THONART : Tolkien or the Fictitious Compiler (ULiège, 1984) – 04 – The Sword

Temps de lecture : 14 minutes >

The sword

Many an earl of Beowulf brandished
His ancient iron to guard is hord

Beowulf, l. 753-4

Then lifted his arm the Lord of the Geats
And smote the worm with his ancient sword
But the brown edge failed as it fell on bone
And cut less deep than the king had need
In his sore distress…

idem, l. 2431-5

Who so pulleth out this swerd of this stone
and anuyld is rightwys kinge borne of all England

Morte d’Arthur

Sir, there is here bynethe at the river a grete
stone whiche I sawe flete above the water
And therin I sawe stycking a swerd
The kynge sayde I wille see that merveill
Soo all the knyghtes went with him

id.

And as for this swerd there shalle never
man begrype
Hym at the handels but one
But he shalle passe alle other

ibid.

He took his vorpal sword in hand
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack !

Jabberwocky

These many quotations from English heroic texts – Jabberwocky can be considered as a kind of mock-heroic poem – suggest that Philippe Sellier’s comment on the importance of the sword in the French medieval literature can be extended to the English medieval literature. He writes: “Au Moyen-Age c’est surtout l’épée qui compte: de l’Excalibor du roi Arthur, de la Joyeuse de Charlemagne à l’épée de Jeanne d’Arc“. Moreover he himself establishes that sword and heroism are not a feature limited to the Middle Ages but common to all heroic literatures of all times – this implies naturally texts involving the use of swords ; one can not imagine Buffalo Bill hunting with a sword. Sellier illustrates his definition of heroism with texts as old as an account of Cyrus’ life by Herodotus (Vth cy b.C.) and as recent as a poem by St John Perse (XXth cy).

Nevertheless, since I have chosen to concentrate on English medieval literature, I shall use the word “heroic” in a more restricted meaning: “heroic” will be opposed to “romantic” (i.e. to all that is connected with the medieval romances and not at all with the 19th cy romantic revival). In a nutshell, heroic literature includes mainly the old English epic poetry from Beowulf to the Battle of Maldon, whereas the romantic literature I shall refer to, includes the middle English romances from the various “matters” up to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (XVth cy).

I shall try to expose in this chapter how the sword – which appears in both heroic and romantic literatures (4) is used in a different way by the Beowulf poet and by Malory. I shall also comment on the various characteristics of the swords in these texts and finally try to explore Tolkien’s swords in the Lord of the Rinqs and other texts.

Mimming, Naegling, Excalibur, Durandal, Joyeuse, Hauteclaire, (5) all  “great” swords are given a name and their name is forever connected with the name of the corresponding hero. To be submitted to such a process of individualization is in fact a privilege which objects are seldom enjoying. Moreover it is a privilege limited to certain swords. In Beowulf one of the hero’s swords is sometimes called Naegling (not so often, the poet often prefers to call it “brown edge” – meaning “bright edge” or “ancient iron”, etc.):

Then the king once more was mindful of glory,
Swung his great sword-blade with all his might
And drove it home on the dragon’s head.
But Neagling broke, it failed in the battle,
The blade of Beowulf, ancient and grey. (OAEL, 1. 253I to L. 2535)

Naegling and the other heroic swords are associated with the hero’s strength, his courage; battles are won thanks to the “ancient blade” but since the sword is considered as a separate being, it can “fail in the battle” and cause the hero’s defeat when it is “not his lot that edges of iron could help him in battle” (1. 2535-6).

The other characters in the poem probably have weapons too but since they have not the status of heroes, their daggers, axes, spears and swords are mentioned but not individualized:

Many an earl of Beowulf brandished his
ancient iron to guard his lord. (OAEL, 1. 733-4)

OnIy Wiglaf, Weohstan’s son, who courageously enters the worm’s lair to help his lord, gives evidence of sufficient heroic virtue to be supplied with a glorious weapon:

Nor could he hold back, but snatched up
his buckler
His linden shield and his ancient sword,
Heirloom of Eanmund, Ohthere’s son,
Whom Weohstan slew with the sword in battle,
Wretched and friendless and far from home. (7)
(OAEL , 1. 2464-68)

Nevertheless his sword remains anonymous though famed.

Since swords are closest allies of the heroes, they are to be praised either by the poet – the Waldere-fragment opens on the praise of Mimming which the hero is to wield against Guthere (8) (Wagner’s Gunther in the Ring tetralogy) – or by the hero himself – Roland laments on his sword:

E. Durendal cum es belee seintisme. (BECR, CLXXTII)

The praise of the sword is in fact a virtual praise of the heroic warrior as a defender of order, a granter of peace for the community, the nation.

L’épée est d’abord le symbole de l’état militaire et de sa vertu, la bravoure, ainsi que de sa fonction, la puissance. La puissance possède un double aspect, destructeur, mais la destruction peut s’appliquer à l’injustice, à la malfaisance, à l’ignorance, et, de ce fait, devenir positive ; constructeur, elle établit et maintient la paix et la justice. (DdS, p.407-408)

For the romantic hero, because of the christian aspect of the romances, the sanctity of the sword reflects the christian virtues or perfect knighthood of its owner.

Symbole guerrier, l’épëe est aussi celui de la guerre sainte. La guerre sainte est avant tout une guerre intérieure, ce qui peut être aussi la signification de l’épée apportée par le Christ (Matt. 10, 34). (DdS, p.408)

Such a sword is the one meant for Galahad in the Morte  d’Arthur. It bears the inscription:

he whiche shal welde me oughte to be more
harder than any other yf he bere me as truly
as me oughte to be borne (MMAE)

or the previous one:

never shalle man take me hens
but only the by whos syde I ought to hange
and he shalle be the best knyght of the world. (MMAE)

A sword’s renoun may result from many different factors: its origin, its make, its quality as a weapon, its beauty, etc. The origin of Wiglaf’s sword was mentioned above. Other swords appear in Beowulf which are of noble descent or of mythical – not to be confounded with magical – origin, e.g. Eofor “struck with his ancient blade, sturdy sword of the Giants” (Beowulf, 2787).

“Of the Giants” and “by Weland made” (Waldere’s Mimming) are the two major trade marks of heroic swords. These sometimes bear the name of the smith carved on the blade or the pommel-guard; this is the case with the real anglo-saxon sword found in Exeter on which one can read a latin inscription “EORI ME FE” (Eori me fecit = Eori made me) (10). Weyland or Weland the smith was at the time synonymous of quality. He was himself a kind of mythical figure, a Germanic Hephaistos, so important to the Anglo-Saxon artists as to be pictured on the Frank’s casket beside the Adoration of the Magi an the Capture of Jerusalem. His craft seems to have been familiar too to the audience of the heroic poems and, whenever a sword appears in a text, it is very often accompanied with a reference to its make:

…and his blade drove home
Plated and gleaming… (1. 2554-5)
But the hard sharp sword, the work of the hammer,
Had laid him low… (1. 2670-1)

Moreover Weland’ s legend itself is based on the technique of forging. Weland’s weapons are standards of quality generally present in heroic texts; the romantic blades have mainly other origins. The unnatural association of christian and magic elements in the romances gave to their writers the occasion of imagining other origins to the ornamental swords of Arthur, Lancelot or Galahad. Sir Degarre’s broken sword is given to him by his father, a fairy knight (12). Excalibur – “that is as moche to say as cut stele” – is offered by the Lady of the Lake to Arthur who complains to Merlin – I almost wrote Gandalf – for not having a sword:

as they rode Arthur said I have no swerd
no force said Merlin here by is a sword that shalle
be yours and I may…
and in the myddles of the lake Arthur was ware of an
arme clothed in whyte samyte
that held a fayr swerd in that hand (MMAE)

In the seventh book of the same Morte d’Arthur Galahad receives a sword

ryche and fayre
and hit was drawen oute of the shethe half a
foot and more
and the swerd was of diverse facyons
and the pomel was of stone
and there was in hym alle manere of colours that only
man myghte fynde
and everyche of the colours hadde dyverse vertues
and he skalys of the hafte were of two rybbes
of dyverse beestes
the one beest was a serpent which was conversant in Calydone
and is called the serpent of the fend And the bone of
hym is of suche a vertu that there is no hand that
handeleth hym shalle never be very nor hurte
and the other beest is a fysshe which is not ryght gerte
and hanteth the flood of Eufrate
and that fysshe is called Ertanax
and his bones be of suche a maner of kynde that who
that handeleth hem
shalle have soo moche wille that he shalle
never be wery (etc.) (MMAE)

This wondrous and richly arrayed blade is said to be nothing less than King David’s sword which had been reshaped by Salamon the wise as it is  reported by Percival’s sister. One can thus see the shift from the material origin of the sword – though mythicaIly coloured – to the religious one which is openly biblical though magical. It is not really a shift from reality to myth but rather a shift in myth: from the natural Germanic mythology to the imposed christian Scriptures. It is however worth mentioning that the magical thus pagan colouring (e.g. the magical properties of Galahad’s sword) is an emergence of the irreductible Germanic or rather Celtic substratum:

La race dominante s’efforçait d’imposer sa civilisation sans pouvoir effacer tout ce qui existait avant elle, et il se produisait entre la nouvelle culture et l’ancienne un phénomène d’osmose. La langue, l’éthique, l’organisation sociale et la religion des nouveaux arrivants avaient certes recouvert celles qui étaient en usage jusque-là dans le pays, mais cette couche de surface était perméable et se laissait imbiber par le tréfonds qu’elle voilait. Une culture est toujours le produit de l’ensemble des conceptions morales et sociales et de l’ensemble des traditions des peuples divers dont est issue la communauté dépositaire de cette culture. (BMC)

We have been concerned so far with the sword as an object in the heroic life and literature. I shall now concentrate on the sword as an element of the  tale and, more than that, as a literary device. My comments will be mainly devoted to the solarity of the sword and its function in the romance as an instrument of recognition. Literary crltics and anthropologists have assumed that one of the main characteristics of the hero was his solarity. The sun (14) is probably one of the first divinities ho have been worshipped (as a source of light or fire, beside water, earth and air) and its cult – a hobbit would write “her” cult – appears all over the world (cfr. DdS, p. 891-896) .

Since the motivation of the archetypal hero can be said to be to elevate  himself to God (respectuously as a priest or defiantly as e.g. Prometheus). The connection between the two hero and God – has been established through light.

The biblical “fiat lux” is not a christian monopoly and light, as opposed to darkness, has been standing for knowledge, revelation, order, power and good in many often religions, from the Yin-Yang to Ahura Mazda. Light is God – be it a god or a divine principle – or at least its manifestation (9 p. 584-589) .

The opposition light-darkness has a narrower meaning in christian manicheism: God-light against the Devil hiding in the dark. It illustrates the eternal struggle between Good and Evil.

The heroic warrior takes part to the struggle and shares with God its solarity (f5-f6). The sword is naturally not behindhand. As the major attribute of the hero, its brightness reflects that of the hero. As I quoted before, Beowulf’s swords are “brown” (i.e. “bright“), “bright“, “plated and gleaming“, it could also have been “grey” (Judith) or “blanche” as Durandal.

The “high-gloss” blades also appear in later texts. Gawain has a “bright sword” (f . 231,9) but in the Morte d’Arthur swords are rather “fayr” and “rich” and brightness seems to have been limited to the Sancgreal. It seems thus that this aspect of the sword, being common to both periods of the literary middle ages, can not be considered as a reference for our “guest” i.e. to determine if the Lord or the Rings has to be considered as a romance, as Dr Brewer assumes, or as more than that.

In this introduction to the sword I have tried to show how it was a necessary attribute to the hero and how, through its luminousness, it was an adequate reflection of the hero’s solarity.

I wouldn’t do justice to the romantic writers if I did not mention their contribution to the use of the sword in literature. Derek S. Brewer has devoted a book to the Symbolic Stories (18) in which he refuses to relegate the romance to the depreciating status of child literature. He in fact rehabilitates the romances as symbolically meaningful tales. In that he encounters the purpose of Prof. Tolkien who wrote in his On Fairy-Stories:

Among those who still have enough wisdom not to think fairy-stories pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connexion between the minds of children’s bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than a normal, if immature, member of a particular family, and of the human family at large. (TTL)

Romances have been submitted tho the same treatment as the fairy tales. Criticists and philologists seem to be the only adults “allowed” to read them provided they don’t enjoy it. Accordind to Brewer the protagonist of the tale is often facing what he calls the “family drama” and has to go through various “rites of passage” in order to achieve maturity and be able to enter the world of adults. The author not only deals with the romances but also with Chaucer, Shakespeare’ Austen and Dickens. Fairy tales are not neglected.

Nevertheless we must go over to Sellier to find a systematic approach to what he calls ” le modèle héroïque” (20) which he applies to all heroic tales. The hero has to go through several births up to his birth to immortarity. Often born of rich or socially important parents (i.e. Gods or kings), the infant is “exposed” to danger and finalty rescued. He often has to be submitted to a phase of “occultation” (21) but thanks to a “token” or to “high deeds” (21b) he is recognized and restored in his status of hero. The “token” which allows recognition can be of various nature.

Cinderella is recognized thanks to the size of her foot and sir Degarre to his pointless sword: sir Degarre’s mother is raped by a fairy knight (!) who gives her a pointless sword, the missing part of the blade having been broken off on a giant’s head and the fairy knight keeping the point in his pouch. Degarre spends his occultation years with a hermit and goes on a quest for his parents. He will be able to identify his mother thanks to a glove which he tests on all the women he meets and will be recognize by his father thanks to the incomplete sword. We see here that the sword is less important as a weapon than as a device in the tale, notwithstanding the fact that the recognition happens during a duel.

To conclude this part of the chapter before examining Tolkien’s swords, I shall summarize what has been said so far. The sword appears in both heroic and romantic literatures. The hero’s sword bears a name or an appellation, e.g. Galahad “swerd with the straunge gyrdels“, it is ornamented and usually handed down from generation to generation:

Precious objects, however, have a tendency to be handed down from one generation to another, as was the sword mentioned in 1015 in a will of the Atheling Aethelstan: “to my brother Edmund I grant the sword which belonged to king Offa“. The sword was more than two hundred and twenty years old when the prince died. (WAS, p. 20)

As effective weapons, they are associated with the glory of the hero and their “light” reflects his solarity. Nevertheless an evolution took place and the heroic sword can not be said to be exactly of the same kind as the romantic one: the courtly civilization of the romances gave less importance to the heroic virtues, a.o. physical strengh and courrage, and the romantic sword faded to the background as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or became a device of recognition in a maturity tale.

The medieval texts are naturally difficult of access for a reader accustomed to modern fiction. What Brewer calls the “Neoclassical naturalism” of the novel-writing and the novel reading (op. cit., intro. VIII, p. L2-I4) often  prevents the reader or the critic from understanding or adhering to the medieval tales. These tales belong to another age, another society, another culture but they were written by human beings and meant for a human audience that had the same fundamental preoccupations as we have nowadays. It is therefore necessary to decide to “cross the Rubicon” and to read as readers- “uncorrupted by literary prejudice” (idem, p- 1). It is in some sense Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” which is required from us. Tolkien himself went further in his On Fairy-Stories (23), he almost recommended what I would call an “unwilling suspension of disbelief“:

A real enthustast for cricket is in the enchanted state Secondary Belief. I, when I watch a match, am on the lower level. I can achieve (more or less) willing suspension of disbelief , when I am held there and supported by some other motive that will keep away boredom, for instance, a wild, heraldic, preference for dark blue rather than light. This suspension of disbelief may thus be a somewhat tired, shabby or sentimental state of mind, and so lean to the “adult”. I fancy it is often the state of adults in the presence of a fairy-story. They are held there and supported by sentiment (memories of childhood, or notions of what childhood ought to be like); They think they ought to like the tale. But if they really liked it, for itself, they would not have to suspend disbelief: they would believe in this sense. (TTL, p.37)

The same holds true in respect of his work, one has to enter Middle-Earth with perfect innocence and start enjoying the pipe (just try and you will come closer to the Hobbit mentality) and number the years according to the “reckoning of the Shire“.

People who have enjoyed H.P. Lovecraft, Van Vogt, Abraham Merrit, Lester del Rey and the sense of humor of Fredric Brown are best prepared for the tales of the Three Ages. That is the reason why I think we must go our way through the paths of Rivendell as we did when we approached Heorot or the Green Chapel. I shall thus apply the same reading to The Lord of the Rings and other tales by J.R.R. Tolkien as I did to the medieval texts in this chapter.

The main swords that will be discussed are:

      • Sting: a “short Elvish sword (or long Elvj-sh kni.fe) (24) discovered by Bilbo Baggins in a troll hoard and passed in later days to Frodo;
      • Narsil, the Sword-that-was-broken, and Anduril, the Sword Reforged;
      • Orcrist and Glamdring, a pair of Elven-swords respectively wielded by Thorin Oakenshield in the Battte of the Five Armies (cfr. the Red Book of Westmarch published under the title The Hobbit (chap. 17) (25), and by Gandalf the Grey throughout the War of the Ring;
      • other secondary weapons from the First Age as Anglachel, Anguirel and Ringil.

Bilbo Baggins did not receive Sting from his father or from a king as  acknoledgment for the killing of a dragon. He simply found it in a cavern containing the booty of the Trolls he had just escaped:

And Bilbo took a knife in a leather sheath. It would have made only a tiny pocket knife for a troll, but it was as good as a short sword for the hobbit. (TBH, p. 53)

This ridiculously common blade – it is discoverecl beside Glamdring and Orcrist, two important swords of high lineage that will be discussed further – nevertheless proves to be an Elvish sword forged by the Elven-Smiths of Gondolin in the First Age (Tyler, op. cit., p. 243) . It bears no name until Bilbo decides to call it “sting” because it helped him to escape from the cobweb of one of Tolkien’s giant spiders:

“I will give you a name”, he said to it, “and I shall call you Sting”. (TBH, p. 162)

It is thus here the bearer of the sword who gives it its name according to a “deed”. In this case the filiation of the sword is limited to an ancient smithing which is however a reference of quality: the Elven-smiths are the equivalent of the Giants in Beowulf. The only availabre explanation for so little renown given to Bilbo’s weapon is precisely the very “medievality” of the tale which, once more, gives evidence of the extreme cleverness of the old professor. Bilbo is the central protagonist in the Red Book of Westmarch, it is a fact. But as a Hobbit – that is as much to say as Mr Smith or the medieval Everyman – he cannot achieve the status of hero either in the heroic nor in the romantic meaning : he is not a king nor a member of the Round Table, he is not even dubbed. The heroes of the old- and early middle English poetry are high-class people. Even Piers the plowman is a christlike figure. Democratically enough a single Hobbit, I mean a single low-class man, can be as courageous as a tiger, he will never be a hero, whereas a prince just has to kill a worm – be it gigantic it is nothing but a worm – or to resist to a nymphomaniac lady to achieve the covetable status of hero. (n.b. if you agree with the irony of the preceding sentence you are not yet uncorrupted enough !).

Tolkien was thus aware of that and, since the Hobbits are after all the central characters of his tale, he gave Bilbo, the low-class thus modern hero, a secondary sword: Sting. The name of the blade points to its rank: a sting is small, causing but small pricks. Moreover the word “sting” is not Elvish and no philological research is required from the reader for him to understand its derisive function. Finally the name is not inherited from Elder Days. In spite of that professor Tolkien had to differenciate Sting from the secondary weapons of the less central characters: Gimli’s broadbladed axe, Legolas’ bow and long white knife and the other Hobbits’s swords (LofR, p. 297). it is probably why Sting has a property shared by all Elven-blades :

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Contents

[INFOS QUALITE] statut: en constructon | mode d’édition: rédaction et iconographie | sources: mémoire de fin d’études ULg | auteur: Patrick Thonart | crédits illustrations: en en-tête, une scène du film de Peter Jackson: l’épée Anduril brandie par Aragorn © New Line Cinema.

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