Tolkien, Eleanor Parker and Winters in the World

I have just finished reading Eleanor Parker’s excellent new book, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year. Rather than write a traditional review, I thought I’d offer an article that is part review and part reflection with a Tolkienian twist.

There are many things I love about this book. As readers of her blog, History Today columns, Patreon articles, and books will already know, Eleanor Parker writes with great clarity and a deep knowledge of British history. On this occasion, she takes us, season by season, through the Anglo-Saxon year, teaching us a surprising amount about our own age as well as a great deal about the ways the Anglo-Saxons saw the world. On the way she also scuppers some deep-rooted myths. For example, she writes:

Today it’s become a popular myth that that symbols linked in modern Britain with Easter, especially eggs, hares or rabbits, derive from the worship of Eostre, but there’s no Anglo-Saxon evidence to support that. None of these symbols were linked to Easter in the Anglo-Saxon period; eggs weren’t associated with Easter in Britain until the later Middle Ages, hares and rabbits not until much later still. There’s nothing to suggest any continuity of customs between the pre-conversion festival and the Anglo-Saxon Christian Easter, and the modern observance of Easter owes nothing to Anglo-Saxon paganism, with the sole exception of its English name.

She also writes beautifully about many Anglo-Saxon poems. Time and time again, she models how to read literature closely and sensitively. Winters in the World isn’t simply a book about the Anglo-Saxon calendar and world view, it’s a great example of what literary criticism can be when it’s done well. In that sense, it reminds me of Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, another book which opens works of literature as you would unwrap a gift rather than dissecting them as you might a cadaver.

Eleanor Parker only mentions Tolkien in passing in this book, though she has written and spoken about him in detail elsewhere. However, her book incidentally provides all sorts of insights for anyone who enjoys Tolkien’s fiction.

Let’s take just a couple of examples, starting with the most important date in The Lord of the Rings: 25th March. This was the day on which the ring was destroyed and Sauron fell. As a direct consequence, it also became the first day of the new year in Gondor. What’s more, it was the day Aragorn arrived at the Bridge of Baranduin and the birthday of Elanor, Sam’s first child. (Elanor is, I think, a much more significant character in The Lord of the Rings than is widely recognised, but more on her another time.) As Eleanor Parker points out, many Anglo-Saxons believed that the 25th March was also the date of the Annunciation, the date of the Crucifixion, and the eighth day of creation. In other words, it was the most important date in history.

(These beliefs weren’t unique to the English, of course. St Augustine of Hippo once wrote that Christ “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.”)

There isn’t space to explore the implications of all this here - though I am attempting to do so more thoroughly in my PhD - but even this brief survey suggests that, in some respects, the action in The Lord of Rings shadows, or fore-shadows, salvation history itself.

Eleanor Parker’s book also got me thinking about the passing of the seasons in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (for The Lord of the Rings, in particular, is a very seasonal book). Let’s look at these parallel passages, for example.

So one day, although autumn was now getting far on, and winds were cold, and leaves were falling fast, three large boats left Lake-town, laden with rowers, dwarves, Mr Baggins, and many provisions… The only person thoroughly unhappy was Bilbo.

That was the end of Chapter 10 of The Hobbit. Here’s Frodo in Chapter 3 of The Lord of the Rings:

To tell the truth, he was very reluctant to start, now that it had come to the point. Bag End seemed a more desirable residence than it had for years, and he wanted to savour as much as he could of his last summer in the Shire. When autumn came, he knew that part at least of his heart would think more kindly of journeying, as it always did at that season.

Now, this is very curious because, as Eleanor Parker points out, autumn is very much not the time for journeying (not even the Anglo-Saxon autumn which began on 7th August!). Spring is the journeying season and, of course, that is when Bilbo sets off at the start of The Hobbit. He leaves in April, a month forever associated with pilgrimage since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But the key date at the start of The Lord of the Rings is not April 28th (when Bilbo first leaves Bag End) but September 22nd, Bilbo’s birthday and Frodo’s too. Rather than leave Bag End in spring, they leave on or about the autumn solstice. In other words, they leave the Shire at precisely the wrong time of year.

So what’s going on here? Part of the answer lies in the nature of their quest, which is difficult, even penitential. You sometimes get the impression that Chaucer’s pilgrims might as well be going on holiday but that’s clearly not the case for Bilbo or Frodo. They are in deadly danger the moment they leave Lake-town (in The Hobbit) and the Shire (in The Lord of the Rings). Maybe Tolkien was thinking more of Sir Gawain than The Canterbury Tales when he wrote these passages. Here, for example, is Tolkien’s own translation of a wonderful passage about the passing of the seasons in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

But then Harvest [the early English word for autumn] hurries in, and hardens [the grass] quickly,

warns it before winter to wax to ripeness.

He drives with his drought the dust, till it rises

from the face of the land and flies up aloft;

wild wind in the welkin makes war on the sun,

the leaves loosed from the linden alight on the ground,

and all grey is the grass that green was before:

all things ripen and rot that rose up at first,

and so the year runs away in yesterdays many,

and here winter wends again, as by way of the world it ought,

until the Michaelmas moon

has winter’s boding brought;

Sir Gawain then full soon

of his grievous journey thought.

Now I wouldn’t want to push the parallels too far, but parallels there certainly are. Gawain leaves Camelot slightly later than Frodo and Bilbo leave Bag End but, like them, he faces many perils, including dragons, wolves, wood-trolls, bulls, bears, boars, and ogres (though, the narrator amusingly tells us, the worst peril of all was the cold. English weather, you know!) Then, at Christmas Sir Gawain finds shelter from the wilderness in a mysterious mansion, just as Frodo finds shelter from the wilderness (and the Black Riders) at Rivendell, from where he sets off on his quest to destroy the ring on… December 25th.

What is clear in the poem is that Gawain leave the comforts of home at such an unpropitious time of year because, just like Bilbo and Frodo, he has a task to do which no one else can complete, a quest which only he can fulfil. Like them, he cannot wait for ideal travelling conditions. What matters here is courage, not good weather.

There is, of course, a great deal more to be said about both Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon year but that’s probably enough from me for the time being. I’ll finish with another quotation from Eleanor Parker which really sums up the importance of the calendar to the Anglo-Saxons (and not just the Anglo-Saxons). She’s writing about Aelfric and other authors of his time, though her words could equally apply to Tolkien, I think:

they wanted to read and interpret the natural world, to learn to recognize the meaning God had planted in it. They saw time and seasons, from the very first day of the world, as carefully arranged by God with method and purpose - so they believed it should be possible to organize the calendar not according to the randomness of custom and inherited tradition, but in a way that reflected that divine plan.