‘Seeing Stones’ is a series on a short story told by J.R.R. Tolkien one Wednesday in 1936. The story is an allegory of the making and modern reception of the Old English poem Beowulf and is illuminated by its sequel, a long story about Hobbits and the Ring of Sauron. Following Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism, the series unveils the design of The Lord of the Rings and, returning to 1936, explains it, restoring a sense of history to Middle-earth.
Allegory in Old Stone
Tolkien’s Friends
Elostirion
Fusion
- Passing Ships
- Straight Road
- Spiral Staircase
- Monsters and Critics
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. Scroll down for abstracts.
Allegory in Old Stone
November 1936, the British Academy, London: Tolkien is delivering ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’, a defence of the art of an Anglo-Saxon poet who made a tale about mythical monsters. He introduces his argument with an allegory of the making and reception of Beowulf. In this short story, a man made a tower of old stones, and from the top of it he could see the sea; but his descendants did not perceive the use of the tower, and his friends demolished it to inspect the old stones.
Three posts frame the image of the poem as a tower in relation to the darkening horizon viewed from the English ivory towers of 1936, Tolkien’s key argument that Beowulf reveals a fusion of Christian and ancient English eschatologies, and his earlier - and to begin with, far more helpful - image of the Old English poem as a rock garden.
1. One Wednesday in 1936
In 1936 Great Britain was in the midst of economic depression while a shadow was falling over Europe. This post contrasts the views on the darkening horizon from England’s two ancient ivory towers. Earlier in the year, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the Cambridge economist J.M. Keynes had circled the fact that the past is no sure guide to the future, underlining that imagination shapes our present expectation of what is to come. By contrast, the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon began with the one certain fact about our future - we will die. With doom his theme, Tolkien turned to the old literature of the English past to draw out an ancient image of courage, mythically depicted by an Anglo-Saxon poet. Beowulf is a tale of youthful victory and final defeat at the hands of mythical monsters, a Christian’s story of a noble heathen hero of an imagined past, who stood his ground even against a dragon, and deemed defeat no refutation, though his death spelled the doom of his people.
2. Anglo-Saxon Tower
The tower of the 1936 allegory rises up from the ground of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, but the enchanted staircase leads the Anglo-Saxon audience up to a view down on the ‘secondary world’ of the poem - the heathen world of old as mapped by the rock garden, with mythological doom at the center. Gazing inland from a high chamber of the tower we perceive a succession of three monsters, the last of which, the dragon, is Beowulf’s doom. Turning around, descending in time, and looking out to sea, a funeral-ship recalls an ancient memory of a ship that sailed out of the horizon, bearing a kingly gift. Between this coming of the king and his departure, however, tradition has been forgotten, and twisted. The heathen heroes under the sky who watch the second ship of the poem’s exordium sail back into the horizon do not know where it will arrive.
3. Rock Garden
Back in 1933, Tolkien had imagined Beowulf as a rock garden, the stones of which are overturned by the friends of the gardener. The image of a rock garden diagrams the poem and maps the argument of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’. Tolkien is arguing with W.P. Ker and his followers (the ‘descendants’ of the later allegory), who see the tower but not its intended use. The point of contention is not the value of this over that stone, but the design, with mythical doom at the center and (mainly) historical legends on the outer edges. Situating the poet in history, Tolkien reads in the design the intention to draw out of the old heroic lays their common theme of doom and give to it mythical expression. As we shall see, the metaphor of a rock garden not only diagrams the dispute with W.P. Ker, it also lends itself to the analysis of The Lord of the Rings. This raises the question of why such a useful image was substituted for an enigmatic tower that nobody understands?
Tolkien’s Friends
The allegory of 1936 depicts foolish friends of the Anglo-Saxon author who demolish his tower. Descending 43 steps of our spiral staircase we arrive in 1979, in which year Tolkien’s friends commenced a comparable work of demolition on his allegory. For four decades, Tolkien scholars and fans have put aside the original story of the tower by J.R.R. Tolkien and taken as canon rather its modern reconstruction by two early academic friends of the author. The most pressing historical question arising out of this series of posts concerns our own critical faculties, or lack of them. We remain enthralled to the authority of two flawed academic monographs published in the wake of the infamous Sex Pistols album cover trial!
Three posts explore the making of what I call the new-Elizabethan consensus, co-fashioned by two academic rivals within a decade of the death of our author. What has endured to this day as a consensus misreading of the allegory reconstructs the second act, fails to account for the sea, and buries the road to Middle-earth.
4. First Brick in the Wall
Jane Chance Nitzsche (1979) was the architect of the new-Elizabethan consensus - the conventional reading of the 1936 allegory repeated in all secondary literature and dropped on your head in online Tolkien forums since before even there was an Internet. This is odd because Chance’s thesis rests on a psychoanalytic reading of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ that is totally out to lunch. Chance draws Tolkien as a self-hating scholar, his lecture the fantasy of an artist who battles academic critics, pedantic scholars whose lack of imagination makes them monsters. Yet unlike Tom Shippey, who will soon establish as dogma that the 1936 tale of a tower is just allegory, Chance glimpses the power of a fantastic story. The fantasy she unveils steps out of some Californian dreaming of the 1970s, 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, the post registers a protest against coyness in the face of evil. Reading ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’, Shippey points to some hallmarks of Nazi ideology, but declines to unpack what he is hinting at. This Basil Fawlty act - don’t mention the War! - echoes the analysis of Chance. Both academics vanish the ‘descendants’ of the 1936 allegory, presumably because the suggestion of an Anglo-Saxon blood-line made them queasy. Hence a dialectical relationship between enthusiastic ‘friends’ and unimaginative ‘descendants’ has become - apparently to everyone ever since, and in the face of the printed word - a moral parable of how the tower of art is destroyed by (one group of) academic monsters, branded Critics by Chance and Historians by Shippey.
- Written before but published a few days after October 7, 2023, reception of this post was surreal. Receiving the news on the ground in Israel and looking murderous antisemitism in the face, I was at the same time receiving 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 accumulating under Shippey’s (since deleted) rebuttal on his academia.edu page. What can I say? There is no debating incompetence, but footnote 4 of the following post takes apart Shippey’s misreading 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
Shippey (1982) insists that the short story is ‘just allegory’, with every metaphor an ‘equation’ to be solved, but cannot account for the culminating image of the story, the view on the sea. He remarks on the similarity of this Anglo-Saxon tower and the three Elf-towers described in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, only to assert the shared sea-view an image of a ‘non-scholarly desire’, ‘private’ to Tolkien, and continue on his way. Two questions confront us when we peer back into this past: (i) Why in 1982 did a professional philologist walk past the road to Middle-earth? (ii) Why have all subsequent critics elected to follow this confused and myopic friend? The second question becomes more pressing after 1987, when ‘The Fall of Númenor’ was published and all could read how, after the flat world became a round sphere, some people built high towers to better look out on the Sea. Christopher Tolkien then remarked that these Númenórean towers would become the three Elf-towers of The Lord of the Rings. Nobody noticed that they became Elf-towers only after an intermediary step in November 1936, when one became an Anglo-Saxon tower. Here is the road to Middle-earth, and it leads upwards by spiral staircase.
Elostirion
Opening the door buried in The Road to Middle-earth, we ascend 15 steps of our tower, climbing from 1982 to 1967, the first year one might purchase, not only all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings but also The Road Goes Ever On, a collection of songs from the Red Book set to music. With these volumes in hand, we consider Elostirion, the tallest and most western of the three Elf-towers. Before our eyes, the map of the story is expanded as Elostirion moves from the western margin to the center and hidden narrative threads of the adventure inland are revealed. Only on concluding composition of these posts did I see that they had been written in dialogue with Verlyn Flieger’s A Question of Time (1997), which taught me how to read the enchantment of Tolkien’s story but overlooks Elostirion as a source of enchantment.
These four posts tease out the hidden design of The Lord of the Rings, revealing an image of the tower of the 1936 allegory, climbed in this long story only in a dream of fairy-tale adventure, the spiral ascent stitched as a red thread into the horizontal adventure of Frodo Baggins. This close reading of The Lord of the Rings clarifies the meaning of the 1936 allegory: Gazing inland from a high chamber of the Anglo-Saxon tower, we look upon an older age of our world, but on clambering out on to the roof and turning around to look out to sea we recall an even more ancient past.
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 sight of Valinor beheld by Frodo Baggins recorded in the Red Book of Westmarch? To spell out the situation: At the end of his story, Frodo gives the Red Book to Sam to complete, and read out from in the age to come, and then boards the last fairy-ship to take the Straight-road into the West. So how is what he sees on arriving on the further shore recorded in the Red Book? Two of Frodo Baggins’ far-seeing visions early in his adventure point to an answer - the secret of the Stone in the Tower; an answer guessed by Sam Gamgee, and passed down by his descendants, generating a distinctive Undertowers reading of the Red Book.
8. Seeing Stones in Dark Towers
Frodo has far-seeing visions on three consecutive nights. Between visions of Elostirion and of the shores of Valinor, the Hobbit dreams of Gandalf’s rescue from Orthanc, the black Númenórean tower where resides a traitor wizard and a palantír. Considering the Seeing Stones as they appear in Books IV and V of The Lord of the Rings, this post draws out of Frodo’s second far-seeing vision the two towers that await him on the border of Mordor. 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. Climbing with Samwise Gamgee all the way up to the topmost chamber of the Númenórean watchtower of Cirith Ungol, I suggest that Tolkien draws 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) 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. The night spent with the Elves in the Woody End is followed by the succession of three far-seeing visions, and this first crossroads of the narrative points to Elostirion as their source. Looking back from the crossroads of the Woody End to the Stone in the Elf-tower, we now have a notion what the Elves saw in it.
10. Thálatta! Thálatta!
The encounter of Frodo Baggins and the Lady Galadriel, the keystone of The Lord of the Rings, draws a semblance of the hidden image received in the Stone in the Elf-tower. While he never in waking life climbs the stairs of this 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 on the Sea reveals Tolkien’s conception of the Third Age of Middle-earth, an early historical age of our round Earth when the light of the Valar might still be seen with straight-sight, though it was hidden to mortals.
Fusion
From 1967, we ascend 31 steps to arrive in early 1936. Elostirion was first imagined as built by the exiles of Númenor, and we now discover how a Númenórean tower was adopted as an image of Beowulf. These four posts spell out the fundamental claim of Seeing Stones: ‘The Fall of Númenor’ gives the key to the allegorical tower of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’. Read right, the allegory is in turn the key to Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism, which frames the flat world of ancient northern myth within the circle of a Ptolemaic model of the cosmos.
Above is a picture of Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism: a map that juxtaposes within one composite image the two perspectives on the world of an Anglo-Saxon who ascends to the top of the internal spiral staircase. However, my version of this image reveals the place of Tolkien’s myth of Númenor - attributed to the Elves but composed for a modern audience who lived several centuries after Nicolaus Copernicus. Hence, above the Straight-road of flat-world mythology are the spherical heavens of the round cosmos of Ptolemaic astronomy, but below the horizon is rather the round Earth, the making of which from a portion of the Straight-road is told in the Elvish myth of Númenor. For us to climb the enchanted staircase that is Beowulf we must first adjust our sense of history so that we apprehend the universe as do the Anglo-Saxons of the age of Bede. We must read the poem as if a round spherical cosmos and an unmoving Earth at its center is newly received scientific fact. By the same token, stepping out of Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism and into the secondary world of his own stories, this ancient image of a circular cosmos falls away, leaving only a world made round at the origin of history.
11. Passing Ships
A return to 1936, to look with Tolkien into the exordium to Beowulf, wherein are seen two ships sailing on the sea. The first sails to our shores out of an ancient myth of the coming of the king. The second ship is an innovation of the Anglo-Saxon poet, borrowed from contemporary British tales of the death of Arthur, and returns the body of the dead king into the Unknown beyond the horizon. Our challenge in the remaining posts of this first volume of Seeing Stones is to tease out the relationship between these two ships of the Old English poem and the three ships seen by Frodo in the Mirror of Galadriel. To do so we must get square on Tolkien’s Beowulf criticism.
12. Straight Road
Tolkien reads the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf as ancient myth, the ship-burial as Anglo-Saxon art. The art breathes meaning into the myth, yet suggests that beyond the Shoreless Sea is hell, the realm of mortal shades in ancient English mythology. Early in 1936, Tolkien called on the Elves to spell out his reading of the exordium from the other side of history. The Elves tell ‘The Fall of Númenor’, a final tale of the ancient world, and suggest that the mythical ship sailed the Straight Road, which was lost to all but memory in its wake. From this perspective, the funeral-ship is a two-sided symbol. From an orthodox Christian point of view, horizontal passage into the West becomes a metaphor for the ascent of the soul out of Time after death. But to an Anglo-Saxon who has climbed the stairs of the tower, the funeral-ship is a symbol of the doom of tradition.
13. Spiral Staircase
The Anglo-Saxon poet looks on the sea from the highest point of the tower and then, without saying all that was seen, begins a descent. The way of the poem traces a spiral staircase. Ultimately, the plan of this staircase follows an Elvish design. The staircase is a picture of the descent of mortal generations in history, drawn from the perspective of those who do not die.
14. Monsters and Critics
‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ is a defence of the art of the old poet. At its core, the defence illustrates the art in the tale of the tower, and then demonstrates that the central theme of Doom fuses heathen and Christian ideas of Time to give dual meanings to the monsters that Beowulf battles. Teasing out Tolkien’s contrast of Beowulf with the later Icelandic myth of Ragnarök and his own tales of legendary alliances, mythical battles with Morgoth, as also the War of the Ring, the eschatological vision at the heart of Tolkien’s argument is spelled out.
Art credits: Rock garden image worked up with thanks from Dave World’s The Callanish Stones 4k drone, Isle of Lewis, Scotland.