Conversation on Mythopoesis and Language in Tolkien*

Dialogues with Wandering Readers with Andrea Ceardi

Cover of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

Interviewer: Let's start from the beginning. What was your first encounter with Tolkien?

B: The question about first encounters usually reveals more about the formation of thought than about literary tastes. In my case, The Lord of the Rings didn't captivate me because of its epic plot of good versus evil, but because of something more fundamental: the fact that a world could be born from language itself.

I: From language itself? Could you explain what you mean?

B: Tolkien was a philologist before he was a novelist. For him, language wasn't merely a vehicle for telling stories, but the matrix from which worlds emerge. His unfinished work on Arthurian romance, The Fall of Arthur (published posthumously in 2013), was written in alliterative verse following the Nordic structure of Old English poetry. Alliteration — that technique where it is the repetition of phonemes, instead of rhymes, that creates internal rhythm — represents a radically different way of conceiving the music of language.

I: You mention the music of language. Are there other authors who explored this?

B: Plenty, but the only example of alliterative verse I, for one, remember is in G.K. Chesterton: another Catholic like Tolkien, an English medievalist who is better known for his Father Brown stories, crime stories with a detective who is a village priest. He also wrote an epic poem called The Ballad of the White Horse (1911). The white horse is actually a geoglyph that exists in England, in Berkshire. It's on a hill covered with grass — well, they removed the grass, put down limestone — and it's more than two thousand years old. Chesterton takes it there as an allegory of the land itself, the white horse being an ancestral symbol of Britain. It's an epic poem about conquest and the resistance of the Anglo-Saxons and their king Alfred the Great against the Vikings who controlled a great part of England for a long time. It contains a significant passage: Ogier the Dane, a Norse warrior, speaks in verses that suddenly become alliterative, as if the poet recognized that this character could only express himself authentically in the cadence of his ancestral tongue:

"There lives one moment for a man

When the door at his shoulder shakes,

When the taut rope parts under the pull,

And the barest branch is beautiful

One moment, while it breaks."

Ogier is old and cynical and full of rage at the world. He speaks of his rage, and finishes his speech by saying that the young may think otherwise, but that the old know that only hate is true — something like that. Magnificent, the way Chesterton gives voice to this viking, a navigator who speaks of the sea and of his soul in the same word, the stormy sea, the sea that swallows people and, although confined to the earth, is only waiting for the moment when it can rise up and destroy the world. The verses become alliterative from then, Chesterton doesn't employ them before, nor after; the alliteration begins in the viking's voice. And "the barest branch" becomes beautiful at the moment it breaks.

I: There’s something fascinating in how you describe these shifts in meaning...

B: It's what the classical rhetoricians called hypallage, that inversion of adjectives where qualities migrate between nouns. Virgil used it memorably in the Aeneid (19 BC) when Aeneas descends into the underworld, after searching for the golden bough — this key to the underworld that the anthropologist Frazer would later take as the title of his work of comparative religion, The Golden Bough (1890). The phrase says: "Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram" — "they went darkly in the solitary night" —, when logically we should read that they went alone in the dark night. In those verses, I found this figure that appeared only two or three times in my life.

I: And is this simply stylistic ornament?

B: No, it's that it's a... stylistic ornament, yes, but also it puts its finger on something that exists, that is fundamental and which sometimes we don’t necessarily think of but have in metaphors, in allegories: that is, this semantic shift from one object to another. Language makes objects, which each have a completely separate materiality in the real world, flow through one another, flow and recombine to create new meanings. When Chesterton writes about the soul that sails on "the sea that drinks the howling ships", we are faced with a cascade of displacements: the weeping of the sailors transfers to the ships, the thirst of the sea devours not water but boats, the soul itself becomes a navigator in this ocean that awaits Ragnarök, "the last eclipse" where the sea will rise against the gods according to the Völuspá of the Poetic Edda.

The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton. Ragnarök — Nordic apocalypse and Viking mythology

I: You mention Ragnarök. That makes me think of endings. It is an apocalypse, yes ?

B: Ragnarök is the apocalypse in pagan Norse mythology. It's a moment that begins with an unleashing of monsters hitherto restrained, the serpent that encircles the world, primordial forms. Ragnarök culminates in the final battle, where the souls of warriors who had remained with the gods, and the gods themselves confront these primordial cosmic forces and die. Which makes me think of Freeman Dyson. He was a physicist famous for his thought experiments — for example, we owe him the idea of the so-called Dyson sphere which would, hypothetically, be an envelope surrounding an entire star to collect all its energy. Among many things, he wrote an article titled "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe" (Reviews of Modern Physics, 1979), about the ways in which an intelligence, taken as something that processes information and needs energy, could survive over an asymptotically long time in an expanding and cooling universe. Dyson was wondering whether some form of intelligence could persist eternally in a cosmos dominated by entropy. At the end of this article he quotes two verses from this passage of the White Horse. And the two verses he quotes are of the sea that is biding its time: "Though in black jest it bows and nods (...) I know it is roaring at the gods"... In Chesterton, in the Dane's words, this describes the sea that is waiting for its occasion to destroy the gods. In Dyson, when he uses it in that article, it's to describe the human soul that bows to reality only grudgingly, but is always thinking of ways to overcome the inevitability of things.

I: A physicist thinking about the eternal survival of consciousness?

B: Yes. His conclusion — that by progressively slowing down its thought processes through increasingly longer hibernations, an intelligence could achieve an infinite number of subjective thoughts in infinite time — reveals the same creative obstinacy that animates Tolkienian mythopoesis. The scientist, Dyson implicitly suggested, always keeps in a secret drawer of his mind the forbidden question: How can we deceive God? How can we overcome what seems inevitable?

Freeman Dyson — Speculative physics and eternity of consciousness

I: That intellectual rebellion connects with Tolkien in an unexpected way...

B: Absolutely. This rebellion against the ultimate limits of reality strangely connects with the impulse of Tolkien as philologist-creator who doesn't settle for existing languages and must invent his own.

I: Let's return to Tolkien then. How exactly does his method of creation work?

B: What distinguishes Tolkien from other creators of fantastic worlds is his understanding that language ontologically precedes the world. He didn't first imagine Middle Earth and then invent languages for its inhabitants; he created complete linguistic systems — with their historical evolutions, their genealogical relationships, their phonetic drifts — and from them a universe emerged organically. As he wrote in his essay "A Secret Vice" (1931), the invention of languages — glossopoeia — wasn't for him a pastime but an aesthetic necessity.

I: Could you give us a concrete example?

B: Elvish Quenya, based on the sonorities of Finnish that Tolkien loved so much since he discovered the Kalevala, isn’t simply an exotic code. It's a form of thought, a particular way of segmenting and organizing experience. When Aragorn pronounces the Oath of Elendil at the end of the saga, "Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien" — I have come from the Great Sea to Middle Earth —, he's not simply speaking in another language; he's invoking an entire cosmology, a history of exiles and returns that can only be fully expressed in those specific syllables.

I: And Sindarin?

B: Sindarin derived from Welsh, a language that Tolkien found of great phonetic beauty, superior to all others except Greek. This distinction between Quenya — high language, liturgical, comparable to Latin — and Sindarin — vernacular language, living — replicates the linguistic stratification of historical societies, endowing Middle-earth with a depth comparable to that of our own world. Middle-earth is that continent of that world where almost all of Tolkien's stories take place. The part of this world that has conflict, death, decay. The Silmarillion (published posthumously in 1977) is the compendium of legends, of mythologies, it's Tolkien's book of genesis.

I: Let's talk about The Silmarillion. I know it had a particular impact on you.

B: If The Lord of the Rings was my entry into this universe, The Silmarillion was the revelation of its true nature. Edited posthumously by his son from manuscripts that his father worked on for more than half a century, here Tolkien abandons narrative concessions and presents mythopoesis in its pure state: cosmogonies, theogonies, divine genealogies. It's world creation without the mediation of individual adventure, pure mythic architecture.

I: What's special about the Ainulindalë?

B: The Ainulindalë — The Music of the Ainur — which opens The Silmarillion, presents the creation of the world as a musical act: Ilúvatar, the One God, proposes themes that the Ainur, angelic spirits, develop in symphony. When Melkor introduces dissonances trying to create his own music, Ilúvatar incorporates these rebellions into a deeper harmony. This musical cosmogony reflects both Plato — with his anima mundi and the music of the spheres from the Timaeus — and Tolkien's philological obsession: the universe is literally born from (sung) language.

I: This makes me think about the difference between superficial fantasy and profound creation...

B: The difference between simply creating "stories in an invented world" and achieving that this world seem to have evolved organically through eons is the difference between decoration and architecture. The hobbits, with their love of tea, pipes, and quiet life, are recognizably English, but they're inserted in a cosmos that infinitely transcends them.

I: Would you say then that Tolkien wasn't writing simple escapism?

B: Not at all. Fantastic literature doesn't represent a flight from reality, it's rather a restructuring of reality in new forms, an exploration of impossibilities...

I: There's something fascinating in how you connect the creation of languages with forms of thought...

B: Creating languages is creating forms of thought; creating mythologies is establishing structures of meaning that transcend historical contingency. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — formulated independently by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s — suggests that language structures thought in a radical way. That is, language sets aside some possibilities for thought and leaves others inaccessible. Tolkien was already doing this.

I: What was Tolkien's ultimate intention with all this?

B: The ultimate intention, I have no idea. Ostensibly, Tolkien said he wanted to give England its own mythology, since the original had been lost during the Norman Conquest of 1066. Tolkien's true legacy isn't in the imitators who populate the fantasy shelves with their own elves and dwarves, but in the demonstration that the deepest creative act begins with language. First the word, then the world. Like that viking of Chesterton contemplating the sea that awaits its hour to rise against the gods, the creator of languages contemplates the primordial silence and decides to populate it with new forms of naming, and therefore of being.

I: What connects all this? Dyson, Tolkien, physics, philology?

B: Ultimately, whether calculating the survival of intelligence in a dying cosmos or inventing elvish languages with coherent historical drift, we're before the same obsession, the same movement: the human refusal to accept the limits of what is given, the insistence that even in the face of the inevitable — whether Ragnarök or the heat death of the universe — there remains room for one more act of creation, one more thought, one more word that reorganizes, if only for an instant, the very architecture of the possible.

I: One last question, and looking at it retrospectively, do you think there's any relation between your career as an astrophysicist and this initial taste for the invention of worlds?

B: I don't know if there's a relation, there's probably a correlation, if not causal. I think I've always liked imagining the distant, the past, the future, the never-was... they fascinated me?

*This interview is part of a series of dialogues with wandering readers, where they share their entryways into their readings through free association. The reader interviewed in this session is Raphaël Gobat, an astrophysicist, his areas of interest are distant galaxies and galaxy structures in the early times of the universe.

Bibliographical References

Chesterton, G.K. (1911). The Ballad of the White Horse. London: Methuen & Co.

Dyson, F.J. (1979). "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe". Reviews of Modern Physics, 51(3), 447-460.

Frazer, J.G. (1890). The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. London: Macmillan.

Plato (c. 360 BC). Timaeus.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1931). "A Secret Vice". In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (published in 1983). London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1954-1955). The Lord of the Rings. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1977). The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (2013). The Fall of Arthur. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins.

Virgil (19 BC). Aeneid.

Völuspá. In the Poetic Edda (13th century).

Whorf, B.L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.