The Rock Garden by Simon J. Cook

I should have put down my credentials to write on Beowulf from the beginning. They are none. What I can fathom of the Old English lines, such as the sky and the sea of the exordium, I have learned from close reading of J.R.R. Tolkien. I am another obsessive Tolkien fan—one of those enthusiasts for some early version of a celebrated tale. Of strictly canonical writings, I like The Hobbit most of all. But the story that I have been reading and re-reading of late is shorter, set in history and told in canonical form about a tower. I mean the "allegory" told early in the famous British Academy lecture of 1936, "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics."

I have prior historical credentials. I once did a dissertation on the moral sciences as taught in late-Victorian Cambridge, and eventually took note of the impact of the mid-century discovery of "pre-history", after which the bottom fell out of History. I followed as the next generations of scholars wove and then rewove strange tapestries out of the threads of archeology, anthropology, and comparative philology and literature. Basically, with the prospect of myriad unsuspected generations of human society opening up into a hitherto unimagined distant past, scholars gave themselves license to project some revealingly unwholesome fantasies of race and gender into what passed as eminently respectable academic reconstructions of very ancient days.¹ Arriving at Tolkien travelling forward in this way from the past, this Oxford scholar really heralds a moment of sanity, at the vanguard of an Interwar generation who addressed the yawning gulf between magical fantasy and sober historical speculation, placing each in its own proper box.

What this wider historical reading has given me when I turn to "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" is, above all, a sense of its remarkable singularity—a rare jewel of scholarly art, a comparison to which it is hard to find. It is worthy of study, even by those without the expertise to comment on Beowulf. Inevitably, studying the essay in its own right, and reading the story within it on these terms, generates disagreement with the academic experts who do have the authority to comment. But in this post I don’t want to criticize anyone, only put on the table the primary warrant for my dissent, which is of course a piece of paper, an earlier draft of the allegory.

The earliest known version of the allegory of the tower dates to summer 1933 and is told in two sentences, of which I give the first:

A man found a mass of old stone in a unused patch, and made of it a rock garden; but his friends coming perceived that the stones had once been part of a more ancient building, and they turned them upsidedown to look for hidden inscriptions; some suspected a deposit of coal under the soil and proceeded to dig for it.²

The second sentence introduces commonplace flowers, juxtaposed with the stones in the making of the garden, and a "best friend", who complains about the confusion of proportion in the placing of the stones by the Anglo-Saxon gardener. Later in this draft lecture material, this "best friend" is named as R.W. Chambers, of University College London. 

And this is all you need to know to master the arguments of "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics". For myself, I wish to understand first and foremost the canonical allegory of the tower, and so cannot rest here. But the first step to understanding the allegory of the tower is to read the allegory of the rock garden, the second step is to finally understand the rest of the 1936 lecture thanks to this helpful diagram of the rock garden, and only then can one take the third step by asking why our author discarded a helpful diagram for an enigma that nobody understands? If you merely wish to understand "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics", my strong counsel is to forget about the tower and hold to the rock garden. Of course, you still have to actually read the essay. Only now this reading may be informed by a clear picture of who is being spoken to and about what.

Facing a real, local, human situation, this post could become long. Left to my own devices, I would commence with a detailed biography of Tolkien in the 1930s with a focus on the relationship between his Catholicism and his study of pre-Reformation English Literature, and then turn to a review of the publications of the Anglo-Catholic Chambers: his British Academy lecture on Bede, delivered in May, 1936, his great study of Beowulf (1921), underlining the dating to the "age of Bede" therein that Tolkien in 1936 accepts without argument, as also his critical review of the Beowulf literature magically redrawn by Tolkien's pen as a crowd of rioting academic "friends". I’d also note Chambers' essay of 1925, which criticized H.M. Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge—a second proper name to pin on the faces of the allegory, for Chadwick in the dark Fens is a chief of the foolish friends: those who date the poem wrong, reading oral tradition from the ancient world and failing to notice the hand of an author before their eyes. Finally, a third proper name, the Old Took of the allegory, the first descendant of the 1936 version. I mean W.P. Ker, the teacher of Chambers and the founder of the tradition of literary criticism of Beowulf that Tolkien (in all drafts of this material) contends with.

But alas, you are not free to read a book, and so the practical step is to quote from Christopher Tolkien, who in his introduction to The Fall of Arthur (2013) refers to a letter penned by Chambers to Tolkien in December 1934:

Chambers (Professor of English at University College, London), eighteen years his senior, was an old friend and strong supporter of my father, and in that letter he described how he had read Arthur on a train journey to Cambridge, and on the way back ‘took advantage of an empty compartment to declaim him as he deserves’. He praised the poem with high praise: ‘It is very great indeed … really heroic, quite apart from its value in showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English.’³

So, yes, the "best friend" of the Anglo-Saxon poet is a little tricky. He is at once a real friend as well as a close colleague of Tolkien, an unnamed "best friend" of the unnamed Anglo-Saxon poet in an allegory of Beowulf, and speaks as an individual for a tradition, which began in London in the previous generation. This "best friend" of the Anglo-Saxon poet is (or was in 1936) a flesh-and-blood scholar, living in London, and representative of a tradition that Tolkien deeply respects, is otherwise at one with, but, on this vital point concerning Beowulf, stands up to refute. 

If you want to read this tradition at source you must open The Dark Ages (1904), wherein Ker the "travelling giant" surveys the ruins of an ancient Germanic tradition of northern alliterative verse, which did not survive the Crusades. Here you will find the doctrinal expression of the northern "theory" of courage, which Tolkien quotes at length in his lecture (to the point that Ker failed has failed to notice that Beowulf is a perfect if Christian expression of this theory), and you will also find Beowulf potted in two pages. 

Ker's 1904 criticism culminated in a carefully chosen spatial metaphor to express the poem's "radical defect", such that the interesting stuff is found on the "outer edges" and at the "center" is but a thin folktale. Back in 1912, and as an aside in a commentary on Widsith, an even older Old English poem, Chambers delivered a memorable substantiation of this verdict, which I take as the precise point of "fusion" where a canonical academic statement kindled the imagination of Tolkien and the allegories of the old stones arose to give shape to Ker's spatial metaphor. A reference in Widsith to the Danish mead hall Heorot and the doom of Ingeld, son of Froda, the last of the ancient Heathobard kings, whose legend is glimpsed more than once as a stone on the outer edges of Beowulf, prompts Chambers to this digression:

Nothing could better show the disproportion of Beowulf, which "puts the irrelevances in the center and the serious things on the outer edges," than this passing allusion to the story of Ingeld. For in this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge we have a situation which the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.⁴

I give you a key, I do not open the door. To open the door we must traverse the rock garden, touring with Tolkien both outer and inner stones. How he reads each individual stone matters, a lot. But the argument with Chambers and the tradition of Ker that Tolkien mounts at the British Academy concerns ultimately not the relative poetic merits of the visions seen in this or that stone, but the peculiar arrangement of them all that has been attempted in Beowulf, a very definite pattern in which myth and history are intertwined and reflect one another to a very remarkable effect—albeit one that modern critics either overlook or, in the dark fens and elsewhere, mistake, confusing artistic illusion for historical reality.

Tolkien told a story about this rock garden to draw out what he and his friend Chambers, the more senior scholar, agreed upon. The rock garden draws out this shared picture of the old poem, and Tolkien’s challenge is to persuade Chambers that this peculiar arrangement of stones and flowers reveals an overlooked design—an attempt by an Anglo-Saxon author to rescue on paper an oral tradition of Northern art now lost to us—but for the one singular instance that is Beowulf. Unlike the enigmatic tower of the famous lecture, which hides the stones and directs our gaze into an empty horizon, the rock garden holds each singular stone in view, each stone standing alone yet seen in relation to all the others, and it plants among these terrible stones some flowers (unfortunately not visible in the illustration accompanying this post).

The rock garden is the picture to hold in mind when pondering how a crowd of respectable academics (almost Hobbits in their lack of good sense) are caught by ancient and evidently still potent spells. Chambers and Tolkien both agree that their distinguished academic colleagues have shown no sense at all in talking about Beowulf, and accepting Chambers on the dating and Christian authorship of the poem, Tolkien with his allegory suggests that their blunders are testimony to an art that his own friend, Chambers, is looking at without seeing. This art is deeper and older than appreciated by Chambers, or his teacher Ker, and more perilous than anything glimpsed by the friends, even in their darkest dreams.

Works Cited

1. For an influential and unpleasant illustration, have a look at William Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), (of which Tolkien’s considered opinion may be teased out of his imagination of Rohan in the Third Age).
2. Beowulf and the Critics, 32.
3. Fall Of Arthur, "Foreword." See also (actually, especially) "Doworst", the illuminated manuscript parody of Oxford oral examinations that Tolkien sent as a Christmas gift to Chambers in December 1933 (having drawn him as the "best friend" in his allegory that summer).
4. Chambers, R.W, Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1912), 79-80; quoting Ker, W.P., The Dark Ages (New York: Charles Scribner, 1904), 253.