Chapter 29: Pan
‘Poor Jack.’ Barfield sighed.
‘Poor us, he’s not the most patient of patients!’ Tolkien responded, and both men laughed.
Tolkien and Barfield had stepped outside for a last pipe before bed, and had decided to take a stroll down Church Lane to the stone circle; the rain showers that had dulled the afternoon had long gone, but the men wore their overcoats, the wind still being cool. Above them the clear spring air revealed a magnificent vista of stars.
They passed the pub, the gas-light still visible through the small leaded windows, and a few small voices still audible inside, and carried on past it, turning left at the crossroads, making for the elephantine Swindon stone that marked the old north entrance of the henge. They walked past the stone, touching its cool sides, and walked anticlockwise along the edge of the newly re-excavated ditch, the great bank beyond blotting out the stars on the horizon. Tomorrow this section would be teeming with men – workmen jostling the stone back in place, which now lay, bound in ropes, at the side of its hole – like a giant tooth waiting to be plugged back into a gaping hole in a jaw.
‘It seems so crude, these poles and pulleys…’ remarked Barfield. ‘I prefer the idea that some ancient sorcerer had them leap up and dance into place.’
Tolkien agreed. ‘Maybe the legends are closer to the truth.’
‘We both know they are. A more profound truth.’ Barfield said.
Tolkien looked at his friend with fondness. True, Owen had always been more Jack’s friend than his own, and of late his business had kept him more often than not away from the weekly gathering of the Inklings – but the two men had always had a mutual understanding; indeed their viewpoints converged a lot more often than they had ever openly spoken about – but circumstances had made it so that they had never really developed as close a friendship as either of them would have liked, a fact not aided by Tolkien’s more introverted, often shy, nature, and the presence of Jack, the organising principle behind the Inklings themselves, who though not consciously standing between the two men, was like the sun around whom the others revolved, their paths crossing infrequently.
Barfield’s comment had been correct; they both knew that in its own way legend could be closer to truth than nuts and bolt facts could manage.
‘I wonder what this place will be like when all the stones are back in place?’ Barfield mused.
Tolkien cleared his throat. ‘I can’t say I wholly agree with the reasons behind it – but I am intrigued, all the same. I doubt Keiller’s desire to recreate the past differs much from my own.’
‘Except yours is a literary endeavour, Ronald; a recreation of words, of splintered light, rather than solid stone.’
‘Words and splintered light. I like that.’ He refilled his pipe, and continued.
‘Keiller has the easier job – he digs and finds a stone, and a socket, and matches them up. My stones are fragments, mostly lost – long shattered and disregarded.’
‘So you see your work as recreation rather than creation?’
‘Of course. And your own work has clarified this for me. I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked you in person for what your ‘Poetic Diction’ did for my thinking. I’d been working alone, you see – and when I read your book I saw that others, too, saw the value of such an endeavour.’
Barfield smiled meekly. ‘Yes,’ he said ‘words are indeed fragments, splinters of the light – once complete and shining and now in disparate sherds, from a time when a word was full of potent magic; as we have become divorced from that original unity with the world, so have our words.’
They continued to walk along the steep edge of the ditch, the spray of the Milky way above their heads.
‘Not many people, Owen, would understand what I’m about to say…’ he looked up at Barfield, nervously.
‘You see, my languages, the elven languages – I started on them years ago, yet the more work I did on them the more I felt I was uncovering something true, something long lost – like Keiller’s buried stones. You see, the words demanded a history from out of which they had sprung – yet I did not invent the history as much as deduce it from the language. It was like uncovering a vast mosaic, hidden for aeons, a mosaic bearing a pattern, an image, fully formed, beautiful, whole.’ he lit his pipe and gazed upwards at where the Milky Way, rising out of the bank with its blasted trees, crossed the sky like a milky river.
‘And all from that line from the poem Christ – eala earendil, engla beorhtest, ofan middelgeard monnum sended – who, or what was Earendil? Why was this ‘brightest of angels’ bringing light to us dwellers in middle-earth? Was he a herald of the Light? I had to know, Owen, and so I began to seek an answer to those questions…’
He puffed on his pipe; his features narrowed with thought.
‘The men who built this circle… what were these stones to them? Not dead matter to be shunted with ropes and levers; Keiller and his men are moving dead husks of rock; the builders of Avebury were not. What word did they use for these stones? A word, I would imagine, rich in meaning, that meant stone, and bone and ancestor and spirit… they didn’t shift these into place with brute force – they sung them into place, danced them into a circle.’
Owen squinted at the stars. ‘Just as the stars circle about the pole star – yes – these stones danced too in a circle, to be fossilised into solidity with the rising of the sun – like your trolls!’
‘Yes. I simply had to put that in The Hobbit – I thought of the Merry Maidens, and of rings of stones said to be women caught dancing on the Sabbath; I wanted to express the idea that a stone wasn’t just a stone, but a being, caught in the first rays of the sun and entombed, enchanted. Surely these stones were seen as such – spirits caught, tamed, trapped, perhaps. Or perhaps they danced when no living man was present; like the fairies dancing in their circles, away from the voyeuristic eyes of mortals.’
Owen grinned. ‘I can imagine the builders laughing at Keiller and his workmen, straining to lift these rocks – when in their day an enchanter stood at the centre and sang as the stones danced about him under the wheeling stars; formed a circle that aped the motion of the moon above… what is the name Geoffrey of Monmouth gives to Stonehenge? – Yes, the Giants Dance, it’s the same idea… and this after they are levitated across the Irish sea by Merlin the enchanter. ’
Tolkien exhaled a smoke ring into the night air. ‘Merlin, yes, Owen. Indeed. Indeed. These rings remind me of Merlin’s observatory in the woods from the Vita Merlini with its 60 windows and doors; it’s the grove of dancing stones magicked into life by the lyre of Orpheus. I think our ancestors associated him with this place too.’
‘Merlin or Orpheus?’ asked Barfield.
‘Merlin. He supposedly built Stonehenge but I wonder about Avebury too – I mean, we are just a stone’s throw, pardon the pun, from Marlborough, and Marlborough means ‘Merlin’s mound’ after a similar mound to Silbury Hill that exists on the outskirts of the town. Strange that he should crop up here, so close to this circle, when we know he was associated with Stonehenge too.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ Barfield said.
‘I don’t know it, for sure; it is just a feeling, a hunch, but one I have only skimmed over and not had time to give my full attention.’
‘Time.’ Said Barfield, ruefully. ‘I wish I had time to think on such matters. Sometimes I hate my London life; I wish I had the opportunity to leave my career and just study and write. I feel split in two – the lawyer and the poet; but it’s necessary, I suppose – I simply would go mad were I not to divide myself thus – I’d forever be hankering to write, and so I force myself to forget it. The moment I walk into my office I am the lawyer, and I stoically bear it until I take my coat from the hat-stand at the door at the end of the day.’
‘I am luckier, I suppose, Owen. My daily work is at least on a topic that I love; but it’s the bureaucracy, the marking, the meetings – and then the demands of home life and the family; if I’m lucky I can sometimes start my work at eleven or midnight – and then I’ll write until 2 or 3 in the morning when tiredness overtakes me.’ The mention of his family brought on a sudden pang of homesickness. ‘I am lucky. Edith understands my writing.’
Owen looked down.
‘Hmm. Maud does not understand mine – indeed she has taken quite violently against some of my beliefs.’ His face contorted as he wrestled with some inner emotion. ‘She, I believe,’ and he paused, wondering if he was going too far, ‘is somewhat jealous of my spiritual leanings towards anthroposophy, and so soured are things between us because of it that I dare not mention this in her presence.’
Tolkien felt odd hearing this revelation from a man with whom fate had decreed an acquaintance rather than a friendship. He wondered if it might not have been better for him to speak to Jack of such matters – and then he knew that quite obviously he had, and that Jack’s own dislike of anthroposophy, the spiritual school headed by the Austrian mystic Steiner, had probably coloured his response. Who else did Barfield have to turn to?
‘The wishes of a wife must be heeded, Owen, for the sake of the family – but I have found it always better, if one disagrees and is adamant in one’s position, just to continue openly with that opposition than to hide one’s doings.’
Barfield nodded.
‘I shall not give up my beliefs, Ronald. They make me what I am. As I have said, I am sure Maud is more than a little jealous of my devotion to Steiner, and of the joy my beliefs bring me. What would she have me do – renounce them and be miserable? Would that make her happy, to limit me so she can say I am wholly her own?’ he looked up, distraught.
‘And Jack, of course, does not understand. How could he? He’s not a husband – not in any conventional sense, loth he is, after all, to clarify that strange business with the Moore woman…’
Tolkien blanched at this subject, taboo amongst Jack’s friends.
‘…and,’ Barfield continued, ‘he thinks little enough of Steiner to perhaps use this disagreement with Maud as a lever to push me back onto the straight and narrow of Protestantism…’
The two met each other’s gaze, momentarily, sharing an unspoken compliance in the face of Jack’s newfound and dogmatic faith.
‘Jack suffers, I would say, from a certain short-sightedness in that he does not seem, sometimes, to value the comfort that one’s beliefs can bestow;’ Tolkien said; ‘he thinks nothing of making a remark that often is aimed at one’s faith but lands on one’s heart – where faith, after all, resides. I once told him of my special devotion to St. John the Evangelist, and he laughed at me and said he couldn’t imagine a pair more unsuited than the saint and I. He took what was a dear thing to me and would have sullied it.’
Barfield stood at Tolkien’s side, then raised his hand and placed it on the other’s upper arm; an act of consolation, of comfort and of understanding. I know, it seemed to say, the pain of what you speak.
‘He’s a vast intellect that allowed, by grace, God to come in to his life,’ Tolkien continued ‘– but ever since his Christianity is analysed and presented with the same intellectual vigour. But my own beliefs, Owen, these are not intellectual concepts; they are the ground of all my bliss.’ At that moment a shooting star fell above them, leaving a trail.
Owen chuckled.
‘What is it?’ Tolkien asked.
‘I shouldn’t laugh but it tickled me; before we left Mrs Mac Govan-Crow had left a jug of cold water for Jack to sip that she said was special. Well, I went into the kitchen and there was a milk pan on the stove with pebbles in it – quartz pebbles; well, I must have looked quizzical because Mrs Mac Govan-Crow came over and said to me that it is an old Irish folk remedy: you take nine crystals from a holy stream – she had these from back home, she said – and you boil them in water and then drink the water when cool! They’re called shining stones, cloch geala, or something, or milk stones, and they are supposed to be a cure-all, but especially for the loss of voice… these are the stones of the fairy folk, the sidhe…’
Tolkien laughed. ‘How would Jack feel if he knew he was drinking pagan Holy Water?’ Holy shining stones from the river that borders Paradise, Tolkien thought, thinking of the Pearl poem.
The two men stood a while in companionable silence, gazing heavenwards, when their reverie was ended by the distant sound of breaking glass followed by raucous laughter.
‘One too many ales, I expect’ Barfield said with a wink.
‘No – it didn’t come from the pub...’ Tolkien replied, beginning to walk along the bank to where a path led down to the western side of the circle. Barfield followed, intrigued. They took the path which set them on the gravel roadway just north of Church Road – a path that lead to the Manor. The laughter was heard again, closer now.
Ahead, flickering lights could be seen through the hedge that ran around the Manor House, and voices heard. There were male voices, sounding as if they were trying to be hushed, sometimes breaking out in laughter; and all the while the orange flicker of naked flames - a number being seeming to be being carried about.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Barfield whispered to Tolkien.
‘I thought it might have been some local lads up to mischief, but I don’t think so now.’
Just then a high pitched squeal broke out – followed by a laugh. A woman’s laugh.
‘My word. I think its Keiller and his friends.’ Barfield said. ‘You don’t suppose Mac Govan-Crow was right, do you?’
Tolkien raised a hand to silence his friend. ‘Listen!’
And the name Pan, intoned in deep voices, was sent towards them on the light spring breeze.
Pan! Pan! PAN!
‘Good God!’ muttered Barfield.
‘A god, yes’ Tolkien whispered, ‘but good?’.
‘Poor Jack.’ Barfield sighed.
‘Poor us, he’s not the most patient of patients!’ Tolkien responded, and both men laughed.
Tolkien and Barfield had stepped outside for a last pipe before bed, and had decided to take a stroll down Church Lane to the stone circle; the rain showers that had dulled the afternoon had long gone, but the men wore their overcoats, the wind still being cool. Above them the clear spring air revealed a magnificent vista of stars.
They passed the pub, the gas-light still visible through the small leaded windows, and a few small voices still audible inside, and carried on past it, turning left at the crossroads, making for the elephantine Swindon stone that marked the old north entrance of the henge. They walked past the stone, touching its cool sides, and walked anticlockwise along the edge of the newly re-excavated ditch, the great bank beyond blotting out the stars on the horizon. Tomorrow this section would be teeming with men – workmen jostling the stone back in place, which now lay, bound in ropes, at the side of its hole – like a giant tooth waiting to be plugged back into a gaping hole in a jaw.
‘It seems so crude, these poles and pulleys…’ remarked Barfield. ‘I prefer the idea that some ancient sorcerer had them leap up and dance into place.’
Tolkien agreed. ‘Maybe the legends are closer to the truth.’
‘We both know they are. A more profound truth.’ Barfield said.
Tolkien looked at his friend with fondness. True, Owen had always been more Jack’s friend than his own, and of late his business had kept him more often than not away from the weekly gathering of the Inklings – but the two men had always had a mutual understanding; indeed their viewpoints converged a lot more often than they had ever openly spoken about – but circumstances had made it so that they had never really developed as close a friendship as either of them would have liked, a fact not aided by Tolkien’s more introverted, often shy, nature, and the presence of Jack, the organising principle behind the Inklings themselves, who though not consciously standing between the two men, was like the sun around whom the others revolved, their paths crossing infrequently.
Barfield’s comment had been correct; they both knew that in its own way legend could be closer to truth than nuts and bolt facts could manage.
‘I wonder what this place will be like when all the stones are back in place?’ Barfield mused.
Tolkien cleared his throat. ‘I can’t say I wholly agree with the reasons behind it – but I am intrigued, all the same. I doubt Keiller’s desire to recreate the past differs much from my own.’
‘Except yours is a literary endeavour, Ronald; a recreation of words, of splintered light, rather than solid stone.’
‘Words and splintered light. I like that.’ He refilled his pipe, and continued.
‘Keiller has the easier job – he digs and finds a stone, and a socket, and matches them up. My stones are fragments, mostly lost – long shattered and disregarded.’
‘So you see your work as recreation rather than creation?’
‘Of course. And your own work has clarified this for me. I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked you in person for what your ‘Poetic Diction’ did for my thinking. I’d been working alone, you see – and when I read your book I saw that others, too, saw the value of such an endeavour.’
Barfield smiled meekly. ‘Yes,’ he said ‘words are indeed fragments, splinters of the light – once complete and shining and now in disparate sherds, from a time when a word was full of potent magic; as we have become divorced from that original unity with the world, so have our words.’
They continued to walk along the steep edge of the ditch, the spray of the Milky way above their heads.
‘Not many people, Owen, would understand what I’m about to say…’ he looked up at Barfield, nervously.
‘You see, my languages, the elven languages – I started on them years ago, yet the more work I did on them the more I felt I was uncovering something true, something long lost – like Keiller’s buried stones. You see, the words demanded a history from out of which they had sprung – yet I did not invent the history as much as deduce it from the language. It was like uncovering a vast mosaic, hidden for aeons, a mosaic bearing a pattern, an image, fully formed, beautiful, whole.’ he lit his pipe and gazed upwards at where the Milky Way, rising out of the bank with its blasted trees, crossed the sky like a milky river.
‘And all from that line from the poem Christ – eala earendil, engla beorhtest, ofan middelgeard monnum sended – who, or what was Earendil? Why was this ‘brightest of angels’ bringing light to us dwellers in middle-earth? Was he a herald of the Light? I had to know, Owen, and so I began to seek an answer to those questions…’
He puffed on his pipe; his features narrowed with thought.
‘The men who built this circle… what were these stones to them? Not dead matter to be shunted with ropes and levers; Keiller and his men are moving dead husks of rock; the builders of Avebury were not. What word did they use for these stones? A word, I would imagine, rich in meaning, that meant stone, and bone and ancestor and spirit… they didn’t shift these into place with brute force – they sung them into place, danced them into a circle.’
Owen squinted at the stars. ‘Just as the stars circle about the pole star – yes – these stones danced too in a circle, to be fossilised into solidity with the rising of the sun – like your trolls!’
‘Yes. I simply had to put that in The Hobbit – I thought of the Merry Maidens, and of rings of stones said to be women caught dancing on the Sabbath; I wanted to express the idea that a stone wasn’t just a stone, but a being, caught in the first rays of the sun and entombed, enchanted. Surely these stones were seen as such – spirits caught, tamed, trapped, perhaps. Or perhaps they danced when no living man was present; like the fairies dancing in their circles, away from the voyeuristic eyes of mortals.’
Owen grinned. ‘I can imagine the builders laughing at Keiller and his workmen, straining to lift these rocks – when in their day an enchanter stood at the centre and sang as the stones danced about him under the wheeling stars; formed a circle that aped the motion of the moon above… what is the name Geoffrey of Monmouth gives to Stonehenge? – Yes, the Giants Dance, it’s the same idea… and this after they are levitated across the Irish sea by Merlin the enchanter. ’
Tolkien exhaled a smoke ring into the night air. ‘Merlin, yes, Owen. Indeed. Indeed. These rings remind me of Merlin’s observatory in the woods from the Vita Merlini with its 60 windows and doors; it’s the grove of dancing stones magicked into life by the lyre of Orpheus. I think our ancestors associated him with this place too.’
‘Merlin or Orpheus?’ asked Barfield.
‘Merlin. He supposedly built Stonehenge but I wonder about Avebury too – I mean, we are just a stone’s throw, pardon the pun, from Marlborough, and Marlborough means ‘Merlin’s mound’ after a similar mound to Silbury Hill that exists on the outskirts of the town. Strange that he should crop up here, so close to this circle, when we know he was associated with Stonehenge too.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ Barfield said.
‘I don’t know it, for sure; it is just a feeling, a hunch, but one I have only skimmed over and not had time to give my full attention.’
‘Time.’ Said Barfield, ruefully. ‘I wish I had time to think on such matters. Sometimes I hate my London life; I wish I had the opportunity to leave my career and just study and write. I feel split in two – the lawyer and the poet; but it’s necessary, I suppose – I simply would go mad were I not to divide myself thus – I’d forever be hankering to write, and so I force myself to forget it. The moment I walk into my office I am the lawyer, and I stoically bear it until I take my coat from the hat-stand at the door at the end of the day.’
‘I am luckier, I suppose, Owen. My daily work is at least on a topic that I love; but it’s the bureaucracy, the marking, the meetings – and then the demands of home life and the family; if I’m lucky I can sometimes start my work at eleven or midnight – and then I’ll write until 2 or 3 in the morning when tiredness overtakes me.’ The mention of his family brought on a sudden pang of homesickness. ‘I am lucky. Edith understands my writing.’
Owen looked down.
‘Hmm. Maud does not understand mine – indeed she has taken quite violently against some of my beliefs.’ His face contorted as he wrestled with some inner emotion. ‘She, I believe,’ and he paused, wondering if he was going too far, ‘is somewhat jealous of my spiritual leanings towards anthroposophy, and so soured are things between us because of it that I dare not mention this in her presence.’
Tolkien felt odd hearing this revelation from a man with whom fate had decreed an acquaintance rather than a friendship. He wondered if it might not have been better for him to speak to Jack of such matters – and then he knew that quite obviously he had, and that Jack’s own dislike of anthroposophy, the spiritual school headed by the Austrian mystic Steiner, had probably coloured his response. Who else did Barfield have to turn to?
‘The wishes of a wife must be heeded, Owen, for the sake of the family – but I have found it always better, if one disagrees and is adamant in one’s position, just to continue openly with that opposition than to hide one’s doings.’
Barfield nodded.
‘I shall not give up my beliefs, Ronald. They make me what I am. As I have said, I am sure Maud is more than a little jealous of my devotion to Steiner, and of the joy my beliefs bring me. What would she have me do – renounce them and be miserable? Would that make her happy, to limit me so she can say I am wholly her own?’ he looked up, distraught.
‘And Jack, of course, does not understand. How could he? He’s not a husband – not in any conventional sense, loth he is, after all, to clarify that strange business with the Moore woman…’
Tolkien blanched at this subject, taboo amongst Jack’s friends.
‘…and,’ Barfield continued, ‘he thinks little enough of Steiner to perhaps use this disagreement with Maud as a lever to push me back onto the straight and narrow of Protestantism…’
The two met each other’s gaze, momentarily, sharing an unspoken compliance in the face of Jack’s newfound and dogmatic faith.
‘Jack suffers, I would say, from a certain short-sightedness in that he does not seem, sometimes, to value the comfort that one’s beliefs can bestow;’ Tolkien said; ‘he thinks nothing of making a remark that often is aimed at one’s faith but lands on one’s heart – where faith, after all, resides. I once told him of my special devotion to St. John the Evangelist, and he laughed at me and said he couldn’t imagine a pair more unsuited than the saint and I. He took what was a dear thing to me and would have sullied it.’
Barfield stood at Tolkien’s side, then raised his hand and placed it on the other’s upper arm; an act of consolation, of comfort and of understanding. I know, it seemed to say, the pain of what you speak.
‘He’s a vast intellect that allowed, by grace, God to come in to his life,’ Tolkien continued ‘– but ever since his Christianity is analysed and presented with the same intellectual vigour. But my own beliefs, Owen, these are not intellectual concepts; they are the ground of all my bliss.’ At that moment a shooting star fell above them, leaving a trail.
Owen chuckled.
‘What is it?’ Tolkien asked.
‘I shouldn’t laugh but it tickled me; before we left Mrs Mac Govan-Crow had left a jug of cold water for Jack to sip that she said was special. Well, I went into the kitchen and there was a milk pan on the stove with pebbles in it – quartz pebbles; well, I must have looked quizzical because Mrs Mac Govan-Crow came over and said to me that it is an old Irish folk remedy: you take nine crystals from a holy stream – she had these from back home, she said – and you boil them in water and then drink the water when cool! They’re called shining stones, cloch geala, or something, or milk stones, and they are supposed to be a cure-all, but especially for the loss of voice… these are the stones of the fairy folk, the sidhe…’
Tolkien laughed. ‘How would Jack feel if he knew he was drinking pagan Holy Water?’ Holy shining stones from the river that borders Paradise, Tolkien thought, thinking of the Pearl poem.
The two men stood a while in companionable silence, gazing heavenwards, when their reverie was ended by the distant sound of breaking glass followed by raucous laughter.
‘One too many ales, I expect’ Barfield said with a wink.
‘No – it didn’t come from the pub...’ Tolkien replied, beginning to walk along the bank to where a path led down to the western side of the circle. Barfield followed, intrigued. They took the path which set them on the gravel roadway just north of Church Road – a path that lead to the Manor. The laughter was heard again, closer now.
Ahead, flickering lights could be seen through the hedge that ran around the Manor House, and voices heard. There were male voices, sounding as if they were trying to be hushed, sometimes breaking out in laughter; and all the while the orange flicker of naked flames - a number being seeming to be being carried about.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Barfield whispered to Tolkien.
‘I thought it might have been some local lads up to mischief, but I don’t think so now.’
Just then a high pitched squeal broke out – followed by a laugh. A woman’s laugh.
‘My word. I think its Keiller and his friends.’ Barfield said. ‘You don’t suppose Mac Govan-Crow was right, do you?’
Tolkien raised a hand to silence his friend. ‘Listen!’
And the name Pan, intoned in deep voices, was sent towards them on the light spring breeze.
Pan! Pan! PAN!
‘Good God!’ muttered Barfield.
‘A god, yes’ Tolkien whispered, ‘but good?’.