Essays on Tolkien

Tolkien in the Cities of Time

            “JRR Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth, now published in its entirety many years after his death,” writes Verlyn Flieger, “is indeed ‘a body of more or less connected legend’” (Flieger 1). Tolkien, in this quote, was describing his vast collection of writings (Letters 131). The idea of “legend” implies great lengths of time. Tolkien was an expert at creating the impression of ancient times. Even in his earliest works, when the legendarium that Flieger refers to above was just budding, Tolkien was able to create a sense of passing time and time passed. Two of these early poems by Tolkien, which create the aura of long ago, are “Kortirion Among the Trees” and “Kôr, In a City Lost and Dead” (Book of Lost Tales 33-39, 136). A close look at the structure of Tolkien’s poetry reveals his ability to create a sense of time, present, past, and even future in these cities of his imagination. This paper will examine the stanza structure and rhythm of “Kortirion Among the Trees” and “Kôr, In a City Lost and Dead,” and how Tolkien employed these poetic devices in his effort to guide his reader through the experience of time.

            The first poem, “Kortirion Among the Trees,” is about a city that existed long ago. It is a long poem, consisting of ten stanzas. The stanzas vary in length from the shortest, eleven lines, to the longest, twenty-one lines. They are arranged in three sections, three stanzas each, and then a final stanza. The arrangement of the stanzas inside the sections is: short (11), short (11), long (20 or 21 lines). Then the final, culminating stanza consists of an even twelve lines.  The length of the poem and the length of the longer stanzas lend a feeling of elongated time to the poem, giving a sense of a place that existed long ago. The eleven line stanzas seem to be missing a line which if present, would make a nice, even twelve line stanza as seen in the final stanza, but in fact, this structure leaves one line standing alone. The focus on one line indicating that Tolkien is highlighting a change in time becomes more apparent as we look closer at the rhythm in the lines of these stanzas.

            In “Kortirion Among the Trees,” Tolkien inserts four-beat lines (tetrameter) and six-beat lines (hexameter) into his predominantly pentameter poem, dramatically changing the feel and the time. The first six lines of Kortirion are in pentameter.

            O fading town upon a little hill,
         Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,
            The robe gone grey, thine old heart almost still;
            the castle only, frowning, ever waits
            And ponders how among the towering elms  5
            The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms,
And then in line seven, Tolkien uses a six-beat line.

            And slips between long meadows to the western sea -

The increased number of beats in line seven gives us a sense of an elongated river, and also elongated time that the river takes to flow to the sea. The five-beat rhythm in pentameter slows the poem down to a stately flow. This extension of time during and between the lines echoes the extension of time portrayed by the idea of the poem, a very old city.  A specific example of this change in tempo from five beats to four beats occurs at line 26. Until that line, the poem has five and occasionally six beat lines. Then suddenly two four-beat lines speed up the pace. The trees being described in old Kortirion suddenly come into the present tense:

            “That crown thine agéd walls and muse
            Of sombre grandeur all the day;” [emphasis mine]

 

This change in tempo is a signal to the reader that the speaker has jumped from the long ago memory of an old city to what is happening right now, the trees musing today. This change of pace occurs again in lines 31 through the end of the stanza with only two exceptions, line 38 when old Kortirion is evoked in pentameter, and the last line, a trimeter, which firmly ends the stanza.       

            Swing slowly in their shrouded hair
            and diadem the fallen day.
            O tower and citadel of the world!
            When bannered summer is unfurled.
            Most full of music are thine elms - 35
            A gathered sound that overwhelms

            the voices of all other trees.
            Sing, then, of elms, belov’d Kortirion,

            How summer crowds their full sail on,

            Like chothéd masts of verdurous ships, 40

            A fleet of galleons that proudly slips

            Across long sunlit seas.

 

The latter half of the stanza above automatically moves faster because of the change to tetrameter, which invokes the summer with stars moving through the trees that are loud with music and full of leaves. The tempo of the lines reflects the action in the poem. A quicker tempo occurs again in the sixth stanza. Lines 79 and 80 are tetrameters in the midst of several pentameter lines. In this case, the trees are coloring for autumn, but see the future when winter will come.

            “Seeing afar the icy spears
            Of Winter and his blue-tipped spears” 80

 

Again, the change in tempo signals a change in season and in time perspective.

            A final, but even more intriguing example of emphasis on time change occurs in lines 126 and 127. The reader may see elves dancing on some moonlit night. It could happen any time because even though the city is ancient, the speaker is still there, illuminating a timeless Faerie.

            “(Save on some rare and moonlit night,
            A flash, a whispering glint of white),”

 

This moment suspends time, emphasized by Tolkien again returning to the four-beat meter. The reader moves from a stately past, in and out of a faster present, and occasionally out of time altogether.

            Using stanza structure and rhythm, Tolkien points out the complexities in “Kortirion Among the Trees” while using “Kôr, In a City Lost and Dead” as a foil for the former. Both Kôr, and Kortirion are ancient cities, but Kôr is even older and farther away than Kortirion. Kôr is a dead city, illustrated by the constant iambic pentameter of the piece.  The first quatrain gives us a picture of the city standing on a hill with the blue background of the sea and sky.

            A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned
            Stands gazing out across an azure sea
            Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground

            Impearled as ‘gainst a floor of porphyry
           

The second quatrain provides a closer look at the white city with bar-like shadows of trees.

 

            Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls; 5

            And tawny shadows fingered long are made

            In fretted bars upon their ivory walls
            By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade
           

The couplet gives us a pause, with the architectural image of black, rock pillars.

 

            Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault
            With shaft and capital of black basalt. 10

 

The final quatrain gives us a sense of the city being long abandoned with “forgotten days, silent shadows, and no voice stir[ring].”

            There slow forgotten days for ever reap
            The silent shadows counting out rich hours;

            And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers

            White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.

 

All of these images are made more pronounced by the slow, sedate rhythm of the poem. Like Kortirion Among the Trees, “Kôr, In a City Lost and Dead” has the pentameter rhythm, which ends each line on a stressed syllable, causing the reader to pause. This pause decelerates the tempo of the poem, emphasizing the formality of the language. In Kôr, every line has five stresses without variation, giving it a stately, dirge-like feel. There are no indications that any particular line should stand out, as seen in “Kortirion.”  The fourteen-line stanza is segmented by its rhyming pattern, but the stanza form itself is static, indicating no change over a long period of time. Looking at “Kortirion Among the Trees” and “Kôr, In a City Lost and Dead” together, both from Tolkien’s early writing, rich with imagery, about ancient cities, the striking difference between them is the effect of the rhythm and stanza structure on the sense of time in the poems.

            Though Tolkien creates a vision of two cities, Kortirion and Kor, with vivid imagery and medieval language that fits the time period, he is also able to create a sense of time, both long lost and presently poignant, using the structure of the poem. Kor is a city we can only see through Tolkien’s imagery, a fleeting memory, nearly gone forever. Kortirion is a city with an ancient past, something of the present, and even a possibility of the future.

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