The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology by Tom Shippey

Author:Tom Shippey [Shippey, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780007445189
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In this passage the key words are perhaps ‘as if’. Within the world of romance everything that happens here is literally ‘coincidence’. The cock means nothing by crowing, that he crows at this moment is mere happenstance. Nor are the horns replying – they only seem to. Nevertheless no reader takes the passage like that. The cockcrow itself is too laden with old significance to be just a motif. In a Christian society one cannot avoid the memory of the cock that crowed to Simon Peter just as he denied Christ the third time. What did that cockcrow mean? Surely, that there was a Resurrection, that from now on Simon’s despair and fear of death would be overcome. But then again, what of Comus and the cockcrow the Younger Brother wishes for? ‘Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering / In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’ It would show there is a world elsewhere. Tolkien too might think of the Norse legend of the ‘Undying Lands’, the Odáinsakr: when King Hadding reached its boundary the witch who guided him killed a cock and threw it over the wall – a moment later he heard the cock crow before he himself had to turn away and go back to mortality.24 Cockcrow means dawn, means day after night, life after death; it asserts a greater cycle above a lesser one.

And what of the horns? They too are just the horns the Riders happen to be blowing, but they carry meaning in a more complicated way as well. Their meaning is bravado and recklessness. When he sets out from Rivendell Boromir blows his horn, the family heirloom, and is rebuked by Elrond for doing so; but he takes no notice. ‘Always I have let my horn cry at setting forth, and though thereafter we may walk in the shadows, I will not go forth as a thief in the night.’ He means that good is stronger than evil, and even if it is not, that makes no difference to him. Challenging horns echo through Northern stories, from the trumpets of Hygelac, Beowulf’s uncle, coming to rescue his dispirited compatriots from death by torture, to the war-horns of the ‘Forest Cantons’, the ‘Bull’ of Uri and the ‘Cow’ of Unterwalden, lowing to each other across the field of Marignano, as the Swiss pikemen rallied in the night for a second suicidal assault on overwhelming numbers of French cavalry and cannon. Horns go back to an older world where surrenders were not accepted, to the dead defiant Roland rather than the brave, polite, compromise-creating Sir Gawain, whose dinner is served to ‘nwe nakryn noyse’ – the sound of chivalric kettledrums. Nor are these the ‘horns of Elfland dimly blowing’ of late Romanticism; their echoes may be ‘dim’, but they themselves are ‘wild’, uncontrolled, immune to the fear and calculation on which the Nazgûl is counting. The combination of horncall and cockcrow means, if one listens, that he who fears for his life shall

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