mortal hope, adding that ‘the name could not be adopted just like that: it had to be accommodated to the Elvish linguistic situation’, something accomplished via a notional Elvish stem ‘*AYAR’ meaning ‘Sea’, referring both to the great Western sea of Middle-earth and (‘
Aman
’) to the Blessed Realm of the Valar.
‘Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun … ’ Heaven/haven is a linguistic riddle that fascinated Gerard Manley Hopkins, and which (of course) predates him as a word-quibble. More relevant to our purposes here is the sense in which it is the spiritual function ‘Ayar’. For this is a word presented as meaning both sea and (Aiya!) ‘hail’ or ‘greeting’; and as specifically intervening between the immortal and the mortal realm. In all this we are being given the answer to a riddle—‘who is Eärendil’?—that reveals itself to be another riddle: broadly ‘how is there a divide between the divine and the mortal?’ and more practically speaking ‘how can the breach be overcome?’ The sea greets us; it welcomes us. But Middle-earth is bordered by a western, not an eastern ocean: a place of sunsets not sunrises.
Sea
is also where the
Exeter Book
starts, with three linked riddles that still puzzle scholars today. Here are the opening lines of the first:
Who is so clever and quick-witted
as to guess who goads me on my journey
when I get up, angry, at times awesome;
when I roar loudly and rampage over the land? 8
The riddle goes on to talk about ‘I with my roof of water’, adding ‘I carry on my back what once covered / every man, body and soul submerged / together in the water’; although confusingly the riddle also claims ‘I burn houses and ransack palaces’. It concludes: ‘Say what conceals me / or what I, who bear this burden, am called.’ Scholars gloss this as ‘a storm on land’, but we cannot be sure, for none of the
Exeter Book
riddles include their own solution. Conceivably lightning from a storm might set light to buildings, although the situation described in the riddle is surely far too wet to permit the sort of conflagration described (‘smoke rises, ashen over roofs’).
Theriddle hinges, we could say, on the deliberate crashing together of two quantities (sea, land) more usually kept apart. One of Tolkien’s more eccentric views was that ‘the Atlantis tradition’ was ‘so fundamental to mythical history’ that it must have ‘some kind of basis in real history’; although this in turn (as he wrote to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964) speaks more forcefully to some important component in Tolkien’s personal subconscious (‘what I might call my Atlantis-haunting’) than actual history. He tells Bretherton how the Atlantis myth, or some version of it, has given him nightmares throughout his life: a ‘dreadful dream’ of a great wave, emerging either from the still waters of the sea or else washing over the green landscape. He adds that converting this nightmare into stories has to some extent ‘exorcized’ the dream, but not to the point of banishing it altogether. ‘It always ends by surrender’, he writes; ‘and I awake by gasping out of deep water.’ 9
The temptation to psychoanalyse Tolkien for this vividly-recalled dream experience, though strong, is worth resisting—as an impertinence quite apart from anything else. And anyway there is a level on which this first
Exeter Book
riddle is not so puzzling: it means death, as with Christian passing finally to the city of Zion at the end of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. Indeed, I suggest that constellating the first
Exeter Book
riddle with Tolkien’s imaginarium draws up another possible solution to the former. In Norse mythology the world-ocean was inhabited by, and to an extent identified with, a dragon called Jörmungandr. In the
Prose Edda
Thor goes fishing for this great serpent, rowing out in a boat and baiting his hook with an ox’s head. A
Aman
’) to the Blessed Realm of the Valar.
‘Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun … ’ Heaven/haven is a linguistic riddle that fascinated Gerard Manley Hopkins, and which (of course) predates him as a word-quibble. More relevant to our purposes here is the sense in which it is the spiritual function ‘Ayar’. For this is a word presented as meaning both sea and (Aiya!) ‘hail’ or ‘greeting’; and as specifically intervening between the immortal and the mortal realm. In all this we are being given the answer to a riddle—‘who is Eärendil’?—that reveals itself to be another riddle: broadly ‘how is there a divide between the divine and the mortal?’ and more practically speaking ‘how can the breach be overcome?’ The sea greets us; it welcomes us. But Middle-earth is bordered by a western, not an eastern ocean: a place of sunsets not sunrises.
Sea
is also where the
Exeter Book
starts, with three linked riddles that still puzzle scholars today. Here are the opening lines of the first:
Who is so clever and quick-witted
as to guess who goads me on my journey
when I get up, angry, at times awesome;
when I roar loudly and rampage over the land? 8
The riddle goes on to talk about ‘I with my roof of water’, adding ‘I carry on my back what once covered / every man, body and soul submerged / together in the water’; although confusingly the riddle also claims ‘I burn houses and ransack palaces’. It concludes: ‘Say what conceals me / or what I, who bear this burden, am called.’ Scholars gloss this as ‘a storm on land’, but we cannot be sure, for none of the
Exeter Book
riddles include their own solution. Conceivably lightning from a storm might set light to buildings, although the situation described in the riddle is surely far too wet to permit the sort of conflagration described (‘smoke rises, ashen over roofs’).
Theriddle hinges, we could say, on the deliberate crashing together of two quantities (sea, land) more usually kept apart. One of Tolkien’s more eccentric views was that ‘the Atlantis tradition’ was ‘so fundamental to mythical history’ that it must have ‘some kind of basis in real history’; although this in turn (as he wrote to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964) speaks more forcefully to some important component in Tolkien’s personal subconscious (‘what I might call my Atlantis-haunting’) than actual history. He tells Bretherton how the Atlantis myth, or some version of it, has given him nightmares throughout his life: a ‘dreadful dream’ of a great wave, emerging either from the still waters of the sea or else washing over the green landscape. He adds that converting this nightmare into stories has to some extent ‘exorcized’ the dream, but not to the point of banishing it altogether. ‘It always ends by surrender’, he writes; ‘and I awake by gasping out of deep water.’ 9
The temptation to psychoanalyse Tolkien for this vividly-recalled dream experience, though strong, is worth resisting—as an impertinence quite apart from anything else. And anyway there is a level on which this first
Exeter Book
riddle is not so puzzling: it means death, as with Christian passing finally to the city of Zion at the end of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. Indeed, I suggest that constellating the first
Exeter Book
riddle with Tolkien’s imaginarium draws up another possible solution to the former. In Norse mythology the world-ocean was inhabited by, and to an extent identified with, a dragon called Jörmungandr. In the
Prose Edda
Thor goes fishing for this great serpent, rowing out in a boat and baiting his hook with an ox’s head. A
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