Tolkien the Modernist?

"That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo’s rhyming… Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging." 

"I don’t know… It came to me then, as if I was making it up, but I may have heard it long ago."

Tolkien's poetry of Middle Earth, or at least so argues Tom Shippey (Tolkien: Author of the Century, H/T Matthew Bardowell and his namesake), achieves its splendor by an act of remembrance that had become foreign to modern England.  "True tradition" shows itself in the interplay between an author's originality and the way that originality is constrained, with or without the author's awareness.  Frodo reprises the "Old Walking song," without any awareness that he is reprising ("as if I was making it up").  Readers of LoTR know, of course, that he is not creating it.  The road that Frodo pursues with "weary feet" is the same road that Bilbo had pursues with "eager feet" when he leaves for Rivendell near the story's beginning.  But, Shippey admonishes, we should not be so quick to assume Bilbo's rhyming is really his, for Bilbo later reproduces the rhyme in a totally different way while retaining Frodo's "weary feet."  In this way, Tolkien signals the existence of a poetic tradition that is deep enough to be unconscious to those who "rhyme" within it.  It inheres in the basic symbols of both the Shire and Middle Earth more widely.  So when Frodo composes, it is rightly called "imitation," but it is no less so in Bilbo's "rhyming."  It is not really his either.

Shippey further illuminates Tolkien's poetics by analyzing his relationship to three other "shire poets":  the author of Pearl, William Shakespeare, and (to a much lesser degree) John Milton.  Shakespeare's poetry is ridden with effects whose presence the poet himself may have known little about.  His alliterative contrast in Antony and Cleopatra between day and dark recalls a pairing that is as old as the Saxons (dœg, deorc)).  And at the conclusion of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, one finds a stanza that Tolkien would later rewrite in Bilbo's own poetry.  Shakespeare's lines seethe with folk charm:

"When icicles hang by the wall
       And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
       And milk comes frozen home in pail..."

Similarly, Milton's Comus preserves an ancient contrast between the unchanging sphere of stars and the change-ridden tangle of life beneath the trees.

Although all three of these poets were capable of writing shire poetry, Tolkien parts company from them because their poetry fails to reproduce the brilliant network of symbols that make the playfulness of shire poetry cohere into a deep and earth seriousness.  Tolkien's "O Light to us that wander here / Amid the world of woven trees" reprises a theme seen in Comus, but Tolkien still has a sense for the ultimacy with which these signs communicate:  "We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees / The starlight on the Western Seas."  There is loss, pathos, and memory here, because Tolkien knows something of what trees and light meant to those who first named something a "tree" in the first place.  The coherence of the mythic web Tolkien is accessing here allows a poetry of astonishing understatement that allows his three lines to do what modern poets would have to go to great lengths to accomplish.  These three lines resound with power even Eliot would be unable to achieve despite at his most brutal moments ("like a patient etherized...").

The comparison with Eliot, however, points out what seems to me to be a missed opportunity in Shippey's argument, the avoidance of a question that could have been pressed far more acutely than he does it.  Eliot and Tolkien represent two different ways of responding to the banality of Victorian England.  Eliot mocks it ceaselessly.  But although Tolkien's picture of modern England is similarly comic (Shippey points out that Bilbo represents the amnesiac sensibility of modern England, "and that means comfort"), there is simultaneously an aptitude in the hobbits to become fuller parts of Middle Earth.  They come from the Shire, and this means that they know more than they can say.  Frodo and Bilbo inherit a poetic tradition each may think they made up even though it is more likely neither of them did.  They do not know where it comes from, but they do know it.  Similarly, modern English people are shire-people, even if they have forgotten this.  They know, deep down, about trees and starlight, about dœg and doerc, and they can summon up courage if they have to.  Tolkien's poetry is filled with pathos and sadness, but it is also a reminder of who they are to the English.  And in this way, it is poetry repurposed.

The great fear of LoTR is the loss of lore.  The tragedy of Tolkien's art is that he has to do with precision, uncertainty, and utter detestable self-consciousness what Bilbo, Frodo, and the Gawain-poet were able to do without knowing it was even an ability they had.  He had to be a lore-finder because lore-masters had vanished from the earth.  For all his archaism, the self-consciousness with which Tolkien did this marks him out as inescapably modern.  He belongs to our time, and lucky us, since it is as a modern person that he instructs modern people.  The modern period knows its own peculiar agonies, and our poetry sucks as bad as it does because there is no mythos for it to connect to.  There is no coherence that allows us to understate; our poetry says too much and crushes the beautiful things by overexertion.

This is not a cry for a golden age; it is a summons for us to be intelligent mythmakers again.  The decay and banality characteristic of our time is the result of our adherence to myths not worthy of the name, myths that have no time, no soil, no sense of how things we know arise from where and when and with whom we are.  Untrue myths.  It will not do to attempt to be Tolkien; it may be enough to be like him.  To look hard at the earth and ask it who we are, to respond to our time with courage, and excavate a beauty that will allow the creation of true myths, in which our silence may express nearly as much as our words do.