One Text to Rule Them All

In a second-hand bookshop in Salisbury, in the year 1965 in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, there was once a Book.* There were of course many other books there, but only this one merited the capital letter: The Fifth Book of Thucydides, edited with a short introduction and notes by C.E. Graves, MA, Fellow and late Classics Lecturer of St John’s College, Cambridge, and published by Macmillan & Co. of London in 1891 (reprinted 1899, 1908).** History does not record why Zillah Shelling chose to leaf through this particular book, but she did so, and was struck by a series of curious annotations in an unknown script that a former owner had added to the pages, including one long one at the very back, as well as by one of the names written on the flyleaf: J.R.R. Tolkien. Intrigued, she wrote to Tolkien to ask whether the inscriptions were indeed his work, and he replied in a letter of 20th July:[image error]

The letter is of course familiar to Tolkien scholars as early evidence for his interest in non-classical languages, but I haven’t come across any discussion of its significance for the reception of Thucydides (and there’s no mention of Thucydides in a recent call for papers on Tolkien and the Classics). Most obviously, it’s useful evidence for the status of Thucydides as a high-level Greek text in British public schools in the early 20th century, or at least at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. My immediate thought was that Tolkien’s memory might have been a little faulty, as it seemed more likely that this was a general prize for Greek with the set text changing regularly, but no: there was indeed such a prize, Bishop Lightfoot’s Thucydides Prize, named after Joseph Barber Lightfoot, theologian, Scholar and later Bishop of Durham, who had been a pupil there in the 1830s and 1840s. Now, I really don’t have time at the moment to go down this particular rabbit-hole, but a quick internet search suggests that, while Lightfoot’s writings focused on the Pauline epistles and the Apostolic Fathers, he did have a habit of invoking Thucydides now and again, whether on the subject of human nature or to excuse Paul’s occasional grammatical infelicities when his thoughts became too profound for language adequately to express.

John Claughton, who was Chief Master at KES 2006-16 but, much more importantly, won the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize in 1975, tells me that it was one of a long list of prizes that reflected the great classical traditions of the school since the 1840s (and Yuddi Gershon says that in his not too distant day there was a rather battered photocopy of topics still going the rounds). Whereas most of these prizes involved the writing of a prize essay (and the Enoch Powell Prize for Biblical Hebrew, according to Yuddi, simply involved recitation), the Thucydides Prize was a rigorous exam, with a mixture of translation and commentary, focused on one book (John studied Book 1). Even in the mid 70s, many of the prizes on the list were competed for by at best one or two pupils; by the turn of the century, the prize essay had been almost entirely squeezed out by the decline of classics and curriculum pressures, and the extended essays written by students studying the IB today are now on very different topics.***

As Hamish Williams notes in the blogpost linked above, the general assumption in accounts of Tolkien’s literary influences is that his interest in classics – the subject he started at Oxford, after his intensive training at KES – was rapidly displaced by a focus on Norse, Anglo-Saxon and other non-classical languages; further, unlike some of his contemporary authors of imaginative literature, his world-building sought to be complete and self-contained, without references to or evocations of other literature. But that doesn’t preclude such influences – see the recent blog posts by Adam Roberts on Tolkien’s work as Great War literature, here and here – and it’s difficult – at any rate for me – not to start suspecting the unavoidable presence of Thucydides in Lord of the Rings, and above all that of the ubiquitous Melian Dialogue, the heart of the very book that Tolkien studied so assiduously for the Lightfoot Prize.

After all, power and how different people respond to it lies at the heart of the whole epic. Just as Thucydides’ account shows, coming into the possession of vast power is almost invariably corrupting; a whole series of characters are tested according to whether or not they are instinctively Athenians, susceptible to the lure of the Ring and the logic of superiority (including the claim that their dominance will be good for everyone). A Galadriel or a Gandalf can recognise the hidden dangers of the Athenian perspective, the way that it is ultimately self-defeating, and so decline the power in order to remain themselves; plenty of others either seek to seize the power without recognising the peril, like Boromir, or fall into the despair and despondency that is the inevitable result of adopting the Realist view of the world. Only a few exceptionally ordinary individuals can both wield the Ring and remain Melians at heart, rejecting the relentless logic of Realism and the superiority of might over right, and continuing to believe in Hope and the possibility of victory against the odds.

I’m well aware that demonstrating, rather than vaguely sketching in a suggestive manner, a link between Thucydides’ account and these episodes requires a lot more close reading, that I don’t remotely have time for at the moment. It’s both the genius and the enduring frustration of the Melian Dialogue that it is so flexible and vague, so amenable to every possible analogy. But can it really be a coincidence that a character called Melian appears in the Silmarillion – the mother of Luthien Tinuviel? Not, one may surmise, when her magical protection of the realm of Doriath, the Girdle of Melian, is described in these terms: “Its magic mazes of mists prevented anyone from entering the kingdom without her or Thingol’s consent, as long as they were less powerful than her.” The strong seize the Silmarils, the weak are swallowed beneath the waves…

*I owe this reference to @Megillus on the Twitter, who helpfully posted the screen shots from Tolkien’s Selected Letters, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien, of which this is no. 272.

**Of course, without being able to examine the actual copy, this is a guess, but the title matches the one mentioned in the letter exactly, and the publication dates fit very well.

***I am available to be patron of any campaign to restore the Lightfoot Prize on some footing. In the meantime, I’m extremely grateful to John and Yuddi for their contributions to this blog post.