Chapter Thirteen: An Eye for an Eye
‘So are you going to enlighten us, now?’ Lewis asked, returning to the table with a jug of beer.
Tolkien was smiling. He took a sip of beer and lit his pipe.
‘Yes. That strange image I had of the lady floating down the Kennet like Ophelia… you see, I thought that had come about from our discussions of the dismembered vegetation god, or of Orpheus, but in fact I now see that it had its roots in what we had been discussing earlier, at Silbury. Remember I had argued that ‘Sil’ had come from the Welsh ‘Sul’, as in sun? Well, the word had been going round my head, clamouring for attention…’ he took another sip of beer – ‘but it was only just now when I saw the name of the spring, Swallowhead, that I understood what I was being shown…’
He scratched his chin, his eyes seeming to focus on a point far in the distance.
‘You see, Silbury and Swallowhead must both be derived from the same root word, which can’t be ‘sol’, Jack, as linguistically ‘sol’ could not become ‘swall’ – so we’re not looking at a derivation from the Latin, but from something much earlier. They both, in fact, come from a very ancient word that predates both the Latin and the Welsh form, that was closer to ‘sawol’; now in Irish this ancient word became ‘suil’ meaning ‘eye’… the sun being the eye in the heavens, one supposes – the divine eye.’
‘As in Ancient Egypt – where the eye of Ra, or of Horus, was the sun?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Exactly, Jack. This would make Silbury the ‘bury’, that is barrow, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘bearw’ - so mound of the eye’; and the Swallowhead spring would be the spring of the eye. As Swallowhead preserves the older form of Sawol, I would suggest it, and not the hill, was named first, though I may be wrong…’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Ronald, whether derived from sun or eye, or whether the name of the spring predated the hill, what is the connection to your Ophelia?’ Barfield asked.
‘If one follows the old Roman road that goes past Silbury,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which follows a much older track-way, you find yourself at Bath – which as you know was known as Aquae Sulis the ‘waters of the goddess Sulis’; Sulis-Minerva was the goddess of the healing springs there, and her name shares the same etymology so it seems highly possible to me that she is also implicated here at Avebury.’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Lewis. ‘It hadn’t even entered my thoughts to link Silbury to Sulis. ’
‘Nor mine,’ Tolkien conceded ‘until I saw the name Swallowhead on this map – it was the connection of the word Sul to the waters of the spring rather than the hill that suggested it.’
‘I now have a rather incongruous image of Minerva, half submerged in the Kennet in a Greek chiton dress, a spear in one hand and an owl perched on her shoulder… ‘ Lewis said, laughing. ‘But the image of the eye and the spring, and a goddess of the waters is, as you know, an old Celtic trope… it’s found in the Irish legend of the origin of the river Boyne in Ireland.’
‘Remind me.’ Said Barfield.
He lit a cigarette and began;
‘The Boyne, Owen, was named after the goddess Boann who was a princess of the Tuatha De Danann, the people of the Goddess Danu, that is the sidhe, the fairy folk; and her abode was the fairy mound of Newgrange. Now Boann had a husband named Nechtan who owned a magical spring. The spring was surrounded by nine hazel trees and the hazel nuts would fall into the water and be eaten by the speckled salmon who lived therein – and as the nuts contained all knowledge whoever drank of the waters of that well or ate of the salmon would become knowledgeable of all there was to know, had ever been known, and ever would be known...’
Jack’s eyes glistened; he enjoyed the telling of tales immensely.
‘…Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers could drink of the well; but out of curiosity Boann one day approached the well, wishing to drink for herself, and walked about it three times counter-clockwise… but the waters of the well rose up, creating a rushing river that pursued Boann to the coast, and it was said that the water erupted with such power that it ripped a leg, an arm and a single eye from her body, and that she drowned in the flood of waters that became the river which today bears her name.’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Given the number of river names in Europe associated with ancient Goddesses,’ he stated, ‘we can assume that the river was the goddess; so I think we can suggest that a similar legend once existed here at Avebury concerning that same goddess of the eye and/or sun, named Sulis – who perhaps drowned at the Swallowhead, or at least transformed into those waters.’
‘And the name Waden Hill…’ Jack offered, ‘comes from Woden? He, too lost an eye at a well…’ he stubbed out his cigarette on the table and let the butt fall onto the floor.
‘It’s a similar myth, Jack, but the name is sheer coincidence - Waden means hill of the idol – weoh-dun – that square enclosure on the map may once have been a shrine housing a heathen image.’ Tolkien said, ‘But you’re right about Woden and the eye. Wishing to gain knowledge of all things, he journeys to the well of Mimir in order to drink from it; but as we know, the price is high – for he has to forfeit one of his eyes to take a draught. – just as Boann loses an eye when she drinks of the well.’
‘Aha! I see,’ Lewis said, ‘….pardon the pun. But what on earth does it mean? Why the loss of an eye in return for the gaining of wisdom?’
Tolkien frowned for a moment.
‘Well, that is the question! The losing of the eye is an act of sacrifice, to prove how much the gaining of knowledge meant, a kind of bartering: one gives up vision in this world to gain vision in another…an eye for an eye…but I’m not sure… After our talk earlier at the tea-rooms a very different answer springs to mind: Surely, to drink of the waters of knowledge should increase one’s visionary faculties, not deplete them; so in what way could losing an eye been seen as a gain? Well it suddenly seems blindingly obvious, pardon my pun, that what is gained through drinking from the spring is the unified mystic vision Owen was celebrating earlier - where all is seen as connected, no longer separate. What better way of depicting this than by making the wisdom seeker one-eyed? Two eyes suggest duality, division, normal everyday vision - but the one eye suggests the undivided vision of the poet!
‘But I think this is all later metaphysical speculation and that the original myth of the losing and gaining of an eye is rooted in mankind’s experience of the natural world – I think (and note, I’m not espousing some all-pervasive solar-theory a la Max Muller, when I say this) that it’s probably solar. Forget the later metaphysics – it’s a seasonal myth – it’s about the loss and return of the sun at winter.’
Tolkien looked up from his drink to find the eager eyes of his friends willing him to continue; for a moment, motes of dust hung suspended in the golden light pouring in from the window.
‘Think of the myth of Orion, the great hunter; he is blinded, but then he journeys across the sea bearing Kedalion, the servant of Hephaestus the Smith, on his shoulders, like St Christopher, and reaches the eastern horizon and regains his vision from Helios, the sun god.’
‘Like Wade carrying Wayland the smith across the Groenasund?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Precisely… and Thunor carries Orvandel across the icy Elivogs river in a basket on his back…’ Tolkien added; ‘Obviously the mythical Orion is linked to the constellation; now, the sun rises near this constellation in the spring, but by the autumn Orion has moved to the other side of the sky at daybreak, so has ‘lost’ the sun; clearly all this marching to the east to regain his eyes from Helios is really an image of the constellation regaining of the sun, the solar eye, in the spring.
‘As for the icy river…’
‘…it’s the Milky Way?’ Barfield suggested. ‘So this Sulis, this goddess, was she also a constellation?’ he asked.
Tolkien scratched his chin in thought.
‘Did you know,’ Lewis said, while Tolkien sat pondering, ‘that in the Old Irish stories Druids were known to cast spells standing on one leg and with one eye closed – it was seen as a magical stance – it’s exactly the same symbolism as Boann in the river, deprived of an arm, leg and eye. That same one eyed figure appears in other Celtic myths, you know – he is one who can summon the animals, a kind of wild man. The master of animals, they call him.’ Lewis added.
‘Like Orpheus.’ Barfield said.
‘Or Bombadil.’ Tolkien rejoined.
‘Are these, then, constellations, too?’
Tolkien cleared his throat, and took out his pipe, methodically packing it as he considered the questions that had been put to him.
‘Oh, and can you also explain, while you’re at it, given all this sun and eye symbolism, why the river Kennet is named after a dog?’
Tolkien seemed about to answer when the door of the pub opened and Mr Mac Govan-Crow strode in, heading straight for their table.
‘Begging your pardon. My wife is wondering if you would like to eat with us at the house tonight? You would be most welcome.’
The three friends nodded in agreement.
‘We shall eat around six, but feel free to return when you wish; I’ll let you get back to your drinks.’ he said, smiling and leaving as promptly as he had arrived.
‘Excellent!’ Lewis said, ‘tonight we dine on venison!’
‘Jack!’ scolded Barfield.
‘What? It’s not me who called him Hawkeye!’ referring to the latter’s epithet of Deerslayer.
The three men laughed. ‘Actually, it would be quite an adventure, being led off into the wilds with Hawkeye…through forests and waterfalls, sleeping under the stars…’ Lewis said.
‘Hunted by the Huron? Idyllic indeed!’ Barfield said, sarcastically.
Tolkien smiled. ‘You know, Jack, for all your romanticism you would hate it! MacGovan-Crow wouldn’t let you stop for a cup of tea, you know! With the Huron on our heels there wouldn’t be time for a decent pint of beer, either.’
Tolkien tuned to Barfield. ‘Imagine how he’d grumble, Owen!’ he said, nodding towards Lewis.
‘It would be unbearable.’ Barfield agreed ‘We could leave him for the Huron, but I doubt even they would want him…’
‘Why so?’ asked Jack, frowning.
‘–nothing to scalp!’ Barfield laughed, pointing at Jack’s bald crown.
‘So are you going to enlighten us, now?’ Lewis asked, returning to the table with a jug of beer.
Tolkien was smiling. He took a sip of beer and lit his pipe.
‘Yes. That strange image I had of the lady floating down the Kennet like Ophelia… you see, I thought that had come about from our discussions of the dismembered vegetation god, or of Orpheus, but in fact I now see that it had its roots in what we had been discussing earlier, at Silbury. Remember I had argued that ‘Sil’ had come from the Welsh ‘Sul’, as in sun? Well, the word had been going round my head, clamouring for attention…’ he took another sip of beer – ‘but it was only just now when I saw the name of the spring, Swallowhead, that I understood what I was being shown…’
He scratched his chin, his eyes seeming to focus on a point far in the distance.
‘You see, Silbury and Swallowhead must both be derived from the same root word, which can’t be ‘sol’, Jack, as linguistically ‘sol’ could not become ‘swall’ – so we’re not looking at a derivation from the Latin, but from something much earlier. They both, in fact, come from a very ancient word that predates both the Latin and the Welsh form, that was closer to ‘sawol’; now in Irish this ancient word became ‘suil’ meaning ‘eye’… the sun being the eye in the heavens, one supposes – the divine eye.’
‘As in Ancient Egypt – where the eye of Ra, or of Horus, was the sun?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Exactly, Jack. This would make Silbury the ‘bury’, that is barrow, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘bearw’ - so mound of the eye’; and the Swallowhead spring would be the spring of the eye. As Swallowhead preserves the older form of Sawol, I would suggest it, and not the hill, was named first, though I may be wrong…’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Ronald, whether derived from sun or eye, or whether the name of the spring predated the hill, what is the connection to your Ophelia?’ Barfield asked.
‘If one follows the old Roman road that goes past Silbury,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which follows a much older track-way, you find yourself at Bath – which as you know was known as Aquae Sulis the ‘waters of the goddess Sulis’; Sulis-Minerva was the goddess of the healing springs there, and her name shares the same etymology so it seems highly possible to me that she is also implicated here at Avebury.’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Lewis. ‘It hadn’t even entered my thoughts to link Silbury to Sulis. ’
‘Nor mine,’ Tolkien conceded ‘until I saw the name Swallowhead on this map – it was the connection of the word Sul to the waters of the spring rather than the hill that suggested it.’
‘I now have a rather incongruous image of Minerva, half submerged in the Kennet in a Greek chiton dress, a spear in one hand and an owl perched on her shoulder… ‘ Lewis said, laughing. ‘But the image of the eye and the spring, and a goddess of the waters is, as you know, an old Celtic trope… it’s found in the Irish legend of the origin of the river Boyne in Ireland.’
‘Remind me.’ Said Barfield.
He lit a cigarette and began;
‘The Boyne, Owen, was named after the goddess Boann who was a princess of the Tuatha De Danann, the people of the Goddess Danu, that is the sidhe, the fairy folk; and her abode was the fairy mound of Newgrange. Now Boann had a husband named Nechtan who owned a magical spring. The spring was surrounded by nine hazel trees and the hazel nuts would fall into the water and be eaten by the speckled salmon who lived therein – and as the nuts contained all knowledge whoever drank of the waters of that well or ate of the salmon would become knowledgeable of all there was to know, had ever been known, and ever would be known...’
Jack’s eyes glistened; he enjoyed the telling of tales immensely.
‘…Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers could drink of the well; but out of curiosity Boann one day approached the well, wishing to drink for herself, and walked about it three times counter-clockwise… but the waters of the well rose up, creating a rushing river that pursued Boann to the coast, and it was said that the water erupted with such power that it ripped a leg, an arm and a single eye from her body, and that she drowned in the flood of waters that became the river which today bears her name.’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Given the number of river names in Europe associated with ancient Goddesses,’ he stated, ‘we can assume that the river was the goddess; so I think we can suggest that a similar legend once existed here at Avebury concerning that same goddess of the eye and/or sun, named Sulis – who perhaps drowned at the Swallowhead, or at least transformed into those waters.’
‘And the name Waden Hill…’ Jack offered, ‘comes from Woden? He, too lost an eye at a well…’ he stubbed out his cigarette on the table and let the butt fall onto the floor.
‘It’s a similar myth, Jack, but the name is sheer coincidence - Waden means hill of the idol – weoh-dun – that square enclosure on the map may once have been a shrine housing a heathen image.’ Tolkien said, ‘But you’re right about Woden and the eye. Wishing to gain knowledge of all things, he journeys to the well of Mimir in order to drink from it; but as we know, the price is high – for he has to forfeit one of his eyes to take a draught. – just as Boann loses an eye when she drinks of the well.’
‘Aha! I see,’ Lewis said, ‘….pardon the pun. But what on earth does it mean? Why the loss of an eye in return for the gaining of wisdom?’
Tolkien frowned for a moment.
‘Well, that is the question! The losing of the eye is an act of sacrifice, to prove how much the gaining of knowledge meant, a kind of bartering: one gives up vision in this world to gain vision in another…an eye for an eye…but I’m not sure… After our talk earlier at the tea-rooms a very different answer springs to mind: Surely, to drink of the waters of knowledge should increase one’s visionary faculties, not deplete them; so in what way could losing an eye been seen as a gain? Well it suddenly seems blindingly obvious, pardon my pun, that what is gained through drinking from the spring is the unified mystic vision Owen was celebrating earlier - where all is seen as connected, no longer separate. What better way of depicting this than by making the wisdom seeker one-eyed? Two eyes suggest duality, division, normal everyday vision - but the one eye suggests the undivided vision of the poet!
‘But I think this is all later metaphysical speculation and that the original myth of the losing and gaining of an eye is rooted in mankind’s experience of the natural world – I think (and note, I’m not espousing some all-pervasive solar-theory a la Max Muller, when I say this) that it’s probably solar. Forget the later metaphysics – it’s a seasonal myth – it’s about the loss and return of the sun at winter.’
Tolkien looked up from his drink to find the eager eyes of his friends willing him to continue; for a moment, motes of dust hung suspended in the golden light pouring in from the window.
‘Think of the myth of Orion, the great hunter; he is blinded, but then he journeys across the sea bearing Kedalion, the servant of Hephaestus the Smith, on his shoulders, like St Christopher, and reaches the eastern horizon and regains his vision from Helios, the sun god.’
‘Like Wade carrying Wayland the smith across the Groenasund?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Precisely… and Thunor carries Orvandel across the icy Elivogs river in a basket on his back…’ Tolkien added; ‘Obviously the mythical Orion is linked to the constellation; now, the sun rises near this constellation in the spring, but by the autumn Orion has moved to the other side of the sky at daybreak, so has ‘lost’ the sun; clearly all this marching to the east to regain his eyes from Helios is really an image of the constellation regaining of the sun, the solar eye, in the spring.
‘As for the icy river…’
‘…it’s the Milky Way?’ Barfield suggested. ‘So this Sulis, this goddess, was she also a constellation?’ he asked.
Tolkien scratched his chin in thought.
‘Did you know,’ Lewis said, while Tolkien sat pondering, ‘that in the Old Irish stories Druids were known to cast spells standing on one leg and with one eye closed – it was seen as a magical stance – it’s exactly the same symbolism as Boann in the river, deprived of an arm, leg and eye. That same one eyed figure appears in other Celtic myths, you know – he is one who can summon the animals, a kind of wild man. The master of animals, they call him.’ Lewis added.
‘Like Orpheus.’ Barfield said.
‘Or Bombadil.’ Tolkien rejoined.
‘Are these, then, constellations, too?’
Tolkien cleared his throat, and took out his pipe, methodically packing it as he considered the questions that had been put to him.
‘Oh, and can you also explain, while you’re at it, given all this sun and eye symbolism, why the river Kennet is named after a dog?’
Tolkien seemed about to answer when the door of the pub opened and Mr Mac Govan-Crow strode in, heading straight for their table.
‘Begging your pardon. My wife is wondering if you would like to eat with us at the house tonight? You would be most welcome.’
The three friends nodded in agreement.
‘We shall eat around six, but feel free to return when you wish; I’ll let you get back to your drinks.’ he said, smiling and leaving as promptly as he had arrived.
‘Excellent!’ Lewis said, ‘tonight we dine on venison!’
‘Jack!’ scolded Barfield.
‘What? It’s not me who called him Hawkeye!’ referring to the latter’s epithet of Deerslayer.
The three men laughed. ‘Actually, it would be quite an adventure, being led off into the wilds with Hawkeye…through forests and waterfalls, sleeping under the stars…’ Lewis said.
‘Hunted by the Huron? Idyllic indeed!’ Barfield said, sarcastically.
Tolkien smiled. ‘You know, Jack, for all your romanticism you would hate it! MacGovan-Crow wouldn’t let you stop for a cup of tea, you know! With the Huron on our heels there wouldn’t be time for a decent pint of beer, either.’
Tolkien tuned to Barfield. ‘Imagine how he’d grumble, Owen!’ he said, nodding towards Lewis.
‘It would be unbearable.’ Barfield agreed ‘We could leave him for the Huron, but I doubt even they would want him…’
‘Why so?’ asked Jack, frowning.
‘–nothing to scalp!’ Barfield laughed, pointing at Jack’s bald crown.