“I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep.”
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote these words in recollection of an experience he had in 1914, when he was just twenty-two years old. What event was he referring to—the experience that “stirred” something within him, giving him this “curious thrill”? It was coming across the following lines of Old English poetry that I quoted at the end of my last post:
Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast—
ofer middangeard monnum sended
“O Earendel, brightest of messengers—
sent above Middle-earth unto men.”
Readers of Tolkien’s fiction will, of course, catch the reference to “Middle-earth,” and perhaps “Earendel” will also ring a bell: Eärendil in Tolkien’s fiction is the elves’ name for the morning star. The story of how Tolkien came unexpectedly upon these enigmatic lines of Old English verse, how they moved him and how pondering their meaning caused his invented world of Middle-earth to take narrative shape, will be the subject of today’s blog post. You might say that the stories and legends and poems of Middle-earth all grew out of Tolkien’s attempt to answer a single question: who or what was “Earendel”?
In 1914, the twenty-two-year-old Tolkien was an English student at Oxford University specializing in medieval languages and literature. During the summer break of that year, he stayed at his Aunt Jane’s farm in Nottinghamshire, doubtless taking great pleasure in finding himself deep in the English countryside that he so loved. But he was also doing schoolwork: he brought with him from Oxford, not some Old English poems, but the complete corpus of Old English poetry, as contained in the five volume Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie or “Library of Anglo-Saxon Verse.”
And it was as the young Tolkien worked his way through these Old English poems, there on his aunt’s farm in the English Midlands, that he suddenly and unexpectedly came across the lines that so mysteriously pierced him and stirred something within him: Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast—ofer middangeard monnum sended… As Tolkien later recalled, when he read those lines, “I felt there was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it.” The words set his imagination wandering, and in September, while still at his aunt’s farm, he wrote a poem titled “The Voyage of Éarendel,” which began “Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup / In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim…” More poems would follow that year, poems about an elvish piper playing and singing along the seashore, a lonely tower overlooking the ocean, a lost city on a distant island, and more; further details and images would emerge from Tolkien’s imagination, and soon Tolkien would begin to join them all together. The tales of Middle-earth began to take shape.
And what’s the story behind those Old English lines that inspired all of this? The words which so moved Tolkien came from a series of Advent poems, each one focused on a different aspect of Christ’s coming to Earth. These Old English Advent poems are, in fact, translations and adaptations of none other than those same early medieval Advent antiphons that I discussed previously (the ones traditionally chanted at the evening or Vespers service in the week leading up to Christmas Day). More specifically, the lines that Tolkien came upon are inspired by the Advent antiphon for December 21st that I quoted last time: O Oriens, it begins: “O Daystar” or “O Rising Light,” an epithet for Christ; the Old English poem begins Eala Earendel, which means the same thing as O Oriens: earendel is an old Germanic word for the daystar, associated in Old English with the light of dawn.
That antiphon, as I discussed last time, speaks to mortal and sinful man’s yearning for a Savior: “Come,” it says, “and give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death a light to those who walk in the darkness of sin and death” (veni, et illumine sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis). The Old English version that Tolkien read during that summer of 1914 beautifully puts it this way:
þin agen geweorc
bideð þurh byldo…
thæt ðu inleohte þa þe longe ær,
þrosme beþeahte ond in þeostrum her,
sæton sinneahtes, synnum bifealdne
deorc deaþes sceadu dreogan sceoldan.
Your own handiwork boldly entreats...that you give light to those who for so long, covered in mist and waiting in the darkness, have sat in perpetual night, we who, enfolded by sins, have had to endure the dark shadow of death.
And now we come to the unexpected link between Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth and the beloved hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”—why I said in my last post that the two are cousins. Those early medieval Advent antiphons were adapted, on the one hand, into the Latin hymn “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel,” which was later translated in 1851 as “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”; the Advent antiphons were adapted, on the other hand, into the Old English Advent poems—and it was one of these Old English Advent poems that inspired the first steps into Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
But the fact that Middle-earth and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” share this common ancestry is more than just a curiosity. Tolkien’s fiction resounds with Advent themes, of figures lost and longing in the darkness—think of Bilbo and the dwarves despairing in Mirkwood, or the Fellowship journeying beneath the mountains in the Mines of Moria—as well as the joyous turn of events that brings unexpected solace and salvation: the coming of the eagles in The Hobbit and again in The Lord of the Rings, or the “unlooked for” arrival of reinforcements from Gondolin at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in The Silmarillion.
Again and again Tolkien gives us, in veiled form, the Christian story of redemption, of salvation from darkness and death: Beren wandering in The Silmarillion through evil lands where “horror and madness walked” finds at his journey’s end the sight of the elf-maiden Lúthien dancing in the twilight, exquisite “as the light upon the leaves of trees”; the Lord of the Nazgûl, claiming to be Death itself, is frightened away by the “great horns of the North wildly blowing” at dawn, signaling the arrival of the Rohirrim; Frodo and his companions, shut up within the darkness of the barrow, face imminent death, until “suddenly light streamed in, real light, the plain light of day”—Tom Bombadil come to rescue them.
And there’s Earendel himself, or in Tolkien’s eventual spelling, Eärendil, the morning star: in The Silmarillion, the people of Middle-earth call Eärendil “the Star of High Hope” because it first ascends during their most desperate hour, as the shadow of the Dark Lord Morgoth spreads over all the lands. And in The Lord of the Rings, the Elf Lady Galadriel gives to Frodo a crystal vial filled with the light of Eärendil. “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out,” she says. And so it proves to be.
These are profoundly Christian images of hope—stories of the goodness and beauty of Christ’s salvation. And when we notice that Tolkien’s fiction is filled with these images of light shining in the darkness, of rescue from despair, we should not be surprised: after all, his initial inspiration for the stories of Middle-earth started with an Advent poem.