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Tolkien’s Old English Exodus and the Problematics of Allegory

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Abstract

This article reconsiders Tolkien’s presumed inattention to the allegorical content of the Old English Exodus. It does so, first of all, by situating allegory in the broader context of Tolkien’s letters and fictional compilations. His reception of the poem is then addressed through textual notes and an incomplete translation Tolkien used in lectures as Exodus became a regular feature of his teaching throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Reconstructed by Joan Turville-Petre and published in 1982, this material shows how Tolkien often departs from standard patristic and early medieval readings of key episodes in the biblical book and their parallels in the poem itself; this is developed in comparison to more recent editorial and textual scholarship stressing the interpretive preeminence of allegory in Exodus. Nevertheless, it is finally argued, the poem also becomes for Tolkien the occasion to imagine a rapprochement of sorts between the historical and the allegorical, something crucial not only to his own fictional sensibilities and aspirations, but also to how we understand current theoretical constructions of allegoresis.

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Notes

  1. Tolkien adds in the same letter that “Middle-earth is not an imaginary world” but an “objectively real” one set in “this earth, the one in which we now live” (p. 239). Allegory has long been a key issue in Tolkien scholarship; see, for instance, Flieger and Shippey (2001).

  2. See the brief discussion of this reference in Drout et al. (2014, p. 196n2). This quote follows Tolkien’s observation that Beowulf as a whole “must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance—a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow” (Tolkien 1984a, b, p. 27). For comparable remarks, see Tolkien (1984a, b): Old English poetical worlds “come down to us bearing echoes of ancient days beyond the shadowy borders of Northern history” (p. 50).

  3. Drout et al. (2014) focuses on the Túrin episode(s) in particular.

  4. Beginning as early as 1914, when he mentions a composition called “Earendel” in a letter to Edith Bratt, Tolkien labored more or less continuously on compiling what would become an epic cycle of history and legend, later describing Lord of the Rings as the “continuation and completion” of this work (Carpenter 1981, p. 8; see, too, p. 149). His remarks concerning The Lord of the Rings in this context occur at pp. 136–137. On the genesis of the Silmarillion in this moment, see Bowers (2011, p. 25). On this process more generally, see Kane (2009). Yet it was only after Tolkien’s death that an edited volume finally appeared in print. Recounting the process of collecting his father’s disparate materials into “publishable form,” Christopher Tolkien writes in the foreword to his 1977 edition that “complete consistency…is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all, at heavy and needless cost,” adding that

    my father came to conceive of The Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales) that had survived in agelong tradition; and this conception has indeed its parallel in the actual history of the book, for a great deal of earlier prose and poetry does underlie it, and it is to some extent a compendium in fact and not only in theory (Tolkien 1977, pp. vii–viii).

  5. On Doworst, see Scull and Hammond (2006, vol. II, p. 214).

  6. A similarly suggestive remark occurs in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman. Repurposed as a preface to the 1977 Silmarillion, the letter registers Tolkien’s disdain for “conscious and intentional Allegory,” in theory providing for an unintended allegorical mode, or that which issues precisely from the reader’s—rather than the author’s—efforts at application (Carpenter 1981, p. 143).

  7. On higher criticism, see Shippey (2000, p. 235). Relevant here is the discussion in the introduction to Klaeber’s Beowulf concerning the “primitive mythological signification” of episodes underlying the poem’s main characters, and the question of whether Beowulf himself belongs “in part to history” or “historical legend” or some “substratum of historical truth” (Fulk et al. 2008, intro., p. l).

  8. Tolkien’s edition is variously critiqued in Lucas (1983, pp. 243–244) and Irving (1983, pp. 538–539). For earlier scholarship, see Moore (1911) and Bright (1912). More recent studies premised on the poem’s allegorical content include Cross and Tucker (1960), Earl (1970), Lucas (1970), Trask (1973), Lucas (1976), Luria (1981), Martin (1982), and Shippey (2003). Much information relevant to the question of allegory is synthesized and expanded in the introduction and notes to Lucas (1994).

  9. On the relevance here of Tolkien’s Catholicism, see brief remarks in the review by Irving (1983, p. 539).

  10. I cite Lucas (1994) throughout for the Old English text, comparing it to Tolkien’s edition (which is incomplete) where appropriate. Parenthetical citations refer to line numbers. Comparison should also be made to Irving (1953) and Krapp (1931). All translations derive from Love (2002) unless otherwise noted. For modern discussion of sources, contexts, and interpretive tradition, see Earl (1970) and Frank (1988). Significant patristic reference points concerning the reading outlined here include Origen’s interpretation in his homily De profectione filiorum Istrahel of the cloud as the Holy Spirit and the crossing itself as a figure for baptism (Borret 1985, p. 150, ll. 29–32), as well as Augustine’s interpretation in sermon 213.9 of the passage through the Red Sea as an escape from sins (signified by the Egyptians) allegorically equivalent to the cleansing of the soul that occurs for Christians in the waters of baptism (Morin 1930, pp. 448–449). In addition to the sermons, see Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John (tractate 45.9) in Willems (1954, pp. 392–393). Yet another important early contribution to this background of patristic thought and figural exegesis includes Tertullian’s comments on Exodus 14:27–30 in his discussion of baptism. Among the scriptural episodes governing the sacramental use of water, “the first is that one when the people [of Israel] are set free from Egypt and by passing through the water escape the yoke of the Egyptian king, the same king [who] with all his forces is wiped out by water. This is a type made manifestly clear in the sacred act of baptism” (“Primo quidem cum populus de Aegypto liber et expeditus uim regis Aegypti per aquam transgressus euadit, ipsum regem cum totis copiis aqua extinxit. Quae figura manifestior in baptismi sacramento?”) (Reifferscheid and Wissowa 1890, p. 208, ll. 7–10). On salvation, Earl (1970) quotes Cassiodorus, P. L. 70, 1059 (545); Earl also suggests a parallel within the poem’s broader “theology of baptism” between the Red Sea crossing and the harrowing of hell, drawing especially on Origen and Gregory (pp. 567–569). For a broad overview of such matters as they relate to the biblical narrative itself, see Daniélou (1960, bk. 5).

  11. Like many biblical place names, Etham was the subject of sometimes ingenious etymological speculation. According to Origen, for instance, “they say that Etham is rightly translated in our language as ‘signs for them’” (“Othon uero in nostram linguam uerti dicunt signa iis”), and so it is there, and not at their first two encampments, that the Israelites encounter divine signs such as those described in the quoted passage (Borret 1985, p. 154, ll. 27–28). Although it is difficult to know whether the poet had this etymology in mind when composing the poem, since it would depend on understanding the derivation of the term “Othon” in the Latin text of Origen’s commentary, the setting itself naturalizes the allegorizing depiction of events there.

  12. See, most recently, Olsen (2002, pp. 191–192). The same passage has been discussed in notably different terms by Ferhatović (2010, pp. 518–519).

  13. Here I am drawing on Love (2002, p. 624, as well as 636n73–74, who leans heavily on Lucas [1994], pp. 88–90). For more detailed discussion of the cloud and pillar imagery, see Lucas (1970). On the Tabernacle as figure, see Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies, in Roberts and Donaldson (1986, pp. 452–454); Origen’s homily De Tabernaculo, from his homilies on Exodus, in Borret (1985, pp. 278–305); and, most extensively, Bede’s De Tabernaculo, in Hurst (1969, pp. 5–139).

  14. Zacher (2014) follows Lucas 1994 (p. 90) in describing the compound term seglrode as “the simplex rod, meaning ‘rood, or cross’” (p. 63). For later commentary on the ark as the ship of the church, see Hugh of St. Victor, De Arche Noe, in Sicard (2001, p. 23 ff.).

  15. Here I follow Lucas’ suggested translation of haswe as “silvery” (Lucas 1994, pp. 114–115), echoed in Love (2002, p. 629).

  16. On the question of whether lines 363–446, which also include the Abraham and Isaac episode, constitute an interpolation, see Lucas (1994, pp. 30–31), Irving (1953, p. 29), and, from a more thematic point of view, Hauer (1981).

  17. Bosworth and Toller (1898–1921), s. v. lifweg. Cf., Lucas (1994), who takes what is in fact the allegorical meaning of lifweg (“The road to safety”) for its suggested literal translation (p. 92). According to Cross and Tucker (1960), it was “natural” for those brought up in an allegorical tradition defined by Isidore’s question—“Quid mare Rubrum, nisi baptismus est Christi sanguine consecratus?”—to recast the Exodus story in Christian terms (pp. 122–123, quoting Migne [1850a, col. 296]). See, as well, their comments on the translation of flodweg (p. 125). For more recent attention to the various Anglo-Saxon mentalities informing metaphorical language in OE Exodus, see Wilcox (2011). As Lucas (1994) says, “[t]he real ‘source’ of Exodus is the Christian tradition in which the poem must have been written” (p. 53).

  18. See, more fully, Lucas (1976, p. 195). Love (2002) articulates the poem’s overarching allegorical meaning with slightly more precision: the Israelites’ flight from Egypt “could be seen figuratively as a journey from the pagan past through the waters of baptism to salvation, a homeland and, ultimately, heaven” (p. 636n105–106).

  19. This formulation derives from the so-called Letter to Can Grande, in Haller (1973, p. 99). Clarifying the allegorical treatment of his subject matter, Dante briefly alights on the different scriptural senses as they would conventionally apply to Psalm 113:1–2, which recounts the departure from Egypt and its aftermath. The allegorical signification of these verses, he argues, concerns “our redemption through Christ” (p. 99).

  20. On bealusiðe, see Earl (1970, p. 546).

  21. According to Origen, “the rod, however, by means of which all these things are accomplished, by which Egypt is subjugated and Pharaoh overcome, is the cross of Christ, by which this world is vanquished, and the ‘prince of this world’ is defeated, with his principalities and powers” (“[v]irga uero, per quam geruntur haec omnia, per quam Aegyptus subigitur et Pharao superatur, crux Christi sit, per quam mundus hic uincitur, et ‘princeps huius mundi’ cum principatibus et potestatibus triumphatur” (Borret 1985, p. 130, ll. 7–10, and cited in Martens 2012, p. 217). For a detailed summation of Origen’s readings of the “rod” or “staff,” see Hanson (1959, pp. 105–107).

  22. See notes in Love (2002, p. 636n281, drawing on Hall (1991). For more on the question of its color, see Hermann (1975) and Luria (1980). It should be noted that while Tolkien accepts a suggested emendation to tane, it is rejected by Lucas (1994, p. 114).

  23. For discussion of this idea and the possibilities for a critical practice no longer dominated by the goal of ideological demystification, see Rosenberg (2015). See, too, recent comments by Holsinger (2011, esp. pp. 610–614) on critical methods oriented towards the “surface” of literary texts.

  24. On Bede’s understanding of the tabernacle and the temple, see DeGregorio (2010, pp. 136–139).

  25. Migne (1850b, caput xiii, col. 310, cited in Moore [1911, p. 102]).

  26. However, Tolkien apparently inquired with Oxford University Press as to that possibility in October, 1932, noting his commentary on Exodus, according to Scull and Hammond (2006, vol. 1., p. 165). He was also later urged to publish his teaching text for exactly this purpose (p. 369). See, as well, p. 499 and vol. II, p. 681.

  27. Cf., Sedgefield (1922, p. 88, l. 104).

  28. Anlezark (2005), while acknowledging a liturgical influence on the poem, also situates its treatment of Noah and Abraham in a broader intertextual network that includes both biblical sources in which the two were closely linked as well as Aldhelm’s account of the flood in riddle LXIII.

  29. To allegorize the poem in more traditional terms would presumably detract from what made the story of Exodus universal. As Tolkien wrote in his letters (Carpenter 1981): “In a larger sense, it is I suppose impossible to write any ‘story’ that is not allegorical in proportion as it ‘comes to life’; since each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life” (p. 212), and that “the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory” (p. 121).

  30. For recent and illuminating discussion of the medieval mnemonic from which these terms derive, see Simpson (2015, pp. 35–36). “Allegorical interpretation,” writes Boitani (1999), “is by its nature infinite: every object, event, or word in a discourse can be attributed with any number of ‘other’ meanings as long as they have cohesion as a system” (p. 91).

  31. Tolkien’s own allegorical inclinations, such as they are, seem closer in some respects to personification, a view cautiously broached in Tolkien’s remarks on Tom Bombadil, whom he describes in one letter as embodying an exemplary meaning (Carpenter 1981, p. 192).

  32. As Rosenberg (2015) has recently observed, “literary theory has been reading every story like an Exodus: for the symptom of something that cannot be represented” (p. 802, discussing Best [2012, p. 461]). Relevant here, of course, is a rich tradition of critical and theoretical work extending from Jameson (1982) and de Man (1979).

  33. For this particular convergence in Tolkien’s career, I am relying on Scull and Hammond’s chronology (2006, vol. I, pp. 134, 138), which traces the first Silmarillion maps to the same period of time, roughly 1926 to 1930, during which Exodus became a regular topic of Tolkien’s scheduled lectures, beginning with Michaelmas Full Term, October, 1926.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Scott DeGregorio, as well as the journal’s reviewer, for thoughtful insights and advice offered during the revision process.

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Lavinsky, D. Tolkien’s Old English Exodus and the Problematics of Allegory. Neophilologus 101, 305–319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-016-9511-7

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