The Peaks of Taniquetil by Simon J. Cook

The Peaks of Taniquetil

In summer 1933, J.R.R. Tolkien penned an allegory: the Old English Beowulf appeared in a story as a rock garden—an arrangement of commonplace flowers and old stones, dug up and overturned by the gardener's modern friends. Two summers later Tolkien expanded the allegory a little. He was now working over material that the following year would be reduced into his famous British Academy lecture, 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'.

But when he delivered that lecture in London in November 1936, the allegory was different. The friends were joined by some descendants, and what the friends destroyed was no longer a rock garden but a tower that commanded a view on the sea.

The original image of the rock garden provides a helpful map of the old poem that diagrams Tolkien's argument with the 'descendants' of the canonical version of the allegory. At root, Tolkien was engaging with W.P. Ker's damning verdict of 1904:

Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of Beowulf is unmistakably heroic and weighty.¹

Tolkien initially framed his defense of the art of the Anglo-Saxon poet by embellishing Ker's spatial metaphor, picturing a rock garden with flowers scattered among central and outer stones.

Contrasting the folktale monsters at the center with the passing glimpses of the historical tragedy of Ingeld, the last Heathobard king, R.W. Chambers in 1912 substantiated the verdict of Ker by drawing attention to this 'stone' on the far outer edge of the 'rock garden':

Nothing could better show the disproportion of Beowulf, which "puts the irrelevances in the centre 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.²

Looking down on the rock garden, Tolkien's homely map of the poem, our eye takes in with one glance the stone-battle between these scholar-wizards. It is not really about the value of this versus that stone. At issue is the design, the particular arrangement of all the stones, the spatial juxtapositions by which each gives meaning to each.

We might picture Tolkien holding up the 'Heathobard Stone' on the far periphery. He shows us within its mysterious depths the tragic legend of Ingeld's royal love and historical doom. Then he suggests that this glimpse of heartbreak and world-ending on the outer edge of the rock garden works, within the garden as a whole, to complement its center, where flower and mythical stone reveal two parts of the life of one individual doomed in time.³ By the end of his demonstration, we will have seen with our own eyes why the design of the poem is just as it is. With Tolkien as our guide, the rock garden comes to life as a valuable pedagogical aid by which to think about Beowulf, or at least to follow Tolkien's reading of the poem.

To date, this is vastly more than may be said for the canonical image of the tower. Half a century of commentaries on the allegory of the tower, and possibly the best that can be said for the image is that, even today, it provides a quick and easy snare with which to catch passing academics, who seem, perhaps for professional reasons, peculiarly drawn to punch-ups on the lawn and averse to opening the door of the tower at the top of the hill.⁴

Why did Tolkien replace a helpful diagram of the Old English poem with an enigmatic image that, at least since 1979, has defied commentary? What did he mean by it?

After some pondering, I suggest an obvious direction. I ask you to follow me in imagination. We stand shoulder to shoulder by the shores of the western ocean, and I am pointing out to you what I think Tolkien was pointing at. I point away from the babel of voices, looking in the same direction as the ancient heroes under the heavens of the exordium of the old poem who, like their lords in their halls, cannot say what lies on the further shore of the shoreless sea. We are looking into the empty horizon, where the sky kisses the sea. Standing by the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, you may cast your gaze over the black expanse of water all the way into the bleak line of ending that encircles the waters all around. Facing due west, I gesture now to some segment of nothing at all just above the horizon, marking with my hands where once could be espied on a clear day the gleaming spires of Númenor. Pointing this out, imagined memory is conjured as a superimposition on an absence, newly perceived on the horizon.

More prosaically, it seems to me that Tolkien took the image of the tower from another story—a 'Silmarillion' story, the last of the 'Silmarillion' stories, composed earlier in 1936.⁵

In this post I give what I take to be the immediate source of the Anglo-Saxon tower that appeared in London in November. We are in the final sections of the final myth of the ancient world as told by the Elves, in the days of Elendil at the dawn of the History of a round world. After Númenor vanished beneath the waves and the Straight Road to Valinor was lost to mortal mariners, the Elves tell in this myth that a sort of after-image of Myth endured: 'the ancient line of the world remained in the mind of Ilúvatar and in the thought of the Gods, and in the memory of the world'.⁶ Because this memory of the now mythical Straight Road endured, without and within the world, so in History

many of the Númenóreans could see or half see the paths to the True West, and believed that at times from a high place they could descry the peaks of Taniquetil at the end of the straight road, high above the world. Therefore they built very high towers in those days.⁷

Dedication

I'd like to dedicate this January post to Himring, whose comment on my December post I have so far failed to answer. Before I read the comment, I was suffering deep writer's block, but on reading it I knew immediately what I needed to write. Thank you, Himring!

Works Cited

1. W.P. Ker, The Dark Ages ( New York: Charles Scribner, 1904), 253.

2. R.W. Chambers, Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge: University Press, 1912), 79-80.

3. This gloss on Tolkien's take on the Ingeld and Freawaru story is mainly drawn from The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 16; Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, "Commentary," 330-333; and On Fairy-stories, "Origins." This 'Heathobard Stone' should be considered carefully in another post.

4. Tom Shippey's Road to Middle-earth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982) remains the authoritative reading of the 1936 allegory of the tower. My post Fawlty Towers took issue with Shippey's biographical sketch of Tolkien going off the professional rails from the mid-1930s, while First Brick in the Wall attended to Jane Chance's 1979 reading of the allegory of the tower. This note concerns Shippey's 1982 reading of the 1936 allegory.

   Two pages (36-37) spurn the analytical category of 'fantasy' proffered by Chance and read the tale of the tower as just allegory: 'everything in this story can be "equated"', says Shippey, who then follows Chance in vanishing the 'descendants'. He quick-fires three equations before engaging with the 'more difficult' stones and older hall:

   'The man' = the Beowulf-poet. The 'friends' looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history. The 'tower' with its view on the sea = Beowulf itself, with its non-scholarly impulse towards pure poetry. (36)

   Concluding his equating of the allegory, Shippey comments that critical sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon poet depended, for Tolkien, on being a descendant (37). But this key term of the allegory has not been equated, so it is hard to know what to make of this comment. That is my basic criticism. But let's step through the three easy solutions.

   (1) 'The man' = the Beowulf-poet.

   With this first equation, I am happy. What might helpfully have been noted is that the two definite descriptions on either side serve in place of a proper name, for that of the Anglo-Saxon poet is lost to us. A reason to note this is that it provides context for the anonymity of the actors in the second act, who all appear as persons unknown.

   (2) The 'friends' looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history.

   As a solution of ‘the friends' this is ambiguous. Note that in his block quotation of the allegory, Shippey omits after 'hidden carvings' the following text: 'and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones.' Are the Beowulf-scholars who try to reconstruct history all these friends in the allegory, or only those particular friends seeking hidden carvings?

   My reading of the 1936 essay is that Tolkien is fundamentally engaged with R.W. Chambers, whose Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (Cambridge: University Press, 1921) served as the first book that Tolkien put into the hands of his students. Looking for some names to pin on friendly faces, the first port of call is Chapter III, 'Theories as to the Origin, Date, and Structure of the Poem'. And a key, I suggest, is found in the presentation of H.M. Chadwick's historical reading of Beowulf as a continuation of the older 'composite theory' (121), the practitioners of which Chambers has just identified as certain German scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who held that the text that has come down to us has been pulled together out of discrete lays or stitched together from two parts, an artless redaction of two or more older stories. Chambers notes the continuity, while Tolkien builds on it, rolling into one group of friends the German scholars and those of Cambridge, where Chadwick was king.

   Following Chance, Shippey's reading equates historical-mindedness with literary sin. But Chadwick's historical mining of the poem was a contingent feature of his modified composite theory. The literary sin of the 'friends'—what illuminates their destructive antics—is that they will not or cannot see an artistic design behind the arrangement of the stones; they deny an author.

   (3) The 'tower' with its view on the sea = Beowulf itself, with its non-scholarly impulse towards pure poetry.

   In the allegory of the tower, the sea view is introduced only at the end: sighting the sea is the consolation of the poet whose name was doomed to be forgotten and whose work to be studied but misunderstood by modern friends and descendants alike. For the builder, the view on the sea is a reward of building the tower, possibly a motivation to build in the first place, and for us, assuredly we are given some motivation for climbing the stairs of the tower, for striving to comprehend the poem Beowulf as a whole (rather than as a collection of episodes or individual stones). To neither ourselves nor the poet-builder, however, is the view on the sea presented in the allegory as an impulse (of any kind), inherently non-scholarly, or poetically pure (I am not even sure what this means).

   What is 'a non-scholarly impulse towards pure poetry'? The best I can say is that I am reminded of Bilbo Baggins on the road to Rivendell. Happily, Shippey pursues his impulse—all the way into a footnote on the following page: the 'tower looking out over the sea', he says here, is 'a strong and private image of Tolkien's own for what he desired in literature'.

   Impulse has become desire and the non-scholarly private, yet we are no nearer to endowing the view on the sea with tangible meaning. Shippey seems to be pointing at Tolkien's art, that which supposedly awaits at the end of the road to Middle-earth. But in doing so he intimates that we cannot speak of it, which might give pause to wonder what then his book is about?

   Yet this afterthought in a footnote culminates in a portentous observation. Shippey's category of the non-scholarly and private brims over with meaning. He cites two additional instances of Tolkien's image of a tower-with-sea-view: from a poem of the 1920s and from the report in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings that (as Shippey puts it) 'the hobbits believe that you can see the sea from the top of the tallest elvish tower on the Tower Hills, but none of them has ever tried to climb it.' Following what has turned into a most excellent footnote, we have unexpectedly encountered a fairy-element of Middle-earth.

   A stone on the outer edges of the great rock garden that is the tale of the War of the Ring. This tallest of the three Elf-towers receives a proper name in The Silmarillion. It is of undoubted, if as yet undisclosed significance to the art of The Lord of the Rings. This tower appears in Prologue, in dream (Crickhollow), and in an astonishing footnote in Appendix A. Most marvelous, perhaps, is the account of what Gildor Inglorion and his company of Elves might have seen in the Stone in the Tower, which may be read in J.R.R. Tolkien and Donald Swann, The Road Goes Ever On: Song Cycle [London: Allen & Unwin, 1967], 65. And returning to The Silmarillion, what have readers over the years made of the curious correction in 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age', where the Númenóreans are first said to have raised towers on Emyn Beraid but then 'It is said' otherwise, and Elf-towers on the Tower Hills appear as a gift?

   How about we approach the allegorical Anglo-Saxon tower by way of this Elf-tower, which seems also to be a Númenórean tower, possibly the Númenórean tower? After some reflection on a tower that loses its Stone at the end of the Third Age, what might we see if we return to 1936 and climb the (presumably spiral) staircase of the Anglo-Saxon tower of allegory?

   I do not especially blame Shippey for being so confused back then; all friends of Tolkien must get used to falling on our faces. Those I do blame are the rest of us ever since. This footnote discusses a book that has been much read and discussed since its publication in 1982.

   A careful reading of these two pages of The Road to Middle-earth reveals no sense of the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' and a reading of the image of the tower that does not make sense. Yet there is a footnote. Those who follow this note to its very end are rewarded with an encounter with the much sought-after art of J.R.R. Tolkien: another tower, like to the Anglo-Saxon tower, only different. This is a discovery of a gateway, a passage between two parts of the road to Middle-earth, but Shippey presumes a cul-de-sac. Why do the rest of us remain in his mess of allegorical analysis? Why not turn around, get ourselves back to the very bottom of the footnote to face the story once again, and then open a door?

5. On the dating of The Fall of Númenor, see John Rateliff, "The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis's Time Travel Triad"' in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl E. Hostetter (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), 163. This dating of the Númenórean tower does not, of course, establish that it appeared earlier (in imagination or on now lost paper) than did the Anglo-Saxon tower that is Beowulf. But the appearance of the coastal towers only in the second version of The Fall of Númenor indicates that this image arose out of the story and only during its composition, and this makes less sense to me if the allegorical tower had already been imagined.

6. The History of Middle-earth, Volume V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, The Fall of Númenor, "The second version of The Fall of Númenor," §11.

7.  Ibid. and "The first version of The Fall of Númenor," §11