Evil in Ireland -- Tolkien and Warnie

So, back some time ago when I was asked to write a guest editorial for MALLORN, I pointed out that there are some things about Tolkien we know because of detailed contemporary evidence. Other things we have to piece together as best we can from fragmentary, sometimes contradictory, evidence. And still others we just have to more or less take on faith. An example of the last is Tolkien's statement that in Ireland you could feel the evil in the very ground, seeping up from below, held back only by the great piety of its people. I commented about this in a post from 2009
( http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2009/12/evil-emanating-tolkien-on-ireland.html ), in which I reproduced the following quote:

George Sayer tells a remarkable story 

about Tolkien describing Ireland as 

'naturally evil.' He could 'feel,' Sayer relates,

'evil coming up from the earth,

from the peat bogs, from the clumps of trees, 

even from the cliffs, and this evil

was only held in check by the great 

devotion of the southern Irish

to their religion.'

A year and a half later, 'BGC' posted a comment saying

I'm pretty sure I have read something of this kind said by, or attributed to, Warnie Lewis (who was, of course, himself Irish) - maybe in his journal or attributed in a letter to Jack - but I can't seem to locate it.

It is certainly more the sort of thing Warnie would have said, in one of his deporessive moods; and very unlike Tolkien.

And now just a few days ago 'Wurmbrand' (Dale Nelson) shared his discovery of that passage BGC had remembered:*

here is the passage that BGC was recalling:

"There is something wrong with this country -- some sullen brooding presence over it, a vague sense of something mean and cruel and sinister: I have felt the same feeling in the hills behind Sierra Leone, and once in 1919 at Doagh in Co. Antrim. A beastly feeling. On the merely physical side, it was most depressing country. I have never seen any place so enclosed before: wherever you go, the grey road is flanked by old stone walls, and banks on the top of which grow thick hedges, the whole overhung by heavy motionless foliage on old trees and lidded with a grey brown sky. After a time the longing for any sort of escape from these everlasting tunnels became acute, and one almost fancied it to be accompanied by a sensation of choking from trying to breathe air from which the oxygen was exhausted. The natives were as depressing as their landscape: during the whole morning I did not see anyone of any age or either sex who was not definitely ugly: even the children look more like goblins than earthborns....I wonder can it be possible that a country which has an eight hundred year record of cruelty and misery has the power of emanating a nervous disquiet? Certainly I felt something of the sort, and would much dislike to see this place again....[Later in the day, after leaving Waterford on our run down the Suir River, we passed Ballyhack, where there were some early Norman castles.] There was [also] a long succession of big houses, all very shut in and desolate, of which J remarked that Walter de la Mare could write detestable stories: and we talked for some time about horror and its treatment in fiction."  (BROTHERS & FRIENDS p. 111-112)

This was written in 1933, years before Tolkien himself first set foot in Ireland. And interestingly enough CSL seems to have disagreed with Warnie -- Warnie's entry for the next leg of their walking tour, in the Plymouth area recounts that

J[ack] and I argued briskly about the country [around Plymouth] we had walked through, J contending that not to like any sort of country argues a fault in oneself: which seems to me absurd . . . I suspect he was talking for victory. [ibid 112]

Congratulations to Dale N. for his connecting the dots and for sharing his discovery.

--John R.
current reading: more on Milne (who suffered badly from Conan Doyle syndrome)


*I've reposted it here because I think those who agree with me about the importance of Dale's discovery are more likely to come across it this way than if it only appeared as a comment on a post from eight years ago.

P.S.: Happy Tolkien Day, all.