Seeing Stones

‘On Seeing Stones’ is a series about a short story told by J.R.R. Tolkien one Wednesday in 1936 and subsequently worked up into a long story about the Ring of Sauron. Following Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism, this series unveils the design of The Lord of the Rings to restore a sense of history to Middle-earth.

The series is hosted on the Silmarillion Writers Guild, as part of the newsletter column A Sense of History. A new post is published each month and linked from this page.

1. One Wednesday in 1936

Tolkien’s famous British Academy lecture ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ was delivered in London in November 1936. A shadow was falling over Europe. This first post reads the ‘northern theory of courage’ invoked in the lecture in relation to the view from the high windows of England’s ivory towers. Comparing The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money of John Maynard Keynes with Tolkien’s lecture reveals a contemporary academic fixation with Time and a careful reappraisal of the place of imagination in the making of history.

2. Anglo-Saxon Tower

The 1936 allegory of the tower is read in the context of the lecture in which it was delivered, revealing an Anglo-Saxon time machine. Beowulf is a tale of a heathen hero of the old homeland, where the Angles and other tribes lived before their migration to the British Isles and conversion to Christianity. Pictured as an enchanted tower, the winding stairs of which take an Anglo-Saxon audience from the green grass of a little kingdom in the British Isles to a view that had vanished from their own waking world. For Tolkien, the Anglo-Saxon poet won a great, if fleeting victory in our human war against forgetting, our collective doom in history. Reading Tolkien’s allegory with the exordium to the Anglo-Saxon poem, we perceive that, in the world of the poem, knowledge of heaven above was forgotten long ago while what is beyond the western ocean is in the process of being forgotten. This post marks the spot to which this series aims to return having stepped through The Lord of the Rings.

3. Rock Garden

Tolkien’s original allegory of Beowulf has the merit of providing a diagram of the poem that illustrates precisely what the argument of the 1936 lecture is all about (as opposed to the canonical allegory of the tower that nobody understands). The point of contention is not the value of this over that stone, but the aesthetic value of the whole design. Tolkien argues that historical stones on the circumference and mythical stones in the center constitutes a difficult, ambitious, yet coherent design. The metaphor of the rock garden provides a way to think about Tolkien’s own stories, and invites the question why such a useful image was substituted for an enigmatic tower with a view that one must read Tolkien’s stories to appreciate.

4. First Brick in the Wall

With this post I open up the question of how for half a century we (Tolkien fans) have been content with the wrong reading of the 1936 allegory of the tower. Jane Chance Nitzsche was the architect of the new-Elizabethan consensus reading of the 1936 allegory - I mean the conventional interpretation dropped on your head in online Tolkien forums since before even there was an Internet. This in itself is curious because the thesis of Chance’s psychoanalysis of Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ is totally out to lunch. Chance it was who first banished the Historians from respectable Tolkien society. Unlike Tom Shippey, however, who will soon establish as dogma among the Tolkien community that the 1936 tale of a tower is just allegory, Chance glimpses the power of a fantastic story. The fantasy she unveils is her own, but read as fan-fiction we feel it touch the magic of Tolkien’s 1936 short story.

5. Fawlty Towers

Some years ago, Tom Shippey’s Road to Middle-earth (1982) awakened my interest in Tolkien’s philological studies. On reading this post, the emeritus professor called me an ‘online troll’. Surveying Shippey’s accounts of Tolkien and the Beowulf-poet, this post registers a protest against coyness in the face of evil. This reading of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ points to some hallmarks of Nazi ideology in what is taken to be the foundations of The Lord of the Rings, but Shippey declines to unpack what he is hinting at.

Written before but published a few days after October 7, 2023, reception of this post was surreal. Receiving the news on the ground here in Israel and looking murderous antisemitism in the face, I was at the same time receiving also a stream of messages from friends abroad, genuinely concerned not for the safety of my family but rather my good name in light of the series of nasty comments accumalating under Shippey’s (since deleted) rebuttal on his academia.edu page. What can I say? Footnote 4 of my January post takes apart Shippey’s analysis of the 1936 allegory. For an SWG perspective on this illustration of what ‘Tolkien scholars’ do in the dark, see here.

6. The Peaks of Taniquetil

This post completes my criticism of Tom Shippey’s reading of the 1936 allegory (see footnote 4). J.R.R. Tolkien borrowed the image of an Anglo-Saxon tower that is Beowulf from a story of time travel back to a mythical Atlantis, which he had penned earlier in 1936 and titled ‘The Fall of Númenor’. As Christopher Tolkien notes, the original Númenórean towers reappear as the three Elf-towers of Emyn Beraid on the margin of The Lord of the Rings. This, my January post of 2024, proposes that a sensible road to Middle-earth will lead us to an understanding of the 1936 Anglo-Saxon tower - this series now pivots to an invesigation of the western Elf-tower, which housed a singular stone.

7. In the House of the Fairbairns

Both Anglo-Saxon tower and Elf-tower are enigmatic, but careful reading unearths more on the Elf-tower. This post proposes a solution to a literary riddle, posed in the long ago by my friend Tom Hillman: How is the vision of Valinor beheld at his end by Frodo Baggins recorded in the Red Book of Westmarch? I seek an answer in two far-seeing visions of Frodo Baggins, in the house at Crickhollow and on his second night in the house of Tom Bombadil, which point to, respectively, the Elf-tower and the Seeing Stone or palantír within it.

8. Seeing Stones in Dark Towers

This post completes my investigation of the three far-seeing dreams or visions that follow the night that Frodo spends with the Elves in the Woody End. Between two intimations of a view of Valinor, the intermediary dream, the first in the house of Bombadil, takes us inland to Orthanc. As inscribed above the western doors of the Mines of Moria, that magical illustration of Elf-Dwarf collaboration, the name of the game is treachery. Stepping from Orthanc to two towers on the border of Mordor, I suggest that Tolkien has drawn in the person of Frodo Baggins the image of the Stone by which the will of the Necromancer enters a Tower.

9. Crossroads

The Road Goes Ever On (1967), a late work of J.R.R. Tolkien, includes annotated translations of two Elvish songs, Namárië and A Elbereth Gilthoniel. This post reads in these two commentaries the hand of Tolkien drawing aside a veil to disclose Elbereth on the mountain beyond the Sea, watching over the journey of Frodo Baggins. This image is hidden in the Red Book, but Tolkien hints that it had been received by Gildor Inglorion and the Elves that Frodo, Sam, and Pippin meet in the Shire. This first crossroads of the narrative may offer an explanation of Frodo’s three far-seeing visions. Looking back from the crossroads to the Stone in the Elf-tower, we now have a notion what the Elves saw in it.

10. Thálassa!

The encounter of Frodo Baggins and the Lady Galadriel, the foundation stone of The Lord of the Rings, is a semblance of the hidden image received by some Elves in the days of the story in the Stone in the Elf-tower. While he never climbs the stairs of this Elf-tower, in Lothlórien Frodo Baggins descends a flight of steps to look into Galadriel’s Mirror, wherein he first sees the Sea. Analysis of the two ships that Frodo sees sailing on the sea reveals Tolkien’s conception of a Third Age of the Middle-earth, as a last age of our world when the light of the Valar might still be seen, though it was already hidden to mortals.

11. Tale of Years

This is a placeholder for three or even four posts, which tackle the composition of The Lord of the Rings as revealed by the early drafts of the story edited by Christopher Tolkien. My idea is to cut through the preliminary account of the design of the story set out in the previous two posts by a chronological tour that notes when and how the various elements fell into place. The last of these posts paves the way for the final discussion in this first volume of the series by relating composition of an alternative version of the Númenor myth with Tolkien’s vision of the end of the story - the ‘ship-funeral’ of Frodo Baggins.

12. Fairy-tale Turn

In this post, the return of Aragorn as king of Gondor is drawn out of the exordium to Beowulf and the fairy-theory of Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-stories’ is illuminated by the hidden theory of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’. Attending to the ships that Frodo sees in the Mirror of Galadriel, this and the following post engage critically with Verlyn Flieger’s curious passage past the 1936 Anglo-Saxon tower in the introductory chapters of her first book, Splintered Light (1983). The aim is to disentangle Flieger’s powerful insights from the faulty reading of the 1936 allegory that Flieger derives from Chance and Shippey.

13. Staircase

Returning to the exordium to Beowulf in these last two posts, the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon and the Elf-tower is delineated. In this post the heathen heroes under heaven are joined by three Hobbits, all gazing out to Sea at the ‘funeral-ship’ of the Bagginses. Once we agree what we are looking at here, we can all descend the staircase and return back to our own houses, wiser Hobbits, if not happier.

Volume II. 1. Freawaru the Hapless

Volume II returns to 1936 and reads concurrently ‘The Fall of Númenor’ and Tolkien’s wider commentaries on the mysterious depths of the stones of Beowulf. We begin with the forgotten tragedy of doomed love and world-ending in the prehistory of old English literature, the tale of the Danish princess and the last priest-king of the North. Echoes of the Entwives and the air of Númenor.

Art credits: Rock garden image worked up with thanks from Dave World’s The Callanish Stones 4k drone , Isle of Lewis, Scotland.