On Tolkien's ‘Lay of Leithian’ (1925-31)

Lay Lady Lay, lay across Beleriand'

Recently, as reported in this post, I reread Tolkien’s ‘Tale of Beren and Lúthien’ in its Silmarillion (1977) version. During my account of the text I mentioned, in passing, his earlier incomplete verse version, ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’, also called ‘The Lay of Leithian’, which Tolkien began writing in the summer of 1925 and which he abandoned in 1931. In that earlier post I called the work ‘drab-age versifying that spools the story out over 4200 lines without even finishing.’ I wondered if I was being unfair. It was many years since I’d read the work: maybe it was better than I remembered? So I reread it. Was it better than I remembered?

It was not.

That is to say, it was, in places, a little better than I recalled, but it was also, rather more often that not, much worse than I remembered.

Last year HarperCollins put out The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond—three hefty volumes, near-enough 1500 pages, yet it included the two long poems ‘Children of Húrin’ and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ only in brief extract. This, as I said in my review of the volume, is a real puzzle, especially since that edition fills up so much of its space with unnecessary variorum textual detail. In that review I express mixed judgments on Tolkien’s merits as a poet: he had a ear for music, could handle rhyme and alliteration well, and some of this poems work well; but his work is also full of lapses, or tone and taste, he had blindspots to his own failings, and much of what he wrote was twee, or stiffly archaic, or clunky.

‘The Lay of Leithian’ is an exercise in deliberate archaism, as per the manuscript title identifying it as a ‘Gest’ (the olde-worlde term for ‘a story or adventure in verse or prose’, pronounced jest). As story, it presents an earlier variant of the ‘Beren and Lúthien’ included in The Silmarillion. In the later version Beren is a human man; here he is a ‘Gnome’; there he goes up against Sauron, as Morgoth’s second-in-command, here Sauron is called ‘Thû’. [For the lineaments of the story, the earlier substack lays it out in detail]. The poem takes the narrative up to the point where the great wolf Carcharoth bites-off the hand in which Beren is holding the Silmaril (Canto 15), and though Tolkien revised and rewrote earlier sections of the poem, he never completed it. It starts:

A king there was in days of old:
ere Men yet walked upon the mould
his power was reared in caverns' shade,
his hand was over glen and glade.
His shields were shining as the moon,
his lances keen of steel were hewn. [1-6]

This is wobbly: ‘mould’ is the archaic term for loose soil, but also figures in the modern sense of fungal growth, decay, etymologically connected to muck—starting the poem off with this word hovering over it, as if the verse itself is decayed and mouldy, is a mistake (in fact Tolkien is thinking of the Old English word molde, which means both earth in the sense of soil and earth in the sense of world. But ‘ere men yet walked upon the world’ is not communicated to the reader in the phrasing Tolkien here chooses). And ‘lances keen of steel were hewn’ knocks up against the fact that steel is not hewn, but forged (later Fingolfin’s soldiers wear ‘helmets tall of steel hewn’, 3250). Indeed, simple sense is surprisingly often transgressed:

To North there lay the Land of Dread
whence only evil pathways led. [49-50]

But whence means ‘from where’; and the ‘evil pathways’ surely lead from Doriath to the ‘Land of Dread’, not the other way around: pathways from that evil place to Doriath would be good pathways.

This may strike you as pedantry: but re-reading the poem I was repeatedly bounced out of it by moments like this. Lúthien’s hair is described as ‘like a cloud’ [528], but unless she is sporting some kind of Afro the comparison is inept. A wolf is described as ‘padding hatred … with feet of velvet’ [1887]: not bad poetry, but historically, or ‘historically’, clunking: for where is Tolkien’s Middle-earth getting all the silk necessary for the making of velvet? Describing Morgoth’s realm, Tolkien writes that ‘rivers of fire at dead of night/in winter lying cold and white … burst out’ [3257]: cold and white is meant to modify winter, but the syntax implies that the terms describe the fiery rivers. Morgoth is introduced living inside a ‘labyrinthine pyramid’ [3842], which strikes an incongruously Egyptian note. A little after this, Tolkien describes Morgoth sat upon his ‘monstrous’ throne, before which is, bathetically enough, ‘a hideous footstool’ [3895].

Word-order inversions and upendings are ubiquitous, often distractingly tangled, awkward to parse: ‘slow and surely who him defied/did hem and hedge’ [2:357]; ‘when Morgoth first/fleeing the Gods their bondage burst’ [3:471]; ‘what foes him meet?’ [1239]; ‘he felt his heart new-turned to flame/for her that through peril to him came’ [2845]. Longer stretches of inwrought word-order are racked across the rhyme-scheme, making a cat’s-cradle of the syntax:

What web from Morgoth’s dreadful halls
hath caught thy feet and thee enthralls
that she bid not this Beren flee
back whence he came, I would him see! [966-9]

My preference would be to avoid archaic inversions like these altogether, but even if one accepts them as part of the old-timey flavour of the work they should be better handled than this. ‘“Then heard ye not that he is gone/that Celegorm sits his throne upon?”’ [2113-14] Ugh.

The rhyme-scheme Tolkien has chosen is exacting: tetrameter couplets mean that the need for a rhyme-word keeps hurrying-up upon the poet. When Lúthien dances ‘in sheen of moon/with silken robe and silver shoon’ [490] one suspects that the creakily archaic plural of shoes is there only to make up the rhyme with ‘moon’. Rhyme-words are often egregious, or forced:

Such players have there only been
thrice in all Elfinesse, I ween. [501-2]

He followed, til its waters frore
were joined to Sirion, Sirion hoar. [1718-19]

Northward they went; and Orcs they met
who passed, nor did their going let. [2018-9]

There were dim cries and horns blowing
And barking dogs through the woods going. [2348-9]

This last couplet is, as Christopher Tolkien’s note elaborates, based on lines from Sir Orfeo: ‘with dim cri & bloweing/& houndes also wiþ him barking.’ But the Middle English reads more naturally, and less contortedly, than do Tolkien’s modern lines.

There are various lapses in euphony. In the opening line of Canto 2, ‘Far in the North neath hills of stone’: northneath is ungainly. Often the writing is actively bad, couplets and passages that wouldn’t be out of place in The Stuffed Owl: writing on a par with the deathless ‘I’ve measured it from side to side, tis three feet long and two feet wide’:

Since ruin fell upon the North
the Gnomes unhappy wandered forth. [906-7]

White glimmering in the tree she rose
and her little door they heard her close. [1386-7]

True words he spoke for when the king
to all his people told this thing. [1834-5]

Hark! how they sudden twang and sing
when Felagund lets forth a cry
and twelves Orcs sudden fall and die. [1977-9]

Him Carcharoth the Red Maw, name
the songs of Elves. Not yet he came. [3714-5]

“What news of Thingol in his hole
shy lurking like a timid vole?” [3998-9]

Iron as tender wood it clove
and mail as woof of loom it rove. [4148-9]

That last couplet is just a mess, a knot of awkwardness of expression. ‘Beren muttered: “who is Thû/to hinder work that is to do?”’ [2161]—who Thû do: in the words of Al Pacino in Heat, what are you, a fucking owl? ‘What tidings dread of war and woe/In Doriath have betid?’ [2407]. Betid. Beren’s fight with Curufin is a strangely silent affair, and ends with a dangling tongue:

Both horse and rider fell to ground
and there they fought without a sound.
The Gnome felt Beren’s finger’s grim
close on his throat and strangle him,
and out his eyes did start, and tongue
gasping from his mouth there hung. [3012-19]

Afterwards Beren is shot by an arrow. Lúthien nurses him back to health:

His brow caresses, and softly croons
A song more potent than in runes. [3142-3]

A hooting kind of rhyme.

Now, let me say: all this, my negativity, is not altogether what one might call fair. Tolkien never published this poem, never finished it. Had he done so, it’s very possible he would have revised these various clumsinesses and faux pas. In 1929 Tolkien gave a copy of the manuscript, as it then was, to C S Lewis, who replied diplomatically: ‘I sat up late last night [reading],’ he wrote. ‘I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal reading of a friend’s work had very little to do with it.’ That very little, rather than nothing, and the Englishman’s politeness-idiom, whereby ‘I can honestly say’ stands as a marker that what follows is to be read as ironic, suggest that Lewis had his reservations about the work. Christopher Tolkien, publishing the poem in The Lays of Beleriand (1985), includes as an appendix the cod-commentary Lewis wrote on it, introducing it thus:

In 1930 Lewis sent my father 14 pages of detailed criticism, as far as line 1161. This criticism he contrived as a heavily academic commentary on the text, pretending to treat the Lay as an ancient and anonymous work extant in many more of less corrupt manuscripts, overlaid by scribal perversions in antiquity and the learned argumentation of nineteenth-century scholars; and thus entertainingly took the sting from some sharply addressed judgments … almost all the verses which Lewis found wanting for one reason or another are marked for revision in [Tolkien’s] typescript B.

Still, looking back upon my initial reaction: to be so harsh upon a work-in-progress is not charitable. And bits of the ‘Lay of Leithian’ are not bad. Tolkien is vivid on the lineaments of Morgoth’s realm (for all that he has his villain living inside a labyrinthine pyramid, with an evil footstool). Here Beren and Lúthien descend through the terrible subterranean structure:

Down awful corridors that wind
down to a menace dark enshrined;
down to the mountain's roots profound,
devoured, tormented, bored and ground
by seething vermin spawned of stone;
down to the depths they went alone.
The arch behind of twilit shade
they saw recede and dwindling fade;
the thunderous forges’ rumour grew,
a burning wind there roaring blew
foul vapours up from gaping holes …
There hammers clanged, and tongues there cried
with sound of like smitten stone; there wailed
faint from far under, called and failed
amid the iron clink of chain
voices of captives put to pain. …

Red was the glare through open doors
of firelight mirrored on brazen floors,
and up the arches towering clomb
to glooms unguessed, to vaulted dome
swathed in wavering smokes and steams
stabbed with flickering lightning-gleams.
To Morgoth's hall, where dreadful feast
he held, and drank the blood of beast
and lives of Men, they stumbling came:
their eyes were dazed with smoke and flame.
The pillars, reared like monstrous shores
to bear earth's overwhelming floors,
were devil-carven, shaped with skill
such as unholy dreams doth fill:
they towered like trees into the air,
whose trunks are rooted in despair,
whose shade is death, whose fruit is bane,
whose boughs like serpents writhe in pain. [3844-87]

This isn’t subtle, or sophisticated, but it is effective, in a gnashing Gothic-fantasy sort of way. More subdued, but rather beautiful, is this winter landscape (a few hiccoughs, mostly through awkward word-order inversion, aside):

An autumn waned, a winter laid
the withered leaves in grove and glade;
the beeches bare were gaunt and grey,
and red their leaves beneath them lay.
From cavern pale the moist moon eyes
the white mists that from earth arise
to hide the morrow's sun and drip
all the grey day from each twig's tip. …
The wind of winter winds his horn;
the misty veil is rent and torn.
The wind dies; the starry choirs
leap in the silent sky to fires
whose light comes bitter-cold and sheer
through domes of frozen crystal clear. [673-90]

And my picking away at sunspots and blots in the versification, above, does not address the throughline story: telling the story is, after all, the main point of the exercise. It’s a good story, and the telling here is well-paced, involving, and fleshes-out the bare-bones Silmarillion version with, mostly, effective and vivid specificity. So in one sense the poem is a success—enough of a success for it to be a pity Tolkien never finished it.

Telling the story in rhyme, all the word-order shenanigans and the various archaisms (shoon, betid etc) give the ‘Lay of Leithan’ a patina of antiquity, as if it were an actual medieval metrical romance, albeit one from a timeline in which the mythology and legendarium were all stuff invented out of JRRT’s head. So far as that goes, I can take or leave: as with C S Lewis’s inhabitation of the cod-archaic pastiche idiom for his commentary, this seems to me inherently stale, clodhopping humour, wincing showoffery. But there is something in the accumulation of narrative via metrical regularity and the sonic patternings of rhyme. It has something to do with aggregative momentum occasioned by fitting the story into the speed-limiting formal structures of the format itself. Lavinia Greenlaw argues that ‘the long poem​ pre-empts its own significance’ since ‘we expect more of it and less of ourselves, adjusting our pace and investing in the big picture’, and there’s something of that in Tolkien’s ‘Lay of Leithian’.