Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey by John Wm. Houghton

Author:John Wm. Houghton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2014-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

First Category: Pastiche and Parody

So too with Tolkien’s works in medieval modes: Once we turn our attention to them, we find they fall into a whole range or continuum, from pastiche and parody to wholly new works employing the metrical scheme or other distinctive attributes of a given genre or specific major medieval work. Sometimes the subject matter remains close to that of its progenitor, as in “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” or The Fall of Arthur; sometimes they are widely divergent, as in Ælfwine’s “Annals.” Of them all, none is closer to its original than “The Clerkes Compleinte,”4 a clever pastiche of the “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales written in good Chaucerian Middle English. “The Clerkes Compleinte” shares not just the language and metre of Chaucer’s Prologue but even some of the same lines,5 while many others are direct reversals of Chaucer’s originals. For example, “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” becomes in Tolkien’s poem “Whanne that Octobre mid his schoures derke / The erthe hath dreint, and wete windes cherke” (lines 1–2). Instead of Zephirus, the gentle West wind, we have Eurus, the sopping wet East wind (Chaucer line 5; Tolkien line 7); instead of gathering to travel to Canterbury in the south, “In al the North to Leedes done they wende … the fairest toune of Yorkeschire” (lines 16–17). Similarly, “And smale foweles maken melodye / That slepen al the nyght with open eye” becomes “wrecche cattes youlen umbewhiles / That slepen nat but wandren on the tiles” (lines 9–10).

After thus closely paralleling Chaucer’s text for the first twenty lines or so, Tolkien’s diverges thereafter, so that rather than a description of how the pilgrims gather for their journey to Canterbury we get instead the mock-serious story of a hapless applicant to a university (Leeds) who fails miserably to gain admittance.

Closely associated with this both in the proximity of their medieval sources and their subject matter is the still-unpublished poem “Doworst,” which takes its inspiration from The Vision of Piers Plowman.6 Tolkien’s parody-poem is headed in Latin “Visio Petri Aratoris de Doworst” (“Vision of Peter [or Piers] Plowman about Do-Worst”) to parallel the title of Langland’s work, just as “Doworst” itself (no doubt deliberately) calls to mind the rubrics (or subtitles) given in many manuscripts to the latter sections of Piers Plowman: “Dowel” (“Do well,” Passus VIII–XIV), “Dobet” (“Do better,” Passus XV–XVIII), and “Dobest” (“Do best,” Passus XIX–XX). In any case, unlike the first third of “The Clerkes Compleinte,” in “Doworst” only one line (the first) closely mimics a specific line of the original, with Langland’s “In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne” becoming Tolkien’s “In a summer season when sultry was ye sun”; thereafter follows a spirited scene, unfortunately soon cut short in our fragment, of dim-witted students (“lourdins [= stupid lazy louts] & lubbers … wood in his wits was each wiȝt”) coming to grief in their oral exams (or vivas).

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