marital love, Venus, doing her thing at St. Anne’s.

I’m keeping this list short just to give representative element-paring themes, but there are many more that could be done. But these last two that I will give here are also chosen very purposefully for what I will be arguing is the meaning to be drawn from this particular chiasm, which is the central theme of marriage and the married couple as facing the “hideous strenht.” The first is that in G (Pendragon) and G1 (Battle Begun) you have the two members of the couple, Jane and then Mark, each presented individually as having multiple versions of themselves interacting. In G, we have four Janes on the train coming back from St. Anne’s, the fourth of which is Jane herself as in control of the first three elements of herself, the first three “Janes,” and simply in a state of joy, while in G1, we have Mark discovering a fundamental version of himself that chooses “Jane’s side,” or the side of the “straight,” and contemplating that version of himself that was always trying to “get ahead” and be in the exclusive inner circle (I love the comments on how he and the tramp become an inner conspiratorial circle whose secrecy is so strong that it can never be broken).

 And the last I will give is maybe my favorite both for how well it is worked into the plot and for how well it embodies the theme I will propose: In D (Liquidation of Anachronisms), we have homes being broken up, particularly marital homes in the form of both Ivy Maggs and the Dimbles being turned out of their homes by the NICE by way of the university. Then in D1 (Real Life is Meeting), we have Jane with Mother Dimble preparing the marriage reunion chamber (the cottage at St. Anne’s) for Ivy Maggs and her “jailbird husband,” and there is this neat long exposition on Mother Dimble as representative of a tradition of mother types tucking young newlyweds into the marriage bed for generations. But we also have the flower-fire lady and her manic dwarves wrecking the place up, just as the NICE wrecked up the homes in the earlier chapter … as the director says, “what you will get if you will not have the other.”

Schwartz’s Chiasm

Schwartz’s has to combine chapters to make elements work, but I will note that it’s interesting that he does have my multiple Janes and Marks chapters isolated (although his emphasis in the latter chapter, or at least his name for it in his actual chiasm descriptors, is not on Mark), which is some nice support for me.

A = Separation (chs. 1–3)

    B = NICE Offensive (chs. 4–6)

        C = Jane’s Transformation (ch. 7)

           D = Head vs. Merlin (chs. 8–10)

        C1 = Facing Death (ch. 11)

    B1 = Merlin to St. Anne’s (chs. 12–14)

A1 =  Reunion (chs. 15–17)

I’ll note one thing in defense of this chiasm off the bat. There is a reason that, say, Rowling’s Harry Potter series occurs in a seven-element chiasm. It’s among the most numerologically significant numbers, if not he most significant when we go all the way back in the Judeo-Christian tradition (to quote Tom Riddle, “Isn’t 7 the most magically powerful number?”). The world was made in seven days, and it is a number symbolizing completion or completeness. Add on top of this the fact that, even moreso than Rowling because he studied a lot more (as an Oxford don, versus simply completing an undergrad degree in classics), Lewis is steeped in medieval lit … and that means literary alchemy. The things all sort of travel together: literary alchemy and chiasm. Aside from all of the stuff provided by John Granger, who is the most knowledgeable person I personally know on this material, including on Lewis’s trilogy, just a small taste of Lewis’s use of alchemy will suffice to show that it is not at all stretching the imagination to suspect he uses it all over the place, including at the deepest levels of structure. Alchemy has a very standard description of it as a three-stage process: black (the negredo), white (the albedo), and red (the rubedo). For instance, Rowling demonstrably uses this structure in the last three of the Harry Potter books: Sirius Black dies in book 5, Albus Dumbledore dies in book 6, and Rubeus Hagrid is emphasized in book 7 as the one who bears Harry to the magical world of Hogwarts (he brought him across the lake in book 1 and carries his body to the castle from the forbidden forest in book 7 … Harry’s death, or undeniable and active willingness, to die). The small example from Lewis is in Perelandra when Ransom comes from the black darkness of the underground cave, up through the white crystal cave, and out into the red earth mountaintop.

The thing is that alchemy also has a seven-stage description. I’m not going to detail that here, partly because I am much less familiar with it than Granger, but Granger himself does a lot of exposition of the seven-stage process as the seven-book structure of the Harry Potter series. My main point here is, again, that these things all travel together: chiasm, literary alchemy, threes, sevens, and so on. And thus, it is not only all right, but even completely fitting and good practice, to look for a seven-element chiasm in a book by a medieval scholar like Lewis. My only problem would be if exposition limits itself to that here. Unfortunately I think that there is a tendency to do this at least on the popular level because of some of what I am going to say in the next section about in interest in “power players” eclipsing considerations of the hoi polloi, the common folk. I think its simply an unfortunate tendency we have to gravitate to the readings of the big power players to the exclusion of inclusion of the commoners.

The Real Difference

So, the real difference is one of emphasis at the center: power players or the “little people,” the hoi polloi. Which is the book really about? I would argue that it’s about both, and really about the connection between them, but also that there is a tendency often, when big power players can be seen, to bump the hoi polloi way down and almost ignore them.

I’ll describe in a moment how I think my chiasm maintains a focus on the hoi polloi and why I think it is significant, but first I want to put in a note of fairness to Schwartz’s reading (and again, I can’t emphasize enough, especially because Schwartz has a LOT more erudition in this field than do I [he got this book published on it by Oxford University Press … that’s a lot bigger achievement than my little blog here], that I think his chiasm is absolutely legitimate, just that it should not be taken in isolation, as I fear many would). Lewis does, in fact, at least at one particular point, employ a heirachical structure between power players and hoi polloi. And it is all the more emphasized by the fact that, at least I think, he uses an actual medieval stage-play structure for it. I am not sure whether “everyman plays” were an official subset of morality plays or that it is simply the fact that the most representative of these morality plays was called “Everyman.” I just know that this is an element we discussed in a class in undergrad when we discussed the play “The Just Vengeance” by Lewis’s friend, famous translator of Dante, one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford, and immensely popular author of the Lord Peter Wimsey series of short stories and novels … Dorothy L. Sayers. The structure in these particular medieval plays (her play was modeled on this and written for performance in the Lichfield cathedral) was that there was the broader lower stage on which went the hoi polloi, the main “everyman” character and a few other principals and the chorus with its representatives of various classes or elements in society, and then there was a smaller upper stage on which God / the Trinity, the angels, and biblical characters acted, sometimes in big-player discussions and sometimes in reenactments of biblical stories, and there was a correspondence between the upper and lower stages … as above, so below (check out my review of the horror film by that name here, btw) … “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Lewis uses this exact setup when the edilla descend on Ransom and Merlin and instill their powers in Merlin to do what he needs to do. With each “god” that comes into the blue room on the upper floor, there is an appropriate effect on the hoi polloi down in the kitchen on the ground floor. I quite simply love this sequence … so much rich texture in the depiction of the hoi polloi. When Mercury, the messenger, the god of language, descends, they have these conversations that they can never remember the content of afterwards, simply that they had amazing wordplays and double entendres, and triple entendres, wit upon wit. When Venus descends, while the bachelor and bachelorette (MacPhee and Ironwood) kind of doze off, the two married couples are leaning close together in intimate conversations with many blushing smiles, and Jane, since she is in neither class (she is married, but not a Christian marriage, on Lewis’s terms, and her husband is not there), simply observes. My favorite is when Jove (Jupiter), the festive king of the gods, descends. They clear the floor and Arthur Denniston brings out a fiddle and they dance, and I love the way Lewis works in the “can’t remember clearly but can remember broad tones” thing, and while I don’t usually quote at this length because of the bother of reading and typing, it is worth doing here (and it reminds me a bit of the dark Morris dance in Pratchett’s Wintersmith):

What they danced no one could remember. It was some round dance, no modern shuffling: it involved beating the floor, clapping of hands, leaping high. And no one while it lasted thought himself or his fellows ridiculous. It may in fact have been some village measure, not ill-suited to the tiled kitchen: the spirit in which they danced it was not so. It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.

[SIDE NOTE: I apologize to Schwartz or anybody else who has written on the use of the stage-play structure in this scene that I am not mentioning. My observation of it is my own work, but I know that I am not a particularly original thinker in this area and that, if I can see it, I’m sure I’m not the first. I simply haven’t read it anywhere else. I have Schwartz’s book, but I have not been through it thoroughly at all to know … I simply picked out the chiasm originally to bring in something interesting for the book club discussion for which I reread Hideous Strength in October 2017, so he may even cover it … I should read it thoroughly to know, but time sometimes does not allow, and I am not always the most organized with time and studies either, so apologies to him or any others I should be crediting on the medieval theater structure relation to the descent of the gods scene, but it is also true that I did put it together myself from memory of studying the structure for the undergrad class … but, in a completely esoteric and nerdy aside, this post is also a bit nostalgic for me because my own notes from which I am working for my chiasm were drawn up while finishing reading the book sitting in Bryant Park behind the NYPL on my last biking trip to NYC, just as I saved rereading part of the Silmarillion for another bookclub meeting for sitting on my reading rock in Central Park on another biking trip END SIDE NOTE].

All of that digression is simply to say that the hierarchy of power players over hoi polloi is not at all out of place in the book. It’s just that I think that Lewis’s main point dwells on the hoi polloi, and particularly the married couple Mark and Jane Studdock. It’s not that it does it to the exclusion of the power players, for the couple could not do what they need to do without the power players (the eldilla, Ransom, and Merlin) doing what they do, they need them. But the emphasis is, I think, still on the couple confronting the head (symbolic of confronting evil in all of their married life together) and needing to have some agency themselves in the doing of it. I don’t think that it is wise to miss the significance of the fact that the book opens with one of the two in that hoi polloi married couple contemplating the meaning of marriage. I don’t think that that is just a mundane detail introduction as you quite often have to make the central elements grab the reader when introduced. I think it’s centrality is evidenced by the fact that it is paired with the very last scene of the book, in which we find that Jane has really prepared her own marriage chamber (and that in it she had to confront the fire lady, again, as Rasnoms tells her, “what you will get if you will not have the other”) and is going in to be with Mark.

The Crux

So, since this is a chiastic argument, the central element must be examined for core meaning. In Schwartz’s chiasm, it is Merlin versus the head, and this is the only place I would offer any direct criticism, but again, it may be that this applies only if his chiasm is taken in isolation of my own (I have posts elsewhere on layered chiasm, particularly in Harry Potter and the first Fantastic Beasts movie). The thing is, we never see Merlin square off against the head or the macrobe that animates it. When he is in the vicinity of the head, meaning at Belbury, he only confuses the language and sets the animals in frenzy on the humans. And then Merlin is out the door and driving Devine to drive at break-neck speed down a cart trail for the fireworks finale at Edgestow. We don’t even see the demise of the actual head in the jaws of Mr Bultitude the bear after he gets all riled up and expectant by Merlin.

But it’s not that we don’t see any central action with the head. We do see it operated by the macrobe right at the crux of the novel as defined by Lewis’s own original chapter structuring … and the title of chapter 9, the dead center of the novel, even focuses on the head, “The Saracen’s Head.” [Weird thing: There’s actually a tavern called this exact name, dating back possibly even to the fifteenth century, but I have never looked into whether it has any connection here for Lewis, which would seem odd, but … how do you account for such exact coincidence?] But only two of our cast of good-guy characters (which group Mark joins in the end) ever directly encounter the head and macrobe … and they are Mark and Jane. Of all the St. Anne’s crowd, Jane is the only one to have actually seen the head or, more centrally as power-player emphasis, to have seen the macrobe in action. Again, the couple cannot hope to face the head, to face the “hideous strength” that moves it, on their own. The power of the good eldilla is necessary for there to be any hope. But at the same time, the central action is the couple facing the head.

There is a wonderful dynamic going on here. They face the head together … but not. Jane is there sort of participating with Mark through her vision and her feelings of sympathy and maybe even empathy for him, but he does not know this, and so he is also really facing it alone. It’s a good symbol of their alienation but also desire for and possibility of unity.

One further aspect I will note is one that I have noted in other contexts in other works, which is a well-done use of classical staging (particularly Greek tragedies) in having particularly traumatic (but central) action take place “off stage” (e.g., in Harry Potter book 4, the dementor’s kiss takes place offstage, and in book 5 the narrative follows Harry and Cho right up to the point of kissing but then all of a sudden Harry is simply retelling it to Ron and Hermione in the common room). The narrative follows Mark right up to the point where he meets the head, but the actual encounter is only retold the next day in Jane telling her dream to Ransom.

And there is one element in that retelling that I really love. Mark’s face is covered, but Jane identifies him by other means: The director asks, “you are uncertain?” and she replies, “No … it was Mark … I knew his walk.” She knew the motions of his body … that’s the intimacy of marriage. (I can’t resist putting in here a mention of my own post on reading a layered-chiastic story as like watching the chiastic bodywalk down the street, just because I think that the fact that it can be used for something so central here supports it strong resonance for humanity, and therefore its aptness as an image for talking about the functioning of literature.)

Conclusion

I’ve pretty much tried to mention my main point over and over again, which is that I think these two chiasms should be taken together, rather than choosing mine over Schwartz’s, but also that I think the chiasm based on the original chapter structure and focused on the couple is essential. To this I will add only a further consideration or argument from my perspective. The more you can tie out smaller units, the more you should go with that chiasm. “Smaller” here includes fineness of material detail, because the more you have to go with bigger “thematics,” the more risk you are running of eisogeting. If I can tie out housebreaking up in the early chapter (Ivy Maggs and the Dimbles turned out of their houses) with housebuilding (Mother Dimble) and housewrecking (the flower-fire woman and her dwarves) in the later chapter and the two chapters are directly opposite in the chapter numbering, which is more units than the Schwarz chiasm, this not only lends support to my reading, but also gives a more complete reading of the work because it accounts for more details. This should be done with caution, though, because complexity (more elements) should not be done simply for its own sake. And I think doing so sometimes distinctly errs in the reading of a work. For instance, I think the four monarchs in Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe is intentional for the four elements as a whole thing or in general, but I think tying it out any more tightly than that (each individual as one of the elements) probably gets unstable (who knows, maybe not, maybe somebody has done it really well, in which case, I would love to read the exposition). Or I think Logan has a center but that it’s notchiastic because I haven’t seen matching elements, and I think that trying totie it out as a chiasm tortures the work. Whereas I think it fits so well with Wonderwoman without having to torture it. And with That Hideous Strength, especially given that seventeen-chapter structure is Lewis’s own original structure, the couple’s encounter with the head almost jumps off the page as the crux when examining the book through a chiastic lens and the many chiastic pairings of specific details are so natural that they also jump off the page.

Postscript

For a little more from me on meaning in That Hideous Strength, check out my use of Mark Studdock’s conversion to Jane as an analog in my post on my final reading of Person of Interest.

Tolkien the Philologist-turned-Poet and Tolkien the Theologian: The TCBS, the Inklings, and John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War

Intro:

This is from reading John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth, which was enlightening beyond what I can say. But I will try to say some of it here.

I’ll start with the largest impact on my overall reading of Tolkien and the whole of the Inklings project. That effect was that I have someplace to put the Inklings within Tolkien’s literary career. An instance of progression would be what Garth traces as a path in which Tolkien (after his fundamental move in school from Classics to English Lit) went from being focused on philology to making a conscious turn to being a “poet,” which here means less about analyzing meter and rhyme than it means about ποιητής / poiētēs in the ancient sense, from the Greek verb  ποιέω / poiƏō, meaning “to make”—a maker of narratives. In ancient times, and up until after the war for Tolkien, this happened mostly in verse form (I would have to look up details, but I believe that the Hebrew Bible is among the first, if not the first, works of religious narrative prose: mythologies, stories of the gods, had always been in verse), but Garth notes that, with the work on the Book of Lost Tales after the war, Tolkien turned to narrative prose (p. 231). But the particular progression of import for my locating the In the preface to the Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien relates that, by the time he was penning The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his father was much more directly interested in theology and philosophy than he had been in his earlier philological days and early days as the poet of

Theology/philosophy was, I think, the defining link of the Inklings, or at least mysticism, to include Williams. They all studied medieval lit, but the real common thread was the philosophical/mystical/religious mode in which they all did it. Barfield was pretty much straight up a philosopher of language, building an interwoven epistemology and metaphysics in Saving the Appearances (one that shares strong affinities with the phenomenology of Husserl, although he makes absolutely no mention of the continental phenomenological tradition). The match-up between Tolkien’s theological turn and the close interaction with Lewis in the Inklings is, thus, pretty tight. For instance, in something like Loconte’s smaller volume A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, you get a lot of detail on Lewis as a motivator in finishing Lord of the Rings.

I can fit what was going on in Tolkien the poet/author of Middle Earth/Silmarillion into philosophical terms, e.g., Ricoaur’s art–life–art threefold mimesis: basically the more well-known statement that “art imitates life” is possible only because “life” first imitates art; we are able to make sense of “life” as having meaning only by constructing narratives out of our experiences, and to do this we need narratival categories, which we must get from narratives we have learned … this is why studying the legends is so important for JRRT, because he knew that they form the categories in our minds by which we interpret the experiences that make up our “life.” But in those early phases (especially before the material becomes the epic of good versus evil with the “Fall of Gondolin” [see more below], but even after that until LotR really takes on dimensions of the medieval theological exposition of good versus evil), Tolkien was not instantiating medieval theology in his art in the way he does at the time of writing LotR. As examples of what I am saying he was not yet doing in the earlier stages, I have written on the elements I see in LotR elsewhere in posts on courtly loveas symbolic of grace in a threefold model of grace and nature interplay takenfrom medieval theology, and I have written on Lembas bread not as the Eucharistas such, but as “sacramentality as such” (with elements of Euharistic imagery used for this end, but in a way that does not make Lembas actually an allegory of the Eucharist), and if I have not done it yet, I should and will do a post on the fact that, with Eowyn, as Aragorn says, “the shield arm is bad, but the main damage came through the sword arm” is, like the problem of Saruman succumbing to ring temptation, an instantiation of the medieval theological principle that any interaction of the will with evil, even in fighting it, while maybe absolutely necessary for a given situation, always has a negative impact on the will, with the sword arm being symbolic of the will as the arm of action rather than of defense.

But the TCBS was before all that, in the formative years of the Silmarillion, in the days of Tolkien the philologist working on the Quenya lexicon, Tolkien the poet of the mythology and the Book of Lost Tales, and Tolkien the author of the Middle Earth/Silmarillion, the last of which overlaps into Tolkien the theologically interested author of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings … and indeed, the author of the Silmarillion lasts through the author of the LotR, as he was working on the Silmarillion up through his death (as well as on the lexicon, a lifelong project), which was not published until after his death. So, that is the place of the Inklings in Tolkien’s career, the last of what I see as four stages: philologist of the lexicon, poet of the mythology, author of Middle Earth/Silmarillion, and author of Hobbit/LotR (but of course, the philology and poetry never left him). Of course, how you mean "before" depends on whether you think the TCBS could ever really end (see just below for some of the real struggle on that issue between the members) ... but it definitely at least started before the theology-incarnating of the LotR.

A first thing of interest here is just to tell the unfamiliar what the TCBS was. It is short for “Tea Club and Barovian Society,” which was an informal “club,” really more of a clique, that Tolkien had in late secondary school (high school) and through undergrad and through the war. And it was a lifelong friendship with all three of the other members—Christohper Wiseman, Robert Gilson, and G.B. Smith … but with Gilson and Smith, that was a much shorter time, for they both died in the war. One has to read Garth for oneself or Shippey or Carpenter to really get what this was for JRRT. This was not just a clique … it was a vision and a passion. At one point, the group sort of started expanding with a few others they met, but Tolkien actually stopped coming around because he and Wiseman saw the new blood as being too sarcastic and ironic and having at best a weak moral compass in thinking about things literary and cultural. As Wiseman complained to Tolkien in a letter, the new blood would make fun of anything but lose their temper about nothing (some things are important enough to lose one’s temper over), and both Wiseman and Tolkien felt they needed to bring the group back to being the four of them as core friendship and vision for having an impact in the world through writing.

There were two important “councils” of the TCBS, which was their name for a weekend when the four of them would all get together and talk, and eat and talk and walk and talk and smoke and talk and drink and talk: the councils of London and of Lichfield. Upon hearing that they liked to call their meetings “councils,” many an LotR fan will probably first think of this being a model for the council of Elrond. But, while I think this could also be that, I think it is more important to recognize it as the model of the “council” of Crickhollow, the night at the house at Crickhollow when Merry and Pippin are singing and splashing up a storm in the bath and then, after a hearty meal and while lighting their pipes, Merry, Pippin, and Sam tell Frodo that they know what he is up to and that there is no way he is preventing them coming along to help … on the eve of their setting out on a journey that would change them forever. That is why the London and Lichfield councils were more the model for Crickhollow than for Rivendell: they were the last times that JRR Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson, and G. B. Smith would meet all together before the latter two died in the Great War in 1916, the last time they would eat and drink and smoke and laugh and talk about their passion for making a mark in the world for the moral good through poetry and cultural writing as scholars.

When Gilson died first earlier in 1916, the differences in their emotional responses and thoughts about how it affected the identity of the TCBS put a lot of strain on the remaining three (Tolkien was in shock to such a degree that he felt that they were no longer a group with a whole-that-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts identity and that it was now just a collection of individuals, a whole that is only the sum of its parts; Wiseman and Smith vehemently disagreed, and sometimes in harsh language). And when Smith died toward the end of the year, it put even more strain on Wiseman and Tolkien’s friendship, which never dissolved but did take hits. It’s one of the things that always makes me think that Jackson/Walsh do have an insight into at least certain emotional cores in Tolkien. Wiseman and Tolkien years after the death of Gilson and Smith were like the look that passes between Sam and Frodo in Jackson’s movie when Frodo the nine-fingered wakes up in the bed after the main action is over, and Gandalf and Legolas are chuckling and laughing and Gimli is doing the I-like-to-talk-about-dwarf-drinking-prowess-a-lot-but-can't-actually-handle-that-much laughing that you really get only in the movies and Merry and Pippin are bouncing all over, but Sam stands in the doorway and they exchange a look: they are more deeply committed as friends now than ever they were before the whole thing, but that is precisely because they underwent some very heavy things together, things that leave heavy scars, including scars between the persons.

And I think I can sense here even a reason for some of Tolkien’s shortness regarding Charles Williams in later years, meaning his terse reply to the idea that he and Williams were big influences on each other. I write this in the immediate wake of the theater release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and there is an analogous issue discussed there … the issue of legends (Luke Skywalker criticizes his own legend). C. S. Lewis was pretty much the center of the Inklings (see Humphrey Carpenter’s book on the Inklings for more on that), and he was a very dynamic personality … which is exactly the stuff of legends. And legends can tend to eclipse the things that are back behind them, by which I mean that, in readers’ eyes, the Inklings, as the later group and the one with such a dynamic personality as Lewis at its center, will eclipse the TCBS in popular thinking about Tolkien.

And there are two problems with this. The first is just accuracy: Tolkien’s fundamental development in world/mythology building happened long before he met Williams. But the second problem and reason for tenseness at legends of Williams and Tolkien influencing each other greatly is the more important because the more personal: to eclipse the TCBS is to erase particularly Gilson and Smith from the picture of Tolkien the author, and so, in a sense, to erase the impact of their deaths on him … and that is very personal. Of course, those who do it don’t mean to do it; they’re just gits like myself in undergrad days getting all twitterpated learning Inklings lore, but I can now very much understand Tolkien’s irritation at the idea. Carpenter says he thinks Tolkien’s later statement was a bit overdrawn and that the evidence points to actually a fair bit of interaction, but I think the rebuttal can be made that Tolkien skewed the situation no more to the negative than do the legends skew it to the positive. And with somebody as well-studied and possessed of his faculties as Tolkien, things don’t really happen as “influence” in the way they happen for less strong-willed authors. Somebody like Tolkien might listen to a critique Williams had as a colleague and find useful and helpful things in it, but that’s a bit different from the "bosom buddies" picture generated in a legend about the Inklings. Much as I like Williams and much as I think some of his material dovetails and interacts with Tolkien's on the same matters (particularly Arthurian material), he and JRRT definitely did not both think of themselves as “the great twin brethren,” which was Tolkien and Wiseman’s nickname for themselves even before the TCBS.

The Real Big Deal

So, above I mentioned that I think Tolkien’s career is revealed to be in four stages, which is the amazing thing I really found in this book: the philologist of the Quenya Lexicon, the poet/author of the mythology and the Lost Tales, the author of Middle Earth, and the author of The Hobbit/LotR. What you really find in Garth is the progression of the first three stages, and the place that tipped me off to what was really being narrated was when Garth brought things right up to the point of Tolkien’s embarking (from what I can gather in the work, England’s of that time technical term for what we in the US now call  “being deployed”) for the actual front in Europe. At this point, Garth said this would be as good a time as any to look at the shape of the mythology at the point at which Tolkien embarked for Europe(pp. 124–28), meaning that Garth is not looking just at a point in the life of Tolkien, but at a moment in the life/progression of “the mythology” that would become Middle Earth.

That was the big revelation for me in this book that vastly broadened my horizon on Tolkien … and blew me away even more at how amazing his imagination was to encompass a progression like this. The massive thing here is that, before the mythology was Middle Earth as an alternate universe kind of thing … it was England. The whole thing started with his playing with words known from languages he studied, like old and middle English, Norse, and Finnish (see toward the end of Garth, I don’t remember what chapter, on the fact that his Quenya is strongly influenced by real-world Finnish and his Gnomish by real-world Welsh). The whole lexicon started as trying to come up with believable earlier words from which the known historical ones might have derived, like if, say (to go totally unrelated), one looked at the fact that the Sanskrit word for “war” literally means “desire for more cows” and then one conjectured back and made up a word for “invasion” that literally meant “cattle drive” … not sure if the logic works there, but it sort of captures the idea of making up background words for real presently-known historical words.

Basically, as best as I can put it, he was coming up with a background language for all the families of northern Germanic languages that fed into his own English. But, at the same time, the places he encountered all these wonderful words for which he wanted to provide a back-history were precisely in the legends, such as Beowulf, and he quickly realized that you cannot separate language from legend. And so the legends he began making up were meant to be the background mythology behind the earliest Norse and Old English legends, back beyond even those on the cusp of recorded literacy. On p. 259, Garth talks about “the hallowed prehistory of England.” While Valinor was a lost pathway, the Elves came from their to Aryador to teach mean “songs and holiness,” and Aryador is continental Europe, and “the Lonely Isle” to which the elves retreat upon failures in the mission is England. Again on 259, Garth discusses the Lonely Isle making “the final voyage to its current location just off the European coast.” On 273, Garth talks of “chronological narrative caught up with the Germanic wanderer’s own day.” The “wanderer” is the mariner bard who has collected and is telling the tales, so the moment of the “tale” is really the passing over from oral tradition of a prehistory to written accounts, precisely on the witness of the bard (see a few paragraphs below on Tolkien himself as the bard) … only this is the stuff that got lost when it happened in the real world: The Book of Lost Tales.

As does all mythology really, it hooked onto the present lived real world. I would have to go back and look through it all in the beginning to make sure, but in addition to what I just mentioned of Aryador being continental Europe (and yes, that is from the same ethnic term “Aryan” but a concept of it other than Hitler’s supremacist hijacking of it) and the Lonely Isle being Britain, I think that (if I remember Garth rightly .... I am writing this at a slight remove) Kotirion was basically Warwick, and there was likewise a mythological element representing larger Warwickshire (maybe Kor?) and another representing Oxford. The two place names in the last of Garth’s chapters, “Tol Withermon and Fladweth Amrod,” basically represent the last two stationings Tolkien had in the war, both of them defense stations in England (much scarier there during the German last push than things ever are here in the States) because he never regained enough strength during the war to return to Europe after he was sent back with “trench fever,” which kept making relapses, which probably saved his life, since the Ypres offensive to which he would have gone back was an even surer path to an Allied soldiers death than the disastrous Somme offensive from which he was sent home.

A distinct step in Middle Earth becoming a fit setting for the Lord of the Rings was when, after Smith’s death and his own return from the war, he wrote “The Fall of Gondolin,” in which, according to Garth, the mythology became for the first time fully an epic of good versus evil (see Garth, p. 217). This is a very distinctive stage: it's at the end of the "English mythology" stage just before it becomes fully the "Middle Earth" stage, and one could reasonably wonder whether there is something in this move to fully being emblematic of the struggle between good and evil that made possible, and even fitting, the creation of full-fledged Middle Earth, something more intangible alongside the material path I'll describe in a moment.

He never got around to publishing the version of the mythology in the Book of Lost Tales form, although it appears in volumes 1 and 2 of Christopher Tolkien’s epic series of publication of the background materials (from which he is now retiring in 2018 after, fittingly, publishing a definitive critical edition of Beren and Luthien). Tolkien himself actually had a place in the Book of Lost Tales. The bard Eriol, telling his tales for the elven queen of trees in the house of lore known as the cottage of lost play, is basically a stand-in for Tolkien himself (see Garth, pp. 224–25).

And this is one of the most interesting parts to me. He had to put the work mostly on the back burner for a while to concentrate on tutoring and then teaching, and basically supporting his young family. At the point just before he did so, his old secondary school or undergrad tutor (I think Reynolds was his name) had asked him what he was up to writing-wise, and Tolkien gave him a synopsis form of the main plot lines. A number of years later when he finally picked up serious work on the whole thing again, what he went from was not the actual material into which he had concretely shaped it before putting it on the back burner, but rather the outline he had sent to his old tutor … and without Eriol in the picture. And this, as I have said, is the point at which it became properly Middle Earth in its own right, as its own fictional place, no longer pre-England/Europe. The point at which Middle Earth was fully born was also the point at which the author completely removed himself from the page.

I know it might seem like a stretch to some, and I am definitely not trying to say any crackpot theory like “I think the Silmarillion is the secret key to hidden great meaning in Paul Simon’s songs,” let alone that Simon was intentionally encrypting Tolkien in his songs. And it may be only in my own head that these two things seem to resonate with each other so strongly. But I do think there is some similarity between what I have just been talking about as the disappearance of Tolkien from the text and about his whole world of themes, and maybe even his loss of his friends in the Great War, on the one hand, and on the other hand, one of Paul Simons’ songs that is among my top 5 favorites (he has too many good ones to have just one fave), “The Cool Cool River” from the Rhythm of the Saints album, the last lines of which run:

And these streets,

Quiet as a sleeping army

Send their battered dreams to heaven

For a mother’s restless son

Who is a witness to, who is a warrior

Who denies his urge to break and run

Who says: Hard times?

I’m used to them

The speeding planet burns

I’m used to that

My life so common it disappears

But sometimes even music

Cannot substitute for tears

Resonances

Finally, I’d like to connect reading Garth’s work with a couple other major strands I have tried to talk about in the posts in this blog. Some of these I will expound more and some of them I will simply give a quote from Garth and a link to my other post. Some will be more concrete and some simply jumping off points.

Incarnational Literature: As part of the whole thing of the mythology being first England is the fact that, for Tolkien, the landscape plays as large a role as anything else. On p. 230, Garth speaks of physical geography versus political geography (or at least, I think, simply political). In our book club on the Inklings, for which I read Garth’s book, the girl who leads the group and makes up discussion guides for each meeting had a question on an earlier reading of part of the Silmarillion to the effect of considering why maps seem to be such a thing for Tolkien. I think that the connection between geology and topography, on the one hand, particularly the former, and demography (consideration of identities of peoples), on the other hand, is an instance of the incarnational aspect of Tolkien’s literature: even the inanimate rocks and waters participate in the identity, just as the love that the elves have for wood and stone and water is the base for their “magic.”

Dream Think: Garth p. 226: “The two cottages, in Valinor and Kortirion, encompass between them a whole complex of relations between dream, reality, and story.”

Biblical Mode: The LotR accommodating theological exposition is kind of the same, or at least similar, mode as Paul’s non-narrative epistles being the “other half” of the New Testament. It's not the same genre (Paul is discursive communication and LotR is narratival instantiation), and that issue of genre definitely impacts meaning, but I also think there is something to the fact that both go to a level of theological concepts.

Biblical Studies and Contemporary Religious/Theological Discourse: On p. 228, Garth describes a “fluidity and stability of Tolkien’s mythopeic conceptions” that, for me, rings a bit like Joseph Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI) thought on the interplay of continuity and discontinuity in the Tradition of the faith. (The element Garth is talking about is a beautiful little bit: “While names evolved and the interrelationships of individuals and peoples changed almost beyond recognition through years of writing, rewriting, and recasting, these embodiments of quintessential elvishness—the house of lore and the queen of trees—recurred.”)

Fodder

These couple paragraphs are parts of my originally jotted notes here that did not make it into the main body of this post but I still think good to provide. A little bit rougher but I still think important points to me.

The point about Ricoeur's threefold mimesis of art–"life"–art is a point that will be entirely lost on those whose minds are saturated with scientism, whether they be actual scientists who have bought that mindset, which is actually a mythology beyond science itself, or they are reactionary religious people who, in their obsessive war on “science” and their desire to beat it on its own grounds have so thoroughly and deeply imbibed the core principles of the scientism that they think they are fighting [that scientific “fact” is the base mode of truth and that scientific discourse is the base mode of all discourse] that they have no cognizance of the fact … fortunately, at least for now, at least in the majority, the secularist scientismists who have won this battle for minds also do not realize that they have won.

The big question for me is how the material of Tolkien the poet feeds into Tolkien the philosopher. While he is doing more philosophical things in LotR, he is still doing them on the material provided by Tolkien the poet, who was born in the TCBS before the war. This provides me a model for understanding, in turn, what was the core of the Inkling: how did the material they studied, the literature, feed into their philosophical/mystical/religious thoughts being instantiated in their writing that mimics it (Tolkien is far and away the most thoroughgoing mimesis, and so he is to me the clearest picture of what was the core of the Inklings [this was part of an original statement in this post that reading Garth's big influence was locating the Inklings within Tolkien's career AND locating Tolkien within the Inklings, but it seemed too distracting so say that when what I went on to do was to dwell mainly on the first part, locating the Inklings era within Tolkien's own progression, so I dropped the opening statement back to just that ... but I still think that it is important to note that what Tolkien the theology-student author uses to do his theological instantiating was created previously by Tolkien the philologist/poet]).