I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the most important themes in Tolkien’s work is loss. Loss of technological ability, loss of lifespan, loss of population, loss of — well, let’s not put too fine a point on it — grace, something that might have resonated with Tolkien’s Catholicism and (I think) inherent pessimism.
But there are more playful examples.
The most obvious is the scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo stands up in a pub and recites a poem about the Man in the Moon, who decided one day to go to the pub (a favourite Tolkien pastime) where he discovers a sportive cow, a cat that plays the violin, a dog with a sense of humour, animated crockery and cutlery and so on … to which Tolkien adds a rare (and teasing) breaking-the-fourth-wall footnote, that only a few lines of this poem are now remembered. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1973 reprint, page 203), Iona and Peter Opie write of Hey Diddle Diddle that it is probably the best-known nonsense verse in English, which might explain why ‘a considerable amount of nonsense has been written about it’, before going on to list the various far-fetched theories as to its origin. Some things are, well, just nonsense.
There is a deeper theme here, though, and one that Tolkien, as a scholar of medieval literature, knew only too well — that the literature that survives from ancient times is a tiny fragment of what might once have been current, and that most tales were never written down. Take Beowulf, for example — a poem that Tolkien knew better than most. The only copy of Beowulf that survives is a late manuscript of what was in all likelihood a version of much older story, transmitted orally, whose origins are lost in the fog of the ancient North. The version we have contains hints of yet other stories, and quite a few words, that would have been well known to audiences at the time but of which no other record survives, speaking to a much larger, lost corpus of storytelling. Along with this is the tendency of tales, especially in an oral tradition, to get bowdlerised in each re-telling, progressively worn down until a nonsensical nubbin remains. After centuries of recitation, Hey Diddle Diddle was all that remained of The Man In The Moon. In the same way, Tolkien’s beautiful, powerful and sometimes frightening Elves, and tough, gritty Dwarves, if they were once real, survive only nowadays as kitsch garden gnomes or filmy fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Tolkien loathed Disney — it is the merest coincidence that The Hobbit came out in the same year as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — yet you could read Snow White as the ultimate adulteration of The Lord of the Rings, with Arwen becoming Snow White; Aragorn, the Handsome Prince; Sauron (or Galadriel!) as the Wicked Queen; the poisoned apple as the Ring; The Wicked Queen’s magic mirror as the Mirror of Galadriel, or a palantir (seeing stone); with all the dwarfs and so on as the supporting cast. One must of course beware of reading too much into what is after all a kind of parlour game rather than serious literary criticism.
In that sportive vein, though, and for reasons I need not articulate here, I was reminded of another nursery rhyme.
I had a little nut tree
Nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg
And a golden pear.
The King of Spain’s daughter
Came to visit me
And all for the sake
of my little nut tree.
Anyone who likes me spends more time than is usual or healthy tolkien to themselves will immediately see in the silver nutmeg and golden pear an echo of the Two Trees of Valinor in The Silmarillion: silver Telperion and golden Laurelin, which, after their slaying by Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant, produced, respectively, a silver flower (that became the Moon) and a golden fruit (the Sun). Nothing else would they bear.
But who was the King of Spain’s daughter, and why would she have gone to all that effort to visit one little nut tree? In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the Opies (this time on page 330) are much more specific than they were for Hey Diddle Diddle. They suggest that the rhyme may have celebrated a particular royal visit. The Opies write (page 331):
Edith Sitwell in Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) pictures Lady Bryane, governess-in-ordinary to the young Princess Mary and then to Elizabeth, singing this song to her charges, and remembering a black and terrible shadow, the shadow of Juana of Castile the mad ‘King of Spain’s daughter’, who visited the court of Henry VII in 1506. [my emphasis]
Juana of Castile (daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) is known to have visited Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) in 1506. There was a family connection: Juana was the sister of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Juana’s visit, however, was unscheduled. Her ship, sailing from Flanders to Castile, was wrecked on the English coast. As if matters couldn’t get any worse, relations between Juana’s husband Philip and father Ferdinand were at that time extremely strained. Civil war almost broke out to decide who would rule Castile. Although Philip and Ferdinand settled their differences, it suited them both to declare Juana, the legal heir to the throne, as mad, and have her confined. She remained locked up until her death in 1555, aged 75. Whether Juana really was mad, or her madness was a convenient fiction to get a meddlesome female out of the way, is in question. But the story of her madness had a wide currency, and one can see that a memory of her visit to England, combined with the shipwreck, would have cast a shadow.
One is tempted to wonder whether the whole story of Juana of Castile became infused in Tolkien’s mind while working on his legendarium, so that, perhaps, and knowing how his mind worked, the back-story to I Had A Little Nut Tree really relates to the dark, extremely dark, definitively dark visit of Melkor and Ungoliant, who came to Valinor specifically to seek out the Two Trees and kill them, and the story only became attached to Juana as a matter of Tudor historical revisionism. After all, we still don’t know — and the Opies don’t tell us — why Juana, mad or otherwise, specifically wanted to visit that tree, and admire its fruit, so gravely borne.
I do like parlour games like this. Whether they have any literary merit is questionable.
