Tolkien Songs
DESCRIPTION: The writings of J. R. R. Tolkien contain much poetry, and because they are so popular, many have tried to set these poems to music. Most of these songs have no traditional currency at all, but some may. This entry tries to summarize those that might.
AUTHOR: Words: usually J. R. R. Tolkien
EARLIEST DATE: (see NOTES)
KEYWORDS: derivative wordplay nonballad | Tolkien Stone Troll Errantry Galadriel
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (4 citations):
N.B. Songs from _The Lord of the Rings_ are cited based on two editions: The Houghton-Mifflin three-volume second edition of 1965 ("HM2Ed," probably the most popular American hardcover edition) and the 50th Anniversary edition of 2004 ("50thEd," with the text closely examined to try to remove many years of errors, making it probably the most authoritative). Book and chapter are also cited to make it possible to find poems in other editions. For background about each poem, and earlier publications, see the NOTES.
"The Stone Troll": _The Lord of the Rings_, Book I, Chapter 12, "Flight to the Ford"; HM2Ed I.219; 50thEd, p. 206; also _The Adventures of Tom Bombadil_ (1962), Poem VII
"I Sang of Gold, of Leaves of Gold": _The Lord of the Rings_, Book II, Chapter 8, "Farewell to Lórien"; HM2Ed I.388; 50thEd, p. 372
"Errantry": _The Adventures of Tom Bombadil_, Poem III
RECORDINGS:
Bobby McMillon, "Galadriel's Song/Song of the Eldamar" [i.e. "I Sang of Gold, of Leaves of Gold"] (Piotr-Archive #33, recorded 05/08/2021)
NOTES [22976 words]: J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND WHAT HE SOUGHT TO CREATE
The works of J. R. R. Tolkien are, I suspect, even more popular with people interested in folk music than they are with the general public, but that doesn't make his works folk songs. Until I came across Derek Piotr's field recording of Bobby McMillon, it never occurred to me that any of his work belonged in the Ballad Index. But there are hints that a few items may have had some very slight traditional currency. And there is overwhelming evidence of Tolkien's abiding interest in folklore. So I'm setting up this entry to supply some background for anyone who chooses to investigate further.
Preliminary note: In the 1977 Rankin/Bass film "The Hobbit," Glenn Yarborough (who was originally known as a singer of folk songs) recorded part of the soundtrack, including the Rivendell Elves' song "O! What are you doing." But this was a modern setting; there is no reason to think it had any traditional component or was taken into tradition.
Furthermore, Tolkien sold the movie rights to his works outright near the end of his life (Drout, pp. 417-418), leaving the Tolkien estate no right of veto over movies or related merchandise. Had they retained those rights, I suspect there would have been no movies. Or, at least, not the movies that were eventually produced; it is known that the Estate avoided voluntary involvement in the Peter Jackson movies. Whether you like the movies or not, they are not traditional and they are not Tolkien.
Similarly, no attempt has been made to discuss all the various settings of Tolkien songs -- e.g. this entry does not include the settings by Donald Swann in Tolkien and Swann, The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine, 1967), because these show no hint of interacting with tradition. It does not include any "filk" settings where people refer to the book while using a common tune. There are whole books of similar modern settings. If anyone wants to try to find all the settings of Tolkien songs, or songs inspired by Tolkien, or other non-traditional things which are no concern of this Index, there is a web site, http://tolkien-music.com/, confirmed to still exist as of November 9, 2023, as well as a substantial discussion by David Bratman on pp. 152-164 of Eden. No notice will be taken of any such in this article. The songs cited in this section have some vague connection with oral tradition or traditional singers.
The amount of criticism of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien is vast (I myself have over eighty volumes either of criticism or of annotated versions of his writing), and the more that has been done, the more we realize how many sources he studied and put into his "cauldron of story" (the term he used for the mix of what we call "folklore motifs" that are the heart of most folklore). It took a long time to really start to understand his method of work and the sources that influenced him -- e.g. early Tolkien criticism ignored "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and "Sir Orfeo," which are absolutely necessary to understand him, while wasting time on Freudian psychoanalysis, which is pure bunk. Understanding how he used language is also necessary. The effect of this is that very little that was written about him before 1980 has retained any value. It was the writings of Tom Shippey that put Tolkien criticism on the right path. (It is my genuine opinion that Shippey's two major books, ShippeyAuthor and ShippeyRoad, are worth more than all other Tolkien criticism combined. Compare Fisher, p. 3: "It was Shippey who first brought Tolkienien source criticism to real prominence and he who developed the approach into a serious and reputable discipline.)
Of course the works of Tolkien can be enjoyed without knowledge of any of this. But, as Helms-World, pp. ix-x, says, "Tolkien's world is indeed traditional; borrowing from the power and import of his sources, recasting where necessary, he has out of the matrix of a dead and often misunderstood literature created an imaginary kingdom that though new is not groundless. To call the ancient works 'misunderstood' is to begin to grasp what Tolkien was trying to do, for this is to speak from his own point of view." I have done my best to sort through the criticism and summarize what one needs to understand his relationship to folklore, folk song, and mythology.
To begin with, keep in mind that The Lord of the Rings is not a novel but, explicitly, a romance -- not a people story but a way-the-world-works story. It is "not so much about what is real as [it is] about what is true"; Crabbe, p. 2. Indeed, "Tolkien's work is so suffused with medieval borrowings that today it serves as most readers' portal into medieval literature, making the real thing more familiar and accessible to modern readers" (so John D. Rateliff, HoughtonEtAl, pp. 144-145)
Tolkien wrote many poems, a substantial fraction of which he labeled songs. But did not consider himself a musician, and there seems to be only one instance of him actually creating a tune for one of his poems (for "Namárië," Galadriel's farewell song as the Fellowship left Lórien, a tune described as plainchant; Hammond/Scull-Companion, p. 856). In 1964 he told a composer "I have little musical knowledge" (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 350), and told a 'cello-playing friend "I have no aptitude for [music]" (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 173), saying that an attempt to teach him fiddle had failed. Apparently his mother tried to get him to learn piano, and that too failed (Hammond/Scull-Companion, p. 615).
I wonder, though, if that means much. We know from a number of sources that Tolkien had trouble with scheduling and executive function, and he was young when his mother tried to teach him piano. The attempt to teach him fiddle was later, but fiddle is a mechanically demanding instrument, difficult to learn, and most of the best players start when they were younger than Tolkien. I suspect he failed for reasons of mechanical and organizational difficulties, not lack of interest. We know he liked music; his mother was a pianist, his wife Edith was good enough pianist that there was talk of a concert career (Hammond/Scull-Companion, pp. 1012-1013), and his beloved aunt Jane Suffield apparently was attracted to her husband Edwin Neave because of his banjo playing (Hammond/Scull-Companion, p. 637). His daughter Priscilla sang in choirs conducted by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Gregory Martin, in Steimel/Schneidewind, p. 131) -- which incidentally means Tolkien probably encountered a lot of folk songs. He himself is said to have whistled constantly when at home (Gregory Martin, in Steimel/Schneidewind, p. 128). Tolkien's mythology described the creation of the universe in terms of musical themes (the "Ainulindalë" in The Silmarillion). I suspect Tolkien was more of a natural musician than he realized; he suppressed what was in his head because of his early failures to make progress on musical instruments.
What's more, although much of the music he enjoyed was what we would probably call "classical," he also knew quite a bit of traditional music, and used it as the basis for his own songs -- the songs of his found in the gag collection Songs for Philologists (1936) sometimes used pop tunes, but most of them were set to folk tunes. And he disliked the pop music of World War II and after (Hammond/Scull-Companion, p. 617). ShippeyRoots, p. 237, declares that "Tolkien, unlike almost all his contemporaries, had a strong sense of the difference between a literary tradition and a living oral tradition," and goes on to point out all the folklore genres with which Tolkien was demonstrably familiar. With this I agree. Crabbe, p. 97, puts it this way: in Tolkien's view, "The trustworthiness of traditional and intuitive knowledge is a part of the larger value of respect for the past."
Tolkien placed the following words in the mouth of Celeborn: "It may be that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know" (Book II, chapter 8, "Farewell to Lórien," HM2Ed I.390; 50thEd, p. 374; cf. ShippeyRoots, p. 319). Clearly he understood the value of folklore and folk verse. Indeed, Verlyn Flieger claimed (Flieger, p. 13) that "Tolkien was the first literary scholar since Aristotle to bend his attention to the development of a critical theory for the evaluation of fairy tales." This is false -- Antti Aarne produced his first draft of the Aarne-Thompson system in 1910, and Stith Thompson's first revision was from 1928! -- but it shows how deeply Tolkien responded to folklore.
The one thing his lack of musical training should remind us is that Tolkien would not use musical terminology with precision. So when Reuven Naveh, e.g., starts trying to speculate on the nature of music Tolkien meant by a "chord" (Steimel/Schneidewind, p. 31), it's not Tolkien, it's 100% Naveh. Similarly, several have tried to analyze Tolkien's use of instrument names (Norbert Maier, on pp. 107-123 of Steimel/Schneidewind, devotes a whole article to Tolkien's use of the word "harp"!). But Tolkien would have known, as these authors apparently do not, that musical instrument names rarely translate well between languages, at least until recent times when we started to standardize our instruments. (Consider, for instance, Daniel 3:5 in the Hebrew Bible, which lists six instruments. The Authorized [King James] version lists them as "cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer." The New Revised Standard Version says "horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum." The Jewish Tanakh renders "horn, pipe, zither, lyre, psaltery, bagpipe.") Tolkien might have meant a specific instrument when he refers to a "harp" or "viol" or whatever, but it is absurd to assume it.
Instead of worrying about what Tolkien is saying from a musical context, I think we need to understand what we read in the light of Tolkien's obsession with philology, in particular the creation and evolution of languages. The study of language is almost certain to be incomplete without folklore -- learned writings often used unnatural language, but the folklore of the common people was the natural language itself! So Tolkien was a deep student of folklore -- almost any folklore in Indo-European, especially that which was preserved in the Germanic languages, whether Old English, Old German, Old Norse, Gothic, or other languages of this type. Indeed, Tolkien once wrote that "I feel strongly the fascination of the desire to unravel the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales. It is closely connected with the philologists' srudy of the tangled skein of Language" (TolkienFairy, p. 120).
Tolkien certainly understood the common broadside phenomenon of creating new words and singing them to an old tune; not only did he do this himself in Songs for Philologists but, in The Lord of the Rings -- the song "Upon the Hearth the Fire is Red" had words by Bilbo Baggins "to a tune that was as old as the hills" (Book I, chapter 3, "Three Is Company"; HM2Ed I.86; 50thEd, p. 77) -- although, ironically, the verse form is six lines of four feet, followed by four lines of a rather limping three feet; I doubt there has ever been a traditional tune with that pattern. Moreover, the very last Hobbit song in the whole book, "Still round the corner there may wait" (VI.9, "The Grey Havens"; HM2Ed III.308; 50thEd, p. 1028) is not only a rewrite-with-variation of one of the two "Walking Songs" (it's not entirely clear which, though probably it's "Upon the Hearth..."), but it ends "Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun" -- a clear invocation of the folktale of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," which Tolkien would have known from The Blue Fairy Book even before reading the original in Asbjørnsen and Moe.
Tolkien also had substantial knowledge of the Child Ballads -- e.g. the very first substantial citation in his justly famous address "On Fairy-Stories" consists of three verses of "Thomas Rymer" [Child 37] (TolkienFairy, p. 110). ShippeyRoad, pp. 278-279, declares, "He respected the English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected by F. J. Child as being... the last living relic of Northern tradition." Helms-Silmarils, pp. 13-14, in fact suggests that Tolkien derived the idea of marriages between Elves and Men from "Thomas Rymer."
Or consider one of the pivotal moments in The Lord of the Rings, at the Siege of Gondor (HM2Ed III.103; 50thEd, p. 829). The Lord of the Nazgûl, once mortal man but now beyond life, has destroyed the gates of the City of Gondor, and is about to enter; "This is my hour. Do you not know death when I see it?" It is his moment of high triumph. And then, "a cock crowed." ShippeyRoad, p. 215, refers it to Peter's denial of Jesus, and the cock crowing, indicating the heart of Christ's Passion -- and it is that. But I would think even more of revenants, and "The Grey Cock, or, Saw You My Father" [Child 248]. The undead cannot remain when the cock crows. The Lord of the Nazgûl does not vanish like a revenant, but he takes no further step into the city, and within minutes he is dead. Did not the cock banish him? Cf. Thompson motif G303.17.1.1, "Devil disappears when cock crows," which is widely distributed.
We might also argue that most Elvish music is "folk music" in the sense that everybody sings it. In both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, what is the first thing we hear from any elf? Singing! (At Rivendell in The Hobbit and by Gildor's company in The Lord of the Rings.) Galadriel sings multiple songs. When Frodo is preparing to leave Middle-Earth, they meet the company led by Galadriel and Elrond -- and "a silver harp was in his [Elrond's] hand." When talking to Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien "said that Elvish ought not to be read but sung and then chanted it in a slow and lovely intonation" (Kilby, p. 27). All elves, it seems, sing. Hobbits are also fond of singing, if on less lofty themes (Crabbe, p. 102); it is only humans who need minstrels.
Admittedly Tolkien uses very un-folk-like poetic forms. To give an extreme example, he considered the "Silmarillion" complex to include three "Great Tales," the Lay of Leithian (Lúthien and Beren), the Lay of the Children of Húrin, and the Fall of Gondolin. The third of these was never written out in full, but the first two were given in substantial form (versions are printed in The Lays of Beleriand, volume III of The History of Middle-Earth). The Lay of Leithian is in standard octosyllabic couplets, such as are used in "Sir Orfeo" or many of Chaucer's early works like "The Book of the Duchess" and "The House of Fame" (though Chaucer later shifted to decasyllables). But the "Children of Húrin," a tale mostly of men rather than elves, is in alliterative verse -- four-stress lines, two stresses before and two after the cesura, typically with the two stressed syllables in the first half-line alliterating with the first stressed syllable of the second half-line. This was also the form used by the Rohirrim in their songs -- not surprisingly, since it was the standard verse form in Old English, and was briefly revived in Middle English for works like "Piers Plowman" and the larger part of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
With that as background, we may break down Tolkien's interactions with tradition into three parts: His sources, places where he borrowed a poem (nursery rhyme, riddle) from tradition and explicated or elaborated it -- in other words, where he borrowed from tradition -- and poems of Tolkien's which were taken up by later singers. (There is one piece, "The Stone Troll," which falls into both categories.) In general the items in the first category will be discussed in their own entries in the Index, but they will be listed in these notes. Songs which fall into the second category will be discussed here.
If I had to sum up the many books and articles written about the music in Tolkien, I would quote Gandalf: "Many words, and few to the point" (Gandalf's description of his conversation with Gaffer Gamgee at the Council of Elrond). The main problem, I think, is because these writers, although some of them know about music in general, have known little about folk music or folklore. E.g. I found Eden to be mostly useless about the actual music in Tolkien (the articles typically dig around for Tolkien's supposed sources, or about the theology represented by his allusions to music). Steimel/Schneidewind was even more irksome -- too little Tolkien, too much music "inspired by" Tolkien that he would have loathed to the heart of his being.
There is also a good bit of argument about Tolkien's un-democratic politics. Obviously he shows an entirely hierarchical society. And, once he got rich, he complained about the income tax -- a lot. But he simply didn't conform to conventional politics. Tom Shippey, who knew him slightly, is convinced that "If he were voting today, Tolkien would certainly vote for the Green Party" (Drout, p. 382). I'm not sure that's true -- I have no idea how radical environmentalism, reactionary Catholicism, and absolute distaste for modern politics would add up. But I think Tolkien's attitude is not that absolute monarchy is good but that too many people, today, think that they have the right to be anything they want to be, and that most of them are not in fact competent to be the things they want to be. (As exhibits A, B, and C -- or perhaps B, C, and T -- I offer the American presidential candidates of 2016-2024.) Tolkien, I think, believes that most people have certain aptitudes, and should try to seek a place that suits those aptitudes rather than trying to rise to the level of their incompetence.
Furthermore: Tolkien seems to contend that Lord Acton's aphorism should be "Power tends to corrupt *those who seek power*...." Those who seek it, from Boromir to Sauron, are overcome by it. Those who do not seek it, from Gandalf to Aragorn to Sam, are not corrupted by it. (cf. Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill, "The Corruption of Power," Lobdell, pp. 55-56.) There is now a good deal of psychological evidence that this is true. The problem is that in a system where those who are granted power are specifically those who desire it, it is all but guaranteed that those who seek power will be corrupted by it and violate their principles (if they have any) in search of it. If nothing else, Tolkien envisions a world in which seeking power is unlikely to be rewarded.
I would also remind casual readers that The Lord of the Rings does *not* have a happy ending -- e.g. ShippeyAuthor, p. 325, refers to "The underlying sadness of his work, its many death-scenes and avoidance of the unmodified happy ending." ShippeyRoots, p. 200, declares, "It is deeply sad, almost without hope. The story is not a quest, about finding something, it is an anti-quest, about throwing it away. The price of throwing it away is extinction" for many of the peoples of Middle-Earth. "Yet The Lord of the Rings is not itself a golden age story; it is the story of a lull in the decline of a world that already looks back to a golden age and mourns its lost grandeur and nobility" (Crabbe, p. 73). There is a eucatastrophe: The "Long Defeat" has been staved off. But it is only postponed. The Ents are dying. The Elves are departing. The Hobbits will dwindle. Frodo is so scarred that he cannot stay in Middle-Earth. And where is Gondor today? We have seen a tragedy, even though it is a tragedy with a resolution. Almost, in a way, like a murder ballad which ends with justice being done.
After the main story ends, the last bit of narrative (as opposed to chronicle) in the Appendices is "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen." And what is its next-to-last sentence? Not "And they all lived happily ever after" but "[W]hen the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, [Arwen] laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the sea." It sounds like the ending of Ecclesiastes, the most depressing book in the Hebrew Bible (maybe in all of literature), and even more like Arcite's famous dying words in Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale":
What is this world? What asketh men to hav?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Allone, withouten any compaignye (Chaucer/Benson, p. 62, fragment I(A).2777-2779).
Stoddard, p. 151, argues that one of the leading poetic forms in The Lord of the Rings is the elegy -- indeed, Stoddard goes on to argue over the next few pages that one of Tolkien's chief interests was memory and how it preserved the past. I think he's right; it's why Tolkien was so interested in folklore and the history of language.
Urang, p. 115, suggests that The Lord of the Rings "is a history of the end; it is eschatology. It has to do not primarily with faith but with hope.
This is supposedly the early history our world, but all our knowledge of that time is lost. As John D. Rateliffe says on p. 68 of Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder, "Only a word or two, a few vague legends and confused traditions, a smattering of lines of nonsense nursery rhyme, and perhaps a single, battered book would remain" of the whole world Tolkien describes. And many of those who read that single battered book do not even think it wise or beautiful. Truly a great loss. (Though one that Tolkien would know about too well. There is only one copy of "Beowulf," and that damaged. There is one of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." There are three of "Sir Orfeo," but the best and oldest is damaged. "The Battle of Maldon" was damaged, and even the damaged copy is now lost. And on and on....)
ShippeyRoad, p. 328, suggests that Tolkien's philosophy could be summed up by the refrain from the Old English poem "Déor," "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg" -- "That passed away, this can/may too."
Rateliffe affirms further, "Tolkien... is firm on this point: however heartbreaking to our human sensibilities, we must accept loss and decay as essential parts of this world" (Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder, p. 87). The world cannot sit still; eventually, it will all be gone with the snows of yesteryear. What we have left is a few scraps (although the whole, in Tolkien's view, was remembered by God). Tolkien regrets the loss but considers it inevitable (and he's probably right). It is the philosophy of a fallen world -- a philosophy we mostly forget today, but which would be familiar to the people who composed most of the oldest ballads; it is the world their church taught them every week.
Tolkien is reported as having said that his "typical response upon reading a medieval work was to desire not so much to make a philological or critical study of it as to write a modern worn in the same tradition" (Richard C. West, seemingly based on a statement of Eugène Vinaver; West, "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings," Lobdell, p. 80). This obviously ties in with his tendency to elaborate old nursery rhymes.
John D. Rateliffe, "Inside Literature: Tolkien's Explorations of Medieval Genres" (HoughtonEtAl, pp. 133-152), suggests that Tolkien's responses to this literature can be classified in three or four categories: "Pastiche and Parody," "Adaptations in Medieval Metres," "New Wine in Old Bottles," and perhaps "Subsumed into a New Context."
In the parody category, Rateliffe mentions among other things two unpublished works "The Clerkes Compleinte," a mash-up of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, and "Doworst," self-evidently a pseudo-continuation of "Piers Plowman's" tales of Dowel, Dobet, Dobest (HoughtonEtAl, pp. 134-135), plus (presumably as pastiche) The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, of which more later, and some bestiary tales such as "Fastitocalon" (published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) and a parody of medieval bestiaries, "Iumbo, or Ye Kinde of Ye Oliphaunt."
In the "Adaptations," Rateliffe lists "Aotrou" again, plus his unfinished "The Fall of Arthur," the related pair the "Lay of Sigurd" and "Lay of Gudrún," and "Imran," all cases where Tolkien took traditional materials, combined and reshaped them to get a more complete story, and rewrote them in a modern version of a traditional meter.
Under "New Wine in Old Bottles" Rateliffe lists Hild Hunecan/Little Nancy Etticoat, Meolchwitum sind marmanstane/In Marble Walls as White as Milk, and Ides Ælfscýne, all described below, plus some fictional annals in Old English and the poem "The Nameless Land." He doesn't really catalog the "Subsumed into a New Context" items, but it appears this involves the short forms used in The Lord of the Rings -- and, I would add, the latter book itself is a revival of the old genre of medieval romance.
Despite his knowledge of traditional song, most of the songs in The Lord of the Rings do not use typical "folk" metrical forms. I count about 55 songs or rhymes or riddles in the books (how many one counts depends very much on which items one considers "the same." I treated all of Tom Bombadil's metrical utterances as one, for instance, since they're almost all on the same pattern. This produces a slightly lower total than the 64 in Tolkien's own index. Verlyn Flieger, on p. 522 of Drout, comes up with 73, but this is counting every scrap of verse as a separate piece). Of these 55-or-so, there are only six that use the standard "Ballad Meter" or "Common Meter": a line of four metrical feet, then one of three, then another of four, then another of three, rhymed xaxa -- and even some of these were printed as two-line couplets rather than as four-line stanzas (in addition one of Treebeard's songs might be of this form, but it's hard to tell with all the hard words). The six are:
-- "Seek for the Sword that was broken" (Book II, chapter 2, "The Council of Elrond," HM2Ed I.259; 50thEd, p. 246. This is a dubious case; syllable count puts it in ballad meter; stress count makes it one of Tolkien's few pieces in triple meter)
-- "I sit beside the fire and think" (Book II, chapter 3, "The Ring Goes South," HM2Ed I.291; 50thEd, p. 278)
-- "An elven-maid there was of old" (Book II, chapter 6, "Lothlórien," HM2Ed I.354, where the song is mis-headed "An ELVIN-maid there was of old"; 50thEd, p. 339)
-- "I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold" (Book II, chapter 8, "Farewell to Lórien," 50thEd, p. 372; printed as couplets. Much more on this song below!)
-- "When spring unfolds the beechen leaf" (Book III, chapter 4, "Treebeard," HM2Ed II.80; 50thEd, p. 477; printed as couplets)
-- "In western lands beneath the Sun" (Book VI, chapter 1, "The Tower of Cirith Ungol," HM2Ed III.185; 50thEd, p. 908)
(Oddly, the ratio of poems in ballad meter is much higher in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil," "Bombadil Goes Boating," "The Mewlips," "Shadow-Bride," and "The Last Ship" all use it. However, I didn't notice anything in The Hobbit in ballad meter; its 16 poems often seem irregular, and frequently use very short lines of six or seven syllables or even fewer.)
Tolkien uses a vast variety of meters, from simple couplets to the alliterative meter (which counts stresses, not syllables, and uses alliteration, not rhyme; it is the standard verse-form of the Rohirrim) to the extremely complex form of "Errantry," but the large majority of his poems use octosyllabic lines with four stresses, iambic or trochaic; he very rarely uses three-syllable feet (I counted just three: Bombadil's many verses, ""Legolas Greenleaf long under tree," and "Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?"). He is much more likely to rhyme aabb or abab than xaxa, and often uses stanzas longer than four lines. 17 pieces struck me as being all four-line, 8 were alliterative (all by the Rohirrim except Malbeth's Prophecy about the Paths of the Dead: "Over the land there lies a long shadow"), 6 or 7 were in Ballad Meter, 4 were complex with some 4-foot lines (including "The Stone Troll" and "There was an inn, a merry old inn"), 7 were complex with no 4-foot lines, and 12 were irregular. One of the ones that didn't use 4-foot lines is Galadriel's Farewell Song "Namárie," or "Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen," which is unusual because it uses Chaucer's invention of decasyllabic lines -- almost iambic pentameter, except that it appears to be in trochees. It is interesting that Tolkien avoided decasyllables, since he used this meter in his non-Middle Earth writings, e.g. in the 1922 "The Clerkes Complainte" (Ruud, p. 72); perhaps he avoided it in The Lord of the Rings because Chaucer hadn't invented it yet?
TOLKIEN AND THE "MYTHOLOGY FOR ENGLAND"
Early in his career, it is usually said that Tolkien's goal was to create a "mythology for England." He certainly felt that English folklore was an impoverished thing, although he never seems to have attempted to collect folktales himself. (Ironically, the one true, substantial, and entirely English folklore corpus -- the Robin Hood legend -- seems to have attracted him not at all. At least, I can't recall him writing about it, and there is no mention of it in Tolkien/Carpenter or Drout. It was certainly old enough to interest him, and Robin's devotion to the Virgin Mary would have suited him well, as would Robin's devotion to the King. But Tolkien really doesn't seem to have liked outlaws; I suspect that that, and/or the degradation of the legend that began in the sixteenth century, caused him to ignore it).
Tolkien's desire for a "mythology for England" has been exceptionally widely quoted. And yet, as Anders Stenström showed, in "A Mythology? For England?" on p. 310 of Reynolds/Goodkind, Tolkien never wrote those words. "A 'mythology for England' -- this must surely be the most-often cited quotation that Tolkien never actually said" (Drout, p. 445). The article goes on to stay that Tolkien would surely have liked to create such a thing, by analogy to the Kalevala, but that wasn't what he eventually produced. If an English mythology had been his goal, the outcome would probably have been more like MacPherson's "Ossian" corpus (that is, original material fitted into a faintly Anglo-Saxon framework). We do see Tolkien trying out ideas like that, very early on, as, e.g., when he identifies England with the the original version of his Enchanted Isles, with the city of Kortirion being today's Warwick, and so forth. But this was abandoned very early. None of it survives in The Lord of the Rings or even The Silmarillion.
A much clearer analogy would be to Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, or the Kalevala, or indeed (despite Tolkien's rejection of Robin Hood) to "The Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117]: Taking existing sources and disentangling them and weaving them together, as the "Gest" combined two or three earlier romances, and the Morte takes individual sources, English and French, and imposes a sort of chronology on them and produces a consistent version. The Kalevala is a little different, because it is combined from many shorter sources rather than a relatively limited number of substantial sources. But all of them show signs of the composite: There are a lot of abrupt transitions and occasional inconsistencies -- more in the Kalevala, fewer in the Morte, because the former has more distinct pieces, but the situation is the same in both.
We see Tolkien assembling just such a work, in the book later published by Christopher Tolkien as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. which tries to bring together the Sigurd legends, being most dependent on the Elder Edda version, but using others texts to fill gaps and flesh out the tale. Tolkien's alliterative poem The Fall or Arthur, also published by Christopher Tolkien, is similar, though Tolkien took more liberties there. This is not, however, what he was doing in The Lord of the Rings. Lönnrot had been able to build the Kalevala using old tales and a relatively slight amount of glue. This was not possible for English mythology; the result of trying to make an English Kalevala would have been about 10% source material and 90% glue.
So Tolkien took a different approach: He used old sources, mostly from northwestern Europe, as ideas, treating them as survivals of something lost rather than as pieces of a connected whole. So, for most of his life, Tolkien was trying to work through mythology and "explain" it. Well-known examples of this are that he found the Woses in a reference to a "wodwos" in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (ShippeyAuthor, pp. 82-84) or encountered the dwarf names in The Hobbit in the "Dvergatal" portion of the "Völuspá" (ShippeyAuthor, pp. 14-17). Another example is how he took references to "elves" (ylfe, álfar) in several traditions, tried to sort out their traits (e.g. what is the difference between light-elves and dark-elves?), and based a large part of his mythology on the result (Drout, pp. 719-720, summarizing a lot of Tom Shippey's work).
We can actually see analogies to the two approaches in Tolkien's use of language. Gothic was a real language, with some surviving writings, but they are basically all religious writings; the surviving vocabulary is limited. So to write Gothic poems like "Bagme Bloma" (descibed below), Tolkien reconstructed some words from other Germanic languages, conjecturing their Gothic forms (Arden R. Smith, "Tolkienian Gothic," Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder, p. 269). But his Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, are pure Tolkien inventions influenced by the sound systems of Finnish and Welsh (cf. John D. Rateliffe, on pp. 82-83 of Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder. Interestingly, as Carl F. Hostetter notes in his essay "Elvish as She Is Spoke" on pp. 231-256 of Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder, Tolkien never actually finished the grammar for either -- what he had was a sound system, a vocabulary, and an incomplete grammar. Neither language was sufficiently defined as to be speakable -- see p. 240 of the Hostetter essay -- and the version of Sindarin created by David Salo for the Peter Jackson movies in fact contradicts what Tolkien did). Tolkien knew his languages were incomplete; when Clyde Kilby suggested he write a story in Elvish, Tolkien "made the surprising answer that he would indeed do a story in Elvish if only he knew enough Elvish!" (Kilby, p. 33). Still, his sound systems made Elvish tongues "the most musical of the languages of Middle-earth, largely because of the high proportion of liquids (l's and r's) and vowels that are sounded at the front of the mouth" (Crabbe, p. 103; on p. 109 Crabbe compares this to Sauron's Black Speech, which is full of harsh consonant clusters and back vowels).
And Tolkien felt passionately that language and the folklore of the people who spoke the languages were intertwined (see, e.g,, Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 131, or even more explicity on p. 231: "It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they below; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition"; compare Stenström on pp. 312-313 of Reynolds/Goodkind.) The Middle-Earth universe is our universe, and our world is the descendant of that, which explains the survivals Tolkien quoted. But the basic mythology is the mythology of Elves -- of the speakers of Quenya and Sindarin -- not of England! (Maybe this is why he couldn't do an Elvish grammar: he never finished the history which would influence it.)
MATERIALS TOLKIEN WORKED WITH AND FROM
Knowing his methods, it is no surprise that the earliest roots of Tolkien's "legendarium" were based on traditional materials which he sought to recast and elaborate. His very earliest thoughts on what became the "Middle-earth" sequence, as far as we know, derive from a couple of lines in the Old English poem "Christ I," found in the "Exeter Book," Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501 (ShippeyRoad, pp. 245-246):
Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended
(lines 104-105; Krapp/Dobbie, p. 6).
This is typical of "Christ I," also known as the "Advent Lyrics"; it's a series of similar poems. (Krapp/Dobbie, p. xxvi). Most of them start with that same word of invocation, "Eala" -- e.g. the second complete one, which starts at line 50, begins Eala sibbe gesihð, Sancta Hierusalem (Krapp/Dobbie, p. 4), which Raffel, p. 67, renders "Oh vision of love, Holy Jerusalem." Most of them are conventional and similar to Latin lyrics; they invoke the "righteous Lord," the Virgin, "God of the Soul and Spirit," and so forth. But this one (the fifth by Raffel's count, or the fourth complete one) Raffel, p. 69, renders somewhat periphrastically:
Oh morning star, brightest of messengers,
Sent to this earth, and to men, truest,...
Bradley, p. 104, offers a prose translation: "O dayspring, brightest of angels sent to men upon middle-earth"; Gordon, p. 135, also gives it as prose: "O Rising Sun, most radiant of angels sent to men upon earth."
ShippeyRoad, p. 245, however, has a more literal rendering:
Oh Earendel, brightest of angels,
sent to men above Middle-earth....
But who or what is Earendel? It certainly isn't a standard Catholic term. There are analogs in the mythologies of other Germanic peoples: Aurvandill/Aurvandil, Orendil, Horvendile, Horwendillus. We know Aurvendil from the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturusson, section 17 of the Skaldskaparmal, Snorri/Faulkes, pp. 79-80. Thor shows up -- with an axe or whetstone or something stuck in his head -- at the home of Groa "wife of Aurvandil the Bold." She tries to take the axe out; while she is doing this, Thor tells her that he had carried Aurvandil across a great river in a basket, but Aurvandil's toe had stuck out of the basket and frozen solid. So Thor broke it off and threw it into the sky; it became Aurvandil's (Earendel's) Star. (Compare ShippeyRoad, p. 246).
The other main account of Orendil is in Jakob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, where he is "the 'first of all heroes,' a mariner who suffers shipwreck, takes shelter with the fisherman Eisen, and later weds 'Breide, the fairest of women'" (Helms-Silmarils, p. 2). This perhaps has some relationship with the Gesta Danorum, in which Horwendillus was a ruler who turned pirate (Tarcsay, p. 141).
(To be sure, the word also occurs in one of the tenth century Blickling Homilies -- but there it refers to John the Baptist; Tarcsay, p. 141. I have no doubt that the Homily reference is an allusion to John 5:35, where John is a "burning and shining lamp.")
Tolkien, looking at the roots of the word, thought it meant "ray of light" and was used of the planet Venus (Tarcsay, pp. 139-140).
In other words, Earendil was apparently a mariner who was also a star. So what is Earendil's Star doing in an Old English religious poem? A sensible assumption is that it was a bit of folklore crossing over into the Old English text. Tolkien kept thinking about it, and responded to this by writing a poem "The Voyage of Earendel" in 1914. And, in The Silmarillion in the chapter "The Voyage of Eärendil," how does Eönwë, the herald of the Valar, greet Eärendil? "Hail Eärendil, of mariners most renowned, the looked for that cometh at unawares...." It echoes both the first words and the parallelism of the Advent Lyrics. Tarcsay, pp. 142-143, also thinks there are parallels to Eärendil's ship name Vingilot, though these struck me as probably coincidence.
Other old sources yielded even richer troves. Tolkien was fascinated with the Finnish Kalevala. The clearest example of this is his use of the Tale of Kullervo: Tolkien first rewrote it as a William Morris-style prose story with poetic interludes (a form he would of course use much more in the future; cf. Himes, p. 69); this was eventually edited by Verlyn Flieger (cited as TolkienKullervo). Then Tolkien took the basic tale and converted it from the tale of a commoner to a tale of an aristocrat; it forms the backbone of the tale "Of Túrin Turambar" in The Silmarillion, or in its fuller form the tale of the "Children of Hurin." Flieger declares, correctly, "Kullervo's story in Kalevala had a profound effect and was the root and source of the story" of Túrin (TolkienKullervo, pp. 133-134 -- although Himes, p. 73, makes the ironic note that the Kullervo tale was much more the work of Elias Lönnrot than most parts of the Kalevala). From it, Tolkien derived Túrin's self-willed stupidity, incest, conversation with his sword as he considers taking his life, and suicide. (Tolkien seems to have thought that Túrin wasn't hopeless, since in one of his apocalyptic tales he actually has Túrin slay Morgoth in the Last Battle -- but it would have to be a very stupid god who would give Túrin a position of responsibility!) Onto this Tolkien grafted the dragon-slaying tale of Sigurd the Volsung (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 150), and perhaps a bit of Beowulf, but it's the Kullervo plot that holds it together.
The tale of Kullervo is Tolkien's most direct borrowing from the Finnish epic, but there are subtler examples. The whole story of the Silmarils has a close Kalevala analogy. "In Runes 10, 42-43, and 47-49 of The Kalevala Tolkien found the source of much of the outline of the Silmarils' story. In that work the blacksmith hero Ilmarinen forges his great treasure, the Sampo, a work much coveted by his antagonist, the wicked Louhi, even as Fëanor made the Silmarilli, objects much coveted by Tolkien's antagonist Melkor" (Helms-Silmarils, p. 42). Here Tolkien takes a plot-outline but makes it specific: although the Sampo is greatly treasured, "'sampo' is not a word with a meaning other than the name given to the mythic object" in Finnish tradition (Himes, p. 78); I seem to recall suggestions that it was a sort of horn of plenty, some sort of defensive weapon, or a mill that turns the sky, but no one known.
The Kalevala supplied Tolkien with many other details (e.g. the singing duel between Finrod and Sauron resembles that of Väinamöinen and Lemminkäinen; Himes, p. 71). David L. Dettman sees a strong link between Tom Bombadil and the Kalevala hero Väinämöinen (HoughtonEtAl, pp. 202-203): "Väinämöinen is the eldest and greatest of all singers. The first to walk on solid earth after the creation of the world, he is often given the epithets 'eldest' and 'aged.' Tom is also old; he is constantly referred to as 'Old Tom Bombadil....' Väinämöinen's singing is very powerful magic and songs are used in battle with song matched to song. Väinämöinen defeats his enemies through skillful singing, transforming their weapons into saplings or reeds and singing one enemy into a swamp, putting him in danger of drowning." Tom too can sing his enemies into submission. (On the other hand, Väinämöinen's courting of Aino the water-girl, whereas Tom successfully woos Goldberry.)
Helms-Silmarils, p. 15, suggests that "How Culhwych Won Olwen" in the Mabinogion was a source for Beren and Lúthien, with its tale of how Olwen's father made impossible-seeming demands to keep Culhwych from meeting the conditions to marry her, and Culhwych met them with the help of Arthur's court. (I'd suggest, however, that the father who makes impossible demands to drive off a suitor is commonplace.)
The Atlantis legend was certainly a source for the disaster of Númenor -- though the story of a flooded land seems to have been a recurring nightmare for Tolkien, and that was probably the leading inspiration (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 213). Tolkien also took significant elements from Greek mythology, with a clever twist: By demoting the Greek gods to the role of the Valar, he managed to preserve most of their functions (and some of their incompetence) without interfering with his monotheism: Manwê is a rather underpowered Zeus, Ulmo parallels Poseidon, Mandos is Hades, Yavanna is Demeter, Aulë is Hephaestos (although Manwë, Ulmo, Aulë, and Melkor also correspond to Air, Water, Earth, and Fire), Eönwë is Hermes although he is further demoted to the Maiar. Oromë has some of the attributes of Artemis, with gender reversed, and the Maia Arien, again with gender reversed, fills Apollo's role as driver of the sun. Athena has no exact analog, but Elbereth/Varda and Olórin/Gandalf take on some of the functions. Tulkas has the less violent aspects of Ares; in a good universe, there is no need for the more violent. In a universe where there is little evidence of lust of of drunkenness, there is of course no sign of Aphrodite, nor of Dionysus.
Also, Túrin, although his story is mostly that of Kullervo, takes on the very Greek aspect of the hero with a tragic flaw. And, Morgoth's curse on the House of Húrin, which shows its effects especially in the life of Túrin, seems very reminiscent of the cursed House of Tantalus/Atreus/Agamemnon and the House of Laius/Oedipus: all are curses that run in the family, even though only one member of the family is at fault.
Kristine Larsen, "Sea Birds and Morning Stars: Ceyx, Alcyone, and the Many Metamorphoses of Eärendil and Elwing (Fisher, pp. 69-83) suggests that the tale in the Silmarillion of Elwing transformed into a sea bird and flying to Eärendil's ship (cf. "There flying Elwing came to him" in The Lord of the Rings, Book II, chapter 1, "Many Meetings," HM2Ed I.247; 50thEd, p. 234) derives from the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone found in Ovid (book XI, starting at line 410) and elsewhere. I don't think Tolkien liked Ovid all that much -- but the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone showed up in another source that Tolkien liked quite a bit, which is Chaucer. Their story is retold in The Book of the Duchess (lines 44-270), as well as in Gower's Confessio Amantis (IV 2927-3123). And Tolkien had particular reason to know that bit of Chaucer: most of that part of the Book of the Duchess was included in a proposed Clarendon student Chaucer, for which Tolkien worked on the text and compiled notes (Bowers, pp. 120-124). The work never came off, only partly because Tolkien failed in his job, but Tolkien had examined the passage in nitpicking detail.
Most of the information about trolls in The Hobbit is clearly derived from Scandinavian sources -- e.g. the idea that trolls turn to stone when exposed to the sun is found in Grettir's Saga (cf. Marjorie Burns on p. 187 of HoughtonEtAl), and the remark "Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each" in the chapter "Roast Mutton" inevitably reminds us of the folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe, where trolls regularly have two, three, or even more heads.
Verlyn Flieger (HoughtonEtAl, p. 73) suggests that the relationship of Sauron with the One Ring is essentially that of the old folk motif of the External Soul (THompson E710) -- a motif well-known to Tolkien in its variant form of the External Heart (Thompson Tale-Type 302), since he cites the tale of "The Monkey's Heart" (in which a monkey claims to have an external heart) from The Lilac Fairy Book (TolkienFairy, p. 117, with mentions of other "External Soul" tales on p. 118).
Sometimes Tolkien made this same sort of "interpreted use" of actual history. For example, the history of the Númenrean Kingdoms in Exile bears many similarities to Roman History (Drout, pp. 576-577), and I seem to recall reading somewhere that Tolkien actually compared Gondor to the Eastern Roman Empire (which we tend to call the Byzantine Empire). Both Rome and Arnor-plus-Gondor were founded by a leader whose home place had been destroyed (Aeneas and Elendil). Both split in two, with one of the halves lasting much longer than the other. Yet there are also substantial differences: Elendil's kingdom was never contiguous, and the split occurred very early in the history of the kingdom (Rome, by contrast, split with Constantinople late in the history of the former, and there were several splits-and-reunions before the final breakup in 395 C.E.). Rome and Byzantium both chewed through dynasties regularly, whereas the succession in Arnor was never disturbed, and even in Gondor, there were only two dynasties (that of Elendil and that of the Ruling Stewards). And there was no religious split between Arnor and Gondor. Tolkien definitely didn't follow Roman history closely!
Tolkien drew many ideas from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and it's my view (which I have not seen elsewhere) that Frodo's Passion in The Lord of the Rings was substantially influenced by "Sir Gawain." In the climactic scene of that romance, we learn that Gawain came close to fulfilling his duty, but fell a little short (by not revealing the gift of the allegedly-magic cloth). Therefore the Green Knight knicked his neck: A minor injury but one that he suffered for failure. Similarly, Frodo has done almost all the work of taking the Ring to Mount Doom, but he fails to cast it into the fire. It is only because of grace (in the form of Gollum's teeth) that he is saved. Frodo, like Gawain, is saved (more or less), but he must always bear the mark of his ultimate, if small, failure. (Although Urang, p. 111, observes that Frodo ends up with the same disability -- a missing finger -- that Sauron had after Isildur cut the ring from his finger.)
E. L. Risden, "Source Criticism: Backgrounds and Applications" (Fisher, pp. 17-28) on p. 18 lists the most noteworthy sources Tolkien is thought to have used; in addition to Old English and Norse sources and Middle English romances (e.g. "Beowulf," "The Wanderer," the Eddas, "Sir Gawain," "Sir Orfeo") and all the other things listed here, he lists "Mandeville's Travels," Saxo Grammaticus, the Grimm and Grunddtvig collections, and some modern sources like Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Many have pointed out other modern sources, but the only ones I find entirely convincing are Haggard's She (covered below) and (for The Hobbit) Edward A. Wyke-Smith's The Marvelous Land of Snergs, which Tolkien described as a source (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 215n.).
The Bible was not a trivial source, either. To take just one example, consider Ulmo's words when Eärendil is on trial before the Valar in The Silmarillion: "For this he was born into the world." (According to Kane, p. 230, this is from the source called the "Conclusion to the Quenta Silmarillion," which apparently dates from the mid- to late-1930s.) Compare Jesus's words when he was on trial before Pilate in John 18:37: "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." For that matter, the summoning of the Elves to Valinor has resemblances to the Call of Abraham. Sméagol's murder of Déagol to take the Ring has echoes of the story of Cain and Abel (Yvette Kisor, on p. 155 of HoughtonEtAl). Large parts of The Silmarillion are full of Biblical echoes. (See Crabbe, pp. 114-115: "In The Silmarillion the two most important influences on Tolkien's life came into direct opposition: his religion and his love for the ancient heroic north. On the one and, his philologist's mind told him that the mythology of the ancient Britons must be similar in most ways to other northern mythologies. On the other hand, as much as he loved those mythologies, and as much as he celebrated the heroes of the unbendable will, he was a Christian and could not rid his mind utterly of the notion that this life is but a prelude to another." The brilliance of Tolkien is that he managed to take these two separate things and make them work together rather than be in opposition, even though the world that results is a world with little hope, in the absence of its future Redeemer; note that his works not only precede Jesus but even, presumably, Abraham.)
(At times, even the style sounds Biblical -- e.g. near the end of the chapter "Of the Coming of Men into the West" in The Silmarillion, there is a capsule genealogy of the family of Hador Goldenhead. Anyone familiar with the Bible will notice the similarity to the early chapters of the Book of Chronicles, or to parts of the "P" source of the Pentateuch.)
It should be remembered, thought, that Tolkien was a Catholic, and that he grew up before Vatican II -- which he largely disagreed with. His Bible was the Latin Vulgate, specifically the Clementine Vulgate of 1592, and not the Greek, or the Hebrew, or the King James Version. (Risden, on p. 18 of Fisher, suggests Tolkien also used the Gothic Bible, but I doubt it; there isn't enough of it left.) Also, his Bible included the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal books such as I and II Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and the additions to Daniel and Esther. Whether he used these books I do not know; he did refer in a letter to Judith being "elven-fair" -- Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 314 -- but the original word "ælfsciene" is from the periphrastic Anglo-Saxon poem "Judith," not the Biblical book: "ides ælfscinu, ærest gesohte," the last line of section X of the English poem; Raffel, p. 95 translates the word simply "radiant," although Bradley, p. 496, has "elfin beauty" and Gordon, p. 320, gives "fairy beauty").
(Also, although people often accuse Tolkien of believing in an excessively hierarchical society, note that he has reduced both heavenly and earthly hierarchies: Instead of the seven or nine orders of angels, from angels to archangels to principalities and on up to cherubim and seraphim at the top, Tolkien has two, Valar and Maiar. And compared to the English hierarchy of nobility that eventually ended up as King, Princes, Dukes, Marquis, Earls, Viscounts, Barons, we seem to have just three tiers in Gondor: Kings, Princes [meaning rulers of a Principality, such as Imrahil; it is not an inherently royal title], and Lords.)
Tolkien often seems to have interpreted his Bible in a Catholic light -- which may indeed have increased the power of his vision. E.g. the Satan is not really the enemy of God in the Old Testament. But "part of the reason Tolkien's vision is so necessary to so many is that it provides a richly satisfying experience of a fully worked out mythological perception of radical evil. Tolkien's particular myth parallels his Christianity, positing a malevolent and corrupting outside influence, spiritual and probably eternal, against which man is doomed to fight, but which he has no hope of conquering on his own" (Helms-World, p. 67) -- a very Catholic sort of view..
Sometimes the Biblical borrowings can be subtle and complex. Consider the name of the Creator: Eru Ilúvatar. Helms-Silmarils, p. 19, says, "That Quenya name Ilúvatar... is the equivalent to a standard Hebrew name for God: ilúvë, "the all," tar, "high" = El Shaddai, 'God Most High' (Exodus 6:3)." (Note: "El Shaddai," which is first used for God in Genesis 17:1 and occurs almost 50 times , is usually translated "God Almighty" although the root may indeed mean "high"; in the Vulgate it is rendered "omnipotens," so Tolkien would not have accepted Helms-Silmarils's equivalence. But "God Most High" is also a name for God; it's just that Helm's reference should have been to El Elyon, "God Most High," first met in Genesis 14:18 and used about thirty times, not always of God; the Vulgate renders "altissimi," so this would have been the version Tolkien would have used.) And yet, Ilúvatar is also, clearly, Ilu-vatar="all-father," the title of Odin.
At a deep level, the Biblical influence is probably most important of all. Urang, p. 120, says that Tolkien is "reliant on analogy" to the Biblical story. "Tolkien required no 'God' in his story; it is enough that he suggest it in the kind of pattern in history which the Christian tradition has ascribed to the providence of God." Or, at least, destiny, as when Gandalf says that Frodo was "meant" to have the Ring. This could perhaps be considered just the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, fate, but Tolkien clearly thinks this fate largely benevolent. Although I can't help but wonder if Frodo, with all the trauma he suffered, would agree.
ShippeyRoad, p. 102 and passim, has a linguistic parallel which makes this clear: the calque, "'calquing' being a linguistic term to mean that process in which the elements of a compound word are translated bit by bit to make a new word in another language.... The point about calques is that the derivative does not sound anything like the original: nevertheless, it betrays influence at every point. Thus historically the Shire is like/unlike England, the hobbits like/unlike English people. Hobbits live in the Shire as the English live in England, but like the English they come from somewhere else...." Shippey's analogy is so useful that other scholars have adopted it, e.g. Nicholas Birns, "The Stones and the Book," Fisher, p. 48, who compares for example the "AInulindalë" to Genesis 1 and on p. 50 mentions Tolkien's own comparison of Elendil to Noah.
But Middle-earth is a calque which draws from myth and legend -- from Beowulf, from Sir Gawain, from the Eddas, from Sir Orfeo, from all of it. Much of what Tolkien produced consisted of thinking about a folklore motif, trying to decide what it really "meant" -- and then putting it into his greater works. The list above isn't even close to comprehensive. Even though Tolkien's work is highly original, it is also exceptionally deeply rooted.
Traditional Songs, Poems, and Riddles With Which Tolkien Interacted
Thus Tolkien made many attempts to explicate surviving fragments, often preserved as nursery rhymes or riddles, and some of these made it into his works. Examples of these are the following items in the Index:
Hey Diddle Diddle (File: OO2213), expanded in The Lord of the Rings as "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late"
I Love Sixpence (File: OO2480), translated into Old English as "Syx Mynet" ("Mynet" being the Old English for "coin," so the title means "six coins"; in Old English times, the largest coin was the silver penny, so there was no term "sixpence"). Privately published in Songs for Philologists; not published in any mass-market Tolkien work
In Marble Walls as White as Milk (File: OO2199), translated into Old English as "Meolchwitum sind marmanstane" in "Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo" ("Two Saxon Riddles Newly Found"); not published in any mass-market Tolkien work, but see Tolkien/Anderson, pp. 123-125, n. 19.
Little Nancy Etticoat (File: OO2373), translated into Old English as "Hild Hunecan" who wears a "tunecan" (tunic) in "Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo" ("Two Saxon Riddles Newly Found"); not published in any mass-market Tolkien work, but see Tolkien/Anderson, pp. 123-125, n. 19.
The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon (File: OO2331), expanded in The Lord of the Rings as "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon" (see the extensive set of sources in the notes to that song)
Merie Sungen the Muneches Bennen Ely (Merry Sang the Monks of Ely) (File: MSMStMoE), quoted, with probable modification, in "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son." They are the last English words of the drama, as the monks come to take Beorhtnofh's body; the only remaining words are from the Latin Office for the Dead (p. 18 in The Tolkien Reader.)
Molly Put the Kettle On (Polly Put the Kettle On) (File: DarNS256), used as the tune for "'Lit' and 'Lang'" (sometimes referred to as "Two Little Schemes"), from Songs for Philologists; not published in any mass-market Tolkien work. There are two reasons for its obscurity. First, it is about the internal politics of English Literature departments, and the conflict between the "Language" specialists (philologists, such as Tolkien) and those interested mostly in literary criticism. Because of their interests, the "Lang" people also usually had more interest in older writings, the "Lit" people in newer writings, which Tolkien disliked. So the song was more than a little nasty; he disliked the way philology was being pushed aside (much as folk music scholars today dislike the way our field has been pushed out of first English departments and then folklore departments!). And, according to ShippeyRoad, p. 6, it was "the worst [song] he ever wrote, so bad indeed that it makes me think (or hope) that something must have gone wrong with it en route between poet and printer." Although the tune is short, the poem uses long stanzas of 12 lines, rhymed aaabcccbcded (Ruud, p. 427).
Thirty White Horses (File: BGMG704), a riddle used almost verbatim in the chapter "Riddes in the Dark" in The Hobbit.
What's the Rhyme to Porringer? (File: MSNR100). This helped to inspire Tolkien's poem "Errantry," which can stand on its own (it has no connection to Middle-earth), and that poem somehow inspired "Bilbo's Song in Rivendell," i.e. "Eärendil was a Mariner."
Who Killed Cock Robin (File: SKE74), translated into Old English as "Ruddoc Hana" ("Ruddoc"=robin; "Hana"=cock). Published in Songs for Philologists; not published in any mass-market Tolkien work
It will be noted that almost all of these were produced pre-Hobbit, even though Tolkien used some of them in his later publications. The pressure that Tolkien experienced to produce a sequel to The Hobbit, plus the fact that his children were old enough that he no longer had to make up tales for them, drove him to concentrate almost all his attention on the Middle-earth universe (so Paul Edmund Thomas, on pp. 62-64 of Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder), so the smaller works fell by the wayside. It's not that he was ignoring the folklore and the old books -- the debts of the Middle-earth universe to stories such as "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Sir Orfeo," "The Elder Edda," the various forms of the Sigurd saga, and the "Kalevala" is immense -- but he no longer expressed it in the same way.
SEE ALSO: King Orfeo [Child 19] (File: C019). Tolkien did not directly interact with the ballad "King Orfeo," but his interactions with the source, "Sir Orfeo," were extensive and included a Modern English translation. (Deanna Delmar Evans, "Tolkien's Unfinished 'Lay of Lúthien' and the Middle English Sir Orfeo," Eden, pp. 75-84, tries to argue direct literary dependence of Tolkien's work on "Sir Orfeo," but this essay drove me bonkers in its obtuseness -- it doesn't even interact with the definitive edition of the Middle English text edited by A. J. Bliss; it relies only uses Tolkien's translation, plus it mis-attributes to Tolkien work that was almost certainly done by Kenneth Sisam. And I really don't think it understands either folklore or Tolkien's working methods. Which is not to deny that the tale has connections to the Orpheus legend; Tolkien himself says that the tale of Beren and Lúthien was "a kind of Orpheus legend in reverse" (Tolkien-Carpenter, p. 193). In fact the Beren story is the Orpheus legend reversed twice: The woman rescues the man, and the ending is happy. This means that the link is much closer to "Sir Orfeo" which has its own happy ending, than to the original Orpheus legend -- noted also by ShippeyRoad, p. 259. The roles are still reversed, though: In "Sir Orfeo," Orfeo goes to the King of Faërie and, using his music, regains his wife Heurodis. In the story of Lúthien, after Beren dies, Lúthien goes to Mandos, the equivalent of Hades, and with her music convinces that power, who never had shown pity, to release Beren; cf. Keith W. Jensen, "Dissonance in the Divine Theme: The Issue of Free Will in Tolkien's Silmarillion," Eden, pp. 102-113, specifically pp. 107-109.
The tales of "Sir Orfeo" and "Of Beren and Lúthien" also share the motif of the Rash Promise, but in completely different contexts. The Rash Promise had occurred in Lúthien's story, when Thingol promised not to kill Beren: "Death you have earned with these words; and death you should find suddenly, had I not sworn an oath in haste"; The Silmarillion, in the chapter "Of Beren and Lúthien." Tolkien was very interested in this theme, as witness his comment on the tale of "The Frog Prince": "the point of the story lies not in thinking frogs possible mates, but in the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences) that... runs through all Fairyalnd. This is one of the notes of the horns of Elfland, and not a dim one" (Tolkien-Fairy, pp. 152-153, pointed up by U. Milo Kaufmann on p. 150 of Lobdell, who thinks it unrealistic).
Tolkien had a deep and abiding relationship with "Sir Orfeo" -- as deep, perhaps, as his relationship with "Beowulf" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Much of "Smith of Wootton Major" seems to me to be a response to it -- almost as if to say "This is what Faërie is really like." Tom Shippey argues strongly that the Mirkwood story of Bilbo encountering the Elvenking is inspired by "Sir Orfeo," and on p. 62 of ShippeyRoad he goes ever farther: "I would suggest that the 'master-text' for Tolkien's portrayal of the elves is the description of the hunting king in Sir Orfeo." And "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" -- to my mind, perhaps Tolkien's best work outside the Middle-Earth universe -- is explicitly labeled a Breton Lay (TolkienAotrou, p. xii), a rare type in English best represented by "Sir Orfeo" and to a lesser extent Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale"; it seems almost certain that one of those two, probably the former, inspired "Aotrou and Itroun" -- and perhaps a strong interest Tolkien developed in things Breton (TolkienAotrou, p. xvii). What's more, "Aotrou" was associated with (and eventually printed with) two "Corrigan" poems. When I read the first of these, I was tempted to label it a composite of "The Queen of Elfan's Nourice" [Child 40] and "Willie's Lady" [Child 6]; the sense of ballad lore is that strong.
So Tolkien certainly had "Sir Orfeo" in his mind for all his career, and maybe even "King Orfeo," which he would have known as well. But Tolkien almost never shows real literary dependence; even his translations and retellings were often very free. Rather, he operated by "Models and Motifs." That is, he took a model form, and worked on it, as the model of "Sir Orfeo" inspired "Aotrou and Itroun," or took a motif and incorporates it, as he used Orfeo's pursuit of the King of Faërie as the principle of Bilbo and the Dwarves chasing the Elvenking. If there is influence on the "Lay of Lúthien," it might even be through "Aotrou and Itroun," which Tolkien was working on at the same time; TolkienAotrou, p. xi).)
SEE ALSO: Tolkien's poem "The Hoard," item #14 in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Even by Tolkien's standards, this went through an extraordinary number of rewrites. the earliest version, published in the Leeds journal The Gryphon of January 1923, was titled "Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden" (TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 240). This is an extraordinarily evocative title, because it comes from "Beowulf," line 3052, see e.g. Beowulf/Chickering, p. 232 (though Chickering gives the orthography "iū-monna gold, galdre bewunden"). Chickering glosses this as "the gold of the ancients, was wrapped in a spell"; Seamus Heaney's recent paraphrase was "That huge cache, gold inherited / from an ancient race, was under a spell" (Beowulf/Heaney/Donoghue, p. 76); Tolkien's own draft translation was "the gold of bygone men was wound about with spells" (Beowulf/Tolkien, p. 102; sadly, his commentary did not extend to this line). It is a description of the dragon's treasure.
The poem Tolkien wrote is of an accursed treasure that passes from one owner to another by death, or killing, as the lure of the gold corrupts. It is a short summary -- sort of Percy-Folio-like -- of many similar items such as the tale of The Hoard of the Nibelung, known in both Old Norse and Middle High German. It is not clear that he was trying to make a "short Nibelungenlied" -- probably not -- but he would likely have thought that there was such a version somewhere. (Shippey-Roots, p. 342, mentions that there is also a golden hoard in Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" which curses those who encounter it, but there is no sign of that hoard being passed hand to hand.)
Note that this image of cursed treasure shows up elsewhere in his work -- The Hobbit is the story of the dwarves trying to recover a hoard of theirs from a dragon. And their song about it (the second song in The Hobbit, and the first serious one, in the very first chapter "An Unexpected Party") has a bit of that Beowulfian language about it: "We must away, ere break of day, To seek the pale enchanted gold... We must away, ere break of day, To claim our long-forgotten gold." Enchanted? Long-forgotten? Is this not indeed "Iúmonna gold galdre bewunden"? Furthermore, the line "To claim our long-forgotten gold" is known to have been in the very first draft of The Hobbit, at a time when Tolkien hadn't even fixed the names of Smaug, Gandalf, and Thorin (Rateliff, p. 14; this is the only line of the poem still legible from this mostly-destroyed draft), and the song has reached effectively its final form in the second draft (Rateliff, pp. 36-37). On how Tolkien saw dragon's gold see also ShippeyRoad, pp. 86-92.
SEE ALSO: Robin Hood and the Monk [Child 119] (File: C119). Tolkien did not do anything with "Robin Hood and the Monk," but almost the earliest of all Middle-Earth poems was "Light as Leaf on Lindentree," which Tolkien seemingly began working on as early as 1919-1920 (Hammond/Scull-Companion, pp. 522-523); it is the first glimpse of what became the story of Beren and Lúthien, his own favorite of all his stories (when he died, he instructed that "Beren" be carved on his grave and "Lúthien" on his wife Edith's). Child's Stanza 76, lines 3-4, reads "And Robyn was in mery Scherwode, As liȝt as lef on lynde" -- "And Robin was in merry Sherwood, as light as leaf on lind[en]." There are other sources which have similar lines: Piers Plowman, B text, Passus I, line 156, reads "Was nevere leef upon lynde lighter thereafter" (Langland/Schmidt, p. 22), and Chaucer at the end of the Clerk's Tale has "Be ay of chiere as light as leef on lynde" -- "Be ever of cheer as light as leaf on linden-tree" (Fragment IV (E), line 1211; Chaucer/Benson, p. 155). Thus it seems clear that it was traditional, at least as a proverb, and Tolkien adopted it.
SEE ALSO: Hind Etin [Child 41]. Whitaker, p. 55, suggests this as a possible source for the story of Eöl and Aredhel in The Silmarillion, in which she is captured by a rogue resident of a dark forest: "Eöl is reminiscent of the folk legend of the 'Erlking,' the forest-dwelling evil elf who ensnares the innocent and unwary; or the Scottish 'Hind Etin' who takes to wife and imprisons the aristocratic maiden who strays into his forest (as punishment for breaking twigs in his domain)." There is certainly a similarity in that the captured woman remains while she bears her abductor's child(ren), as well as the fact that the woman and her son(s) return to their home. However, in "Hind Etin," there is a reconciliation between Akin/Etin and his wife's family; in the tale of Aredhel, although Eöl is offered a reconciliation, he refuses it and murders his wife. (Which, to be sure, is a typical response of a macho man to feeling betrayed.)
SEE ALSO: The Gypsy Laddie [Child 200]. As with "Hind Etin," and to an even greater degree, note the significant similarities between this and the story of Eöl, Aredhel, and Maeglin in The Silmarillion. In the ballad, an unhappy wife leaves her husband, probably taking her baby with her, and the abandoned husband follows. In Tolkien's tale, Aredhel takes her son Maeglin and leaves her husband Eöl, who follows. The parallels are not perfect, but this might be obe element that went into Tolkien's story.
SEE ALSO: Tolkien's The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun and the two related Corrigan poems. The direct source of the Corrigan poems is the Breton material of Theodore Claude Henri Hersart de la Villemarqué's Barzaz-Breiz: Chants Populaire de le Bretagne of 1846 (TolkienAotrou, p. xvi, 31, 45), and "Aotrou" itself is a development of these ideas into a full-blown "Breton Lay" (the same genre as "Sir Orfeo"). But there is a lot of Child Ballad influence in the poems themselves. Jessica Yates suggested that Tolkien "wanted to write a version of the 'Clerk Colvill' story about a young man and a water nymph [and] was intrigued by the translations he found of the analogous Breton 'Lord Nann' ballad [found in Child]." (ScullHammond-Guide, p. 487). This hasn't convinced many scholars (it certainly doesn't convince me), but the second "Corrigan poem" printed in TolkienAotrou appears to directly cite "Lord Randall" [Child 12]: "A! mother mine, if thou love me well, Make my my bed! my heart doth swell, And in my limbs is poison fell" (lines 69-71; TolkienAotrou, p. 51). The first Corrigan poem features a changeling. I felt as if there were hints of "The Queen of Elfan's Nourice" [Child 40] and maybe "Willie's Lady" [Child 6] in there as well. And the alluring corrigan perhaps hints at the attractive Queen of Elfland in "Thomas Rymer" [Child 37]. On the whole topic of elves, fairies, fays, and even corrigans, see also the excursus "Faërie and Elfland" under "King Orfeo" [Child 19].
Tolkien's Entries in Songs for Philologists
The collection Songs for Philologists (printed 1936, but suppressed for copyright reasons; it is believed only 14 copies survive; Ruud, pp. 422-423) contained 13 songs by Tolkien plus others by his student and colleague E. V. Gordon; there were 30 songs in all. (One of Gordon's was "When I'm dead don't bury me at all, Just pickle my bones in alcohol," which he rendered into Old English, Gothic, and a Scots dialect -- Drout, p. 252. That must have been an interesting translation!) Most of Tolkien's contributions were set to traditional tunes. Some were mentioned above; the rest I list here based on Hammond/Scull-Companion, p. 968 and Ruud, pp. 423-428, adding what additional information I can:
Bagme Bloma -- Gothic, in praise of the birch tree, which loses its leaves in the wind. Probably another comment on the difference between the Literature and Language tracks at Leeds (known as "A" and "B" -- Drout, pp. 350-351 -- and Tokien considered the birch an emblem for "B"). Some of the ideas would show up later in Tolkien's "Smith of Wootton Major," where the birch saves Smith from the "wild Wind" but loses its leaves in the process. Written in Gothic, a very poorly preserved language but one which Tolkien loved. The listing in Songs for Philologists says it is to be sung to "O Lazy Sheep," which no one has succeeded in identifying, and given that it uses alliterative lines (Ruud, p. 424), it's hard to see how it could have been sung to any tune such as we use -- Tolkien himself said that the lines of alliterative poetry "do not go according to a tune" (Drout, p. 8). Reprinted and translated in ShippeyRoad, pp. 354-355. Arden R. Smith, "Tolkienien Gothic," Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder, p. 271, says that the poem contains 55 distinct words, only 38 are attested in other Gothic writings (and some of those are found only in different inflections) and 17 of the words are Tolkien's reconstructions of what word Gothic would likely have used.
Éadig Béo Þu! -- sung to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." The title is translated by Tom Shippey as "Good Luck to You." It is a sort of a drinking song and toast, calling for mead and wishing luck to all (Ruud, p. 424), but like "Bagme Bloma," it also praises "the birch, and the birch's race, the teacher." There is much alliteration; the rhyme scheme is ababcdcd. Reprinted and translated in ShippeyRoad, pp. 355-356.
Frenchmen Froth (in praise of "The English tongue 'fore all") -- sung to the tune of "The Vicar of Bray." A song of praise for England, English, and students of the language. -- a subject superior to all others, especially to literature, which is studied by "moles." There are four stanzas rhyming ababababcc (Ruud, p. 426).
From One to Five -- Five stanzas, to the tune of "Three Wise Men of Gotham," with each stanza describing problems suffered by students and/or professors with academic life (Ruud, p. 423)
I Sat Upon a Bench -- a drinking song to the tune of "The Carrion Crow." It seems to be little more than a song of getting drunker and drunker until the world is shaking and it seems that a beery tide is approaching; the singer thinks it would be merry to die in such a sea. There is a "Fol de rol de rol..." chorus line used as the second and last lines in six-line verses rhymed abaabb (Ruud, pp. 425-426).
Ides Ælfscýne -- to the tune of "Daddy Neptune" (whatever that is). The title is translated by Tom Shippey as "Elf-fair Lady." The singer meets a beautiful woman who says they must never be separated; after many adventures in magic lands, he returns to earth to find all those he had known are dead and he is "grey and alone." Published in Songs for Philologists; reprinted and translated in ShippeyRoad (Ruud, pp. 424-425. This is an idea that Tolkien also used in the poem "Looney," which later became "The Sea-Bell" in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; it also seems to have influenced "The Book of Lost Tales"; clearly it had much meaning to him (compare the Thompson Motif F377, "supernatural lapse of time in fairyland"). One wonders if he was influenced by "Thomas Rymer" [Child 37], which, as mentioned, Tolkien knew well. (Ruud, p. 33, also suggests influence from the romance of Lanval. This is unlikely, since Lanval is French -- one of the Breton Lays of Marie de France -- but Tolkien would have known its English translations "Sir Landevale" or "Sir Launfal." However, I doubt he used it, since the "Launfal" version ends with the hero happily going back to Faërie with the beautiful creature who was known only to him. If a ballad influenced Tolkien here, I really think it was "Thomas Rymer." John Rateliffe, on p. 143 of HoughtonEtAl, also mentions "Thomas Rymer," plus "Clerk Colvill" [Child 42].)
On the other hand, ShippeyRoad, p. 353, thinks this may have been intended to be the pseudo-original of "Tam Lin," "The Queen of Elfan's Nourice," or perhaps "The House Carpenter." Shippey gives the text and translation on pp. 356-358.
Note, however, that Tolkien's title, at least, is from the Old English poem "Judith," who, as noted above, was "ælfscinu," "elven-fair" -- and that Judith led Holofernes astray, although Holofernes ended up dead, not old and alone.
La Húru -- a drinking song to the tune of "O'Reilly," but we don't know which song of that title Tolkien meant. The name is Old English and means something like, "Oh, Surely." Three stanzas with a chorus; each stanza has four tetrameter lines, usually with all four lines rhyming (Ruud, p. 425). See also the next item.
Natura Apis: Moralie Ricardi Eremite -- like "La Húru," to be sung to the tune of "O'Reilly," but very different; the Latin title means "(The) Nature of the Bee: (The) Moral of Richard the Hermit." It is a praise to the bee, probably inspired by the famous Richard Rolle of Hampton (author of many works, "The Pricke of Conscience" being the best-remembered), who had offered the bee as an example for humans to follow. The format is similar to La Húru: Five verses with four verse lines, tetrameters, all rhyming, with a nonsense chorus (Ruud, p. 426).
Ofner Widne Garsecg -- said to be sung to the tune of "The Mermaid," but the reference is not to the Child ballad but to "Married to a Mermaid"; Tolkien explicitly stated that it was "An O[ld]E[nglish] version of 'Twas in the broad Atlantic in the equinoctial gales That a young man fell overboard among the sharks and whales'" (ShippeyRoad, p. 353). The title is translated by Tom Shippey as "Across the Broad Ocean." A young man is blown out to sea and ends up among the merpeople; he is invited to marry, and goes back briefly to tell his former companions that he will live among the merpeople; they curse him (Ruud, p. 425). The four-line stanzas rhyme aabb; the chorus is an allusion to "Beowulf." Reprinted and translated in ShippeyRoad, pp. 359-360.
Traditional or Semi-Traditional Pieces Derived from Tolkien: The Point of This Entry
The Stone Troll
("Troll sat alone on his seat of stone, And munched and mumbled a bare old bone...")
This song connects to tradition because it is the one Tolkien piece for which we unequivocally know the tune, and that tune is traditional, and Tolkien modeled his song on the traditional song. The song he used is "The Fox" (Rateliff, pp. 57-58; TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 197).
TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 193, record that Tolkien called his first version of this "Pēro & Pōdex," Latin for "Boot and Bottom." He revised it and called it "The Root of the Boot." This circulated in booklets by E. V. Gordon at Leeds, where Tolkien had his first academic appointment including the infamous, impossible-to-find booklet Songs for Philologists in 1936. "Pēro & Pōdex" is published in Rateliffe, pp. 101-102; "The Root of the Boot," as Tolkien corrected his copy, is in TolkienBombadilAnnotated, pp. 193-196. This was modified much more to produce the version in The Lord of the Rings. TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 198, says that the steps of this evolution were traced by Christopher Tolkien in The Treason of Isengard.
This is one of the songs that Tolkien recorded on George Sayer's tape recorder in 1952; TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 199, and others say that he used a tune that is different from "The Fox." Based on the transcription by Gregory Martin on p. `146 of Steimel/Schneidewind, they are correct, but I think it's related; perhaps Tolkien's memory slipped over time. And his tune does reduce the range slightly -- a non-trivial point for a 60-year-old who was not a professional singer and who had unusual speech patterns (Tolkien, in ordinary speech, spoke in a sort of high-speed spasmodic mumble that others usually found very hard to understand. Almost everyone who met him commented on this; see e.g. Carpenter, p. 13).
Although the song is called "The Stone Troll" in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, the troll does not actually turn to stone; it's just hard as stone all the time. The trolls in The Hobbit gave Tolkien a problem; trolls were not part of the "Silmarillion universe," and Tolkien when he wrote that part of The Hobbit had not connected Bilbo's story with his greater legendarium. So he rather casually threw in the motif of trolls turned to stone (Thompson motif F531.6.12.2, "Sunlight turns giant or troll to stone"), a rare theme in British troll-lore ("This trait has been made familiar to may readers by its introduction into J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit" -- Briggs, p. 413). The trolls of The Hobbit are more Asbjørsen and Moe trolls than anything else, and "The Stone Troll" follows in that vein; the trolls in The Lord of the Rings are more explicitly evil. Later, Tolkien struggled to explain trolls (as he struggled, even more, to explain and justify orcs -- creatures with intelligence, speech, and independent wills, but seemingly incapable of turning away from their evil masters). In The Lord of the Rings, Treebeard says that trolls are an imitation of ents, but Tolkien does not seem to have followed up on this idea; elsewhere he hints that they were non-intelligent creatures which evil somehow managed to control and give intelligence see, e,g,, the comments in the notes in Morgoth's Ring, p. 412). These notes do not really solve the problem of how trolls capable of speech could be found living independently.
The poem is interesting in its language. It is, of course, deliberately non-learned, as in the use of "axed" for "asked" and "larn" for "learn" (or, properly given the song's context, "teach"), as well as "I thought he were lyin' in graveyard" for "I thought he was...." But there are other interesting forms -- e.g. "afore" instead of "before," which is a Middle English form (Onions, p. 18) although it survives in some modern dialects. And both parties address the other as "thee" (familiar form in Middle English) rather than "you." And then there is the repeated use of "nuncle" for "uncle." This is an instance of "nunnation," "addition of inorganic n in Middle English forms" (Onions, p. 618). This is a technique Tolkien would use very commonly in "Smith of Wootton Major," where the Smith's wife is Nell, his daughter is Nan, and his son is Ned -- nunnated short forms of "Eleanor," "Ann(a)," and "Edward." Furthermore, the bad guy of the piece is "Nokes," nunnated from "Oak(s)" (ShippeyRoad, p. 273). What's more, although "axe" for "ask" is considered vulgar now, it was a perfectly normal Middle English form, used e.g. by Chaucer; Tolkien himself defined it as "Axe(n), v[erb], to ask, demand, inquire of" (Sisam/Tolkien, glossary on "axe(n)"); he derives it from Old English "axian" and cites instances from "Piers Plowman," John Wycliff, and John Gower (you don't get much more upper-crust than Gower!). What's more, "learn," or at least "lere," was used in Middle English for "teach" (Sisam/Tolkien, glossary on "Lere/Leere," again citing "Piers Plowman" plus the York "Harrowing of Hell" play, and deriving it from Old English "læran," to teach). Thus although the poem sounds like it's using lower-class English, every "vulgar" form, except the nonsense chorus verbs, is in fact good Middle English! Is Tolkien trying to say that, in some instances, lower-class dialect preserves older forms? (So ShippeyRoad, p. 376 note 4.) Or is Tolkien simply trying to evoke Middle English?
These forms cannot be derived from the earlier versions of the poem, which are clearly more "sophisticated," in the worst sense of the term. The poem has been "vulgarized" for Sam's use -- and made closer to the Middle English.
I will confess to wondering, a little, if this song takes something from Tolkien's cordial dislike of Shakespeare. Is this a takeoff on the graveyard scene in "Hamlet"? In the latter play, Hamlet recognizes (or claims to recognize) Yorick by his skull -- not an easy thing to do, but at least the skull conveys some of the shape of the face. But Tom, in the poem, claims to recognize his uncle by his *shinbone*! How many people would recognize even a living person by his shin, let alone by the shinbone?
Errantry
("There was a merry messenger, A passenger, a mariner")
From The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, #3. I have seen no sign of this in oral tradition, but Tolkien himself claimed it was found there. Before it was published in a wide-circulation venue -- indeed, before The Lord of the Rings was published -- he wrote a letter to Rayner Unwin on June 22, 1952, who apparently had asked him about it: "[A] few weeks ago I had a letter from a lady unknown to me... She said that a friend had recently written out for her from memory some verses that had so taken her fancy that she was determined to discover their origin. He had picked them up from his son-in-law who had learned them in Washington D.C. (!) but nothing was known about their origin save a vague idea that they were connected with English universities" (Tolkien/Carpenter, letter #133, p, 162). She had eventually managed to locate Tolkien and write to him; he commented that "I must say that I was interested in becoming 'folk-lore'" -- and added some observations about oral transmission that are typically Tolkien-esque -- radically original, not entirely wrong, but only sometimes true. I'm not sure this really qualifies as oral transmission, and there is no indication that she song was ever sung prior to Donald Swann's creating a tune, but whatever else we say, this was *not* a case of the poem being transmitted because it was by Tolkien!
It would seem that the version heard by Tolkien's correspondent was not the published version, for Tolkien reported (Tolkien/Carpenter, letter #133, p, 162) that the version that was in print at that time had been published in The Oxford Magazine of November 9, 1933 and that he had since revised the poem. The revised version approximates that published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil a decade later. Note that this means that the poem had managed to stay in circulation for two decades and across an ocean; if perhaps not oral transmission, it was certainly persistent transmission. What's more, Tolkien admitted in a 1966 letter to Donald Swann that he was partly inspired by "What's the Rhyme to Porringer?" but those elements were partly revised out in the 1962 version: "The piece has had a curious history. It was begun many years ago, in an attempt to go on with the model that came unbidden into my mind: the first six lines, in which, I guess, D'ye ken the rhyme to porringer had a part" (The Treason of Isengard, volume VII of The History of Middle-Earth, p. 85).
John D. Rateliffe (HoughtonEtAl, p. 136) argues that Chaucer's "Sir Thopas" was "at least a partial inspiration for 'Errantry'" (and "Fastitocalon"). This statement requires caution. "Sir Thopas" is in six-line tail rhyme (stanzas rhymed aabaab, the lines with the "a" rhymes having four feet, the "b" lines having three). It has none of the complex partial rhymes and repeats of "Errantry," parodies romance conventions, and moves slowly toward... no ending, since the Host interrupts the telling. And yet it shows that a romance doesn't have to take itself so seriously. Similarly another Middle English poem, "The Tournament of Tottenham" (which sets out to tell the "heroic" deeds of a bunch of homebound peasants, who compete to win the hand of the bailiff's daughter Tyb, plus a cow and a chicken, in a "tournament" fought with staves and flails; cf. Sands, pp. 313-322) reminds us that a romance doesn't have to feature noble characters, or travel farther than the local mudpit. This perhaps would make it easier for Tolkien to write a poem that cares more about the fact of traveling than the purpose of the trip.
It certainly had a complex history of versions; Christopher Tolkien wrote "No poem of my father's had so long and complex a history as that which he named Errantry" (The Treason of Isengard, p. 84). Tolkien apparently wrote five different versions before settling on the Oxford Magazine version (The Treason of Isengard, pp. 85-91; the published version is also in TolkienBombadilAnnotated, pp. 155-159). With that as a base he started turning it into the poem that appears in The Lord of the Rings as "Eärendil Was a Mariner" (Book II, chapter 1, "Many Meetings"; HM2Ed I.246; 50thEd, p. 233). It's easy to see why people who see only the finished poems think them unrelated, since they have only one line in common, but they both go back to the same inspiration (TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 163); the metamorphosis was gradual.
The form is so complex, with assonances and partial internal rhymes, that Tolkien never tried it again (TolkienBombadilAnnotated, pp. 162-163); he declared that it "just blew out in a single impulse" (Tolkien/Carpenter, letter #133, p, 162). It has no real relationship to the Middle-Earth cycle, even though it was passed off as a Hobbit poem; the names in it are mostly artificial and presumably made up for purposes of the poetry. There is one exception, the name "Belmarie" " "a-harrying beyond the sea, and roaming over Belmarie...." (TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 57). Tolkien may have gotten this from Chaucer; the Knight had "riden in Belmarye" (General Prologue, line 57; Chaucer/Benson, p. 24. The notes on p. 801 glass this as the name of an African dynasty, Banu Merin, converted to a place name, though I'm not sure I trust this).
We should note that only to the proper nouns are made up; the common nouns are sometimes obscure but were generally legitimate English words. An obvious example is "dumbledor" ("He battled with the Dumbledors, the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees"); "Dumbledor(e)" is a legitimate archaic English word for a bee-like insect that J. K. Rowling just happened to like the sound of.... Some of the others are discussed in TolkienBombadilAnnotated, but they can be found in a sufficiently substantial dictionary.
It is capable of being used as a circular poem, and Tolkien was clearly aware of this form, and consciously wrote "Errantry" as such: "Also of course the reciter was supposed at once to begin repeating (at an even higher speed) the beginning" (The Treason of Isengard, p. 85; TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 161) and called it a "never-ending tale" (The Treason of Isengard, p. 106; TolkienBombadilAnnotated, p. 161). Also, Tolkien apparently meant each of the stanzas (which are of irregular length) to be begun with the reciter speaking quickly, then slowing down toward the end of the stanza. Despite its pseudo-traditional status, I doubt it could be sung in the way Tolkien imagined it. - RBW
I Sang of Gold, of Leaves of Gold
("I Sang of Gold, of leaves of gold, And leaves of gold there grew")
Field recording: Bobby McMillon, "Galadriel's Song/Song of the Eldamar," in the Derek Piotr archive. The words are Tolkien's; the tune was set by McMillon. Obviously not traditional in origin, but McMillon was very much a traditional singer -- a collateral relative of Charles Silver, the husband of Frankie Silver; for background on him, see the notes to "Frankie Silvers" [Laws E13] or Daniel W. Patterson, A Tree Accursed: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver, University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Tolkien's other two pieces that went into tradition are light pieces; this one is much more serious, and calls for a deep understanding of Tolkien's inner thinking. "Without using blatantly theorlogical terms his ideas are often clearly theological nonetheless, and are best understood when viewed in the context of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas" (Kocher, p. 77; a number of others have seen Thomist elements in Tolkien's opinions, but Kocher seems to have been the first).
Given the often excessively masculine bent of Christian theology, it is perhaps noteworthy that this is the only one of Tolkien's three semi-traditinal songs that is in the first person -- and the first person voice of a woman.
Tolkien has been accused of ignoring female characters -- there are no women at all in The Hobbit, and few in The Lord of the Rings -- but this is in part because he was writing toward a particular market. When not writing for this market, the situation is different. There are more women in The Silmarillion -- and probably even more than that in Tolkien's original conception; Kane, p. 26, says that Christopher Tolkien tended to edit them out in creating the published Silmarillion, and on p. 252 lists some of the women he downplayed; Galadriel is one of them! Blackham, p. 13, suggests that his aunt Jane Neave (at whose request he assembled The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) might have been one of the inspirations for Galadriel -- and she was certainly an independent, modern woman by the standards of the time 1910s: one of the first women in England to earn a science degree, she taught Tolkien geometry, and when her husband died, she bought a farm and ran it for many decades.
According to Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien "spoke of his special regard for the book of Luke because the writer included so much about women" (Kilby, p. 54).
Melanie A. Rawls, "The Feminine Principle in Tolkien," (Croft/Donovan, pp. 99-100) says, "But open The Silmarillion. The feminine presence abounds.... [When] the Feminine and the Masculine... are in equilibrium and in harmony, there is Good, but Evil is the result of an insufficiency or disharmony of the attributes of one or the other of the genders." Furthermore, "Attributes of the gender are not necessarily confined to the sex of the same gender, i.e. feminine attributes are not confined to females or masculine attributes to males. The Macho Man, with his paucity of finer feeling and his neglect of thought in favor of action, is not admitted in Middle-earth or Valinor." Similarly, Stratford Caldecott suggests that the Elves are, in part, a sort of representation of what humans would be like if humans (to paraphrase very loosely) had a stronger feminine side: "The Elves also represent the feminine aspect of our civilization, just as the Normans for [Tolkien] represented the cruder masculine aspect" (Caldecott/Honegger, pp. 228-229).
There is a tendency, in The Lord of the Rings, for such women as there are to be almost cartoonishly beautiful. (As if ballad singers can argue; how many songs feature "the fairest maiden I e'er did see"?) But one could, perhaps, argue that here Tolkien is following in the footsteps of romance; Tolkien's own translation of Sir Orfeo concludes its description of Heurodis by saying "but none her loveliness can tell" (Tolkien-Gawain/Pearl.Orfeo, p. 134, translating line 56, "Ac no man may telle hir fairnise"). In "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Bertilak's lady is "more lovely than Guinevere" (Tolkien-Gawain/Pearl.Orfeo, p. 48, translating line 945, "wener þen enore) -- a superlative, since Guinevere was said to be the most beautiful woman in Britain. Tolkien's student A. J. Bliss studied the English descendants of Marie de France's "Lanval," including the Middle English "Sir Landevale" and "Sir Launfal" (the former of which appears in the Percy Folio); in the Percy Folio version, Launfal tells Guinevere, who is trying to seduce him, "I am loved with my lemman, that fairer hath noe gentleman," (Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume I, lines 265-266; p. 153). The Canterbury Tales is littered with descriptions of incredibly beautiful women: Alison, May, the transformed Loathly Lady, and of course Emilie: "that fairer was to sene Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene" (The Knight's Tale, A.1035-1036; Chaucer/Benson, p. 39). Even the (real if idealized) Duchess Blanche of "The Book of the Duchess" is given ten lines of superlatives in describing her beauty (lines 939-948; Chaucer/Benson, p. 341; I won't try to quote these because frankly it would sound pretty strange by today's standards). Tolkien, since he knew the Child Ballads, would also have known "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" [Child #31], and though the Percy Folio is defective for the description of the Loathly Lady turned beautify, the source, "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell" has it: "He sawe her the fairest creature Thet evere he sawe withoute mesure" (lines 641-642; Sands, p. 342).
Let's face it: romances are (too) prone to describe women in superlatives. It's a sexist tradition, and obviously not everyone can be that beautiful, but Tolkien was following a tradition.
And if these women are very beautiful, they aren't the passive creatures of many of the romances: Galadriel's help makes success possible, and Éowyn saves Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Nazgûl. Lúthien actually went off to contest against Morgoth himself! Even Arwen, probably the most passive of all the major characters, "makes the Christ-like choice of taking on mortality out of love" (Nancy Enright, "Tolkien's Females and the Defining of Power," Croft/Donovan, p. 123). As anyone who knows Greek will know, the "love" Arwen feels is not the same as Christ's, but her sacrifice is important in reviving the lineage of the heirs of Elendil.
I also have a feeling that Tolkien, if challenged on the beauty of his women, would say that their beauty reflects their inner goodness and power, just as the Virgin Mary in Catholic legend is portrayed as extremely beautiful. It is a beauty that is more than skin-deep. Why else would Gimli, who is not even of her species, find Galadriel beautiful?
This reminds me a bit of the comment on p. 49 of Chance: "Galadriel... signals the principle of supernatural (even divine) communal wholeness and harmony." And although we only see her briefly, her role in victory is surprisingly great: It was her advice which led Aragorn to take the Paths of the Dead, and if he had not done so, Minas Tirith probably could not have been saved. Her role in Frodo and Sam's trip to Mordor is even greater: other than the Ring, the two of them had four extraordinary objects, all of which were essential to their success: their elven-cloaks (they would surely have been captured without them), lembas (they would never have made it without that food), the sword Sting, and the Phial of Galadriel (both needed to survive Shelob). And Galadriel supplied three of the four, and it is likely that only she could have done so.
In writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien often would invent a character and then have the character insist on being more important than Tolkien intended. He told his son Christopher that this was true of Faramir, for instance: "A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking in the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir" (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 79). There is every reason to believe that Galadriel was another such: Tolkien encountered her, one of the last survivors of the Noldor of the First Age, in Lothlórien. (Most of what is said about her in The Silmarillion seems, based on Kane, to be from 1951-1952, after the writing of The Lord of the Rings).
As she first appears, she seems to owe much to H. Rider Haggard's "She" (from the book of the same name) -- immortal, so beautiful as to drive men half-mad, and having a gadget that showed glimpses of the future (ScullHammond-Guide, pp. 355-358; having read She half a century after first meeting Galadriel; I can say that the relationship is instantly obvious. Purtill, p. 115, points out another trait: if Galadriel had taken The Ring when Frodo offered it to her, "all [would] love me and despair!" [HM2Ed II.381; 50thEd p. 366] -- which is exactly what any man who sees "She" does. John Rateliffe, "She and Tolkien, Revisited," Fisher, pp. 145-161, says that Tolkien admitted to reading She (p. 144); on p. 157 Rateliffe lists some of the others who have studied the connection, while claiming to have been first in print. Rateliffe goes on to list other ways in which She might have influenced Tolkien. Most of these are a little unconvincing, but the similarities of Haggard's Ayesha and Tolkien's Galadriel are dramatic).
Tolkien is known to have read a lot of George MacDonald, and many see him finding inspiration there also (e.g. Stratford Caldecott, on p. 215 of Caldecott/Honegger). Tolkien admitted that part of the idea for orcs came from the goblins of The Princess and the Goblin (Drout, p. 399; Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 185), but Tolkien himself said that he never believed in parts of MacDonald's idea (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 178). There is a certain resemblance of Galadriel to the old Queen Irene of The Princess and the Goblin and it sequel The Princess and Curdie; Irene is seemingly immortal, very beautiful (when she wants to be), and very magical. But I suspect Tolkien would reject the comparison; Irene is too much of a guardian angel to her descendants rather than a general force for good. If Tolkien took any other inspiration from the Curdie books, it is probably in the ending: a eucatastrophe in which the sick old king who has been thrust aside is brought back to health and restores his realm to order and prosperity, but his line dies out and the nation eventually falls and is forgotten. All those elements exist in The Lord of the Rings, too. But Tolkien could have derived that just as well from Catholic doctine.)
Others have seen other influences, e.g. Mac Fenwick though he "found echoes of Homer's Circe and Calypso" (Leslie A. Donovan, "The Valkyrie Reflex," Croft/Donovan, p. 222), which I don't see, and Marjorie Burns regards her as a sort of yin-and-yang good-versus-evil double of Shelob (Drout, p. 128), which comparison I suspect would have disgusted Tolkien as being just the sort of whackdoodle analysis that made him disdain literary criticism. (Tolkien I believe knew, as many of his critics seemingly do not, that many species of spiders are strongly sexually dimorphic, with the females much, much larger than the males. Shelob -- like Ungoliant before her -- is not a large spider who happens to be female; Shelob is female because large spiders have to be female. And all the psychoanalytical hypotheses about Shelob are patently wrong because, ahem, Freud was wrong.) Donovan herself (Croft/Donovan, p. 230), compares Galadriel to Wealhþeow (Wealtheow) the wife of Hroðgar (Hrothgar) in Beowulf, mostly on the basis that Galadriel is a lord's wife who gives gifts (true, but somewhat trivial). Noel, p. 118, turns to German rather than English myth and suggests "Galadriel is comparable to Berhta ("Bright"), Holda, and all the other women in white in Teutonic mythology who were associated with wells, spun and wove, and gave gifts that turned into gold." On p. 119 Noel associates Galadriel's swan-boat with the Teutonic swan-maidens, and speculates that Galadriel, whose women wove the elven-cloaks of the Fellowship, should remind us of the Norns who spun human destiny (though that gives Galadriel an awful lot of power...). Both Donovan and Noel compare Galadriel to the Valkyries, which I really don't buy; Noel, p. 120, adds the grail-messengers and the Celtic goddesses who presided over cauldrons of plenty.
(Noel also points up Galadriel's golden hair. Perhaps significant, but I think not. Galadriel is the brother of Finrod, who also was noteworthy for his blonde hair -- it's responsible for the FIN element, found also in the name Glorfindel. Noel says that yellow hair is rare in elves -- I think she means the Noldor -- and she is right. But Galadriel and Finrod, although considered Noldor, were in fact only one-fourth Noldor by blood. Their paternal grandmother, Indis, was one of the golden-haired Vanyar. Their mother, Eärwen, was a Telerin elf, the daughter of Olwë of the Telerin royal house, whose members, I read somewhere, had very pale hair -- Celeborn, who was of that family, is described as silver-haired, and Elwé Thingol, the head of the family, is said in Chapter 5 of The Silmarillion has "hair as grey silver." Galadriel's golden hair, arguably, is a token that she represents *all* the houses of the Elves, not just the Noldor -- just as the Virgin Mary intercedes for all of humanity.)
Whatever elements went into creating Galadriel, Tolkien grew enthralled with her, and gradually increased both goodness and her capability. Thus, in "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn" we read that "Galadriel was the greatest of the Noldor, except Fëanor maybe, though she was wiser than he," though they, "the greatest of the Eldar of Valinor, were unfriends for ever"; he also called her "a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar in the days of their youth" (from Unfinished Tales, pp. 226-227 in the first Houghton-Mifflin edition). Purtill, after arguing that Tolkien often creates characters in contrasting pairs (such as Frodo and Gollum or Boromir and Denethor) suggests that "Galadriel is the intended contrast character to Fëanor; her rejection of the ring contrasts with his refusal to give up the Silmarils" (Purtill, p. 138). But the character of Fëanor long predates Galadriel.
Also, Tolkien gradually increased her virtue -- initially she was one of the "fallen" Noldor, but clearly he changed his mind about that (e.g. Tolkien/Hostetter, p. 346; on p. 347 Tolkien says that, in her, Sauron had "met his match (or at least a very serious adversary)." Think also of the Phial of Galadriel. This, be it noted, is a silmaril in miniature -- it captures the light of Eärendil's Star. Flieger, p. 159, in fact, suggests that "like all forces in the story, the Ring is balanced by an opposite, and that opposite is the Phial. As the Ring is the cause of Frodo's journey, so the Phail is the beacon to light his way. As Galadriel's gift to him, it matches the Ring, so often described as a 'present.' As light, it balances the Ring's darkness." I don't think Galadriel had such an idea, but still: Galadriel matched the greatest feat of Fëanor! Yes, she presents a contrast to Fëanor-- but she was not initially intended as one.
Jason Fisher (Drout, p. 507) points out a parallel to Rev. 2:28 in the Bible: "(26) The one who conquers and keeps my works.... (28) I will give him the morning star." Eärendil, recall, is the morning star in Tolkien -- is Galadriel fulfilling the promise?
It has been suggested, I think correctly, that Tolkien's view of Galadriel came to be deeply influenced by Catholic views of the Virgin Mary, particularly in her role as the source of mercy -- Tolkien admits (in a 1971 letter to Ruth Austin) that "I think it is true that I owe much of this character [Galadriel] to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary"; Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 407). So, e.g., that when Frodo is near Cirith Ungol and is tempted to put on the ring, touching the Phial of Galadriel brings him relief (at the cross-roads by Minas Ithil: Book IV, chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol," HM2Ed II.316; 50thEd p. 707). A priest friend of Tolkien, Father Robert Murphy, had pointed this out to Tolkien even before the books were published (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 172), and Tolkien eventually admitted it himself (e.g. Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 288). Bradley J. Birzer write that "one finds elements of Christ, Odin, and St. Michael in Gandalf. One finds elements of the Arthurian Lady of the Lake and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Galadriel" (Drout, p. 89, article "Catholicism." Birtzer is religious bigot enough to have penned a defense of Andrew Jackson, but I would mostly agree with this). Clyde S. Kilby says that Tolkien had "a special reverence for the Virgin Mary" (Kilby, p. 53).
On the other hand, Cath Filmer-Davies says that "the person of Galadriel can be seen to symbolize the church in its feminine aspect of 'the bride of Christ.' Catholics refer to our mother the church.' Galadriel represents the church, not the Virgin Mary, because Galadriel is not a virgin. All the same Galdriel (sic.) is holy" (Drout, p. 645).
There has been some debate among Tolkien scholars about whether his elves are Fallen -- a crucial point, because if Elves are fallen, then Galadriel cannot be of the same order as an angel, or as the Virgin Mary (the one human who, because of the Immaculate Conception, was not fallen; Hardon, pp. 187-188. The Immaculate Conception is of course non-Biblical, and not even a particularly old tradition -- but it doesn't matter if it's made up; Tolkien believed it). Tolkien's opinion on the Fall are relevant even for non-Christians as they read his books, since most of the traits of fallen humanity can be shown to be likely outcomes of the evolutionary process.
Although The Lord of the Rings never discusses the early history of humanity, Tolkien explicitly wrote that humans are fallen, but the fall occurred off-stage, presumably to avoid inconsistency with the Biblical tale. Tolkien, in summarizing his work for publisher Milton Waldman, says "The first fall of Man... appears nowhere -- Men do not come on the stage until all that is long past" (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 147; cf. Nicholas Birns, "The Stones and the Book," Fisher, p. 49). Furthermore, the "Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth," published in Morgoth's Ring, discusses the legends about the Fall among the Edain -- the Edain know little and will say less.
Furthermore, in Tolkien's conception, Morgoth/Melkor, the devil-figure, had a direct hand in the shaping of the world: Ilúvatar (the One God) created the vision of Arda, but the Valar and Maiar, including Melkor, were responsible for the final shaping of the world, and Melkor's interference was everywhere. The result was "Arda Marred"; nothing is as perfect as Ilúvatar's original vision. This adds a basic defect, almost an entropy, into the world; nothing works quite right. (Only the Valar, who were created before the world, are free of this taint, and they don't understand those who suffer from it.) The death of Míriel the mother of Fëanor, for instance, is attributed to the defects in Arda Marred (Kristine Larsen, "The Power of Pity and Tears," Croft/Donovan, p. 198). The Marring is not the cause of the Fall, but perhaps it makes everything a little more prone to error.
Tolkien's version of the Fall does have one interesting difference from the standard Catholic version. Catholic doctrine states that Adam's fall cost him "and his posterity the supernatural gift of sanctifying grace and the preternatural gifts of integrity, bodily immortality, and impassibility [that is, freedom from bodily ills]" (Hardon, p. 144). Yet Tolkien explicitly calls death the "Gift of Men" and says that Ilúvatar gave them this gift from the beginning. His notes on the "Athrabeth" speculate that what the Fall caused was for men to begin to *fear* death. This, we might note, is not incompatible with Genesis 3 -- the Garden of Eden contained two special trees, the Tree of Knowledge/Experience and the Tree of Life. But if the Tree of Life would have given immortality, does it not follow that Adam and Eve were not inherently immortal? There is much debate over the meaning of Genesis 3, but Tolkien's interpretation is certainly logical. But since it makes the Fall more "psychological," it makes it harder to determine who else has suffered it.
The status of the Elves is a much more complicated question -- e.g. Duriez (who is a C. S. Lewis nut, not a Tolkien expert), p. 90, declares, "Elves are not fallen as a race, and only rarely turn to wickedness individually, so they have no original sin." Crabbe, p. 70 says the elves are "a race in whom the attributes of divinity are legion," which hints they are not fallen. Lobdell suggests that "Arguably, Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age is neither fallen nor unfallen" (Drout, p. 614), which strikes me as a bit of a weasel-out since it is humanity, not earth, that is fallen, but still suggests a higher state of existence than the ordinary fallen human. But Clyde S. Kilby says the fate of the Noldor "suggests the Old Testament motif of disobedience and its dire results" (Kilby, pp. 60-61). Crabbe, p. 120, also compares Féanor's rebellion to the fall of Adam and Eve. Tolkien himself was inconsistent; in his commentary on the "Athrabeth," on p. 334 of Morgoth's Ring he wrote that the Elves "remained as a people 'unfallen.'" On the other hand, in 1951 he told Waldman that "the Elves have a fall" (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 147) -- referring to the Flight of the Noldor. The Flight, however, differs from the Fall of Man: rather than being expelled from the Undying Lands, the Noldor -- or some of them -- leave on their own. The physical consequences of the Fall of Man -- the loss of "impassibility," i.e. the coming of death and disease -- do not apply to the Elves, and they did not explicitly suffer the Temptation, nor did they explicitly defy the will of God -- even Fëanor, when he rebels against the Valar, invokes Ilúvatar the One God. Moreover, with the exception of Maeglin, none of them voluntarily take the side of Morgoth or Sauron. Similarly, apart from Maeglin (the child of a rape), his father Eöl (the rapist), and Celegorm (one of the worst of the Sons of Fëanor, and in any case it was a brief flash of lust), there seems to be no instance of improper sexual desire, and with the exception of Finwë after his wife truly died, no instance whatsoever of an Elf ever being in any way unfaithful to a spouse. So they are clearly not fallen in the same sense as humanity.
(By contrast, note that illicit desire contributed directly to the fall of Númenor: Drout, p. 602. In the Akalabêth, King Ar-Gimilzôr forcibly takes Lindórië to wife. Their sons are the next king, Tar-Palantir, and Gimilkhâd. Tar-Palantir's daughter was Tar-Míriel; Gimilkhâd's son was Ar-Pharazôn, who forcibly married Tar-Míriel and seized the throne -- and whose arrogant invasion of the Undying Lands led to the overthrow of Númenor.
On the other hand, pride, the greatest of human sins, is clearly present in Elves as well. Lust for power and lust for women seem to go almost hand in hand -- which makes some sense, because both involve seeking more than is one's due.)
It is certain that the Elves have a soul or spirit of some sort, since they can be reincarnated -- but it is not known if they can survive the ending of the world, whereas it is known that the spirits of men have an afterlife. And the Noldor certainly defied the will of the Valar at least, and furthermore, the lesser Elves, who did not go to Aman, are clearly inferior in culture, and indeed in might, to those who did; they aren't just primitives, they are fundamentally lesser elves -- so if the Elves are not fallen, neither are most of them as exalted as they could be.
And certainly Fëanor makes terrible mistakes out of pride, and both Fêanor and his sons slaughter other elves. If we look at just the House of Fëanor, we would certainly think that they are fallen. But Elrond? Galadriel? It almost seems as if the choice of whether to Fall still lies with the Elves, as it does not with humans. Or perhaps they are in a sort of pre-death version of Limbo, not having attained salvation but not having fallen to the equivalent of Hell. We can't really know Tolkien's answer. But surely Galadriel's status must be assessed in the light of this uncertainty.
Bettridge, p. 29, points out that what the Ring "reveals... is Adam's sin, pride, the assertion of self at the expense of others. All who wield the Ring do so in the hope of gaining power, and power means the control of others." This is presumably why the Ring has no effect on Tom Bombadil, and why he is not a fit custodian: He is unfallen, so he does not have anything for it to operate on. Galadriel fears the Ring; this says to me that she, and hence all Elves, are fallen. (It would be interesting to know what effect the Ring would have had on Elves before Fëanor's rebellion, but we cannot know the answer.)
All this may sound like logic-chopping, or perhaps theology-chopping. But Tolkien was a fanatical Catholic, of the sort who opposed Vatican II (of course, that's easy for a guy who was fluent in Latin!); anything he says must generally be absolutely consistent with Catholic doctrine. (There is one peculiar exception: suicide. Catholic doctrine says that "It is a grave sin against the natural and revealed law"; Hardon, p. 422. Yet suicide, and attempted suicide, is common in Tolkien: Nienor, Túrin, Húrin, Maedhros, and Denethor all kill themselves, and Éowyn tries to die in battle. And while Túrin and Denethor perhaps deserve their fate, Húrin and Nienor surely do not; neither would Éowyn had she succeeded. I cannot believe that Tolkien would deny Húrin a place in heaven -- or even deny him burial in consecrated ground had his body been found.)
Keep in mind that being fallen would not make it impossible for Galadriel to be the greatest power for good in Middle-earth. As Enright points out on p. 128 of Croft/Donovan, "even if Galadriel remains a redeemed sinner, by grace a penitent can reflect the beauty of Mary and even of Christ, and Galadriel does this certainly." This is well-attested in Christian history and legend -- e.g. both Paul and Mary Magdalen were sinners who came to be called saints, and Paul at least is recorded as performing miracles.
On yet another hand, in humans, Original Sin is heritable -- "all have fallen as Adam fell." But Galadriel's sin, if there is one, is not inheritable. Celebrían, the daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn, and the wife of Elrond, is permitted to go to Valinor when she desires to (in the year 2510 of the Third Age, according to Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings).
Bottom line: Combining all we know, it seems to me that the best real-world analogy to Galadriel is to the greatest Christian saints. Tolkien assuredly believed in saints; he wrote about miracles that allegedly took place at Lourdes, and told a correspondent that "he had adoped St. John the Evangelist as his personal patron" (Drout, p. 586; the references appear to be to Tolkien/Carpenter, pp. 100, 397, from 1944 and 1969). But, because Galadriel lived before the Incarnation, she could not foresee her own end in an un-redeemed world.
Note that this would not make it impossible for her to be the greatest power for good in Middle-earth. As Enright points out on p. 128 of Croft/Donovan, "even if Galadriel remains a redeemed sinner, by grace a penitent can reflect the beauty of Mary and even of Christ, and Galadriel does this certainly." This is well-attested in Christian history and legend -- e.g. both Paul and Mary Magdalen were sinners who came to be called saints, and Paul at least is recorded as performing miracles.
Which brings us to "magic." Galadriel, in talking to Frodo and Sam before showing them her mirror, says "this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the enemy" (Book II, chapter 7, "The Mirror of Galadriel," HM2Ed I.377, 50thEd p. 362). Galadriel's distinction is important, I think, though Tolkien struggled to convey it (Kristine Larsen, "Alone Between the Dark and the Light"; HoughtonEtAl, p. 228). But it seems clear to me: Sauron's "magic" serves to destroy and defile. The greatest magic of Elrond is healing things, and Galadriel's skill is in making things grow. The cloaks of Lothlórien are a form of camouflage. Yet living things strive to heal and grow and conceal themselves in and of themselves; the "magic" of the elves simply lets them do better that which they have always done. This power the Elves have not lost, except insofar as it was amplified by the Three Rings. It is a power that preserves and maintains -- appropriate for the Elves, whose fault, if they have one, is not wanting to change.
As for the Rings of Power themselves, they are surely no less (and no more) believable than psychic powers, since that, apart from infinite prolongation of (non)-life, is what they seem to offer: the Nine Rings give the Nazgûl the power to broadcast terror, and the One Ring causes a powerless wearer to project invisibility, while a powerful wearer gains the ability to govern the thoughts and actions of others.
Tolkien in fact drew a distinction between "enchantment" and "magic" (Drout, pp. 159-160). The former could, perhaps, be defined as "something which brings one closer to Faërie." "Magic" on the other hand was the use of the power of enchantment for one's own ends. Thus Sauron's use would clearly be magic, but Galadriel's, insofar as we see it, is enchantment, not magic.
The Three Rings also served to preserve things as they were -- most clearly seen in the nature of Lórien, where time seems almost to stop passing (Kocher, pp. 98-99); not even in Rivendell is this so true. So perhaps that too is partly the work of Galadriel -- it's almost as if she stops entropy from happening.
If we know Galadriel was to some degree fallen, we do not know if she was a rebel against the Valar -- Tolkien is inconsistent on this point. The line "golden tree... beside the walls of Elven Tirion" is obviously a reference to Laurelin the golden, one of the Two Trees of Valinor -- the mentions shows that Galadriel came from Valinor and is one of the Exiles. The references to the "Sundering Seas" and the "Hither Shore" reinforce this. (The "Sundering Seas" are also mentioned in the song of Lúthien and Beren in the chapter "A Knife in the Dark"; they refer both literally to the sea between Middle-Earth and Valinor which only certain ships can cross and to the gulf that separates the mortal Beren, whose soul when he dies goes beyond the world and the immortal Lúthien, who in the ordinary course of things would, if slain, go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor.) The last line of the song, "What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a sea?" is evidence that, at this time, Tolkien viewed Galadriel as subject to the Doom of Mandos that forbade the leaders of the Noldorin Revolt from returning to Valinor. It was only after the War of the Ring that she was forgiven and allowed to return. She was, at least since the death of Gil-Galad and perhaps even before that, the last of these leaders.
On the other hand, Romuald I. Lakowski, "The Fall and Repentance of Galadriel," Croft/Donovan, p. 159, says that Tolkien did not make Galadriel's exile explicit until 1967, when he described the situation in The Road Goes Ever On. Lakowski (following Christopher Tolkien) says that Galadriel's statement that she will refuse the ring, and "diminish, and go into the west" ("The Mirror of Galadriel"; Book II, chapter 7, HM2Ed I.381; 50thEd p. 366) contradicts the idea of enforced exile, because she can go west. On the face of it, Tolkien when he wrote The Lord of the Rings had determined that she was an exile but had not figured out the reason.
And if she was in such trouble with the Valar, why would they give her one of the Three Rings?
Exile is certainly a strong theme in Tolkien; the Númenoreans are in exile; the Noldor, including Galadriel, are in exile; Frodo is in exile; and Yvette Kisor suggests that Gollum is the ultimate exile (HoughtonEtAl, p. 153). There is much medieval exile literature, including in particular the poem "The Wanderer," which Tolkien knew well.
(Here it is worth reminding ourselves that Galadriel is one of the rare Elves who has been to "the west" -- she was born there! Perhaps the appeal is less for her. And, as Kocher writes on p. 101, "One wonders how content they [the elves] will be in the Undying Lands. These are not Paradise. No beatific vision or new celestial life awaits the returning elves." This is the reason why mortality is called the "gift of men" -- it offers what Tolkien elsewhere called an "Escape from Deathlessness" -- TolkienFairy, p. 153)
(The passage also shows that Galadriel has maintained the ability to be humble -- and to know that this does not make her less herself; it makes her more truly hersel. As Purtill, pp. 115-116, points out, characters like Saruman and Denethor will not humble themselves -- and they pay for it. Kocher, pp. 50-51, observes that Galadriel's rejection of the ring is only one of many such cases where characters are tested by the ring. Bilbo, Gollum, Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, Galadriel, Boromir, Faramir, and Sam are all directly tested; Denethor and Saruman are indirectly tested. Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, Galadriel, Faramir, and Sam all pass the test; Bilbo passes with help from Gandalf. Boromir, Denethor, and Saruman fail, though Boromir partly redeems himself. Frodo finally fails, but in circumstances that let the quest succeed -- at extraordinary cost to Frodo. Gollum had long since failed, and the attempt to redeem him also failed. I note that those who fail, die, while those who pass survive, though many, like Galadriel, are "diminished." I do wonder if, in Tolkien's universe, Gollum's brief attempt to repent, and the fact that it was due to him that the quest succeeded, made him more or less culpable in the afterlife than, say, Boromir or Denethor.)
Lakowski (Croft/Donovan, p. 163) suggests parallels in Galadriel's speech here to the Magnificat of Luke 1, which would be another link to the Virgin Mary if it is real (but I don't see the link). I do, however, see Lakowski's link between being "diminished" and the statement in John 3:30 that "He must increase, but I [John the Baptist] must decrease." The Latin word for "decrease" is "minui"; the first meaning given for Greek ελαττοω is "diminish" or "make less" -- a word which occurs in the New Testament only in that verse in John and in Hebrews 2:7, 9. (John's "diminishment" reminds me in turn of Matthew 11:11: among those on earth none is "greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.") The song, and her words to Frodo, says that she has and will diminish; the Biblical reference implies that she *must* diminish.
There is every reason to think Tolkien changed his mind about her exile (see Nancy Enright on p. 127 of Croft/Donovan), but the concept survives in The Lord of the Rings, and so Galadriel sings the song of someone in exile for seven thousand years. No one seems to believe there is a dependence, but I wonder if the Old English "The Wanderer" and the "Lay of the Last Survivor" from "Beowulf" weren't somewhere in Tolkien's mind.
I will throw out a wild speculation that can perhaps reconcile all this, though I doubt Tolkien thought of it. After the destruction of Númenor, the "straight road" to the Undying Lands was lost, and ordinary ships, sailing west, simply continued around the world. To be able to follow the "lost road" required a specially hallowed ship. There is a hint that such ships literally would not carry those who were unworthy: in the poem "The Last Ship," the last item in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. when the Elves call the mortal Fíriel to join them on their way, she takes one step to come to them, "then deep in clay her feet sank"; the earth itself barred her from going. Galadriel, in her youth, was proud -- justly proud, we would probably say, in her power and her skill and her beauty, but they were her natural gifts, not her own doing. Might not such pride be enough that the ship would reject her, as Fíriel was rejected? Only when Galadriel learned humility would the ship carry her, and how could she know, while still in Lórien? So Galadriel perhaps hopes to go to the West, and strives to earn it, but cannot be sure it is permitted. Is this not the fate (in the Catholic view) of everyone living? (Kocher, p. 68, suggests humility as a vital virtue; it is one that Sauron cannot overcome, presumably because he does not understand it. I agree at least that Tolkien placed great value on humility.)
One of the many, many levels on which The Lord of the Rings operates is as a sort of meditation on The Lord's Prayer -- Tolkien wrote to Michael Straight that the key scenes "exemplify... the familiar words 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil'" (Tolkien/Carpenter, p. 233). The entire plot succeeds because the Good Guys offer mercy and pity (noted by several commentators, e.g. Leon Pereira, Caldecott/Honegger, p. 181; ShippeyRoad, pp. 144-145; Crabbe, p. 50, broadens pity to include all charity, but I'm not sure this is warranted). Is this not another case where mercy and pity are vital?
ShippeyRoad, p. 324, reflecting in part on the New Testament parallels, says that "One thing absolutely certain about The Lord of the Rings is that it is about renunciation: it inverts a very familiar narrative pattern, in that it is not a quest to obtain something, but an anti-quest, to get rid of it." And Galadriel, of course, renounced the Ring more than almost anyone; several people (e.g. Gandalf, Elrond, Faramir) say they would not take the ring -- but only Galadriel is given a specific and credible offer; the Ring has already corrupted Frodo significantly, but he still offers it to her freely.
Referring specifically to Galadriel reminds me of another important Biblical passage, "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:43-44). Chance, pp. 49-50, points out that when the Fellowship comes to Lothlórien, she welcomes Gimli, whom even Celeborn distrusts because he is a dwarf. "Her sympathy for the dwarves and loving desire to accept all different from herself, even a traditional enemy, helps to heal old wounds.... Forgiveness, hospitality, understanding -- all are qualities characteristic of Lady Galadriel that inspire Gimli's courteous praise of her and serve as a model of toleration for difference" (Chance, p. 50).
Jason Fisher, on p. 228 of Drout, concludes the entry on Galadriel by saying, "It appears that in his final days, Tolkien may have intended to revise Galadriel into a more deliberately Marian figure after all, and had he lived longer, it seems likely that his vision of her in The Silmarillion would have altered considerably. As it is, we're left with a powerful and pivotal character caught in the midst of an unfinished transformation."
I'm not sure that this transformation would have been for the better. Tolkien was often sentimental about his characters in his later years. If Galadriel was changing, it was not for the sake of the plot but because of how he felt about the character. It seems to me that, in his life, Tolkien loved only two women other than his mother. One was his wife Edith (née Bratt), who was the single most important inspiration for his Lúthien. The other was Galadriel. "The fact that Tolkien continued to think about Galadriel and her place in his own private mythology of the first age right until the very end of his life indicates also how important Tolkien himself considered her" (Lakowski, on p. 167 of Croft/Donovan).
Based on Hammond/Scull-Companion, p. 333, this song had no antecedents; Tolkien wrote it specifically for Galadriel in this context. Garth, pp. 107-108, however reminds us of "Kortirion among the Trees," a long poem written in 1915, "Oh fading town upon a little hill, Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates... One year and then another to the sea, And slowly thither have a many gone Since first the fairies built Kortirion." It's not a direct antecedent of this, but Garth thinks there is a connection from it to Galadriel's other farewell song, "Ah! Like gold fall the leaves in the wind."
B. S. W. Barootes, "'He Chanted a Song of Wizardry': Words with Power in Middle-earth," on pp. 115-131 of HoughtonEtAl, discusses the idea that, in certain circumstances in Tolkien, words have particular power to bring things about: "Language sets the universe in motion, and it continues to be the primary means of creation in Middle-earth" (p. 115) -- although "While language is a means a creation and of action in the metaphysical phase, this power is greatly diminished in the later ages" (p. 122). He specifically cites this song as an example: there was a time when Galadriel could sing the leaves to life and the flowers into the bud, but she can do so no more.
This obviously reminds us of several things. First, and perhaps most important to Tolkien, is John 1:1-18, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through it...." (John 1:1-3). Obviously this would have been a pleasant motif to a philologist like Tolkien! But one is also reminded of the power of words to bind, as naming the devil drives him off, e.g., in versions of "Riddles Wisely Expounded" [Child 1] and "The Fause Knight Upon the Road" [Child 3]. There is also the motif of the "secret name" or "hidden name," and the idea that "the name is the thing," so that to know something's name is to have power over it, as in "Rumpelstiltskin" (as well as such modern works as Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" books).
I wonder, though, if Barootes is right. I agree with him that "I Sang of Leaves" is an exile's song. But is the sorrow is for the loss of Galadriel's power -- or for her exile? -- "what ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?" (Book II, chapter 8, "Farewell to Lórien," HM2Ed I.389; 50thEd p. 373).
On p. 124, Barootes makes the observation that this is a "Fourteener" -- almost. That is, the lines are of fourteen syllables, rhyming in couplets (standard Ballad Meter, or Common Meter), and there are fourteen such lines. If laid out in stanzas, in other words, it would be seven stanzas long. There is only one line which violates this form: line 11 has fifteen rather than fourteen syllables: "O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore." According to Barootes, "There is... significance to his aberration, however. The out of place syllable is the stressed I: Galadriel herself does not fit -- in Middle-earth or in her own song." Barootes, on p. 130 n. 13, demonstrates that Tolkien's early drafts did not have the excess syllable. It was clearly a deliberate change to emphasize the word "I" -- the word that is about her exile.
Is Galadriel's power gone? Recall that, at the end of The Lord of the Rings, the soil from Galadriel's garden makes plants grow at many times their normal rate. Furthermore, Appendix B says that "when the Shadow passed, Celeborn came forth and led the host of Lórien over Anduin in many boats. They took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel threw down its walls and laid bare its pits, and the forest was cleansed" (HM2Ed III.375; 50thEd p. 1094). That doesn't sound too feeble to me. This is after the Three Rings lose their power, remember. So perhaps her power was not lost -- or perhaps it increased again after Sauron was overthrown? Galadriel did not seek power -- she rejected the One Ring when it was offered to her.
Rather, what the Elves have lost, it seems to me, is not power but *will* -- the ability to get up and to do. Why did not Elrond or Galadriel go with the Fellowship? Surely, with their power, they could have brought Frodo safely to Mordor. And if anyone would know the way to Orodruin, it would be Elrond, who was there for the battle between Gil-galad and Sauron in the Second Age. But, even though Galadriel is the greatest of the elves of Middle-Earth, even with all the aspects of the Virgin Mary, she is a relatively passive character, giving gifts that are necessary to success but taking no real action. Is Galadriel, besides lamenting her exile, lamenting her lost power, or her inability to use it? I do not know. - RBW
Bibliography - N.B. This does not attempt to list the fiction works by Tolkien cited in this article; these will simply be referred to by title. All Tolkien works cited are non-fiction or letters or literary criticism. The Lord of the Rings is cited from the two editions listed above; other Tolkien works are cited in what I hope is sufficient clarity to locate the reading.
- Beowulf/Chickering: Howell D. Chickering, translator and editor, Beowulf, a dual-language edition (with Old English text and close Modern English parallel plus introduction and notes), Anchor, 1977
- Beowulf/Heaney/Donoghue: Seamus Heaney, translator; Daniel Donoghue, editor, Beowulf: A Verse Translation, a Norton Critical Edition with introduction and critical articles, Norton, 2002 (Heaney's translation was published 2000)
- Beowulf/Tolkien: J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, Together with Sellic Spell, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 2014; I use the 2015 Mariner Books paperback
- Bettridge: William Edwin Bettridge, "Tolkien's New Mythology," article in Mythlore, The Mythopoeic Society, Issue 62 (Volume 16, Number 4), Summer 1990, pp. 27-31
- Bowers: John M. Bowers, Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, Oxford University Press, 2019
- Bradley: Anglo-Saxon Poetry, translated and edited by S. A. J. Bradley, 1982 (I use the 1995 Everyman edition)
- Briggs: Katherine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures, 1976 (I use the 1977 Pantheon paperback)
- Caldecott/Honegger: Stratford Caldecott & Thomas Honegger, editors, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, Walking Tree Publishers, 2008
- Carpenter: Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, George Allen & Unwin, 1977 (I use the 2000 Houghton Mifflin paperback)
- Chance: Jane Chance, The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power, Twayne's Masterworks Studies No. 99., Twayne Publishers, 1992
- Chaucer/Benson: Larry D. Benson, general editor, The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1987 (based on F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which is considered to be the first and second editions of this work)
- Crabbe: Katharyn F. Crabbe, J. R. R. Tolkien, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981
- Croft/Donovan: Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, editors, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeic Press, 2015
- Drout: Michael D. C. Drout, editor, J.R.R. Tolkien: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, Routledge, 2007
- Duriez: Colin Duriez, The J.R.R. Tolkien Handbook, Baker Book House, 1992
- Eden: Bradford Lee Eden, editor, Middle-Earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, McFarland & Company, 2010
- Fisher: Jason Fisher, editor, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources, McFarland & Company, 2011
- Flieger: Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, 1983; revised edition, Kent State University Press, 2002
- Garth: John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, Houghton Mifflin, 2003
- Gordon: Anglo-Saxon Poetry, selected and translated by R. K. Gordon, 1926, revised and reset edition, Everyman’s Library, 1954
- Hammond/Scull-Blackwelder: Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Lord of the Rings, 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, Marquette University Press, 2006
- Hammond/Scull-Companion: Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, Houghton Mifflin, 2005
- Hardon: John A. Hardon, S.J., Pocket Catholic Dictionary, an abridgement of the Modern Catholic Dictionary, Image Books, 1980
- Helms-Silmarils: Randel Helms, Tolkien and the Silmarils, Houghton Mifflin, 1981
- Helms-World: Randel Helms, Tolkien's World, Houghton Mifflin, 1974
- Himes: Jonathan Himes, "What J. R. R. Tolkien Really Did with the Sampo," article in Mythlore, The Mythopoeic Society, Issue 86 (Volume 22, Number 4), Spring 2000, pp. 69-85
- HoughtonEtAl: John WM. Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, John D. Rateliff, and Robin Anne Reid, Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey, McFarland & Company, 2014
- Kane: Douglas Charles Kane, Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion, Lehigh University Press, 2009
- Kilby: Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien & The Silmarillion, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976
- Kocher: Paul H. Kocher, Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 1972
- Krapp/Dobbie: George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, editors, The Exeter Book (The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, Volume III), Columbia University Press/Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936
- Langland/Schmidt: A. V. C. Schmidt, editor, William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS. B.15.17, 1978; I use the updated Everyman 1995 paperback edition
- Lobdell: Jared Lobdell, editor, A Tolkien Compass, Open Court Publishing Company, 1975
- Noel: Ruth S. Noel, The Mythology of Middle-earth, 1977; I use the 1978 Houghton-Mifflin paperback
- Onions: C. T. Onions, editor, with the assistance of G. W. S. Friedrichsen and R. W. Burchfield, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford University Press, 1966
- Raffel: Poems from the Old English, translated by Burton Raffel with a Foreword by Robert P. Creed, second edition, revised and enlarged, University of Nebraska Press, 1964
- Rateliff: John D. Rafeliff, The History of The Hobbit: Part One: Mr. Baggins, Houghton-Mifflin, 2007
- Reynolds/Goodnight: Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight, editors, Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, 1992 (considered to be issue 33 of Mallorn and issue 80 of Mythlore), The Tolkien Society/The Mythopoeic Press, Milton Keynes and Altadena, 1995
- Ruud: Jay Ruud, Critical Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, Facts on File, 2011
- Sands: Donald B. Sands, editor, Middle English Verse Romances, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1966
- ScullHammond-Guide: Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Houghton Mifflin, 2006
- Sisam/Tolkien: Kenneth Sisam, editor, with a Middle English glossary by J. R. R. Tolkien, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, Oxford, 1925
- ShippeyAuthor: Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 2000; I use the 2002 Houghton-Mifflin paperback
- ShippeyRoad: Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, revised edition, Houghton-Mifflin, 2003
- ShippeyRoots: Tom Shippey, Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, Walking Tree Publishers, 2007
- Snorri/Faulkes: Snorri Sturluson, Edda [i.e. the Prose Edda], translated and edited by Anthony Faulkes, 1987, 1995 (I use the 1998 Everyman edition)
- Steimel/Schneidewind: Heidi Steimel & Friedhelm Schneidewind, Music in Middle-Earth, Walking Tree Publishers, 2010
- Stoddard: William H. Stoddard, "Simbelmynë: Mortality and Memory in Middle-Earth," article in Mythlore, The Mythopoeic Society, Issue 111/112 (Volume 29, Number 1/2), Fall/Winter 2010, pp. 151-160
- Tarcsay: Tibor Tarcsay, "Chaoskampf, Salvation, and Dragons: Archetypes in Tolkien’s Earendel," article in Mythlore, The Mythopoeic Society, Issue 126 (Volume 33, Number 2), Spring/Summer 2015, pp. 139-150
- Tolkien/Anderson: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, annotated by Douglas A. Anderson, second edition, Houghton Mifflin, 2002
- TolkienAotrou: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, edited and with notes by Verlyn Flieger, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017
- TolkienBombadilAnnotated: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), expanded and annotated edition edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, HarperCollins, 2014
- Tolkien/Carpenter: The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, selected and edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 1981
- TolkienFairy: J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories" (presented as a lecture in 1938, then in 1947 in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, then combined with "Leaf by Niggle" in the 1964 volume Tree and Leaf); later republished in The Tolkien Reader, 1966; I cite the version in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 1983, for which I use the 2006 HarperCollins paperback
- Tolkien/Hostetter: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Nature of Middle-Earth, edited by Carl F. Hostetter, William Morrow, 2021
- TolkienKullervo: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Story of Kullervo, edited by Verlyn Flieger, 2010; American Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 2016
- Tolkien-Gawain/Pearl.Orfeo: J. R. R. Tolkien, translator, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight * Pearl * Sir Orfeo, with an introduction (and perhaps some light editing) by Christopher Tolkien, 1975 (I use the 1988 Ballantine edition)
- Urang: Gunnar Urang, Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writing of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien, SCM Press, Ltd., 1971
- Whitaker: Lynn Whitaker, "Corrupting Beauty: Rape Narrative in The Silmarillion," article in Mythlore, The Mythopoeic Society, Issue 111/112 (Volume 29, Number 1/2), Fall/Winter 2010, pp. 51-68
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