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167
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
Michael D. C. Drout,1 Namiko Hitotsubashi and
Rachel Scavera
One of the most celebrated aesthetic effects of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
writings is the “impression of depth” that these works create,2
the sense that behind the immediate text “there was a coherent, con-
sistent, deeply fascinating world about which he had no time (then) to
speak” (Shippey, Road 228–29). Tolkien himself identied this quality
in works of medieval literature that had “deep roots in the past” that
were “made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements
that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the
poet” (MC 72). He believed that part of the attraction of The Lord of
the Rings was “due to glimpses of a large history in the background: an
attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the
towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunset mist” (Letters 333).
Previous scholars have made signicant progress in explaining the
ways that Tolkien creates this impression of depth, attributing it to
four major factors: (1) the vast size and intricate detail of the back-
ground Tolkien created for his imagined world; (2) the ways he refers
to this background material through seemingly casual and incomplete
allusion; (3) the logical gaps and apparent inconsistencies in the sto-
ries; and (4) the variations in style within given texts.3 In this paper we
build upon and extend this scholarship, explaining in greater detail
how each factor contributes to the aesthetic effect of Tolkien’s works
and arguing that all four were to a signicant degree generated by
the tortuous evolutionary histories of the texts. Although Tolkien may
not have set out to create a complex, multi-layered textual archive
as a background for subsequent work, once this resource existed he
exploited it, and the ways in which he both drew upon and modied
the archive created a textual patchwork whose heterogeneity in both
content and style contributes signicantly to the impression of depth.
Vast and Detailed Backcloths
“The allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not illusory,” notes Christo-
pher Tolkien (LT I, 3). The development of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legend-
arium had begun as early as the winter of 1916–17,4 so by the time he
began to write The Lord of the Rings5 Tolkien had created a great mass
of interconnected stories, poems, and histories upon which the later
work was able to draw. Thus the “songs and digressions like Aragorn’s
lay of Tinúviel, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more” (Shippey,
Road 229) were linked to stories in actually existing texts. When
Tolk ie n us ed th e phrase “v as t ba ck cl ot hs ” (Letters 144) to describe this
material, the adjective was no exaggeration. The sheer size of just the
published record is staggering, including as it does The Silmarillion,
Unnished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales Parts I and II, The Lays of Bele-
riand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, sections of The Lost Road, Morgoth’s
Ring, The War of the Jewels, and The Children of Húrin. And because Tolk-
ien’s writing process was that of multiple drafts and revisions,6 behind
the published material lie further drafts, partially edited copies, riders,
cancelled pages, and even lost texts.
Although we will discuss the textual history of Tolkien’s Túrin story
in greater detail below, it is perhaps useful to sketch it here to illustrate
the extent of Tolkien’s writing and revision.7 There are twelve pub-
lished versions of the Túrin story written over the course of approxi-
mately forty years,8 the earliest, “Turambar and the Foalókë,” being
composed between 1917 and 19199 and the last, parts of the Narn i
Chîn Húrin and some Túrin material in the Grey Annals, in the 1950s.10
These texts range from chronicles of differing length and detail to
poems, summaries, and elaborated, novelistic narratives—a network
of revisions and rewritings in which each successive version draws on
what came before, continuously evolving while retaining a core story.11
After the prose “Turambar and the Foalókë,” Tolkien wrote two drafts
of the “Lay of the Children of Hurin” (c. 1918) in strict alliterative
long lines (Lays 7). The Lay, which followed “Turambar” fairly closely,
was abandoned before the story reached the fall of Nargothrond, and
Tolkien only returned to the story of Túrin in 1926, when he wrote
the “Sketch of the Mythology with especial reference to ‘The Children
of Húrin’” (Shaping 1).12 In the 1930s, Tolkien expanded this Sketch
into the Quenta (Shaping 76-77), and around this time he also wrote
the Earliest Annals of Beleriand, which told the same tales as the Quenta
in abbreviated form (Shaping 294–95). A revised version of the Annals
brought the plot of the Túrin story close to the form in the published
Silmarillion (Lost Road 124–25). In a parallel development, also during
the 1930s, Tolkien began The Grey Annals, but he abandoned that
manuscript before the narrative reached Túrin (WJ 3–4). It was not
until after the completion of The Lord of Rings that Tolkien returned
to the Túrin material, writing the long prose narrative, the Narn i Chîn
Húrin,13 in the 1950s. He also epitomized that text in producing a new
version of the Grey Annals that did include the Túrin story (WJ 144–45;
CH 283–89).
The Túrin story is only one—and not the oldest—of the three
“Great Tales” at the heart of the Silmarillion’s narrative.14 Its complex
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
and reticulated textual history is characteristic of the Silmarillion
material. Thus by the time Tolkien eventually came to write The Lord
of the Rings, he had created an extensive textual archive. The size of
these “backcloths,” their detail and their existence as texts—in contra-
distinction to the apparently sketched, fragmentary, or purely imag-
ined backgrounds of other works of fantasy15—generate two major
aesthetic effects. First, there is sufcient background material that ref-
erences to it are not all of a piece. Unlike, for example, H. P. Lovecraft,
who repeatedly refers to a small suite of imaginary texts and places,16
Tolkien invokes a great number of different—albeit related—sto-
ries, characters, events, and objects. These small references, scattered
through the text and not possessing an obvious tight cohesion among
themselves (with the exception of the Beren and Lúthien story; FR,
I, xi, 203–6), can be invoked in a non-systematizing way even though
they, as a result of their ontogeny in a connected body of legend, pos-
sess an internal consistency of their own. Second, the detail of the
referenced background material produces the sense that the world
extends both temporally and physically beyond the text. For example,
two brief references to Tharbad (FR, II, iii, 287; viii, 390) imply both
that the geography of Middle-earth is much more extensive than the
landscape passed through by the characters and that a deep history
extends beyond the main narrative (i.e., one not linked specically to
the story of the Ring). The wood smoke that rises over Coombe even
though that village is hidden from the view of the characters and is
not a signicant part of the story (FR, I, xi, 193) similarly shows that
the world of the text is richly imagined even at the periphery of the
narrative.17
Reference and Referentiality
When the Fellowship is deep in the Mines of Moria, Aragorn reassures
the other companions, telling them that Gandalf “is surer of nding
the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel” (FR,
II, iv, 325). The esh of Shelob was so tough that it “could not be
pierced by any strength of men, not though Elf or Dwarf should forge
the steel or the hand of Beren or of Túrin wield it” (TT, IV, x, 337-38).
The horn that Éowyn gives Merry “came from the Hoard of Scatha the
Worm” (RK, VI, vi, 256). Shippey’s approximation of similar referenc-
es as “dozens” is probably conservative, even if we limit our count to
those times when the characters or narrator mention people, places,
things, or events that are entirely unknown to the reader.18 These refer-
ences are not treated as invocations of arcana, nor do they usually be-
come opportunities for authorial explication; they are instead casual,
offhand mentions of cultural material that the other characters in the
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
conversation seem to understand, thus helping to create the impres-
sion that the characters are operating within a sophisticated historical
culture that happens to be distinct from that of the readers.
A number of Tolkien’s medieval sources and inuences treat refer-
ences similarly. In Beowulf, for example, the poet writes as if his audi-
ence has preexisting knowledge of the identity and signicance of many
characters, including Hygelac, Hrothulf, Éomer, and Onela.19 Chaucer
refers to “Wade’s Boat”20 and “Jakke Straw and his meynee”21 as if he
assumes that his audience knows what these are, and the Gawain-poet
brings Morgan La Fay into his story without ever explaining why she
hates Guenevere (presumably because the audience already knew the
reasons).22 We have no evidence that these references were esoteric
to the authors or their audiences; the poets’ assumptions that readers
would understand are probably not qualitatively different from a con-
temporary writer’s assuming readers’ knowledge of the name of the
U.S. president or the approximate distance from New York to Boston.
Both literary and ordinary discourse are lled with similar refer-
ences, as writers and speakers presuppose an enormous amount of
cultural background knowledge in their readers.23 When speakers are
correct in their assumptions about shared knowledge, references are
useful because, through the phenomenon of communicative economy,24
they transmit more knowledge to the speaker than is contained in
themselves alone by invoking information that had been acquired
piecemeal and assembled in the minds of the audience over periods of
time.25 When the Beowulf-poet mentions Hama in line 1198, he is pre-
sumably assuming that his audience already knows a story in which this
character has something to do with king Eormanric and the marvelous
Brosing necklace.26 The poet does not have to re-tell the story but can
simply trigger his audience’s recollection of it.
But when the shared cultural knowledge no longer exists, refer-
ences cannot communicate more information than they themselves
contain. For readers whose cultural knowledge is substantially dif-
ferent than that of the original interpretive community, the reference
is not a metonymic invocation of information external to the text but
simply a noticeable gap in knowledge. Because we no longer know
the details of the stories behind Beowulf’s Éomer, Háma, Unferth, and
the Brosing necklace, there is a contrast between these references
and their surrounding discursive matrix. Such references, instead of
transmitting information through communicative economy, now call
particular attention to themselves, standing out because the audience
does not know to what they refer.
These broken references27 are an effect of cultural change and its con-
comitant information loss.28 The presence of broken references in
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
an artwork thus emphasizes the distance between the reader and the
author’s original imagined audience. The obscurity of references in
medieval texts produces a particular effect for the modern reader, the
impression that, to repurpose Shippey’s words, “there was a coherent,
consistent, deeply fascinating” culture behind the text and that this
culture is different from the one we inhabit (Road 228–29). We thus
perceive simultaneously both the remarkable survival of these pieces
of culture and their ruined and fragmentary nature. Tolkien repro-
duces this effect in The Lord of the Rings when his characters and nar-
rator assume that their interlocutors and readers know about Beren
and Lúthien, the Silmaril, and the Iron Crown.
The effect is heightened by the casual manner in which characters
employ the references. Because the characters do not identify their ref-
erences as unusual discourse, their invocation emphasizes the episte-
mological situation, in which characters effortlessly understand the ref-
erence in detail while readers must rely on context and inference.29 This
unequal distribution of knowledge helps to generate the illusion that
the background material in the story is of a historically factual kind, the
sort of reference that—because the knowledge was so widely shared—
a character would make without thinking it required explanation. For
example, when he says that, by accepting the quest of the Ring, Frodo
has earned himself a seat among the great elf-friends, including “Hador
and Húrin, and Túrin, and Beren himself” (FR, II, ii, 284), Elrond is
not being oblique or deliberately confusing: obfuscation would com-
pletely undercut his rhetorical aim. He is merely speaking in an idiom
he expects to be understood (if not by Frodo, then at least by the other
elves, Gandalf, Aragorn and Bilbo). But the rst three names in the
list of elf-friends are at this point in the narrative entirely unknown to
the reader of The Lord of the Rings. Their denotations are thus unavail-
able, and even any connotations beyond a generally positive notion of
an “elf-friend” can only be interpreted in a local context.30 The signi-
cance of the nal elf-friend, Beren, may be in part understood through
Aragorn’s earlier song and summary in “A Knife in the Dark,” and so
by placing this name in the list, Tolkien implies that the accomplish-
ments of the other elf-friends are similar. But because the character
making the reference apparently also understands the background of
the stories of Hador, Húrin, and Túrin and acts as if he assumes that
his hearers do also, readers must infer the existence of cultural infor-
mation to which they are not privy. For them, Elrond’s comparison is
a broken reference that has called attention to itself exactly because it
invokes a cultural context not available to the reading audience.
It is useful to draw some distinctions between kinds of references. A
simple broken reference at one time invoked a larger meaning in the
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
minds of an audience but no longer does. Chaucer’s mention of Wade’s
Boat is one such: although the full context is now lost to us, it appears
to have existed for both Chaucer and his readers (Speght, in his 1598
edition, certainly appears to have known about Wade’s Boat).31 But
authors can feign the invocation of cultural knowledge by employing
what appears to be a reference, but which in fact never referred to any
particular cultural knowledge. This is a pseudo-reference. Chaucer’s “Book
of the Leon” may be an example, and Malory’s “French Book” almost
certainly is.32 Closer to Tolkien’s time, we nd pseudo-references in
early science ction, fantasy, and horror, including the invented cryptic
runic manuscript by Arne Saknussemm in Jules Verne’s A Journey to the
Center of the Earth, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and Chambers’ The King in
Yellow.33 Although Tolkien was obviously not the rst writer to create
such references, he did it extraordinarily well and was the direct inspi-
ration for many subsequent fantasy writers, including Ursula Le Guin
in her original Earthsea trilogy, in which the referenced stories of Elf-
arran, Morred and the Firelord (among others) were only written
decades after the books were published.34 The use of pseudo-references
may have become a cliché in fantasy literature, but the technique is per-
haps overused by Tolkien’s imitators precisely because it is so effective
at creating the impression of a large, lost cultural context.
Note that there is no conscious experiential difference between
a reader’s perception of a pseudo-reference and one that is merely
broken. That the Beowulf-poet was referring to cultural knowledge that
he assumed to be widespread35 while Tolkien was drawing on back-
ground material he had written himself is, in the case of any given
reference, a difference in ontogeny rather than aesthetic effect. Indi-
vidual pseudo- and broken-references will be perceived in the same
way by an audience that cannot access the requisite background infor-
mation. In fact, Tolkien’s references are almost all broken rather than
pseudo-. According to three letters he wrote in 1956, of all his refer-
ences, only the Cats of Queen Berúthiel did not already exist in the
Legendarium when he wrote The Lord of the Rings.36 At least in part
these pseudo-references are just an accident of composition history,
since Tolkien originally intended to publish the Silmarillion and so was
not writing the stories and poems primarily for the purpose of having
material to draw upon in order to create an impression of depth in
a later work.37 But whether originally intended or not, the seemingly
broken links between individual references and their backgrounds
generate the impression of signicant cultural distance between the
text and the contemporary reader.
Because Tolkien had the Silmarillion material to draw upon, his
references, while seeming broken to the audience are—with the
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
exception of Queen Berúthiel’s cats—coherent in their underlying
stories. They thus have a logical consistency and a lack of overt contra-
diction characteristic of real traditions. A similar overall coherence of
background gives Beowulf much of its particular quality of feeling his-
torically true, or as Tolkien put it, as taking place in “the named lands
of the North” (MC 17), even though it includes trolls, sea-monsters,
and av dragon. Linked to a coherent (if not textually stable) body of
legends, the references possess a consistency that, while perhaps not
obvious to the reader, nevertheless gives the impression that the world
they refer to exists on its own and so that the details are not ad hoc
inventions of the author. Not every reference needs to be linked to a
denite extratextual antecedent to produce this Zusammenhang—the
cats of Queen Berúthiel, after all, did not have a story until well after
the publication of The Lord of the Rings—but many links and no overt
contradictions produces the impression that another culture is both
underlying and distant from the text.
At the very beginning of his composition of The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien may not have intended to produce this particular effect. By
1938, according to Carpenter, he had mostly abandoned hope that the
Silmarillion material would be published.38 He therefore cannot have
assumed that his readers would be able to identify the references and
allusions in the evolving The Lord of the Rings.39 Thus, because of the
contingencies of publishing history, the references in Tolkien’s works
present some complicated problems. Tolkien was in a situation unlike
that of either the Beowulf-poet, who did not know his references would
be broken, or Verne, Lovecraft, or Chambers, who knew that their ref-
erences were entirely pseudo-. Although his references were in fact
unbroken, he knew that his audience had no access to the referenced
material. Thus he had to shape the references in The Lord of the Rings
subtly so that some of their meanings could be reconstructed through
immediate context, thus causing readers to experience the distancing
effect of a broken reference without fatally compromising the informa-
tion content of the passage.40 Readers who are familiar with The Silmar-
illion may have a richer understanding of the signicance of the com-
pliment Elrond is paying to Frodo by comparing him to Hador, Húrin,
and Túrin, but even naive readers can still extract enough information
from context to make general sense of the passage while at the same
time receiving the aesthetic impression of a broken reference.
When a reference is decoupled from its background information
context but nevertheless continues to be replicated, it can evolve into
what scholars of oral tradition call a traditional referent.41 Like a refer-
ence, a traditional referent invokes previously accumulated informa-
tion through communicative economy. But unlike a reference, which
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
is linked to external cultural information,42 a traditional referent is con-
nected only to information inside the traditional discourse.43 Repeti-
tion of particular phrases or formulas within a tradition creates links
between individual instantiations and other appearance of the same
words within the tradition, thus enabling a variant of communicative
economy that invokes “a context enormously larger and more echoic
than the text or the work itself” (Foley, Immanent Art, 6-7), but still
within the discursive tradition. For participants in a tradition, then,
the appearance of repeated phrases such as “korythaiolos Hektor”
(“Hector of the Glancing Helm”) or “glaukopisAthene” (“Grey-Eyed
Athena”) are able to invoke the entire traditional persona of a char-
acter even if the particular characteristics of a historical or literary
antecedent have been completely lost.44
A broken reference becomes a traditional referent when it is rep-
licated in its own form and can thus be lexicalized with a denotative
meaning within the discourse.45 Referents are therefore under sub-
stantial selection pressure to evolve formal features that contribute
to mnemonic (and hence replicative) stability.46 Traditional referents
are thus often efcient ways of solving problems of the interlinking
of form and content. “Beowulf maþelode, bearn Ecgþeowes” fills
out an entire metrical line, introduces the character, and reminds
the reader of his heritage; “korythaiolos Hektor” similarly meets
a metrical need.47 Such references are consistent with a tradition’s
poetic requirements and so remain stable as long as the tradition
itself persists. The conservation of form leads to the well-studied
phenomenon of traditional referents being marked linguistically
with “poetic” features of a given language, features which are tradi-
tion-dependent and thus vary from one cultural context to another,48
but which in Modern English would include a word or phrase’s met-
rical prole, alliteration, and rhyme. Furthermore, because those
elements of a discourse that are not xed will of necessity change
more rapidly than those that are, xed elements like traditional ref-
erents are more likely to preserve archaisms. The interlinking of
formal features with potential archaism contributes to the marked
linguistic quality of the surface form of the traditional referent,
which by its being broken is already marked at the level of content.49
The combination of formal features and broken content makes
the traditional referent stand out from its discourse matrix, thus
enabling readers to extract from it patterns that will then be associ-
ated with traditionality or referentiality. And once a traditional ref-
erent has evolved, it can become a template for future traditional
referents, even if these themselves were never references to extra-
discourse information.50
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
A number of references in The Lord of the Rings exhibit some fea-
tures of traditional referents. The formal patterning of Elrond’s com-
parison of Frodo to heroes of the First Age can be made more obvious
if we lineate the passage and underscore the vocalic alliteration, bold-
face the consonantal alliteration, and italicize the rhymes:
elf-friends of old,
Hador
and Húrin,
and Túrin,
and Beren himself,
were assembled
The passage is organized paratactically, without subordination, and the
repeated coordinating conjunction “and” is an example of anaphora,
the repetition of words at the beginning of clauses for the purpose of
emphasis.51 The reference may not yet have fully become a traditional
referent that would be repeated in precisely its own form (we simply do
not have the data to tell), but it has many of the characteristics of one
in that it is both broken and marked with “poetic” linguistic features.
The /h/ and /r/ sounds in the epithet of “Hador the Goldenhaired”
(TT, IV, v, 287) do not all take primary stress and technically they all
do not alliterate, but they have started to evolve into a traditional refer-
ent. “Elrond the Halfelven,” used by Boromir, is similar (FR, II, ii, 259),
as is the Cats of Queen Berúthiel. Goldberry’s epithets “daughter of the
River,” “River-daughter” and “River-woman’s daughter” (FR, I, vi, 130;
vii, 134-37) not only include repetition of /r/ sounds but are metrical,
as is the often-used “Theoden king” (TT, III, ii, 35 and passim).
Because it is a kind of broken reference, a traditional referent cre-
ates an impression of depth in the same manner: by invoking a cultural
context not possessed by the reader. But a traditional referent also pro-
duces the impression of a different kind of depth. Because the form
of the referent is linguistically marked, readers interpret it as coming
from a source other than the text’s primary discourse. This phenom-
enon is most obvious when a character explicitly quotes an older text,
as when Sam recites some lines from “Gil-galad was an Elven-king,”
(FR, I, xi, 197-98), and it can also be seen when a character self-con-
sciously employs a proverb, as when Theoden says “But it has long
been said: oft evil will shall evil mar” (TT, III, xi, 200). But even when
there is not an explicit in-text indication, linguistically marked words
or phrases indicate the inuence of other discourses behind the main
discourse, suggesting that a character or narrator is referring to previ-
ously existing texts. Any text that is in some way culturally distant from
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
a reader can include broken references, but only one that is also old is
likely to contain traditional referents, whose inclusion, therefore, gives
the impression of a series of transmissions and thus implies the exis-
tence of a tradition—the same way a smoothly polished pebble in a
stream implies a long history of weathering.
Gaps and Inconsistencies
Akin to the use of broken references and traditional referents, the ab-
sence of important information and the presence of apparent contra-
dictions also help create the impression of a deep textual history. Read-
ers know intuitively that a work of ction, at least the level of content,
is under the absolute control of an author, who is able to eliminate
inconsistencies and contradictions from the text by at through the
act of revision. The presence of apparent contradictions, then, suggests
that the text is not entirely under control of the godlike author but
instead a compilation of different discursive sources, of multiple minds
and hands. Tolkien made multiple revisions to The Lord of the Rings,52 so
we know that he was not entirely averse to emending his text to elimi-
nate contradiction. For example, correspondent Rhona Beare pointed
out that although elves were said to ride horses without saddle, bridle
or rein,53 Glorndel’s horse in The Fellowship of the Ring was said to have
not only a bridle but also a bit.54 Tolkien acknowledged the apparent in-
consistency in a letter and emended accordingly, so that in later print-
ings the texts reads “headstall” (Letters, 279; FR, I, xii, 221). However,
he either did not catch or decided not to change the apparent contra-
diction in Glorndel’s saying that he would shorten the stirrups for
Frodo, or that the hobbit’s hand leaves the bridle and grips the hilt of
his sword when confronted by the Black Riders (FR, I, xii, 223, 225).
Similar inconsistencies are not unknown in other literary texts.
In the notes to “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien had
argued that “minor discrepancies” in Beowulf were not proof of com-
posite authorship, arguing that
It is very difcult, even in a newly invented tale of any
length, to avoid such defects; more so still in rehandling
old and oft-told tales. The points that are seized in the
study, with a copy that can be indexed and turned to and
fro (even if never read straight through as it was meant to
be), are usually such as may easily escape an author and
more easily his natural audience. . . . Modern printed tales,
that have presumably had the advantage of proof-correc-
tion, can even be observed to hesitate in the heroine’s
Christian name. (MC 46–47 n. 28)55
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
But even while asserting that “minor” discrepancy is not proof of com-
posite authorship, Tolkien points out that small discrepancies are the
result of “rehandling” older material, and thus the presence of such
apparent discrepancies would be characteristic of a text whose author
is making use of previously existing discourses, “old and oft-told tales.”
And Tolkien in fact makes a virtue of what might originally have
been error by not emending away other apparent contradictions in
the text. Most famously, Tom Bombadil states: “Eldest, that’s what I
am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and
the trees; Tom remembers the rst raindrop and the rst acorn” (FR,
I, vii, 142), but when Gandalf prepares Théoden for his meeting with
Treebeard, the wizard says that “Treebeard is Fangorn, the guardian
of the forest; he is the oldest of the Ents, the oldest living thing that
still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth” (TT, III, v, 102).
The seeming conict between the two claims has led to scholarly argu-
ment that has not been resolved.56 Tolkien might have nessed the
apparent contradiction, the way he said he could have with Glorn-
del’s horse’s tack,57 explaining away the discrepancy, but instead he let
it stand. Other inconsistencies also remain, although it is not always
known if Tolkien was aware of them.58 Among the most signicant
are the seeming loss of a full day from the chronology when Sam and
Frodo are in Shelob’s lair (a discrepancy that may or may not be inten-
tional);59 Aragorn’s claim that Sauron does not permit his name to
be spoken being contradicted by the words of both the messenger to
Dain and the Mouth of Sauron; Gandalf’s assertion at the Council of
Elrond that the Nazgûl possess the Nine Rings seeming not to agree
with either his earlier statement that Sauron gathered the Nine Rings
to himself and/or Galadriel’s that Sauron “holds” the Nine.60 And
there are other apparent inconsistencies in chronology and between
information in the main body of the text and both the appendices and
the posthumously published Silmarillion material, including Gildor
introducing himself as being of the house of Finrod.61
Tolkien also leaves gaps in the story, not just those in pseudo-refer-
ences (like the Cats of Queen Berúthiel), but also in unresolved plot
points. The identity of the old man seen by Aragorn, Legolas, and
Gimli at the eaves of Fangorn is never conrmed. Gandalf says it was
not him, but the man is wearing a hat, not the hood that Saruman is
said to wear (TT, III, ii, 45; TT, III, v,102, 108).62 The voice that says
“Verily I come, I come to you!” could be Frodo or the Ring itself (FR,
II, x, 417). The tale does not tell us what eventually happens to Shelob
(TT, IV, x, 339), and although the Lord of the Nazgûl is defeated, the
narrator only tells us that his voice was never heard again “in that age
of the world” (RK, V, vi, 117).63 The fate of the Entwives is also not
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
known from the text, with Treebeard at times seeming to assume that
they are extinct but at others hoping for a reunion (TT, III, iv, 78-81; x
191; RK, VI, vi, 259-60). In a letter Tolkien wrote
I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good
. . . [but] . . . some, of course may have ed east, or even
have become enslaved . . . If any survived so, they would
indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapproche-
ment would be difcult—unless experience of industrial-
ized and military agriculture had made them a little more
anarchic. I hope so. I don’t know. (Letters 179; our emphasis)
Tolkien certainly could have revised away all of these seeming
inconsistencies, but he did not. Some apparent contradictions he
explained in letters and others he ignored. Statements by authors that
they do not know things inside their texts may be psychologically true,
but the texts are ction and thus, in a reader’s mind, remain at a fun-
damental level under the author’s ultimate control.64 But a compiler has
no such freedom, since he can at times lack important information
that was unrecorded or has been lost. This imaginative stance justi-
es the appearance in Tolkien’s work of “the inevitable aws when
plots, motives, symbols, are re-handled and pressed into service of the
changed minds of a later time, used for the expression of ideas quite
different from those which produced them” (MC 72), and the pres-
ence of these “aws” implies both that behind the stories was a real his-
tory that their author was not at liberty to change and that the history
itself existed in the form of stories and texts that might not include all
the information desired by later readers. Discrepancies and gaps con-
trast with the general consistency of the references in the text, but they
end up contributing to the same impression of depth, making Tolk-
ien’s works seem as if they are not invented, but reported, not a new
creation, but a continuation of a long tradition.65
Un-Feigned Textuality
The culture and history of Middle-earth that underlies the main nar-
rative thus gives the impression of being mediated through texts, some
of which are referred to in the body of the narrative itself; some, like
the Red Book of Westmarch, invoked only in the book’s apparatus,
and some merely implied through variations in discourse or via the use
of what appear to be traditional referents.66 This textual depth, Nagy
argues, makes Tolkien’s works seem as though they are elements of a
corpus “within a textual world” and accounts in part for their myth-
like quality (“Great Chain” 240). The impression of textual depth
179
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
is created by the references to other, absent texts, which are for the
reader broken references (and for the author may be, in some cases,
pseudo-texts). For example, when Sam recites lines that Aragorn iden-
ties as being a translation, by Bilbo, of The Fall of Gil-galad, “which is
in an ancient tongue” (FR, I, ix, 197–98), Tolkien implies the existence
of at least two texts that are not contained in The Lord of the Rings:
the original lay and Bilbo’s complete translation. Similarly, Aragorn’s
recitation and retelling on Weathertop invokes both a poetic version
of the Beren and Lúthien story written in “the mode that is called
ann-thennath among the Elves” and also a written translation, unless
Aragorn’s comment that the poem is “hard to render in our Common
Speech,” and his evaluation that his poem “is but a rough echo” of the
original lay means that he is performing the remarkable compositional
feat of translating poetry from one language into poetry in another in
real time (FR, I, ix, 204–6). Nagy calls attention to similar implications
of textuality in the Túrin story, including the in-text statement that the
version in the published Silmarillion is a compression of an originally
much longer lay, the Narn i Hîn Húrin, which itself cannot be identi-
cal to the version of this text published in Unnished Tales, since a lay
would presumably be in poetry (written in Elvish by the Mannish poet
Dírhaval),67 while the published Narn is in prose.68 “The implication is
that Túrin is a compressed retextualization of another text. This is where
depth is again created by a claim of a unknown text and a correspond-
ing textual relation” (Nagy, “Great Chain,” 243).
As these examples demonstrate, some of the texts referenced or
implied in Tolkien’s works do not exist. There is no poetic Fall of Gil-
galad, and the identication of the claimed textual history of the Túrin
story with the extant fragments is, to say the least, problematic. Never-
theless, many of the texts referred to in Tolkien’s work did have inde-
pendent existences; they are not pseudo-texts like the Necronomicon or
The King in Yellow, but they are instead the posthumously published sto-
ries and poems. Just as the allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not
illusory, the sense of textuality is not just an impression. The vast back-
cloths of Tolkien’s narrative are in fact textual, arising as they do from
the written corpus of the Silmarillion material. The archive enables
copious reference (both broken and pseudo-), traditional referenti-
ality, the cohesion among references, and the apparent gaps and incon-
sistencies in the nal text, all of which combine to help produce the
famous impression of depth.
That impression is not limited to The Lord of the Rings. The Silmaril-
lion, Unnished Tales, The Children of Húrin, and the History of Middle-
earth volumes produce some of the same effects that we see in The Lord
of the Rings even though these texts, when taken as a whole, do not have
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
a source in the same way that The Lord of the Rings does in the Silmaril-
lion material. When Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, he could draw
upon his previous creations, but when he was writing the Silmarillion,
background material did not exist—at rst. Nevertheless, The Silmaril-
lion and the other posthumous works read as if they are very old, part
of a deep textual tradition. Some of this impression is no doubt due to
Tolkien’s ability to mimic the features of traditional texts and to write
archaic English accurately,69 and we do not want to underestimate the
importance of Tolkien’s inventive powers. But it seems likely that the
rich textual histories of the Silmarillion tales also contribute signi-
cantly to the impression of depth, because in some ways The Silmarillion
and other posthumously published texts have the same relationship to
their own archival antecedents as The Lord of the Rings does to the Sil-
marillion material. The archive is multi-layered and its textual history
reticulated and self-referential, with texts drawing upon other texts,
revisions made and cancelled, and new approaches tried and rejected.
This ontogeny is in part responsible for the aesthetic qualities of the
works,70 some of whose features may be emergent phenomena of the
“course of actual composition” (Shippey, Road 294–95, 313–17).
To substantiate this claim, in the remainder of this paper we will
trace in detail one particular Silmarillion tale, the story of Túrin,
reconstructing its evolution through multiple versions and across
many years, and then showing that its textual history is correlated with
variations (both gross and subtle) in its prose style. Stylistic variation
in the texts contributes, we argue, to the overall impressions of depth
and textuality in Tolkien’s work, hinting to the reader, perhaps even at
a subconscious level, that the text is not the pure invention of a single
author but rather a compilation of the work of multiple writers over
many years—exactly what, by adopting the conceit that he is trans-
lating the Red Book of Westmarch, Tolkien claims his work to be.71
We focus on the Túrin materials for several reasons. First, the tex-
tual background is extraordinarily rich, with different versions of the
narrative published in a number of volumes, so the sheer quantity of
material and number of stages of rewriting allows us to trace the evo-
lution of the story at a level of detail rarely available to the literary
scholar. Second, in two extremely important essays explaining Tolk-
ien’s technique, Nagy focused on the Túrin texts,72 so by examining
the tale in evolutionary and lexomic terms we can engage with and
supplement this theoretical argument with evidence of a different
nature. Third, examining the creation of the impression of depth in
the Túrin story is useful exactly because Tolkien did not intend it to
be used in The Lord of the Rings, and in various versions it represents
both earlier and later stages of his development as a writer. Finally, the
181
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
Table 1.
Published Variants of Tolkien’s Túrin Story
Title
Date of
Composi-
tion
Description
Chris-
topher
Tolkien’s
Siglum
Pub-
lished
in
Date
Pub-
lished
Turambar and
the Foalókë
1917–
1919 Prose narrative LT II 1984
Lay of the
Children of
Húrin (I)
1918–
1926
Poem in alliterative
long lines ILays 1985
Lay of the
Children of
Húrin (II)
1918–
1926
Poem in alliterative
long lines II Lays 1985
Sketch of the
Mythology 1926 Prose narrative in
synoptic style SShap-
ing 1986
Quenta 1930 Prose narrative Q Shap-
ing 1986
Quenta Sil-
marillion
1930s–
Nov. 1937 Prose narrative QS (C) Lost
Road 1987
Later Quenta
Silmarillion 1937–38
Prose narrative,
revision of Quenta
Silmarillion
QS (D) Lost
Road 1987
Earliest Annals
of Beleriand 1930s Annalistic treatment
of story AB1 Shap-
ing 1986
Later Annals
of Beleriand 1930s Annalistic treatment
of story AB2 Lost
Road 1987
Grey Annals 1950–51 Revision of Later
Annals of Beleriand GA1 WJ 1994
Grey Annals 1950s Revision and expan-
sion of Grey Annals GA WJ 1994
Narn i Chîn
Húrin 1950s Expansive prose tale
in novelistic form Narn UT 1980
“Of Túrin
Turambar”
1930s,
1950s,
[c.1977]
Content of Narn but
in synoptic style of
Quenta Silmarillion
synthesized by Chris-
topher Tolkien
S1977
The Children of
Húrin
1930s,
1950s
[c.2007]
Extended and ex-
pansive prose tale in
novelistic style
Chil-
dren 2007
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
story of Túrin was of personal importance to Tolkien,73 so in tracing its
development we can, perhaps, better understand the workings of his
mind as we examine the development of his technique.
Textual History of the Túrin Story
Tolkien’s Túrin story evolved over the course of multiple decades. Its
rst instantiation, “Turambar and the Foalókë” was “certainly in ex-
istence by 1919, if not before” (CH 9), and Tolkien worked on later
versions and elaborations after the publication of The Lord of the Rings
in the 1950s. As noted above, the published record is quite complex.
Túrin material has been published in The Silmarillion, Unnished Tales,
The Book of Lost Tales Part II, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Mid-
dle-earth, The Lost Road, The War of the Jewels and The Children of Húrin.
Christopher Tolkien sets out the chronology in the appendices of this
last book,74 but it seems useful to rehearse it here in some detail.
Figure 1 illustrates the textual history of the Túrin story. Each text
is listed under the heading of the volume in which it is published
with a probable date of composition. The rst variant of the story,
“Turambar and the Foalókë,” a prose text, was written some time
between 1917 and 1919. The plot (and some of the language) was
then developed into the poetic Lay of the Children of Húrin I, which
evolved into the Lay of the Children of Húrin II. Both of these texts, com-
posed in 1918, are written in very strict alliterative long lines that are
often characterized by extreme archaism. From the Lay (and perhaps
from the earlier prose tale), Tolkien drew the story of Húrin and his
children for the earliest “Sketch of the Mythology,” which he wrote
around 1926. The Túrin material in the subsequent Quenta (1926–30)
was based in part on the “Sketch,” but also directly on the Lay. Tolkien
revised and expanded the Quenta to produce the Quenta Silmarillion
in 1937, but the “dependence of the new version on the Lay is in some
places close, extending even to actual wording here and there” (Lost
Road 316). In a parallel development, around 1930 Tolkien began to
write the history of Beleriand in an annalistic style, drawing content
from the Quenta Silmarillion. These Annals of Beleriand were revised
and expanded later in the 1930s. The Quenta Silmarillion was the man-
uscript delivered to Allen and Unwin in 1937, and Tolkien abandoned
work on it when it was rejected, focusing instead on The Lord of the
Rings. When, after the completion of that work, Tolkien turned again
to the Silmarillion material, he proceeded on two fronts, revising
the Annals of Beleriand in 1950–51 to produce the Grey Annals, and
expanding and developing the Quenta Silmarillion Túrin material to
produce the much more elaborate Narn i Chîn Húrin. At some point
in the 1950s, however, there was an anastomosis or crossover in the
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
textual tradition: Tolkien reworked a good portion of the detailed
and, at times, novelistic Narn into the terser style of the Grey Annals.
When Tolkien stopped work on the Túrin material, there existed no
complete text in either style.
In editing The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien was faced with the
challenge of producing a coherent text from very disparate mate-
rials. As Douglas Kane has documented, the nal published text
was stitched together from a wide range of antecedents. Most sig-
nicantly with regard to the Túrin materials, Christopher Tolkien
converted the more elaborated, slow-paced style of the Narn into the
summarizing style of the Quenta Silmarillion and then appended the
text from the Grey Annals (some of which, as noted above, had been
epitomized from the Narn by J.R.R. Tolkien) at the point in the nar-
rative where the Narn text ended. The Narn itself was published in
Unnished Tales, and the many antecedents appear in The History of
Middle-earth volumes. In 2007 Christopher Tolkien published The
Children of Húrin, in which reedited material from the Narn, the Grey
Figure 1. The Textual History of Tolkien’s Túrin Story
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
Annals and other sources was brought together to produce a narrative
from the birth of Húrin to the death of Túrin.
This messy textual history produced not only a large archive of texts
but also a reticulated genealogy for most of them, in which portions of
different works are inuenced by portions of others that in turn had
multiple antecedents. The end result is similar to the complex of medi-
eval texts that surround the Legend of the Volsungs (Shippey Road
310–14), whose precise relationships with each other and with any
potential archetype of the story are not entirely understood, but which,
as a whole, produce the impression that there was once a coherent
(even historical) kernel of story, now obscured by an accreting, rami-
fying, and evolving set of textual traditions.
Gross Heterogeneity of the Prose Style
As discussed above, the absence of information can create a sense of
textual depth. Broken references can imply the existence of a culture
shared by the characters but not the reader; seeming inconsistencies
and gaps suggest that events occurred long enough ago that they are
no longer remembered and so may have generated conicting or in-
complete representations. But the sense of depth is not solely gener-
ated by content. Variations in style also imply the inuences of different
authors or sources, thus giving the impression that a narrative so char-
acterized would have had a complicated textual history. The presence
of a quotation indicates a source. An unattributed passage that sounds
like it is a quotation implies almost as strongly that other texts are in-
uencing an author. Sounding like a quotation, therefore, is one way
that the prose style of one passage of a text can be detectably different
from that of another. Segments of a text may differ in vocabulary (both
content and function words), sentence length or structure, repetition
or avoidance of rhyme and alliteration, and other linguistic features.
A consistent variation of features between any two text segments gives
the impression that a text is not simply the invention of a single author
but instead has a history of compilation and transmission. Stylistic het-
erogeneity within given texts therefore contributes to the impression
of depth in Tolkien’s works. 75
In “The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of Beleriand,” Nagy argues
that in the published Silmarillion “styles change within units of text,”
with the “resulting disunity in the 1977 text producing a tting effect”:
the impression that The Silmarillion is a compilation of multiple
sources.76 “Tolkien succeeds in implying, merely by the stylistic dif-
ferences, that the Silmarillion is indeed a compendious volume ‘made
long afterwards from sources of great diversity’” (21).77 Tolkien’s prose,
Nagy notes, contains many instances of marked language, including
185
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
anaphora, alliteration, rhyme, polysyndeton, parataxis and repetition.
“There are passages, short strings of sentences, individual sentences or
even single clauses which read as if they were poetry adapted to prose,”
implying that the text as we have it was at some stage based on poetic
texts that are unavailable to the reader in the “textual world” (22).
The poetic language therefore creates the same sorts of effects as the
broken references or traditional referents, hinting to the reader that
there is a much larger culture, possessed of long-standing traditions
(both textual and otherwise) beneath the surface narrative.
We know that extensive textual traditions do underlie the text’s sur-
face form. Tolkien had indeed composed several long poetic works,
most signicantly the version of the Túrin story in alliterative long-
lines and the long poem on Beren and Lúthien in octosyllabic rhyming
couplets, but also other, shorter poems on Middle-earth subjects.78 A
reasonable hypothesis, therefore, might be that lines from that poetic
archive would appear in the prose narrative of the published Silmar-
illion, creating some of that text’s stylistic heterogeneity. Nagy does
note several places where we can use Christopher Tolkien’s editions to
identify those passages of the prose text that preserve the language of
the underlying poetry, a “relatively large number [of which] go back
explicitly to the verse Túrin,” such as: “bearing a burden heavier than
their bonds” and “that grief was graven on the face of Túrin and never
faded” and “he walked as one without wish or purpose” (29). But Nagy
nds no direct poetic sources for other, very similar passages of the
Túrin story, some of which come from parts of the narrative that the
verse text did not reach,79 and others that appear not to have sources
in either the verse or prose antecedents.80
The impression of depth created by the presence of poetic lan-
guage is similar to that created by a reference. In both cases the refer-
ence invokes pars pro toto a larger body of material: for the reference,
a general culture; for the poetic interpolation, the subset of that cul-
ture that is a textualized tradition. The “poetic” passages that are not
based upon the extant verse texts—such as “tall and terrible on that
day looked Túrin, and the heart of the host was upheld as he rode
on the right hand of Orodreth” (S 212)81—are analogous to pseudo-
references. Just as pseudo-references produce in the reader the same
effects as broken references, so too do both types of poetic interpola-
tion signal the participation of the surface narrative in a textual tradi-
tion not available to the reader.
Tolkien created the broken interpolations in The Silmarillion text by
slightly modifying the syntax of his earlier poems and printing them as
prose. Features of the language that would not have been particularly
unusual in poetry thus became marked when they were transferred
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
into the prose narrative, making the interpolated material distinct
from its surrounding matrix even when the text is not typographically
distinct. Tolkien does something similar in The Lord of the Rings with the
speech of Tom Bombadil (FR, I, v, 131–32; vi, 135–40), much of which,
as Shippey notes, falls into “strongly marked two-stress phrases with or
without rhyme or alliteration, usually with feminine or unstressed end-
ings” (Road 107). But Bombadil’s poetic speaking is not lineated or
printed in italics like the other poems in the text. Pseudo-references in
the Túrin chapter are created similarly, with the difference that instead
of converting an existing verse passage into prose, Tolkien produced
new prose passages with many of the same marked linguistic features
as those passages that drew directly on older poetry.
We cannot conclude, therefore, that the stylistic heterogeneity and
thus the impression of textual depth given by The Silmarillion is entirely
the result of the poetic origin of some of the passages, since other pas-
sages that appear to be just as “poetic” (and therefore just as interpo-
lated) do not have their ultimate sources in poems. When we follow the
evolution of the Túrin story word by word through its various textual
incarnations, we nd that language from the poems does not in gen-
eral survive through multiple revisions,82 so that there is very little of the
alliterative “Lay of the Children of Húrin” in The Silmarillion. Nagy notes
that many of the sections of the text that appear most marked by poetic
language “evolved sometimes suddenly, sometimes by slow steps of
renement, sometimes obviously by editorial action” (“Adapted Text”
25).83 The poetic features of the prose narrative evolved independently
and signicantly later in the process. Some passages may have been
shaped by the patterns of language features in the interpolated poetry
that Tolkien then imitated, but the textual history does not strongly
support this hypothesis, as there is no particular correlation between
the appearance of broken- and pseudo-interpolations (which we might
expect if the broken interpolations were inuencing Tolkien to imitate
their features). Instead, as Nagy rst noted, we see a concentration of
poetic features in “central scenes, climaxes or privileged points in the
narrative” (“Adapted Text” 25), passages that were, as examination of
the textual history shows, extensively revised and reworked.
The process of copying, revising re-copying, and converting a text
from one genre to another (for example, from narrative prose to verse
to annalistic prose and back to narrative prose) creates a textual tradi-
tion, where “with time the work incorporated many layers and changes
that are preserved or discarded according to the needs of the actual
version worked on” (Nagy “Adapted Text” 25). That the tradition was
the production of a single author rather than of a distributed network
of contributors does not prevent it from developing according to the
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
dynamics of more “traditional” traditions. Quite the opposite: that all
the texts were written by Tolkien, that it was his single mind through
which they passed and re-passed as they were copied, revised, and rein-
vented, simply speeds up the cultural evolution that occurs in distrib-
uted traditions. Processes that might otherwise take a century or more
could occur in decades or even years. The iterative copying and revi-
sion of the text generates the same evolutionary pressures that shape
traditional referents.84 “Poetic” passages are more likely to be repro-
duced in their own forms than unmarked language with the same
content because the linguistically marked passages are mnemonically
superior and so less likely to be modied.85 Even though Tolkien is
producing written texts—presumably less labile than purely oral tradi-
tions—he is not forced to copy them verbatim. A text transferred from
the page through the eyes to the brain and then back to the page
through the hand is shaped by various selection pressures. The form
on the page has a certain inertia,86 but it may be that only selected fea-
tures of that form remain after the passage through a mind: plot, per-
haps, or theme, or a pattern of sounds.
We see this evolution happening in the history of a short passage
describing the killing of Beleg. As Nagy shows, although the passage
in The Silmarillion derives directly from the prose tradition, it has some
formal links with the verse text (“Adapted Text” 30):
Then Túrin stood stone still and silent, staring on that dreadful
death, knowing what he had done. (S 208)
stone-faced he stood standing frozen
on that dreadful death his deed knowing. (ll. 1273-74;
Lays 47)87
Note that the particular alliterative sounds /s/ and /d/ have come
through to the nal version as well as the pairing of “stone” with “stood”
and “dreadful” with “death,” but the precise wording has not been re-
produced, demonstrating how an author’s mind can transfer some for-
mal patterns even in the absence of verbatim copying. Note also that the
later, prose version of the lines is more poetically effective than the orig-
inal verse. The cliché “stone-faced” has been replaced by the descriptive
(though still slightly clichéd) “stone still,” a collocation that extends the
alliteration to an additional word. The evolution of traditional referents
out of broken references and the appearance of pseudo-interpolations
(which cannot in their formal features be distinguished from broken
interpolations) late in the textual history of the Túrin story shows a
purely textual creation of a single author following the same patterns
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
documented for oral traditions (both living and historical).
88
Tolkien’s
works give the impression of depth not only because he consciously
imitated the features of other texts that produce this same aesthetic ef-
fect—in their modern readers if not their original audiences—but be-
cause his writing process
89
generated the same dynamics of replication,
circulation, and adaptation as do distributed cultural traditions.
Subtle Heterogeneity of the Prose Style
Because it is linguistically marked, the poetic language that appears
in The Silmarillion’s prose is relatively easy to detect. The presence of
alliteration, rhythm, polysyndeton, and other formal features in some
places in the text and their absence in others implies to the reader
that the text is part of both a textual tradition and a culture. Yet this
impression of depth can be felt in places within Tolkien’s works that
do not appear to contain interpolations or pseudo-interpolations.
Throughout the Tolkienian corpus there is a subtle stylistic variation
that, while not as obvious as interpolations, broken references, or
traditional referents, nevertheless generates in the reader a similar
sense that the text has deep roots, that it is part of a textual tradition
and arises from a culture. This stylistic heterogeneity has to this point
been difcult to document objectively, but new developments in the
computer-assisted statistical analysis of texts may be of some use. In
what follows we use “lexomic” methods to create a visual representa-
tion of the distribution of vocabulary in The Silmarillion’s “Of Túrin
Turambar,” which we then interpret in light of the Túrin story’s evolu-
tion, demonstrating a correlation between textual history and nal
vocabulary distribution.
Developed at Wheaton College with the partial support of grants
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, “lexomic” methods
are an outgrowth of work on computational stylometry by John Bur-
rows, David Hoover, and others.90 Enabled by the recent proliferation
of high-quality digital editions, lexomic analyses employ computer-
assisted statistical techniques to identify patterns, which are then inter-
preted using traditional literary methods. The techniques discussed
here all can be performed using the Wheaton research group’s soft-
ware, which is browser-interfaced and freely available in the Lexos
Integrated Workow at http://lexos.wheatoncollege.edu.91
We begin by scrubbing an electronic edition of a text, removing
punctuation, changing capital letters to lower-case, and deleting for-
matting codes and other tags. Scrubbing allows us to be certain that
we count king as being the same word as King and (king) and do not
count commas or periods as “words.” After the text is scrubbed, we
divide it into segments and then tabulate the words in both the entire
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
text and in each segment. In order to allow us to compare segments
of different sizes, we compute relative frequencies for each word by
dividing the number of times the word appears in a segment by the
total number of words in that segment.
92
From this data we produce an
n-dimensional array for each segment, where n represents the number
of distinct words used in the entire collection of texts being studied.
We then use the free implementation of hierarchical, agglomerative
cluster analysis
to group the segments.
93
This clustering method uses
a dissimilarity metric for the grouping of texts without pre-specifying
a number of groups. The dissimilarity or distance measure is com-
puted for each pair of segments, and these distances are then used
to create groupings, or clades,
94
of segments by clustering those that
are most similar (i.e., have the shortest distance between them).
95
In
the analyses presented in this paper, we employ the most commonly
used metric, Euclidean distance,
96
to calculate the distance between
the multidimensional averages of the segments and their groupings.
We then use hierarchical agglomerative clustering to order these dis-
tances and construct a branching diagram, or dendrogram, of their
relationships.
In a dendrogram, the dissimilarity between clades is represented
by the vertical length of the line connecting them.
97
Figure 2 illus-
trates the similarities of four hypothetical segments or texts. Any levels
of the branching diagram can be identied as clades, which we label
from left to right using Greek letters, rst marking all clades at the
same level of the hierarchy and then descending to the next level and
again labeling left to right. Thus in gure 2, clade contains segment
A, clade contains B, C, and D, and clade contains only segments C
and D. A clade with no subsidiary branches, like clade , is said to be
Figure 2. Sample Dendrogram
190
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
simplicifolious.
The geometry of the dendrogram indicates that segments C and D in
gure 1 are most similar, segment B is closer to clade , which contains
both C and D, and segment A is least like the other segments. The ver-
tical distance between segments C and D is smaller than that between
the simplicifolious clade and bifolious , indicating that segment A is
quite different from the other segments.
To produce the dendrograms in this paper, we used the Lexos Inte-
grated Workow to scrub an electronic version of chapter 21 of The
Silmarillion, “Of Túrin Turambar,” thus removing all formatting and
punctuation as well as forcing all letters to lowercase. We divided the
text into 1500-word segments98 and used hierarchical agglomerative
clustering to produce gure 3.
Before we examine the contents of the segments, it is useful to ana-
lyze the geometry of the dendrogram. At the highest level, gure 3 sep-
arates into two clades, , made up of segments 1–5, and , containing
segments 6–9. Clade then divides into and the simplicifolious clade
(segment 2). Clade further separates into two bifolious clades,
and , which contain, respectively, segments 1 and 4 and segments 3
Figure 3: Dendrogram of “Of Túrin Turambar” cut into 1500-word segments
191
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
and 5. Clade also divides into two bifolious clades, (segments 6 and
9) and (7 and 8). That each side of the high-level division between
and contains an unbroken sequence of segments shows that there
is a signicant difference in vocabulary distribution between the rst
and second halves of the text.99 That (segment 2) is simplicifolious
within indicates that this section of the text (words 1501–3000) is
signicantly different in vocabulary distribution from all of its neigh-
boring segments (although not different enough to be placed outside
clade ). The relatively consistent vertical distances between branch-
points indicates that the divisions indicated by the dendrogram are not
merely minor chance variations in word choice but are instead reason-
ably robust distinctions in the total vocabulary distribution of the seg-
ments. Previous research has shown that generally homogeneous texts
produce “stepwise” dendrograms in which each terminal leaf joins sep-
arately, rather than bunching in clades,100 so the dendrogram in gure
3 is evidence that the vocabulary of the “Of Túrin Turambar” chapter
of The Silmarillion is distributed heterogeneously, supporting with rea-
sonably objective evidence Nagy’s subjective impression of “disunity”
(which he nds “tting”) in the text (“Adapted Text” 21).
But the narrative content of the Túrin story does not fully explain
the dendrogram geometry. The division between the two clades occurs
in the middle of the sack of Nargothrond, and although this certainly
is an important episode in the story, it does not appear to be the most
signicant turning point.101 The Túrin story does not naturally break
into two narrative pieces here, and there are as many differences in
characters and actions within clades as there are between them. The
early material is just as tragic in tone as the later (for instance, the
death of Beleg in the rst half is paralleled by the death of Nienor in
the second), nor are there appreciably more speeches or descriptive
scenes in either section. Furthermore, there are no obvious stylistic
differences between the text that comes before and that which comes
after this episode, no particularly frequent uses of rare words or spe-
cic grammatical constructions. The heterogeneous vocabulary distri-
bution is therefore not immediately visible in the surface form or the
content of the text.
But although the narrative content of the segments is not corre-
lated with the dendrogram geometry, the textual history of chapter
21 of The Silmarillion is. As discussed above and illustrated in gure
1, the Túrin story has a complex ontogeny, beginning as far back as
the original “Turambar and the Foalókë” story written in 1919, and
continuing through the 1950s. After the publication of The Lord of the
Rings, the tale of the Children of Húrin became “the chief narrative c-
tion of Middle-earth after the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings,” and
192
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
UT
SMI
UT
GA
GA
Sources
SMII
LB
Sources
GA
TF
UT
LB
Sources
UT
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
Sources
TF
LRI
Sources
GA
Sources
SMIII
Rescue of Túrin, death and burial of Beleg, Eithel Ivrin (403-
468)
Laer Cú Beleg,
Gwindor travel to
Nargothrond (469-
492)
Unfinished Tales
SMII
SMII
SMII
Thingol's
pardon,
Beleg's
search (88-
98)
Beleg leaves Doriath, finds Túrin and
the outlaws and fails to bring Túrin
back (99-138)
Beleg returns to Menengroth, gifts given,
Anglachel and Eöl, lembas, departure (139-
186)
Morwen in Dorlómin
Túrin to go to
Doriath, Narn I Hîn
Húrin (15-40)
Nienor born,
Túrin in
Doriath, Dragon-
helm, Beleg (41-63)
3
4 5 6
SMIII
SMIII
Túrin, Mîm and the Petty
Dwarves (235-269)
Beleg arrives at Bar-
in-Danwedh (170-
299)
Dor-Cúarthol, the might
of Angband, spies (300-
330)
Betrayal of Mîm and
capture of Túrin (331-
361)
SMII
Ribbon Diagram
Sources and Content of "Of Túrin Turumbar"
The Shaping of Middle Earth I (SMI) The Shaping of Middle Earth II (SMII) The Shaping of Middle Earth III (SMIII)
The Lost Road I (LRI) The Lost Road II (LRII) Unfinished Tales (UT) The Grey Annals (GA)
Turambar and the Foalókë (TF) The Lays of Beleriand (LB)
Outlaws, Mîm, Amon Rûdh, Bar-en-
Danwedh (187-234)
Rían,
Morwen,
Huor and
Húrin (1-
14)
Saeros, Túrin leaves
Doriath (64-87)
1 2
UT UT
LRII
LRII
UT
LRII
III cont.
LRII
LRII
UT
Beleg tracks the orcs, Gwindor
, orc
camp (362-402)
LRI LRII UT
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
Sources
LRI
GA
GA
Sources
SMI
Sources
GA
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
Sources
UT
GA
UT
UT
Sources
Sources
GA
SMIII
The Grey Annals
SMII
Sporadic use of Unfinished Tales
The Grey Annals
Gwindor, Finduilas,
Agarwaen,
Mormegil, Gurthang
(493-523)
Mablung finds Nienor; they find other
elves; attacked by orcs, Nienor escapes and
runs through the woods, reaches Brethil
(853-892)
Nienor at Haudh-en-
Elleth, found by Túrin
and named Niniel. Niniel
beloved of Brandir, loves
Turambar (893-925)
Brandir, Niniel, Turambar, wedding, dragon
news, Dorlas, Hunthor and Turambar to
seek dragon. Niniel and Brandir follow (926-
979)
9
10 11
7 8
UT
UT
SMII
The Grey Annals
Grey Annals
SMIII
Gwindor and Finduilas, Bridge of
Nargothrond, fame of the Mormegil,
Morwen and Nienor to Doriath (524-
578)
Messangers of Círdan,
warning of Ulmo, Handir
slain, Nargothrond
attacked (579-608)
Battle of Tumhalad,
Orodreth slain,
Gwindor rebukes
Túrin (609-629)
Túrin to Nargothrond, Glaurung and Túrin, Finduilas, lies of Glaurung
(630-699)
Glaurung settles in
Nargathrond, Túrin to Dor-
Lómin, winter, finds
Morwen gone (700-729)
129 cont.
6 cont.
Unfinished Tales
SMII, III
SMII
Túrin kills Brodda, departs from Dor-lómin, search for Finduilas,
Haudh-en-Elleth, Dorlas, Ephel Brandir, Turambar (730-799)
News of Mormegil to Doriath, Morwen,
Mablung and Nienor, Glaurung overwhelms
the company, Nienor enchanted (800-852)
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
Sources
UT
Sources
Sources
The Grey Annals
UT Unfinished Tales UT
SMII
SMII
Brandir finds Niniel and leads her away,
Niniel finds Turambar and Glaurung.
Enchantment broken. Suicide at Cabed-en-
Aras (1026-1073)
Brandir returns to Nen Girth
and gives news to people.
Túrin returns (1074-1109)
Wrath of
Turin,
Brandir
slain (1110-
1126)
Mablung arrives,
Turin hears news
of Morwen and
Nienor (1127-
1046)
Hints of TF
UT
TF
12 cont. 13 14
Cabed-en-Aras again,
Gurthang speaks, Death of
Túrin, burial and lament,
headstone (1147-1178)
Three companions travel to find the dragon.
Dorlas is a coward. Crossing of the Teiglin,
dragon fight, Glaurung killed. (980-1025)
Figure 4. Ribbon Diagram of Content and Sources of “Of Túrina Turambar,” part 1
Figure 5. Ribbon Diagram of Content and Sources of “Of Túrin Turambar,” parts
2 and 3
Figure 6. Ribbon Diagram of Content and Sources of “Of Túrin Turambar,” part 4
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
Sources
LRI
GA
GA
Sources
SMI
Sources
GA
Silmarillion
content
(line nos.)
Segments of
1000 words
Sources
Sources
UT
GA
UT
UT
Sources
Sources
GA
SMIII
The Grey Annals
SMII
Sporadic use of Unfinished Tales
The Grey Annals
Gwindor, Finduilas,
Agarwaen,
Mormegil, Gurthang
(493-523)
Mablung finds Nienor; they find other
elves; attacked by orcs, Nienor escapes and
runs through the woods, reaches Brethil
(853-892)
Nienor at Haudh-en-
Elleth, found by Túrin
and named Niniel. Niniel
beloved of Brandir, loves
Turambar (893-925)
Brandir, Niniel, Turambar, wedding, dragon
news, Dorlas, Hunthor and Turambar to
seek dragon. Niniel and Brandir follow (926-
979)
9
10 11
7 8
UT
UT
SMII
The Grey Annals
Grey Annals
SMIII
Gwindor and Finduilas, Bridge of
Nargothrond, fame of the Mormegil,
Morwen and Nienor to Doriath (524-
578)
Messangers of Círdan,
warning of Ulmo, Handir
slain, Nargothrond
attacked (579-608)
Battle of Tumhalad,
Orodreth slain,
Gwindor rebukes
Túrin (609-629)
Túrin to Nargothrond, Glaurung and Túrin, Finduilas, lies of Glaurung
(630-699)
Glaurung settles in
Nargathrond, Túrin to Dor-
Lómin, winter, finds
Morwen gone (700-729)
129 cont.
6 cont.
Unfinished Tales
SMII, III
SMII
Túrin kills Brodda, departs from Dor-lómin, search for Finduilas,
Haudh-en-Elleth, Dorlas, Ephel Brandir, Turambar (730-799)
News of Mormegil to Doriath, Morwen,
Mablung and Nienor, Glaurung overwhelms
the company, Nienor enchanted (800-852)
193
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
Tolkien spent a great deal of energy writing, emending, and revising a
ramifying collection of texts (CH 280–81). As a result, the Túrin mate-
rial is “in some respects the most tangled and complex of all the nar-
rative elements in the story of the First Age” (UT 6). To produce the
coherent narrative in the published Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien
had to stitch together multiple texts that had been written at different
times and in different styles. The ribbon diagrams102 in Figures 4–6 show
that a major shift in the source material in “Of Túrin Turambar” corre-
sponds to the division in the dendrogram between clades and . The
material that clusters in clade is based most proximately on the prose
text of the Narn i Chîn Húrin as epitomized, shortened, and revised by
Christopher Tolkien to match the style of the Quenta Silmarillion. That
in clade , however, is taken, almost word for word, from a different
text, the Grey Annals, because “from the battle of Tumhalad to the end,
the text of the Grey Annals was virtually the sole source of the latter
part of Chapter 21, ‘Of Túrin Turambar,’ in the published Silmarillion”
(WJ 144–45).103 The close similarity of The Silmarillion text to the Grey
Annals begins at word 7212, with “Then Gwindor said to Túrin. . . .” (S
212), a close correspondence between the change in source and the
high-level geometry of the dendrogram.
Every segment of clade has substantial wording in common with
the Annals, whereas the text in the clade varies signicantly and is
often similar to the text of the Narn published in Unnished Tales.104
The reasons for this divide are to be found in the textual history of the
Túrin story, which at this point is reticulated. The original Quenta of
1926–1930 is the source for both the later Quenta Silmarillion and the
Annals of Beleriand; and from the former evolved the Narn i Chîn Húrin,
from the latter, the Grey Annals. But, after the plot of the story reaches
the Battle of Tumhalad, the Narn rather than the Annals of Beleriand
becomes the immediate antecedent of the Grey Annals: “The long nar-
rative in the Grey Annals was based directly on the nal text of that in the
Narn,” Christopher Tolkien explains, “and was a reduction of that text,
congruent with it at virtually all points” (WJ 144). The high-level hetero-
geneity of the vocabulary distribution in “Of Túrin Turambar,” there-
fore, is a product of the text’s ontogeny. The dendrogram is detecting
the difference in vocabulary distribution between sections in which
Christopher Tolkien converted his father’s novelistic narrative style to
an annalistic style, and passages in which J.R.R. Tolkien converted his
own novelistic narrative style to an annalistic one. The text gives the
impression of the “disunity” of multiple authorship because, at some
level, it has multiple authors. The lexomic analysis demonstrates objec-
tively that even though we may not be consciously aware of consistent
but subtle variations in vocabulary, such variations are present.
194
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
In addition to the high-level bifurcation in vocabulary distribution,
we also see the inuence of disparate sources within clade , in which
segment 2, comprised of words 1501–3000, is single-leafed. This pas-
sage is the only portion of the Silmarillion chapter that does not have
a signicant antecedent in the 1930s. Tolkien had stopped work on
the manuscript of the Quenta Silmarillion in 1937, abandoning the
text at the point in the story where Túrin becomes an outlaw after his
self-imposed exile from Doriath (CH 274, 284) and not returning to
the narrative until after the completion of The Lord of the Rings. But, as
Christopher Tolkien notes, at this point in the text “the Narn is here
at its least nished,” so in preparing the text of The Silmarillion he
“derived, by necessity, much of this section of the tale of Túrin” from
outlines of possible turns in the story and a variety of materials “of
extraordinary complexity in their variety and interrelations” (UT
6–7). These varied materials were written by J.R.R. Tolkien de novo in
the 1950s, not directly epitomized or adapted from preexisting mate-
rial, and then these were revised, synthesized, and in some cases com-
posed by Christopher Tolkien to create the published narrative. The
passage is different enough from its Narn-based neighboring segments
to be simplicifolious within clade , but it is sufciently closely tied
to these segments by Christopher Tolkien’s necessarily heavier edito-
rial hand to remain inside the higher-level clade and not link with the
Grey Annals-based segments in clade , which were much less strongly
inuenced by the editor. There are thus both gross and subtle varia-
tions in vocabulary distribution (and hence prose style) throughout
the chapter.
In addition to providing objective evidence to support the impres-
sion of stylistic “disunity” (Nagy “Adapted Text” 21), lexomic methods
can be used to further examine the heterogeneity of the vocabulary in
Tolkien’s text. For example, we can reduce the size of each segment
to get better resolution of features (although doing so risks allowing
the dendrogram geometry to be inuenced by random uctuations in
the data). When we use these smaller segments, we do see additional
clumps of similar vocabulary distributions within the text, but these
are not in their broad contours substantially different from those dis-
cussed above, and their detailed analysis would take us beyond the
scope of the current paper.105 The examination of the text divided into
1500-word segments establishes the objective existence of vocabulary
heterogeneity in the Túrin story, which is sufcient for the present
argument about Tolkien’s creation of the impression of depth. Differ-
ences in vocabulary distribution are not easily identied by the unaided
mind, but, since they can be detected by lexomic methods, we know
that they are present in the text. The subtle heterogeneity of style is
195
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
characteristic of old texts, such as Beowulf, that have passed through
multiple stages of transmission, editing, and augmentation.106 We infer
that the patchwork of subtle stylistic differences helps generate the
peculiar “feel” of both Beowulf and Tolkien’s work, a subtle, perhaps
even unconscious impression in the reader that the text has a deep,
multi-authored textual history.
The correlation of textual history and dendrogram geometry may
very well be an epiphenomenon of the dynamics of copying and
recopying rather than of conscious artistic design. Tolkien may not
have been aware of the effect or even of the existence of subtle vocab-
ulary heterogeneity in old texts, and even if he was, he may not have
consciously tried (or been able) to imitate it in his own writings. Nev-
ertheless the complex ontogeny of Tolkien’s published texts created
the effects of an elaborate textual history, not necessarily through the
direct imitation of medieval texts, but because Tolkien’s writing pro-
cess—and Christopher Tolkien’s editing—ended up producing the
same kinds of heterogeneity found in genuinely old works of literature.
Conclusions
The word “impression” that Tolkien used in its description makes the
famous “impression of depth” seem like an entirely subjective phenom-
enon, an illusion brought about through artistry (or luck). But just as
the allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not illusory, so too is the impres-
sion of depth more than just an impression. As we have shown above,
specic features of Tolkien’s work give it linguistic, textual, historical,
and cultural depth. The most signicant of these is the inuence of
the massive textual archive that underlies both The Lord of the Rings and
Tolk ie n’s ot he r wo rk s. Tol ki en m ay n ot ha ve e ve r artic ul at ed t he m eth-
ods by which he reproduced the aesthetic effects of Beowulf or Sir Ga-
wain and the Green Knight,
107
and he may not even have tried consciously
to imitate these texts, but his composition and revision process created
works of literature that produce the same impressions in his readers
as are experienced when reading works of medieval literature whose
cultural matrices are no longer intact. The Lord of the Rings and The Sil-
marillion are not genuinely old, but they are genuinely textual, and they
are genuinely traditional. Their creation may not have been distributed
among many individuals over many years, and they are not the direct
products of multiple minds, voices, or hands, but their complex circu-
lation and recirculation through the mind, eyes and pen and eyes of
J.R.R. Tolkien produced the same features of broken and pseudo-ref-
erences, gaps and inconsistencies, and heterogeneity of the prose style
that evolve in more conventional traditions. Christopher Tolkien’s edit-
ing of these texts only extended and further developed the tradition,
196
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
making the Túrin story in The Silmarillion even more like an ancient text
possessed of a long history of transmission and evolution. Merely by be-
ing embedded in their own culture, readers have developed intuitions
that allow them to recognize the characteristics of such traditional texts.
The presence of these qualities in Tolkien’s literary works produces the
subtle but pervasive impression of cultural, historical, and textual depth
that makes his writings qualitatively different from—and aesthetically
superior to—both their antecedents and their imitations.
Notes
1. The authors would like to thank members of the Wheaton
Lexomics Research Group for their intellectual support, especially
professors Mark LeBlanc and Michael Kahn and research partners
Elie Chauvet, Leah Smith, Allison Dennett, Natasha Piirainen,
Richard Neal, Bryan Jensen, Devin Delno, Julia Morneau, Helen
Meng, Ann Marie Brasacchio, Vicky Li, Rosetta Berger, Donald
Bass, Alicia Herbert, Emily Bowman, Phoebe Boyd, Amos Jones,
Courtney LaBrie, and Shiqi Zhen. Visiting faculty Scott Kleinman,
Sarah Downey, and Yvette Kisor and visiting researchers Carol
Mannix, Veronica Kerekes, and Douglas Rafe also contributed
signicantly to the project. The authors would also like to thank
Verlyn Flieger, David Bratman, and two anonymous reviewers for
To lk ie n S tu di e s who signicantly improved the essay with their com-
ments and critiques.
Some of the research in this article was supported by two
grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, NEH
HD-50300-08 (2008) and NEH PR-50112-11(2011-2012). Any
views, ndings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in
this publication do not necessarily reect those of the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
Corresponding author: mdrout@wheatoncollege.edu.
2. Tolk ie n u sed t he phrase t o d escri be th e ef fe ct of Beowulf, the whole
of which “must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds
of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pa-
gan but noble and fraught with a deep signicance—a past that
itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of
sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justication of
the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more
pagan, and desperate than the foreground” (MC 27).
3. For the foundations of this analysis, see Christopher Tolkien’s
Foreword to The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1–7); Shippey (Road,
223-26, Author 261–63).
197
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
4. LT I, 13.
5. Carpenter (185-87); Shadow (3, 11–13).
6. See Glyer, and also Shippey (Road 223–35, 244–53).
7. In tracing the various iterations of the Túrin story we are much
indebted to Douglas Kane’s Arda Reconstructed and Charles Noad’s
“On the Construction of The Silmarillion.”
8. See Table 1.
9. LT II (69–116).
10. WJ (3–4).
11. As Christopher Tolkien says in the Foreword to The Silmarillion, “it
became long ago a xed tradition . . . but it was far indeed from
being a xed text” (S 7). See also Shippey (Author 228–29).
12. For discussion see Lays (3); Shaping (1); CH (273–4).
13. This text is entitled “Narn i Hîn Húrin” in Unnished Tales be-
cause Christopher Tolkien was concerned that readers would
pronounce the ch in “Chîn” as a voiceless palato-alveolar affri-
cate, like the initial sound Modern English “chin,” rather than
giving the digraph the phonetic value of a voiceless palatal frica-
tive, as in German dich (Lost Road 322).
14. The others are the Beren and Lúthien story and The Fall of Gon-
dolin. See Letters (7, 214–15).
15. No analogous archive has been published from later fantasy
works inspired by Tolkien, including, among others, series by
Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, and David Eddings. It is a
commonplace that fantasy authors invent and compile signicant
background material, but Tolkien’s was textualized in a way that
the others’ seem not to have been.
16. Among these, the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, the Pnakotic
Manuscripts, and the city of R’lyeh. For the adaptable nature
of the Lovecraftian mythos, see Schultz. Compare also Robert
W. Chambers’ references to the imaginary The King in Yellow or
Frank Herbert’s many epigraphs in Dune that are said to be taken
from pseudo-texts like the Orange Catholic Bible, the Azhar Book,
The Manual of Muad’dib and the Tleilaxu Godbuk, even though
Herbert never wrote the books from which they are said to be
drawn.
17. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for Tolkien Studies who
suggested both the terminology of “peripheral imagination” and
the specic example of the smoke above Coombe.
198
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
18. There are some references that might not be quite as opaque,
such as those to Beren and Lúthien, which occur after that story
has been told by Aragorn.
19. So, for example, the Beowulf-poet assumes that his readers know
something about Éomer, the grandson of Offa, mentioned in
line 1960, but this assumption was not even correct with re-
gard to the scribe who around the year 1000 copied this part
of Beowulf: he did not recognize Éomer as a proper name and
so wrote “geomor” [mournful] in this place. Tolkien and many
other scholars conclude from this failure of understanding
(among many other pieces of evidence) that the poem itself
must antedate the scribe by more than a century. See Fulk, Bjork
and Niles (227).
20. Line 1424 of The Merchant’s Tale (Benson 156).
21. Line 3394 of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Benson 260).
22. Line 2446 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien and Gordon
115-116).
23. It requires signicant effort to compose a text of any length that
does not include such references, which can seem alien (and
alienating) in as little as a generation. For example, even in a
relatively contemporary text like Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great No-
tion (1964) allusions to consumer products, political events, ad-
vertising campaigns or popular music from as recent as the 1960s
can be incomprehensible to readers born after 1980, while to a
reader born before 1970, the allusions do not even stand out as
being cultural references.
24. For discussion see Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (53–54).
25. For a provocative thought experiment, see Dennett (419–22).
26. Fulk, Bjork, and Niles (193–94).
27. What we are calling “broken references,” Nagy calls “contentless
allusions,” contrasting them with “genuine” allusions (“Great
Chain” 242). We believe our nomenclature eliminates a potential
misunderstanding, in that broken referents still contain some con-
tent, which can be inferred from local context (for example, that
the named elf-friends did heroic things that helped the elves).
Calling them “contentless,” therefore, potentially invites unpro-
ductive arguments.
28. For discussion of the inuence of such broken references on
Tolkien’s imagination, see Shippey on woodwose and other cruces
of absence (Road 65 n).
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Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
29. All a reader needs to understand the denotative meaning of Ara-
gorn’s reference is the common understanding that cats see well
in the dark.
30. Tolkien creates the cognitive situation of a nonparticipant in a
tradition—the exact opposite of what Foley’s scholarship in The
Singer of Tales in Performance tries to reconstruct. In fact the lo-
cal context in this particular case is somewhat misleading, since
Túrin is a much more ambiguous character than a reader can
infer from the local context. Tolkien’s other reference to Túrin,
in the Adventures of Tom Bombadil, is opaque enough to be mislead-
ing (Bombadil 8): Tolkien’s statement that “The Hoard” “seems to
contain echoes of the Númenorean tale of Túrin and Mim the
dwarf” even led Robert Foster to conclude erroneously (but rea-
sonably, given the available evidence), that “Túrin seems to have
killed a dragon in his youth and later to have become a king.
He was perhaps slain in old age by an invading army” (Guide to
Middle-earth 259). We are grateful to David Bratman for directing
us to this reference.
31. Benson (886). In another example of a crux in medieval literature
leading to Tolkienian literary production, Tolkien was apparently
inspired enough by the fragmentary and enigmatic references to
Wade and his boat Guingelot to try to incorporate them into his
mythology via a reference to Wade of the Helsings (taken from the
Old English poem Widsith) and by Eärendel’s ship being named
Wingelot (Lays 142–44; Peoples 371). And see Garth (86–87).
32. Malory did indeed use French sources, but, as Eugene Vinaver
demonstrated, he often deliberately misleads his readers when
he authorizes elements of his narrative with the phrase “As the
French booke seyeth” (Malory 1260); see also Wheeler (116–25).
33. Nagy calls imaginary books like these “pseudo-texts” (“Great
Chain” 240–41). All pseudo-texts are pseudo-references, but not
all pseudo-references are pseudo-texts. It is important to differ-
entiate between the published story “The King in Yellow” and the
imaginary text of the same name that the story discusses. The
former is not a pseudo-text.
34. See the introduction to Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea.
35. The audience of the “original” story of Beowulf would not have
noticed losses in cultural continuity, since the poem would have
arisen out of their immediate (and thus broadly continuous) cul-
ture. However, if Tolkien is correct, and Beowulf as we have it was
“already antiquarian, in a good sense,” and “its maker was telling
200
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
of things already old and weighted with regret” when the poem
was made into its current form, then there would have been bro-
ken or at least attenuated references in the materials used by the
poet (MC 33).
36. Letters (217, 228, 231). In the draft of the letter to “Mr. Thomp-
son” of 14 January 1956 Tolkien adds “the names and adventures
of the other 2 wizards” to Queen Berúthiel’s cats, but even these
two deliberately broken referents acquired back stories, as noted
by Christopher Tolkien in Unnished Tales (401–2 n. 7).
37. In a letter of 15 December 1937, Stanley Unwin suggests that Tolk-
ien should use the Silmarillion material for exactly this purpose:
“The Silmarillion. . . in fact is a mine to be explored in writing
further books like The Hobbit rather than a book in itself. I think
this was partly your view, was it not?” (quoted in Carpenter, 184).
38. See Carpenter (184–87, 207–212). As David Bratman pointed out
to us, the situation may be somewhat more complicated. A de-
cade later, Tolkien was attempting to get Collins to publish both
The Silmarillion (even though it was not in publishable form) and
The Lord of the Rings, perhaps because he now worried that the
many references he had built into the latter text would be incom-
prehensible to a reader who did not have access to The Silmaril-
lion. If this is the case (and without additional information, such
as may be contained in Tolkien’s diaries, we cannot be sure about
his state of mind at the time), then the impression of depth of the
published text is even more of a happy accident.
39. These references would be broken for any imagined audience for
the published work, but the reading experience for the Inklings
and Tolkien’s son Christopher, who had some familiarity with the
older stories, would be qualitatively different.
40. That enough information was to be found in The Lord of the Rings
and its appendices to gure out almost all of Tolkien’s referenc-
es enabled the creation of works like Foster’s A Guide to Middle-
earth. However, for some references the available information
was so limited that very little of the meaning of the reference
could be reconstructed. For example, in the pre-Silmarillion ver-
sion of the Guide, Húrin is described merely as “elf-friend and
hero” (Foster 124).
41. It is unfortunate that “reference” and “referent” are so similar, but
the nomenclature has already been established for the former in
literary studies and the latter in oral traditional scholarship.
201
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
42. Pace Derrida and orthodox deconstructionists, there is something
outside the text: the signicance of name “Hama” or of “The Cats
of Queen Berúthiel” can only be found outside the physical texts
of Beowulf or The Lord of the Rings.
43. The disassociation of the inferred denotative meaning of a refer-
ence from its original connotations allows for semantic change. In
Beowulf, “Hama” may have originated as a reference to a specic
story about the acquisition of a necklace, but after enough cul-
tural change the character’s name might only be an archetype of a
thief. When there has been sufcient cultural change in the audi-
ence of a referent, the surface features and literal meaning may
even take on meanings that contradict the import of the original
reference. For example, in the earlier Icelandic sagas in which
he appears, Bjarni Brodd-Helgason, although called Víga-Bjarni
(Killer Bjarni), is a peacemaker and a reluctant ghter who re-
ceived his sobriquet not out of lust for murder but from a very
complex family situation in which he reluctantly had to kill some
relatives for reasons of both justice and self-preservation. Víga-
Bjarni’s name, however, appears to have inuenced later writers to
depict the character as a blood-loving, death-dealing maniac: the
inuence of the name itself was too strong once its link to particu-
lar stories was broken. Thus the conservation of the surface form
led to a signicant change in meaning. This phenomenon may be
called the Killer-Barney Effect (see Drout “Reference and Refer-
entiality”). For a much more detailed discussion of Bjarni Brodd-
Helgason’s treatment in various sagas, see Sigurðsson (146–57).
44. Foley (Immanent Art 6-8; Traditional Oral Epic 389–90).
45. For more discussion, see Drout, How Tradition Works (22–35, 236-
38) Tradition and Inuence, (103–110). For an explanation of how
the conserved form might not be identical to a surface-structure
representation, see Drout, Tradition and Inuence (34–45, 112–14).
46. For a discussion, see Drout, Tradition and Inuence (86–94, 102-
107).
47. The adjective can either ll the fourth colon or, when paired with
megas, the entire second hemistich. See Foley (Traditional Oral
Epic 146; Immanent Art 146–147).
48. For tradition dependence, see Foley (Traditional Oral Epic 9–10).
49. For a discussion of linguistic marking, see Mize (102–105).
50. See Drout, Tradition and Inuence (126–7). See also, Mize (97–
102).
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
51. For parataxis and anaphora as characteristic of oral traditional
poetics, see Foley (Immanent Art 9–10) and Drout (“A Meme-
Based Approach” 283–86).
52. See Douglas A. Anderson’s “Note on the Text” in the standard
edition of The Fellowship of the Ring; see also Sturgis (385-86) and
Hammond and Scull (Companion xviii–xliv).
53. See (TT, III, ii, 42) and (TT, III, xi, 202).
54. See Hammond and Scull (Companion, 191).
55. A penciled note in the B-version of the lecture provides a hint as
to why Tolkien may have noticed a particular discrepancy: “the
heroine’s very name changed from Edith to Ethel” (B&C 432).
56. Some have speculated that Bombadil is not technically a “living
thing” but a spirit of some sort. In Shippey’s view, Tom is a lusus
naturae, a unique individual belonging to no category or class,
and a genius loci, a spirit of the particular countryside (Road, 107–
8). Gene Hargrove, however, reads the same evidence differently
to suggests that Tom and Goldberry are the Valar Aulë and Ya-
vanna in “mortal” form (Hargrove, 20–24).
57. “I could, I suppose, answer: ‘a trick cyclist can ride a bicycle with
handle-bars!’” (Letters, 279).
58. See Hammond and Scull (Fiftieth Anniversary 107, Companion
118), Rateliff (12–14), and Bratman (“Corrigenda” 18–19).
59. See Klinger (143–209).
60. (TT, III, i, 18; FR, II, ii, 254; RK, V, x, 165–67). Again, these seem-
ing inconsistencies can be nessed.
61. A list that is perhaps too extensive can be found at http://tolk-
iengateway.net/wiki/Mistakes_and_inconsistencies_in_Tolk-
ien’s_works (accessed 10 September 2013). At the time Tolkien
wrote the passage, the character who is Finrod in the published
Silmarillion was Inglor and his father was Finrod instead of Finar-
n. Finrod would have no “house,” since he had no wife or son
(S 130). For the interchanges between the names Finrod, Inglor,
and Finarn, see LT I (44); Shadow (72, 188 n. 9).
62. In The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien discusses the prob-
lem, noting that although his father wrote “Vision of Gandalf’s
thought” in the margin next to the mention of the old man, in
a time-scheme written around the time of “Helm’s Deep” and
“The Road to Isengard,” he had noted that “Aragorn and his
companions spend night on the battle-eld, and see ‘old man’
203
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
(Saruman)” (Treason 427–28). Tolkien was attempting to resolve
the apparent contradiction, but in the end he still failed to do so.
63. In his essay in Meditations on Middle-earth, Terry Pratchett specu-
lated that the Lord of the Nazgûl is not destroyed and, since the
Third Age ends quite soon after the main action of The Lord of
the Rings, the Witch King would return in the Fourth Age. This
interpretation would be more convincing if Tolkien had capital-
ized “age” in the passage.
64. Although readers themselves may buy into the idea that the char-
acters in the story have an existence independent of the author.
Stephen King recently noted that part of his inspiration for writ-
ing Doctor Sleep was a question at an autograph session: “Hey, any
idea what happened to the kid from The Shining?” He adds, “This
was a question I’d often asked myself about that old book” (King,
423).
65. We recognize that there is the potential for circularity in this ar-
gument, in that under this rubric, simple mistakes by the author
could end up being interpreted as clever, imaginative touches
that produce the impression of depth (a similar problem plagues
Beowulf criticism). But we can avoid circularity by noticing the
difference in effect between simple mistakes—like the dropped
lines noted by Christopher Tolkien in The History of The Lord of
the Rings volumes—and the more complex contradictions noted
in the above discussions.
66. Nagy (“Author,” 1–17). For additional discussion of the Red Book
frame inside The Lord of the Rings, see Thompson. For analysis of
the signicance of imagined book frames in Tolkien’s corpus, see
Flieger, “Tolkien and the Idea of the Book,” and Flieger, Inter-
rupted Music, 55–84.
67. UT (146); WJ (311–12).
68. See Nagy (“Great Chain” 242–46) for more discussion.
69. See Shippey (Author 69–70).
70. See Agøy and Fisher.
71. Note, however, that Tolkien makes this claim directly only in the
Prologue (FR, Prol. 10), particularly the “Note on the Shire Re-
cords” (FR, Prol. 23–25) and in Appendix F (RK, Appendix F, II,
411–16), sections of the text that are not read by all readers. For
additional discussion see Thompson and Brljak.
72. Nagy (“Great Chain” and “Adapted Text”).
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Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
73. See Letters (87); Carpenter (59, 96); Flieger (211–13); CH (281).
74. CH (269–92).
75. Stylistic heterogeneity among Tolkien’s texts has long been re-
marked by many critics who have noted (some have also lament-
ed) the differences between The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and
The Silmarillion. David Bratman’s taxonomy of style in The His-
tory of Middle-earth volumes is useful and can be extended be-
yond Tolkien’s posthumously published works (“Literary Value”
72–73).
76. Nagy is building upon Bratman’s three-part classication scheme
into Annalistic, Antique, and Appendical styles (Bratman “Liter-
ary Value” 71–75).
77. This last is Christopher Tolkien’s description, in the Foreword to
The Silmarillion, of his father’s conception of that book (S 8).
78. These are collected in The Lays of Beleriand. For an exhaustive list
and discussion, see Lauro (517–20).
79. Nagy (29); S (204, 219).
80. Nagy’s example 15 (S 212).
81. Nagy’s example 15 (S 212).
82. See Table 1 and Figure 1 and Figures 4–6.
83. See also Christopher Tolkien’s discussion of the evolution of his
father’s work in The Return of the Shadow (430–31).
84. For discussion of these processes and their speeds, see Drout, Tra-
dition and Inuence (185–86) How Tradition Works (51–53).
85. See Drout, Tradition and Inuence (102–110).
86. For a discussion, Drout and Chauvet (forthcoming).
87. The textual history of this passage is complex, and it is some-
what difcult to interpret some of Christopher Tolkien’s expla-
nation in the appendix to The Children of Húrin. In the Narn pub-
lished in Unnished Tales, the death of Beleg and other material
is omitted, with the reader being directed to pages 204–15 of the
published Silmarillion (UT 104). In The Children of Húrin, Chris-
topher Tolkien integrates this material word-for-word into the
main text of the Narn, noting that “where there was nothing to
be added to the Silmarillion version (as in the tale of the death
of Beleg, derived from the Annals of Beleriand) that version is
simply repeated” (CofH 288–89). Kane interprets this statement
as indicating that Christopher Tolkien himself wrote the passage
205
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
in The Silmarillion, since all the annalistic treatments of Beleg’s
death are minimal and contain none of the poetic description
quoted above (Kane 202). If this line of reasoning is correct,
then the lines quoted here were derived by Christopher Tolkien
himself, from the poem printed in The Lays of Beleriand. How-
ever, it seems somewhat unlikely that Christopher would trans-
mute “stone-faced he stood, standing frozen” into “stood stone
still and silent,” when his practice elsewhere had been to substi-
tute exact quotations or simple paraphrases rather than invent
poetic language of his own. More likely, it seems to us, is that this
particular phrasing, which, as Nagy notes, has its ultimate source
in the “Sketch of the Mythology” and the Quenta Noldorwina,
would have been part of the “many tentative or exploratory out-
lines and notes . . . and even short stretches of connected narra-
tive on the scale of the Narn” that Christopher Tolkien mentions
in the Appendix to the Narn in Unnished Tales (UT 150). Fur-
thermore, even if Christopher is indeed responsible for the ex-
act phrasing in The Silmarillion, having derived it from the verse
Túrin, the point still stands—and is perhaps even reinforced:
the poetic features of the line have the power to inuence later
prose treatments of the same material.
88. See Foley (Immanent Art 39–60); Drout (“Variation within Limits”
447–50); Honko (100–114).
89. Albeit possibly unintentionally. But see Shippey on the effects of
writing and rewriting (Road 316–17).
90. Burrows uses statistical analysis of “function words” to create tex-
tual “signatures” for various writers. These signatures are then
employed to attribute authorship in a set of English Restoration
poems. Hoover renes Burrows’ methods and applies them to
third-person American novels.
91. Documentation, instructional videos, and explanatory texts are
available at http://wheatoncollege.edu/lexomics/introduction-
lexomics (accessed 10 September 2013).
92. If there are 1000 words in a segment and ond appears 50 times, we
record 50/1000 = 0.05 as the relative frequency of ond. If a word
appears somewhere in the complete text but not in a particular
segment, we record 0/1000 = 0 for the word’s relative frequency
in that segment.
93. An explanation of these statistical methods, aimed at humanis-
tic researchers, can be found in Drout (Tradition and Inuence
51–56).
206
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
94. The terminology is borrowed from evolutionary biology (Hennig).
95. To compare four segments we list all the words in each segment
and calculate the relative frequency of each word in each seg-
ment. We then compute (4•3)/2=6 distances, one for each pair
of segments, calculate the difference between the proportion of a
word’s use in each segment, square the differences, and total the
squared differences from each word. The distance, then, is the
square root of the squared distance.
96. This metric makes use of all n words in a collection of texts to
measure the dissimilarity between two texts. We also experiment-
ed with Manhattan and Canberra metrics but found no signi-
cant difference in the nal clustering results. Our software allows
researchers to choose among these metrics and between differ-
ent linkage methods.
97. In our lexomic analyses the number of words is quite large, so it is
difcult for the distributions of any single word to make two seg-
ments highly similar or dissimilar. A great deal of commonality
(or difference) in the proportionate use of a wide array of words
is required to create signicant similarity (or distance) between
two texts. See the discussion in Drout et al. (“Of Dendrogram-
matology,” 311–15).
98. Previous research has shown that segment sizes smaller than 500
words are not always reliable; the dendrogram geometry is not
always consistent with the known authorship, structure, or sourc-
ing of the control texts (Drout et al, “Of Dendrogrammatology”
311–15). As a general principle, smaller segments provide higher
resolution but also have the potential to amplify artifacts created
by segment boundaries not matching textual divisions. Segment
sizes of 1000 words have produced consistent results in the analysis
of poetry, but 1500-word and larger segments seem to be less like-
ly to be perturbed by random variation in the longer prose texts.
Although we can hint segment boundaries in order to make them
match syntactic, stylistic, or syntactic boundaries in the text, there
is some concern that cutting segments along such lines prejudices
the nal results of the analysis. We have, therefore, as a screening
device, segmented the text arbitrarily and mechanically at merely
mathematical boundaries. If we nd patterns in such a division of
the text, we can then more subtly adjust the boundaries.
99. In a homogeneous text, contiguous segments tend to be most
similar to each other, so segment ve not linking to segment six
in gure 3 is evidence for signicant vocabulary heterogeneity.
207
Tolkien’s Creation of the Impression of Depth
100. A scrambled text, in which all the words have been randomly per-
muted, produces a stepwise dendrogram with small vertical dis-
tances between clades (Drout et al., “Of Dendrogrammatology”
311–12). The work of some authors appears to be so homogenous
that dendrograms of their texts differ only slightly from a scram-
bled text. The tenth-century Latin poem Waltharius, for example,
produces a stepwise dendrogram with almost no vertical distance
between most clades (Downey et al., “Lexomic Analysis”).
101. Although it does mark the entrance of the main antagonist, the
dragon Glaurung. Therefore, to be certain that the geometry of
the dendrogram was not overly inuenced by the entrance of the
monster, we used a feature of the Scrubber program called “Stop
Words,” which allowed us to remove all instances of the words
Glaurung and dragon (and their plurals and possessive forms)
from the text. The resulting dendrogram was indistinguishable
from that in gure 3.
102. To the best of our knowledge, ribbon diagrams were invented by
M. Drout and Courtney LaBrie.
103. Christopher Tolkien states that at his section 287 (correspond-
ing to page 215/ line 717/word 8375 of the 1977 text), the Grey
Annals becomes the sole source for the Silmarillion. However, the
very close correspondence between the Annals and “Of Túrin
Turambar” actually begins somewhat earlier, on page 212 of The
Silmarillion (line 621/ word 7212), which is section 276 in The War
of the Jewels.
104. From 7200 to 8818 (Túrin’s return to Dor-Lómin), the wording
in the Unnished Tales version of the Narn is very similar to that of
the Grey Annals.
105. We produced dendrograms with segments of 750, 900, 1000, 1100
and 1200 words. Some of the divisions founds within these—par-
ticularly the tendency of the Nienor-focused portions of the text
to separate from the rest of the narrative—are probably worth
pursuing in additional research. But the general division between
the material derived from the Narn and that which comes from
the Grey Annals, as well as the separation of the “Túrin and the
Outlaws” section of the text, is consistent with the dendrogram
geometry of the text divided into 1500-word segments.
106. See Drout, Kisor et al.
107. Effects that, ironically, the original authors of the medieval texts
may never have intended and which likely did not exist for the
works’ original audiences.
208
Michael D. C. Drout, Namiko Hitotsubashi and Rachel Scavera
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