Tolkien's Norse Connection (Part 4): Hitches

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf: The Hitches

[Last week, I discussed Tolkien’s poem in dróttkvætt meter, “The Derelicts,” and showed how “Bleak Heave the Billows” is in ljódaháttr meter. This helps date both texts to 1932-1934. As I’ll show here, however, the picture is actually more complicated than that.]

Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 for this entry. Click here to read Part 3.

The Problem

To pick up where I left off last week, I’ve been arguing that Tolkien’s four poems in Norse meters all appeared roughly together during the period of 1932–1933. By relying on metrical form rather than subject matter, I also avoid the problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse meters for Old English subject matter.

That problem is mainly why I hesitated with the dating provided by Scull and Hammond. After all, they linked “The Derelicts” with Tolkien’s first lectures on the old Germanic legend of Finn and Hengest, which in my view puts the poem two years too soon, and they also linked “Bleak Heave the Billows” thematically with the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Although I ultimately agree with their c. 1932 dating, there’s nothing concrete about any of these poems’ contents to suggest this linkage. Nothing except vibes, anyway.

Here’s the hitch. Even if “The Derelicts” and “Bleak Heave the Billows” are Old Norse-style poems (and they most definitely are), they sure are weird Old Norse-style poems.

Actually, let me back up a moment. Earlier, I had harped on the idea of Tolkien using a metrical form that misaligns with his content. However … well, he sometimes did do exactly that. At least for “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” we can blame things on habit. Tolkien was just used to writing poetry in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. In something like The Fall of Arthur, though, he clearly uses Old English meter for an Arthurian subject, but the Anglo-Saxons, of course, never had an Arthurian tradition. It was the Saxons, after all, whom Arthur was most famous for trouncing from one end of the British Isles to another.

My best explanation for that one is that Tolkien just wished to combine the “Matter of Britain” with a metrical form especially connected with the English language prior to the Norman Conquest. Yet it’s relevant, too, I think, that Tolkien had just completed his Norse quartet. He remained bored with octosyllabic couplets and had rediscovered his joy in alliterative verse. The Fall of Arthur helped him continue in that vein.

Which brings me back to the weirdness of “The Derelicts” and “Bleak Heave the Billows.”

Now: Old Norse and Old English alliterative poetics share the same basic fundamentals. In terms of content, however, they had some differences. Norse poets generally used fornyrðislag for heroic legends and ancient myths. Dróttkvætt is a court poetry for praising kings. Ljódaháttr typically applies to wisdom poetry, magical charms, and dialogue.

None of these conditions apply to “The Derelicts” or “Bleak Heave the Billows.” In fact, according to Tolkien’s own lecture notes, Old Norse poets like to “seize the situation.” They had a flair for the dramatic and the shocking. In other words, these poets (says Tolkien) wanted to “poke you in the eye,” or to borrow a more contemporary idiom, Old Norse poets wanted to present their audiences with a nice swift kick in the gonads.

What does such gonad-kicking entail? You know, the standard things. Murder. Incest. Bloody betrayals. Or maybe eating a dragon’s heart cooked over an open flame. Perhaps even forcing your (semi-) beloved young sons to knead dough filled with poisonous serpents, but after they start whining about the snakes like the sniveling little cowards they are, asking your handsome brother to decapitate them with a battle-axe. The usual.

In the Old English tradition, however, scopas brought a slightly different sensibility to things. Oh, don’t get me wrong. They liked a good old-fashioned blood feud just as much as the next guy, particularly if everyone winds up dead at the end. But they at least expected you to feel sad about it.

This beach sure looks sad.

Their sense of elegy, this mournful melancholy, is certainly a mood that pervades Tolkien’s two Norse-metered texts. In the first one, “The Derelicts,” Tolkien hits on bleak nature imagery especially hard. A nameless “they” are gazing upon a lonely beach at night, and various pools are reflecting “winter’s candles,” the stars, as a wind causes ripples across their surface. Tolkien’s next stanza then transitions to the stanza reprinted by Roberta Frank, then moves onto a third stanza that emphasizes gloom and silence. By this time, however, a mist had enshrouded the shore, so now the repeated phrase “winter’s candles” no longer refers to pool-reflected starlight but to starlight as “twisted” by the thick encroaching mist.

Which, you know, seems pretty bad. Somehow.

Happy times continue with “Bleak Heave the Billows.” Like Tolkien’s dróttkvætt poem, this one hits the nature imagery hard (i.e., waves–ship–shore), but Tolkien also subtly hints at a vicious, piratical marauding: “On a gleaming gunwale a glint of shields, / a white foaming furrow.” Yet beyond such vague hints of soul-destroying violence, the central situation – the reason for such gloom – is no more spelled out than in “The Derelicts.” We encounter an atmosphere of spiritual desolation as incarnated within bleak seascapes, but nothing specific.

This kind of spiritual desolation goes unparalleled within Old Norse literature. For one thing, skalds rarely bother to describe nature. Even more to the point is how frequently academics comment on the emotional impassivity of folks in Norse texts, especially the sagas. Such characters avoid every demonstrable expression of emotion. When a passionate response arises, poets generally represent them through involuntary gestures such as facial tics or random fist clenching. Or to put matters more bluntly,

Ole' Bogey as Sam Spade

Norse heroes are about as attuned to their feelings as hard-boiled detectives. Mr. Sigurd Sigmundsson? Meet Sam Spade.

For Old English poets, however, although they don’t ever focus on the psychology of individual  people, if you read their work long enough, you soon realize how every scop is basically just an emo goth kid moping his way through life. Emotional coloring suffuses their verse, especially the elegies. Britt Mize in Traditional Subjectivities (2013) does a good job highlighting this general moodiness. In Old English verse, he says, the poets give “generous attention to mental and emotional qualities and states” (p. 6). Even more importantly, they often strive to create an “atmosphere dominated by the portrayal of private emotion” (p. 7).

To me that sure sounds like “The Derelicts” and “Bleak Heave the Billows.” Tolkien punts on individual psychology, and he combines natural seascapes with a randomized sense of spiritual gloom in order to create a particularly un-Norse-like effect. He doesn’t “poke you in the eye”; he takes you by the hand and asks if you’d like to see a priest. So when Scull and Hammond date “Bleak Heave the Billows” to c. 1932 because of the striking similarities they see between this poem and The Seafarer and The Wanderer … well, damn. I can’t entirely disagree.

In fact, just about the only real Norse quality to these texts (other than meter) is Tolkien’s technique of stanzaic parataxis. Both New Lays use this often. Rather than wasting syllables by describing how episodes relate to one another causally, Tolkien simply sets his episodes side-by-side. He therefore forces readers to make the necessary connective leaps themselves, to deduce how situation A has contributed or led to situation B.

The same paratactic technique occurs throughout “The Derelicts” and “Bleak Heave the Billows.” The former poem has three stanzas; so does the latter. Between these stanzas there exists no explicit causal connections. In fact, we can’t be entirely certain these stanzas even constitute unified texts at all. But if they do form single texts (and I suspect they do), it’s up to readers to glean the narrative situations these poems seem to imply.

At end of day, it’s still not entirely clear to me why Tolkien chooses to mix-and-match medieval traditions in quite this way. What is clearer, at least in my humble estimation, is that “The Derelicts” and “Bleak Heave the Billows” are sister poems, perhaps written consecutively, and each belongs to the 1932–1933 period when Tolkien was likewise experimenting with fornyrðislag for his two New Lays.

The Final Countdown

Finally, though: why does any of this matter?

Well, for me, perhaps the major reason simply involves coming to a better understanding of Tolkien’s trajectory as a poet. Everyone knows that The Lord of the Rings contains verse, and everyone knows several of these verses appear in Old English alliterative meter. For that, Tolkien’s brief Norse phase was a stepping stone.

There’s a more general biographical interest as well. Tolkien was a busy guy, and for him the early 1930s were an especially fruitful time. Besides his alliterative anni mirabiles, Tolkien was also rewriting his “Sketch of the Mythology” in 1930; working to reform the Oxford English Syllabus in 1931; composing A Secret Vice by August of that year; taking on new students like E. O. G. Turville-Petre; writing and drawing his annual Father Christmas letters; and composing The Hobbit up through the death of Smaug. (He lent the manuscript to a friend at the end of 1932 or shortly thereafter.)

Between all this, Tolkien somehow found the time to reinvent himself as a poet. By June 1933, moreover, Tolkien was nominated as an honorary member of the Icelandic Literary Society – a group dedicated to promoting Icelandic language, literature and learning. I have no idea if Tolkien’s membership was connected somehow to his Norse quartet. Maybe. Or maybe he was nominated solely because of his teaching on Norse subjects. In any event, for understanding Tolkien better as a scholar, a poet, and as a fantasy author, everything helps.