Tolkien’s Old English Exodus and the Problematics of Allegory

Abstract

This article reconsiders Tolkien’s presumed inattention to the allegorical content of the Old English Exodus. It does so, first of all, by situating allegory in the broader context of Tolkien’s letters and fictional compilations. His reception of the poem is then addressed through textual notes and an incomplete translation Tolkien used in lectures as Exodus became a regular feature of his teaching throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Reconstructed by Joan Turville-Petre and published in 1982, this material shows how Tolkien often departs from standard patristic and early medieval readings of key episodes in the biblical book and their parallels in the poem itself; this is developed in comparison to more recent editorial and textual scholarship stressing the interpretive preeminence of allegory in Exodus. Nevertheless, it is finally argued, the poem also becomes for Tolkien the occasion to imagine a rapprochement of sorts between the historical and the allegorical, something crucial not only to his own fictional sensibilities and aspirations, but also to how we understand current theoretical constructions of allegoresis.

Although he may not have invited allegorical readings of his work, literature for Tolkien needed larger frameworks, in keeping with his “historically minded” way of thinking (Carpenter 1981, p. 239).¹ His extended composition process and deep roots in earlier mythology were crucial components of this outlook; both help to account for an effect scholars have sometimes referred to as Tolkien’s “impression of depth” (Drout et al. 2014, p. 167; Nagy 2003, 2004). The phrase itself assumed prominence in his reading of Beowulf, where it was meant to underscore the poet’s “use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground” (Tolkien 1984a, b, p. 27).² Responsibility therefore rested with the translator to discover the poem’s “essential kinship” with “our own” language and to avoid “[a]ntiquarian sentiment and philological knowingness” (Tolkien 1984a, b, pp. 33–34, 56). But while the “impression of depth” entailed immediate obligations for the Beowulf scholar, it also describes how Tolkien’s use of background material produces, according to much recent criticism, “the sense that the world extends both temporally and physically beyond the text” (Drout et al. 2014, p. 169).³

Such a concept has the advantage of explaining a historical mode in Tolkien’s fiction that does not always abide by the strict exclusion of allegory. Nor is allegory necessarily out of place with respect to compilations such as The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, the disparate parts of which, we might assume, only fit together according to some superordinate level of signification or intentionality.⁴ Outside the curious episode of Doworst, a brief Langlandian parody set in contemporary Oxford, references in Tolkien’s writings to Piers Plowman are few, but his disdain for “any ‘interpretations’ in the mode of simple allegory”—those, he explains, privileging “the particular and topical”—suggests a more nuanced understanding of allegoresis than one might suppose from an author who routinely disparaged it (Carpenter 1981, p. 212).⁵ And certainly, the historicizing gestures so characteristic of his fiction, its ruptures and discontinuities, its recurring allusions to discursive backgrounds and source materials beyond our immediate frame of reference, but nonetheless still important to our ethical apprehension of events—all these variously presuppose sophisticated forms of allegorical thought and application, Tolkien’s memorable comment in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings notwithstanding:

But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author (Tolkien 1987, p. xvii).⁶

We are entitled to ask here if allegory has a place in the tradeoff between true and “feigned” history, as indeed it sometimes did in higher criticism’s historical approach to the same medieval authors Tolkien taught, edited, and translated.⁷ “After all,” he wrote in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, “I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode” (Carpenter 1981, p. 147). With this in mind, I want to reconsider Tolkien’s response to a text often taken as a centerpiece of medieval allegorical writing, the adaptation of Exodus found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11.

Tolkien taught the Old English Exodus, a set text in the Oxford English School curriculum, regularly throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The poem seems to have interested him for reasons other than its various allegorical dimensions, which had been outlined by earlier scholars such as Samuel Moore and J. W. Bright.⁸ Although his lecture notes, incorporated into an edition published by Joan Turville-Petre in 1982, frame the poem as “an allegory of the soul, or of the Church of militant souls, marching under the hand of God, pursued by the powers of darkness, until it attains to the promised land of Heaven,” Tolkien’s textual commentary as it is reconstructed here betrays little interest in the allegorical implications of individual words and passages key to such a reading (Tolkien 1982, p. 33). If his professional obligations as a teacher and editor (to say nothing of his own deeply-rooted Catholicism) could be expected to override any reflexive distaste for the poem’s allegorical content, it is also worth noting just how particular and topical that allegorical content actually is.⁹

Focused mostly on the escape of the Israelites from Pharaoh’s army and Moses’ role as a valiant commander (freom folctoga) and heroic protector of his people, the poem invites a specific interpretation of its biblical source by compressing its action around the same episodes (derived from chapters 12 through 15) that were necessary for patristic writers to construe escape through the Red Sea as a figure for baptism or salvation, to take just two examples, and leaving aside various other parallels made possible by the adaptation of material from elsewhere in the Old Testament, including a wholly conventional reference later in the poem to Abraham’s beloved son (swæsne sunu) who is to be sacrificed in victory (sigetibre) (14, 402).¹⁰ At the same time, the pacing and formal patterning of the text allow for a density of allegorical reference within individual passages, as, for example, in the description of the Israelite camp near the city of Etham:¹¹

Þær halig God

wið færbryne      folc gescylde,

bælce oferbrædde      byrnendne heofon,

halgan nette,      hatwendne lyft.

Hæfde wederwolcen      widum fæðmum

eorðan ond uprodor      efne gedæled,

lædde leodwerod,      ligfyr adranc

hate heofontorht.      Hæleð wafedon,

drihta gedrymost.      Dægsceldes hleo

wand ofer wolcnum;      hæfde witig God

sunnan siðfæt      segle ofertolden,

swa þa mæstrapas      men ne cuðon,

ne ða seglrode      geseon meahton

eorðbuende      ealle cræfte,

hu afæstnod wæs      feldhusa mæst,

siððan He mid wuldre      geweorðode

þeodenholde (71–87).

[There holy God

shielded His folk from the frightful heat:

arched a roof-beam over the burning heaven,

spread a sacred canvas against the scorching air-

a soaring cloud had split heaven

and earth asunder with its awesome mass,

directing the troops as it drank the surging

fire of heaven. Folk gazed up

joyfully wondering. Daylight’s warden

shifted over the sky: God had stretched

in his wisdom a sail over the sun’s course-

though no man could have made out the mast-ropes

or the sail-yard cross that shipped it there,

no man on earth for all his craft,

or how the mighty pavilion was pitched

when He gave this glory to grace the Lord’s

faithful followers (Love 2002, p. 624).]

The allegorical shadings of this passage have figured prominently in editorial, textual, and linguistic scholarship on the poem.¹² For instance, the “roof-beam” (bælce) and “sacred canvas” or curtain (halgan nette) that make up the “mighty pavilion” (feldhusa mæst) can be understood symbolically as the Mosaic Tabernacle, the material components of which became a focal point in early figural exegesis for numerous similitudes and mysteries.¹³ Lucas, who has done much to illuminate these patterns, emphasizes that veil and curtain imagery here (e.g., nette, segle) derives coherence in relation to the description of the sanctuary from Exodus 26.33 (“And the veils shall be hanged on with rings, and within it thou shalt put the ark of the testimony, and the sanctuary, and the holy of holies shall be divided with it,” to quote the Douay Rheims translation) and thus implies both “a scale of values (earth/heaven; holy/holiest),” and the desirable “progression” from one to the other. The journey “through life on earth to heaven,” he writes, “is the allegorical equivalent of the Israelite exodus” (Lucas 1994, p. 88). The term “sail” (segle) therefore also corresponds to the Ship of the Church (later recapitulated in reference to Noah’s ship), and the more specifically nautical image of the “sailyard” (seglrode), or the cross-bar of the mast, to the holy cross itself (Lucas 1994, pp. 89–90, and, more fully, pp. 47, 68).¹⁴ All these are in turn distilled into a closely related image a few lines later described from the vantage point of the assembled troops:

Forð gesawon

lifes latþeow      lifweg metan;

segl siðe weold,      sæmen æfter

foron flodwege (103–106).

[Over them they saw

the beacon of life beckoning them on:

the sail at their head, the seamen followed

along life’s floodway (Love 2002, p. 625).]

From this point on, the Israelites are frequently referred to as sæmen—seamen or seafarers. The term is confusing at first, since their flight from the Egyptians is initially halted at the shore (126–129), and it is only when the dry seabed yields a “silvery path” (haswe herestræta) and the earth’s “ancient foundations” (ealde staðolas) are laid bare that they venture forth (284, 285).¹⁵ The first “tribe” to go is Judah’s, “traversing green ground,/hastening across the unheard of path/before their kinsmen” (“Þa þæt feorðe cyn fyrmest eode,/wod on wægstream, wigan on heape,/ofer grenne grund, Iudisc feða,/on onette uncuð gelad/for his mægwinum”) (310–314; Love 2002, p. 629). Assuming the material drawn from Genesis is an original feature of the poem and not merely an interpolation, the story of Noah in lines 362–376 makes these initial references to seafaring less confusing by encouraging the progression from a literal and historical understanding of the term to a figurative and allegorical one, restaging the same progression from earthly to spiritual already suggested with respect to the Tabernacle and its sanctuary.¹⁶

To think of the Israelites as sæmen, however, also reminds us that all allegory, in Gerald Bruns’ words, is a kind of “radical interpretation,” a rewriting of one tradition in terms of another, whereby “an alien system of concepts and beliefs” is calibrated to a new cultural context (Bruns 1992, p. 83). However “natural” it may have been for an Anglo-Saxon religious poet to recast Exodus in Christian terms, seafaring cannot be explained solely by reference to allegorical tradition, except in the very general sense implied above by the term lifweg—literally, according to Bosworth and Toller, who cite this instance, “[a] way which leads to life, way of life, one’s path in life” (104).¹⁷ Broadly speaking, of course, this and related terms (e.g., flodwege) function allegorically in suggesting that throughout the poem exodus “stands for the journey…which all Christians take through this life towards the Promised Land of heaven” (Lucas 1994, p. 92).¹⁸ And yet such an emphasis only begins to suggest the openness to history that constitutes the alleon or alienus of allegorical signification.¹⁹ It is this supplementarity that I now intend to discuss in connection to Tolkien’s editorial scholarship.

For Tolkien, the “key to the poem” was to be found in its opening lines, where the word bealusiðe suggests “not only the troublous passage through life, but the journey of the Israelites to the Promised Land, a symbol of that weary passage” (1982, p. 36).²⁰ More specific evocations of allegorical meaning later in the poem, however, are rarely pursued in his discussion. Commenting on the line “Faraones cyn,/Godes andsacan, gyrdwite band” [“Pharaoh’s race, the enemies of God, he constrained with the plagues of his rod,” in Tolkien’s own translation], he neglects to mention the traditional interpretation of Moses’ staff as a symbol of the cross, or tie it to the word seglrode later in the text (83)—a key term, as we have seen, for scholars more sensitive to the poem’s local allegorical resonances (14–15; 1982, p. 20). This lacuna in Tolkien’s commentary is even more interesting because the very thing that makes the term seglrode linguistically noteworthy—it is a hapax legomenon formed through incorporation of the term “rood”—also calls attention to its significance within the allegorical framework of the poem. Moreover, unlike Love, whose translation of the same lines refers to Moses’ “scourging rod,” an image-concept crucial to the allegorical interpretation of Godes andsacan as the devil, and thus Egypt as hell, Tolkien’s translation does not encourage readers to decipher the rod’s meaning beyond what is already suggested by the literal historical level of Exodus, the plagues, and the promised delivery of the Israelites (Love 2002, p. 635).²¹ Later, when Moses smites the ocean tide using his grene tane, or “green wand,” Tolkien, adducing conspicuously unallegorical criteria, explains that his emendation of tacne to tane is supported by the latter’s “native magical associations,” leaving aside any speculation regarding the wand as a figure for the cross or, as also seems possible here given the term grene, the tree of life (281; Tolkien 1982, p. 60).²²

We can discern a similar pattern in Tolkien’s notes concerning the other textual cruxes mentioned above. Commenting on lines 71–85, he draws attention to the imagery of the canopy and the sail, the latter used with “fine effect” towards the end of the passage:

… hæfde witig God

sunnan siðfæt      segle ofertolden,

swa þa mæstrapas      men ne cuðon,

ne ða seglrode      geseon meahton

eorðbuende      ealle cræfte,

hu afæstnod wæs      feldhusa mæst (80–85; Tolkien 1982, p. 42).

The term segle, writes Tolkien, “is apt at describing the texture of something woven which a cloud may imaginatively be thought to possess; its whiteness shining with sunlight and yet absorbing the sun’s heat; and also its onward motion, directing the march” (Tolkien 1982, p. 42, emphasis his). The concreteness of Old English poetry is by now a commonplace, but Tolkien’s reading enhances this effect by imbuing segle with phenomenological presence and specificity, so that what would otherwise be a fixture of the poem’s overarching allegorical meaning contributes instead to the sensory effects of language: texture, color, and motion. If allegory places us beyond the text, features such as these attune us to its surface, or “what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (Best and Marcus 2009, p. 9, emphasis theirs).²³

In his comments on the feldhusa mæst itself, Tolkien similarly stops short of enumerating allegorical topoi, despite the structure’s implied parallel to the Tabernacle, itself the subject of extensive commentary in Bede’s exegetical writing; this and other early medieval sources also stressed the allegorical and spiritual significance of the beamas twegen occurring a few lines later in the poem, when the Israelites look up and see “broad pillars/dividing between them the days and nights,/high-thanes of the Holy Ghost,/for the whole breadth of the brave men’s journey” (“beamas twegen,/þara æghwæðer efngedælde/heahþegnunga Haliges Gastes/deormodra sið dagum ond nihtum”) (Love 2002, p. 625; 94–97).²⁴ If this translation diverges somewhat from Tolkien’s own (“…two pillars that each in turn did equally divide the high service of the Holy Spirit, waiting upon the journey of those bold-hearted men by day and by night”) it also unfolds more precisely against the backdrop of allegorical tradition by emphasizing the boundary between day and night, or light and dark, with all its typological resonance (Tolkien 1982, p. 22). Tolkien was no doubt familiar with early investigations into the question of the poem’s sources that had cited Bede’s conclusions regarding the symbolism of the beamas twegen or their equivalent in Exodus: “These two columns figure the two churches, that is the Old and the New Testaments” (“Duae quoque columnae duas Ecclesias figurant, id est Veteris et Novi Testamenti”).²⁵ Situating lines 249–251 in the same continuum of pillar imagery, Tolkien nevertheless associates the phrase “siðboda sæstreamum neah/leoht ofer lindum lyftedoras bræc” with “something bright appearing above the horizon,” which in turn prompts him to dwell on the two beamas as natural phenomena, and secondarily as “emblems of God’s protection and guidance,” controlled as they are “by an angel” (250–251, my emphasis; Tolkien 1982, p. 58).

Turville-Petre finds Tolkien’s arguments about lines 249–251 “unconvincing,” though not specifically because they fail to address the question of allegory; in any case, she cautions readers that his commentary “was never intended as an edition” (Tolkien 1982, intro., v).²⁶ As an interpretation, however, they almost entirely circumvent Christian allegorical tradition as represented in patristic commentaries on Exodus and in the poem itself, which relies on the same material in its treatment of particular images such as the great pavilion and the two pillars; this is the case even when Tolkien connects the former to its recapitulation in lines 103–106:

Forð gesawon

lifes latþeow      lifweg metan;

segl siðe weold;      sæmen æfter

foron flodwege (103–106).

Here he instead concludes that “the combined influence of ancient native poetry with its gallant sea-rovers, and the imminence of the passage of the Red Sea, is filling the poet’s mind with old sea-language, until he can actually call the Israelites sæmen” (Tolkien 1982, pp. 42–43). Theoretically, at least, this emphasis would also encourage allegorical thema foreshadowing 1 Corinthians 10:2 (“And all in Moses were baptized, in the cloud, and in the sea”), according to which, as Challoner notes, following patristic writers, the Israelites had “received baptism in figure, by passing under the cloud, and through the sea” (1847, p. 142). But Paul’s words, reasoned Chrysostom, had also introduced the type for baptism (ideoque adducit baptismatis), and from this point on the typological and allegorical associations inhering in the connection between Exodus 14 and I Corinthians 10:2, as well as related biblical episodes, would be widely attested, both in commentaries predating the poem and in a range of later sources (Migne 1862, p. 191); they are given detailed visual representation, for instance, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. M. III.13, a fifteenth-century “blockbook” illustrating selected New Testament scenes together with their Old Testament antecedents, all part of an extensive network of textual parallels and correspondences. In one page from the manuscript, a central panel depicting the baptism of Christ is flanked by two others, the first showing Moses, rod in hand, leading the Israelites through the Red Sea, and the second showing the spies from Numbers 13 and 14 carrying the cluster of grapes back across the river Jordan. This cluster of images, not necessarily to be “read” from left to right but selectively related according to the varying needs of devotional reading and biblical commentary, reasserts longstanding allegorical associations extending from the same scene so dramatically rendered in the Old English Exodus.

Tolkien habitually suggests alternatives for words central to the allegorical conception of this moment in the poem. Noting the repetitive pairing of life and lifweg in line 104 of the passage quoted above, for example, he argues that the latter word could have been a mistaken rendering (presumably the fault of the scribe) of lyftweg, which he characterizes as “more forcible” even if lifweg seems a better fit with the symbolism of the Israelites’ perilous journey through the sea (Tolkien 1982, p. 45).²⁷ But while he does not always pursue them where we would expect, Tolkien certainly grasped these associations, and elsewhere in his commentary shows himself quite alert to specific allegorical motifs, most notably in his remarks concerning the liturgical origins of the poem’s “excursus” on the patriarchs at line 351 and following. Apparently recalling an earlier essay by J. W. Bright, Tolkien situates this episode in relation to the sequence of Old Testament readings used for “the instruction of catechumens about to receive baptism” during Holy Saturday services (Tolkien 1982, p. 64).²⁸ According to this reading, what seems to be an interpolation of disconnected material from other parts of scripture, especially Genesis, actually reinforces the thematic and allegorical coherence of the poem. In this respect, the representation of Noah as a wise seafarer (snotter sæleoda) makes sense on allegorical and historical levels simultaneously, underscoring both the spiritual valences of nautical imagery as it pertains to the Red Sea and the cleansing waters of baptism, and the significance of the same imagery in the context of Anglo-Saxon migration and cultural identity (374). Seafaring, as differently emblematized by Noah and Moses, is the dominant image of a historical and cultural context inseparable from the poem’s figural evocations of baptism and salvation. Indeed, Tolkien’s speculation on the liturgical underpinnings of the poem, perhaps his most topical and specific concession to allegorical interpretation, keeps the focus firmly on the heroic gesta of the Israelites, their sea-crossings, and the “feigned” history by which the poet imagines his Northumbrian ancestors participating in the larger biblical drama of exodus and arrival in the promised land. In other words, the allegorical register Tolkien initially seems to neglect is in fact already encompassed by the historical perspective of a poet “familiar with this island and English traditions” (Tolkien 1982, p. 44).²⁹

This conclusion seems consistent with the argument that Exodus and other Anglo-Saxon migration narratives sanctioned what Nicholas Howe has referred to as “mythmaking” for an incipient English nation (Howe 1989; Michelet 2011). Perhaps, then, the poem as we have it here is just another instance of allegory’s oblique incorporation of the historical, as well as Tolkien’s own indulgence in a form of textual scholarship adequate to an author whose literary ambitions announced themselves under the sign of “historically minded” fiction. Broader contexts and constructions of allegorical interpretation, both medieval and modern, are also implicated in this work, however. From a traditional standpoint, allegory concerned credas, or what one should believe, rather than gesta, thereby subordinating plot lines and narrative temporalities to a concept located beyond the literal historical level of the text; and in its selectivity, its contrived systematicity, implied that the story itself could be evacuated of meaning, the written page treated as a source of themes and figures of thought rather than something valuable on its own terms.³⁰ “The mere stories were the thing,” Tolkien once wrote in terse reply to just such an allegorical reading of his work (Carpenter 1981, p. 145).³¹

It is not so much that Tolkien’s response to this poem disregards its allegorical possibilities, however, but that his interpretation understands allegoresis as something already embedded in the traditional subject matter of “ancient native poetry,” and its accompanying modes of narrative emplotment. In Tolkien’s reading, no shift in register is required to understand the poem in its properly allegorical sense or to grasp what it actually “represents.” If, as Thomas Pavel writes, a referential paradigm such as allegory “generalizes realist schemata to fictional activity,” then we can imagine a counterpart “wherein poetic intimacy between a text and a [sic] idiosyncratic world is generalized to all types of knowledge” (Pavel 1986, p. 74). The readerly attunement encouraged here is not symptomatic, focused on a hidden or obscured set of correspondences, or what modern literary criticism, including that devoted to Tolkien’s fiction itself, has often understood in terms of subtext, depth, or political unconscious³²; nor is an allegorical interpretation of the text therefore even necessarily hermeneutic. Perhaps a parallel can be drawn to the topographical maps Tolkien began to formulate for his legendarium at roughly the same time he first occupied himself with the poem.³³ Like contour lines indicating depth and elevation, the allegorical application of the biblical story unfolds in the foreground of the text, where we then survey its features. The veil of language and the external form of things: textual surface has its own kind of depth, its allegorical planes and relative gradients of meaning. The gesta inscribed there for us in the form of a story are, for Tolkien, themselves material to the same allegorical subject matter that lends Exodus its historical character.