[Bêthberry]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a rather bleak view of this essay, for many reasons. For me, it fails utterly in proving that Tolkien's writings "were strongly influenced by the musico-literary symbolism of Victorian fictionists." There are many reasons for this.

I am initially put off by his stated aim: "This article will focus on the influence of English Victorian fiction on Tolkien's writing style" (p. 149). Eden throughout his essay refers to the works he quotes from Tennyson, Swinburne and Morris as "fiction" and they as "fictionists". These words denote prose fiction, not poetry. Dictionaries even name "novelist" as a synonym for "fictionists" and Tennyson was no novelist, as were Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontes, Trollope, etc. The confusion is particularly unfortunate because the period in question is noted particularly for its prose fiction, the high point in the tradition of realist novels. Instead, the works Eden quotes are poems and their authors are properly called poets. They are long poems which tell stories and perhaps that confuses him, but from time immemorial poetry was used to tell narrative. Look at Beowulf for example. It is a poem, not fiction. To confuse the Arthurian legends with the development of prose fiction is to do a great disservice to those legends even in their Victorian form. Perhaps Eden is not very familiar with narrative poems or perhaps he is trying to discuss these writers as fellow writers of fantasy, but that also is incorrect and inaccurate. So already I'm not trusting his use of language or his knowledge of the field.

(I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of his other essay on Tolkien, "The Music of the Spheres", for similarly sloppy diction. He calls Tolkien "a classicist and medievalist" when Tolkien was not a classicist. He spent his entire professional life and imaginative life defending northern literary traditions, not the Greek and Latin ones. He cannot properly be called a classicist; he knew those languages, but his training was as a medievalist, and particularly an Old English medievalist. It doesn't help that in this essay he calls Elrond's brother "Eros" ( ) (p. 189) either, although as a possible typo this is not as bad as confusing Turin and Tuor, which in a scholarly paper is reprehensible. Again, such confusion does not inspire my confidence in what he has to say.)

Some of you might call this concern for a precise and correctly used vocabulary a pedantic quibble, but as Tolkien has taught me, words do matter. My next point raises no such quibble because it is a basic tenet of literary source scholarship. Nowhere in this essay on "Strains of Elvish Song and Voices" does Eden provide evidence that Tolkien actually read Tennyson's Idylls or Swinburne or even Morris for that matter. If he wants to claim that their writing influenced Tolkien's style, he has to demonstrate great, consistent, and lasting familiarity with their works. The only shred of reference he provides is a footnote to Douglas A. Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien, which briefly identifies Tolkien's familiarity with Morris. That isn't good enough for an argument that is supposed to prove "J.R.R. Tolkien's writings, especially his early mythological and poetic endeavours, were strongly influenced by the musico-literary symbolism of Victorian fictionists" (p. 158-159).

A writer's influences are exceptionally tricky to get right. Tom Shippey said it better than I can in The Road to Middle-earth and so I will quote him here.

Originally Posted by Shippey, pp. 343-344

Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner was the most obvious. . . . But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew first-hand. . . . Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true form from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

That bolding is mine. It is a great shame that Eden refers merely to one small essay by Shippey in his references and not to Shippey's great work on Tolkien's method, because there he would have learnt that Tolkien's sources are original ones and not the second-hand mewlings of those who likely were not as familiar with the originals as Tolkien was. Not once in the entire essay does Eden acknowledge that Tolkien's greatest influence was Beowulf, not a medieval work but an Old English work.

What is required in addition to that kind of biographical information is concerted analysis of the various texts. Summary, description and mere quotation provide only "surface similarities." For example, let me give you links to several famous English poems which are not examples of Victorian medievalism but which are replete with musical imagery. And sea imagery. And if you want I can give you poems which discuss language which aren't Victorian medievalism either.

Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale" "Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?"

Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind" "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:/ Why if my leaves are falling like its own/ The tumult of thy mighty harmonies/ Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone

Wordsworth, "The Solitary Reaper" "The music in my heart I bore,/ Long after it was heard no more."

Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" All of life in this poem is sound, a "living lyre"

Adelaide Proctor, "A Lost Chord" "But I struck a chord of music/Like the sound of a great Amen"

Anne Bradstreet, "In Reference to Her Children" "But sing, my time so near is spent"

Philip Sydney, "You Gote-heard Gods" extensive development of musical references about love-sickness in Arcadia, not a medieval tradition

Harmony and disharmony are fairly basic themes and not defining content. It should be clear from this random smattering of poetry that musical imagery and allusions are not limited to Victorian medievalism. Nor is interest in language. Nor is sea imagery. etc. What is needed is analysis to consider what the musical references mean, how they function, how they fit into the philosophy of the poems. If only Eden had been able to supply the kind of analysis that John Hollander does in The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500-1700 he might have been able to discriminate better between what is a significant theme and what is simple figure of speech. Hollander's book is about how the great theme of cosmic unity was demythologised so that it became simply a decorative metaphor. Isolated quotations do not by themselves demonstrate cosmology. Exposition is needed.

And to go back to Shippey's argument about Tolkien's differences with Wagner: if Wagner failed to achieve the tone and spirit of the first hand materials Tolkien worked with, how much more different was Swinburne's work than some of those early heroic poems. To try to claim that Swinburne influenced Tolkien is both laughable and absurd. Swinburne was attempting to do something modern with his Arthurian legends and that isn't a perspective Tolkien had much sympathy with. I really wonder just how well Eden knows Tolkien.

And just so you know how curmudgeonly I am today, I will point out one more aspect where Eden got it not quite right.

Originally Posted by Eden

Almost all of Tolkien's early work is done in the context of tales or stories as related or even sung to a listener or listeners. What we are reading is the documentation of that listening experience, again another strong indication that Tolkien was trying to portray the way medieval audience would have heard and listened to the great stories of their past.

We can argue over what Eden means by medieval here, although in the context of his essay it seems to refer to post 1066 literature, the literature not of Old English but of Middle English, after the French invasion which Tolkien so deplored. Arthurian legends and the troubadour tradition did not have a patent on oral production. Here's one last poem which should demonstrate that Tolkien's original source was not medieval, and not Victorian, but Old English. I'll quote a modern translation and give a link to the Old English.

Caedmon's Hymn

Originally Posted by modern translation

Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,
the might of the Creator, and his thought,
the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.


In the beginning Cædmon sang this poem.]

Yes, the name "Middle-earth" comes from a poem out of the Old English oral tradition--the first extant poem in the history of our language. Tolkien didn't need to ape the Victorian hit parade.

And just so you know I'm not all that mean, I think very highly of Gregory Martin's contribution, "Music, Myth, and Literary Depth in the 'Land ohne Musik' " And of many other of the contributions in this valuable and significant book. (Haven't read them all yet).

I wouldn't have written at length so despondently about Eden's essay had I not thought that it gave an entirely wrong and misleading view of Tolkien. I can easily and lightly overlook disagreements with my own point of view, with those of Shippey and other major scholars on Tolkien, but I can't ignore a profound misrepresentation of Tolkien's work.