Bevis and Tolkien Romancing the foundation of myth

Tolkien and Bevis: romancing the foundation of myth Lynn Forest-Hill The fourteenth-century in England witnessed the flowering of a genre of adventure stories written in Middle English verse and known as romances. This term is particularly associated with tales about knights who characteristically lose what is precious to them. There are also other categories of romance which do not relate to this essay. They suffer many hardships and undertake many dangerous adventures as they set about regaining what has been lost. These romances have much in common with modern fantasy as they confront their heroes with various monsters, including dragons, and evil characters. Tolkien was, of course, familiar with a number of these fourteenth-century romances, but it is useful to separate them into those he edited, those he acknowledged as influences during his lifetime, and those which left unacknowledged traces in his work. The romances Tolkien edited – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hereafter SGGK. and Sir Orfeo, have in common their engagement with Faerie. The story of Sir Orfeo is a retelling, in the form of a Breton lai, of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But it is initially set in Winchester at the (medieval) court of King Orfeo, Medieval kings were automatically knights. whose unwise Queen Herodis is visited by the King of the Fairies. He is a very medieval fairy in the Celtic tradition, and threatens to have Herodis torn limb from limb if she does not go with him. In spite of Orfeo’s attempts to protect her, she is abducted and Orfeo sets out to retrieve her from the court of the Fairy King. In the case of SGGK, the fairy element is less obvious but the Green Knight is a magical being, and the entire test of Gawain’s perfection is devised by Morgan le Fay. Tolkien’s editions of these two romances are well known, and in spite of their Celtic and Arthurian elements, Tolkien expressed his dislike of Celtic story in Letter 19, and of Arthurian literature in e.g. Letter 131 and letter 144. Humphrey Carpenter ed., with Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1995) their distinctively insular elements, including SGGK’s elegant alliterative metre, would have attracted his attention. In her essay ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain’, Verlyn Flieger wrote that when Tolkien was constructing his great legendarium ‘it was The Matter of Britain that offered him the clearest model.’ Verlyn Flieger, ‘J.R.R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain’, Mythlore 87, vol. 23.1, Summer/Fall 2000, 47-58, p. 47. The essay, though it makes a persuasive case, actually goes on to list all Tolkien’s objections to tying his work down to models drawn from specifically British storytelling. In Letter 144 he rejects Arthurian legends that are ‘associated with the soil of Britain but not with English’. Ibid. Flieger carefully points out the difference between the ‘landmass’ and the language, Ibid, p. 52. but does not address the existence of other romances written in Middle English. Donald B. Sands, in his Introduction to Middle English Verse Romances, is more specific, describing how the thirteenth-century French poet Jehan Bodel defined three basic ‘matters’. These include the Matter of Britain which covers the Arthurian material. Alternatively, Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin and J.D. Pheifer have written ‘Chretien [de Troyes] was more than any other individual responsible for the literary form of the Matter of Britain, the mass of Celtic myth and legend whose “natural magic” was a survival of the ancient religion of the world.’ Ní Cuilleanáin and Pheifer, eds, Noble and Joyous Histories: English Romances (Blackrock, Irish Academic Press, 1993), p.2. Sands then notices that ‘an additional category which Bodel does not mention is of great importance to English literature – the “Matter of England”, the name associated with romances such as King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Athelstan, and Gamelyn, romances which treat with native material.’ Donald B. Sands, ed., Middle English Verse Romances (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986), pp. 3-4. They are all set in recognisably English locations and medieval environments, and Geraldine Heng argues that ‘their use of legendary motifs and plots amassed from elsewhere is uniquely concretised in England, in a given form at a given moment and specifically serves English socio-cultural interests.’ Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia UP, 2003 p. 6. Heng’s comments reverberate with Tolkien’s own ideas about the ‘naturalising’ of language developments expressed in his O’Donnell lecture ‘English and Welsh’. See Christopher Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1883) 163-97, p.186-87. Andrew King also argues that what underlies the distinctive narrative patterns of romances in the native tradition is ‘an interest in self-understanding of identity for both the hero … and for the nation.’ Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and the Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. viii. The expression of distinctive Englishness through the use of the English language after the Norman Conquest ‘as writers tried to articulate their growing consciousness of the distinctiveness and coherence of English language and culture’, Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans, eds, The Idea of the Vernacular (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 331-325, p. 333. fits well with Tolkien’s own agenda for a specifically English mythology. The Index to Tolkien’s Letters, and to Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond’s Companion and Guide confirm Tolkien’s knowledge of the romances Havelok the Dane, and King Horn. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). However, his awareness of the romance Bevis of Hampton – very widely-known during the Middle Ages – seems remarkably absent from the usual works of criticism and biography. Yet any reader of LotR who then stumbles into the exotic world of Bevis will discover that although Tolkien does not mention it, this romance shows startling similarities to episodes in his work. This essay will suggest later that this is actually to see the relationship the wrong way round, and that when seen ‘in reverse’ the relationship repositions LotR in accordance with Tolkien’s desire to historicise his mythology. In Letter 131, he writes of his linguistic technique giving ‘an illusion of historicity’. Carpenter, ed., Letters. Bevis of Hampton, like King Horn and Havelok the Dane, has no Faerie element, although the supernatural plays an incidental role at times. Although this essay is not concerned with the fairy aspects of the romances Tolkien edited: Sir Orfeo and SGGK share a particular feature with Bevis, Horn and Havelok. All these fourteenth-century adventure stories may be classed as belonging to the genre of the Matter of England because the heroes are always associated with specific English geographical locations. Real places feature in the action, although some of these also become part of the fantasy. Heng notes that ‘historical phenomena and fantasy may collide without explanation’, in romances. Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 2 Gawain travels through the Wirral peninsula, It may be argued that SGGK belongs more properly to the Matter of Britain because it begins with the founding of Britain by Brutus and contains Arthurian material. and Orfeo has his capital at Winchester. Bevis is heir to his father’s lands which comprise Southampton and the Isle of Wight. Some of the romances provide aetiological myths of origin. Havelok moves to Grimsby – the town founded by Grim, before progressing through the social hierarchy and inheriting two thrones, those of Denmark and England. Arundel castle in Sussex is said in the Bevis romance to have been built in honour of Bevis’s loyal horse. Tolkien used the name ‘Arundel’, but only as the short form of the name ‘Éarendel’, in The Notion Club Papers (Part Two), and asserted that the form ‘does not look to Sussex’. The place name Arundel is not connected with the Old English star name ‘Earendel’. See Christopher Tolkien, ed., The History of Middle-earth, vol. 2 (London: HarperCollin, 2000), p. 234. The name of the horse in Bevis is spelt ‘Arondel’, a form not used by Tolkien, and the castle pre-dates the rise of the romance. Romances were the most popular adventure stories of the Middle Ages, and familiar English geography made them immediately relevant to their audiences no matter how exotic the action and characters later turned out to be. Tolkien does not include specific geographical locations in his major works although in early versions of his ‘mythology for England’ he transposes Kortirion – the town of Warwick – into Tirion the city of the Elves in The Silmarillion. For the early development and fictionalising of Warwick, see Christopher Tolkien, ed., The History of Middle-earth, vol. 1, The Book of Lost Tales 1, ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ (London: HarperCollin, 2000), p. 26. In the development of his mythology, the Shire in LotR is a more generic (and nostalgic) view of the rural Midlands, See Carpenter, ed., Letters, Letter 178. but Tolkien certainly sources material from the Matter of England in a way that links his work to that genre. In his letters he notes that he took the name ‘Westernesse’ from King Horn, Ibid., Letter 276. the earliest surviving English verse romance belonging to the Matter of England. Sands, ed., Verse Romances, dates it to c. 1225, p. 15. In the story the lady’s messenger announces ‘I seche fram biweste / Horn of Westernesse / For a maiden Rymenhild’. Ibid., King Horn, lines 953-55. Westernesse is taken to signify the west of England from where the eponymous hero sails to a clearly named Yrelond (Ireland). J. S. Ryan, among others, has noted that Havelok the Dane, with its shifts from Grimsby to Denmark, was among the set books for Old English and Middle English exams taken by Tolkien in 1915. J.S. Ryan, Tolkien’s View: Windows into his World (Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Press, 2009), p. 22. See also Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The Tolkien Companion and Guide, 2006, p. 935). He also tentatively proposes that Tolkien may have derived the name Goldberry from Goldeboru the name of the English heroine of Havelok. Ryan, Tolkien’s View p. 209. While SGGK was aimed at an élite chivalric audience, and Sir Orfeo may have been owned by Chaucer, Sands, ed., Verse Romances, p. 185. the romance of Bevis was widely known and disseminated. The author, or scribe, is unknown, but the romance shows all the signs of composition for oral performance and development over many generations. Of the eight surviving manuscripts the last dates to the sixteenth century. Some are deeply nationalistic and include St. George, but the most authoritative is the Auchinleck manuscript (c.1330-1340), National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1, http://www/nls.uk/auchinleck/ which also includes Sir Orfeo and King Horn (called Horn Child ‘childe’ was a degree of knightood and Maiden Rimnild in the ms). Nicholas Jacobs has traced the significance of this distinctive version of the Bevis story for other medieval romances in ‘Sir Degarré, Lay Le Freine, Beves of Hamtoun and the “Auchinleck Bookshop”’, Notes and Queries, August 1982, 294-301, noting that it is the oldest surviving ms. of the romance, and that it is ‘a redaction of Beves which survives only in the Auchinleck MS.’ p.298, 299. Bevis was one of a small number of romances which remained popular for 300 years - witnessed by the fact that it survives in so many manuscripts, and so many versions. It was so famous in the later fourteenth century that Chaucer referred to it in his Tale of Sir Thopas: Men speken of romances of prys, Of Horn child and of Ypotys, Of Beves and sir Gy. The Riverside Chaucer, ed., Larry D. Benson (Oxford: OUP, 1988), Sir Thopas, lines, 897-99. There is an Anglo-Norman version, and it was rewritten in Ireland to suit Irish social and narrative norms. A Welsh version was found bound with some of the manuscripts of The Mabinogion (a text known to Tolkien). Bevis also gave rise to a saga in Old Norse as well as to a version in Yiddish. In the romances of the Matter of England that do not include Faerie, there is a strong sense of the legitimate inheritance of land by a male heir. Bevis, Horn and Havelok all include the ‘male Cinderella motif’ – a dispossessed young hero, Sands, ed., Verse Romances, p. 55. King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance, also notes the paradigm of the orphaned, exiled, displaced young man nobly born but impoverished. p. vi. a motif repeated in Tolkien’s characterisation of Aragorn. Like Horn and Havelok, but unlike SGGK and Sir Orfeo, the story of Bevis is built around this motif of the disinherited young lord. Bevis is the son and heir of the earl of Southampton. When the earl is killed, Bevis is dispossessed, but his foster-father arranges to send him to another land Fer be southe, To a riche erl, that schel thee gie And teche thee of courteisie In the youthe. And when thow ert of swich elde, That thow might the self wilde, And ert of age Thanne scheltow come in te Ingelonde, With werre winne in to thin honde Thin eritage. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds, Four Romances of England (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), Bevis of Hampton, lines 363-72. [Far to the south to a wealthy earl who will guide you in your youth and teach you about chivalry. And when you are of such an age that you can govern yourself … then shall you return to England to win back by war your heritage.] Although Aragorn is not so violently dispossessed as Bevis after the death of his father, he is kept out of harms way and fostered by Elrond in Rivendell and then serves in the household of Ecthelion, Steward of Gondor, far to the south. After fighting many battles he eventually wins back all his hereditary lands, (uniting two kingdoms as does Havelok). Like Bevis, Horn, and Havelok, he endures hardship and disrespect while honing his fighting skills before he can claim his patrimony, his beloved lady, and the kingship. LotR shares some elements with most of the romances of the Matter of England but there are similarities with Bevis at all levels. Among these is the small significant detail in Bevis of the king with the magic ring. This old king is the vassal of another king. His function is to keep Bevis’s lady, Josian, under surveillance, but he is too old to guard her physically. However, he ‘much can of nygremancy; / He may see in his goldryng / What any man dooth in alle thinge’ [He knows a lot about black magic; he can see in his gold ring whatever anyone is doing]. The ancient vassal kings in LotR are the nine kings of old who have become the servants of Sauron, It may be argued that the exact number of king/Ringwraiths is open to debate. In a note to Letter 156 Tolkien wrote ‘There were evil Númenóreans: Sauronians, but they do not come into this story [The Lord of the Rings], except remotely; as the wicked kings who had become Nazgúl or Ringwraiths.’ The number is not specified in this letter of 1954. Robert Foster, on the other hand, refers only to three Black Númenóreans who became Ringwraiths, but does not give their rank. Foster, The Complete Guide to Middle-earth (London: Unwin, 1978), p. 282. Therefore either four (including the Witch-king of Angmar), or all nine Ringwraiths were kings and vassals of Sauron. and in light of the strange power of the necromancer’s golden ring in Bevis, the possibility that it contributed to the development of Sauron and the One Ring cannot be discounted. This is not to ignore other influences such as the nine ghostly kings that appear to Macbeth, and the nine flying venoms of the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm. Tolkien refers to Sauron as the ‘necromancer’ in early versions of the character, John D. Rateliffe locates the early development of the necromancer from its origin in The Lay of Leithian to 1930-1931 and the writing of The Hobbit, in which the Necromancer is named. See Rateliffe, The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr Baggins (London: HarperCollins 2007), p. 83. and in his letters, See for example Carpenter, ed., Letters, Letter 17; Letter 114. and while the One Ring gives a special power of sight to Frodo when he wears it, actual power of surveillance remains with Sauron. The magic ring that confers the gift of distant sight is a known folk motif, and after observing the similarities, in this instance it is the differences between Bevis and LotR are instructive. Sauron the necromancer is a Maia, while the necromancer in Bevis is just an old mortal king. This projects a diminished status that is consistent with Tolkien’s theories of creativity. In Splintered Light, Verlyn Flieger defines a ‘pattern of diminution which underlies [Tolkien’s] mythology’, Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman, 1983), p.62. and is intimately connected with its development towards history. One other episode in Bevis illuminates Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation in terms of historical process. The arming of the young knight offers a persuasive clue to this romance as a source for one small but significant element in LotR. In chivalric fashion, Bevis is dubbed and receives his sword and shield from the foreign king he serves. The rest of the arming illustrates Tolkien’s creative manipulation of source material, which, together with the example above, illuminates his theory of creativity as well as his desire to ‘historicize’ his work. In the Auchinleck Bevis we learn that: Beves did on his actoun, Hit was worth mani a toun; An hauberk him broughte that mai, …. Hit was wel iwroughte and faire, Non egge tol mighte it noughte paire. Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury, eds, Four Romances, Bevis, lines 979-984. (Bevis put on his padded jacket, it was worth as much as many a town. The maiden [Josian, the king’s daughter] brought him a hauberk (mail shirt)… it was well made and beautiful: no edged weapon could damage it.) My italics. These remarkable attributes of the protective clothing in the medieval romance echo vividly in LotR in the description of one of the wonders of Middle-earth – the corslet or shirt of dwarf mail that Bilbo passes on to Frodo. Bilbo tells him ‘I have a fancy it would turn even the knives of the Black Riders’, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p.270. and it proves its worth in the Mines of Moria when it deflects an Orc spear thrust. Shortly before this assault, Frodo hears the shirt being discussed by Gandalf who tells Gimli: ‘I never told [Bilbo], but its worth was greater than the value of the whole Shire and everything in it’. (p. 310) Although Bilbo’s dwarf mail comes with its own ‘actoun’ or padded undergarment this is not accorded any special worth or distinction. ‘Under the mail there was a shirt of soft leather’. Ibid., p. 327. The marvellous nature of the dwarf mail alone is a conflation of the extraordinary attributes of the two parts of Bevis’s medieval armour – the actoun and the hauberk. But we may read this in the opposite direction. It seems initially that the similarities between the marvellous qualities ascribed in both Bevis and LotR to these particular kinds of protective clothing are too close to be coincidental and show that Tolkien borrowed from the fourteenth-century verse romance, adapting its elements to suit his own prose romance. This adaptation could be taken to reflect the process by which traditional storytelling evolves, and to follow the process discernible in the extant Bevis mss. which, for example, differ in their nationalistic agendas as well as in the development of characters. However, Flieger has shown that in The Silmarillion Tolkien’s version of creation moves from paradigms of unity to fragmentations of many kinds including kin groups and languages, following Owen Barfield’s theory of ancient semantic unity, Barfield writes of language that ‘single meanings tend to split up into a number of separate and often isolated concepts’. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (London: Faber and Faber, 1927), pp. 87. and that this is a symptom of the historical development of the peoples of Middle-earth. ‘The further back in time, the closer to whole the concept appears.’ Flieger, Splintered Light, p. 46. Therefore, by drawing together the separate marvellous attributes of Bevis’s actoun and hauberk into one garment – the mithril shirt given to Frodo – what we see is Tolkien’s sub-creation moving in the opposite direction – from fragmentation to unification, so that his work is located semantically prior to Bevis. This pushes back LotR to a putative time earlier than the Bevis romance, making LotR its precursor, Without developing their comment, Stuart lee and Elizabeth Solopova suggest a similarly inverted timeline. They write: ‘One could … imagine a repetition of Legolas’s lament, hundreds of years after the destruction of the Ring, as some unknown traveller comes across the remains of Rivendell, or even Minas Tirith. Tolkien’s mythology suggests that this might even have been the germ of [the Old English poem] The Ruin itself.’ Lee and Solopova, eds, The Keys of Middle-earth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 137. and implying that romances like Bevis are ‘subsequent’ because of their ‘fractured’ form. Being ‘fractured’, we consequently see ‘diminution’ taking place – as for example from Sauron the Necromancer in early versions of The Silmarillion material to the ‘nygromancer’ in Bevis. In many of his letters Tolkien refers to LotR as a ‘romance’, See for example, Letter 91 where he writes of ‘the Fourth Book of that great Romance’. Carpenter ed., Letters. and C.S. Lewis called it ‘heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent and unashamed.’ C.S. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds, ed., Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982), p. 112. While the wider influence of the romances of the Matter of England locates LotR within that genre, more significantly its echoes of the Bevis story historicize LotR as a precursor to those romances, bridging the space between Tolkien’s mythology and history. PAGE 1 LF-H Aug Aug 2011