Chapter Seventeen: The Lady of the Lake
After a brief nightcap by the fire, Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms, but Tolkien was not yet sleepy; he had gone outside to the small garden of the cottage to take in the cool night air, and when Alfred had been lulled to sleep by her singing, Shona McGovan-Crow had stepped outside to join him.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘when you were talking over dinner about Boann and the well - I didn’t feel it was my place to say but it reminded me of something. And since you later mentioned the stars…’
‘No, please, tell me, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow.’ Tolkien insisted.
‘Shona, please’ she insisted. Shona pointed upwards at the sky to the pale band of stars that bisected the heavens.
‘It’s just that I always think of Boann when I see the Milky Way.’
‘Why so?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bothar Bo Finne is the Gaelic name for it,’ Shona said, ‘’Path of the White Cow’’ Boann means white cow.’
Tolkien lifted his brows in delight.
‘Thank you. I never knew that.’
Shona remained gazing upwards at the Milky Way. ‘Sometimes I come out here and look up at the stars and feel like I’m home. There’s my beloved Boyne. I wonder which was named first, though, the river on earth or the one in the sky?’
Tolkien tapped his pipe-bowl against the low garden wall and sat on its top, touching a small pile of white rocks clustered on the wall top, beside which stood a couple of burned out snubs of old candles.
‘It’s her dog I feel most sorry for.’ Shona smiled, as she turned to go.
‘Her dog?’
‘Yes; Boann’s lapdog. Dabilla was its name; poor mite was washed out to sea and drowned with her. I had a dog named Dabilla as a child, I named it after Boann’s dog…’
Tolkien looked up at the stars, open mouthed and flushed – and then laughed out loud at his own ignorance.
‘Ha! You’re a dunce, Ronald!’ he chuckled. Shona looked a little taken aback.
‘If that’s the Boyne in the sky then there’s your lost dog, safe and sound!’
Tolkien gestured skywards to the pale celestial river and there on its banks he pointed out to Shona the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, not hard to see for its brightest star, Sirius, the ‘dog-star’ as it was known, was the brightest star in the entire northern sky.
Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? All the clues were there! Where else should one look for a ‘bright dog’ but the star Sirius, the brightest star, the dog-star, pacing beside the river in the heavens? Tolkien berated himself. So many legends had been writ large upon the heavens in antiquity – just as the siblings in Mr Mac Govan-Crow’s bear story had been transferred to the heavens so too in the west – many heroes of myth had been afforded the same privilege; the sky was populated by heroes and gods – so why not the characters of British myth, too? Orion, the hunter, had been the subject of their discussion earlier – and they’d agreed the icy river he was crossing to regain, somehow, his solar eye, was the Milky Way, but Tolkien had not quite grasped the final part of the image - Orion’s hunting dog, following its master, trotting alongside the Milky Way, had in all probability inspired the name of the Kennet… ‘bright dog’ - meaning the Kennet, like the Boyne, was somehow the earthly equivalent of the river of stars in the sky. The presence of Dabilla in the Irish tale had made it a near-certainty that a version of the Boann myth had existed here – there was the river of the dog, and the well-head of the eye, linked by name to the nearby goddess of the waters at Bath.
I should have known after all our talk earlier, he thought…It was there all along in ‘Pearl’ - under the nose of this dim-witted philologist for years and I never saw it! He softly intoned the verses of this medieval lyric, so close to his heart, the meaning of the stone-strewn river separating the poet from his deceased child suddenly clear:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night
Like the river in the poem, the Kennet’s depths were stippled with small pebbles of chalk that shone white like stars in the winter sky. And remembering the stone he had picked up earlier he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the small piece of chalk. The river of the poem was the river that divided Paradise from mortal realms – the same as the Greek Styx on whose banks the three-headed dog Cerberus roamed; the river and the dog; now of course its stones twinkled like stars, for they were stars! He wondered if the poet had drawn on some older tradition when he had written these lines, unbeknown of their meaning, or whether he had known all along of what he was writing, and Tolkien just hadn’t seen it: The river of paradise was the heavenly river – the Milky Way, across which the souls of the dead might pass…
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, but would it be overly rude if I went for a short walk? I have some thinking to do…’ he said, his voice shaking with repressed excitement.
…
Tolkien had retraced the route they had walked earlier back past where the road curved about Silbury, and along to a gate in the field below the hill on whose easternmost point West Kennet rose, and where Barfield had earlier pointed out a copse of trees at the far side of the field in which the Swallowhead spring was hidden. Taking the path towards the trees Tolkien continued until he reached a still pool, crossed by a handful of large sarsen stepping stones. Beyond the stones, in a hollow cradled by the hillside, stood two willow trees, and from between them the waters of the Kennet bubbled from the earth. He strolled around the trees, noticing a small stone cut in the hillside beyond; here, he guessed, in the winter, the waters would rise, but already, in April, the flow had lessened to emerge from the earth closer to the pool.
Tolkien returned to the brook and sat on one of the large, flat stones that forded the stream; he sat gazing into its clear depths.
There, to the north, was the shadow of the domed Silbury hill against the pale starlight, and at his feet the chuckling water, one part silvered now by the light of the crescent-moon; all was quiet, save the lilting of the water, though in the distance an owl hooted, two, three times.
How long had men come here to worship or seek solace at the wisdom-giving waters of the eye, he wondered, here beneath the stars at this holy stream?
This flashing silver river that seemed to divide the world of the dead from the living; the river of the bright dog…
Tolkien knelt, and cupped a clear handful of the cool water, and let it flow back through his fingers. And as he did so he lifted his head, and lo! There above him on the rim of the south-western sky, as if summoned, the jewel-like Sirius still hung in the heavens, flashing a purplish blue, just on the point of sinking down below the hillside to follow its master Orion into the lands below the horizon, but it would rise again in the east as herald of the new dawn. And in the east at this late hour lay Vega, glinting blue in the Lyre, and to its left, Deneb, the tail of the swan - and rising to a gentle arch across the back of the swan in the northern sky was the milky waters of the heavenly river aping the flow of the Kennet on the ground.
Was this pool once ringed with hazel, he wondered? Did the salmon of wisdom swim here, silver beneath the moon?
The reflection of the crescent-moon, like a curved barque sailing between the horns of Taurus, seemed to traverse the waters before him, casting a bright shifting path across the water, that trembled then broke into many pieces before reconstituting; forming then dissolving, trembling and breaking, the crescent becoming a lidded white eye, a curved back of a silver salmon; it broke apart, re-forming, shivering, pulsing and morphing into wild patterns and shapes; a crescent, boat; a lidded eye again; a dancing cool white flame; a trail of flowers, of stars, of sparks, of fish; once more a sliver of moon …
It was hypnotising, lulling, and Tolkien, tired from the days walk and the whisky found himself drifting somewhere between thought and sleep. The waters of the river seemed to rise and swirl; churning to a white starry foam; lifting, breaching their banks; a dual stream of liquid shooting forth to land and sky; one flooding the land and creating a broad river on earth, the other rising to the sky and forming the milky river of stars… the primal waters divided into above and below.
Into these waters Tolkien stared entranced… and there, at the heart of the black mirror, the reflected flash of the moon like a pale severed head in the ripples of the stream lay as if suspended from the branches or caught in the roots of a shining tree that joined earth and heaven… But it shifted and flashed, became distorted into an eye, first a barely-open white eye, then the burning eye of the sun, yellow like a cat’s; and it seemed to him that the eye looked across time and space from a place that knew neither, and that somehow the one eye was wise but possessive… wishing to hide its precious treasure from the unworthy, from those who would steal it… it became the eye of Fafnir the dragon, hiding the ring that would be stolen from him by Siegfried… the eye of Smaug guarding the cup that Bilbo Baggins would steal; and the eye of Nechtan jealously guarding the waters of knowledge from Boann… or the lamp-like pale eye of the creature Gollum…
Then, in the reflecting waters, it seemed he saw, in that eternal moment between two thoughts, the lady of the waters, the fairy princess, lady of the white cows; Sulis-Minerva, mistress of magic – the poet’s daughter who in the Pearl poem lay across the river of death on the shores of Paradise - about her head a silvery-gold corona of stars; now rising from the waters and straddling the river. She bent over the waters, seeming to pour the glimmering flashes of moonlight into the pool; her pale beauteous face lifted high amid the stars, and she bridged the earth and the heavens like a pallid rainbow, the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia her nourishing breasts, a white-shadow arching over the sleeping men of earth; blessed; snow-white, queen of stars....
All in white she was, her hair loose about her shoulders, soft as the owl’s feather; wise beyond years, and about her throat a pendant or phial of rock crystal, lit by an inner fire; the reflected light of the star shining from on the western horizon; and she seemed to peer down into the mirrored surface of the waters…no, she WAS the waters, and the stars combined, and one flowed into the other… a face below and a face above, their gaze meeting; two but yet one.
There she arched above and below, this maid of the sidhe, this Elven princess, this lady of the lake; her white track streaming behind her… a track of flowers, of stars, of chalk pebbles in the holy stream, of the shimmering ripples caused by the moonlight on the waters… and it seemed to him that she had come from a far distant land, a land that was beyond the reach of mortal man… from Paradise… But the water! Flooding over the low, green land! The terror of the approaching waves! The burning, baleful eye…blazing over the flood… … and then there was a dark-haired girl floating in the water surrounded by flowers and shining stones and then flames and the sound of gunfire and shells exploding… the past, or shadows of what might yet come to pass?
Then at last this shifting reflection calmed and resolved once more into a mirrored form of distant figure standing on the far, green, shore; a kind, sad, face, and his heart leapt… Mother?… his heart cried out… Mother?! Unthinking he reached forward, seeking to grasp her reflection, his hand plunging into the cool water so that the image atomised into fragments and disappeared.
When the void closed the sparkling water resolved to mirror the moon-ship sailing across the heavens above; the vision that had come unbidden left him as swiftly as it had arrived. The moon on the water, though, still shifted and trembled, but now through the prism of his tears; in the distance the owl once more called, once, twice, three times….
After a brief nightcap by the fire, Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms, but Tolkien was not yet sleepy; he had gone outside to the small garden of the cottage to take in the cool night air, and when Alfred had been lulled to sleep by her singing, Shona McGovan-Crow had stepped outside to join him.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘when you were talking over dinner about Boann and the well - I didn’t feel it was my place to say but it reminded me of something. And since you later mentioned the stars…’
‘No, please, tell me, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow.’ Tolkien insisted.
‘Shona, please’ she insisted. Shona pointed upwards at the sky to the pale band of stars that bisected the heavens.
‘It’s just that I always think of Boann when I see the Milky Way.’
‘Why so?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bothar Bo Finne is the Gaelic name for it,’ Shona said, ‘’Path of the White Cow’’ Boann means white cow.’
Tolkien lifted his brows in delight.
‘Thank you. I never knew that.’
Shona remained gazing upwards at the Milky Way. ‘Sometimes I come out here and look up at the stars and feel like I’m home. There’s my beloved Boyne. I wonder which was named first, though, the river on earth or the one in the sky?’
Tolkien tapped his pipe-bowl against the low garden wall and sat on its top, touching a small pile of white rocks clustered on the wall top, beside which stood a couple of burned out snubs of old candles.
‘It’s her dog I feel most sorry for.’ Shona smiled, as she turned to go.
‘Her dog?’
‘Yes; Boann’s lapdog. Dabilla was its name; poor mite was washed out to sea and drowned with her. I had a dog named Dabilla as a child, I named it after Boann’s dog…’
Tolkien looked up at the stars, open mouthed and flushed – and then laughed out loud at his own ignorance.
‘Ha! You’re a dunce, Ronald!’ he chuckled. Shona looked a little taken aback.
‘If that’s the Boyne in the sky then there’s your lost dog, safe and sound!’
Tolkien gestured skywards to the pale celestial river and there on its banks he pointed out to Shona the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, not hard to see for its brightest star, Sirius, the ‘dog-star’ as it was known, was the brightest star in the entire northern sky.
Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? All the clues were there! Where else should one look for a ‘bright dog’ but the star Sirius, the brightest star, the dog-star, pacing beside the river in the heavens? Tolkien berated himself. So many legends had been writ large upon the heavens in antiquity – just as the siblings in Mr Mac Govan-Crow’s bear story had been transferred to the heavens so too in the west – many heroes of myth had been afforded the same privilege; the sky was populated by heroes and gods – so why not the characters of British myth, too? Orion, the hunter, had been the subject of their discussion earlier – and they’d agreed the icy river he was crossing to regain, somehow, his solar eye, was the Milky Way, but Tolkien had not quite grasped the final part of the image - Orion’s hunting dog, following its master, trotting alongside the Milky Way, had in all probability inspired the name of the Kennet… ‘bright dog’ - meaning the Kennet, like the Boyne, was somehow the earthly equivalent of the river of stars in the sky. The presence of Dabilla in the Irish tale had made it a near-certainty that a version of the Boann myth had existed here – there was the river of the dog, and the well-head of the eye, linked by name to the nearby goddess of the waters at Bath.
I should have known after all our talk earlier, he thought…It was there all along in ‘Pearl’ - under the nose of this dim-witted philologist for years and I never saw it! He softly intoned the verses of this medieval lyric, so close to his heart, the meaning of the stone-strewn river separating the poet from his deceased child suddenly clear:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night
Like the river in the poem, the Kennet’s depths were stippled with small pebbles of chalk that shone white like stars in the winter sky. And remembering the stone he had picked up earlier he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the small piece of chalk. The river of the poem was the river that divided Paradise from mortal realms – the same as the Greek Styx on whose banks the three-headed dog Cerberus roamed; the river and the dog; now of course its stones twinkled like stars, for they were stars! He wondered if the poet had drawn on some older tradition when he had written these lines, unbeknown of their meaning, or whether he had known all along of what he was writing, and Tolkien just hadn’t seen it: The river of paradise was the heavenly river – the Milky Way, across which the souls of the dead might pass…
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, but would it be overly rude if I went for a short walk? I have some thinking to do…’ he said, his voice shaking with repressed excitement.
…
Tolkien had retraced the route they had walked earlier back past where the road curved about Silbury, and along to a gate in the field below the hill on whose easternmost point West Kennet rose, and where Barfield had earlier pointed out a copse of trees at the far side of the field in which the Swallowhead spring was hidden. Taking the path towards the trees Tolkien continued until he reached a still pool, crossed by a handful of large sarsen stepping stones. Beyond the stones, in a hollow cradled by the hillside, stood two willow trees, and from between them the waters of the Kennet bubbled from the earth. He strolled around the trees, noticing a small stone cut in the hillside beyond; here, he guessed, in the winter, the waters would rise, but already, in April, the flow had lessened to emerge from the earth closer to the pool.
Tolkien returned to the brook and sat on one of the large, flat stones that forded the stream; he sat gazing into its clear depths.
There, to the north, was the shadow of the domed Silbury hill against the pale starlight, and at his feet the chuckling water, one part silvered now by the light of the crescent-moon; all was quiet, save the lilting of the water, though in the distance an owl hooted, two, three times.
How long had men come here to worship or seek solace at the wisdom-giving waters of the eye, he wondered, here beneath the stars at this holy stream?
This flashing silver river that seemed to divide the world of the dead from the living; the river of the bright dog…
Tolkien knelt, and cupped a clear handful of the cool water, and let it flow back through his fingers. And as he did so he lifted his head, and lo! There above him on the rim of the south-western sky, as if summoned, the jewel-like Sirius still hung in the heavens, flashing a purplish blue, just on the point of sinking down below the hillside to follow its master Orion into the lands below the horizon, but it would rise again in the east as herald of the new dawn. And in the east at this late hour lay Vega, glinting blue in the Lyre, and to its left, Deneb, the tail of the swan - and rising to a gentle arch across the back of the swan in the northern sky was the milky waters of the heavenly river aping the flow of the Kennet on the ground.
Was this pool once ringed with hazel, he wondered? Did the salmon of wisdom swim here, silver beneath the moon?
The reflection of the crescent-moon, like a curved barque sailing between the horns of Taurus, seemed to traverse the waters before him, casting a bright shifting path across the water, that trembled then broke into many pieces before reconstituting; forming then dissolving, trembling and breaking, the crescent becoming a lidded white eye, a curved back of a silver salmon; it broke apart, re-forming, shivering, pulsing and morphing into wild patterns and shapes; a crescent, boat; a lidded eye again; a dancing cool white flame; a trail of flowers, of stars, of sparks, of fish; once more a sliver of moon …
It was hypnotising, lulling, and Tolkien, tired from the days walk and the whisky found himself drifting somewhere between thought and sleep. The waters of the river seemed to rise and swirl; churning to a white starry foam; lifting, breaching their banks; a dual stream of liquid shooting forth to land and sky; one flooding the land and creating a broad river on earth, the other rising to the sky and forming the milky river of stars… the primal waters divided into above and below.
Into these waters Tolkien stared entranced… and there, at the heart of the black mirror, the reflected flash of the moon like a pale severed head in the ripples of the stream lay as if suspended from the branches or caught in the roots of a shining tree that joined earth and heaven… But it shifted and flashed, became distorted into an eye, first a barely-open white eye, then the burning eye of the sun, yellow like a cat’s; and it seemed to him that the eye looked across time and space from a place that knew neither, and that somehow the one eye was wise but possessive… wishing to hide its precious treasure from the unworthy, from those who would steal it… it became the eye of Fafnir the dragon, hiding the ring that would be stolen from him by Siegfried… the eye of Smaug guarding the cup that Bilbo Baggins would steal; and the eye of Nechtan jealously guarding the waters of knowledge from Boann… or the lamp-like pale eye of the creature Gollum…
Then, in the reflecting waters, it seemed he saw, in that eternal moment between two thoughts, the lady of the waters, the fairy princess, lady of the white cows; Sulis-Minerva, mistress of magic – the poet’s daughter who in the Pearl poem lay across the river of death on the shores of Paradise - about her head a silvery-gold corona of stars; now rising from the waters and straddling the river. She bent over the waters, seeming to pour the glimmering flashes of moonlight into the pool; her pale beauteous face lifted high amid the stars, and she bridged the earth and the heavens like a pallid rainbow, the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia her nourishing breasts, a white-shadow arching over the sleeping men of earth; blessed; snow-white, queen of stars....
All in white she was, her hair loose about her shoulders, soft as the owl’s feather; wise beyond years, and about her throat a pendant or phial of rock crystal, lit by an inner fire; the reflected light of the star shining from on the western horizon; and she seemed to peer down into the mirrored surface of the waters…no, she WAS the waters, and the stars combined, and one flowed into the other… a face below and a face above, their gaze meeting; two but yet one.
There she arched above and below, this maid of the sidhe, this Elven princess, this lady of the lake; her white track streaming behind her… a track of flowers, of stars, of chalk pebbles in the holy stream, of the shimmering ripples caused by the moonlight on the waters… and it seemed to him that she had come from a far distant land, a land that was beyond the reach of mortal man… from Paradise… But the water! Flooding over the low, green land! The terror of the approaching waves! The burning, baleful eye…blazing over the flood… … and then there was a dark-haired girl floating in the water surrounded by flowers and shining stones and then flames and the sound of gunfire and shells exploding… the past, or shadows of what might yet come to pass?
Then at last this shifting reflection calmed and resolved once more into a mirrored form of distant figure standing on the far, green, shore; a kind, sad, face, and his heart leapt… Mother?… his heart cried out… Mother?! Unthinking he reached forward, seeking to grasp her reflection, his hand plunging into the cool water so that the image atomised into fragments and disappeared.
When the void closed the sparkling water resolved to mirror the moon-ship sailing across the heavens above; the vision that had come unbidden left him as swiftly as it had arrived. The moon on the water, though, still shifted and trembled, but now through the prism of his tears; in the distance the owl once more called, once, twice, three times….