The Mewlips

This poem from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil seems the right stuff for Hallowe’en.  May you all be kept from the Mewlips tonight.

The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool´s borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they´ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips – and the Mewlips feed.

 

The Ethics of a Poem in the Dark

During the summer and autumn, I’ve slowly been working my way through a gem of a scholarly book in the field of medieval studies. It’s The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers, and it’s about how people in the Middle Ages memorized things, why they memorized, and memory’s role in story-telling and moral formation.

It so happens that, just after writing my post on Strider’s recitation of the poem on Weathertop, I ran across the following passage in Carruthers’ book. It’s from a chapter called “Memory and the Ethics of Reading,” which I recommend indiscriminately to everyone who likes to read.

“In considering what is the ethical nature of reading, one could do much worse than to start with Gregory the Great’s comment, that what we see in a text is not rules for what we ought to be, but images of what we are, ‘our own beauty, our own ugliness.’ It is this which enables us to make these texts our own. We read rhetorically, memory makes our reading into our own ethical equipment (“stamps our character”), and we express that character in situations that are also rhetorical in nature, in the expressive gestures and performances which we construct from our remembered experience, and which, in turn, are intended to impress and give value to others’ memories of a particular occasion.”

This is a really good description of what is happening on Weathertop. By remembering and reciting the Lay of Beren and Lúthien, Strider is informing his own character, because it is a story that he himself is re-enacting in a certain way. But Strider also uses the story to form the Hobbits’ characters and guide their action, in the hope that it will strengthen them to resist evil and bear suffering.  In short, Strider’s use of poetry is a good example of a medieval use of poetry.  I’m not at all sure that Tolkien consciously premeditated it as such, but it is nevertheless befitting that his quasi-medieval world should incorporate a quasi-medieval poetic ethics.

 

A Poem in the Dark

The Lay of Beren and Lúthien, especially as it is recorded in the Silmarillion, is without doubt one of Tolkien’s masterpieces, if not the Masterpiece. It is the tragedy of Orpheus gone right. Even when Tolkien transcribes the tale in his tripping rhymes (admittedly more suited to the comic vein than the high romance), it is enough to move the passions.

But why, of all places to introduce this ancient ordeal of love and sacrifice, does Tolkien choose the moment when our four Hobbits are shivering in a hillside dell on Weathertop, awaiting the inevitable approach of the Ringwraiths?

One obvious answer is that the tale is supposed to boost their morale. In fact, the Hobbits begin to discuss another Elvish tale to keep their spirits up (the story of Gil-galad), but Strider interrupts because he thinks it too dark for the occasion. As indeed he should: Gil-galad was an Elf who bravely and nobly perished at the hand of the Enemy. What Frodo and the other Hobbits need, as the dreadful minutes tick by on Weathertop, is a story of someone brave and noble whom the Enemy did not destroy.

Up to this point, Strider’s discussion of historical persons has been rather didactic, as Gandalf’s was as well back in the second chapter. It seems, however, that didactic storytelling may not be the most bolstering thing in the hour of real need. So, for the first time in the romance so far, we find history transformed into poetry. Strider chants the Lay of Beren and Lúthien, in a pleasant rhyming meter, and only later does he offer a longer explanation of the history, presumably because the Hobbits do not know the full story behind Lúthien’s sacrifice.

Beyond all this, however, Strider has ascertainable personal reasons for telling the tale. It is significant that the first narrative verse to come from Strider’s mouth not only implicates his own lineage, but serves as a foil to his own romance. For Strider too is the offspring, however many generations removed, of the love between Beren and Lúthien, and he himself is playing the role of Beren as, for the second time in the history of Middle Earth, an Elf will sacrifice her immortality for a man. Tolkien does not portray Strider’s love for Arwen by speaking of it, but by deliberately speaking around it.

Like the rest of the chapter, Strider’s account of Beren and Lúthien sheds further illumination on his character, though (ironically) the reader does not realize this until the second time through, and the Hobbits realize nothing about it until the end of the story.

 

A Poem in Honor of the Hobbits’ Adventures in the Old Forest

Sometimes I wonder if Tolkien was a reincarnation of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  I ran across one of my favorites the other day in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1990).

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared, with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
 
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
 
 
Then, of course, there is the last stanza of “Inversnaid”:


What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

 

An Attack of William Blake, brought on no doubt by a second over-nighter reading Plotinus

Time 

Every time less than the pulsation of the artery

Is equal in its period and value to six thousand years.

For in this period the poet’s work is done, and all the great

Events of time start forth and are conceived in such a period,

Within a moment: a pulsation of the artery.

 

Space

Every space larger than a red globule of man’s blood

Is visionary, and is created by the hammer of Los.

And every space smaller than a globule of man’s blood opens

Into eternity, of which the vegetable earth is but a shadow.

 

To Juan At The Winter Solstice

by Robert Graves

 

There is one story and one story only

That will prove worth your telling,

Whether as learned bard or gifted child;

To it all lines or lesser gauds belong

That startle with their shining

Such common stories as they stray into.