PART ONE: The Well of Knowledge
Handsome is the yellow horse,
But a hundred times better
Is my cream-coloured one,
Swift as the sea mew
Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees)
Accursed be the damsel,
Who, after the wailing,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging deep
Accursed be the maiden,
Who, after the conflict,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging sea
Taliesin, Seithenin
Chapter One: The White Horse
(Wed 14th April 1937)
On a warm mid-April morning in 1937 three gentlemen, two Oxford dons and a solicitor, were beginning their customary annual walking tour that this year was to be a ‘literary pilgrimage’ from the pretty market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire to Porlock in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where in 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, intoxicated with opium, had written the famously obscure and unfinished verse ‘Kubla Khan’. Their plan was to walk the nearly 100 miles to Porlock over a leisurely eight or nine days, taking in the ancient sites of Wiltshire, before crossing into Somerset and reaching their goal via the Cathedral of Wells and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Having left Marlborough at nine in the morning, the three friends had taken the path westwards across the Downs, climbing slowly for about a mile and then turning northwest at the hamlet of Rockley, to the Hakpen horse – one of Wessex’s famous white-horses carved into the chalk hills of the Downs. Here they had decided to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view before turning south and taking the prehistoric track-way known as the Ridgeway to Overton down, where they would join the Marlborough to Bath road close to their first proper stop, the village of Avebury, a small unassuming village that stood within the bounds of what was the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. The intention of the three hikers was to take lunch in the Red Lion, the pub that lay at the centre of the circle, before walking the last few miles to Calne, where Coleridge had stayed in 1814-16, and where they aimed to spend that night. From then on they would take a bus to Wells and walk the rest of the way to Porlock, all going well.
Clive Staples Lewis, who his friends knew as ‘Jack’, dark, balding and thickset, was presently leading the other two men down the gentle slope of the hill on which the Hakpen horse had been carved a century before. Behind him strode Owen Barfield, lean, tall and well-built with a full head of dark hair, above a handsome, elfin face – who was struggling to keep up a conversation with his friend who kept striding forward out of earshot. Their physical differences had always amused the third member of the party, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who, like Lewis, was a fellow of the school of English at the University of Oxford. This kind, if serious-faced man, the shortest and the eldest of the three by 6 years being now in his mid-forties, and who seemed to wear a perpetual frown as if always chewing over some deep problem, watched the ill-matched pair walk ahead and disappear over the brow of the hill vanishing out of sight.
Damn their route-march! Tolkien thought. This was a supposed to be a leisurely hike, not a military exercise! Well… let them march on! He thought, letting his heavy pack fall from his shoulders.
The April sun was pleasing; Tolkien, who had already removed his tweed jacket on the climb out of Marlborough, now rolled up his shirtsleeves and took off his hat, wiping his now-greying dark fringe where it had stuck to his brow. Then, fishing into the pocket of his plain brown waistcoat for his pipe and tin of Navy Cut tobacco, he began to fill his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a thumb and then scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for a box of matches.
As he smoked Tolkien felt himself relax for the first time in what seemed months. The spring term at Oxford had not been any busier than normal, but all of his spare time had been taken up since before Christmas correcting the proofs of his book. He had tried, not wholly successfully, to remain unruffled at the errors the type-setters had made, but at least correcting their mistakes had allowed him the opportunity to add some new material and to iron out some minor inconsistencies he had discovered in his tale. You think a book is done and dusted, but writing it is only the beginning! He had said in frustration to Lewis over a half a glass of beer in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen college two days before. He had just returned from the Post Office having sent his publisher, Stanley Unwin, an illustration for the dust-jacket, showing the dragon Smaug flying out of the Lonely Mountain; it was, to Tolkien’s eye, a little amateurish, but preferable to what some professional artist with no real idea of the story might dream up. Jack had raised his glass to the success of the book, but Tolkien had shrugged. ‘I’m happier celebrating that the bloody thing is finally out of my hands, Jack. It had become, alas, like a guest who outstays his welcome. No doubt in time I will miss his company, but for now I’m happy to be free once more.’. ‘Freedom, Tollers, is one of those invisible qualities one fails to appreciate until it is taken from oneself. Like a fish only appreciates water when dangling from the angler’s hook…’.
‘When I was in Flanders…’ Tolkien said, ‘I thought a simple glass of beer, in a quiet country pub, would be a joy forever. And so it was, for a time; but then came the time I just downed the drink and thought no more of it; the tragedy of mankind is his ability to forget…’
‘Then may we ever be sent…’ said Lewis, raising his glass, ‘adversity, so that we may never tire of freedom.’
…
Now distanced from the demands of not only book, but also family and work, Tolkien let out a happy sigh. After Mass that morning he had left his stack of papers on his desk at Northmoor Road, and had left for the station determined not to even think of Hobbits or dragons until he returned home late the following week. He hoped, now, that this was the end of the matter; and standing here looking out over the valley he felt a sudden sense of freedom welling up within him, that escaped as a chuckle; this was a new start – no longer constrained by ‘The Hobbit’ he could return to his languages and mythology.
Above him skylarks were singing, invisible against the pale sky; he stood in the long grass, watching as industrious bees flitted from cowslip to cowslip. Below him, out of sight, he could hear Jack laughing, and so he walked on to join his companions who were now sat on the sloping ground close to the carved horse’s head.
On first sight the Hakpen horse was a strange looking beast, more reminiscent of a dog than a horse, Tolkien thought, thin legged and barrel bodied, though he conceded one was meant to see it from a distance away not upside down from above its back.
‘You’ll know, Tollers... Why do you imagine these horses were carved?’ Lewis turned and asked Tolkien as the latter approached the seated pair.
‘This one is a century old, as I recall – and I believe was cut to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria; but as for the others - why do people ever feel the need to mark the landscape?’ he replied, seating himself beside his companions, and refilling his pipe.
Lewis looked down over the valley for an answer – the only marks he could see were the lines of hedges and field boundaries; a small road ran north to south at the bottom of the valley, with a single motorcar heading along it.
‘To show land ownership: “This land is mine!” I suppose?’ He suggested, his slight Belfast accent adding a tuneful lilt to the words.
‘Spot on, I would say.’ Tolkien replied. ‘They were originally, I would think, a stamp of ownership of the local landowner; it’s like hanging a Stubbs above your fireplace – the Uffington horse, for instance, was undoubtedly a territorial marker for the tribe that lived in the hill-fort above it.’ His own words tumbled out quickly and slightly incoherently, somewhat staccato and punctuated with quick flashes of a smile.
The Uffington horse, to which Tolkien referred, was the most striking, as well as being the oldest, of all the Wessex horses. It’s sinuous, streamlined form had graced the Berkshire Downs from time immemorial; once believed to have been carved by Alfred the Great to celebrate a victory over the Vikings at Ethandune in 878 AD, its curved, abstract, and almost skeletal shape, three times the size of the Hakpen horse, had always suggested to Tolkien an origin much further back in prehistory.
‘But why a horse? What has a horse to do with territory per se?’ Lewis continued, lighting a cigarette.
‘Everything – to a prehistoric tribesman. Think, Jack! As a tribesman, how do you defend your land?’
‘Earthworks; arrows; swords.’ He said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily away.
‘Now how large is your territory going to be?’ Tolkien prodded.
Lewis shrugged. ‘As large as you can defend, I suppose, within a few hours walk from your camp.’ Their view over the edge of the Wiltshire Downs presented such a territory – it would take them a good few hours to reach the distant slopes above Cherhill, to their west; it was a rich land; worth defending; worth planting and settling on; worth fighting for.
‘Well think how much more territory you could defend on horseback than on foot. The first tribes to ride horses possessed a marked superiority over their contemporaries: they could not only possess more land, and defend it, but also embark on taking that of others – taking their land and their resources – their herds of cattle...’
Tolkien looked down at the carved face, dulled with age; overgrown with grasses and moss.
‘This one may be relatively new, but the white horse of Uffington… well, it’s is still galloping possibly thousands of years after it was carved, still claiming that land for a tribe who have long since journeyed beyond that vale to another...’ he drew on his pipe and peered out over the valley.
‘So you agree with Chesterton that it’s old?’ Lewis said, meaning the Uffington Horse.
Tolkien nodded. Chesterton’s poetry rose in his mind and he gave voice to his words over the crudely cut body of the chalk steed below:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.’
He flashed a quick smile at his companions; although on the surface he often appeared shy, there was something of the bard about this man, and, when encouraged, enjoyed such recitations.
Lewis let out a sigh. ‘I must read the ballad again, Tollers. It has some beautiful parts – how does that verse go?:
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.’
Lewis turned to the hitherto silent Barfield, who had been consulting his map.
‘Listen, Owen. Did I tell you? Tollers, Warnie and I walked to Uffington last summer and we were at the pub in the village, discussing why the hill beside the horse had been named Dragon Hill. Well, Warnie and Tollers were talking about dragons in general, sadly commenting on how they were all dead and gone when some local workman pipes up ‘They are not! I seen ‘em myself!!’
Lewis roared with laughter.
‘So why does it bear the name of Dragon Hill?’ Barfield asked, smiling at his friend’s jollity.
‘Local legend says it’s where St George slew the Dragon.’ Tolkien answered. ‘But I wonder just how old the name is - the Dragon-slaying myth is really very ancient indeed, so I doubt Good Old Saint George had much a part to play in it! One only has to think of Apollo slaying the Python at Delphi to see that it’s really a myth about new cults and new gods overcoming the old, and in many cases taking over their holy sites.’
‘Ah, so you think the older British cults, like the Greek, were represented by the dragon or the serpent?’ Barfield asked. ‘That is interesting; I’m not overly familiar with ancient British beliefs but wait until we get to Avebury: I’ll show you something that I think might interest you.’
Lewis yawned.
‘Yes, Avebury… Delightful as this view is, I can’t help feeling we’re wasting precious drinking time at the Red Lion by being here. Horses and dragons aren’t really part of the Coleridgian theme of this holiday, after all…’
‘No?’ Barfield said, an eyebrow raised on his boyish face, ‘You may have a point about dragons, but not horses: think of Kubla Khan… is it not said that he owned ten thousand white horses? And was not the milk of these beasts only to be drunk by the Khan himself? Perhaps this milk was even the Milk of Paradise of Coleridge’s poem? I would say the white horse is extremely Coleridgean!!’
Lewis conceded the point to his friend and rose, shouldering his pack and waving his walking stick in the air with a cry of ‘Onward! Ale awaits!’ Tolkien remained seated for a moment, looking out over the pale landscape, to where the distant downs fading to blue were crested by the spike of the Cherhill monument, marking the end of that day’s proposed walk. He narrowed his eyes in the bright morning sun and muttered a few more lines of Chesterton before he rose to follow the others:
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
This image of the white horse stayed with Tolkien for the hour it took to walk along Hakpen hill to the edge of the downs at Overton. Here, at the point where the path met the Marlborough to Bath road, the hillside was crowned with a line of large round hillocks: the burial mounds of long-forgotten prehistoric kings; Lewis slowed his pace momentarily to survey these grass-covered tombs, four thousand years in age, but did not stop. Tolkien, however, paused and then ambled across from the path into the meadow to the middle one of the three ancient and time-weathered graves, now strewn with grasses, dandelions and other meadow flowers.
Tolkien climbed atop the steep rise of the barrow, and took a deep breath of the warm, spring scented air. Before him stretched the Kennet valley; running east to west, the Downs rising on both sides, steeper to the north where he sat, more gentle to the south, rising in soft folds of palest green, interrupted here and there by a copse of trees or lines of hedgerow, before fading to a lilac wash against the sky.
Tolkien re-lit his pipe and let his mind sink into the deep past. How might this gently undulating valley have looked when the kings whose bones lay beneath these once chalk-white burial mounds had first climbed this rise thousands of years before? He could almost hear the thumping of their horses’ hooves, see their pale hair blowing in the wind; hear their strange voices calling out even stranger names… their bronze spears glinting in the sun, striking fear into the small dark men with their flint blades who had lived in this place before them, and who stood cowering in the trees on seeing these tall mounted warriors arriving from the east. Did they see them, he wondered, as the Aztecs had seen the Spanish Conquistadors – as dreadful hybrid beasts, never having seen a horse and thinking man and steed were a single animal? What prehistoric Cortez or Pizarro rode this ridge so long ago, and did he accept the peace of the painted tribesmen who prostrated themselves before him or did he like the Conquistadors turn these green hills into a sea of blood?
It was these newcomers, Tolkien mused, who having overcome the native cults were perhaps the first to carve the shape of their steeds into the green hillsides of Wessex… a white horse on a field of green as a sign of victory; (why did that phrase always arise in his mind, he wondered?). But the Uffington horse, at least, was a strangely emaciated beast of victory, with a beak-like muzzle. He shuddered at a memory: the half-rotted body of a horse he had marched past on the way to the trenches of the Somme twenty years before, left hanging, bloated and rotting on a barbed wire fence, its body moving with rats, its head eyeless and lipless – the bleached bones of the muzzle protruding from the flyblown jaw … Tolkien blanched at the recollection. For four thousand years the horse and rider had dominated warfare but times had changed and no cavalry could match the artillery and machine gun fire of the modern battlefield.
The words of an Old English poem arose in his mind:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære….
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.
Gently he twisted a blade of grass around a finger. The memory of the decaying horse had made him uncommonly anxious, but perhaps that was as much to do with what Barfield had been talking about over breakfast at Marlborough that morning after they had alighted from the Oxford bus: the damned war in Spain; and that ignoramus Hitler sending troops there to support the fascists; and France extending its defences along its border with Germany…
Tolkien drove the thought from his mind. Such speculation not only solved nothing, but also cast a cloud over what was a beautiful spring day. And it was beautiful - the sky cloudless; his book was finished and his time his own; the grass smelled sweet, and the peace of the day only disturbed by the sound of an automobile wending its lonely way along the road back to Marlborough; his eyes were becoming heavy… maybe, he thought, he should just rest a bit longer…
Handsome is the yellow horse,
But a hundred times better
Is my cream-coloured one,
Swift as the sea mew
Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees)
Accursed be the damsel,
Who, after the wailing,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging deep
Accursed be the maiden,
Who, after the conflict,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging sea
Taliesin, Seithenin
Chapter One: The White Horse
(Wed 14th April 1937)
On a warm mid-April morning in 1937 three gentlemen, two Oxford dons and a solicitor, were beginning their customary annual walking tour that this year was to be a ‘literary pilgrimage’ from the pretty market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire to Porlock in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where in 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, intoxicated with opium, had written the famously obscure and unfinished verse ‘Kubla Khan’. Their plan was to walk the nearly 100 miles to Porlock over a leisurely eight or nine days, taking in the ancient sites of Wiltshire, before crossing into Somerset and reaching their goal via the Cathedral of Wells and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Having left Marlborough at nine in the morning, the three friends had taken the path westwards across the Downs, climbing slowly for about a mile and then turning northwest at the hamlet of Rockley, to the Hakpen horse – one of Wessex’s famous white-horses carved into the chalk hills of the Downs. Here they had decided to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view before turning south and taking the prehistoric track-way known as the Ridgeway to Overton down, where they would join the Marlborough to Bath road close to their first proper stop, the village of Avebury, a small unassuming village that stood within the bounds of what was the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. The intention of the three hikers was to take lunch in the Red Lion, the pub that lay at the centre of the circle, before walking the last few miles to Calne, where Coleridge had stayed in 1814-16, and where they aimed to spend that night. From then on they would take a bus to Wells and walk the rest of the way to Porlock, all going well.
Clive Staples Lewis, who his friends knew as ‘Jack’, dark, balding and thickset, was presently leading the other two men down the gentle slope of the hill on which the Hakpen horse had been carved a century before. Behind him strode Owen Barfield, lean, tall and well-built with a full head of dark hair, above a handsome, elfin face – who was struggling to keep up a conversation with his friend who kept striding forward out of earshot. Their physical differences had always amused the third member of the party, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who, like Lewis, was a fellow of the school of English at the University of Oxford. This kind, if serious-faced man, the shortest and the eldest of the three by 6 years being now in his mid-forties, and who seemed to wear a perpetual frown as if always chewing over some deep problem, watched the ill-matched pair walk ahead and disappear over the brow of the hill vanishing out of sight.
Damn their route-march! Tolkien thought. This was a supposed to be a leisurely hike, not a military exercise! Well… let them march on! He thought, letting his heavy pack fall from his shoulders.
The April sun was pleasing; Tolkien, who had already removed his tweed jacket on the climb out of Marlborough, now rolled up his shirtsleeves and took off his hat, wiping his now-greying dark fringe where it had stuck to his brow. Then, fishing into the pocket of his plain brown waistcoat for his pipe and tin of Navy Cut tobacco, he began to fill his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a thumb and then scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for a box of matches.
As he smoked Tolkien felt himself relax for the first time in what seemed months. The spring term at Oxford had not been any busier than normal, but all of his spare time had been taken up since before Christmas correcting the proofs of his book. He had tried, not wholly successfully, to remain unruffled at the errors the type-setters had made, but at least correcting their mistakes had allowed him the opportunity to add some new material and to iron out some minor inconsistencies he had discovered in his tale. You think a book is done and dusted, but writing it is only the beginning! He had said in frustration to Lewis over a half a glass of beer in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen college two days before. He had just returned from the Post Office having sent his publisher, Stanley Unwin, an illustration for the dust-jacket, showing the dragon Smaug flying out of the Lonely Mountain; it was, to Tolkien’s eye, a little amateurish, but preferable to what some professional artist with no real idea of the story might dream up. Jack had raised his glass to the success of the book, but Tolkien had shrugged. ‘I’m happier celebrating that the bloody thing is finally out of my hands, Jack. It had become, alas, like a guest who outstays his welcome. No doubt in time I will miss his company, but for now I’m happy to be free once more.’. ‘Freedom, Tollers, is one of those invisible qualities one fails to appreciate until it is taken from oneself. Like a fish only appreciates water when dangling from the angler’s hook…’.
‘When I was in Flanders…’ Tolkien said, ‘I thought a simple glass of beer, in a quiet country pub, would be a joy forever. And so it was, for a time; but then came the time I just downed the drink and thought no more of it; the tragedy of mankind is his ability to forget…’
‘Then may we ever be sent…’ said Lewis, raising his glass, ‘adversity, so that we may never tire of freedom.’
…
Now distanced from the demands of not only book, but also family and work, Tolkien let out a happy sigh. After Mass that morning he had left his stack of papers on his desk at Northmoor Road, and had left for the station determined not to even think of Hobbits or dragons until he returned home late the following week. He hoped, now, that this was the end of the matter; and standing here looking out over the valley he felt a sudden sense of freedom welling up within him, that escaped as a chuckle; this was a new start – no longer constrained by ‘The Hobbit’ he could return to his languages and mythology.
Above him skylarks were singing, invisible against the pale sky; he stood in the long grass, watching as industrious bees flitted from cowslip to cowslip. Below him, out of sight, he could hear Jack laughing, and so he walked on to join his companions who were now sat on the sloping ground close to the carved horse’s head.
On first sight the Hakpen horse was a strange looking beast, more reminiscent of a dog than a horse, Tolkien thought, thin legged and barrel bodied, though he conceded one was meant to see it from a distance away not upside down from above its back.
‘You’ll know, Tollers... Why do you imagine these horses were carved?’ Lewis turned and asked Tolkien as the latter approached the seated pair.
‘This one is a century old, as I recall – and I believe was cut to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria; but as for the others - why do people ever feel the need to mark the landscape?’ he replied, seating himself beside his companions, and refilling his pipe.
Lewis looked down over the valley for an answer – the only marks he could see were the lines of hedges and field boundaries; a small road ran north to south at the bottom of the valley, with a single motorcar heading along it.
‘To show land ownership: “This land is mine!” I suppose?’ He suggested, his slight Belfast accent adding a tuneful lilt to the words.
‘Spot on, I would say.’ Tolkien replied. ‘They were originally, I would think, a stamp of ownership of the local landowner; it’s like hanging a Stubbs above your fireplace – the Uffington horse, for instance, was undoubtedly a territorial marker for the tribe that lived in the hill-fort above it.’ His own words tumbled out quickly and slightly incoherently, somewhat staccato and punctuated with quick flashes of a smile.
The Uffington horse, to which Tolkien referred, was the most striking, as well as being the oldest, of all the Wessex horses. It’s sinuous, streamlined form had graced the Berkshire Downs from time immemorial; once believed to have been carved by Alfred the Great to celebrate a victory over the Vikings at Ethandune in 878 AD, its curved, abstract, and almost skeletal shape, three times the size of the Hakpen horse, had always suggested to Tolkien an origin much further back in prehistory.
‘But why a horse? What has a horse to do with territory per se?’ Lewis continued, lighting a cigarette.
‘Everything – to a prehistoric tribesman. Think, Jack! As a tribesman, how do you defend your land?’
‘Earthworks; arrows; swords.’ He said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily away.
‘Now how large is your territory going to be?’ Tolkien prodded.
Lewis shrugged. ‘As large as you can defend, I suppose, within a few hours walk from your camp.’ Their view over the edge of the Wiltshire Downs presented such a territory – it would take them a good few hours to reach the distant slopes above Cherhill, to their west; it was a rich land; worth defending; worth planting and settling on; worth fighting for.
‘Well think how much more territory you could defend on horseback than on foot. The first tribes to ride horses possessed a marked superiority over their contemporaries: they could not only possess more land, and defend it, but also embark on taking that of others – taking their land and their resources – their herds of cattle...’
Tolkien looked down at the carved face, dulled with age; overgrown with grasses and moss.
‘This one may be relatively new, but the white horse of Uffington… well, it’s is still galloping possibly thousands of years after it was carved, still claiming that land for a tribe who have long since journeyed beyond that vale to another...’ he drew on his pipe and peered out over the valley.
‘So you agree with Chesterton that it’s old?’ Lewis said, meaning the Uffington Horse.
Tolkien nodded. Chesterton’s poetry rose in his mind and he gave voice to his words over the crudely cut body of the chalk steed below:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.’
He flashed a quick smile at his companions; although on the surface he often appeared shy, there was something of the bard about this man, and, when encouraged, enjoyed such recitations.
Lewis let out a sigh. ‘I must read the ballad again, Tollers. It has some beautiful parts – how does that verse go?:
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.’
Lewis turned to the hitherto silent Barfield, who had been consulting his map.
‘Listen, Owen. Did I tell you? Tollers, Warnie and I walked to Uffington last summer and we were at the pub in the village, discussing why the hill beside the horse had been named Dragon Hill. Well, Warnie and Tollers were talking about dragons in general, sadly commenting on how they were all dead and gone when some local workman pipes up ‘They are not! I seen ‘em myself!!’
Lewis roared with laughter.
‘So why does it bear the name of Dragon Hill?’ Barfield asked, smiling at his friend’s jollity.
‘Local legend says it’s where St George slew the Dragon.’ Tolkien answered. ‘But I wonder just how old the name is - the Dragon-slaying myth is really very ancient indeed, so I doubt Good Old Saint George had much a part to play in it! One only has to think of Apollo slaying the Python at Delphi to see that it’s really a myth about new cults and new gods overcoming the old, and in many cases taking over their holy sites.’
‘Ah, so you think the older British cults, like the Greek, were represented by the dragon or the serpent?’ Barfield asked. ‘That is interesting; I’m not overly familiar with ancient British beliefs but wait until we get to Avebury: I’ll show you something that I think might interest you.’
Lewis yawned.
‘Yes, Avebury… Delightful as this view is, I can’t help feeling we’re wasting precious drinking time at the Red Lion by being here. Horses and dragons aren’t really part of the Coleridgian theme of this holiday, after all…’
‘No?’ Barfield said, an eyebrow raised on his boyish face, ‘You may have a point about dragons, but not horses: think of Kubla Khan… is it not said that he owned ten thousand white horses? And was not the milk of these beasts only to be drunk by the Khan himself? Perhaps this milk was even the Milk of Paradise of Coleridge’s poem? I would say the white horse is extremely Coleridgean!!’
Lewis conceded the point to his friend and rose, shouldering his pack and waving his walking stick in the air with a cry of ‘Onward! Ale awaits!’ Tolkien remained seated for a moment, looking out over the pale landscape, to where the distant downs fading to blue were crested by the spike of the Cherhill monument, marking the end of that day’s proposed walk. He narrowed his eyes in the bright morning sun and muttered a few more lines of Chesterton before he rose to follow the others:
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
This image of the white horse stayed with Tolkien for the hour it took to walk along Hakpen hill to the edge of the downs at Overton. Here, at the point where the path met the Marlborough to Bath road, the hillside was crowned with a line of large round hillocks: the burial mounds of long-forgotten prehistoric kings; Lewis slowed his pace momentarily to survey these grass-covered tombs, four thousand years in age, but did not stop. Tolkien, however, paused and then ambled across from the path into the meadow to the middle one of the three ancient and time-weathered graves, now strewn with grasses, dandelions and other meadow flowers.
Tolkien climbed atop the steep rise of the barrow, and took a deep breath of the warm, spring scented air. Before him stretched the Kennet valley; running east to west, the Downs rising on both sides, steeper to the north where he sat, more gentle to the south, rising in soft folds of palest green, interrupted here and there by a copse of trees or lines of hedgerow, before fading to a lilac wash against the sky.
Tolkien re-lit his pipe and let his mind sink into the deep past. How might this gently undulating valley have looked when the kings whose bones lay beneath these once chalk-white burial mounds had first climbed this rise thousands of years before? He could almost hear the thumping of their horses’ hooves, see their pale hair blowing in the wind; hear their strange voices calling out even stranger names… their bronze spears glinting in the sun, striking fear into the small dark men with their flint blades who had lived in this place before them, and who stood cowering in the trees on seeing these tall mounted warriors arriving from the east. Did they see them, he wondered, as the Aztecs had seen the Spanish Conquistadors – as dreadful hybrid beasts, never having seen a horse and thinking man and steed were a single animal? What prehistoric Cortez or Pizarro rode this ridge so long ago, and did he accept the peace of the painted tribesmen who prostrated themselves before him or did he like the Conquistadors turn these green hills into a sea of blood?
It was these newcomers, Tolkien mused, who having overcome the native cults were perhaps the first to carve the shape of their steeds into the green hillsides of Wessex… a white horse on a field of green as a sign of victory; (why did that phrase always arise in his mind, he wondered?). But the Uffington horse, at least, was a strangely emaciated beast of victory, with a beak-like muzzle. He shuddered at a memory: the half-rotted body of a horse he had marched past on the way to the trenches of the Somme twenty years before, left hanging, bloated and rotting on a barbed wire fence, its body moving with rats, its head eyeless and lipless – the bleached bones of the muzzle protruding from the flyblown jaw … Tolkien blanched at the recollection. For four thousand years the horse and rider had dominated warfare but times had changed and no cavalry could match the artillery and machine gun fire of the modern battlefield.
The words of an Old English poem arose in his mind:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære….
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.
Gently he twisted a blade of grass around a finger. The memory of the decaying horse had made him uncommonly anxious, but perhaps that was as much to do with what Barfield had been talking about over breakfast at Marlborough that morning after they had alighted from the Oxford bus: the damned war in Spain; and that ignoramus Hitler sending troops there to support the fascists; and France extending its defences along its border with Germany…
Tolkien drove the thought from his mind. Such speculation not only solved nothing, but also cast a cloud over what was a beautiful spring day. And it was beautiful - the sky cloudless; his book was finished and his time his own; the grass smelled sweet, and the peace of the day only disturbed by the sound of an automobile wending its lonely way along the road back to Marlborough; his eyes were becoming heavy… maybe, he thought, he should just rest a bit longer…