Did Tolkien Kipple?

I have just finished reading Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) by Rudyard Kipling, in the Project Gutenberg edition.¹ It’s a book for children. J.R.R. Tolkien was 14 when it was published, so he was a bit old for it, but I get a distinct feeling that either he read it or he was told about it. Holly Ordway‘s new book, Tolkien’s Modern Reading, has a table of works that she knows for certain Tolkien read. It’s very thorough, and Puck isn’t among them. That may be just for lack of evidence — the book wasn’t obscure ² and there’s no specific reason it would ever have come up in a surviving written source. Nonetheless, I heard echoes of Tolkien’s stories all through Kipling’s book.

Tom Bombadil

The eponymous character Puck is the first and last fairy in England. He was there first: “I’m Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England,” he introduces himself (p. 8), which I have to put next to “Eldest, that’s what I am!” from Bombadil. Puck is the last because he is a nature spirit, with a source of strength that could resist drab Protestant conformity.

The People of the Hills have all left. I saw them come into Old England and I saw them go. Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins, imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-people, hill-watchers, treasure-guards, good people, little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders, pixies, nixies, gnomes and the rest—gone, all gone! I came into England with Oak, Ash, and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash, and Thorn are gone I shall go too. (p. 10)

The way Bombadil put it sounds almost the same:

Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. (LotR, I, vii)

The common reference to oaks and acorns is also good for us dendrophiles. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is connected to the prehistory of our world, which we can see here because Puck tells us the water-spirits are all gone, whereas Bombadil knows exactly where he can find one.

Also, not such a strong connection, but the story “Dymchurch Flit” is narrated by Puck himself, in disguise under the name of Tom.

Pictish Hobbits

Two chapters of the book are stories from the Roman Empire, narrated by a centurion on Hadrian’s Wall. North of the Wall were the Picts. Our narrator Parnesius befriended a Pict named Allo. There’s a Pictish Song before the story begins, which contains the lines,

We are the Little Folk—we!
Too little to love or to hate (p. 201)

This has countless echoes in The Lord of the Rings; the one that came to my mind was,

‘… one poor hobbit coming in from the battle is easily overlooked.’
‘It’s not always a misfortune being overlooked’, said Merry. ‘I was
overlooked just now by…’  (LotR V, viii)

The part that inspired this whole post is when Allo takes Parnesius and his comrade Pertinax hunting north of the Wall:

You are quite safe so long as you are his guest, and wear a sprig of heather where it can be seen. If you went alone you would surely be killed, if you were not smothered first in the bogs. Only the Picts know their way about those black and hidden bogs. (p. 158)

I couldn’t help thinking of Gollum leading Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes.

Jewish Dwarves or Dwarvish Jews

A line I always wondered about in LotR: “Gimli was fingering gold in his mind, and wondering if it were fit to be wrought into the housing of the Lady’s gift.” (II, ix) Gold is an elemental metal. All gold should be the same. Maybe Dwarves have a different sense, though, like a master vintner who can tell apart grapes from two adjacent vines, just by taste. Kipling’s character can do that. Kadmiel is a Jewish moneylender whose choices forced King John to sign Magna Carta. Kadmiel tells us,

I know the Golds. I can judge them in the dark; but this was heavier and redder than any we deal in. Perhaps it was the very gold of Parvaim. (p. 271)

(Actually, it was gold from West Africa.) This parallel doesn’t appear in any of the accounts I’ve read that explore how Tolkien’s Dwarves are influenced by stories of Jews in Europe.

The Departure of the Elves

The departure of the fairies, by Rackham

Tolkien’s Elves are leaving Middle-earth because their time is over. They’re boarding ships and sailing into the West. Kipling’s fairies feel the same way: “Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the Images.” (p. 242). They’re referring to the Protestant Reformation. But these are tiny, Tinkerbellish fairies. How can they get out?

A boat to be sure. Their liddle wings could no more cross Channel than so many tired butterflies. A boat an’ a crew they desired to sail ’em over to France, where yet awhile folks hadn’t tore down the Images. (p.242)

Puck has always maintained relations with us humans, so he could find them a couple of unlikely lads and a boat just barely large enough. Of course, these elves sailed into the South. There were still Catholics in France, and maybe some remnant of the Forest of Brocéliande had escaped the loggers’ axes.

Conclusion

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are many things, but first they are adventure stories. Kipling was a master of adventure stories from the previous generation. When Tolkien sat down to write long-form fiction, common tropes of the genre were well established and ready to hand. This is a partial list of the ways Tolkien could play off of Kipling’s tropes, whether they were things he liked, such as nature spirits who are invulnerable to the changes in human society, or things he didn’t, such as Pigwidgeon fairies.

Any reader who does not like this essay can procure one leaf each from an oak, an ash, and a hawthorn, and forget the whole thing instantly.

Coda: Intertextuality goes both ways

Totally irrelevant to the rest of this post, but Kipling wasn’t above recycling a good thought, either:

“All good families are very much the same” (p. 131) vs. “Happy families are all alike…”  -Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878).

1. Page numbers cited are from this e-book.
2. though I just heard of it