TOLKIEN'S 'MYTHOPOEIA' and ESSAY ON FAIRY TALE LITERATURE

One of the foremost investigators of epic composition, Albert Lord, noted:

An oral poet who is asked to dictate a song for someone to write finds himself in an unusual and abnormal position. He is accustomed to composing rapidly to the accompaniment of a musical instrument which sets the rhythm and tempo of his performance. For the first time he is without this rhythmic assistance, and at the beginning he finds it difficult to make his lines. He can easily learn to do this, however, and he sets up a certain rhythm in his mind. He is also some what annoyed by having to wait between lines for the scribe to write. His mind moves ahead more rapidly than does the writer's pen. This technique he can also learn, particularly if the scribe is alert and helpful. The singer is accustomed to the stimulus of an audience, but again an intelligent scribe and a small group of onlookers can provide this stimulus.... The chief advantage to the singer or this manner of composition [oral dictation] is that it affords him time to think of his lines and of his song. His small audience is stable. This is an opportunity for the singer to show his best, not as a performer, but as a storyteller and poet.

Lord also spoke of the "return song"-based on the vegetation myths-if to a tribal the culture, the growing season fades and winter comes, the key question is will the growing season ever return, and how can we be sure it will...


Elements of the return song according to Lord:
1--absence
2--devastation
3--return
4--retribution
5--marriage (reconciliation of opposites--Coleridge)

We will observe the Tolkien's compositions accomplish in prose what Lord describes, and this page will examine his own poetry and prose criticism on the subject.

MYTHOPOEIA

CLICK HERE TO PRINT OUT AND READ THE POEM

Tolkien wrote this poem in 1929 to C. S. Lewis while discussing the latter's conversion to Christianity and hostility to myth, and as such the poem outlines what an epic poet ought to do as Lord observes. We might also recall the effect on Odysseus of the bard's recitations, Book VIII:

• These things the famous singer sang for them, but Odysseus,
  taking in his ponderous hands the great mantle died in
  sea-purple, drew it in his ponderous hands and veiled his fine features
  shamed for tears running down his face before the Phaiakians;
  and every time the divine singer would pause in his singing,
  he would take the mantle away from his head, and wipe the tears off...

(ll. 83-88 / Lattimore translation)

Probably most readers have a favorite place in Tolkien that occasions similar emotions.

Discussion questions / comments for MYTHOPOEIA:

1-In general, does the poem describe in precis the origin of Tolkien's universe? Be aware of at least the following influences:

• Sacred Scripture, and the dogma of the Catholic Church
• Anglo-Saxon culture
• The Odyssey
• Coleridge and Keats and Shelley
• Plato
• Wordsworth
• Hesiod
• the creative process in the macrocosm and microcosm

2-from Stanza one "You look at trees..."

1. what does LABEL mean? (See also Carpenter's Biography plus my link to the C.S. Lewis page).
2. What does COMPELLED mean? REGIMENTED?

3-from Stanza two "At bidding of a will..."

1. To whom or what does WILL refer? There is an important allusion to Coleridge's Biographia.
2. This stanza suggests "reconciliation of opposites" from Coleridge
3. What does ORIGO connote?
4. Note the use of color imagery which will foreshadow a later motif
5. Romantics value as does Plato the senses as transcending gateways to a knowledge of the forms. How is this in evidence
6. What is the epistemology of the stanza?

4- from Stanza three "Yet trees are not trees..."

1. What makes a tree a tree? How do humans participate in the creative act?
2. Tolkien shares the romantic conviction that all share the same world spirit or soul; the romantics have different terms for it from Wordsworth's 'presence' in Tintern Abbey to Shelley's "...unseen power" in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
3. There are strong allusions to Wordsworth's Intimations Ode--see stanza V. The Allegory of the Cave is the philosophical premise.

5-from Stanza four "He sees no stars..."

1. What is the paradox in lines one and two--what kinds of sight are there?
2. Note the reference to fire and nature (flowers).
3. In this stanza, Tolkien's mythos becomes more specifically defined
   
   1. the existence of the void has Greek echoes
   2. myths are woven--strands of oral recitations (Lord) making a mosaic
   3. the process is "elf-patterned" as we will see in The Silmarillion
   4. the womb is a standard romantic metaphor--from internal to external-see The Mirror and the Lamp by Abrams.

6-from Stanza five "The heart of man..."

1. Who is the only wise?
2. The creation myths have an explanation for evil as we have noted. What is it here?
3. Tolkien accepts the fall of man, but certainly sees redemptive potential-which is what?
4. The stanza contains one of Tolkien's most famous phrases also repeated in the Fairy Tale Essay. What is it that redeems man?
5. Note that light imagery is also used that has the same function as music in Kubla Khan (Coleridge)
6. Tolkien dramatizes a dialectic between the right to create and daring to. Recall what we said regarding The Theogony and Genesis. Can we create evil? Do we always need permission?

7-from Stanza six "Yes! 'wish-fulfillment dreams'..."

1. Romantic writes use dreams as metaphors for the creative process. Keats is especially important here--what does Tolkien believe?
2. What does CHEAT? mean. As a parallel, early in Eve of St. Agnes, Keats warns of being "hoodwinked by faerie fantasy."
3. Why are FACTS ugly?
4. The reference to Pain and striving recall Of Works and Days. What did Hesiod say about strife?
5. This stanza makes it quite clear that Tolkien embraces traditional Catholic teaching. How?

8- Stanzas seven, eight, and nine "Blessed are the timid..." / "Blessed are the men..." / "Blessed are the legend-makers..."

1. Obviously paralleling the Beatitudes of Jesus, Tolkien in turn lauds the timid who hate evil, the Noahs who have the faith to confront evil (There is a parallel here to an Anglo-Saxon poem called The Seafarer., and of course the "legend-makers", the bards, the scops, the shapers who recite stories of who we are.
2. The pedagogy of myth (recall Campbell) is important here. Myth does not require we become ensnared in realities so other to our own that we forget or life's mission. Odysseus, we recall, knew that when he rejected Calypso's offer. In the secondary world of myth, though, we are given clues to our essence and those of the universe, the sense of wonder Campbell and Tolkien both endorse.
3. What does Tolkien mean by MACHINE-PRODUCED and SEDUCED?
4. The power of myth is evident here: the confrontations with the man made horror of World War I, technology, or going to Mordor require song. More than once in the trilogy, Frodo and Sam wonder what future generations will sing of their adventures.
5. We thus turn to the lyre.

9-Stanza ten "I would that I might..."

1. This stanza echoes Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, wherein the poet hopes to become identified with the wind's power to scatter his thoughts over the cosmos.
2. As with Shelley but for different biographical reasons, Tolkien longs for acceptance of his ideas, his mythos. As he said, the realm is perilous.

10- Stanza eleven "I will not walk..."

1. Here Tolkien strong repudiates technological Darwinism. He loathes progress that destroys the ENTS, and begs God to end that kind of progress.
2. He will reject IRON for the "small golden scepter." (Recall Hesiod).

11-Stanza twelve "In Paradise perchance..."

1. Tolkien endorses the objectiveness of salvation history. How?
2. What does MIRRORED TRUTH mean?
3. Salvation for Tolkien is predicated on what?
4. The allusions to Genesis are obvious.
5. Tolkien concludes by lauding the myth-makers who guide us on the quest to complete the RETURN SONG noted by Lord. In so doing, as Tolkien told Lewis, they do not lie; rather they (to quote Wordsworth) "...see into the heart of things."

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TOLKIEN' S ESSAY ON FAIRY TALE LITERATURE

The Essay on Fairy Tales expands and analyzes the poetry of Mythopoeia. Herein, Tolkien articulates how myths originate, and what they ought to do:

The following ideas will lead us to The Silmarillion and LOTR:

I. ADVENTURES OF MEN IN THE PERILOUS REALM

• What does Perilous mean?
• Note the romantic idea of transcendence and magic--why is are the terms important? Transcendence from what to what? In what sense is magic used and not used?

II. CAMPBELL--MYTH ATTEMPTS TO PLACE THE SEEN WORLD INTO CONTACT WITH THE UNSEEN, MUCH LARGER WORLD, ON WHICH IT IS DEPENDENT.

• This is fundamental to Christian philosophy. How do we come into contact with the Divine?
• This contact, for example, is fundamental to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, wherein the rule of law (reason) symbolized by the Duke's Athens, gives way to the passions of the forest where in these laws give way. The Duke's analysis of the imagination (V,i) suggests what myth does...

• ...as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name.
  Such tricks hath strong imagination...

(Vi,15-19)

III. FOR TOLKIEN, MYTH (UNLIKE GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, FOR EXAMPLE) MUST, PROVIDE THE FOLLOWING:

• Distance
• Satisfaction of human desire
• process (leading to transcendence--recall Campbell)
• The presence of Wordsworth

IV. REJECTS DREAMS AS THE SUBSTANCE OF MYTH. --FOR JRRT, FAERIE HAS...

• An objective distance.
• He observes the heart of faerie is, "To hold communion with other living things."

V. THE ORIGINS OF FAIRY TALE LITERATURE:

• For Tolkien, myth begins with language--recall the naming of the TREES
• What does he mean by the metaphor of the soup?
• The evolution of myth depends on:

1. independent evolution of the similar?
2. invention?
3. inheritance from a common ancestry?
4. diffusion from a central focal point?

VI. TOLKIEN’S EXAMPLE OF GREEN GRASS: THE MIND SEES BOTH GREEN AND GRASS:

• The writer of faerie seeks new combinations
• See Coleridge on the secondary imagination--It "dissolves, diffuses and dissipates in order to recreate."
• The writer of faerie uses language to create, but the question becomes:

WHAT KIND OF WORLD WOULD ALLOW FOR BLUE OR YELLOW
OR RED GRASS?

VII. SUB--CREATION AND MYTH…

• Tolkien as a revisionist of tradition: Pre-Tolkien: "Myths developed as personifications of natural occurrences."
• Tolkien: The approach is inductive; we see a man (Personality comes from a person) and derive stories of his behavior that are diffused in three phrases:

1. mystical toward the supernatural
2. magical toward nature
3. scorn and pity toward man

• The metaphor of the SOUP..

1. new bits are added, and the soup boils
2. so History and Myth blend (monsters ARE at the center of BEOWULF)
3. composites emerge
4. Myths are ways of expressing what was once forbidden
5. [Frye's comment that as a society matures, myths evolve from the literal to the metaphoric as in the Iliad]

VIII. FAIRY TALE LITERATURE & CHILDREN

• Why do we select children as audience?
• Romantic view---"CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN"

IX. COLERIDGE'S 'WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF' IS REJECTED:

• Tolkien prefers "sub-creation"--what is the difference
• What makes his "secondary world" work?--what do we see when we look inside?
• See the paragraph that begins, "Children are of course..."
• Suspension should be unnecessary

1. the filming of LOTR--listen to the EXTENDED DVD--Jackson's comments
2. historical fact
   

X. WHAT DO FAIRY TALES ACHIEVE?

• Truth--poetic and literal truth (Recall Homer and General Sir John Hackett during the North African Campaign in World War II.
• Must enjoyment be contingent on the reality happening in the nominalist world?
• The awakening of desire:

1. The desiring of dragons
2. Making of other worlds (sub-creation) is at the heart of desire
3. The Hobbits

XI. FAIRY TALES AND LOTR:

• Children must grow up?
• Does this mean to leave the garden: i.e. Campbell?

• What about the loss of innocence?
• The quest bestows wisdom as Frodo and Sam know...

XII. THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF FANTASY

XIII. DO YOU AGREE WITH TOLKIEN’S REASON FOR SAYING LOTR COULD NOT BE
FILMED:

• Problems with the dramatic
• The difficulty with direct experience
• The need for enchantment
  
• Is FAERIE a lie?--is the notion of escape implicit from the ugliness of life?
• Tolkien sees it as a human right in which we attempt to recover what is lost, so could we film Genesis?
  

XIII. TOLKIEN'S LAUDING OF FAERIE IS DERIVED FROM ITS ABILITY TO CONSOLE:--

• He speaks of the EUCATASTROPHE--the joy of the happy ending which in the Romantic sense means the reconciliation of opposites, [but not without paradox.] This is the GOOD CATASTROPHE.

1. As we know, this means Christianity
2. The Gospels are the greatest fairy tales in history
3. They enter the primary world--The birth of Christ is the euchastrophe of man's history.
4. The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus define human history. [How does Gandalf come to be known as "the White?"

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THE MORALITY OF FAIRY TALE LITERATURE

1. The epic hero's adventures is the focus of the poet's recital:

2. Additionally, the epic hero learns humility, suffers alone, (splendid isolation--Frodo and Sam on Mt. Doom), and brings the story back to beginning,

3. God reveals his favor to the just, evil is defeated, and

4. The Nordic perspective...

According to Edith Hamilton's- Mythology, the Nordic myths embody the following:

(link: see also a good web site for Greek and Nordic Mythology compared: click here)