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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The story lacks the ‘counsel cold’ that in Tolkien’s later and longer Aotrou and Itroun darkens the mind of the childless lord and makes him deliberately seek out the fay in order to procure a magical potion to aid fertility. Without this complication, the plot of ‘The Corrigan’ II follows the standard fairy tale formula of an innocent mortal’s accidental incursion into the faërie world and its consequences, a plot that, in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’, Tolkien called ‘Faërian Drama’ and described as ‘those plays which according to abundant records the elves have often presented to men’ (MC
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Leaves From the Tree: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction,
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And then he saw her on silver stool Singing a secret litany.
He heard her voice and it was cold; Her words were of the world of old, When walked no men upon the mould, And young was moon and mountain.
But rather would I die this hour Than lie with thee in thy cold bower, O! Corrigan, though strange thy power In the old moon singing.’
Darkness lay upon the land, 102 But afar, in pale Broceliand There sang a fay in Brittany.
from the forest eaves; Into twilight under the leaves (ll.26 & 27). The lord’s progression shows him riding unaware through an entry-portal into the Otherworld. Celtic Otherworlds are various in their natures and appearances, but one of the most evocative is the deep forest, far from the human community, whose shadowed reaches are the habitat of all kinds of ‘otherness’, from strange birds and beasts to wild men to creatures of the other reality of faërie.
the corrigan of this poem represents a figure more typical of myth than of folklore (though she appears in both), the human-size fairy who can appear as either a beautiful woman or an old hag.
She is seen here as she is most often pictured in fairy-lore, near water, seductively combing out her long hair.
Tolkien’s poem, darker than its Barzaz-Breiz source, closes with the singing of the fay. He has chosen to omit the Breton ending in which the wife is buried in the same grave as her lord, and twin holly-oaks (pagan emblems of rebirth) grow from the tomb. In their branches are two white doves who sing at sunrise and fly up toward heaven.
In form the lai is a long narrative in rhymed, octosyllabic couplets, traditionally focused on a magical or supernatural object – in this case the magic potion of the fay. A legitimate comparison can be made with Tolkien’s Lay of Leithian with its focus on the Silmaril.
Thither one day, as drooping red the sullen sun was sinking dead, and darkly from the mountain-rims the slanting shadows reached their limbs, that lord, alone, with lagging feet 45 came halting to her stony seat, as if his quest he now half rued, half loathed his purpose yet pursued.
In Brittany the ways are long, 85 and woods are dark with danger strong; the sound of seas is in the leaves and wonder walks the forest-eaves.
Dear love had been between the twain; but stronger now it grew again, and days ran on in great delight,
In Britain’s land beyond the waves are forest dim and secret caves; in Britain’s land the wind doth bear the sound of bells along the air that mingles with the sound of seas 335 for ever moving in the trees.
the shreds of dreams, wherein no more was sun nor garden, but the roar of angry sea and angry wind; 355 and there a dark fate leered and grinned, or changed – and where a fountain fell a corrigan was singing in a dell; a white hand as the fountain spilled a phial of glass with water filled.
Tolkien’s use of ‘rede’ here is typical of his tendency to go out of his way to use an archaic form for a conventional meaning. The usual definition of rede, from Old English ræd from Old Norse ráð, is ‘counsel, advice’, not as here, ‘decision’ or ‘resolve’.
The story thus is more Macbeth than Oedipus, not a tale of a man caught unknowingly in the toils of fate, but the tragedy of a man going willfully down the wrong road, whose fall into error makes him the architect of his own destiny.
The direction of these revisions, and indeed of the general changes from poem to poem, take the story into ever deeper and darker territory.
No work of Tolkien’s says more about his concept of the dark side of faërie, his belief in the very real peril of the perilous realm, and his awareness of its pitfalls for the unwary and its dungeons for the overbold.
Tolkien asserted his deep conviction that language and myth are inseparable one from the other; each being the outgrowth of the other; each dependent on the other for its essential meaning. The paired notions that a world created by the language that describes it generates the language of the world it describes led him directly from his study of real-world myths in their proper languages (including Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Finnish and Breton) to his invented world and the languages he developed for its peoples’ expression.
‘mythology is language and language is mythology’ (TOFS 181).
