WANDERING BUT NOT LOST

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August 05, 2021

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Chronicles

Written by John Howe

“When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.” — Rudyard Kipling^[1]

Late last year, I was asked if I would consider doing a preface for a book on Tolkien.

I duly received a copy of the text, and replied that I would be delighted to write something. The preface is below, but before that…

I’m tempted to say that the theme of the book is not simply what is announced on the cover. The immediate focus is on the ten days or so that young J. R. R. Tolkien spent in the warm August of 1911 crossing the Alps from Lauterbrunnen to Sion. Surrounding this journey, though, reside the even more pertinent and wider questions: how does inspiration function, and how neatly can it be pinned down?

Of course, I can speak only for myself and in no way intend to generalize, but honestly, I still have no real idea of how inspiration works. (Admittedly, given that it is a process that I rely on professionally, that does seem a little hazardous to say the least. Equally, if I am so circumspect in my affirmations, it is because I know very well that what the artist may put in an image is often not what the viewer sees.)

But first, please allow me to indulge in a bit of etymology:

inspiration (n.)

1300, “immediate influence of God or a god,” especially that under which the holy books were written, from Old Frenchinspiracion“inhaling, breathing in; inspiration” (13c.), from Late Latin inspirationem (nominative inspiratio), noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin inspirare“blow into, breathe upon,” figuratively “inspire, excite, inflame,” from in- “in” (from PIE root *en “in”) + spirare “to breathe” (see spirit (n.)). ,

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. [Genesis ii.7]

The sense evolution seems to be from “breathe into” to “infuse animation or influence,” thus “affect, rouse, guide or control,” especially by divine influence. Inspire (v.) in Middle English also was used to mean “breath or put life or spirit into the human body; impart reason to a human soul.” Literal sense “act of inhaling” attested in English from 1560s. Meaning “one who inspires others” is attested by 1867.^[2]

The shift from the divine to the artist came relatively late, witness to the enduring (and, in the end, accurate) notion that inspiration belongs and yet does not entirely belong to us. The sentiment that inspiration is a connection of some undefinable source beyond our control persists. The embodiment of this connection, which can be tenuous, is the opportunity to perceive unexpected relationships between thins, to connect unsuspected dots, and ultimately “seeing” vividly the result. The relinquishing of control is equally important; you cannot command inspiration.

Inspiration can be a journey, signposted by what you stumble upon, guided by circumstance. Sources of inspiration obey no easily established taxonomy or hierarchy, they simply happen. Perhaps this explains the persistence of the notion of divine involvement, whatever “divine” may be taken to mean. At any rate, even if you do not know where you are going – and it is better not to – inspiration is truly the guide for those wandering but not lost.

But, rather than go on endlessly about it, (my students would be relieved) I leave you with the preface. Information on the book itself can be found at the end.

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THE WILDERLAND OF THE IMAGINATION

I would like to begin this preface with two seemingly contradictory thoughts.

Firstly, I cannot agree with everything in this book. Conversely, I immensely enjoyed reading it and am honoured to have been asked to contribute this preface; it truly is a book long overdue.

When 19-year old J. R. R. Tolkien undertook his 10-day walking tour of the Alps in the fine summer holidays of 1911, he travelled in a very different Switzerland than today. Dr Monsch takes us back, in Tolkien’s company, to a Switzerland that has long since disappeared. It is worth reconsidering “Tolkien’s Switzerland,” for if the silhouettes of the mountains have themselves remained largely unscathed, power lines, ski lifts, panoramic restaurants and hydroelectric dams have left their imprint. The Alps Tolkien experienced was a less domesticated and accessible world, infinitely closer to the novels he was to write decades after his trip.

The very wildness of the landscape must have grandly impressed young Tolkien. Through the filter of his memories, we are no longer strictly dealing with topography, but with archetypes. We are less attempting to identify observable features than dealing with inspirations, which, in themselves, invite extrapolation and distortion of scale. Dr Monsch is not necessarily proposing that every parallel he draws is true, but that all are worthwhile weighing and considering.

What a grand shame Tolkien kept no diary of his alpine escapade! Additionally, he was not leading the expedition, so his memories, when he came to write of it, are vivid but disjointed and delocalized. This is another key to reading Dr. Monsch’s book. Because Tolkien (not unlike Bilbo) wrote about his journey far later in life, the spatial relationship linking experiences, outside of ascent and descent, was blurred by time. (In a letter written to Michael Tolkien in 1967 or 68, Tolkien directly equates Bilbo’s adventure to his own.) The series of impressions that remained from a relatively modest portion of the map had by that time expanded to fill a world. Therefore, if upon the author’s maps, Middle-Earth transposed on the Valais seems an impossible fit, it is necessary to ignore the relative exiguity of the topography and imagine instead a series of loosely conjoined vignettes, excerpts or flashes from a larger narrative.

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit deal in archetypes, in the symbolism of landscape and in the essence of our relationship to nature. The landscapes of Middle-earth are directly inherited from Romanticism, drawing intimate and essential parallels between each contrée and its lords or denizens. Tolkien claimed to be allergic to allegory, but each land in Middle-earth is the topographical metaphor of the spirit of the peoples that dwell therein. Evaluating the validity of an inspirational landscape is as much down to feeling and impression as it is to feature and contour. How can we hope, a century later, to capture the spirit of the landscape through which Tolkien walked, factoring in the dépaysement of an Englishman abroad for the first time^[3], the strenuous marching and the vigour and enthusiasm of his 19 summers? He says as much himself: the vividness of his experience remained undiminished by time. Perhaps his memories of Switzerland were even enhanced by the passage of time, purified and refined to their essential elements. To judge the validity of Dr Monsch’s proposals, we must abandon a periods-and-commas approach, ignore scale, and adjust our views to a remembered but far-ago world.

Some alpine landmarks are cited by Tolkien as inspiration, the most explicit being the Silberhorn, a side peak of the Jungfrau. “I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.”^[4] It is a reminder – and a bit of a word of warning – that inspiration does not always follow logic; it was not the obvious and famous mountain trio of Jungfrau, Eiger and Mönch that inspired Tolkien, but rather a side peak of one of these. (Context is all-important here: Tolkien’s comment tells us as much about the light – fleeting and dramatic – as it does about the mountain.) The valley of Lauterbrunnen is a clear candidate for Rivendell. The forest fires of August 1911 might have cast a pall over the country during the time he was present in the Valais. The encroaching and disquieting darkness of the smoke is surely evocative of the tangible Darkness spreading from Mordor as Sauron’s power waxes. If the mountain vista identified as a source for Mordor, above the village of Ferpecle, is rather tamer today, with easy access by paved road, the wilderness of stone below the glacier, devoid of any vegetation, does evoke Mordor, not as a precise topographical anchor point or a literal transposition, but as the incarnation of an atmosphere of mineral desolation that, if applied to an entire landscape, could very well represent the dead and desolate land of Sauron.^[5] In other words, Tolkien did not directly lift sections of landscape from the Swiss Alps and sprinkle them across his far vaster Middle-earth, but took back with him a series of vivid and sublime impressions that may well have resurfaced naturally as he wrote.

Equally, the search for Tolkien’s sources of inspiration, focusing on those aspects of landscape mirrored in Middle-Earth, help us see more clearly the evocative power of the landscape itself. In this sense, Tolkien is a guide who takes us back in time, to better consider the changes the intervening century has wrought.

Today, we have left Romanticism so far behind that Tolkien’s Switzerland is akin to a foreign country. This exploration incites us not so much to check and compare salient features, (although there is a certain satisfaction in trying them on for size, and assuredly this thorough text will be greeted with much nodding and shaking of heads) but to experience the landscape, to erase the pylons and lifts and imagine the Alps as seen in 1911 by a vibrant 19-year old with a vivid imagination and a penchant for storytelling.

Above all, this book is an invitation to consider the narrative qualities of the landscape, its storytelling power to evoke and inspire. Pinpointing a source of inspiration is not as simple as following a watercourse upstream to its fountainhead. Inspiration may go underground, change direction and flow, branch as well as receive tributaries. Inspiration is syncretic, a source may not be exclusive, but a conjoining of impressions. Additionally, fantasy is hardly subject to practical considerations.˜˜˜

On a personal note, I have been wandering, pencils and paintbrushes in hand, for more than four decades in Middle-earth. I know how incidental and serendipitous inspiration can be, and what deep-seated convictions it may reveal. I know the Canadian Rockies as well as the Alps, but they do not work for me as a visual source for Tolkien. The Alps are far more to my liking. I certainly agree there is no real or logically defendable reason for this, it is simply based on the hard-to-define notion of what is “right.” (On the other hand, only Patagonia will do for the mountains of the Second Age, and only New Zealand for the shores of Numenór and Beleriand.) Inspiration can be infinite and intimate. The sweep and the grandeur of the Alps can combine harmoniously with the more personal and secretive landscapes of the Jura, the former providing scope and scale, that later credibility of detail necessary for the willing suspension of disbelief so crucial to fantasy. Where on earth is Middle-earth? As much a landscape of the mind as it is identifiable on a map, it is everywhere that story and narration are present in the landscape.

This book is above all else an invitation to step into Tolkien’s hiking shoes, shoulder his pack, and step back a century into a world which is as far from today as Middle-earth is from our world; a guidebook of impressions, a walking tour of the nature of imagination and the imagination of nature.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, chapter 8 (1937)

[2] From that helpful resource, the Online Etymological Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com

[3] Although he was born in South Africa, Tolkien had lived in England since the age of three.

[4] Letter to Michael Tolkien, 1967 or 1968

[5] Inspiration may be indirect: Tolkien passed through Switzerland when the Swiss Lake Dwellers enjoyed immense popularity and may have contributed to the imagining of Lake Town. (The piquant fact that the whole notion was based on enthusiastic national rivalry and wishful thinking nonetheless is all the more ironic: historical error begetting enduring fiction.