The series was originally hosted on the Silmarillion Writers Guild, as part of the newsletter column A Sense of History. Now I am gathering and revamping the old posts into a book. Scroll for contents and overview of each section and chapter.
Prologue. Tower
Allegory in Old Stone
Elostirion
Fusion
- Passing Ships
- Straight Road
- Spiral Staircase
- Doom and Ascent
A Hobbit’s Guide to Stairs
- Two towers
- Ring & Stone
- Towers
- Fairy-tale Turns
- Sea-road
Epilogue. Undertowers
Appendixes: Tolkien’s friends
A. First Brick in the Wall B. Fawlty Towers
Prologue. Tower
Below a coin-bright moon, a corkscrew spine turns, and turns again. The serpent bites down. It is far too late.
Unlike other studies, Seeing Stones illuminates Middle-earth by means of time travel. We employ Tolkien’s own method of stairs, but employ a much smaller staircase, our journey taking us past only a handful of windows onto the twentieth century. A staircase is a vertical adventure: Up and down again.
Our staircase-tour discovers the design of The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) in a story fashioned of metaphors and told in an academic lecture of 1936. Descending to 1979, we watch Tolkien’s academic friends demolish the story, burying the road to Middle-earth under a pile of rubble. Ascending to 1967, we purchase in a bookshop the key to Tolkien’s design and unveil an Anglo-Saxon Elf-stone as the hidden foundation of the story of Frodo Baggins.
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.
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. Tower and Rock Garden
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.
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?
3. 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.
4. Frodo’s Dreams
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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Doom and Ascent
‘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.
A Hobbit’s Guide to Stairs
‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ is a fierce defence of the design of an Anglo-Saxon work of art that hitherto had not been seen for what it was. Imagine some friendly member of the audience that Wednesday in November 1936 catching the Oxford Professor on his way out with unsolicited counsel: ‘Your defence of this novel Anglo-Saxon mode of art would be clinched with a tale in modern English, made on the same design.’ Tolkien replies: ‘That is what I did with my allegory of the tower!’
But in the end he did make a sequel, a fairy-story for our own day in which some critics actually climb the enchanted Anglo-Saxon staircase, although only metaphorically, as it were in the dream of a horizontal adventure that follows the map of Beowulf, only with the sea-journey at the end of the story. Descending 15 stairs as Tolkien composes the Red Book of Westmarch, supposedly penned by the three Hobbit Ring-bearers of Bag-end, a horizontal hole in the ground, we watch him map out a story of two towers. One tower is near the sea, and houses the Stone of Elendil, which is never mentioned in the narrative. The other is inland, the Dark Tower of the Eye of Sauron, and appears to be the very center of the story.
12. Two Towers
Composition of a new Hobbit story began in the week before Christmas 1937 with a long-expected birthday party and the idea of (a) giving Bilbo Baggins an heir, and (b) sending this heir and some friends on a first adventure to a hole on the other side of the hill - a barrow on the Downs above the House of Tom Bombadil. But early in the new year Tolkien tackled the delicate question of what horizontal-hole dwellers make of vertical staircases. Following an unpremeditated encounter with first Black Riders and then Elves, the narrator explains the unmentioned stairs of Hobbiton, three Hobbits discuss the nuisance of stairs, and one describes three Elf-towers beyond the western border, from the tallest of which it is said that one can see the sea. Already in Bag-end, Gandalf had mentioned the Dark Tower of the Necromancer. With one Dark Tower and one white Elf-tower, the foundations of the new Hobbit story were laid.
13. Ring & Stone
Tolkien saw a Ring of Power only in autumn 1938, when the Hobbits reached Weathertop. Our author had taken the Black Riders as Barrow-wights on horseback; but a Hobbit now looked into the invisible face of myth and saw the likely end of his own adventure with a magic ring. For a mortal, a Ring of Power is a perilous bridge, leading into the view of ancient myth glimpsed from a high tower. The Rings of Power project the time-travel of the Anglo-Saxon staircase into the story, allowing Hobbits to walk on the ground into another Time. On an Elvish hand, the result is a horizontal bridge into myth that may be crossed as a tourist, as Frodo steps into Lórien and out again. On a mortal hand, a Ring is a one-way street, as for the Nine who are now undead wraiths.
On the way to Weathertop, Trotter the Hobbit (met in Bree) refers to the Last Alliance, and the story drops into history. Yet only in 1940 did Tolkien bite the bullet. That summer, Trotter became Aragorn, the heir of Elendil, and the new Hobbit story the sequel to ‘The Fall of Númenor’. Elrond in Rivendell became an eyewitness to ancient history, mapping by tower-construction the two ancient Númenórean kingdoms of Elendil. Only with arrival at Isengard in late 1942, when a Ptolemaic crystal orb was thrown from a high window of Orthanc, were these Númenórean towers imagined as once housing Seeing Stones. With the Stone of Elendil hidden in the Elf-tower, Tolkien secured the enchantment of his story; but only once the narrative was complete did he leave any record of this Stone - hiding it in a footnote in an appendix.
14. Fairy-tale Turns
The passage of the funeral-ship in the exordium to Beowulf is mourned by lords in their halls and heroes under the sky. When Aragorn sails an enemy Corsair ship to Gondor, the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf sails into The Lord of the Rings as an image of doom. Tolkien contrasts the perspectives of an unhinged lord in a high chamber and a mighty hero under the sky. Locking wills with Sauron in a Seeing Stone, Denethor the Steward of Minas Tirith sees the ship of Aragorn and falls into suicidal heathen despair. On the battlefield, Éomer of Rohan stands his ground and sings his death song, only for certainty of defeat to turn to joy in victory beyond hope. On Fairy-stories proclaims this turn to joy the hallmark of and seal upon a fairy-story, while our spiral path reveals its source in the ancient memory of the coming of the king, recalled and passed down to our own day in the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf.
15. Sea-road
From the top of the Anglo-Saxon tower, we look down upon heathen heroes watching the funeral-ship of the good king disappear into the horizon. From a high chamber in Elostirion we spy three heroic Hobbits standing on the shore, watching the last fairy-ship return on the Straight Road. The funeral-ship is an innovation of the Anglo-Saxon poet; the fairy-ship a carefully contrived echo fashioned by the twentieth-century apprentice. Once we see how and why the funeral-ship of Beowulf has become the fairy-ship of The Lord of the Rings, we can all descend the staircase and disperse to our own homes, wiser Hobbits, if not happier.
Epilogue. Undertowers
- The second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) added a new section to the Prologue: ‘Note on the Shire Records’, which underlined the significance of Undertowers in the early reception of the Red Book. As with his commentary on two Elvish hymns, published the following year, Tolkien nudged readers towards the Stone of Elendil - the key he had hidden in an appendix. Stepping into the 1970s and descending the staircase to return to the green grass of our own present, none of his friends appear to have caught either clue.
Late in the Second Age, Emyn Beraid became a refuge for Elendil, the exile of Númenor and mythical king who came out of the Sea. When his heart was heavy with exile, Elendil would climb the spiral staircase of Elostirion and gaze over the Sundering Sea.
After the death of Elendil the Elves reclaimed Tower and Stone. Emyn Beraid in the Third Age was a place where High Elves might ascend the spiral stair to gaze upon the starlight on the western sea. At the end of the Third Age it was said among Hobbits that from the tallest of the three Elvish towers one could see the sea. But the Hobbits of the Shire turned their faces away from the Tower Hills in the West, and the Sea became for them a token of death.
After the Elves returned the Stone in the last fairy-ship into the West, the Tower Hills became part of the Westmarch of the Shire, by gift of the King. Emyn Beraid in the Fourth Age became the Hobbit colony of Undertowers, where lived Elanor the Fair, daughter of Samwise Gamgee. Her family, the Fairbairns, were Wardens of the Westmarch and the keepers of the Red Book of Westmarch.
Unlike the early Fourth-Age libraries of Great Smials and Brandy Hall, where eager Hobbit scribes recorded all that adventurious Hobbits could discover on Númenórean Lore or the customs and language of Rohan, the Fairbairns kept to themselves, and passed down their own Hobbit Lore, as received from the Gardener, Samwise Gamgee.
Unlike anyone else in the whole wide world, the Hobbits of Undertowers recognized the past significance of their now empty western tower. And therefore, they possessed the key to the Red Book, which recounted the ending of the previous age of the world. The Undertowers Hobbits were proud of all three of the towers on the hills above their houses, and venerated these monuments. But they did not make the mistake of the Elves of old, and they knew that in their day the Stone was absent from the Tower and the light of Emyn Beraid was now read out of a Book.
So the Tower Hills in the Fourth Age of our Middle-earth became a place to sit by the fire in a house in the valley and listen to a book read out loud, gazing inland with the eye of the mind to survey the world and the doom of an age that had passed. The Hobbits of the Westmarch did not in their ordinary, everyday business of life climb the towers on the hills under which they lived, but on occasion they did because they liked to look out on the sea. Some built boats and sailed out to sea, seeking a lost point of view.
dracon ēc scufun, wyrm ofer weallclif, lēton wēg niman, flōd fæðmian frætwa hyrde.
And in conclusion, a step into an allegory of my own making.
- The Fourth-Age Hobbits of Undertowers could not forever fence themselves off from the wider world to the East. Once they had beheld with their own eyes the great Folly on the Hobbiton Hill - a mock Elf-tower built were once had stood an ancient tree - they resolved to establish, once and for all, the deal with Hobbits and stairs. The result was the famous Undertowers Guide to Stairs. This now ancient Guide is the hidden foundation of this series on Seeing Stones.
Appendices. 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!
The appendices detail 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.
A. 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.
B. 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.
Art credits: Rock garden image worked up with thanks from Dave World’s The Callanish Stones 4k drone, Isle of Lewis, Scotland.