Text: Carol Marhsall Peirce, “ ‘In the Perilous Realm’: The Fantastic Geographies of Tolkien and Poe,” Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities, Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986, pp. 124-136 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 124:]

In his critical study of fantasy and fairy tale, “On Fairy-stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien identifies most such stories as “about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches.” He also writes: “To the elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires, and when it is successful of all forms of human art most nearly approaches.” At another point he adds that fantasy must combine Imagination with unreality, have “a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression” — an “arresting strangeness” — and possess an “inner consistency.” It demands, says Tolkien, “a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.” “Few,” he adds, “attempt such difficult tasks.”(1)

One of those few who did attempt the craft was Edgar Allan Poe. In his poetry and tales one not only enters the Perilous Realm, one feels the very air that blows from that far countree. Indeed, in “Journey to the End of the Night,” a chapter in his book, The Power of Darkness, Harry Levin speaks of Poe’s “unique absorption in atmosphere” and concludes, “If he was at home anywhere, perhaps it was in his ‘Dreamland’.”(2) Like Tolkien, Poe had the “enchanter’s power” (to use Tolkien’s words) to “put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror,” to “make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine,” and to “cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold.”(3)

Of course, Poe and Tolkien differ in many major ways. Although each wrote poetry, and criticism, Poe is best known for his short stories and mood essays or “mindscapes,” undertaking only two longer works, the unfinished Pym and the philosophic probe of the universe, Eureka. Tolkien, on the other hand, did write a few short tales but concentrated his major publication on The Hobbit and the long three-volume Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile, he bore in his heart of hearts The Silmarillion, the constantly rewritten, never totally consolidated epic of the earliest ages of Middle-earth. The Silmarillion materials also encompassed his studies of language and related to them, for it was from the creation of the Eldarin languages that Tolkien turned to write the Ring trilogy. Here, too, is another difference from Poe (but, paradoxically, in some ways a likeness too), for whereas languages (the reconstruction of certain ancient languages and the creation of new ones) enthralled Tolkien most, Poe loved ratiocination, as he called his involvement with reasoning out mysteries — he was equally intrigued with solving real ones and with creating new ones himself for others to solve. Just as Tolkien invented languages, so Poe invented the modern detective story. [page 125:]

Poe’s characters, too, differ from Tolkien’s. Although in both men’s works the characters are generally other-worldly, not of this time or place, Poe’s greatest creations — his Ligeias, his Berenices, his Roderick Ushers, and even his omnipresent narrators — are often in their depths psychological studies in passionate abnormality or even madness. Tolkien’s, however, are mythic in their deepest being and seem to emerge from fairy lore and legend: “‘And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the Sun,’” says Théoden.(4)

Finally, in their culminating visions — in their mythic and mystic journeys — they ride toward different ends. For Poe (except in his detective fiction which does not pertain here) forever moves out of light into darkness, despair, and tragedy: there exists always the hope of beauty but the threat of oblivion. Tolkien, facing a world of darkness and of terror, a Götterdammerung, strives on toward light and toward the Eucatastrophe, as he calls it, the fairy-story opposite. In “On Fairy-stories,” he writes:

Though some of the realms Poe and Tolkien inhabit are not the same, however, others reveal a profound affinity. Both authors are mythmakers who open windows on the world of the creative imagination. Fascinatingly, some of the windows reveal the same landscape of fantasy. Surely there are archetypal worlds, as well as archetypal gods, that still call us home. Some of these primordial lands, then, exist in the geographies of both Tolkien and Poe, especially the dark world of horror and the bright world of Faërie.

To begin, each author sets his characters a-questing, riding down the Road of Trials on the journey inward to illumination.(6) Like Frodo and Gandolf and Aragorn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Poe’s hero persona sets out in “Eldorado”:

And just as in Tolkien’s definition in “On Fairy-stories” and in the plot of The Lord of the Rings, he sojourns long and penetrates deep into its shadows and perils:

The world that most of Poe’s knight-errants reach, however, like the world of his poems, “Dream-land” and “Ulalume,” seems in its fantastic natural features and its horror most to resemble Tolkien’s Mordor and the lands lying near it. Both are terrible worlds ruled by princes of Darkness and inhabited by Orcs in Tolkien and Ghouls in Poe. Tolkien writes: “Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. . . .has indeed arisen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor . . . .like a shadow on the borders of old stories.”(8) Frodo and Sam must travel a long and deadly road into Sauron’s kingdom in their quest to destroy the ring of power in the fires of Mount Doom. Poe, too, has his own dark king described in the poem, “Dream-land”:

He writes of his realm, “. . .a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of Space — out of Time.”(9) Tolkien, similarly, lists, as one of man’s archetypal desires, this very ability “to survey the depths of space and time.”(10)

Again, Poe’s journeyer in “Dream-land” must go through “Bottomless vales and boundless floods, / And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods.”(11) So too, the quest of Tolkien’s Fellowship leads to the crest of a great flood just outside the Elven valley of Rivendell: “At that moment there came a roaring and a rushing: a noise of loud waters rolling many stones. Dimly Frodo saw the river below him rise, and down along its course there came a plumed cavalry of waves.”(12) It leads, also, to the fight of Gandalf with the Balrog at [page 127:] the Bridge of Kazad-Dam. Defeated by the wintry mountains, the company enters the caverns of Moria beneath them. Pursued by “the certainty of evil ahead and of evil following,” the doom, doom of the orcic drum, “Suddenly Frodo saw before him a black chasm. At the end of the hall the floor vanished and fell to an unknown depth.”(13) Later, as they approach the Elven city of green towers, Caras Galadon of Lothlorien, they look back at the “Titan woods” behind them: “‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,’” said Haldir. “‘It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither.’”(14) One feels one has almost here in Tolkien explored Poe’s vales and floods and caves and woods, especially when one finds in “Silence — A Fable,” this description:

This last could almost be a sentence from Tolkien’s description of the riveting eye of Sauron, gazing down on Middle-earth: “The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.”(16)

Indeed, with every step, Tolkien’s Fellowship is approaching Mordor. As Frodo and Sam leave the company and press closer alone, they must pass the Dead Marshes:

Poe, still wandering in “Dream-land,” sees something like the same horror: [page 128:]

Such is the character of Poe’s “Dream-land” and of the marches of Tolkien’s Mordor.

In an even more mysterious poem, “Ulalume,” “down by the dank tarn of Auber, An the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” Poe, in progress of a last terrible journey, in depthsof agony, sees a star, a star that seems to”point us the path to the skies.” His soul warns him, but he does not heed: “Let us bathe in this crystalline light! Its Sibyllic splendor is beaming With Hope and in Beauty to-night.” But the star (“Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?”) misleads him and he comes in the end to the grave of his lost love, Ulalume:

So in The Lord of the Rings Sam, with Frodo, striving along the final road to the volcanic mountain, looks up:

Sam takes new heart, and the star, unlike that in Poe, has not deceived him. He and Frodo come in the end to witness and participate in the destruction of evil for their time. [page 129:]

Another fascinating parallel lies in Tolkien’s description of the last moments of Mount Doom and the Dark Tower, Sauron’s inner citadel of power, with Poe’s description of “The City in the Sea.” Tolkien writes:

The flood is a metaphor here and a symbolic repetition of the “devouring wave” that “rolled over the land” and toppled Númenor, “Land of the West,” in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.(22) This mythic theme, like the medieval Celtic stories of drowned cities, like the ancient storyof Atlantis,(23) also forms the thematic basis for Poe’s poem, “The City in the Sea”:

Thus Poe and Tolkien cross some of the same shadowy lands of Darkness [page 130:] and see some of the same green iridescence of Death. But they share happier and more poignant moments and visions too, as they pause in their quests to linger awhile in Faerie, breathe its sweet airs, and rest in its riddle of beauty and loss. They both linger in the silver woods and sleep beneath the blue moon. In fact the most striking correspondences of all occur in their ideas of Fairyland.

Poe describes that evanescent world especially in his poems, “Fairy-land” and “The Valley of Unrest,” and in his stories, “Eleonora” and “The Island of the Fay.” “Fairy-land,” an early poem, is filled with marvelous moonlight:

The moon bathes in its light strange woods and spirits on the wing-and “every drowsy thing.” Butterflies rise forever toward it, as well, bringing back its light on their wings. This is a simpler work than some of his others on the fairy world, and one thinks instinctively of Tolkien’s earlier children’s story, The Hobbit. There “hundreds of butterflies” flutter high in the woodelves’ trees.(26) And there one visits Elrond’s Last Homely House in the fair “secret valley of Rivendell,” where the air is always warm, the water running, and the evening filled with the scent of flowers and pine-trees, making one “drowsy”: “ ‘H mmm! it smells like elves!’ thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars. They were burning bright and blue. Just then there came a burst of song like laughter in the trees.”(27) Here, too, Elrond discovers the moonletters on Bilbo’s map: “They can only be seen when the moon shines behind them . . . . . . (28) Of such “filmy,” “mooney” correspondences are these fairylands created. In The Lord of the Rings, however, Tolkien sees an end coming to his Elven race. With the fourth age — of men — the Elf people will gradually fade from the earth and all their lands be left mourning. So, it is, too, in Poe’s poem, “The Valley of Unrest,” which seems like nothing so much as the Vale of Rivendell after the Elves’ departure to the West:

Now, eternal dews fall from the “fragrant tops” of ever-stirring trees, “over the violets,” “over the lilies” that there still wave.(29) “‘And many fair things,’” said Tolkien’s Elrond, “‘will fade and be forgotten.’”(30)

Most beautiful of all the realms of Tolkien is Lothlórien “fair and perilous,” and it has its parallels too in Poe: “Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name.” Aragorn explained it simply: “‘Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,’ he said, ‘and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I.’”(31) Lóthlorien too must slowly vanish and its elf queen, Galadriel, diminish and pass: “‘Lóthlorien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.’”(32)

This conception of Lothlórien compares on many levels with that of Poe in his stories, “Eleonora” and “The Island of the Fay.” Their geographies, and not only their geographies, are remarkably similar to Tolkien’s. To begin with, even their place-names relate. Early in “Eleonora” Poe explains, “We had always dwelled together . . . in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.”(33) Tolkien writes that Lóthlorien is only a shorter version of the old Elven name, Laurelindórenan — “Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, that was it, once upon a time.”(34) Tolkien tells us further that the Fellowship of travellers, arriving, pass the source of the swift river, the Silverlode, which rushes over “shining pebbles” as it branches into many small streams, “leaping down to the trough of the valley, and then running on and away into the lower lands, until it [is] lost in a golden haze.” Of the woods and its leaves he writes: “Not till the spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the woods is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the balk of the trees is smooth and gray.”(35) Finally in the very center, “the heart of the ancient realm”:

In “Eleonora,” likewise, Poe writes of the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass:

Much the same scene is set in “The Island of the Fay.” Through mountain locked in Mountain “I”, the searcher (unlike the narrator of “Eleonora” who lived in the valley and saw it fade away), comes to find a river, with the green forest surrounding it and in the center a small circular island. The western side glows with sunlight and flowers and grass interspersed with asphodel. The trees are tall and slender, and butterflies move in their “gentle sweepings” of joy. The east, though, is dark, shrouded in shade, cypress, and death.

It then appears to him that he sees one of the Fays in a “singularly fragile canoe” circling the island. Each time she circles she grows fainter and fainter until at last he loses her fragile sight in the darkness.(38)

So, too, as Frodo and the Company leave Lothlorien, Galadriel appears a last time in a Swan-ship: “She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.”(39)

Finally, to conclude and also to touch on two last particularly illuminating parallels, it should be noted that Tolkien sees fantasy and fairy-stories as having “three faces.” These include the “Magical” that they turn “towards Nature,” “the Mystical towards the Supernatural,” and “the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.”(40) Both writers have looked on all three faces, and the correspondences again are fascinating in their varied nuances.

The Magical face that Faërie turns to Nature appears in central passages of both writers. Poe, for example, in “To Helen,” is drawn back to imagine beauty so haunting that “On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home . . . .” (41) In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien describes the music of Elven voices: “Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world.”(42) Not only do these writers discover seas in their visions of Nature but seas described with adjectives that evoke the very magic of Fairyland. As Keats put it earlier:

Second, the face of the mystical toward the supernatural can be seen in two powerful images that seem each to reveal in its own epiphany the different vision but mystic likeness of Tolkien and Poe. Toward the final battle for Middle-earth, Gandalf, the Grey Wizard, seemingly destroyed by the Balrog at the Bridge of Kazed-Dûm, after passing in travail through fire, [page 134:] earth, water, and air, returns to the green earth to lead the Quest again. But now he has become the “White Rider.” Aragorn, who, like Arthur, again shall be king, rises to meet him:

Merlin? One of the mythic Northern Gods? Gandalf has returned from beyond this world, an angel figure who would save Man, Tolkien suggests.

In comparison, one thinks immediately of Poe’s symbolic figure at the end of Pym. At the farthest point Poe’s voyager had journeyed toward the Southern Pole in darkness visible, “relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us,” his boat still hurried “on to the southward under the influence of a powerful current”:

Whiteness incarnate? Some primitive White God or Goddess? Here again is the face of the Mystical towards the Supernatural. And now here too in Poe — as seen again and again in Tolkien, from the ever changing vision Galadriel may grunt to the powerful voice and spirit of Gandalf — is the very Mirror of scorn and pity that Faërie turns toward Man. Indeed, what strangely different yet what hauntingly similar conceptions exist in the works of Tolkien and Poe. For all these versions of fantasy have a profound affinity of archetypal heritage, of visions held deep in our unconscious, of other worlds existing on the shores of other seas.

[page 134, continued:]

NOTES

1.  The Tolkien Reader (New York, 1966), pp. 9. 53, 17-19. [page 135:]

2.  Harry Levin, The Power of Darkness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York, 1958), pp. 102, 108.

3.  Reader, p. 22.

4.  The Two Towers: being the second part of The Lord of the Rings, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1966), p. 155.

5.  Reader, p 68.

6.  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. [Bollingen Series XV11] (Princeton, 1968), pp. 97 ff.

7.  M. 1:463.

8.  The Fellowship of the Ring: being the first part of The Lord of the Rings, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1966), p. 60.

9.  M. 1:343-344.

10.  Reader, p. 13.

11.  M. 1:344.

12.  Fellowship, p. 227.

13.  Fellowship, pp. 825, 337-846, 843 (quotation).

14.  Fellowship, p. 366.

15.  M. 2:195.

16.  Fellowship, p. 379.

17.  Two Towers, p. 235.

18.  M. 1:344.

19.  M. 1:415-418.

20.  The Return of the King: being the third part of The Lord of the Rings, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1966), p. 199.

21.  Return, p 224.

22  The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1977), pp. 279-280.

23.  Ruth S. Noel, The Mythology of Middle-earth (London, 1977), pp 48-49.

24.  M. 1:201-202.

25.  M. 1:140-141. [page 136:]

26.  The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (Boston, 1958), p. 159.

27.  The Hobbit, pp. 58-59. Cf. Fellowship, p. 238.

28.  The Hobbit, p. 64.

29.  M. 1:195-196.

30.  Fellowship, p. 282.

31.  Fellowship, pp. 365, 367

32.  Fellowship, p. 380.

33.  M. 2:639.

34.  Two Towers, p. 70.

35.  Fellowship, p. 349.

36.  Fellowship, pp. 364-865.

37.  M. 2:639-640.

38.  M. 2:603-604.

39.  Fellowship, p. 389.

40.  Reader, p. 26.

41.  M. 1:166.

42.  Fellowship, p. 245.

43.  John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Clarence DeWitt Thorpe (New York, 1935), p. 351.

44.  Two Towers, p. 104.

45.  Two Towers, p. 103.

46.  Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York, 1938), pp. 881-882.