Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

Song that can't be bought or sold

Alan Jacobs has a lovely and deeply melancholy reflection on orally transmitted song and music, sparked by a recollection by the poet Edwin Muir, a native of the Orkneys. Here’s a particularly poignant reflection from Jacobs himself, one that chimes with memories of sitting with my grandparents on their front porch, eating popsicles and talking:

When my late father-in-law was a child in Columbiana, Alabama, his family was very poor, and could afford no musical instruments; so evening after evening, they just sat on the front porch and sang in four-part harmony. All of them experienced music in a way I never have and never will. Eventually they did a little better, financially, and Daddy C—as I would call him, decades later—got a cheap guitar from Sears as a Christmas present. But he had no one to teach him to play until a friend of his sister’s, a fellow his own age but from Montgomery, came by one day and taught him a few chords. That friend was named Hank Williams—and yep, it was that Hank Williams.

That’s a marvelous surprise ending, and the stuff family lore is made of, but Jacobs’s line about his father-in-law “experienc[ing] music in a way that I never have and never will” expresses what I was driving at in my memorial reflection on Jon Daker last week. That was a world in which a great store of music, stories, and culture was still traditional in the literal sense of being handed over or handed down, generation by generation. That world is disappearing, replaced, as I noted, with canned music by digitally tweaked and scrubbed professionals, with whom we compete at our peril.

There is great danger in this state of affairs. I feel this acutely in the case of my own children. Jacobs touches on this anxiety by quoting this passage from novelist and critic Marina Warner: “We are in danger of cultural illiteracy, of losing the past. If nestlings are deprived of their parents’ song during a certain ‘window’ at the beginning, they will not learn to sing. This sounds uncomfortably recognizable.”

And summing up, Jacobs writes:

Children will always play, when allowed to, and people will always sing. But will they play or sing anything that can’t be bought and sold? Will playing and singing, in the Western world anyway, ever again be anything other than a set of commercial transactions?

Read the whole post. It’s worth your while. And for a related point, listen to this piece by the late Roger Scruton, “The Tyranny of Pop Music.”