Swanships and Swanroads inTolkien and Beowulf

From the earliest days of the legendarium the

swanships were present.  In 1917 (or so) Tolkien wrote

in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One1:

Now do the Solosimpi take great joy of [?their] birds, and ofthe swans, and behold upon the lakes of Tol Eressëa already theyfare on rafts of fallen timber, and some harness thereto swansand speed across the waters; but the more hardy dare out uponthe sea and the gulls draw them, and when Ulmo saw that he wasvery glad.  For lo! the Teleri and the Noldoli complain much toManwë of the separation of the Solosimpi, and the Gods desirethem to be drawn to Valinor; but Ulmo cannot yet think of anydevice save by help of Ossë and the Oarni, and will not behumbled to this.  But now does he fare home in haste to Aulë, andthose twain get them speedily to Tol Eressëa, and Oromë was withthem, and there is the first hewing of trees that was done in the

1 For those not familiar with The Book of Lost Tales, a couple of quick observations may be useful. First, it contains early versions of many stories that we later see in The Silmarillion, but these stories often differ greatly in emphasis, tone, style, names, and characterization (to name a few). Some find these differences as surprising as The Silmarillion itself is to those who have known only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Book of Lost Tales, however, is as interesting a work in its own right as it is as a precursor to the later tales. Second, Christopher Tolkien performed heroic work on chaotic manuscripts to come up with a publishable version, reading nearly unreadable handwriting set down in faded 70 year old pencil on paper that had sometimes held older versions which had been erased and overwritten. No doubt an electron microscope and a palantír would have come in handy.

For the date see The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (Boston 1984) 1.203; The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (Boston 1984) 2.146-47; Unfinished Tales (1981) 4-5.

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world outside Valinor. Now does Aulë of the sawn wood of pineand oak make great vessels like to the bodies of swans, and thesehe covers with the bark of silver birches, or .... with gatheredfeathers with the oily plumage of Ossë's birds, and they are nailedand [?sturdily] riveted and fastened with silver, and he carves theprows for them like the necks of upheld swans, but they arehollow and have no feet; and by cords of great strength andslimness are gulls and petrels harnessed to them, for they weretame to the hands of the Solosimpi, because their hearts were soturned by Ossë.

(BoLT 1.124)

And though Tolkien never wrote more than a few scraps

and notes of Eärendil's tale, he nevertheless had at

least one detail of his ship clear in his mind. It was

'shaped as a swan of pearls' (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two,

263).  Tuor, Eärendil's father, had a boat just like

those of the Elves of Tol Eressëa, 'with a prow fashioned

like to the neck of a swan' (BoLT 2.151), and he was

subsequently guided by swans on a path that led him in

time to Gondolin, where he adopted the swan's wing as the

sign of his house (2.152-160).2  In his later years, after

Gondolin had fallen, Tuor built a ship called 'Swanwing'

in which he sought to sail to Valinor (2.253-55, 260,2  At BoLT 2.160 Tuor names himself as being 'of the house of the Swan.' He seems to have taken this description to himself rather than inheriting it: 'This [dwelling] by slow labor [Tuor] adorned with fair carvings of the beasts and trees and flowers and birds that he knew about the waters of Mithrim, and ever among them was the Swan the chief, for Tuor loved this emblem and it became the sign of himself, his kindred and folk thereafter' (2.152).

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263, 265), on whose shores was Alqualuntë (later

Alqualondë), 'Swan-Haven,' where the ships of the

Solosimpi were berthed (BoLT 1.163-64). 

In Tolkien's painting of Taniquetil from the 1920s,

we can glimpse just such a ship

in the sea at the foot of the mountain:

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Nor does Tolkien abandon the swanships as Middle

Earth develops.  The one in which Galadriel comes to bid

farewell to the Fellowship is only the most famous

example from The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.372-73):

They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailingproudly down the stream toward them, they saw a swan of greatsize. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneathits curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyesglinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were halflifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; andsuddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carvedwith elven skill in the likeness of a bird.... 

Aragorn stayed his boat as the Swan-ship drewalongside.... 

The Swan passed on slowly to the hythe, and they turnedtheir boats and followed it.

In the song Bilbo sings at Rivendell he can still say

of Eärendil's ship: '[h]er prow he fashioned like a swan'

(FR 2.i.234); and the banner of the Prince of Dol Amroth

bears 'a white ship like a silver swan upon blue water'

(RK 5.viii.871; cf. 6.iv.953). We can also find swans and

swanships in The Silmarillion (61, 238), and the link between

these birds and Tuor is maintained in the lengthy

fragment Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales (25-

28). 

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So clearly the images of the swans and the swan-ships

had an abiding appeal for Tolkien, but where the

swanships come from is a question that to my knowledge

has not been answered.  There are a number of

possibilities, and though I incline more to one than the

others, it is not implausible or unlikely that several

influences combined to produce the swanships.

The first is simple, and might seem ridiculous.

Indeed it might be ridiculous, but that in itself does

not rule it out.  When I first read of the swanship of

Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, I found it odd, but I could

visualize it immediately.  At that time I was a little

boy spending my summers in a small beach town adjacent to

Asbury Park, NJ, and in the lake between the two towns

there was a swan-boat:

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As I was considering the possibility that Tolkien had

seen such a boat somewhere, and actually inclining to

dismiss it, the latest issue of The Tolkien Society's

newsletter,  Amon Hen (253), arrived in my mailbox.

Inside, by chance, was a request from a member to contact

him if anyone remembered 'the "Swan" boats at Hinksey

boating pool' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s, which he

saw as a possible source of inspiration for Tolkien. And

while I don't consider chance-if-chance-you-call-it an

adequate basis for scholarship, it made me think twice.

Now the swan-boats at Hinksey Park cannot be the

inspiration for the swanships themselves, since the park

did not exist until the mid 1930s,3 and both The Book of Lost

Tales and the painting of Taniquetil predate this. It's

quite possible, however, that the boats at Hinksey3 Hinksey Park was built on the grounds of the former Oxford Waterworks, which were purchased for this purpose in 1934.  See here.

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influenced Tolkien's description of them in The Lord of the

Rings.4 As the gentleman from The Tolkien Society put it in

his reply to my email:

I cannot but think that Tolkien used the idea of these twoboats at Hinksey for his Swan boat of Galadriel. The description isuncannily similar to how I remember them, with their "whitewings half lifted", and I guess Tolkien must have seen them if heever walked down that way. They were not, alas, propelled by twoelves clad in white, using black paddles....

For a medievalist and a man of his time like Tolkien

inspiration might also be found in the tale, first found

in the late 12th century, of the Knight of the Swan and

more recently in Wagner's Lohengrin.  In sum, a mysterious

knight arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to rescue a

woman in peril. Here there clearly seems to be a link to

the passage of The Book of Lost Tales I quoted above, which

describes the swans pulling the rafts on the lakes of Tol

Eressëa.

4 I contacted the gentleman who had placed the notice in Amon Hen by email, to which he was kind enough to reply as quoted.  Unfortunately he did not have a photograph of his swan-boats, and I have so far been unable to locate one.

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Lohengrin Postcard ca. 1900

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17th Century Woodcut

But while this might explain the swans drawing the

boats in the lakes, it does not explain the swanships

themselves.  For this we must look elsewhere.

Fortunately an answer seems to be ready at hand, in a

source that will surprise no one.

                             Hét him ýþlidangódne gegyrwan;   cwæþ, hé gúþcyningofer swanrade        sécean woldemærne þéoden,      þá him wæs manna ðearf.

(Beowulf  198-201)

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                             He ordered hisship built,A great wave-walker, and said he would seekOver the long sea, the swan's road,

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that well-known king needing brave new men.

(transl. Williamson)

Swanrad, the swan-road, as the context makes clear,

is a kenning for the sea, much like the better

known hronrad, the whale-road (Beowulf 10). But there's

something odd about it.  Swans may be water fowl, but

they are not seabirds.  That Tolkien perceived this is

evident: in the lakes of Tol Eressëa swans pull the rafts

of the Elves; but in the salt sea petrels and gulls are

harnessed to the swan-ships.  Robert Woodward resolved

this oddity by pointing out that swanrad is in fact a

double kenning, in which swan is itself first a kenning

for ship, and then is joined to rad to become a kenning

for the sea.5 And it's only a few lines later, as Woodward

notes, that the poet likens the 'neck' of the ship to a

bird's:

Gewát þá ofer wægholm    winde gefýsedflota fámiheals    fugle gelícost,

(Beowulf  217-18)

Over the scending sea, driven by the wind,Went the ship, foamy-necked much like a bird,

5 Robert H. Woodward, 'Swanrad in Beowulf,' Modern Language Notes 69 (1954) 544-46.  He also identifies parallels in Old Norse using svan.

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(transl. mine)6 

Heals, the second element in the adjective fámiheals, means

both prow and neck, and the poet plays ably on both these

senses in fámiheals fugle gelícost.  Birds don't move fast

enough through the water to make the sea foam around

them, but ships do; and ships don't have necks, but birds

do. 'Its foamy prow so like a bird's neck' catches, I

think, the double sense of it, but loses the poem's

eloquent compression. Nevertheless, the poet evokes the

image of a bird here to describe Beowulf's ship, and it

can hardly be an accident that seventeen lines earlier he

had chosen to use swanrad when he could just as easily

have used hronrad,7 but instead of the whale he conjured

the swan, whose neck curves so like the prow of a ship of

this era.

6 I supply my own translation here because I think a more literal rendering isnecessary to the point being made. I also think Williamson's otherwise excellenttranslation of Beowulf stumbles on fámiheals fugle gelícost, for which he gives us 'the foam-necked floater.' To be sure flota is a rather colorless word for ship, but the super-literal 'floater' conceals more than it reveals. And revelation is what we seek7 On hronrad see Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 141-43, where he argues that "'whale road'-- which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic" is not quite the right rendering of this word, since rad may be the ancestor of ‘road’ by form, but in OE is a noun related in meaning to ridan,i.e., ‘ride.’ Thus he translates ofer hronrade (10) as ‘over the sea where the whale rides’ (13, lines 7-8) and ofer swanrade (200) as ‘over the waters wherethe swan rides’ (18, line 162). See also Caroline Brady, ‘Old English Nominal Compounds in –rad, PMLA 67 (1952) 567-69.

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The famous Oseberg ship, built ca. 820

And Tolkien's close attention to this passage could

not be more clear.  He chose these very lines (210-228)

to illustrate his explanation of the workings of

alliterative verse in his essay On Translating Beowulf (61-

71), in which he also already discussed swanrad, though

the meaning of rad was his subject there (51-52). We have

three separate renderings of fámiheals fugle gelícost by him: in

verse as 'foam-throated, like a flying bird;' in prose as

'with foam at the throat most like unto a bird;' and a

literal prose version in the Old English word order,

'foamy-neck (to) bird likest.'8

8 The poetic and the literal prose translations come from On Translating Beowulf, 63 and 69respectively, reprinted in in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London, 2006), andthe prose from Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (New York 2014).

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If, moreover, we turn back for a moment to consider

Galadriel's swan-ship, 'wrought and carved with elven

skill in the likeness of a bird,' we can see an

interesting progression in Tolkien's description of it.

When the members of the fellowship first see it, they

take it to be a proper 'swan.' Then they realize that it

is in fact a 'swan-ship.'  And finally it becomes a

'Swan.'  From 'swan' to 'swan-ship' to 'Swan,' it's like

watching the birth of a kenning.  If Tolkien did not

recognize the swan in swanrad as itself a kenning for ship,

he turned it into one here.

Now Old English possesses a second word for

swan, ilfette/ilfettu, which establishes another link to the

swanships and the Elves in The Book of Lost Tales.  In

a marginal gloss on the words 'Kópas Alqualuntë, the

Haven of the Swanships,' Tolkien wrote Ielfethyþ. This word,

Christopher Tolkien explains,

is Old English, representing the interpretation of the Elvish namemade by Eriol in his own language: the first element meaning'swan' (ielfetu), and the second (later 'hithe') meaning 'haven,landing place.'

(BoLT 1.164)

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As Christopher Tolkien's note indicates, ielfethyþ is

his father's coinage through the character of Eriol, the

seafarer who finds his way to Tol Eressëa and learns the

stories told in  The Book of Lost Tales (1.13-27). Why

use ielfethyþ when swanhyþ would have worked just as well?

Not to conceal one connection by choosing the less

obvious synonym, but, I would argue, to suggest another

by echoing ilfe, the Old English for elves, the entry for

which directly precedes ilfette in Bosworth Toller.9

Hyþ, the second element in ielfethyþ, also has echoes in this

connection since 'hithe' is used by Tolkien only to

describe the landing place where the swan-ship of

Galadriel lands; he spells it 'hythe' in an archaic

manner evocative of Old English; and the three times the

word 'hythe' appears here are the only three times the

word appears in The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.371, 373, 377).

Except for Christopher Tolkien's note above, it also does

not appear, in either spelling, in The Hobbit, The

9 What the difference may be between swan and ilfette is unknown to me. Hexam. 8 suggeststhat to some there may have been one: sume fugelas beóþ langsweorede swá swá swanas ond ilfette. 'Some birds are long-necked like swanas and ilfette.’ According to Bosworth Toller, in Icelandic svanr, the cognate of swan is only poetical, while alpt/alft, the cognate of ilfette, was the normal word for swan, but it does not appear from the citations in Bosworth Toller that Old English maintained so neat a distinction.

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Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, or Unfinished Tales.  In an

author so careful of his words, so knowledgeable about

them and their history, and so inclined to archaic words

in the right context, the fact that he uses 'hythe' three

times here and nowhere else indicates great

deliberateness in choosing it.  It was not merely an old

word that meant 'landing.'

On balance then there seems to be ample evidence for

tracing Tolkien's inspiration for the swanships to the

combination of swanrad and fámiheals fugle gelícost. Other

influences are not to be ignored for other aspects of the

swanships, like the Knight of the Swan and the likelihood

that Tolkien saw swanboats at Hinksey Park. Michael

Martinez has summarized still other likely reasons for

the imagery of swans in Tolkien.  But the ships

themselves first sailed the swanroad.

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