Volume 40 Article 22

Number 2

4-2022

Tolkien and the Sea: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar

1996, edited by Richard Cranshaw and Shaun Gunner
Kris Swank
Pima Community College

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Tolkien and the Sea: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 1996, edited by
Richard Cranshaw and Shaun Gunner

Abstract
Review of the book Tolkien and the Sea: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 1996.

Additional Keywords
Sea

This book reviews is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic
Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol40/iss2/22
 Reviews

Ethical issues in the books include Edward’s reluctance to turn Bella

into a vampire. There are issues regarding Bella’s loyalty, lack thereof, and
friendship with Jacob. There are ethical issues regarding roles of the three
focalizing characters within the conflicts between vampires and werewolves.
Also, the question of how to treat Bella’s own life-threatening pregnancy of a
half-human, half-vampire child is part of the dramatic presentation of ethics in
the book. About the Twilight series Guanio-Uluru writes, “The base line
message of the series in terms of its progression, then, is that it makes a strong
case for following one’s deepest romantic inclinations or obsessions with no
regard for the personal cost or immediate consequences of such a path as ’all
will be right in the end’” (181). A thoughtful and understated comment
regarding the books by Guanio-Uluru is, “Given the nature of vampires,
however, it may seem overly optimistic to expect healthy relationship dynamics
in a vampire romance series” (208).
In conclusion, Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature would sit nicely on
the shelf with Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in “The Lord of the
Rings” by Matthew Dickerson and “The Lord of the Rings” and Philosophy: One
Book to Rule Them All edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson. Guanio-
Uluru does a fine job of exploring her topic in the works of her three chosen
authors. The book is particularly strong in describing and discussing the plots
and characters of The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. Guanio-
Uluru’s book would be appropriate for undergraduate and advanced high
school literature students or metropolitan libraries, and I also think it would be
very good for book discussion groups.
— Phillip Fitzsimmons

T OLKIEN AND T HE S EA : P ROCEEDINGS OF T HE T OLKIEN S OCIETY

S EMINAR 1996. Edited by Richard Crawshaw and Shaun Gunner. Tolkien
Society; Luna Press Publishing, rev. ed. 2021. xi + 99p. 978-1-913387-55-6. £9.00.
Peter Roe Memorial Series VII.

T OLKIEN AND THE SEA IS A RECENT REPRINT of Tolkien Society proceedings

featuring five papers delivered at the 11th Tolkien Society Seminar held
at the George Hotel in Colchester on June 15, 1996. Originally published as
Tolkien, The Sea and Scandinavia (Telford: The Tolkien Society, 1999) as a folded
and stapled paper booklet, this revised edition is available as an e-book or a
paperback. I was provided with a PDF copy for review, so I cannot evaluate the
book’s final formats, but I’m familiar with a number of other recent Tolkien
Society proceedings published by Luna Press and I like the handsome, small

262  Mythlore 140, Spring/Summer 2022

 Reviews

(5”x7”) paperback format. The order of the papers has been altered from the
original publication, and the text has been further edited with corrections by the
Society’s Shaun Gunner. The title has also been amended to better reflect the
contents of the papers included. These five papers are more or less in harmony
with the theme as they analyze such narrative elements as the ineluctable Wave
of Tolkien’s self-described “Atlantis-haunting” (see Tolkien, Letters 347, #257),
the changes to the coastlines of Middle-earth, and the sea as a road to various
fairy realms and Earthly paradises.
Patricia Reynolds recapitulates the many dreams and visions in
Tolkien’s masterwork in her paper, “The Great Wave and Other Dreams in The
Lord of the Rings,” categorizing them as inconsequential or portentous, memory
or future vision. The first part of the essay is primarily a list of dreams in the
story. The second part is a discussion of various beliefs about dreams (e.g.,
communications from the gods, cultural archetypes, personal symbols, wish
fulfillment, foresight, or memory). Along the way, Reynolds explores Tolkien’s
comments from On Fairy-stories on dreams as narrative devices, and the dreams
in Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers. She concludes that several dreams in The
Lord of the Rings were sent by the Valar (21). Tolkien, she writes, believed both
dreams and creative writing were subcreations under God, and were, therefore,
divine revelation (29). However, aside from the “Great Wave” dream of Faramir
(and Tolkien), this essay is not specifically related to the sea-theme of the book’s
title.
In “Seas and Shores: A Study of Cataclysm in Middle-earth,” Alex
Lewis considers possible geological causes for the Drowning of Beleriand, the
Drowning of Númenor, and the destruction of Mordor. For example, he
concludes that the inundation of Beleriand at the end of the First Age was caused
by simultaneous volcanic activity and plate movement with one “probably the
trigger for the other” (35). The problem with applying real-world scientific
principles to a fantasy world is that sometimes you can’t. Finding no satisfactory
geological explanation for the sundering of Valinor from Middle-earth and the
re-forming of a flat world into a round one at the end of the Second Age, Lewis
is forced to accept a metaphysical solution instead: that Valinor existed “within
some other dimension of the Universe close to our own but far enough apart to
make it very difficult for mortals to reach with their conventional physical
means” (39). As a thought experiment, Lewis’s essay is interesting and
entertaining, but it’s reminiscent of the Beowulf scholars who, Tolkien said,
pulled down the tower to examine its stones. Lewis, like those scholars, focuses
too much attention on the stones while failing to appreciate the sea.
Maria B. Kuteeva’s essay, “Searching for an Earthly Paradise: Some
Common Images in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis,” compares
Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers and its inset poem, “The Death of Saint Brendan”

Mythlore 40.2, Spring/Summer 2022  263

 Reviews

(later revised as “Imram”) with Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the
reliance of both works on the medieval legend of Saint Brendan the Navigator.
Kuteeva discusses several common images, most-strikingly Tolkien’s “three
symbolic episodes—a Cloud, a Tree and a Star— [which] have a recognisable
correlative in Lewis’s story” (52). A cloud in Tolkien envelopes Brendan’s boat
“for forty days and ten” (qtd. 57), while a cloud envelops the mysterious and
terrifying Dark Island in Lewis. The white tree covered with bird-like leaves in
Tolkien is represented in Lewis by the banquet table at the end of the world
covered daily with snow-white birds. Kuteeva links the star with Lewis’s
Ramandu, a self-professed “star at rest” (qtd. 60), and with Tolkien’s third “fair
kindred” (i.e., the Elves) (qtd. 60). But she entirely misses the point that Tolkien’s
star is actually Eärendel, the legendary star-mariner who is woven throughout
Tolkien’s legendarium. Ultimately, Kuteeva finds too many shared images for
coincidence's sake, and concludes that “Tolkien discussed the images of Saint
Brendan’s legend and other journeys in search of the Earthly Paradise with
Lewis, making an impact upon his practice of mythopoeia” (63). Although such
views of the Inklings’ mutual influence are now commonplace, Kuteeva made
her observations a full decade before the publication of Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The
Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community.
Kuteeva’s paper also predates other published scholarship comparing Lewis’s
and Tolkien’s otherworld voyage tales, such as essays by Huttar (2007) and
Swank (2019).
In “The Sea-Bell: A Voyage of Exploration,” Christine Davidson
illustrates Tolkien’s poetic lineage by comparing the penultimate poem in his
collection, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962 [ATB]), to other English sea- and
fairy-poems by Malory, Masefield, Keats, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Allingham,
and Coleridge, as well as Tolkien’s own “Errantry” and “The Song of Eärendil”
(i.e., Bilbo’s poem in the house of Elrond). Davidson takes the poem’s late
appellation as “Frodo’s Dreme” as indication that the voyager is a hobbit, an
oddity she acknowledges:

One wonders why the sea should be ‘ever-present in the background of

hobbit imagination’, a people that, so far as we are told, had their origins
in the middle of a large continent and progressed from a semi-nomadic
hunting and gathering way of life to settled agriculture. (70)

Of course, the appellation was added by Tolkien as he attempted to

retrofit an older, non-Middle-earth poem, “Looney” (1934), into the conceit that
the poems in ATB were written or transmitted by hobbits.1 The conceit works
well for some poems, like “The Last Ship” (revised from “Firiel,” also 1934) but

1 “Looney” was written and published in 1934, The Oxford Magazine, vol 52, no. 9, p. 340.

264  Mythlore 140, Spring/Summer 2022

 Reviews

not as well for “The Sea-Bell,” as its dark tone is discordant with the ebullient
nature of other hobbit poetry in The Lord of the Rings and ATB.2 Davidson does
not address “The Sea-Bell’s” pre-Hobbit provenance as a likely source of the
incongruity. (Interestingly, John Ellison’s paper in the collection does mention
“The Sea-Bell’s” origins as “Looney.”) Overall, Davidson’s survey is thought-
provoking, but ultimately she asks more questions than she answers, and
readers may be further enlightened by pairing Davidson’s piece with Sue
Bridgwater’s essay, “What is it but a dream? Tolkien's ‘The Sea Bell’ and Yeats’
‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’” (2013).
The final paper in the collection is “Tolkien-on-Sea: The View from the
Shores of Middle-earth.” Here, John Ellison considers the “crucially important
image” of the sea in Tolkien’s work and relates it to the German Romantic
movement (87). Ellison makes the fascinating observation that, despite Tolkien’s
preoccupation with “sea-longing,” otherworld voyages, and ships and sailing
in general, a characteristic of Tolkien’s writing is, “There are descriptions of
arrival or departure, but none of actual days at sea. [...] [T]here is no single major
scene in any of his writings actually set on board ship” (90-91). He attributes this
to Tolkien’s romantic view of the sea as a liminal space:

it is the seashore, the sea’s margin, that represents reality; the sea itself is
a symbol. [...] The sea stands for everything that divides the real world
from the unseen, imagination from reality, the unconscious, dreaming
mind from waking experience, myth from history, and above all, this life
from the hereafter. (86-87)

Ellison compares this view from the shoreline, gazing out to sea with
longing, with the German Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840) (“of whom Tolkien almost quite certainly never heard” 98) whose
work frequently shows figures “sitting or standing on the seashore gazing on
over the sea at spectral ships which advance towards the picture plane or recede
from it, and which are thought to symbolise ‘the stages of life’ (the title of one
such painting) [...] or man’s relationship with death and the hereafter” (98). The
paper abruptly stops before making a proper, English-literature-class
conclusion, but Ellison leaves enough bread-crumbs for readers to make their
own. As an early exploration of the relationship between Tolkien and the
German Romantics, Ellison pre-figures Julian Eilmann’s groundbreaking J.R.R.
Tolkien, Romanticist and Poet (2017).
Overall, the collection has a few limitations. Some typos remain (in my
PDF review copy, at any rate) despite Gunner’s re-editing. The focus of a couple

2 “Firiel” was published in 1934 in The Chronicle of the Convents of the Sacred Heart, vol. IV.

Mythlore 40.2, Spring/Summer 2022  265

 Reviews

of the papers is only tangentially related to the sea. And, of course, Tolkien
scholarship has moved on since these papers were first presented in 1996.
Nevertheless, Tolkien and the Sea remains an interesting and
illuminating little collection. Ostensibly available as a stapled booklet since its
1999 publication, this new, more accessible and higher quality edition will bring
these papers to much wider attention and appreciation. Anticipating several
directions Tolkien scholarship would take in succeeding decades, this small
volume is enlightening and inexpensive (as well as supportive of a good cause:
proceeds from the sale of books in the Peter Roe Memorial series go back into
the Society’s fund to support and disseminate Tolkien-related scholarship). All-
in-all, the book’s merits outweigh its limitations, and anyone interested in
Tolkien’s thematic uses of the sea, or in Tolkien scholarship in general, should
enjoy these five vintage papers from the vault of the Tolkien Society.
—Kris Swank
WORKS CITED
Bridgwater, Sue. “What is it but a dream? Tolkien’s ‘The Sea Bell’ and Yeats’ ‘The Man who
Dreamed of Faeryland,’” Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner,
Walking Tree Publishers, 2013, pp. 117-151.
Eilmann, Julian. J.R.R. Tolkien, Romanticist and Poet. Walking Tree Publishers, 2017.
Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community.
Kent State UP, 2008.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher
Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Huttar, Charles A. “‘Deep Lies the Sea-Longing’: Inklings of Home.” Mythlore, vol. 26, no. 1/2
(#99/100), 2007, pp. 5-27.
Swank, Kris. “The Child’s Voyage and the Immram Tradition in Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman.”
Mythlore, vol. 38, no. 1 (#135), 2019, pp. 75-98.

P AGAN S AINTS IN M IDDLE - EARTH . Claudio A. Testi. Zurich and Jena:

Walking Tree, 2018. 196 p. ISBN: 978-3-905703-38-2

C LAUDIO A. TESTI’S STUDY OF THE CONTESTED ISSUES surrounding the

religious implications of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium consists of a deeply
researched, well-thought out, and well-reasoned appraisal of existing
scholarship in this area. Testi’s objective revolves around reconciling the
Catholic and Christian implications of Tolkien’s work with the intentions of the
author. Testi attempts to examine all existing arguments and his own in light of
the entire body of Tolkien’s work. In doing so, Testi relies heavily on Tolkien’s
own words on the matter, which is one of the great strengths of this scholarship.
Testi proposes his own original theory of Tolkien’s work, espousing what Testi

266  Mythlore 140, Spring/Summer 2022