Passing Ships by Simon J. Cook

Passing Ships

This series of posts in A Sense of History is intended as a series of steps to a reading of a short story by J.R.R. Tolkien—one of his shortest, yet very dense, and presented as an allegory. The story tells of a tower that is an image of the Old English Beowulf. From the top of this tower, the story concludes, the builder had been able to look out upon the sea.

Since the new year, I've followed the lead of Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth (1982) and investigated Elostirion, a tower in Tolkien's very long story, with the hope of gaining insight into the sea-view that Tolkien points us to with his earlier and shorter story. Elostirion is the proper name of the tallest of the three Elf-towers on the Tower Hills, which are planted in the margin of The Lord of the Rings, just beyond the narrative told in the Red Book.

The investigation, not yet concluded, has revealed visions of Valinor received through a singular Seeing Stone set up in the Elf-tower, yet in the days of the story only for the eyes of Elves. But we have also encountered elements of Elostirion as it were scattered through the dreams of Frodo Baggins. In the house at Crickhollow, the Hobbit dreams of a white tower that he desires to climb to look upon the sea, but awakes before reaching its staircase. Two nights later, his second in the house of Bombadil, Frodo experiences far-hearing: a song that seems like a vision of Valinor as might be received from the Stone in Elostirion. On ascent into Mordor, the dream of climbing a high tower becomes a waking nightmare. And within the Golden Wood, itself a dream of enchantment, Frodo descends a long flight of stairs to look upon the Mirror of Galadriel, wherein he sees the sea for the first time, and three ships.¹

Hold those three ships. We will return to them, but only after a summer detour. Basically, I need a breather from writing these long posts on The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, this series has now run for one year, and I wish to recall the Anglo-Saxon tower of the 1936 allegory.

The short story of the tower was told in London in November 1936, one element of a lecture that Tolkien delivered to the British Academy titled 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. Here is my summary from last June's post, Beleriand in Beowulf:

The arguments of the 1936 lecture are framed by a story told in two acts: A man takes some old stones and makes a tower. Then his friends turn up and, eager to inspect the stones, destroy the tower; meanwhile, on the sidelines, the builder's descendants stand and complain, one to the other, about their ancestor's sense of proportion. The second act is something of a snare, inviting readers to remain on the ground discussing the shortcomings of other readers. The first act illustrates the poet's design: An audience in some little Anglo-Saxon kingdom are to climb the stairs and look out upon the world as it was imagined by their heathen ancestors.

When the short story is read in the context of the lecture in which it was told, we apprehend that the tower that is the Old English poem is a sort of time machine—although not of the fantastic kind envisaged by H.G. Wells. An Anglo-Saxon artist built for his contemporaries an enchanted staircase, the steps of which led up to a panoramic view down onto a vanished world, a sort of cinematic display in which a Christian audience faced the imaginative world of their heathen ancestors. This Anglo-Saxon audience looked back into the past, not the future, and reaching out and touching the view, in the way of Wells' time-traveler or Frodo in Lórien, formed no part of the design.

Once we situate the tower in relation to the arguments of the lecture, we perceive that the staircase connects two radically different imagined geographies or astronomies.

To appreciate how this staircase works, some historical background is helpful. Conversion to Christianity introduced the Germanic settlers in the British Isles to the written word and, in addition to the Bible and various works of the Church Fathers, a very small library of ancient pagan science. By the eighth century, the age of Bede and (Tolkien believed) the Beowulf poet, the descendants of the original Germanic settlers in the British Isles had substantially expanded their horizons.

The poet's contemporaries know the world as a great globe surrounded by a series of revolving crystalline orbs, the most distant of which is the sphere of the fixed stars, while beyond is Eternity outside of Time. Standing on the green grass of their little Anglo-Saxon kingdom and looking up, they see the heavens, the border between Time and Eternity. And when they look out on the sea, they explain to each other how the horizon of vision reveals the curvature of the Earth.

The staircase of the Anglo-Saxon tower takes these newly enlightened Anglo-Saxons up to a view down on the world as it was imaginatively apprehended by their heathen ancestors, whose native Northern learning had not yet met and kissed ancient Greek astronomy. To climb the staircase of the tower is not to step out of the real world—the shape of which remains the same however it is imagined. To climb the stairs is to apprehend our primary world differently, to behold a view that, to a civilized Anglo-Saxon audience, would have appeared a fairy-tale geography:

... he who wrote hæleð under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms 'heroes under heaven,' or 'mighty men upon earth,' but he and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsceg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky's inaccessible roof… That even this 'geography,' once held as material fact, could now be classed as a mere folk-tale affects its value very little.²

From the top of the tower the Anglo-Saxon audience looked out upon a heathen geography. Our Middle-earth appears as a flat disc-world ringed by endless ocean, gārsecg, the shoreless sea. These hæleð under heofenum of line 52 of the poem become, in Tolkien's modern English translation, heroes under the sky—for in the world of the poem knowledge of heaven was long ago forgotten.³ As for the horizon where the sea meets the sky, these ancient heroes have no notion of a spherical world and perceive rather a straight road over the sea that passes through the horizon that is the limit of their world, or at least the visible world.

From the top of the tower an audience may look out upon gārsecg, the shoreless sea. But Tolkien in his description of the panoramic view directs our gaze to the hæleð under heofenum of the exordium, who (if only by the mind's eye) are themselves gazing on the sea. The sea that appears an enigmatic symbol in the 1936 allegory, a mythical element in a story made of metaphors, is enigmatic also to the ancient heathen heroes of the Old English poem. Nobody seems to know what to make of the sea, not then nor now—except perhaps those poets who have built towers the better to look upon it.

The exordium to Beowulf, the first fifty-two lines of the poem, frames the myth of the ancient king of the North in relation to the sea. The myth is framed by two ships. The heathen heroes of line 52, the hæleð under heofenum, are gazing on the second, the funeral ship that is returning the dead king to an unknown haven on the other side of the horizon. On this further shore of the shoreless sea dwell 'those that in the beginning sent him forth alone over the waves' (lines 44-46)—unnamed others who placed the mortal infant in a ship and sent him over the sea, a miraculous gift of kingship recalled as the origin of history in the North.⁴

My title for this series of posts is 'Seeing Stones'. We are approaching the foundation stone. This stone was already ancient when, more than one thousand years ago, the Anglo-Saxon poet peered into its mysterious depths and saw the sea.

The exordium to Beowulf tells of the good king Scyld Scefing, founder of the Danish royal house. Tolkien believed that the Danes had appropriated a very ancient poetical myth of the North, descending from primitive Germanic times and telling of 'the mysterious arrival of the babe, the corn-god or the culture-hero his descendant, at the beginning of a people's history'.⁵

Peering into this ancient stone, the Anglo-Saxon poet had seen the sea—and one ship sailing out of it, and had recognized a very ancient recollection of unlooked for joy at an unforeseen and unexpected turn of the tide.

And then something odd occurred—peering into the stone, the poet saw a second ship, a ship that sailed into his imagination from out of native British stories.

The second ship, the funeral-ship that returns the dead king over the sea, Tolkien deems an innovation of the Anglo-Saxon poet. A modern poet has renovated an ancient myth by supplementing it with local material. (Ancient and modern here meaning, respectively, before and after the migration of these Germanic tribes to the British Isles.) The modern renovation borrows local British stonework and yet Tolkien deems it a restoration of the lost meaning of a very ancient and very significant Germanic myth.

Within Tolkien's Oxford lecture material, one may discern the suggestion that the Anglo-Saxon poet has borrowed from native British tales of King Arthur. With this funeral-ship, he wrote, the poet clothed the departure of the mythical king 'with a glory and mystery, more archaic and simple but hardly less magnificent than that which adorns the king of Camelot, Arthur son of Uther'.⁶ Tolkien endorses this artistic use of native British stone to lay the foundation of a new northern tower. By introducing a funeral-ship that mirrors the original ship of ancient myth, he explains, the exordium to the poem raises

the suggestion—it is hardly more; the poet is not explicit, and the idea was probably not fully formed in his mind—that Scyld went back to some mysterious land whence he had come. He came out of the Unknown beyond the Great Sea, and returned into it: a miraculous intrusion into history, which nonetheless left real historical effects ...⁷

Yet this suggestion is circled with the final image of the exordium—those ancient heroes who stand under a northern sky and gaze on the passing of the funeral ship, vanishing into the Unknown. Already in the ancient days of the heathen heroes in which the poem is set, people could no longer recall the true traditions about those mysterious others who dwell on the unknown shore of the shoreless sea.

Sifting through the old stones, comparing one to the other and teasing out their intertwining meanings, alone and each in relation to each, the poet had caught something that was lost. Something that the Anglo-Saxon poet deemed lost already in the days of the ancient heroes. Likely the poet had no clear idea of the further shore beyond the shoreless sea, says Tolkien. Nevertheless, this poet of long ago had caught a glimpse of Valinor.

Appendix

Beowulf, lines 43-52 and Tolkien's translation:

Nalæes hī hine laēssan lācum tēodan
þēodgestrēonum, þon pā dydon,
þē hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon
ǣnne ofer ȳðe umborwesende.
Þā gȳt hīe him āsetton segen g(yl)denne
hēah ofer hēafod, lēton holm beran,
gēafon on gārsecg; him wæs geōmor sefa,
murnende mōd. Men ne cunnon
secgan tō sōðe, selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum, hwā þǣm hlæste onfēng.

With lesser gifts no whit did they adorn him,
with treasures of that people, than did those
that in the beginning sent him forth
alone over the waves, a little child.
Moreover, high above his head they set
a golden standard and gave him to Ocean,
let the sea bear him. Sad was their heart
and mourning in their soul. None can
report with truth, nor lords in their halls,
nor mighty men beneath the sky, who received that load.⁸

Dedication

This post goes out to DJ Lulu of the legendary Clueless System, who mixed the music under a northern sky and turned our flat earth round.

References

1. Crossroads reveals the image in the tower received by the High Elves who visit Elostirion. On Frodo's subsequent incidents of far-seeing and far-hearing see In the House of the Fairbairns (when I wrote this post, I had not noticed that what appears to be a vision of Valinor in the house of Bombadil is actually a song). Seeing Stones in Dark Towers looks at the towers of Mordor in relation to Elostirion. Thálatta! Thálatta! explores Lothlórien in relation to Elostirion and frames Frodo's first view of the sea in the Mirror of Galadriel. Verlyn Flieger (A Question of Time [: Kent State University Press, 1997], 192) suggests 'that Lórien itself is in a very real sense a dream sent or dreamed by the God of Dreams and that the Company in Lórien is, in one sense at least, inside that dream.' On Shippey's pointer to Elostirion, see footnote 4 of The Peaks of Taniquetil. An overview of this series is set out on my website.
2. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 18.
3. Tolkien writes: "the Anglo-Saxon poet's view throughout was plainly that true, or truer, knowledge was possessed in ancient days (when men were not deceived by the Devil); at least they knew of the one God and Creator, though not of heaven, for that was lost." Ibid., note 25. 
4. Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, 13-14.
5. Ibid., 138-9.
6. History of Middle-earth, Volume V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, The Lost Road, "Notes on King Sheave." Christopher Tolkien is quoting from the same lecture material from which he subsequently published his father's 2014 "commentary" on Beowulf. I read J.R.R. Tolkien as pointing to a cultural borrowing of native British stories by an Anglo-Saxon because I attribute to him the view of Arthur as historical (as asserted in "On Fairy-stories") and as embalming the memories and hopes of the natives of Roman Britain in the face of the Anglo-Saxon settlements, as set out by Tolkien's Pembroke colleague R. Collingwood in the final pages of his 1936 volume on Roman Britain for the Oxford History of England. As indicated also by Tolkien's 1932 etymological note on "The Name Nodens" (originally published in Appendix I of Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, No. IX: Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932], 132-36) and Collingwood's unfinished essay on fairy-stories, Tolkien and Collingwood had some very interesting conversations! Tolkien's unfinished Fall of Arthur, composed earlier in the 1930s, tells of Arthur as his song might have been sung by an Anglo-Saxon, whose sense of history is fundamentally different—the British tale of the once and future king becomes a song of irrevocable doom in alliterative verse. Retrospectively, we can see Tolkien feeling his way to that "fusion" of Germanic and British senses of history (as expressed in ideas of kingship) that is Aragorn, who in 1940 appears in his writing as the Germanic king who does return—only not as the original king of ancient tales, but his heir.
7. Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, 151.
8. Klaeber, F.R. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1922), 2-3; Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, 14.