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(Eleanor Parker) Earendel at Epiphany, the Bishop of Truro and J R R Tolkien

Posted on February 9, 2024 by Kendall Harmon

I learn from this wonderful website that after Stubbs became Bishop of Truro, the carol was performed at his cathedral’s ‘Festival of Lessons and Carols’ in 1911 – Truro being the place where services of ‘Nine Lessons and Carols’ first originated at the end of the 19th century.

That same winter, 1911, the young Tolkien had just finished his first term at Oxford. A year or two later, in the course of his studies, he stumbled across the Old English ‘Earendel’ poem, and its first lines had a remarkable effect on him:

I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened by sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.

Tolkien adopted Earendel into his own growing imaginative cosmos, as a mariner ‘who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun… a herald star, and a sign of hope to men’. He later called the Old English poem ‘rapturous words from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology’. His sense that there was something ‘very remote and strange’ about the words eala Earendel, engla beorhtast is one of those instincts no one can explain. Why these lines more than any other? What moved Stubbs to make them the basis of his Epiphany carol? No one really knows what ‘Earendel’ means, and yet perhaps it draws the imagination all the more for that, as the Star of Bethlehem drew the Magi on their long and weary way. Such is the magic of mystery, of words half-understood – of a glimpse of Godlight.

Read it all.

Posted in Church History, Poetry & Literature, Theology