Tolkien, Europe, and Tradition: From Civilisation to the Dawn of Imagination by Armand Berger

Author:Armand Berger [Berger, Armand]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781914208980
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2022-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter IV

For an Ecology of Imagination

The Sense of Nature in Anglo-Saxon Poetry

I f Tolkien is influenced by solar myths — perhaps through reading the works of Max Müller, the father of comparative mythology —, as discussed with Éarendel, this is certainly because of the importance of the sense of nature as it appears in Old English literature 42  — a contemplative nature, a feeling that will have an abstract and explanatory ethical character, on the one hand, and, on the other, one that will be like a gaze riveted to the moving surface of that which is real. We need only read the powerful mediaeval elegies like the Old English The Seafarer to be convinced of this:

I can tell the true riddle of my own self, and speak of my experiences — how I have often suffered times of hardship in days of toil, how I have endured cruel anxiety at heart and experienced many anxious lodging-places afloat, and the terrible surging of the waves. There the hazardous night-watch has often found me at the ship’s prow when it is jostling along the cliffs. My feet were pinched by the cold, shackled by the frost in cold chains, whilst anxieties sighed hot about my heart. Hunger tore from within at the mind of one wearied by the ocean. 43

The sea — a cold, deep beauty — rises gigantic and terrible before the man doomed to death; it is during times like these that man feels most concerned about his existence, and these songs full of melancholy, like a funeral dirge before the final hour, remind us with the greatest lyricism of our human condition. Such a flowering of simple and profound feelings would not be encountered again before the age of romanticism, restless yet confident, full of trouble and fervour, towards the end of the 18th century. In such circumstances we think of Charles Baudelaire’s verse: ‘Free man, ever will you cherish the sea!’ 44 In its way of depicting the sea, English literature of the Middle Ages gives the feeling of nature its expressive power by developing it to a very high level, with all its potentialities.

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