Man of Middangeard
September 2 is the 38th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien (1973). The man who inspired so many to see the real, enchanted world and not the sterile, imagined one of modernity was himself inspired by deeply Christian Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The very idea of "Middle Earth" came from a (likely) ninth-century poem called Christ or The Ascension, by a man named Cynewulf. In honor of the creator of Lord of the Rings, here's the relevant passage:
Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended,
ond soðfæsta sunnan leoma,
torht ofer tunglas, þu tida gehwane
of sylfum þe symle inlihtes!
Swa þu, god of gode gearo acenned,
sunu soþan fæder, swegles in wuldre
butan anginne æfre wære,
swa þec nu for þearfum þin agen geweorc
bideð þurh byldo, þæt þu þa beorhtan us
sunnan onsende, ond þe sylf cyme
þæt ðu inleohte þa þe longe ær,
þrosme beþeahte ond in þeostrum her,
sæton sinneahtes; synnum bifealdne
deorc deaþes sceadu dreogan sceoldan.
Charles W. Kennedy has translated this to read:
Hail Day-Star! Brightest angel sent to man *throughout the earth* [in Middle Earth], and Thou steadfast splendour of the sun, bright above stars! Ever Thou dost illumine with Thy light the time of every season. As Thou, begotten God of God, Son of the True Father, without beginning abodest ever in the splendour of heaven, so now for need Thy handiwork bessecheth boldly that Thou send the bright sun unto us; that Thou come and shed Thy light on those who long ere this, compassed about with mist and in the darkness, clothed in sin, sit here in the long night, and must needs endure the dark shadow of Death.
How boring is the world of Christopher Hitchens and his fellow science-worshipers! Tolkien, like Cynewulf, knew that reality is far more interesting than the mere visible world.
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Aaron,
Thanks for this wonderful tribute to a wonderful writer. Both Tolkien and his friend and colleauge C. S. Lewis were scorned for swimming against the currents of their time, but they continue to have a far greater influence than their Oxford colleagues who went along with that secularist tide.
It is indeed good to see the fruits of the Hand of Providence, the Author of the only story, the story in which we are creatures and not mere characters, wright His work through those very creatures: pagan Saxons, ancestors mine, swept Christianity and its Roman vestiges from the British Isles, only to be in the proper span of time themselves converts to and defenders of the Faith. From Cynewulf to Tolkien runs the divine thread. Thanks to Dr. Wolf for pointing it out to us, for such communions which make the past not the past are easily lost in post-modernity.
When I discovered Tolkien, almost every work of fiction that I read before and after suffered in comparison. I was in a funk until I realized that just as a man cannot step into the same river twice, a man cannot read the same book twice, not because the book changed like the water in the river, but because the man changed from his experiences between readings. Now I delight in rereading the Hobit and Rings trilogy because doing so not only brings back happy memories from my first discovery, each reading also becomes a new delightful discovery because I am more adequate to the task of understanding what Tolkien was trying to tell us. I put Faulkner's "The Bear" and "The Brothers Karamazov" in that category, too.
Yesterday, as Dr. Wolf has reminded us, marked the anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien. As I thought about Tolkien last night, I remembered a paper which I once contemplated writing, a paper which I never wrote and which I quite likely never will right. It would have been a comparison of two passages in two very disparate works: Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
It would have been a comparison of the Valley of Ashes, where George Wilson owns a garage. Overlooking the surrounding garbage heap is a billboard advertizing an ophthalmologist, a billboard with a set of huge eyes looking through a pair of glasses with Tolkien's passage in The Two Towers of Frodo and Sam in the gray desolation with the Eye of Sauron searching them out. I was struck by the descriptive similarities of the two passages, with absolutely no discernible objective correlative in content or intent.