The Real Middle Earth

29

The Real Middle Earth

Introduction

For us . . . this was no mere earthly invention . . . nor is it a mere human opinion, . . . but truly God Himself, Who is Almighty, the Creator of all things, and invisible, has sent from Heaven, and placed among men, Him Who is the Truth, and the holy and incomprehensible Word, and has firmly established Him in their hearts. He did not, as one might have imagined, send to men any servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who bear sway over earthly things, or one of those to whom the government of things in the heavens has been entrusted, but the very Creator and Fashioner of all things – by Whom He made the Heavens – by Whom He enclosed the sea with its proper bounds – whose ordinances all the elements faithfully observe – from Whom the sun has received the measure of his daily course to be observed – Whom the moon obeys, being commanded to shine in the night, and Whom the stars also obey, following the moon in her course; by Whom all things have been arranged, and placed within their proper limits, and to Whom all are subject – the Heavens and the things that are therein, the Earth and the things that are therein, the sea and the things that are therein – fire, air, and the abyss – the things which are in the heights, the things which are in the depths, and the things which lie between.

The Epistle to Diognetus (A.D. ca 130)

This passage from the early second century “Epistle to Diognetus” is remarkable for revealing the traditional sources of the hierarchical vision of Old English poetry. The pagan sagas are “baptised” by the Christian bards who went on to produce their own Catholic poems, from Caedmon to Cynewulf and from “The Dream of the Rood” to “Piers Plowman.”

Most notable is the fact that these early Christian poets took over pagan notions such as the relationship between the King-Lord and his vassals or thanes with the concept of heroism and converted all into a world transformed by Grace. Pagan customs and ideas were thus saved by the Grace of the Incarnation and the Redemption. They were lifted up into the Real world of Faith.

I hope to demonstrate this by examining one notion in particular in its context – that of “Middle Earth” – and thereby reveal the radical difference between a true Middle Earth and the false one of J. R. R. Tolkien. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, along with many others who followed them, immerse the key events and ideas of Catholic Christianity into the world of a revived paganism and humanistic mythology. This perversion has been studied by the present writer in the book entitled Fairyland Is Hell and Magic Is Demon Power. In this present study, I hope to emphasize the more positive aspect of the subject and thereby show how the mind of the Catholic poet remains thoroughly Catholic when he builds various poetic “worlds”.

Some brief comments on the sound patterns of Old English poetry are in order. Perhaps the first characteristic we notice is the lack of rhyme. It is worth noting, before proceeding, that rhyme, in the opinion of most historians, originated with the ceremonials of the Church where it was used mainly as an aid to memory but came later on to be esteemed as the aesthetic quality it is – very pleasing to the ear and the mind. The Dies Iræ (12th century) is an example of one of the earliest uses of rhyme. Who does not thrill with pleasure at the sound of

Dies iræ, dies illa,

Solvet sæclum in favilla,

Teste David cum Sibylla

especially when sung to the chant! This hymn uses both alliteration and rhyme. Old English did not employ rhyme but used instead a rhythmic pattern of accents or stresses combined with alliterative syllables that drew together the two halves of a long line. Thus, even in translation from the original, we can hear these patterns, as in the following from an anonymous poem:

. . . The light beam

Cándle of héaven búrned round the hóly hoùse

From evening gloom until from the east

Over the deep-way the dawn-rush came.

But perhaps even more forcefully characteristic – a quality we can appreciate also in the translations – is the Old English habit of repeating or elaborating upon a general idea or substantive, like the sun, in a congeries of kennings or metaphorical word-phrases. This is seen very beautifully in “The Phoenix” which is a primary example of the Christian poet assimilating and transforming pagan symbols into the world of supernatural truth. For the Phoenix becomes a fitting symbol of Christ our Lord and the sun is restored to its true identity as a creature of the Almighty Maker and Wielder of all things. The Editor-translator tells us that the legend of the Phoenix originated in the Egyptian worship of Ra, the Sun-god, whose cult was kept at Heliopolis. Here is a particularly striking passage from this poem:

Ever keeping ward over the wood

is a bird feather-strong; its name is Phoenix.

There the lone-goer beholds the earth,

bravely he dwells; death shall not touch him

on the plain of pleasure while the world stands.

There must he behold the sun’s pathway,

coming up before him, God’s candle,

the gladdening gem, watching eagerly

when it comes up, noblest of stars,

over the sea-waves from the east shining

wondrously radiant, the first work of the Father,

God’s bright token.

The sun here becomes “God’s candle . . . the gladdening gem . . . noblest of stars . . . wondrously radiant / from the east shining, / God’s bright token” and “the first work of the Father.” What in a scientific treatise on the Phoenix or on the sun would be intolerable redundancy, becomes here in the poem a highly aesthetic pattern of sound and meaning. For not only is the idea of the sun elaborated upon by the metaphors and other phrases that describe its movement, but there is also an intricacy of internal relations that cause the poem to be shaped or structured much in the manner of a fabric woven of many delicate colors: “over the wood” is echoed but with contrast by “over the sea-waves”; “beholds the earth” and “There must he behold the sun’s pathway” relate by means of the verb behold, again with the contrast of “earth” and sky; “Keeping ward” and “watching eagerly” repeat in different shades of meaning the same general idea. Such echoes, contrasts, repetitions and patterns of sound delight the mind. This is poetry at its finest –and this, too, is Catholic poetry.

The reference in the poem to the sun as “the first work of the Father” requires some explanation and leads us to the next section of this study wherein it will be necessary to delve, at least briefly, into the cosmogony and cosmology of the Old English mind vis a vis reality.

Cosmogony and Cosmology

The Old English dialogue poem of “Salamon and Saturn” is the “earliest extant version of a legend found in the literature of many European countries.” It belongs to the time before the great Greek Schism of 1054, to a time when the Church of East and West was one. Margaret Williams says, “It seems strangely out of harmony with the rest of Old English poetry,. . . Its exotic character is in keeping with its Eastern origin,. . . The germ of the tale is found in Jewish sources. . . The Queen of Sheba had come to Solomon to “try him with questions.” How Saturn comes into the Old English version is a puzzle to historians, but Williams speculates it may have come in through “some obscure channel of Nordic mythology, which had early become confused by an interchange of names with Roman deities. In any case, the Anglo-Saxon poet makes him, Saturn, the spokesman of heathenism, while Salamon, with sublime indifference to chronology, becomes the champion of Christ and his Pater Noster . . .” (pp. 158-9)

There are two references in this long poem to middle earth. The first occurs in one of the several prose passages with which the poetic dialogue is interspersed:

Salamon:

Pater Noster has a golden head and silver hair, and though all the waters of earth should be mingled with the waters of heaven above into one channel, and it should begin to rain together upon the earth with all its creatures, yet might it stand dry under one single lock of Pater Noster’s hair. And his eyes are twenty-one thousand times brighter than all this middle-earth though it should be overbraided with the brightest lilly blossoms and the leaf of each blossom had twelve suns, and each blossom twelve moons, and each moon were twelve thousand times brighter than it was ere Abel’s murder.

Disregarding the numerical excesses which are typical of the oriental tales, there are at least two major topics that are noteworthy in this passage. First of all, it is clear that “all this middle-earth” is a repetitive phrase for “the earth with all its creatures.” Then I cannot forbear calling attention to the fact that “all the waters of earth” mingling with the “waters of heaven above” and coming down as rain upon the earth is a rather precise description of what happened at the time of Noah’s Flood. This reference to “heaven above” and the rain coming down upon the earth reveals the poet’s acute awareness of the up and down cosmology of Traditions. In other words, the earth here is situated mid-way between the heavens above and the abysses beneath, so envisioned even when not all the places are mentioned.

Then there is the reference to the moon’s light “ere Abel’s murder.” The Editor-translator tells us in a footnote that “There was an old belief current that when Cain murdered Abel the lights of the universe were dimmed.” Some say this dimming of the lights of the universe happened at the Fall of Adam. But this is a minor difference. The great reality alluded to here is Sin, the Sin at the very origin of history. In the later poem “The Dream of the Rood” the poet says that “all Creation wept, bewailed the King’s death, Christ on the rood.” This is the Death or “Fall” of the Second Adam, undoing the Fall into Sin of the First Adam. And the Second Eve, the Ever-Virgin Mary, is at His side. We know from the Gospel, too, that all Creation did, indeed, react, in the darkness and in the great earthquake, felt world-wide, at the death of Christ our Lord on the Cross.

The Old English poets were well aware of man’s place in the universe and the equally important fact that whatever man does on earth has repercussions throughout the entire cosmic order.

Later in this same dialogue poem, there is a passage that raises all kinds of questions as to the cosmogony and cosmology the poet envisioned, though the concept may be due to unassimilated pagan influences of the East. The reference to the sun as coming, along with all creation, from some primordial fire and an implicit relation of “Light” that “has the hue and kind of the Holy Ghost” to this original fire – all this, even with the mystical identity of “Light” with the Holy Ghost, sends forth echoes of the most ancient Greek philosophers, such as Anaximenes and Heraclitus who spoke of the four elements as the most basic constituents of the natural world. Recall, too, the reference in the Phoenix poem to the sun as “the first work of the Father.” Here is the passage from “Salamon and Saturn”:

Salamon.

Light has the hue and kind of the Holy Ghost.

It makes known the nature of Christ.

Often if the unwitting, for any while

Hold it without bond it goes through the roof,

breaks and burns the house timbers.

Steep and high it lours, it towers aloft,

climbs by its own kind. Fire when it can

strives towards its first source in the Father’s dwelling,

back to the home whence it came of old.

It is in all things, a sight for men

those who can share in the Lord’s lamp.

For there is no creature of those quick-living,

no fowl nor fish nor stone of the field,

nor water’s wave nor wood-bough,

nor mount nor moor nor the middle-earth

that comes not forth from fire’s kind. . . .

Now here the denotation of “middle-earth” could well be a certain place in the midst of the earth as a whole; but in view of the enumeration of all the specific places mentioned – fowl, fish stones, water and woods, mountains and moors – it could also be a culminating reference, a summation of all the other places.

However, such an idea that all creatures with “middle-earth” came forth originally from “fire” was hinted at by some of the ancient Greeks but did not appear explicitly and in a developed form until the influence of the Copernican revolution, in such philosopher-scientists as Rene Descartes, Leibnitz, Buffon, Kant, Laplace, and the modern Catholic scholar, Fernand Crombette. (See this writer’s From the Beginning, vol. 2) Crombette took his ideas from the ancient Coptic, so perhaps there could be some unknown influence from the Eastern Egyptian to the Old English poets and scholars. But I believe it would have to have been filtered through the early Fathers of both East and West.

Anaximenes had said that all was air and that air, when rarefied, becomes fire. Further, when air is condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, and with increased condensation, it becomes successively and cyclically, water, earth and all else. And this is not unlike what Heraclitus had said: “Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.” Further, Heraclitus seems to have equated the Logos with the primordial fire from whence everything else came, according to Anaximenes. The early Fathers of the Church took these ideas, especially those of the four elements, and explained them in terms of the Six Days of Creation as revealed in Genesis.

Saint Basil, for example, whose Hexaemeron was the most influential of all such works, (see From the Beginning, vol. I). spoke of the light of the First Day as being not the light of the sun but the very nature of light (the word kind in the Old English poem above means nature) whereas God made the sun, moon and stars on the Fourth Day. The implicit connections between light and fire and the Holy Ghost in these poems might well be a kind of poetic fusion or con-fusion of these Traditional ideas. We can never hold the poet to the kind of precision of discourse that we can hold and must hold the scientist and even, to a large extent, the rhetorician. Poetry, Rhetoric and Scientific discourse are three modes of speech with different ends or purposes, and these purposes greatly affect the form of the speech produced. Poetic speech is speech unlike all others; it is made for itself alone and simply for the contemplation of those who regard it. Scientific discourse and to a certain extent also, rhetorical discourse, invite and even compel us to look at the objects being described. The poet, on the other hand, induces – or seduces us to look at the beauties of his language, the images and their intricate patterns of sound and meaning.