'If in day of Doom one deathless stands'

Readers of this blog may be interested in watching this series of talks given recently in Oxford (in connection with the Bodleian Library's exhibition Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth) on the subject of the medieval languages which interested and influenced Tolkien. There were lectures on Old and Middle English, Medieval Welsh, Gothic and Old Norse (my contribution). If you're interested in Tolkien, the whole archive is worth exploring - the Bodleian have made available talks dating back to 2008, on a range of topics relating to Tolkien and his works.



In my lecture I talked about Tolkien's interest in Old Norse and especially in the legend of the Völsungs, which he explored in his long poem The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. This text interests me because it's such an individual take on the story; though it arises from a deep engagement with the medieval sources, it's far from a straightforward retelling of the legend. There are several ways in which this is true, but in the lecture I focused on the element of Tolkien's retelling which interests me the most: his Christian-inflected retelling of the story of Ragnarök. This too is highly individual, and while some lovers of Norse mythology might feel it detracts from the powerful bleakness of the Ragnarök myth, Tolkien's version has a poignant beauty of its own. His Sigurd, dragon-slayer, is not just a great hero but a Christ-like figure, the Chosen One (that's Tolkien's proposed interpretation of Völsung): the promised Saviour, the fulfilment of prophecies, whose return at the end of time will be the salvation of the world.

A seer long silent
her song upraised –
the halls hearkened –
on high she stood.
Of doom and death
dark words she spake,
of the last battle
of the leaguered Gods.

'The horn of Heimdal
I hear ringing;
the Blazing Bridge
bends neath horsemen;
the Ash is groaning,
his arms trembling,
the Wolf waking,
warriors riding.

The sword of Surt
smoketh redly;
the slumbering Serpent
in the sea moveth;
a shadowy ship
from shores of Hell
legions bringeth
to the last battle.

The wolf Fenrir
waits for Ódin,
for Frey the fair
the flames of Surt;
the deep Dragon
shall be doom of Thór –
shall all be ended,
shall Earth perish?

If in day of Doom
one deathless stands,
who death hath tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Ódin,
then all shall not end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head shall be helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
The Serpent shall shiver
and Surt waver,
the Wolf be vanquished
and the world rescued.'

(Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (2009), pp. 62-3)

Some of this is drawing on (in places directly translating) the description of Ragnarök in Völuspá, the first poem in the Poetic Edda, but its context and function are very different in Tolkien's poem. The fulfilment of this prophecy, as Odin ensures, is to be Sigurd: he who shall come, 'who death hath tasted / and dies no more.' Tolkien's reworking of Sigurd as a Christ-like figure is done with a light touch - a bit of subtle source-reshaping here, a resonant turn of phrase there - and it takes away nothing from the original story, but invites us to read it in a new light, with new eyes.

All this seems particularly appropriate to think about here at the beginning of Advent, the season which by ancient tradition is not just a preparation for Christmas but an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between prophecies and their fulfilment, between the Old Testament and the New, between the first Advent and the Second Coming at 'the day of Doom'. Tolkien's interpretation of the story of Sigurd is a kind of typological reading of the myth, somewhat like the way medieval readers interpreted the different 'types' for Christ they found in the figures of the Old Testament: Isaac, Moses, Jonah, and more. Those figures and their stories were understood simultaneously to be real historical episodes and to be signs foreshadowing the story of Christ's birth, death and resurrection; neither reading takes anything away from the other, but offers an additional layer of meaning in the divinely-composed narrative of human history.

The idea of a parallel between Sigurd and Christ is something I wrote about a few years ago in this Advent post; there I was discussing the history of the word arkenstone (Old English earcnanstan, Old Norse jarknasteinn), which - as Tolkien must have known - one Old English poem applies to Christ, and one Old Norse poem to Sigurd. The Old English instance occurs in a prophecy, embedded within an account of Christ's second coming at Doomsday:

...æt ærestan
foreþoncle men from fruman worulde
þurh wis gewit, witgan dryhtnes,
halge higegleawe, hæleþum sægdon,
oft, nales æne, ymb þæt æþele bearn,
ðæt se earcnanstan eallum sceolde
to hleo ond to hroþer hæleþa cynne
weorðan in worulde, wuldres agend,
eades ordfruma, þurh þa æþelan cwenn.

...from the beginning,
from the origin of the world, foreknowing men
with their wise wits, prophets of the Lord,
holy ones sage in spirit, spoke to men
often, not once only, of that noble child:
how the precious stone should
come into the world as refuge and comfort
to all the race of men, the ruler of glory,
beginner of bliss, through the noble woman.

This poem is known today as Christ III and as it comes down to us in the Exeter Book (though probably not as originally composed), it stands last in a sequence of three poems which moves from Advent to Apocalypse, from creation to destruction and rebirth - as Völuspá does too, in its different way.

As I've said before, the medieval understanding of Advent was as a season which encourages new and exciting kinds of reading - a season rich in imaginative possibility for those who are prepared to read with the right eyes. Advent is the time when the church reflects on the many different kinds of meaning which Scripture, and the world around us, can reveal: the season for interpreting 'the signs of the times' written in the book of the world, and for reading a Christian interpretation into the prophecies and poetry of the Old Testament (the same kind of light-touch typological reading Tolkien offers in his version of the Sigurd story). The ancient liturgy of Advent is crafted to appeal to all the faculties of the mind and heart which we call upon when we read poetry, or take in stories in any form: it offers metaphor, allegory, foreshadowing, wordplay, expressions of urgent desire, and (especially in the link between Advent and Apocalypse) creative thought experiments with narrative time. Medieval liturgists were some of the greatest literary critics who ever lived - sensitive and imaginative readers of Scripture, who wove together connections between texts, between characters and words and ideas, and between moments in time, and hallowed the very act of reading as a way of trying to understand the mind of God.

There's an imaginative fertility and a reaching ambition about the medieval view of Advent which offers something much richer than just a cheery countdown to Christmas. For many people the basic details of the Christmas story are so familiar that its strangeness and power and meaning have been sucked dry, and it doesn't have the imaginative appeal that other kinds of less well-known mythic story do - the story of Ragnarök, for instance, or the fierce beauty of the Poetic Edda. But Advent can be a yearly exercise in 'making strange' - reading old stories with new eyes.

'An elephant in its bath'

An extract from my latest piece for History Today:

I recently read a letter written by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1937, when The Hobbit had just been published. Tolkien wrote to his publishers to comment on the description on the dustjacket, which compares his book with the work of Lewis Carroll. As Carroll the mathematician amused himself in Wonderland, the blurb suggests, so Tolkien the medievalist took inspiration from his specialism to write his children’s book. ‘Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play,’ it trills.

With patient precision, Tolkien takes issue with the use of the word ‘abstruse’ to describe his academic work. ‘I do not profess an “abstruse” subject,’ he protests. ‘Some folk may think so, but I do not like encouraging them. Old English and Icelandic literature are no more remote from human concerns, or difficult to acquire cheaply, than commercial Spanish (say). I have tried both.’ He also objects to the publishers’ description of him as ‘a professor at play’ – ‘a professor at play rather suggests an elephant in its bath,’ he remarks wryly.

Read the rest here.

'This doubtful day of feast or fast': Good Friday and the Annunciation

Annunciation and Crucifixion, from BL Add. 18850, f. 204v

This year Good Friday falls on Lady Day, the feast of the Annunciation. This is a rare occurrence and a special one, because it means that for once the day falls on its 'true' date: in patristic and medieval tradition, March 25 was considered to be the historical date of the Crucifixion. It happens only a handful of times in a century, and won't occur again until 2157.

These days the church deals with such occasions by transferring the feast of the Annunciation to another day, but traditionally the conjunction of the two dates was considered to be both deliberate and profoundly meaningful. The date of the feast of the Annunciation was chosen to match the supposed historical date of the Crucifixion, as deduced from the Gospels, in order to underline the idea that Christ came into the world on the same day that he left it: his life formed a perfect circle. March 25 was both the first and the last day of his earthly life, the beginning and the completion of his work on earth. The idea goes back at least to the third century, and Augustine explained it in this way:

He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since.

This day was not only a conjunction of man-made calendars but also a meeting-place of solar, lunar, and natural cycles: both events were understood to have happened in the spring, when life returns to the earth, and at the vernal equinox, once the days begin to grow longer than the nights and light triumphs over the power of darkness. Here's Bede explaining some of the symbolism of this latter point (from here, p.25):

It is fitting that just as the Sun at that point in time first assumed power over the day, and then the Moon and stars power over the night, so now, to connote the joy of our redemption, day should first equal night in length, and then the full Moon should suffuse [the night] with light. This is for the sake of a certain symbolism, because the created Sun which lights up all the stars signifies the true and eternal light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, while the Moon and stars, which shine, not with their own light (as they say), but with an adventitious light borrowed from the Sun, suggest the body of the Church as a whole, and each individual saint. These, capable of being illumined but not of illuminating, know how to accept the gift of heavenly grace but not how to give it. And in the celebration of the supreme solemnity, it was necessary that Christ precede the Church, which cannot shine save through Him... Observing the Paschal season is not meaningless, for it is fitting that through it the world's salvation both be symbolized and come to pass.

As Bede says at the end here, this dating is symbolic but it is not only a symbol; it reveals the deep relationship between Christ's death and all the created world, including the sun and moon and everything on earth. According to some calculations 25 March was also considered to be the eighth day of the week which saw the creation of the world (for more on that, see this post), as well as the date of certain events from the Old Testament which prefigured Christ's death, including the sacrifice of Isaac and the crossing of the Red Sea. It is the single most significant date in salvation history, and for that reason has also made it into some fictional history too: those of you who are Tolkien fans will know that the final destruction of the Ring takes place on 25 March, to align Tolkien's own eucatastrophe with this most powerful of dates.

Calendar, marking the Annunciation and Crucifixion on 25 March (BL Royal 1 D X, f.10)

But it's the link between the Annunciation and the Crucifixion which has most fascinated theologians and artists over the centuries. Here's one beautiful passage from the Old English Martyrology, in its entry for March 25, explaining what was by the ninth century the common understanding of the date (the text is from this edition, pp.72-7, with my translation):

On ðone fif ond twentegðan dæg þæs monðes com Gabrihel ærest to Sancta Marian mid Godes ærende, ond on ðone dæg Sancta Maria wæs eacen geworden on Nazareth ðære ceastre þurh þæs engles word ond þurh hire earena gehyrnesse, swa þas treowa ðonne hi blostmiað þurh þæs windes blæd.... Ond ða æfter twa ond ðritegum geara ond æfter ðrym monðum wæs Crist ahangen on rode on ðone ylcan dæg. Ond sona swa he on ðære rode wæs, ða gescæfta tacnedon þæt he was soð God. Seo sunne asweartade, ond se dæg wæs on þeostre niht gecierred fram midne dæg oð non.

On the twenty-fifth day of the month Gabriel first came to St Mary with God’s message, and on that day St Mary conceived in the city of Nazareth through the angel’s word and through the hearing of her ears, like trees when they blossom at the blowing of the wind... And then after thirty-two years and three months Christ was crucified on the cross on the same day. And as soon as he was on the cross, creation revealed that he was truly God: the sun grew black, and the day was turned into dark night from midday until the ninth hour.

At the Annunciation Mary becomes like the blossoming trees in spring, and like the tree which became Christ's cross: she bears new life to the world. The parallel reflects the ancient tradition which links Mary with scriptural images of the tree or the vine, frequently used in the liturgy on feasts of the Virgin - this, for instance. She is the root of Jesse from which grows the rod, the virgo who bears the virga. And if she is the vine and the tree, she is like the cross - most honoured among human beings and closest to Christ, as the tree of the cross is the most honoured among creatures of the natural world. (For a fascinating discussion of this imagery in light of the link between Mary and the tree/cross in the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, see this book.) The later medieval hymn Lignum vitae quaerimus muses on the parallel:

Lignum vitae quaerimus,
Qui vitam amisimus
Fructu ligni vetiti...
Fructus, per quem vivitur,
Pendet, sicut creditur,
Virginis ad ubera,
Et ad crucem iterum
Inter viros scelerum
Passus quinque vulnera.
Hic virgo puerpera,
Hic crux salutifera,
Ambe ligna mystica;
Haec hysopus humilis
Illa cedrus nobilis,
Utraque vivifica.

We seek the tree of life,
We who lost life
Through the fruit of the forbidden tree...
The fruit which gives life
Hangs, as we believe,
Upon the Virgin's breast,
And again upon the cross
Between two thieves,
Pierced with five wounds.
Here, the child-bearing Virgin,
Here, the saving cross;
Both are mystic trees.
[The cross], the humble hyssop,
She, the noble cedar,
And both life-giving.

The name 'MARIA' as a tree bearing the fruit 'love', from a 15th-century English manuscript, BL Add. 37049, f. 26

(the poem beside it is 'In a tabernacle of a tower')

With Mary's Ave from the angel at the Annunciation began the work of redemption completed on Good Friday; and so, as many medieval writers note, her answer makes her the inverse of Eva, the means by which Eve’s sin is turned to good. In the Old English Martyrology, the next entry describes how on 26 March Christ descended into hell, to save Adam and Eve and all those who had died before his coming. Eve appeals to him by merit of her kinship with Mary:

Đær hine eac ongeaton Adam ond Eua, þær hi asmorede wæron mid deopum ðeostrum. Đa ða hi gesawon his þæt beorhte leoht æfter þære langan worolde, þær Eua hine halsode for Sancta Marian mægsibbe ðæt he hire miltsade. Heo cwæþ to him: ‘Gemyne, min Drihten, þæt seo wæs ban of minum banum, ond flæsc of minum flæsce. Help min forþon.’ Đa Crist hi butu ðonan alysde ond unrim bliðes folces him beforan onsende, ða he wolde gesigefæsted eft siðian to þæm lichoman.

Adam and Eve saw him there too, where they were stifled in deep darkness. When they saw his bright light, after that long age, Eve implored him there for the sake of her kinship with St Mary to have mercy on her. She said to him: ‘Remember, my Lord, that she was bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Help me for that reason!’ Then Christ released them both from that place and also sent a countless number of joyful people before them, when, triumphant, he set out to return to his body.

Crucifixion and Annunciation (BL Add. 44949, f. 5)

The traditional pairing of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion means that the two scenes are often depicted together in medieval art, as above in a fourteenth-century manuscript, and in the image at the top of this post. The first example from England is probably the one found on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross, where a depiction of the Crucifixion was added directly below the Annunciation scene some time after the original design was completed:

Some six hundred years later, artists were still finding new ways to explore this conjunction. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the idea inspired the development of a distinctive and beautiful image found almost uniquely in English medieval art: the lily crucifix. This iconography combines the Annunciation and the Crucifixion by depicting Christ crucified on a lily amid an Annunciation scene. The lily is the symbol of Mary, of course, and is often referenced in depictions of the Annunciation and in poetry about the Virgin; this idea grafts that flower imagery into the tradition which links Mary to the root of Jesse and the tree of the cross. Here's a gorgeous example of a lily crucifix from a Welsh manuscript, the Llanbeblig Hours, made at the end of the fourteenth century:

The Virgin sits under a green canopy, while Gabriel in green and red kneels facing her.

Another slightly later manuscript image can be seen here, but the lily crucifix is found in all kinds of media - there are estimated to be 19 surviving examples in all, ranging from painted screens and stained glass to carvings on stone tombs, misericords and wall-paintings. Here's a painted ceiling from the Lady Chapel of St Helen's Church, Abingdon, with the lily bearing the crucified Christ between Mary and the angel:

The rest of this impressive ceiling, which dates from c.1390, depicts the ancestors of Christ in a form of Jesse Tree. There are more pictures here.

Not far away in Oxford, there's a beautiful stained glass window of a lily crucifix in the church of St Michael at the Northgate:

This too was originally part of an Annunciation scene, though the other panels are now lost.

And here's a wonderful example in alabaster, now in the V and A, where a giant lily-stem carrying Christ soars right up into heaven:

Click to zoom in and study the detail! The top half of the panel is damaged, but clearly showed God the Father holding the crucified Christ, part of a common depiction of the Trinity - compare the image at the top of this post, and there are more examples collected here.

Mary and John at the foot of the cross (BL Sloane 2321, f.111v)

The lily cross flanked by two figures, Mary and the angel, offers a visual parallel to the usual Crucifixion scene, where Christ on the cross is attended by Mary and St John. One of the ways in which medieval Christians were most often encouraged to approach the Passion was by imagining and entering into Mary's emotions, to see Christ, as his mother might, as a vulnerable human child even at the moment of his death as an adult. There are many superb examples of poetic meditations on this subject - here's a particularly moving one, and more can be found here. This four-line poem is one of the best-known:

Nou goth sonne under wod,
Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.
Nou goth sonne under tre,
Me reweth, Marie, thi sone and thee.

[Now goes the sun under the wood,
I grieve, Mary, for your fair face;
Now goes the sun under the tree,
I grieve, Mary, for thy son and thee.]

Although so short and apparently so simple, this is full of meaningful wordplay: as the sun sets behind the wood, so Christ the Son is shrouded in darkness on the wood of the cross, the tree. Rode can mean both 'face', and rood, of course.

Another good example of a text which approaches the Passion through Mary's motherhood is 'Stond wel, Moder, under rode', with its explicit appeal to a female audience and its poignant comment that by her grief Mary learns to understand 'what pain they have that children bear'. In this poem Mary's situation, though so extraordinary, gives her kinship with all women who have lost children or found in motherhood grief as well as joy. The link between the Annunciation and the Crucifixion brings together in one circle the beginning and the end of Mary's motherhood, its joy and its sorrow, as well as completing the circle of Christ's life on earth.

Crucifixion (BL Harley 2851, f. 31)

However, although the Annunciation and the Crucifixion are so closely linked, they don't often occur on the same day. Good Friday fell on March 25 in 1608, too, when John Donne wrote this poem on the occasion:

Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day
1608

Tamely, frail body, abstain today; today
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away.
She sees Him nothing twice at once, who’s all;
She sees a Cedar plant itself and fall,
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive, yet dead;
She sees at once the virgin mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha;
Sad and rejoiced she’s seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty and at scarce fifteen;
At once a Son is promised her, and gone;
Gabriel gives Christ to her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity,
At once receiver and the legacy.
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)
Of the Angel’s Ave and Consummatum est.
How well the Church, God’s court of faculties,
Deals in some times and seldom joining these!
As by the self-fixed Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where the other is, and which we say
(Because it strays not far) doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to Him, we know
And stand firm, if we by her motion go.
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud, to one end both.
This Church, by letting these days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one:
Or 'twas in Him the same humility
That He would be a man, and leave to be:
Or as creation He had made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating Spouse would join in one
Manhood’s extremes: He shall come, He is gone:
Or as though one blood-drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have served, He yet shed all,
Or as though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords;
This treasure then, in gross, my soul uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.

A paradoxical conjunction of feast and fast: was there ever a day more suited to metaphysical poetry? Although this wonderful poem is all so characteristically Donne, it explores many of the same parallels as the medieval texts and images we've already seen: the circle, the tree, beginnings and endings, and the two moments in the life of the Virgin, seen at once 'at almost fifty and at scarce fifteen'.

The coincidence of feasts gains rather than loses from being a rare occurrence, as Donne suggests - from falling 'some times and seldom'. It is, he says, an act of wisdom in the church, existing in time, to be moveable, while God is a fixed star, eternally the same. The overlapping cycles of the church's calendar offer many such conjunctions, which change every year as the fixed cycle intersects with the variable one. Although these coincidences often have their origin as much in pragmatic decisions about the calendar as in theology, with the kind of approach Donne exemplifies here they can be read in meaningful and imaginative ways. Through such eyes, a meeting of feasts like this year's is not exactly a coincidence, but perhaps one of those 'occasional mercies' of which Donne writes elsewhere: 'such mercies as a regenerate man will call mercies, though a natural man would call them accidents, or occurrences, or contingencies'. They are moments which seem to reveal a purpose behind the randomness of life, to show both natural and man-made events and seasons to be part of an ordered and carefully structured universe. It's the calendrical equivalent of a pun, like the medieval poet's 'sun under wood' or Donne's orbity - a place where meanings meet.

This year's conjunction is a particularly rich example, but all through the year these coincidental graces can be found, as beauty and meaning are produced by the changing juxtaposition of feasts and fasts, the fixed and the moveable seasons. Lent, Easter, Ascension Day, Whitsun - all can at various times coincide with different fixed occasions, different stages in the seasons of spring and summer, and the experience of each can accordingly change from year to year. As the cycles intersect in different ways, familiar texts and images breathe new life into each other, and bring forth new and different fruit (to borrow the Old English Martyrology's metaphor for Mary's conception). In such ways the interlocking wheels of the calendar give cosmic meaning to the cycle of our own days, months, and years.

Crucifixion with living tree, sun and moon (BL Arundel 60, f.12v)

Of course, a fixed date of Easter would do away with all this. As a medievalist, I found the discussion of the question of fixing a date for Easter a few months ago rather depressing. If there were any theological arguments under consideration, no one seemed to think it worthwhile to articulate them publicly; discussion focused mostly on solving the non-existent problem that some people (schools, maybe?) apparently find a movable date for Easter a bit inconvenient. I've never in my life heard anyone complain about being inconvenienced by the date of Easter, so I really struggle to imagine who considers this a pressing issue. And for that, churches would break with nearly two thousand years of tradition, a complex system worked out with great care and thought and invested over centuries with profound meaning. The fixed dates proposed for Easter are in April, so never again would Good Friday fall on the feast of the Annunciation. So much loss for so little gain!

Bede truly would be spinning in his grave. It strikes me (once again) that however much many people today, in their ignorance of all but the broadest stereotypes about the Middle Ages, stigmatise the medieval church as worldly, rigid, and oppressive, it was in some ways immeasurably more humane and creative than its modern successors. It was happy to see human life as fully part of the natural world, shaped by the cycles of the sun and moon and the seasons; it was able to articulate a belief that material considerations, convenience, and economic productivity are not the highest goods, and not the only standards by which life should be lived. When confronted by calendar clashes with the potential to be a little awkward or inconvenient, the medieval church could have the imagination not to simply suppress them or tidy them away, but to find meaning in them - meaning which springs from deep knowledge of the images and poetry of scripture, the liturgy, and popular devotion.

So enjoy the coincidence this year, this meeting of dates which has inspired preachers, poets, and artists through many centuries of Christian tradition. Unless you plan to live until 2157, you won't see another in your lifetime - and if the date of Easter is fixed, it will never happen again.

'The words linger': Christ the Arkenstone and 'The Hobbit'

Shooting a dragon (BL Arundel 91, f. 28v)

Today I want to share with you a very short extract from an Old English poem, which I hope will be of interest this week for two reasons: firstly because it's about Advent and the birth of Christ, and secondly because it contains a single word which features prominently in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. This is a pleasing confluence of events, and entirely a coincidence (somehow I don't think Advent had much to do with the timing of The Hobbit movie, except that we've replaced Advent with the commercial potential of the run-up to Christmas...)

I wrote about The Hobbit and its relation to some medieval stories about werebears and dragon-slayers last year, but today's poem offers a particularly nice coincidence because it brings us close to the Old English version of the O Antiphons, appropriate reading for the last week before Christmas. Scholars, somewhat lacking in imagination, have traditionally given the name Christ I to the untitled poem based on the O Antiphons, because it's the first poem in the manuscript and it's about Christ. The third poem in the same manuscript is known as Christ III (I bet you can't guess why...). While Christ I is about the first coming of Christ into the world, Christ III is about the second coming: it describes the end of the world in fire, Judgement Day, the joy of the saved and the misery of the damned, the terrible beauty of Christ as he returns in glory. (The whole poem can be read online in translation here.) It's in this poem that we meet our word from The Hobbit, and the title of this post has given away the clue: the word is Arkenstone, the name Tolkien gave to the great jewel of the dwarves, which he took from the Old English earcnanstan, 'precious stone'. This word appears a handful of times in Old English, sometimes in reference to a particular gemstone - a pearl or a topaz - and sometimes for jewels generally. But in Christ III (ll. 1190-8) it's used for something a bit more special:

...æt ærestan
foreþoncle men from fruman worulde
þurh wis gewit, witgan dryhtnes,
halge higegleawe, hæleþum sægdon,
oft, nales æne, ymb þæt æþele bearn,
ðæt se earcnanstan eallum sceolde
to hleo ond to hroþer hæleþa cynne
weorðan in worulde, wuldres agend,
eades ordfruma, þurh þa æþelan cwenn.

...from the beginning,
from the origin of the world, foreknowing men
with their wise wits, prophets of the Lord,
holy ones sage in spirit, spoke to men
often, not once only, of that noble child:
how the precious stone should
come into the world as refuge and comfort
to all the race of men, the ruler of glory,
beginner of bliss, through the noble woman.

The context of these lines is rather difficult to explain, because this is, quite apart from anything else, a beautifully intricate manipulation of narrative time: this description of the incarnation comes after the destruction of the world, when Christ appears in glory with the radiant Cross at his side. At the sight of the wounds he bears, sinful mankind is forced to confront the evidence of their cruelty towards him, which the poem describes; then it says they should have known who he was, because 'from the origin of the world' it had been prophesied that the earcnanstan would come. In the middle of a poem which is about the future, the end of the world and the second coming, this loops back to a moment when the first coming itself was still in the future, the subject of prophecies and hope but not yet of reality. Such a link between Advent and Apocalypse is an ancient part of the church's observance of the season before Christmas (an idea explored in an Anglo-Saxon context by Ælfric in an Advent sermon I posted recently), and this description of the incarnation, embedded within an account of the end of the world, follows that conventional association of ideas.

But why is Christ called the earcnanstan? One reason might be that this poem, like the Biblical descriptions of the Apocalypse, is studded with literal and metaphorical precious gems: Revelations describes God as appearing like jasper and ruby, enthroned upon a rainbow like an emerald, and in Christ III the stars are called tungolgimmas 'starry gems', the eyes heafodgimmas 'the head's gems'. Among all these jewels, Christ is the most precious: the gem, the earcnanstan. In the passage quoted above there's a notable emphasis on the language of nobility, drawn from secular lordship; God is called wuldres agend, literally 'the owner of glory', and both Christ and Mary are called æþele 'noble'. The word used for Mary, cwenn, can just mean 'woman', but frequently also 'queen' (it's the origin of the Modern English word, of course). The earcnanstan seems to fit with this royal context. Not only are precious stones naturally associated with kings and queens, but the first element, earcnan, seems to mean something like 'noble'; it's found in some early Anglo-Saxon royal names, such as Eorcenberht, seventh-century king of Kent, and St Erkenwald. Perhaps 'noble stone' would be a better translation - fitting for The Hobbit's royal heirloom.

Even so, it strikes me as an unusual name for Christ in this particular situation (the incarnation is Christ becoming flesh, and what's less like flesh than a precious stone?) but that very strangeness makes it a richer image, something which rewards extended thought. The Old English translations of the O Antiphons meditate on some of the mysterious titles given to Christ: key, cornerstone, craftsman, king, daystar, 'God mid us'. This creative poetic naming comes, in that instance, from the liturgy and ultimately from scripture, but it's just the kind of variation and allusive titling and re-titling which harmonised with Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, and in which Old English poetry abounds. Just look at the different titles by which Christ is called in the few lines quoted above: noble child, precious stone, ruler of glory, beginner (in the sense 'author, source') of bliss. The Old English version of 'O Emmanuel', a poem especially concerned with Christ's name and titles, offers even more examples. 

In medieval tradition precious stones were not only beautiful but powerful, that is, they were considered to have the ability to heal; so to call Christ a precious stone is fitting in more ways than one. Somewhere behind this is an echo of the 'pearl of great price', for which earcnanstan is used in an Old English translation of Matthew 13:45-6: Gelic is rice heofunas menn ceape sohte gode ercnanstanas... The Virgin Mary, too, is addressed by God as min meregrot... min eorclanstan 'my pearl, my precious stone' in one of the Blicking Homilies. The pearl is the central image of a later medieval poem with which Tolkien was deeply engaged, a text of dazzling complexity in which the pearl stands for a multiplicity of things. (It's worth noting that the Middle English poem Pearl is often linked to a poem in a similar style about St Erkenwald, and they're sometimes ascribed to the same author; the pearl and this earcnan- name thus have an additional tie for anyone who has worked on both texts.)

All this is a resonant context for Tolkien's Arkenstone. This stone, which has its own alternative title ('heart of the mountain'), shines 'of its own inner light', like Earendel/Christ who tida gehwane of sylfum þe symle inlihtes 'of thine own self ever enlightenest every age'. Remembering the apocalyptic context in which the word appears in Christ III, the title of the short chapter in The Hobbit which deals with Bilbo's bartering over the Arkenstone is particularly striking: 'A Thief in the Night' refers to the little burglar himself, of course, but it is a reference to St Paul's description of the second coming in 1 Thessalonians 5: 'the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; for when they shall say, peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.' All this is the subject of Christ III; in fact the poem opens with this very image, saying that 'the great day of the Lord' will come like

...sceaða fæcne,
þeof þristlice, þe on þystre fareð,
on sweartre niht...

...a crafty burglar,
a bold thief who moves in the darkness,
in the black night...

(sceaða means 'robber, criminal' so I don't think burglar is too inapposite a translation...) Bilbo's nighttime deed of daring with the Arkenstone brings about a day of judgement of sorts - and certainly sudden destruction.

The Second Coming, from the Benedictional of St Æthelwold (BL Add. 49598, f. 9v)

If you look for the Arkenstone in some of the many guides to Tolkien's use of Anglo-Saxon literature, you'll be informed that the word appears in Beowulf, in the form eorclanstan. There the stones in question are not just any gems, but the most famous jewels of Germanic mythology: the necklace of the Brísingamen, treasure of the goddess Freyja, forged for her by dwarves. It is mentioned in Beowulf because after killing Grendel, Beowulf is presented with many rich rewards for his labours, among them a precious neck ring. The narrator says that he has never heard tell of any greater treasure – except, that is, for the 'necklace of the Brosings', which he calls þa frætwe wæg, eorclanstanas 'the ornamented thing, the precious stones' (1207-8). Unlike the earcnanstan of Christ III, these jewels are a dangerous treasure: in Norse tradition they are the product of sexual bartering by Freyja, constantly coveted and stolen, and the object of immoderate desire and dragonish lust. Thorin never had a chance against this kind of arkenstone.

Virgin and Child (BL Additional 34890, f. 115)

But Beowulf aside, the connotations of the word are generally positive. The cognate Old Norse word is jarknasteinn, and this too is applied to a human being in one memorable instance - in the Poetic Edda, as a comparison for the great hero Sigurðr the Völsung. After Sigurðr's death, his wife Guðrún mourns him with a moving lament:

Svá var minn Sigurðr hjá sonum Gjúka
sem væri geirlaukr ór grasi vaxinn
ða væri bjartr steinn á band dreginn,
jarknasteinn yfir öðlingum.

So was my Sigurðr, compared to the sons of Giuki [her brothers],
like a green leek growing up out of the grass;
like a bright stone threaded on a string,
a precious stone among the princes.

Sigurðr was by far the most famous dragon-slayer of Germanic legend (it wouldn't have taken him three movies to kill Smaug), and there's not as big a gap as you might think between Sigurðr and Christ; the scene of Sigurðr killing the dragon appears on early carvings in a Christian context, which are difficult to interpret but may show Sigurðr's triumph being cast as a battle between good and evil. Tolkien, of course, produced his own version of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, though he did not include this poem, so we don't know how he would have rendered Guðrún's word jarknasteinn. (The Edda contains several different variants of Guðrún's story; this lament comes from Guðrúnarkviða I, and Tolkien instead based his telling on Guðrúnarkviða II.) Tolkien's Sigurðr is a very noble figure indeed: 'sun-bright Sigurd', he is called, 'golden Sigurd / glorious shining'. After he is killed he goes to Valhalla, to await the war with which, in Norse mythology, the world will come to an end:

There feasts he long
at his father's side,
for War waiting,
the World's chosen.

Perhaps there is an echo of this in Thorin's words as he lies dying: 'I go now to the halls of waiting, to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed'. (This is omitted from the film, for reasons which pass understanding.) Thorin is buried, within the mountain, with the Arkenstone on his breast. But Sigurðr, the jarknasteinn, will have a second coming:

In the day of Doom
he shall deathless stand
who death tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Óðin:
not all shall end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head the Helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
When war passeth
in world rebuilt,
bliss shall they drink
who the bitter tasted.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 2009), pp. 179-180.

Tolkien was working on this poem, according to Christopher Tolkien's recent edition, in the early 1930s, during which time he was also teaching and lecturing on the Poetic Edda at Oxford (as well as on Beowulf and his other medieval interests, of course). This is also the period when The Hobbit was written, so the Sigurðr story must have been at least in the back of his mind. The Hobbit's most obvious debt to the Poetic Edda is in the names of the company of dwarves, which come straight from a list in Völuspá, the first poem in the Edda, but there are some other elements of the story strongly reminiscent of the Sigurðr legend. Sigurðr (in the Norse poems and in Tolkien's translation) seeks his dragon through misty mountains, Mirkwood, and withered heaths; he famously learns to understand the language of birds, like the helpful speaking thrushes and ravens which swoop through the last pages of The Hobbit. The final section of the book leans heavily on an equivalency between dragon-fire and literal and figurative 'rivers of gold', which is a key part of the story of Sigurðr's treasure-hoard. And Thorin's rapturous list of similes for the Arkenstone - 'it shone like silver in the firelight, like water in the sun, like snow under the stars, like rain upon the Moon' - is structurally not unlike Guðrún's lament for Sigurðr: 'like a green leek growing up out of the grass, like a bright stone threaded on a string, a precious stone among the princes...'

In his edition of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Christopher Tolkien quotes his father saying in a lecture on Guðrúnarkviða II that he (unlike many readers of the Edda) was more interested in Guðrún, 'usually slighted, and considered as of secondary interest', than in her rival, Brynhildr, contrasting the long agony of Guðrún's grief to Brynhildr's 'brief and terrible storm' of passion. Guðrún lives for many years after the death of Sigurðr, forced to marry again to a man who develops an all-consuming lust for Sigurðr's dragon-won treasure. This terrible greed brings about destruction in which Guðrún loses her brothers, is a second time widowed, and kills her own children. Tolkien's version of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun ends with Guðrún's grief:

While the world lasteth
shall the words linger,
while men are mindful
of the mighty days.
The woe of Gudrún
while world lasteth
till the end of days
all shall hearken.

Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, ed. C. Tolkien, p. 305.

'The words linger'. No one did more than Tolkien himself to make this come to pass; every time you hear the word 'Arkenstone', even amid the sound and fury of the Hobbit movies, you're hearing a word of Guðrún's lament.

Dragon-fight (BL Additional 34890, f. 158)

You can make up your own mind on how much all this tells us about the Arkenstone of The Hobbit, but it's a reminder of how complex a history any single word 'borrowed' from Old English or Old Norse really has – what a deep well of legend and poetry Tolkien was drawing from as he created his mythology. A word which can be used as a name for Christ and for the pre-eminent dragon-slayer of Germanic legend, for the kingdom of heaven and for one of the most perilous objects of Norse mythology, for the Virgin Mary and for the necklace of the goddess Freyja, is a word located at the centre of an intricate web of literary traditions. Perhaps you might think that to investigate these contexts is excessively pedantic, but it follows a good example: Gandalf's very first words in The Hobbit are a philological quibble, insisting to know what, out of a four possible meanings, Bilbo means by his polite 'good morning'. If we imitate him and ask what 'arkenstone' means, we have to take all these many medieval contexts into account.

The Anglo-Saxon O Antiphons: O Oriens, O Earendel

The sun in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript (BL Arundel 60, f.12v)

On 21 December, the date of the winter solstice, the Advent antiphon sung at Vespers is 'O Oriens'. It's an appeal addressed to Christ the Dayspring, the rising sun, to come and lighten the darkness of the midwinter world:

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Dayspring, splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

In the Anglo-Saxon poem known as the Advent Lyrics (or Christ I), a series of poetic meditations inspired by the O Antiphons, this is the corresponding section (for background on the Old English poems based on the O Antiphons, see this post):

Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended,
ond soðfæsta sunnan leoma,
torht ofer tunglas, þu tida gehwane
of sylfum þe symle inlihtes.
Swa þu, god of gode gearo acenned,
sunu soþan fæder, swegles in wuldre
butan anginne æfre wære,
swa þec nu for þearfum þin agen geweorc
bideð þurh byldo, þæt þu þa beorhtan us
sunnan onsende, ond þe sylf cyme
þæt ðu inleohte þa þe longe ær,
þrosme beþeahte ond in þeostrum her,
sæton sinneahtes; synnum bifealdne
deorc deaþes sceadu dreogan sceoldan.
Nu we hyhtfulle hælo gelyfað
þurh þæt word godes weorodum brungen,
þe on frymðe wæs fæder ælmihtigum
efenece mid god, ond nu eft gewearð
flæsc firena leas, þæt seo fæmne gebær
geomrum to geoce. God wæs mid us
gesewen butan synnum; somod eardedon
mihtig meotudes bearn ond se monnes sunu
geþwære on þeode. We þæs þonc magon
secgan sigedryhtne symle bi gewyrhtum,
þæs þe he hine sylfne us sendan wolde.

O Earendel, brightest of angels,
sent to mankind over middle-earth,
and righteous radiance of the sun,
splendid above all stars, of your own self
you ever enlighten every age.
As you, God born of God long ago,
Son of the true Father, eternally existed
without beginning in the glory of heaven,
so your own creation cry with confidence
to you now for their needs, that you send
that bright sun to us, and come yourself
to lighten those who long have lived,
surrounded by shadows and darkness, here
in everlasting night; who, shrouded by sins,
have had to endure death's dark shadow.
Now, hope-filled, we look for healing,
brought to the world's people through the word of God,
who was in the beginning with the almighty Father
equally eternal with God, and now became
flesh, free of failings, born of the virgin,
a support to the sorrowful. God was with us,
seen without sin; together dwelt
the mighty Measurer's child and the son of man,
at peace among the people. We may ever address
our thanks to the Lord of victory for his deeds,
because he chose to send himself to us.

It's no coincidence that 'O Oriens' is sung on the evening of the winter solstice, as darkness falls on the longest night of the year - the time when winter is at its deepest, but the year's turning-point has come. In the antiphon and in the Old English poem, Christ is figured as the dawn and the returning sun, appearing in the time of greatest darkness, in the depth of the season the Anglo-Saxons called midwinter. In his De temporum ratione, Bede explains the traditional understanding of the relationship between the church year and the equinoxes and solstices:

very many of the Church’s teachers recount... that our Lord was conceived and suffered on the 8th kalends of April [25 March], at the spring equinox, and that he was born at the winter solstice on the 8th kalends of January [25 December]. And again, that the Lord’s blessed precursor and Baptist was conceived at the autumn equinox on the 8th kalends of October [24 September] and born at the summer solstice on the 8th kalends of July [24 June]. To this they add the explanation that it was fitting that the Creator of eternal light should be conceived and born along with the increase of temporal light, and that the herald of penance, who must decrease, should be engendered and born at a time when the light is diminishing.

Bede, The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis (Liverpool, 2004), p. 87.

The medieval church attached profound importance to the solstices and equinoxes as signs of God's power over time and the created world. What Bede is explaining here is that early in the development of the Christian calendar, four important feasts were fixed to these four key points in the solar year, marking the births and conceptions of Christ and his forerunner John the Baptist. Christ and John were 'the children of one year', the Creator of light born in the darkness of midwinter and the herald who must diminish before him at the time when the year begins to wane.

It was the date of the winter solstice in the Roman calendar, 25 December, which determined the date of Christmas, nine months after the feast of Christ's conception (the feast of the Annunciation, on 25 March). By Bede's time in the eighth century, the solstice was dated a few days earlier than this, on 21 December, but Bede doesn't dispute the central point of the symbolism linking Christ's birth with the winter solstice. It would not have occurred to him to do so: to a medieval scientist, the structure of the year reflected deep essential truths about the structure of the universe, ordained by God. That included every detail of the calendar: the four seasons, the twelve months, the equinoxes, solstices, and more. (Two of the most popular, though unhistorical, opinions about the solstice often expressed today - that the church 'stole' the solstice from the pagans, and therefore has no right to celebrate it, or that celebrating the solstice is something only pagans would do, and therefore unchristian - were both foreign to medieval thinking.) The birth of Christ is celebrated in midwinter, when light is lowest, because he is the rising sun, oriens.

And so, as you might expect, the Old English version of 'O Oriens' (which you can hear read aloud here) glows with words relating to light: beorht 'bright'; leoma 'a ray of light'; torht 'bright'; inlihten 'to enlighten'. The opposite is þrosm and þeostre 'shadows' and 'darkness', sinneaht 'perpetual night', and deorc deaþes sceadu 'death's dark shadow'. Christ is the sun in two senses, of course: he is both soðfæsta sunnan leoma 'radiance of the true sun' and sunu soþan fæder 'son of the true Father'.

The poem gives us words for 'sun' (sunne) and 'stars' (tunglas) but the opening address seems to be to the name of a star: Earendel. This is a rare and very interesting word. Its cognates in other Germanic languages suggest that it was originally a name, possibly a personification in pre-Christian mythology: a story in the Old Norse Prose Edda tells of a star formed from the frostbitten toe of someone called Aurvandil, thrown up into the heavens by the god Thor. Whether the Anglo-Saxons connected the word with toes or not, they might first have known Earendel as a star-name, perhaps a name for the morning star. In other surviving Old English texts the word is used for the light of dawn, which is clearly its significance in the Advent Lyrics too. In one sermon, it's also used as a name for John the Baptist: he's called 'the new Earendel', the morning star whose rising is a sign that the dawn of the true Sun is near.

The sun's rays (BL Harley 603, f. 55v)

Tolkien came across the Advent Lyrics as an undergraduate at Oxford, around 1914, and it gave him the name 'Eärendil' which he was to use in his own mythology. Later in his life he wrote (through a fictional persona) of how encountering the first few lines of this poem produced 'a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words.' He called these lines 'rapturous words from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology', and explained his understanding of the name's appearance in this poem:

I was struck by the great beauty of this word (or name), entirely coherent with the normal style of A[nglo]-S[axon], but euphonic to a peculiar degree in that pleasing but not 'delectable' language. Also its form strongly suggests that it is in origin a proper name and not a common noun. This is borne out by the obviously related forms in other Germanic languages; from which amid the confusions and debasements of late traditions it at least seems certain that it belonged to astronomical-myth, and was the name of a star or star-group. To my mind the A-S uses seem plainly to indicate that it was a star presaging the dawn (at any rate in the English tradition): that is what we now call Venus: the morning-star as it may be seen rising brilliantly in the dawn, before the actual rising of the Sun. That is at any rate how I took it. Before 1914 I wrote a 'poem' upon Earendel who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun. I adopted him into my mythology - in which he became a prime figure as a mariner, and eventually as a herald star, and a sign of hope to men.

Tolkien's Eärendil became a herald, more akin to John the Baptist (light of the summer solstice) than to Christ (light of the winter solstice), although Christ is clearly the subject of the Old English poem. The poem Tolkien refers to here is The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star, which he wrote on 24 September 1914 - perhaps significantly, the date of the equinox feast of the conception of John the Baptist. It's been called 'the founding moment of Middle-earth', and it was a first attempt to imagine an identity for this mysterious Earendel, personified star - the beginnings of a new cosmological myth.

As Tolkien's mythology grew over the next few decades, so did the story of his Eärendil. He developed a family history which gave him half-Elven descent, gained a tragic love-story, and became the father of twin sons, Elrond and Elros (first king of Númenor). But his ultimate fate was still to become a star, bearing the light of a Silmaril in his ship across the night sky. He forms part of the ancient legendary past which gives depth to the backdrop of The Lord of the Rings, as for instance the subject of a long poem sung by Bilbo in Rivendell. In Lothlórien, Galadriel gives to Frodo a phial containing the light of Eärendil's star. When Sam and Frodo are trapped in the darkness of Shelob's lair, it is the light of Eärendil which comes to their aid:

[A]s he stood, darkness about him and a blackness of despair and anger in his heart, it seemed to him that he saw a light: a light in his mind, almost unbearably bright at first, as a sun-ray to the eyes of one long hidden in a windowless pit... 'Master, master!' cried Sam, and the life and urgency came back into his voice. 'The Lady's gift! The star-glass! A light to you in dark places, she said it was to be. The star-glass!'

'The star-glass?' muttered Frodo, as one answering out of sleep, hardly comprehending. 'Why yes! Why had I forgotten it? A light when all other lights go out! And now indeed light alone can help us.'

Slowly his hand went to his bosom, and slowly he held aloft the Phial of Galadriel. For a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists, and then as its power waxed, and hope grew in Frodo's mind, it began to burn, and kindled to a silver flame, a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow. The darkness receded from it until it seemed to shine in the centre of a globe of airy crystal, and the hand that held it sparkled with white fire.

Frodo gazed in wonder at this marvellous gift that he had so long carried, not guessing its full worth and potency. Seldom had he remembered it on the road, until they came to Morgul Vale, and never had he used it for fear of its revealing light. Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima! he cried, and knew not what he had spoken; for it seemed that another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.

Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima means 'Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars', and is, as Tolkien later put it, 'derived at long remove' from the line of the Old English poem: Eala earendel, engla beorhtast. There's a beautiful chain of reinterpretation at work here: Latin antiphon becomes Anglo-Saxon poem becomes Elvish cry of praise. The power of the light and the power of the words are entwined, and Frodo's experience as he speaks these words, with a voice not his own, recalls the strange, quasi-mystical effect the Anglo-Saxon poem seems to have had on Tolkien when he first read it. 'Another voice spoke through his' - the voice of an Anglo-Saxon poet, seeking light in his own deep darkness.

The Sun (BL Harley 603, f. 58)

Wyrms and Werebears: Tale-Telling in the Eleventh Century and Today

A man fighting a dragon (BL Royal 6 C VI, f. 79v, C12th)

Along with half the rest of the world, last weekend I went to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. My reaction was probably in line with half the rest of the world's, too: awesome dragon, shame about the love-sick elves. But with my academic hat on I was also playing 'spot the medieval motif' which, as always with Tolkien, is not difficult ('medieval motif Tolkien bingo' would not be a very long-lasting game) but is both rewarding and fun. With The Hobbit it's even easier than with The Lord of the Rings because - well, mostly because there's a dragon. Whatever flaws the films might have, it's still an exciting experience to see scenes from much-loved medieval stories brought to life on screen: dragons and goldhoards, competitive riddling, Gandalf the Odinic wanderer, fierce dwarves with lovely Norse names... the list goes on. You might say that the end of The Desolation of Smaug is the most enjoyable film version of Beowulf ever made. It only left me wishing that one day someone will make an adaptation of the legend of Sigurðr the Völsung, which would make an amazing film in this vein.

Anyway, the reason I decided to post about this is that I've spent part of the past few years researching a particular medieval legend which incorporates several of these motifs. It comes from the English East Midlands, and seems to have developed in stages there between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This legend has a couple of points of contact with The Hobbit, more because they're both drawing on common Scandinavian motifs than because Tolkien was using this particular legend (though surely he knew it). The story is lively and dramatic and might easily while away a winter evening; I find it wonderful to think of cinema audiences going in their millions to enjoy just the same stories as people in the East Midlands were telling each other nearly a thousand years ago.

So let me tell you the story of Siward. 

Dragon (BL Harley 628, f. 87)

But first just one or two facts, because Siward, hero of our tale, was a real historical figure. He was born in Denmark, probably a little before the year 1000, and probably came to England during the reign of Cnut, when England was the best place for a young Dane to make a career for himself. By 1042 he was earl of Northumbria, a huge, complicated earldom stretching from the River Humber up north to the borders of Scotland. During Edward the Confessor's reign Siward also held a southern earldom in the area around Huntingdon/Cambridge/Northampton. He died in 1055 and was buried at York, in a church he had founded and dedicated to the brand-new Norwegian saint Olaf. This suggests he retained a sense of loyalty to his Scandinavian roots, and in English sources he was known as Siward digri, an Old Norse nickname which means 'big, large'.

And this would be all we knew about Siward, were it not for the fact that his son Waltheof was executed in 1076 for rebellion against William the Conqueror, and was considered to be a martyr and saint by the monks of Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire, where he was buried. This meant that at the beginning of the thirteenth century the monks of Crowland produced a series of texts (in Latin) about Waltheof and his family, including one about Siward's ancestry and youthful deeds. That story is the one we're concerned with - it's pure legend, and it's awesome. It starts like this:

The stories of the ancients say that a certain nobleman, Ursus – whom the Lord permitted, contrary to the normal manner of human procreation, to be created from a white bear as father and a noblewoman as mother – begot Spratlingus; Spratlingus begot Ulsius; Ulsius begot Beorn, nicknamed Beresune, that is, 'Bear's Son'. This Beorn was a Dane by race, an excellent earl and famous soldier. However, as a sign of the difference of species between his parents, nature had given him the ears of his father, that is, of a bear. In everything else he was like his mother's species. And after many deeds of courage and military experiences, he had a son, very brave and a noble imitator of his father's military skill. His name was Siward.

Both Ursus and Björn (the Old Norse form of Beorn) mean 'bear', and this is a version of a Scandinavian story-type where a man is said to be descended from a bear - either an actual bear or a human who has been turned into a were-bear. The most famous is Böðvar Bjarki, but it's also often noted that one interpretation of the name Beowulf is 'bee-wolf', a kenning for 'bear' - and there are berserkers, of course. Siward was not the only person in eleventh-century England who numbered a bear among his ancestors; the family of Harold Godwineson might have done too, on their Danish mother's side. All these people are distant cousins of The Hobbit's shape-shifter Beorn. As Gandalf describes him:

He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin; sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard. I cannot tell you much more, though that ought to be enough. Some say that he is a bear descended from the great and ancient bears of the mountains that lived there before the giants came. Others say that he is a man descended from the first men who lived before Smaug or the other dragons came into this part of the world, and before the goblins came into the hills out of the North. I cannot say, though I fancy the last is the true tale. He is not the sort of person to ask questions of.

At any rate he is under no enchantment but his own. He lives in an oak-wood and has a great wooden house; and as a man he keeps cattle and horses which are nearly as marvellous as himself. They work for him and talk to him. He does not eat them; neither does he hunt or eat wild animals. He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey. As a bear he ranges far and wide. I once saw him sitting all alone on the top of the Carrock at night watching the moon sinking towards the Misty Mountains, and I heard him growl in the tongue of bears; ‘The day will come when they will perish and I shall go back!’ That is why I believe he once came from the mountains himself.

The idea that bear characteristics are hereditary is embedded in the medieval versions (as with Siward's father's 'ears of a bear'; it makes concrete the idea that the hero's ancestry tells you something about his character), and so in The Hobbit:

Beorn indeed became a great chief afterwards in those regions and ruled a wide land between the mountains and the wood; and it is said that for many generations the men of his line had the power of taking bear’s shape, and some were grim men and bad, but most were in heart like Beorn, if less in size and strength.

'Beorn' is the perfect name for this character because the ambiguity - is he man or bear? - is right there in the word itself: the Old Norse name means 'bear' but in Old English beorn means 'man, warrior'. All the references to this legend in English sources link it to Scandinavian characters - either Danes or Norwegians - so I thought it was a nice touch that in The Hobbit films Beorn is played by a Swedish actor. To an eleventh-century English audience a were-bear would have had a distinctly Norse 'accent'!

Knight and dragon (BL Burney 216, f. 32v)

To return to Siward, the bear's grandson: filled with youthful ambition, he leaves his father’s house in search of adventure, with fifty companions and a well-stocked ship. He sails from Denmark to the Orkneys, where he lands on an island and is told that its inhabitants are being terrorised by a dragon. When Siward learns this he decides to fight the dragon, and put it to flight from the island. (In doing this he is following in the footsteps of his famous namesake, the most glorious dragon-fighter of Germanic legend, Sigurðr the Völsung). Triumphant, he sets sail again, south to Northumbria, where he has heard there's another dragon to fight. But when he lands in Northumbria, instead of meeting a dragon, he meets an old man sitting on a mound. Siward asks the old man if he knows where to find the dragon. But the man greets him by name, and says, "Siward, I know well for what reason you have undertaken this journey, to test your strength against a dragon; but you labour in vain, for you will not find it. Go back to your companions, and I will tell you what your fate will be. When you set out on your journey you will have favourable winds, and they will bring you to a river which is called the Thames. There you will find a city called London, and the king there will take you into his favour, and grant you great lands."

(It's not quite 'turn again Whittington, Lord Mayor of London', but that's the general idea!) 

Siward says he doesn't believe him, and that if he goes back to his companions and tells them this they will say it's nonsense. But as a token of his trustworthiness the old man presents him with a banner, and says its name is 'Ravenlandeye' - a name which is interpreted as 'Raven, terror of the land'. Siward takes the banner and goes back to his ship, and all the old man's words come true: he is guided to London, and goes to find King Edward. The king has heard of his coming, and accepts Siward into his service. Siward stays with the king and distinguishes himself so much that King Edward promises that the first high honour which becomes available in the land will be given to him.

Dragon (BL Burney 216 f. 69v)

Then one day it happens that Siward is travelling from Westminster to London when he encounters an enemy of the king, a Danish man named Tostig, earl of Huntingdon. The king hates Tostig because he's married to the queen's sister, a daughter of Earl Godwine. (This figure gets his name from the half-Danish Tostig Godwineson, who was in fact King Edward's brother-in-law, but this really has no basis in history). Siward and Tostig meet at a bridge over the river, which is so narrow that as haughty Tostig passes he splashes Siward's cloak with mud. (In those days, adds the monk of Crowland, men wore long animal-fur cloaks.) Siward takes Tostig's behaviour as an insult, and decides to get revenge. He lies in wait for Tostig, and as the earl returns across the bridge, Siward draws his sword and cuts off his head. Concealing the head beneath his cloak, he goes to the court and asks the king to make him earl of Huntingdon, because that earldom is vacant. The king says he must be joking - the earldom isn't vacant, the earl's only just left him! But Siward produces Tostig's head from beneath his cloak and throws it at the king's feet. King Edward, remembering his promise, has no choice but to grant the vacant earldom to Siward.

Siward leaves the court and seeks out his companions, and finds them fighting against Tostig's men. They kill them all and bury them near London, at a place which becomes known as the 'Danes' Church' - 'and so it is to this day', says the Crowland monk in the thirteenth century (and so it is to this day).

Dragon (BL Harley 624, f. 101v)

Some time later, Edward decides to make Siward earl of Northumbria, Cumberland and Westmoreland. And thus, says that Crowland monk, the ancient prophecy is fulfilled:

As the accounts of ancient historians of the English agree, the spirit of the prophet was fulfilled, which says that divine providence allowed to be born from the mixture of rational and irrational beings, that is of a bear and a woman, a man who gloriously and famously defended the king of England against his enemies: this was entirely brought to fulfilment in Earl Siward’s defence of the holy king Edward against invasion and danger.

So that's the story of Siward. Except for two more short episodes, for which we can turn from the Crowland monks to the historian Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the early twelfth century. He tells how Siward's elder son, Osbeorn (a name which means 'godlike-bear'), was killed in battle against the Scots in 1054:

Around this time Siward, the mighty earl of Northumbria, almost a giant in stature, very strong mentally and physically, sent his son to conquer Scotland. When they came back and reported to his father that he had been killed in battle, he asked, ‘Did he receive his fatal wound in the front or the back of his body?’ The messengers said, ‘In the front’. Then he said, ‘I am completely happy, for I consider no other death worthy for me or my son.’ So Siward set out for Scotland, and defeated the king in battle, destroyed the whole realm, and having destroyed it, subjected it to himself.

Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. by Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp.377-9.

The point of this questioning is that if you received your wounds in the front it means you got them in battle, fighting bravely; if you got them in the back, it was because you were running away. This Scottish campaign and this same dialogue feature towards the end of Shakespeare's Macbeth, after Siward's son has been killed by Macbeth:

ROSS
Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt.
He only lived but till he was a man,
The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.

SIWARD
Then he is dead?

ROSS
Ay, and brought off the field: your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.

SIWARD
Had he his hurts before?

ROSS
Ay, on the front.

SIWARD
Why then, God's soldier be he!
Had I as many sons as I have hairs,
I would not wish them to a fairer death:
And so, his knell is knoll'd.

The Death of Earl Siward (via wikipedia)

Some years later Siward himself, having lived awesomely, died awesomely too:

Siward, the stalwart earl, being seized by dysentery, felt that death was near. And he said, ‘How shameful it is that I, who could not die in so many battles, should have been saved for the ignominious death of a cow! At least clothe me in my impenetrable breastplate, gird me with my sword, place my helmet on my head, my shield in my left hand, my gilded battle-axe in my right, that I, the bravest of soldiers, may die like a soldier.’ He spoke, and armed as he had requested, he gave up his spirit with honour.

Historia Anglorum, trans. Greenway, p. 381.

And that was the end of stalwart Siward.

Isn't this a brilliant assortment of tales?  It's a jumble of stories recognisable from other more famous Old Norse and Old English sources: bear ancestry, dragon-fighting, the grim trickery with Tostig's head and the king's promise, and two kinds of valiant death. The mysterious old man who tells Siward his fate is clearly related to Odin, who in Norse tradition wanders the world in this disguise and intervenes in the lives of his favourite heroes. These motifs are widespread in folklore, but it's never quite enough to say 'this is a widespread motif'; we ought to ask ourselves who was telling this story in this particular situation, and why. The fact that this lengthy legend became attached to an eleventh-century earl suggests that a lively story-telling tradition existed in Anglo-Danish (and then Anglo-Norman) England, well into the twelfth century - a tradition capable of taking familiar story-elements and blending them together into new narratives, stories told about real contemporary people and not just great heroes of the past.

And then there is the question of why the monks of Crowland thought it was worth writing any of this down, as part of a collection of saints' legends which had deep significance for their abbey. The way Siward's legend is told is not 'here's a fun tale' but 'this is a story which demonstrates why our St Waltheof was a great man from a great family, and why Crowland can bask in his reflected glory'. Even if the monk didn't quite understand the story he was recording, he knew why he was recording it. You might think a Christian monk would have a problem with such faintly pagan motifs as human-bear miscegenation and spooky prophetic old men; but clearly not. He was prepared to take greatness for Siward wherever he could find it!

Beautiful Crowland Abbey

In all this, however, I think we should not underrate the importance of sheer narrative pleasure. It drives me crazy when scholars talk about legends like Siward's as if medieval writers only repeated them because they didn't know any better (I haven't got over one eminent historian haughtily describing one writer as being 'at the mercy of such legends', as if oral tradition were a contagious illness!). People tell stories because they want to, not because they have no choice; and stories about bear-men and dragon-fights and clever trickery are more than anything hugely enjoyable. Tolkien, who understood this better than anyone, has done more than anyone to remind us of the pleasures of such narratives - which is why cinema audiences of the twenty-first century are now enjoying just the same kinds of stories as people were in England and Scandinavia, many centuries ago.

ETA: My article on this topic in Neophilologus, 'Siward the Dragon-Slayer: Mythmaking in Anglo-Scandinavian England' can be found here (subscription required).