A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man: Noteworthy Omission in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son

But if we speak of a Cauldron, we must not wholly forget the Cooks. There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-stories" (OFS 47)

Possibly he was a member of Byrhtnoð's well-born heorðwerod, who missed the battle and happened to be a practised poet.

—E. V. Gordon, on the identity of the anonymous author of The Battle of Maldon (1937) (22)

For the purpose of this modern poem, it is suggested that Torhthelm (Totta) afterwards, when the duke's body has been brought to its long home at Ely, composes the poem, The Battle of Maldon.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, Bodleian Library Tolkien MS 5

No authorial move would seem more plainly at odds with the elitist view of Tolkien as pedant—as writer of bloated, overwrought prose or laundry lists—than that of omission-by-excision: a strike-out here, a shelved word, passage, or chapter there. Yet omit he did, and often to great effect.

In Tolkien's letters, he broaches the subject of omission on occasion, noting that such editorial decisions are often made according to the exigencies of narrative pacing and focus. On the links between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he noted that these "were mostly written or sketched out, but cut out to lighten the boat." A measure of this cutting-room material finds its way into the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, to be sure, but even there Tolkien implies that narrative economy was a matter of some concern. Where, for instance, Tolkien chronicles the build-up to Bilbo's admission to the dwarf party to the Lonely Mountain, "the difficulties that Gandalf had with Thorin," he notes, "are omitted" (Letters 334).

He was also famously keen to characterize his role in the creation of the text "as a 'recorder' only," and, in this role, to raise an important distinction between omission on the one hand, and error or untruth on the other:

The faults that may appear in my record are, I believe, in no case due to errors, that is statements of what is not true, but omissions, and incompleteness of information, mostly due to the necessity of compression, and to the attempt to introduce information en passant in the course of narrative which naturally tended to cut out many things not immediately bearing on the tale.

(Letters 289)

While undoubtedly frustrating to certain readers, omissions are not, in Tolkien's view, to be seen as narrative flaws or authorial blunders. On the contrary, in this mode of recorder or chronicler, he goes so far as to prescribe omission, quite apart from its benefit to pacing and narrative buoyancy, for its virtue of lending an added air of realism to literary works:

I feel it is better not to state everything (and indeed it is more realistic, since in chronicles and accounts of 'real' history, many facts that some enquirer would like to know are omitted, and the truth has to be discovered or guessed from such evidence as there is).

(Letters 354)

In placing such an emphasis on the role of omission in his texts, Tolkien seems almost to be taking a page from the manual of another 20th-century writer scarred by experiences in the Great War, Ernest Hemingway.

While there is no evidence that Hemingway and Tolkien read one another's work, the American's now-legendary "Iceberg Theory" of omission endures as an effective model and a remarkably valuable analogue to the "impression of depth" so essential to Tolkien's whole literary project.¹ As such, I give here a brief overview of the Iceberg's development over the course of Hemingway's career, followed by some preliminary considerations of its applicability to the study of Tolkien's works.

The story goes that Hemingway experienced something of an epiphany during the writing of his 1923 short story "Out of Season." [End Page 164...