Today, we’re going to talk about everybody’s favorite deciduous character: Treebeard. I think that he is a central figure in LOTR and that he creates the connections that tie together a number of disparate aspects of the text (hobbits, Rohan, Fangorn) and Tolkienian interests (ecology, philology, deep history). I’m going to have to set up these connections fairly methodically, but stick with me; we’ll get there.

Rohan and Philology

Many a precocious undergraduate, having first read Tolkien at the age of ten, comes to a realization in the middle of a medieval literature course: the language of Rohan is Old English! This happened to me, and I thought that I had made a stupendous discovery, only to have my professor inform me that this was common knowledge among medievalists.

Tom Shippey takes this revelation a step further and convincingly demonstrates that not only is the language in question Old English, it is also a specific dialect of Old English, i.e. Mercian.1 The Riders refer to Rohan as "The Mark," which is derived from West Saxon Mearc, which the Mercians themselves would have pronounced "Mark." Tolkien has to construct this dialect mostly through West Saxon, since relatively little of the Mercian survives in written form, but it was the dialect of what would become the English heartland, of the country around Birmingham in his youth and the Oxfordshire of his adulthood.

He was able to perform this reconstruction because of his profession: he was no mere literary medievalist (as I am), but a bona fide, old-fashioned philologist, a vocation which has all but disappeared, having been replaced on the one hand by linguistic studies and on the other by literary studies.

Philologists of the nineteenth century had broken the language code and traced the relationships between what they called the "Indo-European" language groups from Irish to Sanskrit. Furthermore, they had worked their way backwards, tracing changing sound patterns, to construct hypothetical lost languages of the past, like Gothic (some of which did survive in writing) and the "Ur-language" of Proto-Indo-European itself, which may have been spoken in the late Neolithic period and the early Bronze Age. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a completely hypothetical reconstruction, because none of it was written down, and it was certainly not a literate culture which spoke it.

As a product of the nineteenth century, philology inevitably got mixed up with emerging nationalism, in the search for originary national literatures and mythological epics—like Beowulf in English, the sagas in Old Icelandic, the Niebelungenlied in German, and the Kalevala in Finnish (which, incidentally, is one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European, and was also a language that utterly fascinated Tolkien and served as the "aesthetic" basis for his own Quenya language, with its limited consonants and proliferating vowels).

These nationalistic obsessions were, in an historical sense, anachronistic, since the concepts of "nation" and "nationalism" were largely the products of the nineteenth century itself and could not be traced back to the hypothetical languages that philologists were constructing. One imagines that if philology had come into its own in our time, then it would have been used to demonstrate how much we all had in common, as opposed to what made us linguistically distinct. Systematic study of any sort cannot be separated from ideology of one kind or another.

And in fact, these sorts of searches for national ur-texts were largely an exercise in frustration, since most of the evidence was "corrupted" by medieval tendencies towards a unifying Latin Christianity, and because of medieval writers' seeming indifference to the sorts of nationalistic concerns of nineteenth-century scholars. Tolkien explained his response to such frustration in a letter to Milton Waldman in 1951:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. (Letters, 203)

He describes this frustration in the context of a long, thorough explanation of his own invented Legendarium, which at some level was an attempt to provide an English mythology, constructed (alas) rather than uncovered or discovered (in, say, a hitherto lost manuscript).

The White Horse

But there was some "uncovering" that went along with his invention, and we see some of this in Rohan. In addition to the language of the Rohirrim, there is their devotion to horses. As Tom Shippey, once again, has pointed out, Rohan's emblem of a white horse in a green field exists in the very soil just a few miles from Tolkien's house: the White Horse of Uffington, a magnificent bronze-age figure cut into the chalk downs. (I made my pilgrimage to the White Horse back in 2007, on the rainiest summer day that you could imagine; I hiked several miles to visit it, along with the nearby Wayland's Smithy, a much older, neolithic site. It was worth getting soaked. I've never been so cold in the month of July, and I warmed myself in a local pub by eating soup and drinking coffee.)

This connection of the White Horse to this location in the Mercian heartland provides a basis for all of the horse-derived names among the Rohirrim, with the element eoh ("horse"): Eowyn, Eomer, etc. The White Horse may have suggested to Tolkien that at one point in the distant past these people had a great reverence for horses, even if it had been forgotten in later years. Rohan’s culture is, therefore, similar to that which we find in Beowulf, with the addition of prominent horses—an imagined, lost horse-centered culture in a hypothetical Mercia, whose traces are literally carved into the land.

Rohan is adjacent to the forest of Fangorn, of which the Rohirrim tell old wives' tales about creatures called ents, as the major river flowing through their land is the Entwash. Here ecology and philology combine to trace an historical-linguistic path through a lost, legendary past of Mercian horse-lords, to a much older culture and language—obscure even to the horsemen—which is completely Tolkien’s invention.

Ents: Philological Origins

Like that of Rohan, this culture is engraved in the English landscape, in the last remnants of old forest remaining in a country that was mostly cleared by the Middle Ages—a culture of beings much like the trees themselves. Ent is a word that Tolkien took from Beowulf. It seems to mean "giant," and the enten are listed with other evil creatures that are associated with the descendants of Cain, along with Grendel. Tolkien rescues the ents from these demonic origins, which, after all, were inflicted on them by the officious Christians who wrote down the poem.

The result is perhaps Tolkien's most remarkably original literary creation: the Ents, the shepherds of the trees. While they clearly reflect his ecological concerns, they are also the aspect of the book that most profoundly connects his twin devotions to ecology and philology. In a sense, the language of the ents is philology, or perhaps more accurately, a language that contains its own philology, in which words correspond directly with the reality of things (rather than the usually arbitrary relationship in language between word and thing). When Merry and Pippin ask Treebeard to tell them his real name, he responds:

For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to. (465)

Here is the real dream of Tolkien's version of philology: if you go back far enough, if you trace language back to ultimate origins, you reach a tongue that corresponds precisely to reality, a pure language spoken by the very land, uncorrupted by ages of abuse visited upon both the land and the language. Of course, Tolkien knew that this dream was impossible, so he brought it to life with Treebeard.

Like the elves in Lothlórien (as we discussed last week), Treebeard provides a memory of time that is beyond even the historical records of humans, a memory which goes back to a time when the woods of Fangorn "were like the woods of Lothlórien, only thicker, stronger, younger. And the smell of the air! I used to spend a week just breathing" (469). As the language evolves with the story of land, it expands without regard for the human sense of time. Treebeard is amused by the word hill, because "it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped" (466). He provides only a part of his word for it: a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burúmë (465).

This kind of language may remind us of the medieval notion of the world as a living text, written by God, but it also corresponds to more modern scholarly and scientific disciplines—cartography, geology, environmental history—which attempt to make ecology legible. The ents inscribe not only the forest and the landscape into their language, but also the “lore of living creatures”—their descriptive lists of fauna.

Ents and Hobbits: Old Connects to New

The absence of hobbits from these lists confuses Treebeard, and their subsequent incorporation of them into Entish lore is a moment of more profound significance in the context of Tolkien’s work than it may appear. In fact, it is a moment that is emblematic of the way in which the hobbits have inserted themselves into the Legendarium.

Hobbits played no role in Tolkien’s mythological world as he first conceived it. He wrote The Hobbit as a children’s story more or less independently of his Legendarium, though mythical elements made cameos, specifically the Mirkwood Elves and Elrond. As Tolkien himself explained in the same 1951 letter:

The Hobbit, which has much more essential life in it, was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged. But it proved to be the discovery of the completion of the whole, its mode of descent to earth, and merging into “history.” As the high Legends of the beginning [The Silmarillion] are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view—and the last tale [LOTR] blends them. (204)

Treebeard, the most obvious pure philologist in our book, has, likewise, not included the hobbits in his world view until they break into his story and make him notice them. They have not been included in the Old Entish lists with elves, dwarves, ents, and humans:

“We always seem to have got left out of the old lists, and the old stories,” said Merry. “Yet we’ve been about for quite a long time. We’re hobbits.”

“Why not make a new line?” said Pippin.

“Half-grown hobbits, the hole-dwellers.” (465)

This is Tolkien’s little philological joke. He explains in the Appendices that the word hobbit derives from holbytla, which in Old English (or in the language of Rohan) means “hole-dweller,” which in turn allows us to translate Pippin’s proposed addendum as redundant: “Half-grown hole-dwellers, the hole-dwellers.” Unlike Treebeard, Pippin is not a philologist and does not recognize the meaning embedded in the name of his own kind. (It is fitting, therefore, that when Treebeard gives us the new lines about hobbits for inclusion in the lists, that it is not Pippin’s proposed line that makes it in—though that lies outside this week’s reading, so I won’t quote it. You may find it in Book Three, Chapter 10.)

But it is more than just a joke: the Rohirrim also refer to the hobbits as “holbytla,” which suggests that hobbit language is a “later” form of Rohan’s language—analogous to the relationship between Old English and Modern English. By using names to establish these links between three societies, Tolkien connects the hobbits, the ents, and the people of Rohan, both philologically and ecologically. And just as Treebeard brings the hobbits into his lists, Tolkien brings them into his Legendarium to play their vital roles, to bring about "the completion of the whole," as he himself wrote.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet ur-language to yours.

The Hythe

Before getting started with today’s main topic, I would like to share a curiosity that I have discovered regarding use of the word hythe, which I couldn’t figure out how to work into the previous essay. I mentioned that there are multiple attestations of the word in Old English. One of these appears in Paris Psalter, an OE translation of the Psalms. From Psalm 107:30: “And he hi on hælo hyþe gelædde” (“And he led them to the desired hythe”). Here is the full context from the English Standard Version as presented in the Oxford Annotated Bible, with hythe translated as “haven”:

28 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he brought them out from their distress;
29 he made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.
30 Then they were glad because they had quiet,
and he brought them to their desired haven.

Here is the curiosity: in what seems to be simply a moment of simple narrative action, Tolkien apparently translates this verse from the OE version, substituting only Celeborn for the pronoun he: “and Celeborn led them back to the hythe.”

Now, of course, this may be a coincidence, but that seems highly unlikely because 1) Tolkien was an OE scholar who was very familiar with the Paris Psalter, 2) he is using a word that is rare in the language after the OE period, and 3) Celeborn is the Lord of Lothlórien, and his name replaces the he in the original, who is “the Lord.”

No scholarship that I have found has made this observation, which is not a surprise, considering the obscurity of the quotation and the fact that it does not occur in a particularly vital or memorable sentence. If Tolkien did, indeed, plant this quotation, then we may well ask why he did so. In the context of the sentence, hythe simply means a landing place on the bank of the river, but Lóthlorien has, of course, been a “desired haven,” a place of healing and quiet for the company, analogous to the haven referred to in the Psalm.

I haven't quite worked out a claim here, except that we might place the biblical reference to a peaceful haven in juxtaposition to what it follows in the narrative: the underworld and the abyss in Moria.

Milton and Tolkien

In Book Two of Paradise Lost, after the Council of Hell has determined that Satan shall make his way into the newly made world, he ascends to the gates of Hell and finds two horrific figures guarding against his escape: Sin and Death. We discover that Sin is actually Satan's daughter, who emerged from his head in heaven when he had his first moment of pride; he then raped her, and she conceived and bore Death as a son. Death, in turn, raped his mother, and she gave birth to hellhounds, who are constantly emerging from her womb and reentering in order to eat her entrails while barking and howling from inside her.

Nice, right?

Milton describes Death like this:

[. . .] The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on. (Book 2, lines 666-673)

Shortly thereafter, we find out that this figure of "shadow and flame" carries a whip, and he threatens Satan with it.

I teach this every year, and each time it makes me think of the Balrog in Moria. I realize that analogy isn't perfect, but it resonates powerfully: in both cases we have an attempted ascent from the underworld and a terrifying, shadowy figure with a whip preventing it.

The results of the two scenes are, of course, different. Gandalf challenges the Balrog and sends it into the abyss, but the creature's whip catches him, and he falls after it. Satan's fall into the abyss came earlier, at the beginning of the poem, but now he is able to negotiate and to win over Death and Sin to his own project with the promise of releasing them into the world to feast on this new race of humans.

Milton and Tolkien are both exploring deep time. Milton, in his attempt to "justify the ways of God to men" (Book One, line 26), goes back to the very beginning, to Satan's fall from Heaven into the abyss of Hell, to the burning lake of fire. Tolkien, while his claims are not as bold (no divine justification going on here), is just as ambitious in the expansiveness of his vision.

This vision of deep time, as I suggested in the previous piece, reveals what we might call an object-oriented ontology: a self-shaping world full of ancient independent phenomena. We see this before the Fellowship decides to go through Moria as they travel through the uninhabited land of Hollin and then fend with the weather in the mountains.

In Hollin, Legolas comments that elves who once lived there "were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone" (284). The land has been shaped by its ancient inhabitants, even if we can no longer detect their presence. This is partly because the present land forms a palimpsest over the past, and this is why archeologists and geologists must dig to find it.

Caradhras

The past extends upwards as well, into mountains that have formed over untold years, and which generate brutal weather patterns that are utterly indifferent to the living creatures who are struggling to survive through them. As the company tries to fight its way through a snowstorm on the mountain Carahras, Boromir speculates that there is some evil will (presumably Sauron’s) trying to prevent their passage. This exchange follows:

"I do call it the wind," said Aragorn. "But that does not make what you say untrue. There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in this world longer than he."

"Caradhras was called the Cruel, and had an ill name," said Gimli, "long years ago, when rumour of Sauron had not been heard in these lands."

"It matters little who is the enemy, if we cannot beat off his attack," said Gandalf. (289)

The difference between this exchange the book and the scene in Peter Jackson's film is instructive. In the book, Tolkien imagines a complex world beyond a simple, moralistic ontology, in which phenomena act independently of any conscious will. The film is not having it: as they struggle in the wind and snow falls on top of them, Gandalf exclaims: "It's Saruman!" And, sure enough, we see Christopher Lee as Saruman, standing on the top of Orthanc, directing the weather to harass the Fellowship. I must admit that, despite generally enjoying the movie, this scene made me roll my eyes when I first saw it.

The film demands that all obstacles must be a direct result of the will of a "bad guy." It imagines a fundamentally more simple universe.

On the contrary, it is bad weather generated by an ancient mountain, a force no less powerful or mysterious than Sauron or Saruman, that forces them to Moria, the alternative route under the mountains.

The Underworld

The descent into the underworld is a trope as old as Homer: Odysseus descends in the Odyssey, Aeneas does so in Virgil, Dante in Inferno, Satan in Paradise Lost. In each of these cases, the hero (or antihero) in some way encounters the past or must cope with it in some way. The difference in Tolkien's variation of the trope in Moria is that it is not some spiritual or disembodied past that manifests underground, but rather the reality of a geological and political history.

Moria is the ancient kingdom of the dwarves, where they mined the immeasurably valuable mithril or "Moria silver" in the Second Age. The depths of Moria are apparent as Pippin unthinkingly drops a stone down a hole in the floor and "felt his heart beat many times before there was any sound." We are deep underground, but the abyss still extends far below. There is a sense in Moria that the deeper one goes, the further one travels into the past. This is literally true in a geological sense, but it also proves resonant in an historical sense. Gandalf explains: "but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane" (317). He does not explain what this means.

The Balrog

We get something of an answer: Durin's Bane is a Balrog. But what is that?

In 1954, when The Fellowship of the Ring was first published, there was no published version of The Silmarillion to explain what a Balrog was. In fact, the Appendices did not even appear until the next year, with the publication of The Return of the King, and they offered no real explanation either.

But despite the reader's ignorance (or perhaps partly because of it?), the effect of the Balrog's appearance is gripping. The imperturbable Legolas cries out in horror when he sees it, and Gandalf says: "This foe is beyond any of you" (330). And, of course, it pulls Gandalf down into the abyss with it as it falls.

Why is this such a powerful scene? It is largely, of course, because we feel the shock of the loss of Gandalf. But partly it is because the text has done the work of establishing the mystery of deep time here. We all live on the surface of our world, with no real sense of what lies deep beneath our feet, beyond our ability to dig; whatever is down there must be unimaginably old and dark. What might we unleash if we dig too deeply? (There are, alas, very real ecological answers to this in our own world.)

The Silmarillion offers some answers in the context of Tolkien's universe, and it brings us back, full circle, to Satan's encounter with Death in Paradise Lost.

Stick with me: we're going into the weeds for a moment. Tolkien's analogue to Satan in The Silmarillion is Melkor, later known as Morgoth. Like Satan, he is among the oldest and most powerful servants of the creator, one of the original Valar, and like Satan, he falls because of his pride and becomes evil. And like Satan, other angelic spirits are drawn to him:

But he was not alone. For of the Maiar many were drawn to his splendour in the days of his greatness, and remained in that allegiance down into his darkness; and others he corrupted afterwards to his service with lies and treacherous gifts. Dreadful among these spirits were the Valaraukar, the scourges of fire that in Middle-earth were called the Balrogs, demons of terror.

Among those of his servants that have names greatest was that spirit whom the Eldar called Sauron [. . .] (Silmarillion, 31-32)

We later find out that one of the Balrogs fled the destruction of Melkor at the end of the First Age and hid under the mountains. We also discover here that the Balrog is a being of the same order as Sauron—an evil that goes back to near the beginning of time. Just as Death in Paradise Lost becomes the servant of Satan, the Balrog and Sauron become servants of Melkor.

But the analogy to Paradise Lost extends even further: just as good angels remain in Heaven, there are other Maiar spirits in The Silmarillion, good spirits, who are just as old as the Balrogs and who serve the creator and the Valar and do good works:

Wisest of the Maiar was Olórin. He too dwelt in Lórien, but his ways took him often to the house of Nienna (another of the Valar) and of her he learned pity and patience. (30-31)

Who is this? We find out from Faramir in The Two Towers that Olórin was one of the names for Gandalf.

So, though the casual reader cannot know this, the struggle between Gandalf and the Balrog is one that extends back thousands of years to before the First Age, once again into deep time. Tolkien's magic trick is that he is able to convey this sense of deep time and to inspire awe and terror in the reader without explaining it.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet demon to yours.

In Book Two of The Fellowship of the Ring, the company leaves Galadriel and Lothlórien by boat. She gives the company their precious gifts, including Frodo's phial, and then "the Lady arose, and Celeborn led them back to the hythe" (my italics). They launch their boats and look back:

As they passed her they turned and their eyes watched her slowly floating away from them. For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world. (377)

You have probably experienced this sort of spatial illusion of movement: as you sit facing backwards on a train, the platform may seem to move away from you, gradually accelerating as you stay still. We know, of course, that we are the ones who are moving, but still one may experience and even thrill in the illusion.

In this passage, however, the illusion is temporal as well as spatial: Galadriel, along with the trees of her magic forest, seem to recede into the ancient world from which they emerged, while the world that remains to them after that departure seems "grey and leafless." As they depart, Galadriel sings in her own language: “Ai! laurië la tar lassi súrinen, / yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!” ("Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees," 377-378).

The ancient nature of Lothlórien is apparent even in Tolkien's antiquarian word choice for various aspects of the ecology: the word hythe, referring to a landing place on a river, is extremely rare in modern English and survives mostly in place names and historical accounts, though it appears often in Old English. Likewise, the word flet, which is used to describe the platforms in the trees where the elves live, is obsolete, unattested in this sense in the language after 1450, according to the OED. And then there is Galadriel's own language, which is not even the Sindarin used by most of the elves remaining in Middle-Earth, but rather the ancient Quenya, in which she refers to the Valar, or presiding spirits, by their ancient names (Varda, for example, rather than Elbereth).1

Tolkien here is giving us a sense of deep time, as he does in a number of settings in this portion of the narrative—time that reaches back beyond the beginnings of human history to the making of the very forests and mountains—in comparison to which the lives of humans and hobbits seem fleeting. This is the time that he narrates in The Silmarillion, and it is the elves who provide the link of consciousness between the two narratives. Their presence creates a sense of time in The Lord of the Rings which is different from the works of any of Tolkien's contemporaries.

Indeed, negative criticism of the book has often attacked it on the grounds of "escapism" or lack of a sense of "reality," or accused it of an avoidance of various concerns of modernity—sexuality, subjectivity, etc.2 Such criticism, however, fails to recognize the means through which the book addresses ideas and concerns seldom approached by its modernist contemporaries, which tend to be concerned only with the parts of reality that relate to post-Romantic individual experience and the fragmentation of a unified world view.3 In fact, to a large extent, Tolkien decenters individual experience in favor of a wider and deeper sense of time and space that takes into account non-human perspectives.

In this sense, Tolkien is actually well ahead of his time, as the critical theory of the past couple of decades has developed an ecological perspective. The fancy academic term is "object-oriented ontology," which simply means a perspective that is not human-centered—recognizing the independent reality of other forms of living and non-living objects like animals, trees, rocks, planets, oceans, stars, etc. Tolkien's technique for providing this wider sense of perspective involves beings with consciousness that extends into deep time: elves.4

Elves and "Realism"

The immortality of elves in Tolkien's universe has caused a great deal of confusion—confusion which Tolkien himself did not definitively clarify in the work that he published in his lifetime. The posthumous publication of multiple volumes of his Legendarium, beginning with The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales and extending through the twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth and beyond, has helped to clarify the issue, though it is clear that Tolkien's own ideas about the elves changed and developed through the decades during which he wrote about them.

In short, the elves are not immortal in the sense that gods are. Rather, they live and die with the world. When the world dies, the elves die.5 (Also, they are not unconquerable and may "die" violently, for example, but they are then carried off to dwell in the far west, rather like the old nordic idea of Valhalla.) This is different from humans, who, in Tolkien's cosmology, will participate in the cosmic music after the current world ends. This idea accords with Tolkien's personal Catholic ontology, but it also separates human essence from the material world (i.e., through their souls) and distinguishes them from the elves.

Whether or not you, as a reader, believe in human immortal souls is not relevant to the point that elves are a mechanism that provides a consciousness of deep time. They awoke before the sun and moon, and the oldest of them have memories that extend thousands of years through the three great ages of Middle-Earth. They have memories of the formation and transformation of land masses, the births and deaths of great forests, the coming of humans and other creatures, etc.

Is this "realistic"? No, of course not. But that is not the point: the point is to contextualize the narrative with a perspective of the universe beyond human apprehension—a perspective that some of our own academic and scientific disciplines attempt to provide outside the world of literature (philosophy, astronomy, geology, etc.), but which is not often taken into account in modern novels. Of course, what LOTR's negative critics fail to acknowledge is that "realism" is also an artificial literary mode, a construction just as much as is Middle-Earth, and that Tolkien's literary world explores aspects of "reality" unavailable to traditional literary realism.

Elves and Trees: Lothlórien

One essential aspect of reality that Tolkien explores through the elves is the life of trees. (Of course, he does this also through the ents, which we will discuss in the coming weeks.) Trees are central not only to the book's ecology but also to its cosmology: two trees provide light to the world in the days before the sun and moon in The Silmarillion. These trees are destroyed by the powers of evil, but the Valar preserve their blooms and, therefore, their light, which they then shape into the sun and moon.6 Trees are, therefore, the source of light and beauty.

In LOTR, this connection is most clearly manifested in the ancient forest of Lothlórien and the mallorn trees that grow there. When Frodo first touches these trees, he experiences a radical shift in perspective:

[. . .] he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was delight of the living tree itself. (351)

This delight is essential to the elves of Lothlórien, who live in perfect harmony with the trees, as long as they shall last. And this is the other aspect of the elves' deeper perspective: they view the passage of time as a long process of fading and ecological degradation. As Galadriel says to Frodo: "[. . .] through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat" (357). The elves of the forest will fade as the forest fades, giving way to modernity. Later, Galadriel foresees her fate:

"Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten." (365)

This is a remarkable moment in the narrative, as it shows that Frodo's possible success in his venture will not bring with it unalloyed good and that all human (or hobbit) achievements are transitory in relation to deep time. Despite this fact, however, or perhaps because of it, it becomes more and more difficult for humans to value the ecology that has formed and sustained their world, as they reshape it and it fades. Before the company leaves the forest, Frodo sees Galadriel differently:

She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time. (373)

Note the move briefly into present tense here: if we remember Bilbo as the presumed narrative voice of the text, then that present is Bilbo's present. However, in this case, it seems that tense may transcend this narrative conceit and bring the perspective into the reader's present. To the modern reader, elves, or what elves represent, may be present in the preserved "nature" of national parks or weekend getaways, but they are no longer central to our consciousness, to the "reality" of modernity that the critics complain is absent from Tolkien's works.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet tree to yours.

I have sat through so many committee meetings, a few that were productive, some that were necessary, and many more that could have been an email—so many hours of my life I’ll never get back. Because we have only a few hours a week actually in the classroom, many assume that academics have cushy jobs. And I will admit, having worked office jobs and retail jobs, that it’s a nice thing to set much of my own schedule and to do much of my work in coffee shops. (Shout out to Soul Caffeine, my second office!)

But what people don’t understand is that as the semester goes on, and administrative tasks pile up, and as departmental, college, and university committees slip into gear, more and more of that “flexible” time gets colonized by boring and often useless meetings—usually with the same few people, some of whom like to hear themselves talk, droning on and on like a broken record about the same problems (real and imagined), while all you want to do is go and prep your classes for tomorrow so that you don’t have to spend your whole evening working. By April, you simply don’t have enough time for all you have to do—until you collapse in a heap after turning in grades in early May.

So, for the most part, I “cordially dislike” meetings (to borrow a phrase from Tolkien).

With that in mind, it seems remarkable that one of the most engrossing chapters in LOTR is an hours-long committee meeting, with several speakers, particularly Gandalf, droning on and on. This is another case in which a modern editor would go nuts with the blue pencil (or with comments in Microsoft Word).

“Why all this exposition?” “Show, don’t tell!” “TOO LONG!”

Every time I read it, however, unless I’m interrupted (usually by a dog, or a committee meeting), I take it straight through in one sitting, and the time flies by.

How does it work? One word: voice.

Polyglossia

I don’t mean voice just in the modern “craft” sense of a writerly voice (though, doubtless, that’s a big part of it), but also in the sense of orality. This book is largely about a culture of oral storytelling, conveyed to a literary culture, and many of its pages are taken up with telling and retelling—with different voices providing different, complex perspectives, while filling in some narrative gaps and opening up others.

The extraordinary success of this chapter, however, is the result of Tolkien using some of the techniques that we associate with the modern novel to reflect brilliantly that most ancient form of discourse: oral narrative.

In his classic essay, “Discourse in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin claims that the novel form is defined by polyglossia, literally “many tongues.” What he means by this is that, unlike, say, the ancient epic form, which is dominated by a single, authoritative narrative presence, the novel has the potential for almost endless inclusiveness with regard to voice. (Please don’t tell our state legislature; if they find out that novels are “inclusive,” they are likely to ban them.) The novel takes in all sorts of discourse: casual and formal speech from various classes and races, letters, diaries, newspaper excerpts, etc. Recently, in my piece about Tolkienian Style, I claimed that the success of the book is largely due to the author’s stylistic flexibility and precision. “The Council of Elrond” demonstrates this technical mastery in microcosm and extends it to the representation, literally, of “many tongues,” of polyglossia.

This is why LOTR is not an epic, though it is often called such, at least not in the classical sense. Rather than the single, authoritative voice of classical epic, it includes many voices. In Bakhtinian terms, then, it is certainly a novel, though it does not behave like most novels, or at least not the novels of Tolkien’s modernist contemporaries.

To demonstrate this flexibility of voice, let’s take a close look at just one voice which is itself polyvocal, that of Gandalf.

Gandalf

First: who is or what is Gandalf? Is he human? We know that he is a “wizard,” one of an order of five, but what is that, precisely? The text of LOTR never quite clarifies this, though you may find some answers if you delve into Tolkien’s Legendarium. As with Tom Bombadil, in the book itself, it is left for the reader to piece things together and decide who or what he is.

As many scholars have pointed out, Gandalf as a name is not Tolkien’s invention, but rather comes from the Old Icelandic Voluspa, which is contained in the Elder Edda. The Voluspa provides a list of dwarves without much context. If you read through the list, you will find that Tolkien took from it most of his dwarf names that he used in The Hobbit. One of the names, however, is somewhat puzzling, because it doesn’t seem like it should be a dwarf name: Gandalfr.

It doesn’t seem like it should be a dwarf name because it translates literally as “staff-elf” (not “staff-dwarf”). Many names in Old Icelandic and Old English have “elf” as an element, for example the prolific Old English writer, Ælfric. When Gildor in Book One names Frodo “Elf-Friend,” he is actually giving us a translation of a real Old English common name: Ælfwine.

Tom Shippey speculates convincingly that Tolkien looked at the list of dwarf names in the Volupsa and asked himself: “Now, what is this this ‘staff-elf’ doing with all of these dwarves? There is a story behind this.” Ergo, The Hobbit.1

Now, we know that Gandalf is not actually an elf. However, we also find out that he has many names and is just called “Gandalf” among hobbits and northern men. It seems likely that he got this name because many years ago provincial hobbits thought of him as an “elf with a staff.” Much later in the book, Faramir says of him:

“Mithrandir we called him in elf-fashion,” said Faramir, “and he was content. Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.” (670)

It is clear, then, that whatever Gandalf is, he has many names and is the master of many tongues, many voices. And so at the Council of Elrond, as he tells his tale to the company, he puts on a performance worthy of Meryl Streep, playing all of the parts himself, taking on the tongues of Saruman, Isildur, Gollum, Sauron (in the Ring’s inscription), Radagast the Brown, Gwaihir the Windlord (an eagle), Gaffer Gamgee, and Butterbur the Innkeeper. He perfectly captures the voice of each, channeled through his own voice, which Tolkien then perfectly translates into his prose. This is why the Council of Elrond is more than a committee meeting and certainly could not have been an email.

Through this command performance, Gandalf shapes the narrative within the narrative. He makes the narrative coherent, uniting many voices in his own voice, and charts its progression after the council.

Perhaps there is a narratological term for a figure within a narrative (not a narrator) who creates the narrative, but if there is, I'm not aware of it. In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde there is Pandarus; Shakespeare's Iago and Prospero both play this role in the different ways; in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy there is George Smiley. These are not simply guiding figures, but rather they actually construct the narrative by making events coherent through their words and actions. Dante's Virgil is not such a figure, for example, because he acts as a guide but not as a narrative force. Gandalf is such a figure—a shaper of narrative within the narrative.

(There is a great book to be written on this topic—not by me.)

Orality and Literacy

In addition to exemplifying the book's orality, the Council also demonstrates the interaction between orality and literacy in a number of ways.2

For example, Gandalf is not only a master storyteller; he is also a kind of hero-scholar. As he recounts, it is his willingness to spend time in the archives and look through old manuscripts that allows him to shape the narrative. He finds the vital document written by Isildur that allows him definitively to make the connection to Bilbo's ring. (Support your local library!)

And speaking of Bilbo, we are reminded in this chapter of his roles as memoirist, scholar, and translator. Bilbo's own story in the chapter is redacted for us by the third-person narrator. The irony of this for the attentive reader is that this third-person narrator, according to Tolkien's complex narrative framing, may actually be Bilbo!

Stick with me: in both the Prologue and the Appendices, the author suggests that this entire story is derived from an array of manuscripts of the Red Book of Westmarch, which originally included the story of The Hobbit and then was later expanded into LOTR. This is Bilbo's work, though other hands revise it through the process of textual transmission.

In a strikingly metatextual moment, Gandalf says to Bilbo:

"If you need my advice any longer, I should say that your part is ended, unless as a recorder. Finish your book, and leave the ending unaltered! There is still hope for it. But get ready to write a sequel, when they come back." (270)

Furthermore, Bilbo himself imagines the current narrative in book form even as it is happening. After Frodo tells his part of the tale, Bilbo says:

"Not bad," Bilbo said to him. "You would have made a good story of it, if they hadn't kept on interrupting. I tried to make a few notes, but we shall have to go over it all again together some time, if I am to write it up. There are whole chapters of stuff before you ever got here!" (249)

This moment takes on greater resonance if we imagine that in this very chapter, we are reading a translation of Bilbo's own account of the Council.

Tell, don’t show.

If all committee meetings were as engrossing as the Council of Elrond, then I would happily attend them every day.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet manuscript to yours.

The Ruin

In the late stages of Book One of The Lord of the Rings, Strider the ranger is guiding the hobbits through an unfamiliar landscape, making for a hill called Weathertop, which commands a wide view of the surrounding lands. The hobbits are wary of the place, and Strider provides them a history of it:

The Men of the West did not live here; though in their latter days they defended the hills for a while against the evil that came out of Angmar. The path was made to serve the forts along the walls. But long before, in the first days of the North Kingdom, they built a great watch-tower on Weathertop, Amon Sûl they called it. It was burned and broken, and nothing remains of it now but a tumbled ring, like a rough crown on the old hill’s head. Yet once it was tall and fair. It is told that Elendil stood there watching for the coming of Gil-galad out of the West, in the days of the Last Alliance. (185)

Don’t worry if you don’t know this history or these names. Neither do the hobbits, for the most part. But both they and the reader have Strider to explain. Surprisingly, however, it is Sam who responds when Merry asks about Gil-galad. He recites three brief stanzas about the ancient elven king, which he had learned from Bilbo, and which Strider recognizes as a translated fragment from an old poem.

This is an emblematic Tolkienian moment: the contemplation of a ruined structure invokes a lost past and a literary history that goes along with it, with the help of a learned guide who knows both the land and its history. History and poetry are not locked in cloisters or libraries; rather, they are engraved in the very landscape, readable to those who know, who have taken the trouble to learn. The ranger and the lore-master are overlapping roles. Scholars do not isolate themselves in cubicles. One must know the land to know the lore, and one must know the lore to know the land. They are not separable. The poem’s translator, Bilbo, has made his own journeys through this land, and thus poetic transmission is linked to his experience of the landscape.

It is not only the distant past that the reader of the land may decipher, but the recent past as well. Strider is able to interpret some obscure scratches on a rock as a message left for them by Gandalf. From the elevated position, he becomes a living map, giving names to the visible features of the landscape. A chapter later, he is able to tell the identity of an approaching rider by putting his ear to the ground.

This phase of the journey is in marked contrast to the earlier parts of the narrative in the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, when the hobbits are without a guide and venturing into places beyond their knowledge. They know neither the land nor its history. The Barrow-Wight is literally a ghost of the land’s history, suspended in the landscape—a spirit of loss and despair, haunting his barrow. History here is so ingrained in the land that when Merry awakens from his trance, rescued by Tom Bombadil, who knows the land and the Barrow-Wight, he begins to speak in a voice not his own, a voice from the distant past: “The Men of Carn Dûm came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart” (143). The history of the land is so powerful that it has almost consumed him.

These two episodes recall the poetry that Tolkien spent much of his academic career studying. A source of frustration for him was the loss of so much of the ancient literature in the languages that he studied: Old English, Old Icelandic, Gothic, Welsh, Finnish, etc. Much of what was extant was altered or supplanted by later medieval Christian influence, especially in English. Since much of the literary past that he longed for was not recoverable, he created his own and tied it to the world and the languages that he built.

Furthermore, the sense of a lost past was already embedded in the surviving fragments that he studied. In the Old English elegy known as The Ruin, preserved in the tenth-century manuscript called The Exeter Book, the poet meditates upon the remains of a magnificent structure and imagines a history for it:

Wonderful the stone wall          that wyrd has broken;
the castle crumbles,           work of giants destroyed.
Roofs fallen in,          tall towers collapsed,
barred gate despoiled,          hoar-frost on the mortar,
mutilated houses have been          cleaved, have fallen,
undone by age.          The earth’s grasp,
hard grip, holds these mighty wrights;          they have withered away,
departed.  Since then           a hundred generations
of people have passed. (my translation)1

The poem’s manuscript itself is damaged and renders parts of it unreadable, creating melancholy metonymy with its subject.

We see this in Beowulf as well, as the poet digresses from the narrative to imagine an unnamed survivor of a forgotten, ancient people, who stows their treasure in a barrow, which the dragon now guards. The treasure has proven a useless curse to those who have possessed it, just as the Barrow-Wight’s treasure does not avail him.2

The Land

Tolkien does not simply imitate these older modes, however. To this sense of a lost past, he adds a sense of regret for the destruction of the landscape itself, as he imagines a decline of a civilization as connected to the environmental damage that it has inflicted upon the earth. As we will see later, Mordor is imagined as a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic landscape, devoid of life and dominated by mechanized power.

The lands through which the hobbits travel from the Old Forest to Rivendell are diminished from what they once were. The village of Bree seems an outpost, a remnant whose inhabitants are only dimly aware of a rich history or of the looming danger that surrounds them. Elrond later recalls that in the past “a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard” (265). The forests have retreated, subject to those who enforce the nature/culture binary.

Tolkien himself echoes Elrond in his Foreword to the Second Edition, as he recalls the landscape of his childhood in the rural midlands near Birmingham:

The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. (xxv)

And in 1972, he sent a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph in response to an article that stated “sheepwalks where you could once ramble for miles are transformed into a kind of Tolkien gloom, where no bird sings.” Tolkien took offense that his name was associated with environmental gloom and pointed out that beauty in his books is largely connected to trees:

It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.

This process of deforestation was old indeed, going back to the early Middle Ages. By the time of William the Conqueror, 90% of England’s forests had been cleared.3 The two World Wars exacerbated the problem, as regulation of forestry was set aside because of the urgent need for resources.

Meanwhile, perhaps the surest mark of righteousness in Tolkien’s universe is ecological care and connection to ecology. Hobbits, or at least the best of them, despite their insularity and ignorance of the wider world, care for the land. Sam, Frodo’s steadfast companion and the favorite character of many readers, is a gardener. The elves preserve their lands and communicate with animals and trees. Gandalf can tame the wildest of horses and may call upon the aid of eagles in need. And then there is Strider the Ranger.

The Ranger

When the hobbits first encounter Strider at the Prancing Pony in Bree, the narrator describes him as “strange-looking” and “weather-beaten.” His boots are “caked with mud,” and a “travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him” (156). Butterbur, the innkeeper, regards him with suspicion: he is a mysterious figure, who emerges at irregular intervals from the wilds and is known as a ranger, “one of the wandering folk”—existing in a liminal space between wilderness and civilization.

It is clear, however, that for Tolkien the wilderness/civilization division is a false binary: the culture of the elves, for example, is not separable from the ecology, and, as we have seen, knowledge and lore of the land is part and parcel of knowledge and lore of history, of culture. We learn also that Strider is Aragorn, the heir to the currently kingless throne. His exile and that of his ancestors is a sign of a world falsely divided, which separates ecology from culture. The fact that Aragorn is a master of both implies that the restoration of his crown would bring about a reunification, a preservation of both ecology and culture as inextricably linked.

Until that day, however, he wanders the periphery, performing unheralded acts of service for the very people who hold him in suspicion for his apparent wildness, but as Bilbo’s poem about him insists, “not all those who wander are lost.” This oft-quoted line implicitly erases the division between wilderness and civilization by suggesting that wandering—or leaving the road, which was created by culture to cope with the wild—may have a purpose, a direction, and that we are of the ecology, not separate from it, and free to move through it as natural creatures.

History and Ecology

If travelers have the knowledge, then the land tells its story as they move through it. For example, after Weathertop, the company passes through the same places that Bilbo had, decades earlier, in his own great journey east recounted in The Hobbit. The hobbits are alarmed when they see a group of three trolls, but they turn out to be made of stone:

Strider walked forward unconcernedly. “Get up, old stone!” he said, and broke his stick upon the stooping troll.

Nothing happened. There was a gasp of astonishment from the hobbits, and then even Frodo laughed. “Well!” he said. “We are forgetting our family history! These must be the very three that were caught by Gandalf, quarreling over the right way to cook thirteen dwarves.” (205-206)

The history of Bilbo’s journey is inscribed on the landscape and has become part of it: the trolls turned to stone with the rising of the sun in The Hobbit. Strider points out that one of the trolls “has an old bird’s nest behind its ear” (206); the ecology of the place incorporates these historical markers until, eventually, they too will crumble into ruin.

The centrality of ecology to Tolkienian narrative is such that the long descriptions of landscape, flora, and fauna are essential to the text, not superfluous digressions, as some readers regard them. And this is my advice and you move forward in the book: when you get to these descriptions, don’t skip or skim. Instead, slow down. Join the journey with your mind’s eye. Tolkien is painting you a picture, is creating this world for you, and its history and richness are inherent in the ecology that he describes.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet traveling squirrel to yours.

The Foreword to the Second Edition includes Tolkien’s famous (or infamous?) remarks on allegory:

But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. (xxiv)

I’ve always wondered about the word choice of “cordially” in this context and whether it was a concession to Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia books are inescapably allegorical. (Cordial dislike strikes me as a peculiarly English concept.) While the two writers were close friends, I always imagine the concept of allegory as a source of argument and debate for them. Perhaps Lewis’s most accomplished scholarly book was about allegory—The Allegory of Love. How friendly was the argument, I wonder. “Cordial,” perhaps?

This issue of allegory becomes a real question when we arrive at the House of Tom Bombadil. Allegorical readings here are tempting but elusive. Who is Tom? What does he “represent”? Is he an allegorical representation of something, and, if so, then what? What purpose does he serve in the narrative? Obviously, Peter Jackson didn’t think that he served much purpose, since he left Tom out of his film.

I have some ideas about this, and I’m interested in your thoughts as well. First, let’s contextualize Tom as we enter The Old Forest. I want to start with a sentence that most readers probably pass over without contemplating, near the beginning of Chapter 6. Frodo and company are leaving the house at Crickhollow at the break of day. They have decided to avoid the main road and instead to travel through the Old Forest in the hope of avoiding the mysterious Black Riders:

Merry went in front leading a laden pony, and took his way along a path that went through a spinney behind the house, and then cut across several fields. (109, my italics)

I had been reading this book repeatedly for the better part of four decades before I stopped at this sentence and thought: “What the hell is a spinney?”

Let’s turn to our old friend, the OED, which gives us two definitions. The first is listed as “obsolete, rare,” so let’s skip it for the moment. The second definition is “a small wood or copse, esp. one planted or preserved for sheltering game-birds; a small clump or plantation of trees.” The earliest listed occurrence is from 1597, and while this is possibly the meaning here, I am skeptical. We never see any mention of game hunting in the Shire, and so at least this particular sense of the word seems unlikely.

The first definition, the “obsolete” one, however is interesting: “? A thorn-hedge.” Note the question mark before the definition, which indicates that the context of usage makes the word difficult to define—“a thorn-hedge . . . maybe?”

What makes this case even more interesting, however, is that the OED cites only two occurrences of the word, both from the same text, dating from the late fourteenth century: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. “As he sprent ouer a spenne, to spye þe schrewe.” (Line 1896: "He jumps over a hedge to flush the prey," my translation; the "he" here is Bertilak, who turns out to be the Green Knight, magically disguised. He is hunting a fox.) Why is this interesting? Well, guess who co-edited what became the standard edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? JRRT, of course. In the glossary to Tolkien's edition, the word is defined as "fence, hedge.”1

The Green Knight is a figure who stimulates the same sorts of categorical questions that we ask of Tom Bombadil. What is he? Does he represent something? If so, then what? What does he have to do with the strange ecology that he occupies? Whether it was a conscious choice or not, it does not seem to be a coincidence that as the hobbits approach the environs of Tom Bombadil, the Old Forest, Tolkien turns to the lexicon of the Green Knight’s world.

The greenness of the Green Knight has led to various allegorical readings: he represents the wilderness or Nature (with a capital N); or he is a devil—usually green (not red) in medieval texts. But he tends to defy such efforts to categorize him neatly. He is too complicated and strange a figure for any easy allegorical reading. He seems to be a manifestation of something rather than a representation. As Tom Shippey writes of Tom Bombadil: "he seems in fact to be a lusus naturae, a one-member category" (The Road to Middle-Earth, 105).

Indeed, this seems to be Tom's own explanation of himself. Frodo asks him: "Who are you, Master?"

"Eh, what?" said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. "Don't you know my name yet? That's the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that's what I am. . . ." (131)

We are our names, Tom seems to suggest, defined only in relation to our ecology. By ourselves, without the context of the world, we are nothing, but in the world we are each singular beings. We have no need for names except to differentiate ourselves from others and to contextualize our existence within an environment.

In addition to reflecting the Green Knight's singularity, Tom's explanation recalls another strange figure from legend: Väinämöinen from the Finnish Kalevala, a text that Tolkien knew and loved, and which served as a philological inspiration for his elvish languages. Väinämöinen is also ancient, and like Tom, his power derives from his song. Indeed, in the Kalevala, to sing is often used as a transitive verb. In a singing contest with an upstart named Joukahainen, "He sang young Joukahainen / sang him still deeper" (33). (Quotations from the Kalevala are from the Oxford World Classics edition, translated by Keith Bosley.) Later, he manipulates the wind with his song:

Then old Väinämöinen
sings under his breath--
sang the wind into a whirl
worked the air into a rage (109)

Tom's power also comes from singing, as we see in the episode with Old Man Willow, and then later with the Barrow-Wight (which we will discuss next week, time and space permitting), it is his song that carries the day. Indeed, he seems to be singing even when he is merely speaking, since his dialogue scans almost like verse. The hobbits notice this tendency as well: "The guests became suddenly aware that they were singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking" (125).

In Tolkien’s larger mythology, music and song are central to the creative force of the universe. The published version of The Silmarillion begins with the Ainulindalë, “The Music of the Ainur”:

Then Ilúvatar said to them: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.” (15)

And the creation of the world follows, with proper nouns echoing the Kalevala’s Finnish influence in their piling up of vowels and diacritical marks. We are left with a sense that the music is not a representation but a manifestation of the creative force, which brings us back to Tolkien’s feelings on allegory. Tom is Tom; his song is his song. They are not metaphors for some ecological spirit; rather, they are the ecology itself. Not an allegory of the wild, but, rather, manifested wildness.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet old willow tree to yours.

In the third chapter of Book One of The Fellowship of the Ring, “Three Is Company,” there is a narrative moment that would not have been out of place in The Hobbit, or even in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. On the first night of their journey, Frodo and his companions, Sam and Pippin, sleep out of doors, setting no watch, within just a few miles of home in Hobbiton:

A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.

“Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer about this.” He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it. (72)

This feels like an excerpt from a children’s story, and in a sense, it is exactly that, even though LOTR as a whole is not a children’s story. What the book is, however, is a concatenation of various narrative modes and styles, and the style of any given narrative moment depends upon its environment, both natural and characterological. In this case, there are only hobbits present, along with the thoughtful fox, and we are well within the boundaries of the Shire, and so the narrative voice and prose style require something quite different from what we might find, say, among the elves in Rivendell or the men of Rohan.

While Tolkien often receives critical praise for his fantastical imagination, his philological dexterity, and his world building, his ability as a prose stylist is sometimes overlooked. This is, however, where he usually succeeds where most of his imitators fail miserably: he very carefully adjusts his prose style, and even his generic conventions and assumptions, according to the narrative circumstances.

This goes beyond dialogue. Of course, hobbits speak differently from elves or dwarves. (Perhaps most interesting in terms of their characteristic dialogue are orcs, but we will save that for another piece.) The voice of the narrator changes as well. Here, it is close to the cheerful travelling companion that we find in The Hobbit, imagining a fox “on business of his own,” who wonders about these hobbits.

Compare this passage from just a few chapters later, chosen almost at random, as the hobbits, now joined by Merry, make their way through the Old Forest:

Strange furtive noises ran among the bushes and reeds on either side of them; and if they looked up to the pale sky, they caught sight of queer gnarled and knobbly faces that gloomed dark against the twilight, and leered down at them from the high bank and the edges of the wood. They began to feel that all this country was unreal, and that they were stumbling through an ominous dream that led to no awakening. (121)

While our company is still composed exclusively of hobbits, we are now beyond the borders of the Shire, into strange territory, where the flora and fauna are less comprehensible, less domesticated, and any talking (or coherently thinking) foxes would be utterly out of place. The tone is much darker, more unsettling, less jovial. Later on, at various narrative points, the narrative voice will sound like an historian, or a nature writer, or an epic poet, or an antiquarian in turn, depending on the moment.

This flexibility of voice and tone is the single most important factor in the continued success of the book over the past seven decades. It’s all about Tolkien’s prose style.

Yes, that’s right. I’ll stand by that claim. I don’t mean to suggest that plot and character and world-building are not important. Of course, all of these elements are vital. But without this mastery of style and tone, they would all go for naught. This is a point that many early critics of the book failed to recognize, and Tolkien clapped back to them in the Foreword to the Second Edition.

The Foreword is a remarkable document: it is Tolkien’s complicated response to LOTR’s critical reception, both positive and negative. It includes his famous remarks about his dislike of allegory; it recounts briefly how the book came into being; and it gives a sense of Tolkien’s literary preferences. Most entertaining is his considerable snark:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. (xxiii)

The amusing implication that some of those who have reviewed the book have not read it indicates his parallel lack of interest in reading the books lauded by such critics. (Oscar Wilde suggested that it was no more necessary to read the entirety of a bad book in order to review it than it would be to drink an entire cask of wine in order to decide whether or not it is good.) His choice of critical adjectives, however, is interesting: “boring” (presumably too long, filled with too much information unnecessary to the plot), “absurd” (presumably referring to its fantastical, “unrealistic” nature), and “contemptible” (probably a matter of style).

These assessments are related: those who think that the content is absurd would also think it boring to spend so much time with it, and would likely consider an appropriate literary style for such content hopelessly unfashionable. In a letter from September 1955 to a critic who had complained about his archaic style, Tolkien demonstrates the absurdity of having a character like Theoden, for example, speak as if he were a modern person, sounding like Bertie Wooster while chatting with Gandalf: “Not at all my dear G.”

In my estimation, however, Tolkien’s ear for the appropriate style at the each point in his narrative is close to flawless, and the critical darlings of the time (Salinger? Nabokov? Golding? Hemingway?) would have been utterly incapable of the sort of prose necessary for such a book. (Well, perhaps Nabokov could have pulled it off, but it would have come across as brilliantly ironic.)

To show what I mean, let’s look at three consecutive chapters (or, rather, the Prologue and the first two chapters), which are all stylistically quite different from each other and yet all work perfectly in context:

Prologue

The subtitle to the first part of the Prologue is an immediate stylistic marker: “Concerning Hobbits.” This places the text in the stylistic mode of a certain strain of nineteenth-century English antiquarianism, which traced folk traditions, place names, and oddities of certain English regions or counties—a sort of local philological or scholarly pursuit: “Concerning Traditional Bee-Keeping Techniques in Kent and How They Differ from Those of Surrey,” or “Concerning Aphorisms in the North Yorkshire Dialect,” or “Concerning River Names in the Northwest Midlands, with Special Emphasis on Welsh Influence.” (FYI: I made up these examples—laziness!)

The Prologue lets readers know right away that they are not about to begin a modern novel, or at least not what they would have previously recognized as one. Indeed, it seems more like a travel guide to a nonexistent place, or a sort of pre-social-science anthropological description of an imaginary society, complete with footnotes, citations, and references to “authorities.” It is strange and amusing, and one can’t quite tell how seriously the author is taking it, but it is clear that he is having fun and is totally committed to this world that he is making. And this world is decidedly not the pseudo-medieval one that we might expect from an Oxford medievalist, but rather something much closer to a pre-industrial, idealized, agrarian English society, combined with certain bourgeois touches (waistcoats, collectible silver spoons, a post office, tea—a drink unheard of in England before the late seventeenth century).

Tolkien’s comfort with this sort of material is clear, because hobbit tastes are largely in accord with his own, and so we can read his survey of the Shire as a kind of gentle self-satire. In a letter to a reader from October 1958, he writes:

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.

In the course of the Prologue, we discover that these preferences and tendencies generally align with typical hobbit behavior. We find out about hobbit social customs, their history, their language, their use of “pipe-weed,” and their previous adventures, in particular the adventures of Bilbo Baggins originally recounted in The Hobbit.

Chapter One: “A Long-Expected Party”

And it is Bilbo to whom we turn our attention in the first chapter, as the narrative voice and the tone shifts to a variation of that of The Hobbit, a shift signaled by the title of the chapter, which is an obvious reference to the first chapter of the earlier book, “An Unexpected Party.” Characteristic of this style are comic asides regarding hobbits’ appetites, their provincialism, and their tendency to gossip, as Bilbo appears as the eccentric country gentleman, beloved (and resented) for his generosity, but treated warily for his somewhat “foreign” tendencies, brought about by his fabled travels to the east, as well as his purported association with elves, dwarves, and wizards.

It is not, however, precisely the style of The Hobbit, for there is one significant difference: as Tom Shippey has pointed out, there are a lot more names—names of towns, surnames, names of regions, inns, rivers, bridges, etc., etc. The Prologue has prepared us for this, with its encyclopedic exposition of the Shire and its inhabitants. The effect of this is to bring the reader, despite the friendly narrative voice, into a wider, deeper, more complex world—beyond the comfortable bedtime story of the earlier book, into a world with fully developed history, geography, and languages. That wider world is clearly in contrast to the hobbits’ xenophobia. As the Gaffer tells his fellow patrons of The Ivy Bush, regarding his son Sam’s interest in what lies beyond the boundaries of the Shire:

“Elves and dragons! I says to him. Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you, I says to him. And I might say it to others” . . . (24)

It is also clear that it is this wider world that will shape the coming narrative, however comfortable we may find ourselves in the friendly confines of Bag End.1

Chapter Two: “The Shadow of the Past”

And it is within Bag End itself that we feel our next stylistic shift, not so much in the third-person narrative voice, but rather in the narrative voice of Gandalf, who becomes the book’s most important story-teller among many. For indeed, the book becomes a narrative of interwoven story-tellers, in which we often pause in the middle of the present action in order to recount the past, both recent and ancient. The style here becomes somber and sober, not antiquated but dignified:

But the Ring was lost. It fell into the Great River, Anduin, and vanished. For Isildur was marching north along the east banks of the River, and near the Gladden Fields he was waylaid by Orcs of the Mountains, and almost all his folk were slain. He leaped into the waters, but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and then the Orcs saw him and killed with arrows.

In its diction, its syntax, and its sentence structure, the style has shifted. Note the paratactic movement from clause to clause and the introduction of unfamiliar proper nouns. Our story has moved far from the Shire both in style and content, even though we are still by the fire at Bag End. He pulls us from the narrative universe of The Hobbit to something new and vaster—and he does this with the narrative material of The Hobbit as well as with the style.

Tolkien has Gandalf reach back into the narrative of the earlier book in order to pull out Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum and shape it into something more significant and ominous. Again, this has been anticipated in the Prologue, in the section entitled “Of the Finding of the Ring.” Here, the third-person narrator tells us that “it is a curious fact this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions” (12).

The reader who goes back to peruse the first edition of The Hobbit will be surprised to find a different version of Chapter 5 to the one that has become familiar since the 1950s. (This variant is available in the appendix to The Annotated Hobbit.) Such is the length to which Tolkien has gone to incorporate this episode into LOTR that he has revised the chapter in order to make the encounter with Gollum more threatening and ominous. In the original version, Gollum shows Bilbo the way out of the maze-like system of caves, having agreed to Bilbo’s request and made his promise, and they say goodbye upon parting.

Tolkien explains the existence of the two different versions through the inconsistency of Bilbo’s story. An unreliable narrator has produced two iterations of the tale, one true and one altered, and both have found their way into variants of the “Red Book,” aka The Hobbit, Bilbo’s memoir. We have incorporated the children’s book into the larger narrative and accounted for narrative inconsistencies with graceful shifts in style and tone.

The brilliance of this incorporation of the two versions of the earlier narrative into “The Shadow of the Past” allows Tolkien a remarkable flexibility for the remainder of Book One—as we have moments of darkness, punctuated by amusing banter and silliness (the insufferable Sackville-Bagginses, the bath song, Tom Bombadil, Frodo’s song later in the Prancing Pony, the hobbit mushroom fetish, etc.). This incorporation also anticipates the incursion of darkness into the Shire itself: Gandalf introduces it in the comfort of Bag End, and in the narrative that follows, the ratio of dark to light shifts gradually.

Conclusions

While I love the whole book, I have always treasured the pastoral silliness of the early parts of Book One, which I find relaxing to read, almost therapeutic. (I realize that some readers disagree with this assessment and think that the book doesn’t really start until we meet Strider, or even later.) Things get much darker later on, of course, but when I begin the book, I know that I have a few chapters, at least through the Bombadil episode, when I can simply enjoy myself and not worry too much. In writing today’s piece, I set out to define and isolate what it is that allows Tolkien to create this effect so beautifully.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet magic ring to yours.

The Dragon and the treasure

In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien, then a young Oxford philologist rather than a household name, published a lecture that he had delivered to the British Academy entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In this lecture, Tolkien challenged what was at the time the conventional wisdom on the poem, at least in critical terms, which claimed that the poem was interesting primarily because of the limited information that it provided around the dynastic narratives and early northern European history. The poem’s “radical defect,” according to such critics, was “a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges.” Such was the judgment of W. P. Ker in his tremendously influential book, The Dark Ages. By “irrelevances,” he meant, essentially, the monsters. The other great scholars of the previous generation, R. W. Chambers and Ritchie Girvan, whom Tolkien also cites, concurred with this assessment.

Tolkien was friends with these people, and he was their junior colleague. (A few years ago, when I was delving in the R. W. Chambers archive at University College London, I came across a letter from Tolkien in his unmistakable, spidery hand—not a momentous letter, since it was largely a complaint about the weather and the state of his garden.) But, despite these friendly relations, in this essay he utterly deconstructs and reverses their critical conclusions.

The monsters, for Tolkien, were not “irrelevances.” On the contrary, they form the literary, cultural, and psychological bases of the poem. For both the Christian poet and his pagan ancestors, the monsters were profoundly important, a source of real, existential terror: “The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host.” And though the Christian revelation had altered this perspective, “a Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God.”

While the poet associates Grendel with the kin of Cain, the dragon’s origins are more mysterious—and more alien. Grendel and his mother are humanoid, but the dragon is of another order entirely, a creature of primal terror, a self-guided weapon of mass destruction, borne out of the dark places in the earth and inextricably linked to the precious treasure that the earth yields.

The awakening of the dragon may feel familiar to first-time readers who know Tolkien’s The Hobbit, in which the bourgeois “burglar,” Bilbo Baggins, awakens and angers Smaug the dragon, as he absconds with a precious object. This, of course, is not a coincidence. Our unnamed burglar in the poem must, I think, have been a hobbit.1

The burglar resonates, for the poet, with the nameless “last survivor” of an extinct people, who in the distant past consigned this treasure to the earth. In a startling imaginative leap, our poet reanimates this anonymous ancient voice in one of the most haunting passages in the poem, in which he remembers everything that has departed from this world:

. . . No trembling hawk
swerving through the hall, no swift horse
pawing the courtyard. Pillage and slaughter
have emptied the earth of entire peoples. (Lines 2262-2265)

The survivor’s final action is to bury the treasure where it lies undisturbed until “an old harrower of the dark / happened to find the hoard open” (lines 2270-2271).

Like Tolkien’s Smaug, the poem’s dragon simply guards the treasure for three hundred years. For what purpose? It doesn’t matter: for the dragon, the dragon is the treasure and the treasure is the dragon.

And here is the great paradox of treasure in the poem: in order for it to serve culture, it must not be hoarded. It must circulate; it must be given and received, but with this circulation comes inevitable violence. The great peace-keepers of the poem—Hrothgar, Beowulf—are great ring-givers, distributors of treasure. But the accumulation of treasure attracts and perpetuates slaughter. Seen simplistically, the dragon could be viewed allegorically in this context, as Tolkien writes, “the conception [. . .] approaches draconitas rather than draco: a personification of malice, greed, destruction (the evil side of heroic life), and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life).”

Like the two fateful urns of Zeus that Achilles describes in the final book of the Iliad, the dragon, in this sense, is doom—is wyrd—in all its terrifying capriciousness. The dragon provides the limit of the efficacy of heroic action. Beyond the dragon is death, the void.

It is in this context that the poet regards the treasure, as the Geats reinter it, “as useless to men now as it ever was” (“eldum swa unnyt swa hit æror wæs,” line 3168). It lies buried, ready to be rediscovered by another tribe—or by another dragon, who may set the earth alight to defend its uselessness. We do not know what the future may hold.

Wiglaf and the future

Something that very few critics remark upon is that it is, indirectly, Beowulf’s generosity that defeats the dragon. As Wiglaf witnesses his king’s desperate fight, he is moved by the memory of his gifts, and by the reciprocal oath that he has made. Though Beowulf dies, it is Wiglaf’s selfless action, despite his king’s command not to join the fight, that gives him the chance to bring the dragon down with him.

What are the implications of this narrative turn? Most obviously, it indicates that Beowulf cannot defeat the dragon alone, that heroic action and indomitable will can carry him only so far. More subtly, however, I think that it recalls Beowulf’s speech about the sorrow of Hrethel, which we discussed in the last installment. That speech suggests that despair in response to a future that appears bleak is a mistake—because we do not know the future. Hrethel saw no hope for his people after the death of his eldest son, but he did not foresee the meteoric rise of Beowulf. The remainder of the poem after Beowulf’s death once again suggests that the future looks bleak, but we do not know the future.

Will Wiglaf rise and protect the Geats from the Swedes and future monsters? We do not know the answer, because it does not fall within the remit of our poem. He might do so, despite the despair of the Geats at this moment. The messenger who bears the news of Beowulf’s death invokes the “beasts of battle” trope, common in Old English and Old Icelandic poetry, which foretells coming slaughter:

[. . .] the swept harp
won’t waken warriors, but the raven winging
darkly over the doomed will have news,
tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,
how the wolf and he made quick work of the dead. (Lines 3024-3027)

The Swedes will come: this we know. The unnamed Geat woman, like Hildeburh in the Finnsburg episode, can only mourn as the flame consumes the body of her beloved lord, and as she imagines the inevitable war to come:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke. (Lines 3150-3155)

These lines resonate all too clearly into our own century, with our planet torn apart by war and greed, by wholesale destruction of our ecology, as the innocent suffer and die. Treasure, then as now, allows our culture to flourish even as it carries the seeds of its destruction. The dragon is always looming. So what hope is there?

“Manna mildust”

The answer may lie in the last three lines of the poem, wherein we may find some hope. This is not to suggest that the poem is optimistic—far from it—but at the same time it does not close the door on the future. These lines convey the Geats’ assessment of Beowulf’s greatness, and they do so with four superlatives:

They said that of all the kings upon earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame. (lines 3180-3182)

Note that they don’t call him the strongest or the most powerful. The first superlative is perhaps the most surprising: “manna mildust,” literally “the mildest of men.” Next is “mon-ðwærust,” which is “the gentlest.” He is “leodum liðost,” or “the kindest to his people.”

These first three descriptors would not be out of place in an assessment of a good Christian, which may reflect the poet’s values. However, it is once again worth remembering Beowulf’s fifty years of peaceful rule also as reflective of these values, as well as the generosity to which Wiglaf attests. But in any case, it may be a surprising place for this poem of slaughter and monster-killing to land—at least if we haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The final superlative, however, would seem out of place in a Christian poem of praise: “lofgeornost.” Heaney translates this as “keenest to win fame.” The word is a compound: lof, which becomes Modern English love, is praise or glory: georn is the verb that will become yearn; and ost is the superlative suffix. So, he is the one who “yearns most for glory.” This sounds like the Christian sin of pride.

But this, I think, would be an anachronistic assessment, if not for the poet, then for Beowulf himself. Remember his words to Hrothgar regarding mortality: we all must die, and so “let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, / that will be his best and only bulwark” (lines 1387-1389). When we consider this perspective, then we can perhaps translate lofgeornost as something like “the one who most desires to perform great deeds.”

And herein lies the hope, both for the poem and for us: in the human ambition to do good things aligned with the qualities of mildness, gentleness, and kindness. It is radical empathy and compassion in conjunction with the desire to leave the world a better place than we found it.

The poem does not predict, but it does prescribe.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

“A revenant quality to his resoluteness”

Last week, we ended with four translations of the passage that describes Beowulf’s state of mind as ponders the dragon hoard, immediately before the speech that recounts his youth and King Hrethel’s sorrow over the death of his eldest son. It is a crucial moment, and the four renderings show us what a difficult process it is to translate this poem, as each decision affects how we understand the end of this notoriously ambiguous narrative. (See last week’s piece for the four translations in full.) Here is the Old English:

Gesæt ða on næsse niðheard cyning;
þenden hælo abead heorðgeneatum,
goldwine Geata. Him wæs geomor sefa,
wæfre ond wælfus, wyrd ungemete neah,
se ðone gomelan gretan sceolde,
secean sawle hord, sundur gedælan
lif wið lice; no þon lange wæs
feorh æþelingas flæsce bewunden. (Lines 2417-2424)

There is a lot to say about every line here, but we will focus on the key differences between our translations. In Seamus Heaney’s essay about the poem, he suggests that in this moment as the poem moves toward its conclusion there is “a revenant quality to [Beowulf’s] resoluteness.” His translation reflects this reading. Compare his version of lines 2419b-2420a to Kevin Crossley-Holland’s, whose rendering is “His mind was most mournful, / angry, eager for slaughter.” Heaney gives us: “He was sad at heart, / unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.”

Either of these is a legitimate choice, considering the problematic OE diction here. Wæfre occurs only three times in the entire preserved corpus of the language. We find it twice in this poem. The first instance occurs in the context of Hrothgar’s description of Grendel’s mother: she is a “wælgæst wæfre” (line 1331), which Heaney translates as “roaming killer.” (I translate it as “restless death-ghost,” because I think it sounds cool.) The other instance is the poem Daniel, which tells the Old Testament story and uses the word to describe the flickering nature of the flames in the furnace. So it could mean “angry” or “restless” or “agitated” or “unsettled.” Wælfus is a compound, which occurs only here. Wæl can mean “battle” or “slaughter” or “death.” Fus can mean “ready” or “anxious for” or “waiting for.”

You see the problem. Our understanding of these individual words makes a big difference here. A Beowulf is who is “angry and eager for slaughter” at this moment is quite different from a Beowulf who is “restless and ready for death” (my translation). For me, the previous half-line favors the latter interpretation: “him wæs geomor sefa.” This clause appears earlier in the poem, in the context of Shield’s funeral (line 49), and so this would seem to support a reading that posits Beowulf’s foreknowledge of death.

Also at issue is the proximity of fate, or wyrd, which all of our translators agree is very close. What they do not agree on, however, is whether or not Beowulf knows that it is there, hovering over him. The text in question is the OE clause: “wyrd ungemete neah, / se ðone gomelan gretan sceolde.” Here, Roy Liuzza translates most literally: “the doom was immeasurably near / that was coming to meet that old man.” And Heaney makes the boldest interpretive choice; he actually moves “fate” or wyrd to the following line to make room to expand “wæfre ond wælfus” in a way that will include the added connotation “sensing his death.” His next line then becomes: “His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.” Here, then, is Beowulf’s revenant quality, and while this is the least literal of the four translations, to me it best captures the mood of the poem at this point, especially considering the dark speech that is to follow this passage. Beowulf is already marked: this is his death-day, and he knows it.

Finally there is the gorgeous final clause of the passage, in which the Old English to me sounds like the beginning of a dirge: “no þon lange wæs / feorh æþelingas flæsce bewunden.” This is difficult to render word-for-word, because the syntax is a bit scrambled to a modern English speaker. Roughly, it would be something like: “not then for long was / the spirit of the prince to be in flesh wound up.” Here, once again, our Nobel laureate provides the most inspired translation. He reverses bewunden, taking that which is “wound up” and unwinding it, choosing his words to convey a dazzling alliterative effect: “Before long / the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.” As Tolkien wrote of the original, “there is not much poetry in the world like this.” And the same is true for the speech that follows.

Hrethel’s sorrow

Beowulf’s speeches in the Danish part of the poem, while acknowledging mortality and the possibility of defeat, are rousing, uplifting: let’s give it the old college try. The speech before the dragon fight is of another order entirely. It begins with an account of Hrethel, his foster father and king of the Geats, who raised him as an equal to his princely sons, one of whom (Heathcyn) killed the eldest (Herebeald). It is unclear whether or not the killing was intentional, since Beowulf says simply that he “shot wide.” Was this a hunting accident? A case of friendly fire? Or was it an assassination? We do not know. It echoes the fratricidal actions of Cain recounted at the beginning of the poem and, once again, seems to acknowledge the monstrousness that humanity contains.

Hrethel is disconsolate, and Beowulf compares his sorrow to

. . . the misery endured by an old man
who has lived to see his son’s body
swing on the gallows. He begins to keen
and weep for his boy, watching the raven
gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.
The wisdom of old age is worthless to him. (Lines 2444-2449)

Like Hildeburh after the deaths of her son and brother, Hrethel sees no recourse: he cannot take revenge or demand recompense (wergild), because this is his own family. Instead, he falls into despair and dies—“chose God’s light” (godes leoht geceas, line 2479). Some scholars have considered this particular turn of phrase to be a problematic anachronism. After all, a pagan king cannot “choose God’s light.” I think that this is a misreading, and that this is a euphemism for death (think of “bought the farm”), which looks both backwards to a pagan sensibility and forward to a Christian one. My evidence for this reading comes from an analogous moment Egil’s Saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandic text that preserves poetry from a much earlier period (though how much earlier is a matter of debate). The title character, Egil, composes a poem about the death of his sons, and he describes his bereft state after the drowning of his eldest in a shipwreck (translated here by Bernard Scudder):

The sea has robbed
me of much,
my kinsmen’s deaths
are harsh to tell,
after the shield
of my family
retreated down
the god’s joyful road.

The “god” here is clearly not the Christian God, but, rather, Odin—though the stanza may remind the thirteenth-century reader of the saga of Christian heavenly rewards. It is a poetic way in which Egil chooses to signify death. As is the case for Hrethel, it is a death without the possibility of revenge or of recompense: one cannot expect payment from the sea. It is one of those points at which, as Tolkien wrote of Beowulf, “new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited.”1

But the question remains: what is this speech doing here, at this point in the poem when Beowulf should be giving a rousing speech to excite himself for the battle, to come to that moment of “berserker rage” that will enable him to challenge the monstrous enemy? Instead, we get this gloomy, depressing bit of family history.

But the speech isn’t over yet. After Hrethel’s demise, war breaks out with the Swedes, who are always waiting for the Geats to show the smallest sign of weakness. Heathcyn dies in battle, and then Hygelac, who inherits the throne, avenges his brother and, with the help of a certain Eofor, kills the Swedish king. After this, Beowulf emerges and becomes Hygelac’s champion, defeating another great enemy, Dayraven the Frank, with his customary battle-rage: “my bare hands stilled his heartbeats / and wrecked the bone-house” (2507-2508).

While the speech remains ambiguous, my reading is this: Hrethel, the foster-father whom Beowulf dearly loves, falls into despair after the death of Herebeald. Despair, according to medieval thought, is a sin, because it assumes a knowledge of providence: if you are in despair, you believe that you know, beyond doubt, what the future holds. Hrethel falls into despair because he believes that the Geats are doomed after the death of his finest son, but it turns out that he is wrong. He does not foresee the rise of Hygelac and of Beowulf, who will protect his people for fifty years. Beowulf, in this moment, while he sees his death coming, refuses to succumb to despair, because he does not know the future. He is granted foresight of his own death but not of the fate of the Geats. His people may be doomed, but they may not be. Wyrd has not necessarily already marked them, despite the forebodings that dominate the poem’s denouement.

There is, after all, a young man named Wiglaf.

Indomitable will or inescapable destiny

Some readers tend to reduce the conclusion of the poem to what I think is a reductive ethical question: is it right for Beowulf to face the dragon alone? And a corollary question: is Beowulf motivated to challenge the dragon by his desire for treasure?

Such questions may be worth asking, but they also underestimate the extent to which wyrd is looming over the poem at this point. Wiglaf’s speech after Beowulf’s death seems to admonish the hero’s decision: “Often when one man follows his own will / many are hurt. This happened to us” (lines 3077-3078). However, he also acknowledges its inevitability: “He held to his high destiny” (line 3084).

According to the poem’s own ontology, if fate has marked Beowulf to die on this day, then nothing can change this. While Beowulf himself has suggested that one’s actions in the world define one’s character and reputation, he also has claimed that courage and indomitable will can help a man only if his fate is not “already marked” (573). As Linda Georgianna has argued in an influential article, there are limits to the efficacy of heroic action in the poem, despite its heroic code.2

Concerning the treasure’s appeal, the narrative voice states the case quite clearly: despite the cursed nature of the hoard, Beowulf meant well: “Yet Beowulf’s gaze at the gold treasure / when he first saw it had not been selfish” (lines 3074-3075). If we recall the king’s role as a provider for his people, then his desire for treasure despite foreknowledge of his death makes more sense. He tells Wiglaf that it comforts him to leave his people “so well endowed on the day I die” (line 2798).

And yet, after Beowulf’s death, the Geats “let the ground keep” the treasure, “as useless to men now as it ever was” (lines 3166, 3168).

So, with all of this ambiguity, where are we left on the questions of Beowulf’s action and the nature of the treasure? Where does the poem leave us?

For that, we will have to address the elephant in the room, or, rather, the dragon in the room.

Next time: the dragon, the funeral, and the future.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

The hall falls silent as the scop finishes his poem and puts down his small harp.

Pause. One beat. Two.

And then . . . a slow . . . clap. The tension lifts as others join in.

This is how I always imagine that moment in Beowulf when the poet has made the strange choice to celebrate the hero’s victory over Grendel by delivering a grim story of revenge, female suffering, and slaughter, complete with a funeral—the burning of the corpses described in disturbing detail:

This is the Finnsburg episode. It is one of those moments, as Seamus Heaney remarks, when it feels like we have been “channel-surfed” into another poem. The first selection on the hall-poet’s playlist had been more appropriate: the tale of Sigemund, dragon-killer, contrasted against the wicked Heremod, who in turn is contrasted against the beloved Beowulf, another slayer of monsters. After all, we are celebrating a man who has brought Heorot out of the darkness—for a moment, at least.

So why is this here—this tragic, obscure narrative of Finn, Hnaef, Hengest, and—above all—Hildeburh? There is a convenient reconstruction of events in this sequence by Daniel Donoghue in the back of the Norton Critical Edition, which may serve as a guide for the perplexed. It seems that this was a well-known story to the poem’s original audience, since the poet does not find it necessary to explain everything. Another extant fragment of a poem, a single manuscript page, tells an earlier part of the story, as Hnaef speaks to inspire his men as they join the fight that will take his life. This other poem serves as evidence that this was a more widely known story.

It all seems like a holiday visit gone very, very wrong. Hnaef and the Danes have come to Frisia, apparently to visit Hildeburh, his sister, who is married to the Frisian king Finn. For unknown reasons, some Jutes are there (another tribe from what is now modern Denmark), and they attack the Danes. In the skirmish, both Hnaef and Hildeburh’s son are killed. In the aftermath, Finn tries to patch things up and makes a truce, as a funeral pyre is prepared for the dead of both sides.

But then winter sets in.

This means that travel back home, over the sea, is not possible, and the Danes are stuck there, as resentment festers and desire for revenge grows. In the end, when spring comes, the Danes, led by Hengest, attack and kill Finn, pillage the hall, and take Hildeburh back to her childhood home.

It’s bleak.

Now, on the one hand, this was an eventual Danish victory, and so one could argue that this is the reason the poet chooses the story for a celebration. But on the other hand, if this were meant as a pep talk for the Danes, then why begin with and focus on Hildeburh’s sorrow and describe the funeral in such an excruciating manner?

In any case, it seems to go over well, since “a pleasant murmur / started on the benches” after the poet finishes (lines 1159-1160). That’s when I imagine the slow clap.

I propose that there is something more significant going on here than a simple celebration of Danish victories. Once again, our poet is working through juxtaposition, or apposition (narrative rather than grammatical), as he leaves the interpretive work to the reader.

Let’s contextualize the moment. After the song of Sigemund, Hrothgar speaks eloquently about Beowulf’s victory and adopts the Geat “as a dear son” (line 946). The feast begins, and the poet delivers his narrative of Hildeburh. But then, notice who appears next, the first person named after the hall-poet’s conclusion:

. . . and Wealhtheow came to sit
in her gold crown between two good men,
uncle and nephew, each one of whom
still trusted the other . . . (lines 1161-1164)

Note Heaney’s choice of “still,” which implies that this will not be the case forever. The “two good men” are Hrothgar and Hrothulf, his nephew, and we already know that family strife will bring down the hall. Wealhtheow speaks and expresses surprise that Hrothgar has adopted Beowulf as a son. Like Hildeburh, she is a queen who is protective of her sons and can envision their vulnerability in this dangerous world of the blood feud. She reminds Hrothgar that he already has two sons—as Beowulf sits on the bench between them. In this moment, the Geat’s position could be construed as either threatening or supportive. The queen may think that Beowulf “has their back” or, conversely, that he is positioning himself to take their place. (I always like to imagine Beowulf with an arm around the shoulder of each of the brothers.)

Of course, we know that Beowulf is not interested in taking over; after Hygelac dies, he refuses the kingship of the Geats, even though Hygd, Hygelac’s widow, entreats him to accept it. No, the threat will come from someone closer—like the connection between Finn and Hnaef. Will we, once more, be left with a Danish queen in mourning and with no agency to do anything but mourn? It seems likely.

In the Finn episode, the poet is showing us a cycle of violence that appears inescapable. While Beowulf can eradicate these nightmarish monsters, he cannot do anything about the ways in which humans can be monstrous to each other. He serves as a counter-example to such internecine strife: when given the opportunity to hold a grudge, in the case of Unferth’s insults, for example, he does not give in to the temptation to violence. On the contrary, he befriends Unferth and exchanges swords with him. This is why, at the end of the poem, the Geats call him “manna mildust,” the mildest of men.

But, unfortunately, as the examples of Heremod, Hengest, Onela, and Hrothulf show us, this mildness is not the norm in this hypermasculine world, in which men always carry weapons and are quick to take offense. It will not be a monster that brings down Heorot or that will pillage the land of the Geats. It will be people who do the damage.

Grendel’s Mother and Beowulf’s Philosophy

Wealhtheow is not the only female figure that the poem places in juxtaposition to Hildeburh. That very night, Grendel’s mother, another mourning “woman,” attacks. It is a different kind of attack, however, from what we are used to with her monstrous son. It is targeted and deliberate rather than chaotic and ravenous. She kills Aeshere, Hrothgar’s right-hand man. It is a killing that actually follows the law of the blood feud—a “proportionate response.”

Because of her monstrousness, however, and her gender, the rules of this homosocial society do not apply to her. We have seen the lack of agency for other women whose children are killed. This is the poem’s one example of a female figure who attempts to participate in this masculine system as an equal player. She pays the price. (We will, by the way, witness one more response to the killing of a son next week—this one from a father.)

It is the agency of revenge that Beowulf himself invokes in response to Hrothgar’s despair upon the death of Aeshere:

Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark. (Lines 1384-1389)

Beowulf not only gives us his ethos as a “man of action” here, but also his ontology and ethics. He does not look to a heaven or a life after this one. We all have a time limit imposed by fate. We are nothing more than the sum of our actions in this world. If this sounds to you like Sartre or Beauvoir, then I think you’re on the right track. Beowulf is an existentialist. He even has the angst and the nausea—or at least he will before the end.

The fight against Grendel’s mother is also different from Beowulf’s encounter with her son: it takes place in the enemy’s lair; he wears armor; he uses a weapon. These differences seem to match the specifics of the monster in this case: like her, he is deliberate and careful rather than wild and instinctive. There is no “berserker rage” in this case.

He is also, apparently, more hard-pressed, saved at one point by only his armor from the monster’s knife, and briefly at a loss when the famous sword lent to him by Unferth does not bite. It is at this point when modern readers, who are used to the conventions of literary realism, are amused to find that there just happens to be a sword there in Grendel’s mother’s lair, which is the only weapon that may harm her and which only Beowulf is strong enough to wield. This seems like a cartoon moment—Bugs Bunny pulling a giant mallet from behind his back to smack Elmer Fudd. It just happens to be there.

It is important, however, to understand that the original audience would not have viewed it this way. They were not familiar with the novels of Henry James and would have had no such qualms about extraordinary coincidence in a narrative. In a classic article, Morton Bloomfield explains this moment as an invocation of judicium Dei, the judgment of God.1 Indeed, the poet tells us as much: “holy God / decided the victory” (lines 1553-1554).

This is an episode in which, as Tolkien described it, the pagan and Christian influences “touched and ignited.” What seems to Beowulf like a manifestation of the power of wyrd—fate—is, to the poet, the intervention of a divine hand. For the original audience, both of these world-views are present simultaneously.

Departure and Arrival

The celebration after Beowulf’s second victory is, understandably, more subdued than the previous feast. Hrothgar delivers what some critics have called his “sermon,” in which he praises Beowulf for his strength and goodness but also warns him about the transitory nature of life and the temptations of “overweening,” or pride. Once again, he invokes the counter-example of Heremod, whose reputation remains stained after his death because of the actions that he took during his life. He urges Beowulf to remember “eternal rewards.” This certainly sounds like a Christian admonition, but the vision of immortality here is the same as Beowulf’s: eternal rewards manifest in the poems that are sung in the hall about you after your death, in the way your people remember you, as “manna mildust” and as “lofgeornost” (more on this word next week).

Beowulf takes his leave and returns to his home and his lord. Wealhtheow need not have been concerned about his worldly ambitions.

As the poet tells us, in the fifty years that follow, “a lot was to happen” (line 2200). We hear about it, however, only in fragments, in flash-backs, memories, and regrets. Beowulf eventually becomes king of the Geats, but the poet does not immediately tell us how this happens. (We will find out a bit later.) He will keep the peace—until the dragon comes.

For next time:

I would like us to consider, for next week, how the poem leaves us. What do we take from it in the end? It is a question that is certainly open for various interpretative perspectives. With that in mind, here are four translations of the same passage, lines 2417-2424, as Beowulf contemplates his forthcoming fight with the dragon, that provide us with some different interpretive options. You will also find the Old English along with an audio clip:

Roy Liuzza:

The battle-hardened king sat down on the cape,
then wished good health to his hearth-companions,
the gold-friend of the Geats. His heart was grieving,
restless and ripe for death—the doom was immeasurably near
that was coming to meet that old man,
seek his soul's treasure, split asunder
his life and his body; not for long was
the spirit of that noble king enclosed in its flesh.

Kevin Crossley-Holland:

Then the brave king sat on the headland,
the gold-friend of the Geats wished success
to his retainers. His mind was most mournful,
angry, eager for slaughter; fate hovered
over him, so soon to fall on that old man,
to seek out his hidden spirit, to split
life and body; flesh was to confine
the soul of the king only a little longer.

My (humble) translation:

The courageous king sat on the bluff;
wished good luck to his hearth-companions,
gold-friend of the Geats. His mind was mournful,
restless and ready for death, fate was very near;
it would come to the old man in the end,
seek the treasure of his soul, break apart
the soul and body; it was not for much longer
that the life of the king would be grasped in flesh.

Seamus Heaney:

The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top.
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain:
it would soon claim his coffered soul,
part life from limb. Before long
the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.

Old English:

Gesæt ða on næsse niðheard cyning;
þenden hælo abead heorðgeneatum,
goldwine Geata. Him wæs geomor sefa,
wæfre ond wælfus, wyrd ungemete neah,
se ðone gomelan gretan sceolde,
secean sawle hord, sundur gedælan
lif wið lice; no þon lange wæs
feorh æþelingas flæsce bewunden.

How do these different translations affect how we view Beowulf at this moment? How do they differently frame the long speech that immediately follows, in which Beowulf tells the story of his youth and of King Hrethel?

Next week, we will discuss the dragon and the aftermath.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Gentle reader,

I’ll look to post an audio version of this soon, but I didn’t want to wait any longer to publish this installment. You may find my introduction to the poem here. The current installment is a revised version of an earlier piece.

Best,

John

Good kings and unnamed women

We open with a King of the Danes, Shield Sheafson, who begins life as a foundling, we are told. This tells us a couple of things: first, it disrupts any assumptions we may have about primogeniture: this is not the eldest son of a former king, as far as we know; second, the name tells us something about a king’s role. He is a “Shield” to his people—a protector. He is “son of Sheaf.” A “sheaf” is a bundle of wheat, so this suggests that a king also provides for his people.

What do we learn about this king? Well, he seems pretty terrifying, as he invades and sacks other territories and takes them under his control. Our poet’s only comment on this reputation is to tell us: “That was one good king” (line 11). Take note of that clause, because it is repeated twice more in the poem about two other kings: Hrothgar and Beowulf. We may note that these are three very different sorts of kings that warrant this description, and so one thematic through-line is an extended political meditation on what constitutes good kingship.

Almost as soon as he is introduced, we have his funeral—a so-called “ship funeral,” in which the body is sent out to sea. (It is worth noting that there are other types of ship funerals where the ship is buried—for example the famous ship burial at Sutton Hoo, the discovery of which was dramatized in the recent movie The Dig, which I highly recommend.)

We have an example here of how the poem collapses time: the arrival, rise, and death of Shield are presented to us like a series of pictures on a wall. And immediately thereafter, the generations that form his legacy appear in quick succession: Beow, Halfdane, Hrothgar and his siblings. Note that the names of all of the siblings are given, except for that of the sister, who is identified only as the wife of Onela, the Swedish king. This immediately signals something about the plight of women in the poem: married off to a hostile power, with very little agency, and apparently not worth naming. Both the first and last women who are mentioned in the poem remain unnamed—though there are some significant, named women in between.

But why marry her to a Swede? We find out in the course of the poem that the Swedes are trouble. Like Fortinbras in Hamlet (though he is Norwegian), they are ready to sweep down from the north and invade at the least sign of weakness. The Swedes are always lurking on the margins in this poem. Clearly, the marriage is for some sort of political purpose, a peace-treaty in human form, though these treaties rarely work for long, as we shall see, and the women are often left mourning the dead of both sides after violence erupts.

Hrothgar, our second “good king,” comes to power, and he builds a great hall, Heorot, and again time collapses, as we hear of the hall’s destruction at the same moment that we hear of its building.

Tip for reading: our poet will sometimes juxtapose two events or ideas without comment. He leaves the interpretive, analytical work to the reader. Our first mention of Grendel follows immediately upon the account of Heorot’s destruction, and yet Grendel is not the ultimate cause of this destruction. What do we make of this juxtaposition?

Mære Mearcstapa

A rule of thumb for this poem is that if times are good, then something bad is coming, and soon. Time collapses:

So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon,
haunting the marshes [. . .] (lines 99-103)

What Heaney translates as “haunting the marshes” (mære mearcstapa) might be more literally rendered as “marsh-stepper,” or, as Klaeber’s glossary has it, “wanderer in the waste borderland.” This is my favorite descriptive phrase for Grendel, partly because I like the sound of the Old English, but also because it indicates his status as outcast, as marginalized, as a wandering, restless spirit in the desolate places where we fear to venture.

The poet explains Grendel’s marginalized state by associating him with the biblical figure of Cain, the Bible’s first murderer, who is cast out by God for the killing of Abel, his brother. This also may be why Grendel is so intolerant of the joyful sounds of the hall and the singer’s poem of creation: this is the soundscape of civilization, of art, of culture, and he is privy to none of it.

So, the next time the grumpy old man next door complains because your music is too loud, just be thankful that he doesn’t break into your house and eat you—which is exactly what Grendel does; in fact, the poet tells us that he grabs thirty (!) men and brings them back to his lair to devour. (Later on we find out that he has a magic pouch made of dragon scales, which apparently enables him to carry all of these corpses.)

This goes on for twelve years, and we are told, curiously, that Grendel will not “pay the death-price” (OE wergild), which means that he refuses to pay recompense—a legal Old English payment to atone for murder. Well, of course he doesn’t. He is a monster, an outcast, and he follows no human law.

Humanoid monsters and monstrous humans

Tip for reading: we don’t learn Beowulf’s name for quite a while, not until line 343, or more than 10% of the way through the poem. However, Beowulf introduces himself through other means: where he comes from, who his father is, who his lord is. Also, when he addresses Hrothgar, he gives him any number of honorifics (“prince of the Bright-Danes,” “friend of the people,” “nation’s shield,” etc.). This is an Old English convention—to provide multiple descriptive titles for important people. Rather than thinking of it as repetitive or beating about the bush, consider the narrative and descriptive work that these name-substitutes accomplish. (The famous “Hymn” of the poet Caedmon, whom I discussed in the last installment, gives us nine different name-substitutes for God.)

And speaking of Beowulf’s name, where does it come from, and does it mean anything? There are no Old English records or genealogies outside of this poem that refer to the name “Beowulf.” All other names in the poem appear elsewhere—but not the name of our hero. Make of that what you will. It certainly points toward his singularity.

There are a couple of different possible etymological explanations for his name. The most recent and probable scholarly theory, expounded by R. D. Fulk and Joseph Harris (see the Norton Critical Edition, pp. 105-107) is that it fits into a Nordic naming tradition, using the suffix -ulf (“wolf”) attached to the name of a god, as in “Thorulf” or “Thorolf” in Icelandic. This would make Beowulf the “wolf,” or scourge, of the god “Beow.”

Ok, that’s fine. But I prefer the older explanation. It may be outdated, but it is much cooler: “beo” derives from the OE word for bee, and so that makes “Beowulf” a “ravager of bees,” or, in short, a bear. I do have other, better reasons for preferring this explanation in addition to the coolness factor: this identification of Beowulf as bear-like suggests an association with the category of the berserker. In the Icelandic sagas, berserkers tend to be out of control and rather unsavory, but in some of the older, legendary texts, they are actual shape-shifters, who turn into bears or wolves, who are immune to blades and shed their armor in order to go into battle naked, without weapons, as they go into a kind of battle trance or rage. The word berserk derives from the Old Icelandic for “bear” and “shirt.” So, when you go into battle, you put on your bear-shirt.

Beowulf sheds his armor before fighting Grendel and uses his bare hands rather than weapons. Later on in the poem, he says that he defeated “Dayraven the Frank” by squeezing him to death: “my bare hands stilled his heartbeats / and wrecked the bone-house” (lines 2507-2508). This is berserker-like behavior.

Furthermore, Beowulf observes that Grendel doesn’t use weapons either, and the poet tells us later that the monster is immune to them. This seems to establish some sort of monstrous equivalence between Beowulf and Grendel. While Grendel grabs thirty men, Hrothgar claims that Beowulf has the strength of thirty men in each hand. To be able to defeat a monster with his bare hands, Beowulf must be monstrous himself.

(This berserker argument, by the way, is not at all a scholarly consensus; it is, rather, my eccentric reading. But it’s my newsletter, so I make the rules. Ha! Take that, peer review!)

The Grendel fight . . .

. . . speaks for itself, but I do want to point out that the poet describes Grendel’s death in a peculiar way:

[. . .] But his going away
out of this world and the days of his life
would be agony to him, and his alien spirit
would travel far into fiends’ keeping. (Lines 804-807)

This suggests that Grendel has a soul, that he is, in this way, human, or at least humanoid. His soul leaves his body and travels “into fiends’ keeping,” or Hell. We might see these lines as the completion of the narrative of the Cain connection—as Grendel is outcast in death as he is in life.

A close reading

Let’s look a bit more closely at Shield Sheafson’s funeral, specifically the moment at which the Danes send his body out to sea. Here is the Old English:

Nalæs hi hine læssan lacum teodan,
þeodgestreonum, þonce þa dydon
þe hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon
ænne ofer yðe umborwesende.
þa gyt hie him asetton segen geldenne
heah ofer heafod, leton holm beran,
geafon on garsecg; him wæs geomor sefa,
murnende mod. Men ne cunnon
secgan to soðe, selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum, hwa þæm hlæste onfeng. (Lines 43-52)

Here is my reading of the final two clauses (with accompanying sounds of my dog chewing on a toy, which seems oddly appropriate):

And here is Heaney’s rendering:

They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. (Lines 43-52)

I have chosen this passage to discuss because it captures with remarkable subtlety what I see as the ontological melancholy of the poem. Let’s take it bit-by-bit:

• The opening, extended clause once again collapses time, invoking Shield’s arrival as a foundling in the same moment that it gives an account of his funeral, the two of which parallel each other as sea passages. Furthermore, the clause is a melancholy example of litotes, a rhetorical trope which, essentially, means “understatement by negation of the opposite.” The Danes have piled up treasures on Shield’s funeral ship, which makes a profound contrast to his arrival as a child when he was destitute, so “no less bountifully” is an understatement. Watch for the use of litotes in the poem. It is one of our poet’s favorite tropes.

• The second clause here describes the Danes’ sending out of the ship. While some ship funerals involved setting the ship on fire, this, apparently, is not the case here. Shield is simply allowed to “drift / to wind and tide” (“letton holm beran / geafon on garsecg”). I think that this decision not to burn the ship is a conscious one on the part of the poet, because it emphasizes the unknowability of the fate of the vessel and of Shield’s body, which is another source of sadness in this passage.

• In the third clause, the poet tells us that not even the wisest of the Danes could tell the fate of the ship. This is, of course, literally true, but it also works through metonymy: not one of these poor pagans could know the fate of Shield’s soul after death. Our Christian poet sees this as a source of profound melancholy. This is the reason for the phrase “him wæs geomor sefa,” which might be more literally translated as “they were sad in their hearts.” This is another repeated phrase that we see pop up again in the poem in moments of sorrow, as we shall see. The verb that Heaney translates as “salvaged” (“onfeng”) could also be rendered as “pulled in,” which I think resonates with the possibility of a divine force, for good or ill, embracing the departed king.

For the next installment

I suggest reading through line 2199, which takes us through the next monster fight and back home to the land of the Geats.

Some questions for your consideration and discussion:

1. In Heorot after the defeat of Grendel, the singer delivers two poems in celebration. The first poem celebrates another famous monster killer, but the second is a terrifying, obscure story of revenge and murder, the so-called “saga of Finn.” What do you think this is doing here? How does it affect our reading of this episode? Remember, our poet sometimes works through unexplained juxtapositions.

2. How does our second monster encounter differ from the first, and how are these differences interesting or significant?

3. We have two contrasting manifestations of the feminine in this section: Wealtheow and Grendel’s mother. Comments on this?

4. Critical commentary often skips over Beowulf’s account of his adventures to Hygelac after his return home, since it is at least partly redundant. What do you think it accomplishes, if anything?

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Apologies for the radio silence over the past couple of weeks as the semester has caught up with me. This week is actually spring break, or, as we call it in the academy, “catch-up week.” The good news is that I have access to some new recording equipment, and so the sound quality of the podcast version of PCF should improve.

But while you are waiting for new installments on Beowulf and Tolkien and Mahler, here are a few great new albums to check out. There may be full reviews forthcoming if I can find the time:

Gorillaz: The Mountain

It was a delight to see Damon and company turn up on Saturday Night Live last week. The new album does not disappoint; on the contrary, I’ve listened to it every day since it dropped, and it sounds even better with each listen—with a huge array of influences that the record wears on its sleeve (so to speak). Also, be sure to check out the new Gorillaz animated short, which features some tunes from the new album. It’s old-school animation, entirely hand-drawn, and it’s gorgeous.

Olive Jones: For Mary

This record just dropped this morning, so you heard it here first. I’ve been waiting for its release for a month or so, ever since I heard a couple of superb teaser tracks on Bandcamp Radio. Jones’s music is soul-inflected, but she certainly has her own sound, and a fantastic voice. Give it a try.

Amy Gadiaga: BabyGoated

I really enjoyed vocalist and bassist Amy Gadiaga’s previous EP, which was more jazz-inflected. This new EP adds a strong dose of what we used to call “world music.” Anyway, it sounds great.

Happy listening, and I’ll be back next week with more Beowulf.

Yours,

John

The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

—Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney, lines 81-85

. . . Speaking of barbarous burnings, on October 23rd, 1731, a fire broke out in Ashburnham House, where the legendary Cotton collection of manuscripts was held, next to the Westminster School in London. Librarians doused the manuscripts with water and flung them out of windows in order to save them. The fire completely consumed some of them, but among the survivors, though badly singed around the edges, was a curious book known as the Nowell Codex, which formed part of a volume labeled “Cotton MS Vitellius A XV.” (Robert Cotton, who had collected the manuscripts a century before, categorized his books with the busts of Roman emperors, which sat atop his shelves—hence, “Vitellius.”)

Included in this book was the only extant copy of the poem that we now call Beowulf, though no one in 1731 knew much about it, because scholars pretty much ignored it until later in the century. The poem was written out in two distinct hands some time around the year 1000 C.E., and it is clearly a copy of an earlier text, though no one knows how much earlier. Here is what the first page of the poem looks like in manuscript form:

Note the damage around the edges. When punctuated, lineated, edited, and presented in modern typeface, the opening lines look like this:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning!

—Lines 1-11

You may notice that in the manuscript, the poetic lines are not lineated, which is typical of Old English poetry. You may also notice that there is no title on the manuscript page, which is also the case with most Old English poems; Beowulf is an editorial title. The poetic form is quite different from what we are used to: rather than using meter and rhyme as organizing principles, our poet here uses stress and alliteration. The caesuras in the middle of each line indicate a division between the first two stresses and the last two stresses, which alliterate with each other in varying patterns. What does it sound like? Here is my approximation of the first three lines:

Or, in Heaney’s rendering:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

Hwæt has been translated any number of ways, but Heaney has captured something essential with his choice of “so”: it suggests the continuation of an ongoing conversation. “Oh, hello. Where were we? So . . .” And this is perfect because, as we discussed in last week’s post, it seems that with this poem we are getting just a fragment of a vast tapestry of narratives, most of which we do not know. It’s as if we had a piece of the Iliad but didn’t know much about the contextual mythology. The choice of “so” also invokes the oral traditions from which this poem apparently springs—though this is the source of much scholarly debate. Is this an oral or a literary tradition? Or is it something in between?

I think it’s probably something in between. To illustrate this liminal space between the oral and the literate, here is an illustration from the Vespasian Psalter, a manuscript from the late eighth century, that depicts King David singing the Psalms:

David is accompanying himself with a harp, and there are horn players and a couple of people apparently clapping along with the beat. But there are also two scribes behind him, who are writing down his song. Here we have a representation of a culture in a transitional stage between oral and literate transmission of poetry—the oral performance of a poem and the written transmission of the same poem are both present in the image.

This image resonates with the earliest description of an English poet, which we find in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the year 731. Bede, a prolific monk and scholar from the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, provides an account of a certain Caedmon, an illiterate brother at the abbey at Whitby, who is visited by God and taught to sing beautiful poetry. Caedmon remains an oral poet, but his literate brothers write down his poetry for him.

While this is a compelling story, Beowulf, because of its length and complex structure, while it draws upon oral traditions, seems to be an imitation of an oral form.

2. Origins

So, who wrote the thing, and when? This is a fraught topic. Our poet is anonymous but was likely clerical and male, simply because the source of most Old English writing is monastic. Various proposals for the dates of composition have stretched from the age of Bede in the early eighth century to the early eleventh century, which is roughly contemporary with the manuscript. There is no consensus on the matter.

Does the poem give us any internal evidence? Well, not really, except that you might have noticed that it takes place in an entirely Scandinavian world, though it was written in English. This may be evidence of a sort, and to my mind makes the earlier date range unlikely. During the age of Bede, the Danes were inveterate raiders of the English coast (Bede’s own monastery was sacked), and so it seems a stretch to imagine an English poet singing their praises. By the early tenth century, however, many Danes had been integrated into the English population, especially in the northeast, and so, as Roberta Frank has argued convincingly (to my mind, anyway), this gives us a likely approximate date, as the poem’s apparent nostalgia for pagan Scandinavians suggests a poet with Danish leanings. (You can find Frank’s essay on the subject, “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History,” in the back of the Norton Critical Edition.)

Another fraught topic is the relationship between Christian and pagan elements in the poem. Is this a pagan story that has been Christianized? Or was the poem conceived by a Christian poet attempting to make sense of his pagan ancestry? These questions are not answerable definitively; however, as we work our way through the poem, we might formulate some ideas. Some characters, especially Hrothgar and Beowulf himself, use a metaphysical vocabulary that sometimes strikes quite close to a Christian sensibility, though the characters themselves never make explicitly biblical references, which are reserved for the narrator. And the biblical references that appear are derived from the Old Testament only. There are no references to Christ. The poet, at least to some extent, seems concerned with avoiding obvious anachronism.

What does at least seem clear is that this is a poet who is looking back elegiacally to what he considers an ancient past, and so, like Homer’s Iliad, the poem powerfully creates a layered sense of antiquity for the modern reader—what Tolkien called “an echo of an echo.” And this profound effect, I think, may be responsible for much of the poem’s continued appeal.

3. Language

Sometimes in a survey course, I will speak a few lines of Old English and ask students what language they think it is. Guesses range from German to Hebrew to Gaelic. No, I tell them, this is what your language sounded like a thousand years ago. Most of them are in a state of confusion about the term “Old English.” They think that Shakespeare is Old English and are surprised when I tell them that Stratford’s favorite son wrote in Modern English. The term covers the language roughly through the eleventh century, though there was no particular morning when everyone woke up speaking Middle English. Like all linguistic change, it was gradual, but it was accelerated by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which made a form of French the language of government, law, and the aristocracy. English became essentially a peasant language, and it did not reemerge in any official capacities for a long time. Parliament was held mostly in French until the second half of the fourteenth century. So, when English did reemerge, it was both transformed and fragmented into numerous regional dialects. And, as a result, Old English manuscripts were not readable except by antiquarians and scholars.

This change is why we generally teach Chaucer (fourteenth century) to undergraduates in his original Middle English (though amply glossed), but we must teach Beowulf and other Old English texts in translation.

Old English differs from modern English syntactically as well: like Latin and German, it has an elaborate declination system, as opposed to Modern English, in which word order does much of the syntactical work. For example, in the passage above, the word after “we” in the first line is “Gardena,” which means “Spear-Danes.” But “we” are not the “Spear-Danes”; the declination in the passage indicates that we “have heard” of the “Spear-Danes,” but the verb (gefrunon) doesn’t come until the end of the second line. Heaney chooses to move that verb to a different clause entirely in order to render the passage in idiomatic Modern English.

To make matters even more complicated, the dialect of Old English in the poem is mostly late West Saxon, but there are elements of other dialects, especially Mercian, which has led some scholars to suggest that the original poem was Mercian and has been transcribed into West Saxon. (Mercian, incidentally, is the dialect that Tolkien uses for the language of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings—“The Mark” derives from Mercia—probably because he subscribed to this Mercian origin theory for Beowulf.)

4. Tone and Genre

The poem begins and ends with the funeral of a king, and there is one other prominent funeral described in the middle. Indeed, despite the crowd-pleasing monster fights, the poem spends much more time contemplating mortality and death, which led Tolkien to describe its tone as “heroic-elegiac,” which is as good a label as any. It has been called “epic,” but this is appropriate only if we use the term fairly loosely. Neither is it a saga (since it is in verse rather than prose) or a “lay” (since it is too long). I prefer to think that it is one of a kind, that it defies any easy categorization. (Duke Ellington said that the greatest compliment was to be called “beyond category.”)

It is a poem about the youth, old age, and death of a great man, a rise and a fall. It is a poem about what we fear in the night. It is a poem about monsters and about the monstrous that is in humanity. It is a poem about how difficult it is for people to live together without killing each other.

It is a poem about what it means to live as a human being in the world without knowledge of what follows the darkness of death. It is a poem that refuses to supply easy answers.

In these senses, though we are not the original audience, the poem speaks to us just as profoundly as it did to medieval readers.

Now that we have gotten introductions out of the way, let’s read the poem!

Reading Tips

1. As you read, don’t get bogged down in all of the names and side-narratives. Be prepared for the poem to go backwards and forwards in time at the drop of a hat. This is simply how our poet rolls.

2. Read with a pencil in hand, and mark any passage that you find particularly confusing, interesting, or strange. We’ll discuss.

Questions for your Consideration and Discussion

1. What is the significance of the opening funeral of Shield Sheafson? What sort of tone does it set for the poem? What sort of ontological perspective does it suggest? In other words, what sort of world do our characters imagine that they inhabit?

2. What do you make of the “Christian” elements of the poem? We clearly have a Christian poet looking back at a pagan past. How does he reconcile these worlds?

3. What sort of effect does Grendel have on the reader? What sort of context does the poet provide for understanding him?

4. Does the fact that we know that Heorot will burn make us read Beowulf’s efforts to save it any differently? How so?

Enjoy the poem! I’m looking forward to discussing it with you.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, PCF will be embarking on two series this spring all about Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings, respectively. Today, we will be setting some context for reading Beowulf. This post is a revised version of a piece first published on January 10, 2024.

Which Edition/Translation?

I recommend the Norton Critical Edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of the poem, edited by Daniel Donoghue. I think that, more than any other translation that I have read, Heaney succeeds in creating a work of art in its own right, and the Norton Critical Edition includes Tolkien’s essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which we will be discussing, along with lots of good supplementary material. But any version of the Heaney translation will do.

I will be referring to other translations during the series and comparing them to Heaney, as well as to the original Old English. If (and only if) you want an edition of the original Old English, then I recommend the fourth edition of Klaeber, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Don’t expect to be able to read the Old English; it is like a foreign language to modern English speakers, and it requires fairly intense study to learn it. This edition has a full glossary and full scholarly apparatus

.

And if you are just along for the ride and don’t plan on reading the poem, then that’s fine: the essays should be accessible to you whether or not you are following along with the text.

Embracing the Unknown

If you are reading the poem for the first time (or even for the fifth time), you should be prepared for some amount of confusion. This is because the poem was not written for twenty-first-century readers. The poet, from the very first lines, assumes that we know some things that we do not know. He says that “we have heard” of these so-called “Spear-Danes” and all of the great things that they have done. Well, we haven’t.

The “we” is not us.

And this is the first challenge as we read this poem: we will have a lot of unfamiliar names thrown at us, and we will find very few reference points as modern readers. But if the poem was not written for us, then it is our job to imagine an original audience, to work out what their values were, to try to empathize with them to the extent that might be possible. We must embrace the unknown and allow our imaginations to fill in the gaps.

(This, by the way, is one of the most difficult aspects of teaching this poem to college students, especially those who aren’t English majors: some of them are extremely resistant to difficulty. They want to be able to understand things clearly and don’t like it when something is unknowable. They want to know what will be on the exam. See my piece on “Negative Capability in a Culture of Mastery” for more about this attitude. Well, since there will be no exams here, you won’t have to worry about that. Find your negative capability. No need for mastery.)

That said, the poem quickly introduces us to some dynamic figures: Shield Sheafson (Scyld Scefing in the original), Hrothgar, and—terrifyingly—Grendel. After a little while, we will meet Beowulf himself. These dynamic figures are your reference points, and they will carry you through the poem. We will discuss how they relate to this tapestry of background material, which we have only in fragments.

The poem also introduces us to a remarkable place: Heorot, Hrothgar’s hall. And as soon as we hear of its building, we are told that “The hall towered, / its gables wide and high and awaiting / a barbarous burning.” The fate of the hall is stitched into the account of its building. It will burn.

This is an example of how the poem’s narrative works: we jump forward in time, and we loop back, sometimes in the same sentence. (Klaeber, the editor of the standard edition, famously referred to the poem’s “lack of steady advance” in his original introduction in the 1920s.)

Don’t be thrown by this: time in the poem works differently from what we are used to. We will discuss some possible reasons for this narrative structuring, as well how it affects our reading.

I’ll be back soon with a fuller introduction to the poem. Meanwhile, start reading!

And be afraid. The mearcstapa is coming.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet microphone to yours.

Gentle reader:

Two years ago, PCF embarked on two read-along projects on Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings. Remember those days? Before large-language models had completely taken over the internet? Both series were great fun to write and stimulated some great conversations among the PCF community. This spring, I am teaching both texts again, and I thought that it would be a good time to return to them in this space. After all, there have been lots of new subscribers in the last couple of years who missed it the first time around. But the old faithful readers need not fear that they will just be getting recycled copy. This time, I’m going to revise and expand the original posts, and I will also be making them available in audio versions as podcasts. Also, I hope to solicit some more guest contributions as well.

I considered taking down the original posts for this second read-along, but I realized that then we would lose the comment sections, which were quite lively, so I will be leaving the old posts in the archive, and I may even link to them sometimes to refer to a particularly apt comment.

Mahler fans need not despair, however: I have not forgotten my promise to finish the cycle with essays on Das Leid and the unfinished Tenth Symphony, so those will be forthcoming in the next few weeks as well, as well as an “honorable mentions” post to supplement the Favorite Albums of 2025 series, to include a few titles I missed or didn’t hear until early this year.

So watch this space, good reader, and dust off your old copies of Beowulf (the Heaney translation) and LOTR if you would like to read along!

Yours,

John

PS: If you would like to dip your toe in, here is an essay that was not a part of the read-along but that is about Tolkien, and was one of the earliest ever pieces to appear in PCF:

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

I don’t usually get political in this newsletter, but today I needed to write this, so if you don’t want to read anything political, feel free to skip this one. And anyway, it’s really more about humanity and decency than it is about politics.

Yours,

John

We all have ear worms sometimes, and we don’t always understand where they came from. But sometimes, tracking down their origins can lead to insights.

Lately, a song from the 1980s by Jerry Harrison (of Talking Heads fame) has been echoing through my mind. It’s called “Man with a Gun.” It is darkly atmospheric, with Chris Spedding’s snaking, subtle guitar supporting Harrison’s moody synth textures. While it sounds very 80s, it holds up well. And while not a great singer, Harrison carries off the lead vocal with a detached coolness that is perfect for the track; it’s an effect that his more frantic bandmate from Talking Heads, David Byrne, could not have captured as well, though Byrne is the better singer generally.

Best of all are the lyrics, which are evocative and chilling. It seems at first like it’s going to be a love song, and in a way it is, but it’s a love song about sociopaths.

A pretty girl, a pretty girl
Can walk anywhere,
All doors open for her.
Like a breath of fresh air,
Her beauty, it precedes her.
Wrapped in her beauty,
Everywhere, she is welcome,
First class on the plane,
Closed door of the club,
All faces turn, all faces turn.

“And when she caught my eye, / We were those for whom / The rules do not apply.”

When you get to that line, you realize that the song is really about privilege and the narcissism that follows from it. Risk is welcome (“she likes to balance on a knife”), and thrills and violence may be courted because “A life like this keeps me alive.” (The video above gives us an edited version of the song that skips that line; for the version with all of the lyrics, see the video below.)

And then there is the chorus which repeats multiple times as the track fades out: “Pretty girl, young man, old man, man with a gun, two people in love, / The rules do not apply / To people in love.”

It’s the “man with the gun” that pops out here: the armed man, like the pretty girl, can force doors to open, can force others to defer.

The rules do not apply.

After listening to the song closely for the first time in years, I realized the probable reason it has been occupying my synapses. We have been witnessing men with guns in Minneapolis, living “on the wire,” shaping reality, forcing others to defer. The vice president has claimed that they have immunity from prosecution for their actions—apparently even when they kill people in cold blood. Even when they detain children. Even when they emerge from unmarked vans, without identification, wearing masks, and kidnap people. Even when they force a man to the ground and then shoot him multiple times.

“Doesn’t matter where we are, / I still say the rules do not apply.”

These are cold sociopaths. They have no empathy. They must do this because they like “to balance on a knife.” They must do this because . . .

The rules do not apply.

No rules of ethics. No rules of law. No rules of conscience. The sociopaths are in charge. They are running the government. They are killing in the streets. The rules do not apply.

Thanks for reading. No glib tag lines today.

It has been a great pleasure to watch ’s wonderful Substack, , grow over the last couple of years. This week, Matthew and I are collaborating: he will be publishing an interview with me, and I am publishing this guest essay, which is entirely in the spirit of Personal Canon Formation. If you have not subscribed to Matthew’s newsletter, then please do so.

Meanwhile, I’m going to find the time to go back and read Lonesome Dove again myself. Enjoy.

Yours,

John

More than thirty years ago, I took my father’s worn paperback copy of Lonesome Dove off the shelf and began to read. I was in high school, navigating the turbulent waters of adolescence while carrying the secret weight of trauma I wasn’t ready to name. My father—one of the last cowboys in this country, a man who had lost a leg like Augustus McCrae—loved Larry McMurtry’s sprawling Western, and I thought understanding the book might help me understand him. Recently, I returned to McMurtry’s work, reading all four books in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy chronologically: Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo. Between these two readings stretches three decades of life, loss, and the accumulation of experience that changes how we see everything—including the books we thought we knew.

During my years at sea, successful navigation required understanding not just your destination, but your starting position, the currents around you, and what the journey itself revealed. This mindset applies to how I approach literature now. What I discovered in returning to McMurtry wasn’t just a story about two aging Texas Rangers driving cattle to Montana. It is an intense meditation on journey itself—the kinds of movement that transform us and the kinds that merely postpone our reckoning with ourselves. It is also a story about friendship: how two people can be indispensable to each other while remaining fundamentally unable to give each other what they most need. Most importantly, it is a confrontation with the question at the heart of every individual life: what survives the changes time makes in us?

Where I Started

My first encounter with the Lonesome Dove story came through the television miniseries, which I watched with my father. Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, and Anjelica Houston all brought their characters to live. We loved it—the heroism and tragedy, the scope and intimacy, the way it captured something true about the masculine codes and silences that shaped my father’s generation. A few years later, I reached for Dad’s dog-eared paperback, eager to experience the story again while hoping the book’s deeper layers might help me decode the man sitting in the next room.

The timing was significant. I was dealing with all the emotional drama high school entails, but beneath that ordinary turbulence lay something darker: the traumatic abuse I had experienced and couldn’t yet speak about. Reading became a form of escape, a way to inhabit other lives and other struggles while avoiding my own. Lonesome Dove offered exactly what I needed then—a story of men facing hard things, of journeys away from painful pasts, of finding purpose in perpetual motion. I didn’t yet have the language or distance to see how perfectly this mirrored my own strategy of survival: keep moving, don’t speak the unspeakable, define yourself through action rather than acknowledgment.

My father had lost his leg a few years before, an amputation that echoed Gus McCrae’s own loss and subsequent refusal of the same surgery in the novel’s devastating climax. Watching my father navigate the world with that loss, maintaining his dignity and competence despite the limitation, I saw something of Gus’s stubborn insistence on meeting death on his own terms. There was also something of Woodrow Call in him—the stoic silence, the inability to speak feeling, the way duty and competence became substitutes for more vulnerable forms of connection. Reading Lonesome Dove at seventeen, I was trying to understand the code my father lived by, even as I was unknowingly absorbing versions of the same masculine silence that would take me years to unlearn.

Fast forward thirty years. My son, now an adult, had never seen the miniseries, so we watched it together. The experience brought back a flood of memories—not just of the story, but of that earlier shared experience with my father. It reminded me how certain narratives become woven into family history, how stories become inheritance. I had heard about the other books in McMurtry’s tetralogy but never read them. This seemed like the right moment: I was three decades older, with a more refined and disciplined reading practice. McMurtry had died a few years earlier, prompting renewed critical attention to his work. And I was curious to read the complete arc chronologically—to meet Gus and Call as young men and follow them to their deaths, seeing how McMurtry structured their journeys from the vantage point of knowing how they would end.

The conditions for this reading were completely different from my first encounter. I wasn’t fleeing trauma into fiction; I was investigating it, using literature as a lens to understand patterns of masculinity, silence, and motion that had shaped both the characters and my life. I wasn’t trying to decode my father; I was trying to understand the cost and gift of the legacy he gave me. And I was thinking seriously about canon formation—about which books earn a permanent place in our interior lives and why.

Augustus McCrae’s Journey Toward

Augustus McCrae is one of literature’s great studies in how a man can evolve profoundly while remaining essentially himself. What makes Gus’s journey so compelling across the tetralogy is precisely this tension between transformation and constancy—he changes deeply while somehow never betraying his fundamental nature.

The young Gus we meet in Dead Man’s Walk is already charming and talkative, but he’s also deeply romantic in the naive sense. He believes in grand gestures, in the power of wanting something badly enough, in the possibility that love can overcome circumstance. His first disastrous Ranger expedition begins chipping away at this innocence. The brutal realities of frontier violence, the indifference of the landscape, the way good intentions crumble against hard facts—all of this starts teaching him that optimism must become something more durable than mere hopefulness.

By Comanche Moon, we see a Gus who has learned to hold things more lightly, who understands that loss is woven into the fabric of frontier life, yet remains stubbornly committed to beauty, conversation, and love. His relationships with Clara and with the prostitutes he cares for show a man who has accepted that the grandest dreams remain unfulfilled while refusing to let that acceptance harden him into cynicism. He’s developing what will become his defining gift: the ability to be fully present to life as it is, rather than mourning what it isn’t.

What changes most dramatically across the tetralogy is Gus’s relationship with time and limits. The older Gus of Lonesome Dove has achieved philosophical acceptance—a clear-eyed understanding that life is finite and most dreams remain unrealized. Yet paradoxically, this makes him more rather than less vital. He has learned that the substance of life isn’t in achieving goals but in how you pass the days: talking, reading, savoring beauty, maintaining friendship. While others scramble after purpose and accomplishment, Gus has discovered that meaning resides in attention and presence.

Throughout life, Gus maintains his belief that tenderness and attention matter more than toughness. He has a gift for seeing people clearly without judgment, for treating everyone from prostitutes to Comanche warriors with a baseline respect that doesn’t depend on their social position. He refuses to let frontier brutality harden him into something less than fully human. While Call becomes increasingly trapped in duty and competence, Gus remains fluid, capable of joy even in the shadow of death.

The lessons Gus carries to his death are bittersweet. He has learned that love—real love—requires presence, not just grand gestures from a distance. His decades-long pining for Clara was a form of romanticism, a way of having feeling without the complications of actual intimacy. When he finally has the chance to join her after his injury, he recognizes that the fantasy can’t survive the reality of who they’ve both become. His choice to refuse amputation isn’t about giving up; it’s about finally understanding what dignity means to him personally—that some things are worse than death, including becoming less than yourself.

He has learned that talking, which others dismiss as idle, is actually a form of generosity—a way of keeping loneliness at bay for himself and others. His endless philosophizing serves a purpose: it maintains human connection in a world bent on reducing people to functions. And perhaps most poignantly, he has learned that some forms of restlessness are terminal, that men like him and Call are fundamentally unfit for settled happiness even though they long for it. The tragedy of Gus isn’t that he dies too soon, but that he dies having achieved genuine wisdom about how to live while lacking a life where that wisdom can be fully enacted.

Woodrow Call’s Journey Away

If Gus’s arc is about arriving at acceptance and presence, Call’s is about the horror of perpetual flight from the self. Reading the tetralogy chronologically reveals Call’s trajectory as one of the most devastating in American literature—a man who constructs himself so thoroughly around motion and competence that he becomes incapable of inhabiting his own life.

The young Call of Dead Man’s Walk is already driven, already defining himself through capability and endurance. But there’s still possibility in him—he hasn’t yet fully armored himself against vulnerability. He can still be surprised, still be reached. Through Comanche Moon, we watch him systematically close off every avenue to intimacy. He can’t speak his love for Maggie. He can’t claim Newt as his son. He can’t meet Gus in the realm of feeling. Each failure to speak becomes another layer of calcification.

The tragedy is that his silence is an almost constitutional inability to translate internal experience into words. Call literally doesn’t have the language for his own interior life. He experiences feeling but can’t name it, can’t give it form through speech, and therefore can’t acknowledge it even to himself. What he can’t speak doesn’t, for him, fully exist.

By Lonesome Dove, this has become his defining prison. The cattle drive is a perfect metaphor: it’s movement without arrival, purpose without destination. Yes, there’s the stated goal of Montana ranch land, but everyone including Call seems to understand that the real point is the going, not the arriving. He can’t retire to the farm Gus suggests because stopping would mean confronting everything he’s spent his life outrunning—his failures as a father, his emotional isolation, the hollowness at the center of all his competence. He needs the drive to Montana because he needs not to be still.

Streets of Laredo is culmination and exposure. Reading it chronologically, you feel the full weight of what Call has done to himself. He’s now tracking Joey Garza across a West that no longer needs Rangers. The frontier is being tamed by railroads and towns and the very civilization he helped make possible. The historical moment that gave his restlessness meaning has passed. Yet, Call can’t stop moving because stopping would mean facing the void.

Streets of Laredo is brilliant and merciless because McMurtry strips away everything that let Call function. Gus is dead. Newt is dead too. And Call is aging, a ghost haunting a world that’s moved past him. The sections featuring Pea Eye—now married, raising children, fully present to domestic life—show us exactly what Call might have had. They make clear that Call’s inability to settle wasn’t about the frontier or historical timing; it was about a fundamental refusal or inability to engage in the work of self-recognition.

The chronological reading reveals that Gus could name things, could speak himself and others into clarity. Call can only do. And when there’s nothing left worth doing, when the moment that needed his particular competence has passed, he’s left with nothing but the mechanical continuation of movement itself. The horror is that he survives. Unlike Gus, who gets a death consonant with how he lived—surrounded by people, speaking until the end—Call just persists, trudging forward because stopping would mean dissolution.

Streets of Laredo shows us that this kind of unlived life is worse than heroic death. Call ends not with tragic grandeur but with exhausted continuation, still unable to speak, still unable to stop, still unable to arrive at the self he’s been fleeing his entire life. It’s the bleakest ending imaginable precisely because it isn’t an ending—just an old man continuing to move through a landscape that no longer has use for him.

The Friendship as Its Own Journey

Gus and Call’s friendship is the beating heart of the tetralogy, and three moments across the four books capture its essential truth—not its drama, but what it actually means.

The first is the texture of everyday companionship in Lonesome Dove—those porch-sitting scenes before the drive begins. Here the friendship feels most alive, most real. They’re not doing anything momentous; they’re just inhabiting the same space with the ease of decades. Gus needles Call, Call grunts or deflects, and beneath it all is profound comfort. What’s revelatory is that Gus’s talking isn’t really about getting responses—it’s about keeping Call tethered to human experience, about preventing him from disappearing entirely into silence. And Call’s presence, his willingness to sit and endure Gus’s philosophizing, is his wordless version of intimacy. It’s the only place Call ever seems close to peaceful. This is the friendship at rest, showing us that for all their differences, they’ve created a shared life where they don’t have to perform or explain themselves.

The second moment is Gus’s death scene—when the friendship becomes most tragic. What destroys you isn’t just that Gus is dying, but that he spends his final hours trying to get Call to speak, to acknowledge what they’ve been to each other. “It’s been quite a party, ain’t it?” Gus says, trying to frame their decades together, to make Call see it as the gift it was. And Call can’t do it. Even at this extremity, even when Gus is asking him to say something true, Call remains locked in silence. Gus dies knowing that Call loves him but will never be able to say it, will never be able to receive or articulate the gift of their friendship. The tragedy isn’t that they didn’t love each other—it’s that Call’s incapacity means that love remains unspoken and therefore, for Call, somehow unreal.

The third moment is Call carrying Gus’s body across the country on a return trip to Lonesome Dove—when the friendship becomes most true. McMurtry makes us see this as devotion and pathology. Call can tend to Gus’s corpse with meticulous care but couldn’t speak to him when he was alive. He can cross a continent to fulfill Gus’s burial wishes but couldn’t claim his own son. Call’s love for Gus is real and profound, but it’s the love of a man who can only express feeling through action, through duty, through perpetual motion. And Gus, even dead, is still the companion Call talks to in his head—the only person he ever got close to genuine conversation with, even if it was mostly one-sided.

Together, these moments show a friendship built on opposite ends of a spectrum: Gus’s fluency and Call’s silence, Gus’s capacity for presence and Call’s need for motion, Gus’s ability to name things and Call’s imprisonment in the unnamed. This opposition was what made them indispensable to each other—Gus needed someone to anchor his talk, Call needed someone to speak his unspoken life. Their friendship was the closest either man got to being fully known, even though one talked constantly and the other hardly at all.

This dynamic was established early and never really changed—which is both the source of its depth and its tragedy. They knew each other so completely that they couldn’t surprise each other into transformation. Gus couldn’t make Call speak. Call couldn’t make Gus settle. And yet they stayed together across decades because the friendship, for all its limitations, was the realest thing either of them had.

Journey and Canon

Reading these books chronologically after decades away taught me how relationships with books mirror relationships with people. Gus and Call journeyed together while remaining fundamentally who they were. We also journey alongside the books that matter to us. Yet while we may change, the books remain fixed on the page.

Every person is on an individual journey. We grow and change with the years. Life adds layers of experience. Our personal path often looks very different when we’re older than when we were young. We want different things, value different things. Maybe some of our characteristics have matured; maybe some have solidified through stubbornness. This personal journey impacts our relational journeys—our friendships, our family bonds, and yes, our relationships with books.

When I first read Lonesome Dove in high school, I was looking to understand my father and escape my demons. In accomplishing these goals, I also absorbed the book’s lessons about masculine silence in ways I didn’t recognize. I admired Call’s competence and stoicism without seeing their cost. I romanticized movement as purpose. The book spoke powerfully to where I was, but I couldn’t yet see all that it was saying.

Returning to McMurtry thirty years later, with my father’s age approaching Gus and Call’s, with my history of learning to speak what had long remained silent, with my journey toward presence rather than perpetual motion—the books revealed dimensions I couldn’t have accessed at seventeen. I saw the tragedy in Call’s silence. I recognized Gus’s wisdom about attention and presence as hard-won rather than natural. I understood that the friendship’s beauty and its failure were inseparable.

The books hadn’t changed, but I had. And that’s precisely what makes certain books worthy of a personal canon—they have enough depth and complexity to meet you wherever you are while revealing new truths as you change. They don’t just confirm what you already know; they remain capable of surprising you, teaching you, showing you what you couldn’t see before.

I think a personal canon should be relatively small—perhaps ten to twenty books, like the handful of deep friendships we can truly invest our hearts in. I read many books, and I have many friendly acquaintances in the reading life, but the core relationships are different. The books that become part of us, that we return to across decades, that survive all the changes we undergo—these form the real canon.

For me, that core includes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which taught me about eucatastrophe and the long defeat. It includes Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Cather’s O Pioneers!, and Steinbeck’s East of Eden. These books speak to eternal truths, tell stories that remain meaningful across ages and across the different seasons of a single life. Lonesome Dove belongs in that company—not because it’s perfect, but because it has something essential to say about journey, friendship, silence, and the ways we fail and succeed at being fully human.

The books that last through changes are those that hold enough familiarity to feel like returning home and enough mystery to still challenge us. They’re books that work as entertainment and as meditation, as story and as wisdom literature. They’re patient with us, waiting to reveal certain truths until we’re ready to receive them.

Some books that meant everything to me in youth have faded with time—not because they were bad, but because they served a particular moment and didn’t have the depth to grow with me. Other books made little impression on first reading but have become central as life gave me the experiences necessary to understand them. This is as it should be. A personal canon isn’t static; it’s a living conversation between who we are and what we read, constantly being revised by the new person we’re becoming.

Lonesome Dove Stands Apart

Having now read all four books in McMurtry’s tetralogy, I can confirm what I suspected: Lonesome Dove remains the crown jewel. Certainly there’s nostalgia involved—it’s the book I’ve read multiple times, the story I watched with both my father and my son, the novel that shaped my first encounter with these characters. But it’s not just nostalgia.

From a craft perspective, Lonesome Dove is a superior novel. McMurtry was writing at the height of his powers, balancing vast scope with intimate character work, epic journey with quiet revelation. The pacing is masterful—the long, slow build in Lonesome Dove, the mounting tension of the drive, the series of losses that accumulate weight as the journey progresses. The secondary characters—Deets, Jake Spoon, Lorena, July Johnson—are fully realized people with their own arcs, not just supporting players. The novel works as Western adventure, philosophical meditation, and elegiac farewell to a way of life.

Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon, written later as prequels, are fine novels but feel slightly mechanical in comparison—McMurtry filling in backstory rather than discovering story in the act of writing. Streets of Laredo, the true sequel, is important and devastating, but it’s relentlessly bleak, lacking Lonesome Dove‘s moments of joy and beauty that make the tragedies land harder.

Lonesome Dove is exceptional because it balances competing truths without resolving them into easy answers. It’s a celebration of the frontier spirit and a clear-eyed accounting of its costs. It honors competence and courage while showing how those virtues can become prisons. It treats violence seriously—as trauma, not entertainment—while still functioning as a gripping adventure. It allows Gus his wisdom without making him entirely right, and shows Call’s failures without making him unsympathetic.

Lonesome Dove understands that journey is both literal and metaphoric, and that the most important journeys are often interior ones we fail to complete. The cattle drive to Montana is an external journey that mirrors the characters’ inability to arrive at themselves. They travel thousands of miles but can’t close the distance between intention and speech, between feeling and acknowledgment, between who they are and who they wish they’d been.

When I read Lonesome Dove at seventeen, I thought it was about the heroism of the drive. At forty-seven, I see it’s about the tragedy of never arriving, the grace of presence in the face of loss, and the ways we fail the people we love most even while remaining devoted to them. That a novel can support both readings—and presumably many more I haven’t yet discovered—is what makes it canonical.

The book earned its Pulitzer Prize in 1986, distinguishing it from most Western fiction, which tends toward formula and easy consumption. Louis L’Amour, whom I also love, wrote accessible adventures perfect for reading in the saddle or reading outside on lazy afternoons. McMurtry was writing literature—not in the pretentious sense, but in the sense of creating art that asks hard questions and refuses simple answers. Both approaches have value, but they serve different purposes. L’Amour never tried to be McMurtry, and that’s fine. But McMurtry succeeded at something rarer: he elevated a genre while honoring its conventions, creating a Western that functions as serious American literature without betraying what makes Westerns compelling.

What Survives

After three decades and four books, what have I learned about journey, friendship, and canon?

I’ve learned that the most important journeys aren’t the ones that cover ground but the ones that move us inward—and that some people, like Call, spend their lives fleeing that inward journey even while traveling thousands of miles. I’ve learned that transformation and constancy aren’t opposites; Gus changes profoundly across the decades while remaining essentially himself, teaching us that growth doesn’t require becoming someone else.

I’ve learned that friendship at its deepest is about creating space for another person to be fully themselves, even when—especially when—that self is frustrating or incomprehensible to us. Gus and Call couldn’t fix each other, couldn’t make each other different, but they maintained presence across decades of difference. That’s its own form of heroism, different from but equal to the physical courage the frontier required.

I’ve learned that books, like people, journey with us across time. The Lonesome Dove I read at seventeen isn’t the same book I read at forty-seven, even though the words haven’t changed. What survives in a personal canon are books capacious enough to meet us in different seasons of life, revealing new dimensions as we gain the experience necessary to perceive them.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that some silences are deadly, even when—especially when—they feel like strength. Call’s inability to speak his love for Newt, his love for Maggie, his love for Gus, destroys more than any external enemy ever could. The masculine code that forbids emotional speech, that equates silence with strength and talking with weakness, creates men who can do extraordinary things while being unable to live ordinary human lives. My father’s generation knew this code intimately. Mine inherited it. I hope my son’s generation is learning to speak what we couldn’t.

The real tragedy of the tetralogy isn’t that Gus dies or that Call survives. It’s that Call carries Gus’s corpse across thousands of miles but couldn’t speak to him when he was alive. It’s that Call finally acknowledges Newt as his son only when it’s too late to change anything. It’s that competence and duty, which seem like virtues, become substitutes for the harder work of presence and speech.

If there’s redemption in these books, it’s in the possibility that we can learn from these failures. That we can choose presence over perpetual motion. That we can do the hard work of speaking what matters before it’s too late. That we can build friendships based not on what we can’t say but on the courage to say it anyway.

During my years at sea, I learned that successful navigation requires knowing not just where you’re going but where you’ve been, not just the destination but what the journey itself reveals. McMurtry’s tetralogy maps one kind of American journey—westward, violent, heroic, and tragic. But it also maps the interior journeys we all make: toward wisdom or away from ourselves, toward presence or into perpetual flight, toward speech or into terminal silence.

Thirty years ago, I read Lonesome Dove looking for escape and understanding. I found both, along with lessons I wasn’t ready to receive. Returning to McMurtry now, having journeyed through my own decades, I find the book has more to teach me. It will still be there, unchanged, when I’m ready to read it again in another thirty years. That’s what makes it canonical—not perfection, but depth. Not answers, but better questions. Not escape, but encounter with truths we’d rather avoid and desperately need to hear.

Like Gus and Call sitting on the porch in Lonesome Dove, my relationship with this book is one of long companionship, of returning again and again to the same space with the ease of decades. The book doesn’t change. I do. And in that gap between constancy and change, between the words on the page and the reader bringing new experience to them, literature does its essential work: it shows us who we were, who we are, and who we might yet become if we can learn to stop fleeing ourselves long enough to arrive.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet horse to yours.

Gentle reader:

And here, on the first day of the new year, is the final installment of my favorite music of 2025. There is a lot in the hopper for the new year at PCF: a guest essay by the wonderful about a significant entry in his own personal canon, the conclusion of our Mahler series, and a forthcoming series on gender and disability in the Middle Ages, which will accompany a course that I am teaching on the subject.

Meanwhile, here is N-Z, the final dozen of the 36 albums on the list. Here are links to part 1 and part 2. I expect that there is at least something on this list for everyone. Happy listening!

Happy new year!

John

The Necks: Disquiet

The Necks are usually referred to as an Australian jazz trio, but they don’t sound like any other jazz trio. For more than twenty-five years, they have honed their own unique style that defies the attention economy with hour-long tracks that will immerse the attentive listener. This album is a commitment at over three hours, but it is a commitment that will pay off if you can grasp their aesthetic of variable drones, sonic atmospheres, grooves, and slow builds. It’s not three hours of sameness, as each of the four tracks creates its own sound world. If you haven’t heard The Necks before, then give them a try. They might not be for you, but if they are, you will likely be delving deeply into their back catalogue.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer

This is the eleventh album by electronic-music producer Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never. It is unique in his catalogue in that it is made up of sounds from a once popular sample library that was deleted from the internet, so you might consider this record as an archival project, but it also sounds completely fresh and quite varied from track to track. Listen with good headphones or IEMs to get a full grasp of the games that Lopatin plays with the stereo field.

Alice Sara Ott: John Field: Complete Nocturnes

It’s good to see the neglected Irish composer getting this deluxe treatment. Up to now, the reference recordings of most of Field’s piano music were by Benjamin Frith in his excellent survey on Naxos, but the composer has been getting more attention in recent years—perhaps because of his documented influence on Chopin. These Nocturnes are beautiful, and Ott plays them with great finesse.

Pacifica Quartet: The Korngold Collection

Korngold is a composer whose moment seems finally to have arrived, which seems an odd thing to say about someone who had a successful career composing for Hollywood films. But that very career is the reason (along with his commitment to tonality) that he was often dismissed as a serious composer by midcentury modernists. But these fantastic recordings of his chamber music make the composer’s melodic and harmonic gifts abundantly clear. This album is two and a half hours of wonderful listening.

Antonio Pappano, London Symphony Orchestra: Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 5 and 9

This is the second installment in Pappano’s ongoing Vaughan Williams cycle. The first was bold in the choice to pair the Fourth and Sixth, the composer’s two most noisy and volatile symphonies. The current record is, in its own way, just as compelling, pairing the pastoral bliss of the Fifth with the spacey angst of the Ninth—the composer’s last major work, premiered shortly before his death. The Fifth is my favorite RVW symphony, but the Ninth may be the most intriguing in its atmospheric mystery. In any case, it’s exciting to hear a new RVW cycle volume-by-volume as it appears, as it joins Andrew Manze’s excellent recent cycle, along with classic interpretations by the likes of Slatkin, Previn, and Boult.

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

This is, obviously, not a new recording, but it is the first audio-only release of music from the famous 1971 “concert” film. (I employ the quotation marks there because it was a concert with no audience.) Steven Wilson, whose own new album appears below on this list, was the perfect choice to remix this record; he understands the Floyd aesthetic better than anyone—particularly from this era between the departure of founding member Syd Barrett and the epoch-defining release of The Dark Side of the Moon. These performances find the Floyd still exploring the world of psychedelic soundscapes and more interested in creating sonic experiences than in song-craft—though the record includes a gorgeous version of “Echoes,” originally from the Meddle album, and the scream on “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” will make you jump out of your seat. This is a must-hear for any Floyd enthusiast, as is David Gilmour’s own recent live album, which featured in part 1 of this list.

Quatour Debussy: Ravels [sic.]

Of all of the releases in 2025 celebrating the 150th anniversary of Ravel, this is my favorite (along with Jean-Efflem Bavouzet’s album of the complete solo-piano music, featured in part 1 of this list), because it is unusual and creative. In addition to a smashing performance of Ravel’s only string quartet (one of my favorite pieces in the entire chamber repertoire), there is a gorgeous string-quartet transcription of Ma mère l’Oye and an original work by vibraphonist Franck Tortiller, Les Danses de Ravel (After Le Tombeau de Couperin), which combines Ravel with jazz-inflected rhythms and harmonies.

Beatrice Rana, Amsterdam Sinfonietta: Bach: Keyboard Concertos, BWV 1052, 1053, 1054 & 1056

Beatrice Rana is one of my favorite working pianists, and she seems to be equally in her element performing Chopin or Ravel or Bach. But she also pulls off the trick of taking advantage of the expressive qualities of the piano in these pieces originally written for harpsichord, but without trying to make them sound like Romantic concertos. To understand what I mean, listen to the opening movement of the magnificent D-Minor concerto that opens this album. The dizzying, dramatic journey through the circle of fifths that builds to the movement’s climax is tremendously powerful, but still sounds very much of its time. The Amsterdam Sinfonietta expertly accompanies throughout. This is some great Bach.

Dabin Ryu: Trio!

The exclamation mark in the title is earned, as Ryu’s tremendous piano chops are matched by a cooking rhythm section of Joe Martin (bass) and Johnathan Blake (drums). This is a very traditional jazz trio record (as opposed to The Necks’ new album, above), but it sounds fresh, combining fantastic playing with a creative blend of off-the-beaten-track standards (“Dorham’s Epitaph,” “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee”) and original compositions. I look forward to following this pianist’s career as it develops; I expect great things.

Sofia Sacco: Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues

Shostakovich is not really known for his piano music, but this piece is the exception. There are several fine recordings of this modernist tribute to Bach, but I think that this young, talented Italian pianist’s interpretation stacks up with the best of them. She combines a delicate touch with virtuosic chops and so is able to cover the large expressive range of music here.

Stereolab: Instant Holograms on Metal Film

This is Stereolab’s first album in fifteen years, but they don’t seem to have missed a step. This record sounds like classic Stereolab, which to me is a good thing. The Krautrock and minimalist influences are still apparent, manifesting in compelling grooves and understated melodicism. Pitchfork’s review called this a “relatively safe” album, but Laetitia Sadler and Tim Gane are not shying away from their bleak assessment of modernity:

Greed is a unfillable hole,
Insatiable
Avid the fear of death
Thirsty is the fear of death
There is no way
We can’t eat our way
Out of it
We can’t drink our way out of it no more

Despite the dark lyrics, the music is often quirkily catchy (which is the case for much of the band’s output historically). Suffice to say, if you’re a fan of Stereolab, you will enjoy this record.

Steven Wilson: The Overview

The prolific Porcupine-Tree frontman returns with another ambitious solo album, and I have been spinning it regularly since it dropped. In my Apple-Music year-end wrap-up, I was mildly surprised to find that Steven Wilson was my most listened-to artist. But it makes a kind of sense, because in addition to this new record, I newly discovered a couple of great albums from his back catalogue—The Raven that Refused to Sing and The Future Bites—after reading his fascinating memoir. This concept of this new album is cosmic scale: the tininess of the human experience in the context of the unimaginably vast universe, a distinction which we can’t allow ourselves to contemplate too much:

And there, in an ordinary street,
A car isn’t where it would normally be,
The driver in tears, about his payment arrears,
Still, nobody hears when a sun disappears,
In a galaxy afar.

The album is made of two long tracks—two suites really—which take you on a musical and lyrical journey through space and time. This is a record that will repay patience and repeated listening.

And that’s it! I hope you find some music here that you will love. Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet new year’s calendar to yours.

Gentle reader,

I will return in a few days for the final installment of my favorite music of the year. I initially projected that I would complete it this week, but Christmas happened. Meanwhile, I thought I would let you know what I’m reading during the holiday break, a time when I try to read at least one book that has nothing to do with my work.

Somehow, I missed all of the press for this novel when it was published a year ago, which is kind of perfect, because now I can just buy the paperback instead of the hardcover. I have been reading John le Carré’s novels for my entire adult life, and, like most people, my favorites are his masterpieces involving his character George Smiley, especially The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley’s People. And so I was a little skeptical about the prospect of the late author’s son, Nick Harkaway, taking up the Smiley baton. I’ve read only one of Harkaway’s earlier novels, and I liked it fine, but it was quite different from his father’s writing. But I heard him interviewed last week on Fresh Air, and I was intrigued.

I’m one chapter in, and I can say only “so far, so good.” I’ll let you know what I think after I finish it.

Meanwhile, enjoy the holidays, and, as always, thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

John

Gentle Reader:

After all my talk of organizing this year’s list in dozens, I inadvertently included thirteen albums in last week’s installment. Consider it a baker’s dozen. As a result, this week’s installment will include only eleven albums. However, this week’s edition also includes my album of the year, and so I will dedicate a bit more space to that entry. Also, I got the alphabet wrong last week, and so this week’s first entry should have come before last week’s final entry—for all of you pedants out there.

So, here are eleven more favorite albums of the year, from H to M!

Yours,

John

Joe Hisaishi Conducts the Music of Steve Reich and Joe Hisaishi

The English would say that the music of Steve Reich is like marmite—a spreadable yeast extract and byproduct of brewing that some people love to eat on toast, while some cannot abide it. There is no middle ground. Reich emerged with the minimalists of the late 60s and early 70s, most notably Terry Riley and Philip Glass, though he soon developed his own distinctive style of repetitive figures pulsing and going in and out of phase in a sort of hypnotic wash. While I enjoy Reich’s music, many do not, and if you number among those, then you may safely skip this piece.

Do not, however, skip the conductor Joe Hisaishi’s work that is paired here with Reich’s Desert Music. While Hisaishi’s The End of the World shares some of Reich’s minimalist DNA, there is notable jazz influence here, along with some swirling fugal digressions, and the music is more dramatic, especially with the inclusion of soprano Ella Taylor. The other link between these pieces is the ecological one, which they evoke and explore here under Hisaishi’s adept baton. And Ella Taylor will break your heart as she sings lyrics from the classic Skeeter Davis song, with an unsettling orchestral accompaniment:

Why do the birds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world
It ended when I lost your love?

Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (and sad women)

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my album of the year. Since it dropped in March, I have listened to it countless times, and it never gets old. It almost instantly became part of my personal canon—really one of my favorite albums ever. The record makes for a striking contrast after the band’s previous album, Jubilee, which was a much more exuberant exercise in pop, complete with synths and horns. For Melancholy Brunettes, on the other hand, is much more restrained, subtle, and lyrically sophisticated. I have already reviewed this album, so I will quote (and lightly revise) much of that review here:

“Here Is Someone” begins the album with celesta, flute, gamelan—an orchestration so delicate it might dissolve if you exhaled too close. Zauner sings, “Life is sad, but here is someone,” in a tone that feels neither defeated nor resolved. It just is. That sentence—spare, wistful, almost parenthetical—might as well be the album’s ethos, at least in its quieter moments: there will also be some scathing commentary on toxic masculinity, but that comes later. For now, we have gentle statement of fact, spoken as if to no one in particular: here is someone. Hmm.

There’s no mistaking the trace of Crying in H Mart in all this, Zauner’s memoir, which was never a confession in the performative sense, but rather an archaeology of feeling, a document of rituals and meals and helpless love. That same grammar of intimacy and ache is all over For Melancholy Brunettes. The record rarely names its grief outright, but it is shaped by its contours: the empty space at the table, the tenderness that comes too late, the minor key you can’t quite shake. If the memoir was about trying to keep someone alive through memory, this album lives in the after—that slippery, haunted zone where grief stops speaking in language and starts humming instead.

“Honey Water” includes one of the most devastating lines I’ve heard all year: “They say only love can change a man / but all that changes is me.” You can feel the exhaustion in that admission, the way a person bends again and again to meet someone halfway who’s never taken a step. And yet, the music doesn’t swell in sympathy. Instead, it churns forward with layered guitars and synths, carrying that lyric like a stone in its pocket.

Elsewhere, Zauner plays with personas and irony, but always with emotional intelligence. “Mega Circuit” is all jagged guitars and arch delivery—“plotting blood with your incel eunuchs”—a satire of fragile masculinity dressed in a kind of grunge cabaret. It’s playful, but also heavy with disappointment. She’s not making fun; she’s just done waiting.

Well, now that I think about it, she may be kind of making fun too. Zauner is nothing if not ambivalent.

“Orlando in Love” floats in on strings and exits through a side door. The lyric—“Orlando in love / writes sixty-nine cantos / for melancholy brunettes and sad women” sounds like something out of a Woolfian pastiche scored by Sondheim and directed by Sofia Coppola. It’s literary and self-aware and more than a little absurd. But the grandeur is earnest. You can hear Zauner inhabiting a character and at the same time slipping sideways into autobiography: the writer who builds an entire lyrical edifice for women who may never notice, who may already be gone.

“Picture Window” is heart of the album for me. Built on a slow burn of a propulsive bass-line and drums, it reaches for something beyond language. “All of my ghosts are real,” she sings, as though she’s tired of pretending otherwise. There’s a moment late in the track when we seem to be moving towards a kind of musical climax—but we don’t get there. We hang, unresolved, like there’s something left unsaid. That decision—to stop just short of crescendo—is the whole album in miniature.

The musicianship here is subtle and meticulous. Produced by Blake Mills, the album trades DIY immediacy for orchestral precision: celesta, sarod, pedal steel, zither, and gamelan weave through the songs like threads in a tapestry. But nothing ever calls attention to itself or seems out of place. Even the guest appearance by Jeff Bridges (yes, that Jeff Bridges—“the Dude abides”) on “Men in Bars” feels less like a cameo and more like a ghost wandering in from another story. His voice rasps alongside hers—“We built this, and even when it falls apart, it’s ours”—a line that could be about a marriage, a country, a life. It sounds like they mean it.

The closing track, “Magic Mountain,” seals the record with a final, strange benediction: “Once the fever subsides / I’ll return to the flatlands / a new man, a new man.” It’s a Mann-like gesture, actually—Thomas, not Aimee—a nod to retreat and return, to the spiritual illness of modern life. But here, it’s not Mann’s ironic detachment; it’s Zauner’s melancholy clarity. The fever won’t cure you, but it might change you. And even if you return, you won’t be who you were.

If there is one album that I recommend that everyone hear from this year, it is this one. It’s a masterpiece.

Paavo Järvi, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich: Mahler: Symphony No. 1

There are a billion recordings of Mahler’s symphonies these days. It seems a right of passage for conductors to record their Mahler cycles, as it used to be (and still is) with Beethoven cycles. Most of these recordings are safely skippable. Why listen to mediocre Mahler when we have magnificent recordings widely available by such great Mahlerians as Bernstein, Kubelik, Gielen, Chailly, and Walter? Paavo Järvi’s new cycle with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, however, may provide good reasons to try something new.

So far, only the Fifth and now the First have been released. The Fifth, a symphony that many conductors have trouble with, showed great promise for the cycle, and the First continues in that mode. Järvi’s reading lacks some of the emotional fire of Bernstein at his best, but he makes up for it in orchestral precision and transparency. Indeed, this is a terrific recording to listen to with the score, because you can hear all of the parts so well. The tempos tend to be on the brisk side, but that’s not a bad thing, except maybe in some moments in the third movement, which can seem rushed. But overall, this is an impressive Mahler 1, and I look forward to the rest of the cycle as it appears.

But don’t take my word for it, here is a review by my favorite classical music critic:

Mon Laferte: Femme Fatale

Mon Laferte’s previous album, Autopoiética, was brilliant and experimental. The current album is just a great but returns to older sensibilities, inspired by the likes of Billie Holiday, as well as Laferte’s own run playing Sally Bowles in a production of Caberet. (Incidentally, I was in a production of that show when I was in high school in the 1980s!) The result is a sound that draws from jazz, cabaret, and, of course, Latin sources, the whole of which showcases the singer’s fantastic voice.

In the title track, she sings: “En mi voz tengo un reino de tormenta en primavera... Lo vuelvo a hacer, lo quemo todo. Soy experta en el arte de sabotear.” (”In my voice, I have a kingdom of storms in spring... I do it again, I burn it all down. I am an expert in the art of sabotage.”)

Indeed!

Natalia Lafourcade: Cancionera

This wonderful Mexican singer returns with her twelfth album and, like Mon Laferte, she is interested in capturing a range of older styles, drawing on jazz and Mexican folk. In order to create a sense of authenticity, all of the tracks on the record were recorded live in single takes to analogue tape. The credits include a star-studded lineup to accompany Lafourcade’s fantastic vocal instrument, Hermanos Gutiérrez and Marc Ribot, just to name a couple.

The album’s title, however, means “singer/songwriter” or “troubadour,” which emphasizes the artist’s intellect and introspection over any sort of virtuosity, and the title is earned. This is an album well worth your time.

The Last Dinner Party: From the Pyre

This band’s terrific debut album appeared on last year’s list, and they are back in 2025 with a worthy follow up. This record just dropped in October, and I have had time for only a few listens. While not as immediately arresting as their debut, it is the sort of album that grows on you and gets into your head. There is an irresistible theatricality to much of it, and it demands your attention: this is not background music. I may write a full review of this when I have had more time with it.

Mansur: Pentatonic Ruins

This record is difficult to categorize, but I would call it world-ambient with middle-eastern leanings, with a bit of trip-hop thrown in for good measure. The band creates an immersive and gorgeous sonic wash using a combination of electronics, acoustic instruments, and traditional instruments, like the oud, the ney, and the erhu. Martina Horváth provides ethereal, wordless vocals, which completes the band’s magical soundscape.

Men I Trust: The Equus Albums (Equus Asinus and Equus Caballus)

I have been a fan of this Canadian band for a decade now, and their music always goes down like a tall drink of water. While their music is always pleasant to listen to and is exquisitely produced, there is an elusively ambitious quality to their lovely pop style, a subtlety to the slickness. This pair of albums may deconstruct that elusive quality, since the two records essentially divide their stylistic tendencies in two, with Equus Asinus (“donkey”) tending more towards acoustic instruments and folk and Equus Caballus (“horse”) tending towards polished pop. Put these records on in the background, or listen to them closely. They work both ways.

Kelly Moran: Don’t Trust Mirrors

This artist also appeared on last year’s list, but this album, while a follow up, is very different. From my earlier, capsule review: “Keyboard wizard Moran returns after last year’s beautiful, pianistic Moves in the Field with this much more electronically focused album. So don’t expect more of the same, as she explores a range of sonic textures and effects.”

Morcheeba: Escape the Chaos

While most 90s trip-hop acts have disappeared or split up to pursue solo careers, Morcheeba has become a sort of multigenerational family business over its three decades of music making, as Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey are joined by their spouses and their children on this album.

The album’s title is a fine summation of its effect on the listener: an immersing, inviting escape from the chaos of the world.

Antoine Morinière & Thibaut Garcia: Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Arr. Garcia & Morinière for Two Guitars)

There have been many, many arrangements of the Goldberg Variations over the centuries (for string quartet, orchestra, voices, chamber ensemble, etc., etc.), but I tend to listen pretty exclusively to keyboard versions, either on harpsichord or piano. This new version, however, for two guitars, has me coming back to it repeatedly—perhaps because the plucked strings invoke the harpsichord’s tonality while providing a different, more expressive spin. It’s Bach. It’s guitar. Two of my favorite things.

So that’s it for the second installment. I’ll be back next week for the final installment. Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet Moog synthesizer to yours.