The Cauldron at the Outer Edge: Tolkien on the Oldest English Fairy Tales

Introduction

History is told from written records. In the course of time such records decay, are destroyed, or are simply lost. The historian must then become philologist, piecing together fragments or inferring lost sources from extant texts. Yet literacy itself emerged relatively late in the human story; countless generations have lived their lives leaving no written record of either their names or their stories. For much of the 19th century comparative philology was hailed as the key to this distant human past, with reconstruction of the genealogies of languages seemingly opening a window onto the ethnological and even social origins of modern nations. Then the anthropologists proclaimed that contemporary “primitive” peoples shed light on their own prehistoric ancestors, and large swathes of older philological speculation were declared little more than fantasy. By the dawn of the twentieth century an alliance of anthropologists and archaeologists had colonized prehistory, and the philologists had been largely pushed back to the study of extant texts (Cook, “Making of the English”). Yet inevitably, a few modern philologists still strained their ears, hoping to hear in the oldest written tales some lost syllables of unrecorded time. One such philologist was J.R.R. Tolkien, and if the fruit of his scholarly labor included a great deal of fantasy, it is my argument in this essay that it was more than mere fantasy.

In a previous essay published in Tolkien Studies I established a relationship between Tolkien’s legendarium and Edwardian scholarship (Cook, “Peace of Frodo”). Specifically, I argued that Tolkien, in his fairy stories, had offered conjectural versions of the sources of the English traditions reconstructed in H. M. Chadwick’s The Origin of the English Nation (1907). The present essay complements this earlier study by surveying Tolkien’s own scholarly writings on some of these traditions. The first parts of the essay explore Tolkien’s discussions of two marginal elements in Beowulf—the Heathobard story and the opening celebration of Scyld Scefing—in the years when his attention shifted from publishing The Hobbit to writing its sequel. The final part relates the fruits of Tolkien’s scholarly reflections to key elements of this later story of Hobbits and their adventures, thereby framing The Lord of the Rings as the source of the earliest mythology of the English.

If the present essay complements the previous one, its conclusions are somewhat different. Whereas the earlier essay set out to demonstrate a scholarly-literary nexus in Tolkien’s work, the present essay draws the limits of such connections. Following Tolkien’s footsteps as he meditated on ancient traditions dimly discernible in Beowulf, we find him first deploying different philological methods and then, in “his 1939 lecture on fairy stories,” establishing a new way of thinking about the history of story by way of his famous metaphor of the “Cauldron of Story.” According to this metaphor, a story is ladled out of a pot in which simmer fairy-tale elements, famous figures of myth and history, and the stories of nameless ordinary people. By so switching his attention from textual criticism to the creative blending of story elements, Tolkien connected his philological inquiries with his emerging story of the Third Age of Middle-earth, or so I suggest. But analytical certainties evaporate in the simmering cauldron, which is heated by the fires of the creative imagination. The connections we articulate are by their nature speculative, and at the limits of our inquiry into the scholarly shaping of The Lord of the Rings, we encounter the imagination of a poet.

Beowulf Lecture, 1936

Tolkien’s most famous lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” defends the unknown Beowulf poet for his placing of the monsters at the center of his poem and his pushing of more conventional dramatic tales, like that of Ingeld and Freawaru, to the periphery. In the lecture, delivered to the British Academy in 1936, Tolkien defended the Old English poet from the criticisms of earlier twentieth-century literary scholars. Most notably, in 1905 the great W. P. Ker had proclaimed the “radical defect...