Who the Hell is Tinfang Warble?
The earliest trace of a hobbit appears in Tolkien's account of Valinor
In our last post on The History of Middle-Earth, we took another “walk” through Valinor, the land of the gods, circling around its palaces and strange places until we came to the dark and prophetic poem of Habbanan beneath the Stars. We noted how J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about this location of the afterworld — where the dead go and ring around camp fires to listen to “one voice” sing in the night — just weeks or days before he would march into the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
That poem did not make it into the final Silmarillion nor into The Book of Lost Tales proper, but I think Habbanan beneath the Stars helps to remind us of the emotional extremes that Tolkien synthesized, from death on battlefronts to drinking songs and pipe-weed. He wrote The Chaining of Melko, the focus of our next two posts (this one and next week’s), mostly after World War I, though there is a curious figure that dates back many years before…
Tinfang Warble — an entirely odd character when read from the far more serious register of the eventual Silmarillion. But even for The Book of Lost Tales, Tinfang strikes a high and fay note. Eriol, our time-traveller who is the vessel for our vicarious visit to Tol Eressëa (the Lonely Isle), tells one of his hosts, Vairë, of “dream-musics” that make his heart ache for legend and lost tales. She then corrects Eriol, telling him the music is played by Timpinen, or Tinfang.*
The elf children prefer to call him Tinfang Warble. As he dances and plays music at dusk, stars flicker: “at every note a new one sparkles forth and glisters.” She also tells Eriol that Tinfang is “shier than a fawn” and “swift to hide and dart away as any vole: a footstep on a twig and he is away, and his fluting will come mocking from afar.” To me, this combination of enchantment, merriment and stealthiness seems like the first trace of a hobbit in Tolkien’s vast works, going back many years before his fateful line about “a hole in the ground.”
But to get to the bottom of that hunch, we first need to answer a different question: Is Tinfang an elf and what is an elf in THOME**?
Well, that’s a very complex question that in fact not just The Book of Lost Tales, but Tolkien’s various books work out over time. Our future posts will map out how he conceives and develops them throughout THOME, but I think at this early stage, with Christopher Tolkien’s guidance, we can make some very simple observations: 1.) They were somewhere between more twee creatures and more perilous beings, 2.) That line moved much more into the perilous by the time Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and revised the Lost Tales into The Silmarillion, 3.) He has many alternating names for the various tribes of Elves, such as Noldoli, and 4.) The Children of Ilúvatar are imagined before the beginning of the world, but are incarnated within it only after the world exists for eons.
That is, while the Elves, as one of the species that comprise the Children of Ilúvatar — the others are humans, and by extension hobbits, and by addendum dwarves — are “immortal,” their bodies can be destroyed by violence or sorrow. So they are magical beings from a mortal and human point-of-view. Further, here in The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien gives far greater affordance to other magical beings familiar to anyone who knows their Tinker Bell or Harry Potter. He lists them as sprites and fays, including leprawns (leprechauns), brownies, and pixies —i.e. fairies in the modern popular sense and little people, or very little people.
In this earliest form of his legendarium, these creatures were Ainu or angels, spirits who existed before the world — one could almost think of them too like molecules and atoms — who entered the world after it was brought into being by the great power of Eru the One, Ilúvatar — the godhead of Middle-earth and all Creation; Christopher Tolkien notes that these tiny beings did not survive into The Silmarillion, which only accounts for the Valar and the Maiar among the angelic Ainu who entered Arda, the World that Is, Eä. That is, the Maiar and mightier Valar are all of human scale or greater in the later evolved mythos.
But while they did not survive as angelic beings, it would be wrong to say they did not survive at all, for Tolkien still kept the puckish flavor of some of these fantasy creatures in The Hobbit especially. He later made a side comment that both he as a child and his children in turn disliked “flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae,” a tradition that he traced back to Michael Drayton’s Nimphidia, the Court of Faery. He considered Drayton’s fantasy “one of the worst ever written.”
In fact, you could say Tolkien probably resented to some degree that Drayton’s depiction of the magical, as drained of perilousness, is part of what invited such derision of Fantasy as a genre by so many modern literary types, the “adults” as it were, to the “children,” or the writers who “never grew up,” stuck somewhere between the twee and the juvenile. And yet in The Hobbit, Tolkien played up singing Elves — “tra-la-la-lally” anyone? — and he drew Bilbo Baggins as a pointed-eared Keebler Elf creature, including with pointy toe shoes and a gnomish pointy stocking hat in his Conversation with Smaug painting.
In April 1915, he also wrote a poem called Goblin Feet at the same time that he was writing The Cottage of Lost Play, the opening movement to his grand vision in The Book of Lost Tales. I am not going to reprint the poem in full below, but I am going to cite a few of its parts. It is not a long poem. The main thing, however, to note is how in its very airy-fairy atmosphere still one detects the darker twilit melancholy that Tolkien trademarked, as well as some critical images that would not continue in their existing popular form, but somehow meld and transform:
I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying
A slender band of gray…The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!…I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone.
And where silvery they sing
In a moving moonlit ring…
Do you see what I see? “Down the road” that goes ever ever on? The air “full of wings” with the music of “tiny horns,” “leprechauns,” and “gnomes” with “padded feet”? And don’t miss the “rabbits” or even the “moonlit ring.” Here in many ways are the ingredients and the germs for some of his most famous mythological breakthroughs, ideas he reworked into Halflings with padded bare feet, and magical rings, moonlit, golden and moving through the great span of time. Whether its Goblin Feet or Tinfang Warble, the amino acids and fairy code comprising hobbits’ DNA is flittering about in these early years.
Vairë — similar in sound to Faery — also gently limns between archetypes in her description. Tinfang Warble “‘tis said everywhere that this quaint spirit is neither wholly of the Valar nor of the Eldar, but is half a fay of the woods and dells,” she opines, explaining that Tinfang eludes even the Elves and sometimes goes to the Great Lands far away in Middle-earth where he wakes minds and hearts.
“Now, however,” she continues, “for such is the eeriness of that sprite, you will ever love the evenings of summer and the nights of stars, and their magic will cause your heart to ache unquenchably.”
Yet is that not the wanderlust that strangely calls Bilbo to his adventure, when he hears the singing of the exiled dwarves of the Lonely Mountain? Did the Lonely Isle become a mountain in a land where the sea washed back away? Tinfang is such a strange name, like Bilbo or Frodo, a construction that feels somehow unserious compared to the ornate “Gondolin” or “Curufinwë.” In Elvish, it translates to “star-beard.” Did he take Tinker Bell and substitute a Fang? Importantly, Tolkien was a fan of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which he saw in theatrical form in 1910 or 1911 in London. And the heart that aches “unquenchably” is most certainly how Tolkien feels himself about transformational Faërie and Fairy Story as he explicated later on.
Well, hobbits don’t have beards, but they do have fur on top of their feet. And while generally they sing more than they flute, they do enjoy a different kind of pipe, the smoking pipe, which in their own way they create enchanting patterns, blowing rings up into the air and over the hills. Are you following me? If you don’t quite believe me, then take Tolkien’s poem about Tinfang Warble, which he published in two forms, one short and sweet in 1917, another longer during Brockton Camp training before his mission in France for the War in 1916.
This longer poem is titled Over Old Hills and Far Away (ahem, Robert Plant). Tolkien continued to rework it over the years, rewriting a final version in 1927 in Oxford, just a few years before he would begin to sketch out The Hobbit. The poem reads as if Tolkien was Bilbo waking up to moonlight and hearing a sweet sound, looking through his lattice glass windows onto the lawn, following it out the door and “away, away!”:
I leapt o’er the stream and I sped from the glade,
For Tinfang Warble it was that played;
I must follow the hoot of his twilight flute
Over reed, over rush, under branch, over root,
And over dim fields, and through rustling grasses
That murmur and nod as the old elf passes,
Over old hills and far away
Where the harps of the Elvenfolk softly play.
Also, let us not forget that in Tolkien’s early drafts of The Hobbit, that Gandalf was a dwarf, except that he realized that the Old Icelandic name that he borrowed and made his own, translated to “wand elf,” and so the bearded dwarf became a bearded wizard, who to my mind, also shares a thing or two with Tinfang (splintering from the same wood block could also be Tom Bombadil).
I know it’s a stretch, a leap over reed, rush, branch and root, but maybe the “old elf” somehow fused into something else in the great writer’s imagination — then divided like a cell into more than one true thing: an old angel beloved by the Elves who could stir mortals hearts to principled action who was sent out twice to the Great Lands of Middle-earth to lead the free peoples to the light — Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White — who through a magic mirror saw himself in a “little fellow” sitting on a garden porch, half Baggins, half “fool of a Took”?
“It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife,” The Hobbit narrator says of Bilbo’s ancestors. So there it is from Tinfang to Bag End: Tolkien’s marvelous imagination seems to make the connection that would change the history of storytelling — a symbiosis of the spritely and the spry, the wandering and the well-fed and the wise.
From his round green door where he meets the Wand Elf with his silver scarf, does he go over old hills and far away to where the Elves of Rivendell softly play. That’s who Tinfang Warble is, a wisp maybe of so much future brilliance. In his step and in his sway, he’s the rabbit or vole in the hole that got away…
*Tinfang Warble is personally not my favorite Tolkien name. Obviously it’s from very early on, and in some ways predates his true legendarium. It does not have the power of his later Sindarin and Quenya formulations. However, it helps to know he is more of a fairy-type character and is a critical creation in the journey from a more twee “Faerie” to a more dangerous Middle-earth. Also, the “Warble” part, we are told, was given to him by elf children, drawing his music somewhat to birdsong. Tolkien Gateway has a handy entry on Tinfang’s etymology. Technically, you can see “fang” in Fangorn, part of the Sindarin name for, ahem, Treebeard, as in Tinfang, “Starbeard,” and Mallorn, “Golden Tree.” Timpinen, curiously enough, also shares some homophony with timpani drum.
Next, let’s get a bit into “elf” and its history. For one, Tolkien used other popular or common terms for magical spirits and creatures before he settled on “elf” as his primary, and then “Elves” versus “elfs”: he experimented with “gnome,” “fairy” and “fay.” “Elf” is an Old English word that derives from a common origin of unknown certainty. Etymologists have mainly connected it to Germanic root words for “nightmare,” “evil spirit” and also “light.” There is also a possible lineage going back to the Indo-European root “elb,” which scholars presume denotes “whiteness” — hence “Albion,” “Alps” and “albinism.”
And not to get too kooky — and I am not a professional etymologist — but there is a great similarity to the Latin “albis” for river too, which pops up in Old English as “elf” (also meaning “river”) and the name for the famous River Elbe.
**THOME is an acronym for the 12-volume The History of Middle-Earth, which contains most of Tolkien’s various manuscripts, backstories and unfinished works, but exclusive of other supplementary books like Unfinished Tales.
Our History of Middle Earth Journal Index - The Book of Lost Tales, Part One:
The Cottage of Lost Play / Opening the Heart of Modern Myth
The Music of the Ainur / Tolkien’s Creation and the Creator
The Coming of the Valar / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part One
The Building of Valinor / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part Two
The Chaining of Melko / Who the Hell is Tinfang Warble?
The Chaining of Melko / The Convolution of Evil in Middle-earth
The Coming of the Elves / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part One
The Making of Kôr / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part Two