When All the World Was Wonderful

Learning to speak in a forgotten language.

The Hobbit was not an obvious choice. My preferences for books to read to our children had always been American classics such as the Edward Eager series (Half-Magic, etc.), The Cricket of Times Square, and Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nihm. 

The world of Tolkien—dragons and elves and dwarves—is more my English husband’s domain. 

But my husband acquiesced – after all, he knew the book well and this was my chance to read a novel I had never deigned to consider as a girl (there is not a single female character in the book which I suspect is one reason why girls don’t gravitate to it). 

In the beginning, my children and I enjoyed the moment where the very proper and posh hobbit panics when he realizes he has forgotten his hat and pocket handkerchief after leaving for the dangerous adventure with his 14 dwarf friends. And then there is the wonderful scene where voracious wolves circle the ground beneath the trees on top of which the hobbit and dwarves are hanging on until their friends -- silent, muscular eagles -- fly to the tree-tops and lift everyone to safety. 

However, we had not yet come across the depth of thought I enjoy in the American classics. English children’s books tend towards eccentricity, playfulness, and punning and can be more odd and subtle (think Winnie the Pooh) than their American counterparts. I associate American children’s literature with intense explorations of emotional landscapes and the delicate inner worlds of children. These frank explorations cannot be found as often in English literature for children (there are exceptions, of course). 

When language is not enough

Then we came upon the following moment in The Hobbit: towards the end of the book, Mr Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, finds himself in the presence of the sleeping dragon, Smaug, who guards the enormous cache of riches and jewels which glisten and sparkle before Bilbo’s eyes -- he is astonished beyond words at the sight:

To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.

These moments when writers come up against a wall, when they realize that they are facing an impossible task—these are my favorite moments. Tolkien can’t describe Bilbo’s “staggerment” (which is actually a real word I had never seen before!) But even that underused word is “no description at all”. These moments in a text reveal that the writer’s only tool – language – is not enough. So we reach for clichés: ‘There are no words’ is a cliché – we have all heard it before.

Although it’s a familiar phrase, Tolkien adds a word to the cliché that changes everything: “left”. That one syllable breaks through the cliché and adds a dimension to the idea of there being no words to describe something. ‘Left’ suggests that there were once words that could express the ‘staggerment’ overtaking Bilbo. Apparently, these words existed in a previous era and originated with the wonderful elves.

This sense that once “all the world” was “wonderful” hums deep inside the human psyche. Many of us instinctually feel that a world has been lost and we ache for it, that once there was something better, more pure, more satisfying. And that language came easily and could transparently reflect feelings and reality. This longing can be found throughout literature. Poets are particularly attuned to it. 

Truth and beauty are one

In the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the 19^th-century English poet John Keats writes, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” These lines suggest that words, melodies, songs, and language that we can’t hear now were “sweeter”, more appealing, and pleasant, than what we do experience today. In the poem, the poet is describing a rendering of a scene from Ancient Greece on an urn, and he imagines the sweetness of that time which he can’t fully access. Those sweet sounds have “left” us. Keats ends the poem with the famous maxim:

   Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

One way of understanding these lines is to hear them as declaring the merging of reality and goodness: deep inside, we all can “know” that truth and beauty are one; in other words, what is real and true is lovely and appealing. If we apply this to Tolkien’s statement, then the writer of The Hobbit is saying that once, when words could reflect truth, the whole world was “wonderful” or beautiful.  

Emily Dickinson also wrote a poem that equates beauty with truth and implies that they are unified: 

I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room -

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied -
"And I - for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren are",  He said -

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss had reached our lips -
And covered up  - Our names -

The fact that poets intuit that truth and beauty are one is no coincidence: poets in particular strive to reflect truth in magnificent language but know this is not ultimately possible. A desire for a beautiful, impossible world when words could communicate, mirror, and signify truth runs deep. 

When all was lovely

This dream of a lost time when all was lovely can also be seen in the ancient Latin in Ovid's Metamorphoses (7 CE). The lost “Golden Age” is depicted as a place and time when everything was harmonious: 

The Golden Age was first; when Man, yet new, 

no rule but uncorrupted Reason knew:
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear.

Ovid suggests that this “uncorrupted” time is inextricably bound up with how language was used: 

His words were simple, and his soul sincere;

Simple, true words reflected the sincerity of the soul. This took place in a world where no one was oppressed, and laws were not necessary because ethics were built inside each person.  

A similar vision of pure goodness can be found in “Fern Hill,” the poem by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, which expresses a nostalgia for the perfect goodness of childhood: 

I was young and easy under the apple boughs

Embracing a vision of glorious moments from a child’s life crafted in beautiful language radiates nostalgia for a time when “all the world was wonderful.”  

Poets “want to tell”, they want to describe, and memorialize what they see around them. However, they sense that there are no words left, the words don’t exist anymore to do so. Since the language is forgotten their task is impossible. Yet they continue to write and somehow in that humble embrace of the hopelessness of their task, they achieve the impossible. 

Perhaps Tolkien’s elves were poets. And perhaps we can imagine the American poet W.S Merwin (1927-2019) as a descendent of one of Tolkien’s elves: he speaks directly in his work to the longing Tolkien describes in The Hobbit: a vision of a time where words were once able to express truths. I’ll end with his poem “Witness”, which speaks for itself:  

I want to tell what the forests

were like

I will have to speak 

in a forgotten language