silwritersguild | Entries tagged with a sense of history

The "A Sense of History" banner is black with 6 small images of historic art, including mosaics, sculptures and paintings. Below the images is the title: "Doom and Ascent. The Argument of 'Beowulf: the monsters and critics' by Simon J. Cook

In July 2023, we published the first in a series of posts by Simon J. Cook as part of our A Sense of History column that considered Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," looking especially at the well-known tower allegory that Tolkien used to describe the state of Beowulf criticism in 1936, when the lecture was first given.

Since that time, Simon has looked at individual elements in that allegory, considered critical reception of them, and ultimately connected them back to Tolkien's work on the legendarium. This month's essay is the final in the series and brings all of the smaller pieces together into a coherent interpretation of the tower allegory, one that pushes against long-established readings by scholars of both Beowulf and Tolkien. By using Tolkien's allegories of the tower and the rock garden, Simon creates a metaphorical map for how the various elements of both Beowulf and the legendarium are both physically and symbolically situated.

You can read Simon's final essay in this series, "Doom and Ascent: The Argument of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’," here.

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A black banner with 6 small images of historic art, including mosaics, sculptures and paintings. It is titled: A Sense of History: Spiral Staircase by Simon J. Cook

This month's A Sense of History article, written by Simon J. Cook, continues to engage the question of how Tolkien's work on his legendarium informed his scholarship on Beowulf and vice versa. Simon extends the metaphor of the tower found in Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"—and of course towers bristle across the landscapes of Arda—to consider what it reveals of the Anglo-Saxon imagination.

This month's column considers what it means to climb the tower, descend it again, and peer through its windows at each landing. The spiral shape of the staircase, Simon argues, is essential to understanding the meaning of the tower.

You can read Simon's article "Spiral Staircase" here.

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The "A sense of history" banner. It is black with 6 icons featuring historic arts, including paintings, mosaics and sculptures. The text below reads: "Straight Road by Simon J. Cook"

For the past year as part of our column A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook has been looking at how Tolkien's writings on Beowulf, namely the lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," informs and is informed by his work on the legendarium that he was undertaking at the same time. Last month, he considered the crossing of ships from and back to the West. A familiar journey to fans of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, a ship journey from and to the West also appears in Beowulf.

A ship-burial suggests that beyond the Shoreless Sea is hell, the realm of mortal shades in ancient English mythology. Tolkien reads the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf as ancient myth, the ship-burial as Anglo-Saxon art. The art breathes meaning into the myth, yet raises the uncomfortable thought that the good king came to his people out of death. Early in 1936, Tolkien penned an "Elvish myth" that told of a king who sailed the Straight Road, out of a mythical flat world and into the round world of history, and then died side by side with his Elvish friend, fighting Sauron in Mordor. This legendary appendage to The Fall of Númenor spells out Tolkien’s reading of the exordium, a connection that Simon explores in this month's A Sense of History article.

You can read Simon's article "Straight Road" here.

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A black banner titled "A Sense of History: Passing Ships by Simon J. Cook". Towards the bottom are six depictions of historic art, including sculptures, mosaics and paintings.

The arrival and departure of ships across the Great Sea carries mythic significance for the peoples of Middle-earth. The image of ships crossing out of and back into a mysterious West appears as well in Beowulf and is alluded to in Tolkien's tower analogy in his lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," where the tower allows those who climb it to observe the passage of the ships.

For the past year, Simon J. Cook has been writing a series for our Sense of History column about towers: the tower analogy in the "Monsters and the Critics" essay (which has long fascinating critics and for which he offers a new reading) and the many towers the pepper the landscape of Middle-earth. In his latest installment, he considers the ships we view from the tops of those towers.

You can read Simon's "Passing Ships" here.

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A black banner with six icons depicting historical art pieces, both paintings and statues. The banner is titled "A Sense of History: Th�latta! Th�latta! by Simon J. Cook"

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues his series on towers in Tolkien's works, both Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and his Middle-earth legendarium. Specifically, this month, we step with Frodo through a high window and into a view facilitated by Galadriel's mirror. Although Frodo's glance in Galadriel's mirror may seem anticlimactic by design—after all, Galadriel refuses the Ring and consents to fade from the story—Simon makes the case that the view Frodo sees and the actions it inspires are in fact a key turning point within the legendarium.

You can read Simon's article "Thálatta! Thálatta!" here.

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The A Sense of History Banner: A black banner with 6 images of ancient art, including sculptures, paintings and mosaics.

For the past several months as part of our A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook has been pursuing the question of towers in Tolkien, beginning with the mysterious tower of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and into the towers of Tolkien's Ardaverse, currently The Lord of the Rings.

This month's column follows the "red thread" of Valarin aid to the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings. Returning from the West-gazing palantír of Elostirion, which is said to show a glimpse of Varda in Valinor, Gildor Inglorion bestows a blessing of Varda's protection upon Frodo. Simon traces the miraculous influence of Varda, revealed via a palantír in a tower, throughout the ensuing narrative that becomes an essential element of The Lord of the Rings.

You can read Simon's article "Crossroads" here.

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The A Sense of History banner. A black banner with 6 small images of ancient art, including both paintings and sculptures.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues to climb the stairs of various towers in Tolkien's works, both Middle-earth and not. This month, he focuses on the three inland "dark towers" of The Lord of the Rings and how they connect to the palantíri and other modes of seeing and imposing one's will in Middle-earth. These towers provide different insights than the tower at Elostirion, discussed last month, that looks out upon the sea. The dark towers—and later in the story, the Elf-towers as well—take on a different role that looks not outward to the numinous West but concentrates on the machinations that will come to be preserved as the history of Middle-earth.

You can read Simon's article "Seeing Stones in Dark Towers" here.

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A black banner with six depictions of ancient arts, including a mosaic, paintings and statues. The text on the banner reads: A sense of History - In the House of the Fairbairns by Simon J. Cook

Tolkien fans and scholars like to find evidence of Tolkien's professional work as one of academia's leading Anglo-Saxonists in his works about Middle-earth. What is less often embarked upon is the search for evidence of Tolkien's Middle-earth work in his scholarly work.

For the past several months, as part of our Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook has embarked upon an analysis of the tower analogy Tolkien uses in his influential lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." In his latest article, Simon applies the use of towers in The Lord of the Rings to consider how a reading of this important symbol in The Lord of the Rings can be applied to Tolkien's writings on Beowulf.

You can read Simon's article "In the House of the Fairbairns" here.

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A black banner with six icons of historical art. The banner title reads: "A Sense of History: The Peaks of Taniquetil by Simon J. Cook"

For the past several months, as a part of our column A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook has been analyzing the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture-slash-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," including critical interpretations of the analogy. Although, on paper, most Tolkien fans know that Tolkien's professional work as a philologist and enthusiast of Northern medieval literature influenced his writings on Middle-earth, rarely do we see this emerge as clearly as in the latest installment in this series, where Simon traces the 1936 appearance of the Beowulf-tower (changed from a rock garden) to the appearance of towers looking West toward Númenor (added to earlier versions of the text). Simon draws a connection between the towers of Middle-earth and how the mysterious tower of Tolkien's "Monsters and the Critics" should be interpreted.

You can read Simon's "The Peaks of Taniquetil" here.

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A black banner titled "A Sense of History". Beneath the text are five icons featuring various types of historical art.

In A Sense of History this month is something a bit different: Never Mind the Dwarves by Simon J. Cook. If you've been following Simon's work over the past few months, you know he has been interrogating the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture/essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in many cases pushing back on the work of established scholars (who have not all reacted well to his series). This month's column is a much lighter approach, itself an analogy that blends scholarship, fiction, and fandom. I asked Simon how he would introduce his own piece:

We all know that feeling of hearing a scholar speak about Tolkien's stories and wondering how a human being could so utterly fail to notice the actual art. Words drop from their lips like acid rain falling on virgin snow. Yet one brave band of scholars has broken out of this mould. While spurning imagination, as all scholars must, they nevertheless have seen with their own eyes the profound architecture of the stories that the rest of us love. What is the secret of those very few who take this left-path of scholarship? What allows them and nobody else direct and unmediated vision of the Truth? Simon's research has long grappled with this question and, after many many weary hours rummaging in the archives of the Lore section of the 'Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza', he now reveals the story of the Boffin Stone, which even today may be touched by those who know how to access the hidden chamber in the highest tower of the Fanatics Plaza.

Comment here if you riddle out who Boffin Took is in the piece! (Hint: He's from The History of Middle-earth ...)

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"We don't need no education!" In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook uses this line from Pink Floyd's classic song to interrogate the perspective of foundational Tolkien scholar Jane Chance concerning Tolkien's analogy of the tower in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."

Tolkien was himself part of academia and valued highly both historical and philological inquiry. Yet, Simon argues, the critics who followed him and tried to make sense of his work, often for non-academic audiences and publication sometimes miss the point of his work in an effort to shape their interpretations to the academic trends of their days. In unwinding the complexities of Tolkien's tower analogy, Chance somehow ends up with the critics as the monsters.

As in past columns in this series, Simon takes the title of the column, "A Sense of History," as a guide to consider not just the historical context in which Tolkien wrote but the historical context in which the first Tolkien scholars did their work. You can read Simon's analysis of Chance's ideas in here, in "First Brick in the Wall."

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A Sense of History - Fawlty Towers by Simon J. Cook

When we look at our own creative work, we are often conscious of the historical context that produced it. Fanworks explored sexuality, gender, race, and disability in Tolkien's legendarium are often linked to events and discussions happening in our particular historical moment. But this same sense is sometimes lost in Tolkien. In this month's "A Sense of History" column, Simon J. Cook continues his series on Tolkien's extended metaphor of the tower in his lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" by looking at the characters who populate that metaphor.

Tolkien scholars have often taken these characters as neutral components of the metaphor. Simon makes the case that they were real people, and viewing them as scholars who were part of Tolkien's orbit, driving the debates that informed his academic work, transforms how the metaphor is read. The loss of this historical context, Simon argues, impacts how the metaphor is read within the larger trajectory of Tolkien's work and leads to some ... strange ... conclusions from popular Tolkien scholars.

You can read Simon's article "Fawlty Towers" here.

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A Sense of History: The Rock Garden by Simon J. Cook

This month's A Sense of History continues Simon J. Cook's series on Tolkien's renowned lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Roundly considered to be a watershed moment in Beowulf studies, Tolkien uses an extended metaphor of a tower, some stones, and coterie of friends and neighbors to comment on the state of Beowulf criticism in 1936.

What often goes overlooked is that the people in the tower analogy were in fact real people: Tolkien's colleagues and fellow scholars, whose ideas about Beowulf he harbored various feelings about. In this month's column, Simon looks at an old draft of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," which presents a simplified version of the tower analogy and sheds some light on whom the various figures in the metaphor represent.

You can read Simon J. Cook's "The Rock Garden" here.

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A Sense of History - Beleriand in Beowulf by Simon J. Cook

Back in 2009, Angelica considered the Anglo-Saxon influences in The Silmarillion in her article Beowulf in Beleriand. In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook turns that concept on its head, considering in what ways Tolkien saw Beleriand in Beowulf, namely the "northern feeling" described by so many readers of Tolkien's First Age work, where history grinds toward a seemingly inevitable decline and loss. Simon considers specifically the metaphor of the tower, present in Tolkien's influential 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," where a man uses old stones to build a tower to gaze upon the sea. The sea, Simon argues, is the unknown that has been forgotten by the Anglo-Saxons in Beowulf—or the "wise talkers" of Middle-earth who look back in nostalgic half-remembrance to a drowned world.

You can read Simon's article, "Beleriand in Beowulf," here.

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A Sense of History - The Fall of Gondolin Reflected in History by MirienSilowende

Tolkien was, of course, extremely well-read in ancient and medieval history, conversant in many of the dead languages that the rest of us read only in translation. Much of his work was, not surprisingly, grounded in this history.

The Fall of Gondolin is one such episode.

In this month's A Sense of History column, MirienSilowende looks at the Fall of Gondolin and the ancient and medieval history that may have informed Tolkien's writing of it. She uncovers numerous historical sources that detail some of the more noteworthy sacks and falls of great cities much like Gondolin, renowned for their splendor and elevated status within their worlds.

Of course, these historical inspirations are more than just an interesting aside in the legendarium but can also become building blocks for expanding on the legendarium via fanworks. For example, some of the historical sources MirienSilowende provides go into detail about what happened to the survivors once the city was overthrown by an enemy military. While Tolkien provides few details on this for Gondolin, reading historical sources that possibly informed his construction of the story generates inspiration for fanworks about these untold tales of Gondolin's people.

You can read MirienSilowende's article "The Fall of Gondolin Reflected in History" here.

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A Sense of History - Galadriel: Parallels among Women in History and Literature by MirienSilowende

Galadriel has always been subject to myriad and diverse interpretations from Tolkien fans and scholars. To some, she is an analogue for the Virgin Mary. At the other extreme, she is a warrior figure on par with male heroes like Fingon and Glorfindel. In the extensive ground between lies many other possible readings of her character. None of this is helped by the texts themselves, which are contradictory and confusing even beyond what one comes to expect from Tolkien.

In this month's A Sense of History column, MirienSilowende looks at the character of Galadriel through a historical lens. Although women typically receive the short shrift in both literary and historical writings, figures nonetheless emerge from ancient and medieval texts that suggest parallels with Galadriel's character. Circe, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Joan of Arc offer three possibilities with whom Tolkien would have been familiar and who might have inspired a woman character at once prophetic, benevolent, and outspoken.

You can read MirienSilowende's article "Galadriel: Parallels among Women in History and Literature" here.

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A Sense of History - Sieges in the First and Second Ages by S.R. Westvik

In multiple places, the legendarium depicts siege warfare: a martial tactic that seeks to wear down an opponent by hemming in a population and leaving them subject to the slow diminishment of provisions. There are, of course, well-known sieges such as the Siege of Angband and the War of the Last Alliance, as well as several lesser-known sieges. In this month's A Sense of History column, S.R. Westvik looks at the historical analogues for the sieges seen in Tolkien's works. Drawing from ancient history through the present-day War in Ukraine, they consider the strategy behind successful siege warfare, the resistance tactics of a besieged opponent, and the humanitarian issues that arise whenever a civilian population becomes an integral part of a military strategy.

You can read S.R. Westvik's Sieges in the First and Second Ages here.