The Story of Kullervo

Notes and Commentary

99 sudden collapse of the proper speaker. That Tolkien was filling in for two collapsed speakers some five to ten years apart, while not impossible, seems to stretch credibility. But since there is no evidence that this version of the talk was ever given, the opening sentence may simply have been transcribed without editing from the earlier version.

literature so very unlike. Note that the word is now spelled with one t.

103 taken the position. A military expression, referring to capture of an enemy redoubt, not the assumption of a political or philosophical stance in argument.

104 weird tales. This was the title of an American magazine of pulp fantasy fiction, first published in 1923, but not widely circulated in England. Tolkien’s allusion (if such it is) is likelier to have been to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories, Weird Tales, translated from the German by J.T. Bealby and published in England in 1884.

105 I would that we had more of it left — something of the same sort that belonged to the English. This statement, misleadingly associated in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography with Tolkien’s undergraduate time at Oxford, does not appear in the manuscript draft of 1914–15, written while he was still a student and before he went to war. It thus comes out of a different context from the original talk with which Carpenter conflated it, and is all the more to be associated with Tolkien’s burgeoning idea of a ‘mythology for England’. The remark was Tolkien’s response to the myth-and-nationalism movement that spread through Western Europe and the British Isles in the 19th and early 20th centuries but had been brought to a halt by the 1914 war. Out of that pre-war movement came Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, Jeremiah Curtin’s Myths and Folklore of Ireland, Moe and Asbjørnsen’s Norske Folkeeventyr, Lady Guest’s translation of the Welsh Mabinogion, in addition to Elias Lönnrot’s Old Kalevala (1835) and expanded Kalevala (1849) and a host of other myth and folklore collections.

107 a no longer understood tradition. The 19th- and early 20th-century view of Welsh myth as seen in the Mabinogion was of a once-coherent concept behind the stories that had been garbled and misunderstood over time, partly through the supervention of Christianity and partly through the limited acquaintance of Christian redactors with the original stories.

108 the catalogue of the heroes of Arthur’s court in the story of Kilhwch and Olwen. The Arthurian Court List is a ‘run’ of some 260 names, some historical, some legendary, some alleged to be Arthur’s relatives, some obviously fanciful, such as Clust mab Clustfeinad, ‘Ear son of Hearer’ and Drem mab Dremhidydd, ‘Sight son of Seer’. The recitation would have been a tour de force for the bard, as well as an evocation of a host of other untold stories.

Yspaddaden Penkawr. Yspaddaden ‘Chief/Head Giant’, is the father of Olwen, Kilhwch’s intended bride, and the tasks he assigns are not meant to test the prospective lover but to kill him. The character contributed not a little to Thingol, father of Lúthien, who assigned Beren the task of bringing back a Silmaril from the Iron Crown of Morgoth in the expectation that Beren would die in the attempt.

109 feeling for colour that Keltic tales show. The spelling-change from Celtic in the manuscript essay to Keltic in the typescript revision is noteworthy but absent of explanation. Both spellings are recognized in modern dictionaries, probably due to the word having come into English twice, once through French from Latin and again through German from Greek. The C-spelling comes from the Latin Celtae and entered English in the 1600s through French Celtes. The K-spelling comes from the original form Keltoi, the name given by Greeks to tribes along the Danube and Rhone rivers, and its use by 19th-century German philologists. It has been pointed out to me by Edmund Weiner, co-author with Peter Gilliver and Jeremy Marshall of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, that Tolkien ‘was very much in a phase at this time — the Qenya glossary uses throughout, where later he switches to in Elvish’ (personal communication).

114 (as Francis Thompson says) ‘none will again behold’. Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was an English Catholic poet, best known for ‘The Hound of Heaven’, which Tolkien admired. The lines quoted here are from the concluding paragraphs of ‘Paganism Old and New: The Attempted Revival of the Pagan spirit, with its Tremendous Power of a Past, Though a Dead Past’ published in Thompson’s collection A Renegade Poet. Christopher Tolkien comments in a note in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, that Tolkien ‘acquired the Works of Francis Thompson in 1913 and 1914’ (Lost Tales I, 29).

‘nostalgie de la boue’. Literally, ‘yearning for the mud’. Metaphorically, the phrase describes the desire, exemplified by the Romantic attraction to the primitive, to ascribe higher spiritual values to people and cultures popularly considered lower than one’s own. The attitude was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, initiated by antiquarians, energized by the discoveries of archaeologists, and fueled by anthropological research into comparative mythology and philology, all of which encouraged the finding of value in the archaic and primitive for its own sake. The word folklore, with its condescending assumption that the ‘folk’ are other (and less educated) than the users of the term, illustrates the mind-set.

the voice of Ahti in the noises of the sea. See the note on ‘Ahti’ following the manuscript version.

121 Finnish minstrel cracking up his own profession. Talking up his own profession, praising it. Tolkien is using crack (derived from Middle English crak, ‘loud conversation, bragging talk’) as a verb in the dialectal expression to crack up, meaning ‘to praise, eulogize (a person or a thing)’. OED definition 8.