PART II
THE WORLD SOUL AND THE GREAT PATTERN
I’ve maintained for a number of years now that Tolkien hid many things in his images, in “plain sight”. Hidden imagery is not an entirely new idea. Decades ago Hammond and Scull (H&S) pointed out a butterfly hidden in the drawing of the young Tolkien’s Undertenishness (Hammond & Scull, Artist & Illustrator [A&I] 39). If you look at the top two wings in the butterfly in Tolkien’s original can you see that they might each resemble a domed tent or some kind of pavilion? “Pavilion” is a word Tolkien uses quite a lot. If we look at its etymology we find: “Old French paveillon “large tent; butterfly” […] Latin papilionem […] “butterfly, moth,” in Medieval Latin “tent” […] the type of tent was so called on its resemblance to wings“. In A&I H&S describe Ishness:
“The first drawing in the book was Ei Uchnem, to illustrate the Russian boatmen’s song. But except that it includes a boat on a river – a boat with oars, not towed as on the Volga – it is a very free interpretation. Its swirling clouds and vibrant shapes recall Van Gogh again, or Munch” (43).
If we look at the etymology of the relevant words we discover why he chose to make the alteration. “Russia” is “perhaps from Ruotsi, the Finnish name for “Sweden,” from Old Norse Roþrslandi, “the land of rowing,” old name of Roslagen […] This is from Old Norse roðr “steering oar,” […] from PIE *rot-ro-, from root *ere- “to row”“. The Volga was in Greek and Latin “Oarus” (“Volga“). “Oar”: “Greek eretēs “rower,”eretmos “oar”“. English “oar” relates to the verb “row”.
So we’re invited to regard Tolkien’s Art as equally his drawings and writings (philology). It reveals Tolkien’s underlying working method, and a general approach to understanding both his writing and his pictures, and the very close link between them. The words to the boatmen’s song reveals a reference to “felling a birch” and in another translation “untwisting the stout birch tree” (“The Song of the Volga Boatmen”). The birch was a life-long personal symbol for Tolkien. This would explain the “swirling clouds” because “twist” and “swirl” are both identical concepts:
“Swirl”: ““whirlpool, eddy,” […] “a twist”“.
“Whirl”: ““to go round, spin,” related to hvirfill “circle, ring, crown,” and to Old English hweorfan “to turn”“.
“Twist”: ““to divide, separate,” Gothic twis- “in two, asunder,” […] German zwist “quarrel, discord,” […] “act or action of turning on an axis”“.
Given Tolkien’s love of puns we might also infer “to row”, “quarrel“. We could interpret the two oars of the two rowers which rotate in contrary directions creating eddies, as quarrelling, at discord in the River of Time (river: “ea […] Old English word for “river”“). The idiomatic expression for quarrelling, “putting one’s oar in” dates back centuries. Are these the two musics “utterly at variance” in the watery vortex of The Music of the Ainur (Sil. 17) perhaps, or the oak and the birch quarrelling that appear in his drawing Eeriness (fig. 1.) below? (A&I 43). In my analysis the birch’s arm stretches out to defend the wizard Gandalf-Tolkien from the arm of the oak attacking him. Philology defends Tolkien from Literature. Tolkien hints at the wizard’s intended destination by visually linking the wizard with the trees (top-left) using the two patches of whiteness. The outline of the two trees at the centre form a heart shape.
Before (A&I 34) is dated 1911-1912 (H&S, Companion and Guide, Chronology [C&G] 1.31). Undertenishness was created in Dec. 1912, just one month before he met Edith to discuss their engagement (1.35-36). Ei Uchnem was added to Ishness in Jan. 1914 one month before he married Edith (1.49). Eeriness was drawn “a day or two earlier” (A&I 44) than Beyond, dated Jan. 12th 1914 (66). We can identify the birch as his (prospective) wife, Edith via his Quenya word for “twist”, “RIKI” (The Collected Vinyar Tengwar [TCVT] 7). “Riki” is found in Old Norse: “kvan-riki“. Old English “Cwen” (“Kvan“) is the root of “Queen”: “In Old Norse the cognate word was still mostly “a wife” […] kvan-riki “the domineering of a wife”“. “Riki” was used in Old Norse to mean “power”,
“authority”, “overbearing”, etc. It is related to Anglo-Saxon “rice“, a word used for ideas such as “power”, “riches”. Edith means: “Old English Eadgyð, from ead “riches, prosperity, good fortune, happiness” + guð “war”“. We might describe their marriage as a “happy war” (harmony and discord) and it implies Edith is one of the Volga rowers, one of the quarrellers who must be “untwisted”, “turned”. The other rower can be found in the original name “Edwy” that Tolkien used for Alf the Faery King (Tolkien) in Smith of Wootton Major (Smith): “An Edwy (or Eadwig; the name means “happy war”) was king of Wessex” (Smith 209). This would naturally make Edith the Faery Queen who Smith, Tolkien pursues. This repeats the motif of the Moon (Tilion) pursuing the Sun (Arien) (Sil. 11.118-119).
Frodo’s parents perish in a quarrel in a boat according to one rumoured account, which involved “pushing” and “pulling”—contrary movements. Boats are deemed “tricky” (LotR I.1.23). Another boat, his image I Vene Kemen the
“World Ship” (The Book of Lost Tales 1 [BoLT] III. 84), has the Sun and Moon quarrelling over possession of a star. The Sun’s arm extends a crook and is trying to wrest the star from the horned crescent moon (see fig 1.1 left). I submit that this is a quarrel over which star the ship should follow, like the quarrelling on board Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, which I suggest incarnates as Minas Tirith whose Classical labyrinth plan consists of two contrariwise spirals. We can pinpoint these two spirals to the oak and birch in Tolkien’s Tol Sirion (Pictures 36). The tree on the right appears to be a pine or fir tree. The oak belongs to the genus “quercus”. “Fir”: “PIE root *perkwu-, originally meaning “oak,” […] Latin quercus “oak,” […] Old English had a cognate form in furhwudu “pine wood”“. “Pine”: “Latin pinus “pine, pine-tree, fir-tree”“. In between them is Finrod Felagund’s Minas Tirith, a motif he later uses in TLotR. We see again the birch branch extending straight out and the oak’s branch slanting down ending in three fingers. You can see the “X” form centred on the tower on the hill suggested by the line of the river and landforms. The Sun and the Moon clearly identify the trees. The identification of the fir with the oak is supported by Tolkien’s early Land of Pohja in which the Moon settles in a birch tree and the Sun in a fir tree. Tolkien has reversed the relationship but we can see the equation of the fir with the oak. The untwisting of the birch would be a metaphor for the resolution of the quarrel. Tolkien is The Man in the Moon and Edith is The Lady of the Sun. He tells his son Michael, lovers are “companions in shipwreck not guiding stars” (Letters 68, #43). I suggest the star they should follow in order to stop quarrelling represents the harmonization of the two lovers, not one of the pair (of stars) dominating the other. Christopher Tolkien tells us that these figures are not just personifications but real people:
“In such cases, however, as nīlō n. ‘moon’, and ūrē n. ‘sun’, beside the personalized forms Nīlū m. and Ūrī f., we have not so much mere personification but the naming of real persons, or what the Adūnāim regarded as real persons: the guardian spirits of the Moon and the Sun, in fact ‘The Man in the Moon’ and ‘The Lady of the Sun’” (Sauron Defeated 9 [SD], 426).
Therefore this quarrel represents the discords of the Devil in the Music which will destroy the marriage of Tolkien and Edith. In reference to I Vene Kemen:
“But as for the Ships of Light themselves, behold! […] For ’tis said that ere the Great End come Melko shall in some wise contrive a quarrel between Moon and Sun, […] So shall it be that Fionwë Úrion, son of Manwë, of love for Urwendi shall in the end be Melko’s bane, and shall destroy the world to destroy his foe, and so shall all things then be rolled away’”(BoLT IX.219).
This narrative repeats in the story of Aulë and Palúrien (Yavanna) in which Melkor tells a lie about Aulë’s wife. In anger Aulë throws down his hammer and the sparks from it create the “seven butterflies” (the Valacirca), (BoLT V.133). Thus we can link the butterfly to the quarrel again.
Look at Tolkien’s image Before closely (fig. 1). Can you see the winged figure? It is an image which also shares the same “X” form as Undertenishness and Eeriness. I suggest that this is the butterfly rune, dagaz (ᛞ). Perhaps the two contrary-handed spirals in Before represent the same things as the two oars and the two quarrelling trees and the two musics “utterly at variance”? The corridor in Before leads down the middle, which suggests we can equate the two wings of the figure with the two spirals and with the wings of the butterfly in Undertenishness which relate to contrary oar movements. I have identified over thirty instances of the spiral in Tolkien’s works. The most obvious appearances include:
1. The two spiralled columns in his illustration ‘Before‘.
2. The two spiralled columns in his illustration ‘Wickedness‘.
3. The two spiralling trees, AB, around the columns on the The Doors of Durin.
4. The two West Gate illustrations which show two sets of spirals (AA and AB). The difference constitutes a riddle.
5. The two spiralled columns, AB, in the illustration ‘Moria Gate (The Steps to the East Gate)’.
6. The “two trees utterly entwined” in his wedding poem. These being A and B, Tolkien and Edith.
7. The Ring of Barahir. The serpent devouring (A) and the serpent upholding (B).
8. The illustration “Three Dragons” gives a dragon’s tail spiralling upwards around a tree. This symbolizes both spirals, A (dragon) and B (Tree). The pun is on ‘Tree of Tails’.
9. The corkscrew staircase (A) in Roverandom which leads down through the centre of the moon to the dark side paired with the chimney (B) which leads in the ‘opposite direction’ upwards.
10. The double spiral forming the central spire of the new house that Father Christmas moves into after North Polar Bear breaks the North Pole. This is paired with the spiral North Pole itself which is illustrated in his illustration “The Man in the Moon”.
11. The Fall and Endless Stair, c.f. stair and chimney in Roverandom. The Balrog and Gandalf represent A (the Enemy) and B (The Free Peoples) ending with Gandalf’s return and the “stars wheeled over”.
12. The alternating switch-back classical labyrinth design of the plan of Minas Tirith. The alternation of directions symbolize the left-handed and right-handed spirals around the axis mundi.
13. At the destruction of Isengard, the coil of vapour (B) twisting around Orthanc with its “”narrow stair of many thousand steps”(A). “One great coil of vapour went whirling up, twisting round and round Orthanc”.
14. The ”rising girdle” of the path that “wound snakelike” around Orodruin. The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Chapter 3.
15. The zig-zag rising path of Dunharrow, plate 165, Untitled (Three Sketches of Dunharrow) J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illustrator.
16. The winding stair of Cirith Ungol, plate 174, p.177 “Untitled (Tower of Kirith Ungol) J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illustrator.
17. The final illustration of Mr.Bliss, the participants of the traditional Maypole dance spirally interweave the ribbons around the pole.
18. The “red may-tree” from the two Cottage of Lost Play poems. The hawthorn is known as the “may-tree”. The etymology of haw is from PIE root *kagh- “to catch seize; wickerwork fence”. “Wicker” is from PIE root *weik- (2) “to bend, to wind.” This symbol is repeated in the May Tree at the end of Mr.Bliss, see previous note. It grows ubiquitously in Oxfordshire and it was known in folklore as the Faerie tree, being inhabited by faeries and guardian spirits. Other names include whitethorn and ‘quickthorn’. Quick means living. ‘Quickset hedging’ was done to enclose land.
19. Danuin, Ranuin, Fanuin, Tolkien’s equivalent of the 3 sisters Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis, and the interwoven cables of the Sun and Moon.
20. The green and red interwoven “snake-like” pattern down the right border of the Númenorean carpet.
21. The spiral around the “pallid minaret” in “The Man in the Moon” drawing.
22. The right-handed spiral on the right turning “covered bridge” in the Untitled drawing of circa. 1915.
23. The idiosyncratic language of the “screw” in The Lord of the Rings.
24. The ladder flanked by the two thorn runes on the urn in his illustration, ‘Conversation with Smaug’, which are intended to be dwarf axes, with pun on axes meaning plural of axis, ‘axes’, A and B. See Chapter ‘Mirrors and Chiasmus’. “axes are used for trees” (Hobbit pdf p15).
25. Spirals A and B on the scroll bottom-right, ‘Conversation with Smaug’.
26. In Farmer Giles of Ham, using the same pun on axes for the ‘ax’ element in the names of the Dragon Chrysophylax (A) paired with the sword Caudimaudax (B).
27. The two coils of the lemniscate appear in “Hringboga Heorte Gefysed (Coiled Dragon, with Two Flowers’).
28. The spiral oak stair in the Cottage of Lost Play. Now that was Ilverin or Littleheart. These two guided him down the corridor of broidered stories to a great stair of oak, and up this he followed them. It wound up and round until it brought them to a passage lit by small pendent lamps of coloured glass, whose swaying.
29. The winding path around the hill with the shaven crown in the Old Forest passage: “The wood stood all round the hill like thick hair that ended sharply in a circle round a shaven crown. The hobbits led their ponies up, winding round and round until they reached the top.”
30. the eagles spiralling up in their rescue in The Hobbit: “Soon the light of the burning was faint below, a red twinkle on the black floor; and they were high up in the sky, rising all the time in strong sweeping circles.”
31. The eagles spiralling down from their eyrie in The Hobbit. “circling round in great spirals. They did this for a long while..”.
32. The Nazgûl spiralling in the air. “The Nazgûl gave a long wailing cry and swerved away; and with that the four others wavered, and then rising in swift spirals”, p 507.
Regarding instance (4.). The two AA spirals (two right-handed spirals) in the West Gate drawing detail are intended to be mirrors of the two raised left hands (two left-handed spirals) at the North Gate Argonath. Thids is because the West Gate and North Gate are mirro images of each other. The West Gate is assocaited with the Moon an silver. The North Gate is associated with the Sun and gold. The Two Trees of Sun and Moon at the West Gate are mirrors to the statues of Anárion and Isildur as Sun and Moon at the North Gate. The first ‘Moria Gate’ shows the two ‘right-handed’ spirals, AA. We can directly link the handedness of the spirals with the Sun and Moon by equating the two spirals with their crescent moon shapes around the Doors of Durin with the two crescent moons in the trees. The sprials around the two columns which bear clear crescente moons shapes in the left hand image can be equated with the trees with the crescent moon shapes in this image on the right. this Therefore we can conclude that the two spirals are Sun and Moon and that they are right and left handed and have opposite contrary directions. These equate to the two oars in the river. The river is water and the Music of the Ainur is water which has harmony and discord, the “two music utterly at variance”. These paired phenomena are all manfestations of the two hands of Ilúvatar in the Music of the Ainur. Therefore we can see an equivalence in all of these things.
The Greeks considered the soul to be the psyche (Greek “psykhē“) depicted as a butterfly, personified in the goddess Psyche. Tolkien mentions Eros and Psyche in On Fairy-Stories (OFS 38). Tolkien’s personal library contained two stories relating to Eros and Psyche (Cilli 11). The “World-Soul” created by the “demiurge” in Plato’s Timaeus & Critius (T&C) was described to resemble the Greek letter “chi, X” (T&C 24), having male and female halves (24). Tolkien mentions the Timaeus in NCP (SD 249). The Demiurge creates the World fundamentally from triangles which we see comprise the butterfly dagaz in Eeriness. Ironically H&S refer to Before and Afterwards (A&I 36) as visionary, as “snapshots of Tolkien’s psyche“, that Before “has the atmosphere of a Greek tragedy” (A&I 35) and ask: “Could Before be the entrance to Death and Afterwards the soul travelling on its way?” The soul was depicted as a butterfly leaving the body. Dagaz, the Old English “dæg” rune is called “day”. “Day”: ““lifetime, definite time of existence”“. Bilbo’s Last Song begins: “Day is ended, dim my eyes, but journey long before me lies”. He is “Guided by the Lonely Star”. It ends, “Farewell to Middle-earth at last, I see the Star above your mast!” (Bilbo’s Last Song). In other words Middle-earth has a mast and a star above it. Tolkien tells us: “Middle-earth is just archaic English for ἡοἰκονμένη, the inhabited world of men.” (Letters 279, #151). This supports my observations about The World Ship I Vene Kemen and dagaz. Before and Afterwards are intended to suggest the “fore” and “aft'” of a ship. This equates the “X” of the World Soul and the geometry in Eeriness and Before to I Vene Kemen, Bilbo’s ship, and Undertenishness. If the mast of Bilbo’s ship has a star, the star must be in the centre of the ship between “fore” (Before) and “aft” (Afterwards), which is at the Door in Eeriness, Before and Afterwards. On the front cover of Foxrook Tolkien had drawn a triangle “Δ” labelled “Friend” in the same arrangement as that which the wizard is in in Eeriness. He drew a line resembling a letter “l” drawn passing through the top angle, the Door. The phonetic spelling of the letter “l” is “el”, which is the first word the Elves uttered when they saw the stars. “El” became the elvish root signifying “star”. Therefore we can infer that this line represents the straight road, the passage through the Door. This agrees with the West Gate which has a star on the doors and the rune for “ando”, which is the Hebrew letter “daleth”, “door”, (it’s equivalent in A.Greek is “delta”, a triangle, “Δ”). The gate is opened by speaking “friend”. “El” is the Hebrew god of the Jewish Dwarves, Phoenician “ilu” from Ilúvatar. “Ando” is centrally placed at the foot of the doors which in the mode used for the spelling of Sindarin is the fifth letter (TLotR 1119), the letter name given as “gate” (1122), which is the “d” sound (for Durin) (1122).
If you look closely you can see that the Sun in I Vene Kemen is also a butterfly (fig.1.1), its wings suggested by the edge of the sail. Should this surprise us if having identified Edith as the Sun (the “Daystar”[3]), we recall the Virgin Mary was “Stella Maris” (“Star of the Sea”) and her name was Edith Mary? The woman clothed in the Sun in the Book of Revelation is considered to be Mary: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (The Holy Bible [THB], re.12.1). The twelve stars are considered to represent the zodiac.
To “perish” is to be lost, shipwrecked: “Old French perir “perish, be lost, be shipwrecked”“. The ancient Egyptians believed that on death Pharaohs returned to stars and like Bilbo (and his parents) the dead also take “magical boats” (Sir E. A. Wallis Budge 4.35) on their journey to the “Elysian fields” (4.31). Of the Pharaoh Pepi we read: “Grant thou that this Pepi may be in thee like an imperishable star” (2.15). The Pharaoh becomes a star: “Pepi appeareth in heaven among the imperishable stars. […] He taketh his seat on the crystal throne” (2.19). Tolkien tells us of Varda, “to each of the stars had she given a heart of silver flame set in vessels of crystals and pale glass and unimagined substances” (BoLT VIII.181). The word “soul”, “has been suspected to have meant originally “coming from or belonging to the sea,” the supposed stopping place of the soul before birth or after death […] if so, it would be from Proto-Germanic *saiwaz (see sea)“. It’s worth noting “kemen” is close to the word kemet, “black earth” in Egyptian. In Quenya: “Kémi QL gives kemi ‘earth, soil, land’ and kemen ‘soil’, from root KEME” (BoLT 257).
Therefore I suggest the repeating “X” form we see is the “World-Soul”, Tolkien and Edith. This form appears in at least twenty other images in his works, for e.g, Other People (Imagination – the Tolkien Estate), the door in Mr. Bliss (Mr. Bliss 13). Briefly, I would proffer the dagaz form we see in Eeriness is the elementary component of Tolkien’s “Great Pattern” (The Nature of Middle-earth II.287), the “lattice” (sometimes referred to as the “diaper”) which appears everywhere in medieval imagery of the Biblical Creation myth. See fig. 1.2 below. The shapes in bold (top-left) represent the basic repeating form in Tolkien’s pattern. The lattice appears on the cover of Waterfield’s T&C[4], cited above, and in Song of Solomon:
“My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice” (THB, SoS. 2.9).
We can infer a pun on “hart”, “heart” regards the heart at the centre of Eeriness peeping through. We can relate the Music to the lattice, geometry with its Door via a few pieces of evidence. We can see Smith of Wootton Major as Tolkien the demiurge:
“But some things, when he had time, he made for delight; and they were beautiful, for he could work iron into wonderful forms […] Few could pass by one of the gates or lattices that he made without stopping to admire it; no one could pass through it once it was shut. He sang when he was making things of this sort; and when Smith began to sing those nearby stopped their own work and came to the smithy to listen” (Smith 17-18).
To quote Shippey: “I would suggest that, if the old Cook is a philologist-figure, and Nokes a critic-figure, the suspicion must be that Smith is a Tolkien-figure” (TRtMe 314).
In the NCP Ramer reports his first descriptions of dream travel:
“All the same, I used to get at that time very extraordinary geometric patterns presented to me, shifting kaleidoscopically but not blurred; and queer webs and tissues […] some like rhythms, almost like music” (NCP 181).
These lead later to descriptions of the composition of different worlds. Ramer describes Ellor Eshúrizel as:
“That immense plain with its silver floor all delicately patterned; […] not of one thought, but of many in harmony; […] There “inanimate nature” was orderly, symmetrical, […] And there was music, too” (SD 198).
Lowdham describes Ramer’s visions as “geometry and landscape” (SD 181) which is what we see in Eeriness and I Vene Kemen: a “symbolic landscape”.
We should not forget the Cottage of Lost Play which lies down the “devious routes” (BoLT 18) of the Olórë Mallë, Path of Dreams. A “high gate of lattice-work that shone golden in the dusk opened upon the lane of dreams” (18). The lane between “deep banks and great overhanging hedges beyond which stood many tall trees” is suggested in the green “lane” in Undertenishness and Eeriness, which converge on the Door, the “X”, the lattice gate. The Cottage was “pierced with peeping lattices” (28) and had “many small lattice windows” (19). Its location was “guarded secretly and jealously” (19). The wizard in Eeriness, later Gandalf the Grey‘s Sindarin name Olórin shares the same Quenya root as Olórë: “‘dream’, olórëa ‘dreamy’. […] from this root […] Olórin (Gandalf the Grey), [..] Olórë Mallë” (259). In the Cottage of Lost Play poem we read: “Tomorrow came And with his grey hand led us back”. “Devious” in 
its figurative sense gives: “deceitful“ […] inconsistent” which recalls Kilby’s “contrasistency”. In fig.1.2.1 left, the two trees at the centre of Eeriness which form the outline of the heart shape, are the same two trees that are quarrelling, but at unity at the centre. The tree forms suggest two people facing each other, their “hair” tangled and holding hands, after the poem: “We wandered shyly hand in hand […] But here and there a little pair With rosy cheeks and tangled hair” (BoLT 1 27-29).
The repeated “X” crossing over of the two planes can be equated to the “two fair trees […] utterly entwined […] tangled” in Tolkien’s wedding poem (Carpenter VII.106),—the same two trees in Eeriness and the two musics “utterly at variance” and the “You and I” of The Cottage of Lost Play poems. In Tolkien’s drawing “Tumble Hill near Lyme R[egis]” (A&I 30), a path leads to two trees forming an “X” figure. This is repeated in “Trials for Doors of Durin decorations” (The Art of the Lord of the Rings [TAotLotR] 69). We find further evidence for this in BoLT, in “Gonlath”, “a great rock on Taniquetil” to which the rope of the year is bound. It contains the element “lath”. Lattice: “from late “lath […] from […] Old High German latta “lath”“. Gonlath appears in the myth which is concerned with the ordering of Time and Sun and Moon where read:
“Fanuin said: “Now doth this mightiest cable hold both the Moon and Sun in tow; and herewith mayest thou coordinate their motions and interweave their fates; for the rope of Fanuin is the Rope of Years, and Urwendi issuing through the Door of Night shall wind it all tangled with the daycord’s slender meshes, round and about the Earth until the Great End come—”(BoLT 1.219).
If we consider that issuing through the door at the centre of the “X” interweaves the two “laths” in the “X” structure , we can regard these two laths to represent the Sun and Moon. This makes sense if we consider that the Two Trees we see in Eeriness and Undertenishness are the Two Trees of Sun and Moon, the same two trees in his wedding poem “Two Fair Trees”, “tangled in the sweet growth” (Carpenter VII.106). It’s also worth noting that in his poem Taliessin in the School of Poets Charles Williams, who we know was a member of the Golden Dawn, uses strikingly similar imagery:
“Taliessin stood by the chair of the poets;
in the court beyond the lattice
[…]
Butterfly fancies hovered” (Williams 45-46).
If we consider this a symbolic landscape and the maxim “as within, so without”, then the inner world of the soul is incarnated in the outside world such as in the World Soul present in the geometry of Eeriness, I Vene Kemen, Dante’s Divine Comedy, medieval T-O maps, the Arthurian heterocosmos, Lynton Lamb’s “gynacomorphical map“[5] of Charles Williams’s Taliessin Through Logres (Williams 7). Apart from I Vene Kemen, the most obvious example of a symbolic landscape is Tolkien’s Ambarkanta “Map IV” (The Shaping of Middle-earth V.249) in which the World is clearly two faces one looking east and the other west. If we travel eastward on the map we descend into the gaping mouth of the west-looking face, the Hell of medieval religious iconography. The east oriented face in contrast has a smiling countenance. In “Terrae Incantatae” (“Land Spells”), Rosalie Vermette writes about the “symbolic geography” of Arthurian Romance:
“In the medieval educational curriculum, the study of geography was subsumed under the study of geometry, one of the four subject areas in the quadrivium […] the quadrivium was used to explicate natural harmony. In the medieval mind, all of nature is a symbol since it reflects the Ideal. The quadrivium serves to interpret the ultimate symbol, the world—the real “world” existing only in the mind of God.
Nature, the anima mundi or soul of the world, lends form to the universe and assures the harmonious balance of all of its parts” (Vermette 146-147).
The Great Pattern was only completely understood by Ilúvatar. In these observations we might be amused enough like Rashbold “to try and solve the puzzle” or become like Lowdham “too fly-away; always after some butterfly theory. Won’t stick to his texts”, (SD 256) or the fox at the beginning of LotR who gets an intriguing “sniff” of something “strange” afoot but “never found out any more about it.” (LotR I.3.72). We might also look at Tolkien’s lattice design 43. Patterns (I) (Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien [Pictures] 43) pictured far right in fig.1.2 above, where I believe we see Tolkien’s most explicit hint of his “Great Pattern” in his newspaper “doodle“.
[3] Sun – Tolkien Gateway. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Sun.
[4] Meisterdrucke Fine Art Prints. Ms 993 fol.114 Properties of the Sky, from Le Livre des Proprietes des Choses by Jean Cordichon. https://www.meisterdrucke.uk/fine-art-prints/French-School/426871/Ms-993-fol.114-Properties-of-the-Sky%2C-from-The-Book-of-the-Properties-of-Things-by-Jean-Cordichon.html.
[5] See Sørina Higgins’s The Oddest Inkling, https://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/the-body-poetic/.
