Whence dwimmerlaik?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I was recently reminded via an odd source of a long-obsolete Guardian article that did the usual Guardian things (moral relativism, historical revisionism, intellectual onanism and so forth), but this time in reference to The Lord of the Rings (chiefly the films, because Manchester Guardian columnists don't have time to read). The author suggested that the Red Book of Westmarch is a hatchet job, history is written by the winners, unreliable narrative, cultural relativism, racism, ect, ect, chiz, mone, drone. Clickbait. Like Seamus Heaney's girl from Derrygarve, that article is now out of the saga, because it made me think about something rather more interesting.

While considering the contention that evil is not really evil, just misrepresented by its enemies, I was reminded of the Witch-king's threat to Éowyn:

Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye

At this point, if I were working out a response, I would go to Théoden berating Saruman on the injustice of his war on Rohan; but instead I just read the entire passage up to Théoden's death for the same reason that any of us would. As always, I was struck by Éowyn's "Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!"

So what is a dwimmerlaik? The first discovery is that Tolkien did not use the word as found, but a variant form. Hence the OED has no entry for dwimmerlaik, but it does record dweomerlayk, which refers the reader to demerlayk. This is indeed from Old English gedwimer ('illusion', 'phantasm') and gedwimere ('juggler', 'sorceror') with the Middle English suffix -laik from Old Norse laikr. Tolkien has used - perfectly acceptably for Middle English, in which spelling had not been standardised - his own spelling that emphasises the Scandinavian influence on the word. A Dwimmerlaik is, then, a phantasm, an illusion, a juggler's trick. A product of sorcery or, as Tolkien puts it in his index to LR, necromancy.

But where did Tolkien find such a word and why did he resurrect it after so many years, casting it before an audience who could never be expected to have encountered it? Its first recorded use since the thirteenth century was in The Return of the King and the OED, gathering its dignity about it, calmly passes that one over. I think that the clue lies in the fact that two of the citations for dweomer derived words are in Layamon's Brut, which is a Tolkien text for several reasons.

Firstly, and most obviously, it was on the Oxford English syllabus so Tolkien was obliged to teach it. Its only complete manuscript is bound in the same volume as The Owl and The Nightingale, which was also required reading. It is written in an early Middle English dialect from around the year 1200 that still preserves much Old English grammar and vocabulary, and its early lines reveal its author to have been based at Ernley (Areley Kings on the Severn in Worcestershire). Moreover, it is the first work in English to make use of the Matter of Britain and the story of King Arthur. It makes reference to Bede (the first English historian) and Wace as sources, and therefore falls into an area that encompassed Tolkien's personal and professional interests. Furthermore, the author was a West Midlander, working in a consciously archaic style as part of a movement that sought to revive old verse forms. Tolkien was almost guaranteed to be a fan.

Which brings us to the reason why I think Tolkien was drawn to dwimmerlaik. The first occurrence in Brut cited by the OED is at line 137, near the beginning, but crucially in its genitive rather than its nominative form. Here the story concerns the generations between Aeneas and Brutus, the mythical first king of Britain. In Brut, the sons of Aeneas are the half-brothers Asscanius and Silvius. Asscanius has a son, also named Silvius. In secret, the younger Silvius has fathered a child (Brutus) on a young woman, a relative of Asscanius' stepmother, and Asscanius wants to know more about the child before it is born. To this end he consults occult practitioners. The full passage is as follows.

Þa sende Asscanius; þe wes lauerd & dux.
after heom ȝend þat lond; þe cuþen dweomerlakes song. 137
witen he wolde; þurh þa wiþer-craftes. 138
wat þing hit were; þat þeo wimon hefde on wombe.

Then sent Asscanius, who was lord and duke
After those in that land, who knew dwimmerlaik's song.
He wanted to know, through that savage craft
What thing it might be that the woman bore in [her] womb.

So the illusory and phantasmal dwimmerlaik, the product of sorcery, is related to a song that somehow enables the singer to harness occult powers. Perhaps the song forces a dwimmerlaik to do one's bidding. Maybe the song comes from the dwimmerlaik and has power in and of itself. There must be a story behind this. Layamon may even have known what it was, but like so much old folklore and legend, like Wade and his boat and Childe Roland's arrival at the Dark Tower, it is gone past recapture. I think that to some extent Tolkien was trying to imagine what a dwimmerlaik might be, and came to see the Witch-king of Angmar as a potential example. Of course, his use of it here also serves perfectly to create the same sense of a larger culture beyond the words on the page that the reader gets from dweomerlaces song and there may be no more to it than that. I feel, though, that it falls into a wider pattern of Tolkien working through problems to which no answer could be found by academic means by fictionalising and reimagining them.