'When All Our Ancestors Worshipped Stocks & Stones'—The Heimskringla, Tolkien, & Milton

In my post on St Olaf yesterday, I quoted the following lines from chapter 119 (in the Icelandic text, here, it is chapter 113) of the ‘Saga of King Olaf’ in Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-c. Heimskringla (in Samuel Laing’s 1844 translation, here), when St Olaf is speaking to a crowd of Thor-worshippers:

Ye see yourselves what your god can do,—the idol ye adorned with gold and silver, and brought meat and provisions to. Ye see now that the protecting powers who used it were the mice and adders, reptiles and paddocks; and they do ill who trust to such, and will not abandon this folly. Take now your gold and ornaments that are lying strewed about on the grass, and give them to your wives and daughters; but never hang them hereafter upon stock or stone.

This last phrase, ‘upon stock or stone’, recalled immediately to my mind some observations of T.A. Shippey in his fascinating The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (London: Grafton, 1992). On p. 160, Shippey quotes from Chapter 6 (‘Many Partings’) of Book Five of The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), where Treebeard is bidding farewell to Celeborn and Galadriel: ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’ (p. 259). He first notes that the phrase ‘is certainly a deliberate echo of the fourteenth century poem Pearl, written by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (p. 161). The poem, according to Shippey, ‘describes a father lamenting his dead infant daughter in the graveyard where she is buried’. He dreams that ‘he sees his lost child facing him, on the other side of a river’, and in his excitement says to her, ‘We meten so selden by stok other ston’—a line which Shippey translates as ‘we meet so seldom by stock or by stone’ (p. 162). Shippey points out how moving this line is in its context:

The pathos lies in the characteristic early English understatement—‘so seldom’ means ‘never’ or worse still ‘just this once’—and also in the last phrase’s suspense between precision and vagueness. ‘Stok other ston’ coule mean nothing, be just a line-filler, like ‘erly and late’ a few liness afterwards. On the other hand it implies very strongly ‘on earth’, ‘in reality’, ‘in flesh and blood’. Where is the dreamer-father? At the end of the poem he will realise that the water was Death, his daughter in Heaven, the strange land a premonition of Paradise. If at the moment he speaks he thinks he is meeting his child in in a land of real stones and tree-stumps, he is sadly mistaken; if he realises he is not, then already a touch of grief is creeping back into consolation. (pp. 162-3)

But there is another, more famous use of these words, ‘stock’ and ‘stone’. In his sonnet ‘On the late Massacher in Piemont’, about the massacre of a group of Protestants in Italy, Milton writes (The Complete English Poems of John Milton, ed. John D. Jump [NY: Washington Square, 1964], p. 82):

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our Fathers worship’t Stocks and Stones . . .

The connection of the phrase with idolatry suggests to me that Samuel Laing must surely have thought of this line when he translated St Olaf’s speech to the idolaters. But he need not have done. In Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-c. Icelandic, the command ‘but never hang them hereafter upon stock or stone’ is ‘og berið aldrei síðan á stokka eða á steina’ (Ólafs Saga Helga 113, here). Laing was merely using the cognate equivalents of the Icelandic terms in the original text.

More interesting then to me, neither a linguist nor even a philologist, is the question of the parallel between the 14th-c. Middle English Pearl and the 13th-c. Icelandic Saga. Was ‘stock and stone’ a happy alliteration that just occurred to both poets independently, something the Pearl poet was perhaps familiar with in Icelandic poetry, or a traditional pair going all the way back to an earlier Proto-Germanic poetic tradition?

Incidentally, on the subject of the line in Milton, Shippey points out that while Tolkien would have approved of Milton’s diction, in his view—

everything else in the poem would be wrong: its ferocity, its equation of God’s truth with Protestantism, most especially its contempt for ‘our fathers’ before they were converted, for the Anglo-Saxons indeed. Milton knew very little about them, and his contempt was based on ignorance. Yet poetry which uses old phrases is not always bound down to its creator’s intention. Reading that line, and adding to it his memories of Finn and Fróda, of Beowulf and Hróthgár and the other pagan heroes from the darkness before the English dawn, Tolkien may have felt that Milton was more accurate than he knew. Perhaps ‘our fathers’ did worship ‘stocks and stones’. But perhaps they were not so very bad in doing so. After all if they had not Christ to worship, there were worse things, many worse things for them to reverence than ‘stocks and stones’, rocks and trees, ‘merry Middle-earth’ itself. (p. 200)

Although the basic goodness—not to mention the ultimate suitability as objects of worship—of ‘stocks and stones’ is apparently contradicted by the passage from the Heimskringla, it is an idea of which Chesterton, for one, would certainly have approved, and probably most of the Inklings as well! And who can deny that stocks and stones per se are much preferable to such cults as that of Moloch, to take one of GKC’s examples, or Cybele and Atys, to take Lovecraft’s?