ANGLO-SAXON: THE KEY TO STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER
______
A Thesis
Presented
to the Faculty of
California State University, Chico
______
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
English
______
by
Jennifer Dempsey Loman 2009
Summer 2009 ANGLO-SAXON: THE KEY TO STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER
A Thesis
by
Jennifer Dempsey Loman
Summer 2009
APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE, INTERNATIONAL, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES:
______Mark J. Morlock, Ph.D.
APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:
______Rob G. Davidson, Ph.D. Harriet Spiegel, Ph.D., Chair Graduate Coordinator
______Geoffrey Baker, Ph.D. PUBLICATION RIGHTS
No portion of this thesis may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful to Drs. Harriet Spiegel, Lois Bueler, Carol Burr, and Geoff
Baker. Your compassion, patience, accessibility, and encouragement went far beyond mere mentorship. I feel very fortunate to have had the honor to work with you all.
I am so grateful to Drs. Rob Davidson, John Traver, and Aiping Zhang for their wise counsel. Thank you to Sharon Demeyer as well for her indefatigable congeniality. I thank Connor Trebra and Jen White for their calming camaraderie.
I am so grateful to my parents, Jim and Penny Evans, and my grandmother,
Jean Quesnel, for teaching me the importance of coupling work with integrity.
I am so grateful to my dear husband, Ed, for his unconditional support of my efforts. Your unwavering belief in me helped make this possible.
Finally, I must thank my children, Natalie, Sean, and Sam. You encouraged me to a chase this dream, and you rarely complained. You inspired me to keep going when the obstacles seemed insurmountable. And you filled the days with easy hilarity and busy contentment. I am not sure where the roads are taking us, but I know that the strength of our love and the joy of simple moments – a wet dog after a walk near the burbling creek, a beautiful, orange sky peering through rain clouds and almond blossoms, an unexpected burst of shared laughter after a long day – are what make the journey worthwhile.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Publication Rights ...... iii
Acknowledgments ...... iv
List of Figures...... vi
Abstract...... vii
CHAPTER
I. Introduction...... 1
Background...... 7
II. King and the Anglo-Saxon Oral Narrative Tradition...... 13
III. The Dark Tower and Anglo-Saxon Riddles ...... 29
King’s Kennings...... 32 Sorg as an Impediment to Raedan...... 38
IV. The Riddlic Whole: Importance of the Anglo-Saxon Guise of the Other ...... 45
Roland and Anglo-Saxon Maxims ...... 51 Jake as the Ultimate Other: Christ...... 56 Conclusion...... 71
Works Consulted ...... 74
v LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE PAGE
1. The Dark Tower's Riddle Paradigm...... 3
2. The Runic Alphabet–Sigel...... 59
vi ABSTRACT
ANGLO-SAXON: THE KEY TO STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER
by
Jennifer Dempsey Loman 2009
Master of Arts in English
California State University, Chico
Summer 2009
Stephen King engages in medieval imitation in his seven-volume series The
Dark Tower, drawing upon many aspects of the Middle Ages—the Arthurian myth, the thematic concepts of commitatus and exile, Anglo-Saxon etymology, and the narrative frame of the dream allegory – to construct within The Dark Tower novels intercon- nected riddles. Indeed, The Dark Tower series is an extended riddle for both King’s
Constant Reader and for the series’ protagonist, Roland Deschain of Gilead. King dares both Roland and the reader to answer a “Who am I” riddle about Roland and a “What
Am I” riddle about the Tower, the focus of Roland’s grail-like quest. Through a close reading of King’s magnum opus, I demonstrate that an awareness of Anglo-Saxon rid- dling is the key to unlocking the interrelated riddles and the puzzling ending of The
Dark Tower novels.
vii
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
They did everything but draw me a map, she thought. She wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn (riddle-de-dum) mysterious, and knew that was a question to which she would never find a satisfactory answer…except it was the human condition, wasn’t it? The answers that mattered never came easily.
Susannah Dean, The Dark Tower VII: Song of Susannah
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower (DT) is an amalgamation of genres, incorporating tropes from horror, science fiction, Gothic romance, and cowboy films of the American West. James Egan in The Gothic World of Steven King: The Landscape of
Nightmares maintains that the first few volumes of The Dark Tower are a “post- apocalyptic environment made up of technological leftovers, medieval customs, and frontier conditions…” (102). My focus in this study is on Egan’s second observation, medieval customs—specifically how Kings’ The Dark Tower incorporates the Middle
Ages, evoking Anglo-Saxon (AS) literature in particular. I contend that a background in medievalism suggests yet another genre for King’s seven-volume epic. King engages in obvious medieval imitation, drawing upon numerous features of the English Middle
Ages—the pilgrimage, the narrative frame of the dream allegory, the Arthurian myth, and the Chaucerian frame story. Less obvious is how The Dark Tower as a whole is suggestive of Anglo-Saxon literature, specifically 1) how King’s work mirrors the social contexts of scop, comitatus, and scribe; 2) how King’s language draws from Anglo-
1 2
Saxon etymology; 3) how King integrates characteristics of prominent themes in Anglo-
Saxon works; and most importantly, 4) how an awareness of Anglo-Saxon riddling sheds light upon the interconnected riddles King constructs—some quite elaborate, others simple compoundings much like the Anglo-Saxon kennings. Knowledge of Anglo-Saxon kennings, maxims, and features of other AS works, helps one decipher these riddles, bringing clarity to King’s characterization and plot structure. In fact, a close reading of
King’s use of medievalism within The Dark Tower series is the essential key to unlocking the conundrum at the end of King’s magnum opus.
The Dark Tower with its riddlic ending is an enigma not only for King’s
Constant Reader,1 but for the series’ protagonist Roland Deschain as well. King dares both Roland and the reader to solve mutually a “What Am I” riddle about the Dark
Tower, the focus of Roland’s Grail-like quest, and a “Who Am I” riddle about Roland himself. To fully read The Dark Tower novels is to engage in a rigorous endeavor, one that mirrors the arcane juxtaposition of impenetrability and clarity that is inherent to the human condition. We may think of King’s riddles as having a progressive structure; the riddles build upon each other in importance with the solution to the ultimate “Who am I” riddle about Roland (at the top) coming in the final pages of The Dark Tower (Figure 1).
Both the Roland “Who am I?” and the Dark Tower “What am I” riddles are reflective of the core questions which vex each of us on our journey through life: What is my true identity, and what is the nature of the path I am taking?
1 King affectionately refers to his reader as Constant Reader throughout his canon. Indeed, his novels often begin and end with a note to his dedicated Constant Reader.
3
Major Riddles “Who Am I” – Roland Deschain “What am I” – The Dark Tower “Who am I” – Jake Chambers “What am I” – The Rose
Minor Riddles Interwoven Into the Major Riddles: “What am I” – High Speech Rhetoric (key terms, kenning maxims, nursery rhymes) “Who am I” – Arthur Eld
Fig. 1. The Dark Tower’s riddle paradigm.
In this study, I argue that King eruditely constructs The Dark Tower as a sophisticated, multi-faceted brainteaser to explore these problematic inquiries, grounding this serious undertaking in the familiar territory of the medieval quest. King depicts two very different experiences—that of the lone individual, the quester, struggling to navigate through the opacity of life; and that of the group, the band of warriors acting much like a comitatus, struggling to navigate through the opacity of relationships. The first is Roland
Deschain of the legendary line of Eld, the last living gunslinger of Gilead; the latter is
Roland’s band – a fellowship called a “ka-tet”—which includes Eddie Dean, and his wife, Susannah Dean; a boy, Jake Chambers; and Oy, the dog-like “bumbler” creature.
Roland and his ka-tet are on an often perplexing pilgrimage, one which alternately mystifies and motivates them, to the shadowy Dark Tower.
4
The settings of the novels are intricate; there are different versions of Earth including a post-apocalyptic Topeka, Kansas, and altered versions of New York City in differing years; the many geographic places of All-World, In-World, Mid-World, and
End-World; and mystical portals outside of the normal sphere of human habituation. In
“The Art of Balance: Stephen King’s Canon,” Edwin Casebeer says that the series combines elements of “apocalyptic science fiction with the Arthurian quest fantasy, itself subordinated to the Western, and then introduces science-fiction’s alternative worlds concept” (208). Amid these commingled, often contradictory, always obscure landscapes,
King drops hints, challenging Roland, his ka-tet, and the reader to consider carefully the focus of Roland’s Grail-like quest, the Dark Tower.
At the very center of the overlapping worlds in this epic series, the problematic Dark Tower is the “linchpin of the time/space continuum” (Furth 405), and the landscapes of its fragile, interconnected worlds are in flux. In The Dark Tower III:
The Waste Lands (King, DT-III), Roland explains to the members of his ka-tet that, in a shape much like a spinning wheel, incorporeal Beams2 hold Mid-World3 together with the Tower as its nucleus. Such Beams, each of which ends in portals acting as doorways into other parallel worlds, may be thought of as energy forces upon which temporal and directional unity hinge. The Crimson King, Roland’s nemesis, and his Red followers are
2 King capitalizes certain words throughout the DT novels such as Beam, Tower, and Rose to emphasize their mystical importance and, ultimately, give them pseudo-religious connotations. See chapter three for an in-depth analysis with regard to Anglo-Saxon literature of the pseudo-religious connotations of the Beam, Tower, and Rose in The Dark Tower novels.
3 In the indispensable Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance (2006) by King’s official research assistant, Robin Furth, she explains that the term Mid-World “refers to the whole of Roland’s version of Earth. However, when [Stephen King] refers to specific regions of Mid-World, he uses the terms In-World, Out-World, Mid-World, End-World, and the Borderlands” (308).
5 trying to destroy the Beams to bring on apocalyptic ruin; the Crimson King even goes so far as to enlist human psychics as “breakers” who telepathically try to erode the Beams.
As a result, such Mid-World places are either in danger of collapsing or have already collapsed. Existence is precarious. In fact, the home of Roland’s youth, In-World Barony, has disappeared altogether. That world has “moved on”—a frequently-used phrase throughout The Dark Tower novels—denoting not only the vanishing or crumbling of civilization, but a fundamental shift in ways of the world. The leitmotif “moved on” is one of many clues in the extended riddle—one at the very heart of Roland’s riddlic journey: When exactly and where is Roland moving on from, and more precisely, what exactly is he moving on to? Should he move on at all?
While there are small indications throughout the series, the definitive lines about when Roland began his journey do not appear until the last pages of the final novel when Roland opens the door at the top of the Tower, and “the knowledge fall[s] upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts”
(King, The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower VII [DT-VII] 1028). Here, the reader (and
Roland) finally learns that Roland has “traveled a loop” in his quest for the Tower.
Denied death, he goes back in time, back to the beginning lines of The Dark Tower series, continuously returning to the Mohaine Desert, the “when” of most import in his purgatorial, cyclical journey because it is where he began the most egregious mistake of his past by knowingly turning away from love again in his pursuit of the Dark Tower.
Through a close reading of the riddles in the seven novels, this study attempts to solve these interconnected major and minor riddles, shedding light on Roland’s final moment in the Tower. To do so, I draw parallels between Anglo-Saxon literature and
6
King’s The Dark Tower, examining how and to what purpose King invokes the early
Middle Ages and how an understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture helps to decipher King’s riddlic magnum opus. At the most basic level, King’s The Dark Tower demonstrates “an adherence to, or interest in, medieval ideas, styles, or usages” as per the definition of medievalism in the online Oxford English Dictionary. Through the lens of medievalism, I make my most original claim: that the character, Jake Chambers, is a Christ-figure who dies not three, but four times, thus fulfilling the Prophecy of Eld. This claim is different than what is expounded on The Dark Tower blogs or in Robin Furth’s concordance of
The Dark Tower. But I believe that when viewed in light of Anglo-Saxon literature, this claim is an interesting and valid supposition.
While it is well known that many works in King’s canon contain characters, themes, or plots related to The Dark Tower novels,4 this study is limited to the seven- volume series. I am interested in examining the series as a chronological whole because that is how Stephen King views it. In the Introduction called “On Being Nineteen” to the
2003 revised version of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (King, DT-I), King states: “The
Dark Tower, volumes one through seven, really comprise a single tale” (xv). King began the writing The Gunslinger at the age of twenty-two after graduating from the University of Maine in 1970. In the Foreword of the new version of The Gunslinger, King says he revised the original novel because “these seven volumes were never really separate
4 The complete list of related works includes the novels: ‘Salem's Lot, The Stand, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, The Talisman (with Peter Straub), It, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, The Dark Tower II: The Waste Lands, Insomnia, Rose Madder, Desperation, The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, Bag of Bones, Black House (with Peter Straub), From a Buick 8, The Regulators, The Dark Tower V: The Wolves of Calla, The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, Lisey’s Story; the collections: Skeleton Crew, Hearts in Atlantis, Everything's Eventual; and the screen play, The Stand.
7 stories at all, but sections of a single, long novel called The Dark Tower, and the beginning was out of sync with the ending” (xxv). Viewed as a “single, long novel,” The
Dark Tower is a daunting read. King states:
And in my enthusiasm – the sort only a young person can muster, I think—I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent trip…the first four volumes run to just over two thousand pages in paperback. The final three volumes run another twenty-five hundred in manuscript. I'm not trying to imply here that length has anything whatsoever to do with quality. I'm just saying that I wanted to write an epic and in some ways I succeeded. (DT-I xxv)
It is my hope that this study sheds light upon the ultimate “What am I” riddles for King’s Constant Reader—a Patient Reader, in my estimation, who waded through over four thousand pages and waited over thirty years to discover the solution to the supreme DT riddles: What is the Dark Tower and who is the gunslinger Roland
Deschain?
Background
A preliminary approach to The Dark Tower looks to Stephen King himself. In
The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance (2006) his research assistant, Robin Furth posits that “it could be argued that [the Dark Tower] is the focus of Stephen King’s creative quest as well, since he has been writing about it, in one guise or another, for more than thirty years” (405). In the Foreword to this concordance, King states:
It is hard to tell how much time passes “inside the story,” because in Roland Deschain’s where and when, both time and direction have become plastic. Outside the story—in what we laughingly call “the real world”—thirty-two years passed between the first sentence and the last one. (xi)
Indeed, the world moved on considerably for King in those thirty-two years. The Dark
Tower series began in story format when King was relatively unknown. He began writing
8 about Roland the gunslinger in 1970. In 1971, he was a teacher at Hampden Academy in
Hampden, Maine, and he wrote his fiction at night. King originally published Roland’s tales in five installments in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman beginning in 1977 and ending in 1981. The first actual novel, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger came out in 1982. The final book The Dark
Tower VII: The Dark Tower came out in 2004.5 In the years in between, King, with his initial success with Carrie (1974), catapulted from relative obscurity to become one of the world’s most famous authors. Recently featured as an “American Icon” in the March
6-8, 2009 edition of USA Weekend, Stephen King has sold more than “350 million copies of his 60-plus novels, short-story collections and other books” (King, It’s Good 6). And
King has won numerous awards for his work, including the O Henry Award for a short story inspired by Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) called the “The Man in
Black” (1996) and the 2003 The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters.
The Dark Tower novels have done remarkably well too. The series has even evolved into other media. Marvel Comics has a Dark Tower Series, which is a prequel of sorts to King’s The Dark Tower novels because the comic books are set around the time of Roland’s youth in Mejis (featured as flashbacks in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass [DT-IV]). Also, J.J. Abrams, the director of the popular television series, Lost, reportedly will direct The Dark Tower, based on the
5 The full series with publication dates is listed here: The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982); The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987); The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991); The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997); The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003); The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004); The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004).
9
Stephen King literary magnum opus, as a TV mini-series or a film (Stax). And the novels themselves have been well received by many too. In his 2004 review for the Washington
Post, Bill Sheehan writes: “The Dark Tower is a humane, visionary epic and a true magnum opus. It will be around for a very long time.”
Other critics have not been as kind to King or The Dark Tower. Samuel
Schuman credits King as a “master of plot and setting; he's skillful and self-conscious manipulator of the English language; a rather stern moralist; and a first-class creator of literary characters,” but he says that King’s craftsmanship is marred by other portions which are “awkward, sloppy, hasty, and obviously not of very much interest to their author” (108). Ray Olson in Booklist faults King for “lean[ing] on his talent for covering
30 seconds of actions in, say, 30 pages, rather too often” in The Dark Tower. And Harold
Bloom in particular has been quite vocal in his disapproval of King. When King received the 2003 The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters, Bloom opined: “The decision to give the National Book Foundation’s annual award for ‘distinguished contribution’ to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life” (Bloom, “Dumbing
Down”). Indeed, earlier when Bloom had the task6 of writing the Introduction for Modern
Critical Views: Stephen King for which he is the series editor, Bloom claimed that the
“triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education” (2), continuing:
6 This must have been a dreaded task for him given his disparaging view of King’s abilities. Unfortunately, Bloom’s contrary comments in the Introduction come across as jarring in contrast to the serious treatment afforded King by others in the collection, such as Anthony Magistrale.
10
I cannot locate any aesthetic dignity in King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he. There is a palpable sincerity to everything that he has done that testifies to his decency, and to his social benignity. Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader. (3)
Bloom’s quip about the “Literate Reader” is slam against King’s Constant reader; Bloom attacks both King and his anonymous reader because Bloom sees both as outside of true literary awareness or appreciation.
Such condemnation begs two questions. Firstly, can a bibliophile with lofty reading interests find literary richness in King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower? And secondly, should King who alludes to over one hundred “writers, poets, playwrights, and artists” in the series – not to mention the over one hundred “books, stories, poems, and paintings”7—be seen as emblematic of a failed education?
I contend that there is a wealth of literary richness available to the Constant
Reader because Stephen King, a voracious reader, is particularly aware of the literary canon as a writer. His primary source of inspiration is Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” which King studied in at university prior to beginning The
Gunslinger (246). He also claims, among other canonical treasures, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The
Lord of the Rings and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as stimulation for his work in The
Dark Tower V: Wolves of Call (King, DT-V ix). But Schuman indicates that King is uninterested in endearing himself to the powers at be: “although King has written a lengthy work of criticism, holds a baccalaureate in English, and has taught literature, he is not given to the respectful kowtowing to litcrit establishment…” (108). King’s
7 See Robin Furth’s Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance pages 572- 573 for a complete list.
11 awareness of the canon and academia does not mean that he conforms to the orthodoxy of either. In fact, “King criticize[d] the traditional approach to literature of the University
[of Maine]’s English Department, and [was] allowed to teach a seminar, Popular
Literature and Culture, while an undergraduate” (Casebeer 220). And Roland in The Dark
Tower may be seen as King’s mouthpiece, complaining to his ka-tet when he learns that their culture demarcates literary genres: “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths? Does no one eat stew ?” (King,
DT-V 40). Clearly, King regards a good read as something that combines genres, blends pulp fiction with high-brow literature, and bridges the gulf between the low-brow fan of dime-store westerns with the high-brow literati.
Therefore, we must see The Dark Tower as King’s serious, career-long attempt to create this particular blend of an exemplary good read. King is plain in his effort to do serious work. In an interview with Tony Magistrale that was done before
King had completed The Dark Tower series, King stated: “There is a great siren’s song to keep giving them whatever it is they want. And I could probably do that, but it wouldn’t necessarily be giving myself what I want or what I need in order to grow as a writer” (T.
Magistrale, Stephen King 17). King had lofty purposes beyond just mere entertainment; he hoped his books would give his readers insight into their own existence. King says that his work is an attempt to “examine the motivations of people…society…institutions…” because he has “…managed to create an integrated world from what I’ve written—not just geographically—but in terms of an overall view of the way in which things in life happen and why they happen” (T. Magistrale, Stephen King 15). Just as The Dark
Tower’s Mid-World involves overlapping realms as integral to the exploration of
12
Roland’s quest, King’s fiction overall involves overlapping genres as integral to the universal quest: to explore this riddle that is life.
This thesis contends that Anglo-Saxon literature in particular and, more broadly, medievalism form a map to help us navigate through Stephen King’s difficult, riddle-laden magnum opus. Regarding “the human condition” with its inherent difficulty of navigating through life, King’s gunslinger Susannah Dean states: “The answers that mattered never came easily” (King, DT-VII 920). The answers to King’s riddles in The
Dark Tower do not come easily either. But far from being representative of the “death of the Literate Reader” as Bloom claims, King’s Constant Reader—through the lens of
Anglo-Saxon literature—is up to the King’s challenging task. Riddle De Dum!
CHAPTER II
KING AND THE ANGLO-SAXON ORAL
NARRATIVE TRADITION
If we are to understand our time, we must find the key to it, not in the eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but in earlier, wilder, and darker epochs… William Carlos Williams “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
An awareness of Anglo-Saxon concepts offers the key to unlocking the riddlic ending of King’s The Dark Tower. Specifically, King’s magnum opus reflects the Anglo-
Saxon social contexts of scop, comitatus, and scribe. A scop was a singer or poet. As an oral storyteller, he was the torchbearer of the language and mores of his culture. A term denoting the pledges of protection and loyalty between a Germanic warrior and his feudal lord, a comitatus was also a band of armed warriors. Copying or annotating “vernacular texts” as well as other manuscripts, the Anglo-Saxon scribe was both innovator and recorder, “moving back and forth between inner and outer speech and spoken and textualized utterances… recreat[ing] the transmitted message through his own performance within the tradition” (Doane 420). Certainly, King as the character Stephen
King within the novels (who describes himself as both conduit and creator) mirrors
Doane’s view of the Anglo-Saxon scribe. While the specific study of King as a
13 14 metafictional scribe warrants further investigation in the future, the more general topics of scop, comitatus, and scribe are of interest here because each term sheds light upon the riddlic ending of The Dark Tower.
In fact, we must consider Roland in light of both scop and comitatus. Roland calls his band of gunslingers a ka-tet, and it is analogous to a comitatus given its armed participants and their allegiance to Roland. King uses the word dinh throughout the series to denote Roland’s role within this ka-tet. In The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, dinh is used as a synonym for baron or king (654). In Furth’s Concordance, a dinh is defined as “father, as in ‘father of his people’” (459). Thus, we may see a ka-tet as hierarchical with Roland as a type of lord leading a comitatus.
This chapter will examine how Roland acts as scop within his comitatus-like ka-tet because he is the last torchbearer of the Way of Eld. Viewing Roland as both lord and scop reveals clues to the multifarious puzzle at the center of Roland’s quest, the Dark
Tower. The quest for the Dark Tower is paradoxical; Roland reaches this target, but he meets with failure while his ka-tet fails to reach it, but they meet with success. Through an examination of the parallels to Anglo-Saxon literature, we learn why Roland does not triumph and why the other members of Roland’s ka-tet do.
Let us focus on another definition of “other” here: the constitutive Other as different or alien to particular social constructs. As we will see in the following chapters, the constitutive Other is essential to the act of riddling and quite important in Anglo-
Saxon literature overall. The “scribal hand” of The Exeter Book “dates from the late tenth century” but “how far back into the oral tradition” the book goes “is an open question”
(Williamson, Feast of Creatures 5): while some of the collection seems to be Latin,
15 hence Christian, enigmata, “the range of subject matter” suggests “an extensive cross- section of Anglo-Saxon society” as well, an overlap of Christian and Pagan cultures.
Thus, any AS scribe is a kind of Other, recording words that are not uniquely his, and even more so is the scribe of the AS riddles who may know neither the source nor the solution. And so, too, with the modern audience, as Gregory K. Jember reminds us: AS riddles “are not consistently rational or empirical” because we stand outside AS culture
(n. pag.). As readers of Anglo-Saxon, we are Others too.
As such, we are unsure of the meaning of Anglo-Saxon literature because as decipherers from a different cultural and historical period—a different time if you will— we rely on written documentation that has been recorded much later. In our examination of Anglo-Saxon literature, we must consider how much has been lost, left out, or modified, and we must also consider how our own modern lens skews our perceptions of the existing documents. Introspection into our own purposes is essential. Medievalist
Leslie J. Workman makes clear that this struggle to reconcile the gulf between scholarly certainty and our standing as Others is characteristic of Medieval Studies:
The Middle Ages are virtually unique among major periods or areas of historical study in being entirely the creation of scholars. Since the term ‘Middle Ages’ in one of its many forms was first coined by Italian humanists, successive cultural revolutions down to and the including the advent of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century found it desirable to adopt and enlarge the term for their own purposes. (227)
Workman maintains that “medievalism” engages in this discourse by being “concerned with process rather than product” (227). King engages in this introspection too, juxtaposing Roland’s language and repeated storytelling of events from his past (his process in the novels as scop) with the permanence of the text (the product of the seven
16 novels). Thus, King demands of his Constant Reader and the members of the ka-tet a concern with deciphering accuracy within the context of Roland’s oral tradition.
King does so by forcing us to acknowledge Roland’s standing and the ka-tet’s as Others immersed in gunslinger terminology derived from ancient High Speech—in other words, speech from another time: the long lost time of Eld. It is important to remember that Roland teaches his band gunslinger rhetoric, and this language is a training tool. Roland has his warriors memorize the “Gunslinger Litany” to teach them to be focused and unflappable during battle. He also introduces them to concepts like ka, ka- tet, and khef as a means of establishing a group philosophy that is aligned with the
Gunslingers’ Way of Eld. In doing so, King demonstrates how the process (jargon assimilation) affects the product (the questers and the quest itself) when there is a failure to recognize original purpose (what the language once meant; how and why the language has changed).
Certainly, the Anglo-Saxon scribe knew Anglo-Saxon. But the act of transferring words from an oral tradition to a written page radically changes the position of such a ‘text’ within society. What was once changeable becomes set as the innovations of individual storytellers are superseded by the permanence of the written record of a single scribe. And the oral form of Anglo-Saxon required a comitatus, an audience, whereas the written form involved a scribe recording for an Other—an audience not present in the time or space of the recording. Thus, we may see the work of the Anglo-
Saxon scribe as a struggle to transmit accurately words from the oral tradition despite subjectivity.
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And subjectivity is certainly an issue within The Dark Tower. Roland shares the beliefs of long-lost Gilead through the stories he tells to his ka-tet, his audience, on many long nights around the campfire on their way to the Dark Tower. Roland learns these tenets of the Gunslinger “Way of Eld” from his childhood tutors, Cort and Vannay, who themselves acquired such knowledge through an oral tradition for paper is rare in the world of Gilead. Formerly, Roland “lived in a world [Gilead] where paper and gold were valued in rough equivalency” (King, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three [DT-
II] 40), and he is shocked when he sees all the paper in New York because “he'd never seen so much paper in his life.” Thus, Roland’s lessons are spoken. On the one hand, the brutish Cort, using such maxims as “You have forgotten the face of your father” to shame a gunslinger when he fails during combat training, instructs Roland and other potential gunslingers “to fight” and “to kill if they had to” (King, DT-V 101) Docile, limping
Vannay, on the other hand, uses the maxims of the High Speech to preach a different code of ethics, instructing the youths to avoid fighting because “violence worsened problems” (King, DT-V 101). Thus the opacity of proverbial language within an oral tradition (with a limited written record) is problematic. Vannay’s maxim “Time’s the thief of memory” (King, DT-I 161) encapsulates this issue: time has exceeded memory, obscuring original meaning. By the end of the series, Cort’s maxim that had been used to train warriors to kill takes on new meaning; King’s Constant Reader realizes that it is a riddle, instructing Roland to remember the face of a loved one, to focus his time on people instead of the quest. In fact, the “Gunslinger Litany,” a grouping of maxims that
Cort and Roland use to train gunslingers to take life, is listed as a “prayer” in Stephen
King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance by Robin Furth, King’s official
18 research assistant. The “Litany” as benediction conforms with Vannay’s use of the High
Speech term, not the rhetoric of Cort and the gunslingers he creates like Roland. But pacifist voices like Vannay’s have become few and far between by the time Roland is indoctrinated.
Unfortunately, Roland minimizes Vannay’s insights, failing to recognize that the riddlic words of Eld have been carried over into his own Gilead from a distant past that might differ from the Gunslinger creed. The dominate culture that Roland upholds is the way of the gunslinger (Cort) versus peaceful resolution (Vannay), and Roland never questions the mores of the dominate culture. Therefore, he fails to understand that something may have been lost with the passage of time within his oral tradition. Nor does the gunslinger grasp the role his own subjectivity and the dominant culture’s bias play in his interpretation of these words as he indoctrinates his own gunslingers.
King draws attention to the importance of language by having Roland grasp for meaning from the words of the members of his ka-tet. Each member of the ka-tet is from a different decade in twentieth-century America, but they share certain societal constructs because of their shared nationality. Roland, however, is an Other within his own ka-tet. He realizes he stands outside of the American vernacular of his group of gunslingers, stating: “but I'll always be an outsider . . .. I can't even say aspirin. Every time I try, the word comes out wrong” (King, DT-V 173). Roland does not share their cultural awareness either; he must have the ka-tet explain to him about Dorothy and the
Wizard of Oz, for instance, during a key passage in The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and
Glass when the ka-tet comes across “blood-red Oxford shoes” and a “glass palace” suggestive of Oz. Calling the shoes “another goddamned riddle” (King, DT-IV 651), Jake
19 fills Roland in after Roland demands of the ka-tet: “I would hear. I would share your khef” (King, DT-IV 653). Khef literally means “the sharing of water” and denotes both individual and communal existence, both experientially and providentially. Robin Furth explains that khef involves:
…a philosophy of interconnectedness, a sense that all individuals, all events, are part of a greater pattern or plan…An individual’s khef is often more complex that he or she realizes. In psychological terms, khef accounts for all parts of ourselves, even those aspects we wish not to see. (462)
It is ironic that Roland uses the word khef—even introducing it to his gunslinger fellowship—when he himself does not demonstrate a full understanding of it. Roland uses the term, but he fails to deliberate on the term. He does not see how to apply it to his own life.
Repeatedly, Roland turns away from the parts of himself he does not wish to see, either subconsciously or consciously. For instance, in the second novel, he travels through magical doorways into modern-day America to draw Odetta Holmes and Eddie
Dean from their worlds into his world, into his ka-tet. To do so, he enters the human body of each member of his ka-tet, sharing their physical and mental experience. To draw
Odetta, however, Roland first has to enter the body of Jack Mort, The Pusher.1 As Roland tries to draw the wheelchair-confined Odetta into Mid-World through a magical portal, he is horrified by the prospect of being inside a killer like Jack Mort. He thinks:
Then there had been Odetta again. The first time [the pusher] had pushed something on her. The second time [the pusher] had pushed her in front of something. What sort of man is this that I am supposed to use? What sort of man?
1 The Pusher is a psychopath named Jack Mort who brings death upon others by putting them into a deadly situation. Jack Mort drops a brick on Odetta Holmes when she is a small child, and in a cruel twist of fate, later she happens to be the woman Mort randomly picks to push in front of an oncoming train.
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But then he thought of Jake, thought of the push which had sent Jake into this world, and he thought he heard the laughter of the man in black, and that finished him. Roland fainted. (King, DT-II 371)
Roland faints because momentarily on the cusp of the awareness that he is also a “Pusher” like Jack Mort. Mort callously kills, a trait Roland exhibits too when he chooses the pursuit of the Man in Black over the youth Jake Chambers, allowing Jake to fall to his death into a chasm beneath the Cyclopean Mountains2. Indeed, Roland, like
Jack Mort, often unsympathetically thrusts others into deadly situations; he may well be seen as a pusher for drawing the unwilling Odetta and Eddie into his violent quest and then befriending them3 to make them amenable to his quest for the Tower.
When awareness becomes possible through the looming Jack Mort, Roland faints as af form of repression. He subconsciously rejects introspection, pushing forward upon gaining consciousness without a thought. This demonstrates Roland’s inability to grasp an ancient word he so diligently imparts to others. Roland fails to deliberate on this opportunity for insight, and in doing so, he fails embrace his own khef, meaning all parts of himself. He feels “a tickle” and “a spark of intuition” that he must not let Odetta “see” her alternative self, Detta, as they share a communal body with the interloping Roland
(King, DT-II 373), or he will not be able to get Odetta/Detta through the reflective portal door. Seeing Detta would have psychological ramifications for Odetta, possibly
2 This is the second time that Jake dies in the series. The first time he was pushed into oncoming traffic by, of course, Jack Mort. He dies, waking up in another realm, the deserted way-station in the desolate Mohaine Desert of Mid-World.
3 Roland also uses this same tactic with the hawk, David, in the coming-of-age trial with Cort. Before the fight, Roland says to the bird, “you will be made a sacrifice” (King, DT-I 229), and later tells Cort: “My weapon is David” (King, DT-I 232). Roland uses affection to entice the bird to fight to the death. He states, “I never trained to David. I friended him” (King, DT-I 238). For Roland, friendship is a means of manipulation, a method to further his path toward the Tower.
21 hampering Roland’s efforts to draw her into his ka-tet and resume his quest for the
Tower. Roland is resolutely single-minded in his desire to find the Dark Tower. Thus he neglects to apply this insight about Odetta’s alternative selves to himself, squashing the opportunity to recognize that not letting Odetta/Detta see each part of their combined self is akin to not letting himself see the evil within, the part that is The Pusher.
Odetta/Detta’s struggle is actually his own.4 Earlier through the use of tarot cards, the
Man in Black indicates that Odetta/Detta is a reflection of Roland himself. But Roland ignores such parts of the Man in Black’s narrative, focusing only on the parts of that move his quest forward
“Sharing khef is a part of being a ka-tet” because it means to “share each other’s thoughts” (King, DT-IV 30), but Roland suppresses his own inner voice because he does not fully understand the word khef, despite using it. Roland is removed from the world in which khef is widely spoken. “High Speech”—the language from which khef derives—is the “ancient, ritualized language of Mid-World” and the language of
“gunslingers...ritual and magic” which “impl[ies] an entire philosophy of life” (Furth
453). But Roland may only guess at that philosophy. His concept of khef is distorted by time. High Speech may have been the vulgate originally, but by Roland’s time it has become a secretive language, relegated to particular uses and rituals. To interpret High
4 Roland commits the egregious sin of leaving his pregnant lover, Susah Delgado, in his pursuit of the Tower in Mejis, and she is burned on the Charyou Tree. When he met her, Roland was using the alias of Will Dearborn because he was acting as a scout for his father. After her death, Roland returns to his gunslinger path, using his birth name again, the one associated with the “Way of Eld” and a dutiful quest to the Tower. It is my belief that King demonstrates in his characterization of Roland/Will and Odetta/Detta/Susannah that one may only be whole and on a righteous path when one embraces one’s khef, meaning all parts of oneself, rather than practicing denial.
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Speech, he relies on a limited written record and his oral tradition, a tradition of course which has been altered with time.
As the Anglo-Saxon scribe deciphers words that are not uniquely his because he is an Other, standing outside of the time of a language, Roland reads a world removed from his present khef; he never “shared the water” with the ancient Arthur Eld (Eld meaning old; a clue to the view of the High Speech and its codes as relics), and he no longer “shares the water” with his original ka-tet from Gilead. Furth states: “If the glorious history of Roland’s world is now no more than the wreckage of a sunken ship, then High Speech is one of the relics that washed up on the shores” (452). Cuthbert
Allgood, Alain Johns, and all others from his Gilead ka-tet are dead, and except for a few magical demons, the High Speech rests on Roland’s lips alone. Given that the High
Speech, like Anglo-Saxon, has varied meanings with many compound words, Roland must wade through their ambiguity. But Roland, who is faulted by his former teacher
Vannay for his lack of imagination, fails to see the ambiguity in the multiple meanings of
High Speech; thus, he fails to see that these riddlic words are metaphors for his life.
Roland also fails to see the ambiguity of his lineage, a heritage that is upheld by the jargon of the Way of Eld and passed along through the oral tradition. Stephen
King implies that Roland regards his dogged pursuit of the Tower as part of a noble endeavor to save Mid-World,5 his dutiful quest as the last gunslinger of the “Way of
5 However, there is a duality here. King also subtly raises the question of whether the pursuit of the Tower is in fact a noble endeavor, and that question is dealt with directly in The Dark Tower VII when Marian Carver of the Tet Corporation (which protects The Rose, the life- force that is antithetical to the Tower) tells Roland that his “work in the matter of the Beams is done” and his “quest to defeat the forces of the Crimson King has been successful” before Roland actually reaches the Tower (King, DT-VII 627-628).
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Eld”—a reference to the training, discipline, and code of honor required of knight-like gunslingers affiliated with the magnificent King Arthur Eld of whom Roland Deschain of
Gilead is supposedly a descendant. Arthur Eld is the long-deceased king of All-World and former guardian of the Tower, a revered ruler whom Roland believes unified his people and brought peace to the land. Once Roland carried Arthur’s “Horn of Eld” in the hope that he could blow it with honor when he reached the Tower; unfortunately, he leaves it on the battlefield of Jericho Hill near his dead friend, Cuthbert.
Upon scrutiny, Arthur’s identity and his legacy come into question. Again,
King explores the notion that something may have been lost with the passage of time.
King’s riddlic approach to the Arthurian myth6 is dualistic as Arthur Eld functions within this series as a presence for both good and evil, a mythical and historical figure whose emulated “Way of Eld” has antinomic results. While it is intriguing to examine The Dark
Tower as one more example of Middle-English Arthuriana, and there is clearly ample evidence to make this claim, a ME Arthurian analysis does not belong in this study given my emphasis on Anglo-Saxon culture and literature. But I mention the parallel between
The Dark Tower’s Arthur Eld and the mythical King Arthur because I want to highlight a particular link between the mythic Arthur and Anglo-Saxon culture. This connection demonstrates how narrative shapes cultural identity. N.J. Higham in King Arthur: Myth
Making and History (2002) traces the historicity of Arthur, noting that:
Arthur was constructed initially within the context of the Historia Brittonum, a redemptive narrative written in northern Wales c. 829-30. A fundamental part of
6 King purposefully draws connections to the Arthurian tradition apparently stemming from Morte D’Arthur. In an interview with Tony Magistrale appearing in Magistrale’s Stephen King: The Second Decade (1992), King appears to use a generic title for the Arthurian works, stating: “But I suppose I’ve been most influenced, as a writer, by the Bible and King Arthur’s Tales—things I read during my formative years” (3).
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this text was necessarily a defensive review, from the British perspective, of the moral, political, and military meaning of the Anglo-Saxon settlement...Anglo- Saxon kings were still then pushing their authority ever further into British-held territories…These medieval scholars were writing history to contest and appropriate memory, to own the past and drape it in particular colors for present purposes. (6)
Higham posits that Historia Brittonum’s account of Arthur should be seen as “more polemical than historical” given its writers “political, cultural, and ideological purposes”
(6). Arthur as a construct to uphold one party, Britain, and undermine others, Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms, is essential to my purposes here, especially Higham’s assertion that this construct “appropriate[d] memory” until memory became history.
We see such maneuvers with regard to our Arthur figure, King Arthur Eld, in
The Dark Tower. On the one hand, Roland considers the venerated King Arthur the original Warrior of the White, a hero whose white stallion, Llamrei, is the revered image emblazoned on the pennons of Gilead (King, DT-VII 681), the city that is the apotheosis of In-World in Roland’s recollections. Roland’s talisman-like guns are derived from
Arthur’s great sword, Excalibur, which was melted down to make the two massive shooters. When Moses Carver, a member of the Tet Corporation, sees Roland’s “revolver with the sandlewood grips” he reacts with reverence: “Say God! Might as well tell your gran-babbies you saw Excalibur, the Sword of Arthur, for’t comes to the same! (King,
DT-VII 621). On the other hand, the Crimson King, also known as the Red King, is said to be a descendant of Arthur as well, presumably from “sexual relations with a demon of some sort” (Furth 127). Robin Furth notes as well that:
Although the human line of Eld serves the White, the demonic line of Eld serves the Outer Dark. Both bloodlines are obsessed with the Tower, which is their birthright, yet while the line of Deschain is sworn to preserve it, the Red King and his son [Mordred, who is also Roland’s son]—the dan-tete, or little king—have pledged to
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destroy it…The Eld’s two bloodlines—destined to battle each other—have each developed their own distinct mythologies about their ancestor. (127)
The warring camps are aware of each other’s appropriation of the mythical Arthur. In the office of Richard P. Sayre,7 Susannah and Roland view an oil-painting of Mordred in his human form “with a livid scar on [the boy’s] side and a birthmark on his left heel as crimson as his lips”—lips that are “curved in a smile of triumph” as his foot rests on the dead “snow white horse” Roland identifies as Llamrei, the “sigul8 of all In-World” (King,
DT-VII 681). Roland rips the painting down the middle with a “savagery that startled”
Susannah, calling the picture “no more than someone’s wishful fairy-tale” (King, DT-VII
681). Similarly, in the New York restaurant, The Dixie Pig, where vampires feast on human ribs, Roland is fixated by a tapestry he views as a “blasphemous parody of Eld’s
Last Fellowship” (King, DT-VII 32) in which Arthur, his wife, and his followers engage in a cannibalistic feast. Here, King’s Constant Reader realizes that Roland’s “eye, trained to see every possible snare and ambush” as it is “fixed at once” on the tapestry, does not in fact “underst[and] its significance completely” (King, DT-VII 32) as Roland claims;
Roland fails to see that both forces, the White and the Red, are guilty of bloodlust. Each side’s gruesome, dogged pursuit of the Tower is based on a mythology each considers predestined when it is actually self-perpetuating. Roland’s “trained” eye is in fact clouded by an opaque vision of Arthur, one that does not take into account Arthur’s own bloodshed: the legendary king’s “reign was a brutal time” in which “people, not stuff- guys, were sacrificed on Charyou Tree fires” (Furth 126).
7 Sayre was the “Crimson King’s Head of Operations” before being laid waste by the gunslinger, Susannah Dean.
8 The word, sigul, is King’s word for sign throughout the series.
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Continually, King’s Constant Reader must consider such brief dualistic passages and the embedded riddlic clues associated with them to solve the secondary
“Who am I” riddle about Arthur Eld and shed light on the ultimate “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland. For instance, the words “meat” and “hunger” act as leitmotifs during many of the series’ battles – reminders of the bloodlust highlighted in the Dixie Pig tapestry. In the Battle of Algul Siento in the final novel, the gunslinger Susannah Dean speaks of “the dry hunger” to kill (King, DT-VII 452). This bloodlust is apparent in
Susannah as she fires on the enemy: “…Susannah broke cover… This wasn’t part of the plan, but the need to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever:
She simply couldn’t help herself, and Roland would have understood” (King, DT-VII
461). Clearly, this passage demonstrates that violence begets a craving for more violence.
King shows that such compulsion—even the compulsion to kill—is inherent to human nature.
In Anglo-Saxon culture, bloodlines and shared destiny are an important part of the oral tradition. Throughout The Dark Tower, both bloodlines of Eld cite ka, King’s word for destiny, as justification for their actions. The rationalization of ka is exemplified in the passage between Mia and Susannah. Mia states, “Each must follow the road upon which ka has set her feet . . .. Mine is to bear my chap [Mordred], and raise him, and thus end your dinh’s quest. And his life . . ..” Susannah said, “It’s wonderful how everyone seems to think they know just what ka means for them.” (King, The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah [DT-VI] 318).
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Each side views their purposes as justifying their behavior. And each side sees their actions as valiant and necessary in war. For instance, Hax9 is a faithful follower of
John Farson, also known as The Good Man; however, Farson’s goodness is suspect to the gunslingers of Eld as Farson is the sworn enemy of Roland Deschain’s father. To further
Farson’s cause, Hax plans to poison the town of Taunton, but he expresses reservations about poisoning children. A guard, his co-conspirator, retorts: “You said it yourself.
‘Soldier ask not.’ Do you enjoy seeing children under the rule of the gun…?” (King, DT-I
140). King expertly provides two clues to Roland’s nature in this passage. He shows the obligation of a soldier in a campaign to not question, a skill Roland masters to his own demise, and he contrasts the negative view of “the rule of the gun” with Roland’s positive depiction of the glory of the Gunslingers of Gilead, calling into question which side is heroically just. Therefore, Roland’s oral tradition, his gunslinger code of ethics, becomes suspect. This is one of the minor clues to the major “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland.
King shows his medievalist bent here. Norman Cantor cites “heroism” and
“just war” as part of the “medieval heritage [that] is very rich today…” (47). And Richard
Glejzer states that “medievalism acknowledges the fictional structure of history” by focusing on the “mythic structure that ties us to history” (220-21). Here, King plays with the Arthurian myth of the good guys and the bad guys by demonstrating that each is based upon a construct. Hax’ actions are based upon the construct of The Good Man, and the “Way of Eld” is based upon the construct of King Arthur Eld. Such constructs shape our perceptions of destiny much like the rolling wheel of Mid-World affects all its interconnected realms. And these constructs are upheld by rhetoric of the ancient High
9 Hax is the castle head cook in Gilead.
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Speech which has long since lost its accuracy. Both Roland and his enemies are caught up an oral narrative of Arthur Eld which acts in much the same way as Higham’s view of the construct of King Arthur as a “grandiose historical framework” (6) pitting the British against the Anglo-Saxons which is conceived from “a very specific ethnicity and in part at least against Others” (6). The warring bloodlines of Arthur Eld have ethnic differences.
Some are regional; some are physical. Each side may be seen as upholding a metanarrative through particular stories with specific language which justifies their violent actions and maintains that the militaristic legacy will continue.
An awareness of Anglo-Saxon narrative culture allows us to view Roland as a scop whose own performance within the Eld tradition—via his gunslinger identity and its corresponding rhetoric—reestablishes the comitatus (ka-tet). Recognition of the limitations of Roland’s High Speech and the Eld legacy provides clues to the riddle that is Roland Deschain: What kind of person is he? Is Roland—the leader of Susannah as her dinh, the last gunslinger of Gilead and its final scop, the trainer of a gunslinger comitatus in the supposedly honorable ways of King Arthur Eld—a hero or an anti-hero? Is the focus of his quest, the Dark Tower, a place of benevolence or evil? And is a just, albeit violent, quest worth sacrificing life, or is life futilely sacrificed by any violent or obsessive quest? To answer such riddlic questions, we must turn to the Anglo-Saxon riddle.
CHAPTER III
THE DARK TOWER AND ANGLO-SAXON
RIDDLES
A riddle is 1) “a mystifying, misleading, or puzzling question posed as a problem to be solved or guessed: conundrum, enigma” or 2) “something or someone difficult to understand” (“Riddle,” def.). Riddles infuse King’s lengthy epic; whether it is the Dandelo anagram in the final novel, the prime-number puzzle put forth by Blaine the
Mono Train in The Waste Lands, or the “ideographic” remnants of the fires left by the fleeing Man in Black in The Gunslinger, embedded riddles force Roland, his ka-tet, and the Constant Reader to reconsider continually The Dark Tower’s ever-shifting realms. In fact, The Dark Tower in its entirety is an extended riddle for both the reader and for the series’ protagonist, Roland Deschain of Gilead.
The Anglo-Saxon riddle requires one to deliberate while sustaining multiple perspectives. A form of “intellectual game-playing” that was “strongly influenced by
Latin precedents”, the OE riddles are “longer than the Latin riddles and contain more detail, and they are far more playful in style…a mixture of the secular and the religious, the cosmological and the mundane…” (Marsden 35). In this thesis, I will show that
King’s riddles share Anglo-Saxon’s intermingling of styles as well as demand multiple perspectives.
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The Anglo-Saxon riddles and Roland’s riddlic language also have in common tampering by later interpreters. Some “ninety-five…are preserved in the Exeter Book” which was found in the Exeter Cathedral in the eleventh century, but the number varies depending on interpretation and “ how editors divide them”; in fact, other AS works like
Wulf and Eadwacer are “so enigmatic that critics have been tempted to include them in the riddling genre as well” (Marsden 310). In other words, interpretation and subjectivity
(as discussed in Chapter II) matter here as well. Just as the tenets of Roland’s High
Speech are unknowable in some ways, so are the OE riddles. Marsden states that a few of the Old English riddles have “never been satisfactorily solved” (310).
Knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature, especially its riddling traditions, is vital for King’s Constant Reader because such knowledge brings with it an appreciation of the rich complexity of King’s work and insight into the riddles interspersed throughout
King’s epic. Riddling is a form of entertainment and education in Anglo-Saxon culture— and the same holds true for King's work. Marsden states that OE riddles “incorporate the challenge, ‘say what I am’ or ‘ask what I am called’; this may take a lot of ingenuity”
(310). King also asks of his readers ‘say what I am’ about the Dark Tower, the Beam, the
Rose, and Roland himself. It is edifying for King’s literate “Constant Reader” to reread the text and skillfully put together the clues to solve these riddles.
Alas, the gunslinger falls short at this rigorous task. Roland of Gilead never manages to put the clues together despite his purgatorial, circular quest that forces him to relive—and thus reread—his world. In “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and
Poetic Obscurity,” Daniel Tiffany notes that the etymological root of ‘riddle’ and ‘read’ is the Old English verb, raedan, meaning ‘to give or take counsel, to advise, to
31 deliberate’” (78). Roland fails to raedan, and as a result, he never gains the insight he needs to end his unremitting loop by dropping his pursuit of the Dark Tower.
Roland Deschain is a lone wanderer, attempting to band together people from disparate times into a gunslinger ka-tet. He struggles knowingly with the American vernacular of his ka-tet and unknowingly with the ancient High Speech he uses to train this ka-tet. I contend that language shapes both the ka-tet and Roland. In fact, we will see that it is their individual abilities to raedan, to decode metaphorical language within the ever-shifting realms of Mid-World that determine their fate.
Roland and his ka-tet are strangers finding their way in a foreign land, much like the modern reader trying to decode an Anglo-Saxon riddle. On trying to decipher ambiguous metaphor with Anglo-Saxon riddles, Craig Williamson writes:
We wander a riddlic landscape, dimly chartered, haunted by unknown or shifting shapes, full of disguised characters, until we reach a kenning, a metaphoric way of knowing that carries us beyond categories of perceptions, beyond the dead world of literal truth. (Feast of Creatures 36)
Notice the use of the word kenning here. Kevin Crossley-Holland states that “the whole body of Old English literature is packed out with many riddles; they are known as kennings and are in fact condensed metaphor” (236). Thus to read the Old English canon, much like to read King’s The Dark Tower epic, is to engage continually in riddle solving.
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King’s Kennings
Clearly, Stephen King is familiar with riddling practices (“Riddle-dee- dum!”1), and especially the kenning. For instance, King uses the word ken to mean
‘know’ in the dialect he creates for the agricultural community known as Calla Byrn
Sturgis, a Mid-World locale in the Borderlands first appearing in The Dark Tower V: The
Wolves of Calla (2003). From the Anglo-Saxon cennan, ken means “to make known, declare, confess, acknowledge” (“Ken,” def.). And kenning suggests both “understanding and paraphrastic naming” (Williamson, Feast of Creatures 36). A kenning is:
. . . a concise compound or figurative phrase replacing a common noun, especially in Old Germanic, Old Norse, and Old English poetry. A kenning is commonly a simple stock compound such as “whale-path” or “swan road” for “sea,” “God's beacon” for “sun,” or “ring-giver” for “king.” Many kennings are allusions that become unintelligible to later generations. (“Kenning,” def.)
The unintelligibility of kennings to subsequent generations brings us back to the problems facing the modern AS reader and Roland and his ka-tet. As Others outside of time, the allusions of kennings—riddlic in nature to begin with—become nearly indecipherable when the referent is lost.
King’s The Dark Tower series has striking similarities to Anglo-Saxon kenning and riddle traditions. Roland is an Other navigating a shifting landscape similar to the wanderer in Williamson’s passage about riddlic landscape. In fact, Williamson could very well be describing Roland’s journey. In addition, Stephen King draws from the kenning tradition in his series to create clues for not just the reader but the characters
1 King plays with his Constant Reader by writing Riddle-Dee-Dum several times in the series. He likes to toy with his readers in general. For instance, he has the name “Bango Skank” appear as graffiti quite a few times in the novels. The last scrawl of Bango Skank appears when Susannah Dean and Mia are in a bathroom in the Plaza-Park Hyatt Hotel; it reads: “Bango Skank awaits the King” (King, DT-VII 89)— and the “King” could refer to the character Stephen King or the diabolical Crimson King depending upon one’s interpretation.
33 as well. Sarah Anderson states that an Anglo-Saxon “riddle works like a kenning” because “each offers a condensed poetic description that must be puzzled out one element at a time before the meaning of the whole figure can be grasped” (170). The same may be said of the riddlic The Dark Tower novels; to understand the puzzling ending of the whole, we must puzzle out each of the compacted riddles throughout the series. Similar to the solver of an Anglo-Saxon riddle, King’s reader is required to deliberate while sustaining multiple perspectives.
Some of King’s kennings are readily apparent to his Constant Reader, but
Roland does not realize that he himself is the referent. For instance, King creates the seemingly simple compounding “hunch-think” to describe moments of intuition for
Roland. Roland uses the term to describe the act of self-reflection. At first glance, this compounding might seem duplicative. A hunch is a guess or a premonition; to think is to deliberate in the manner of raedan. But King creates a kenning here, and kennings are never duplicative. The sea in Old English is described metaphorically as a ‘whale-path’ not ‘sea-path’ or something equally replicative. While King’s “hunch-think” might seem to be merely a compound word, it is in fact a kenning because King creates a new concept that is neither an instinctive hunch nor the act of thinking. The kenning “hunch- think” suggests the crux of Roland’s problem: his inability to stop and think about his intuition, to pause in his journey and think about his automatic actions so as not to make the same mistakes again and again. His ka-tet is impressed with his hunches, his ability to know what comes next. But an astute reader can see Roland’s reliance on “hunch-think” as another missed opportunity for Roland to examine his own jargon, and therefore stop his robotic push forward to the Dark Tower.
34
The kenning “hunch-think” also denotes the cyclical nature of Roland’s task, calling into question the notion of intuition altogether. A first read of the novels might indicate that Roland has a remarkable sixth sense. Rereading, however, suggests that what was once considered intuition is more likely déjà vu—an accurate feeling given that
Roland did indeed experience the event before many times in his many purgatorial loops.
For instance, when Detta senses Roland’s presence in her shared body as Roland tries to draw her into Mid-World, she thinks: “The hideous thing about the Really Bad Man's invasion had been the sense of familiarity that came with it, as if this amazing thing had happened before—not once, but many times” (King, DT-II 350). Considering how many times he has relived his life, the events did genuinely happen in the past. Thus, his intuitive hunch is really suppressed memory that he misreads or ignores. Essentially, the answer to the ‘What am I’ riddle of “hunch-think” is “I am meditation” for the kenning asks Roland to ruminate on his instincts in the nature of raedan. At the core of this task is
Roland’s need to halt his quest to allow for contemplation.
Therefore, we may see this kenning as a cautionary warning to Roland on both a conscious and subconscious level. King plays with the concept of the unconscious throughout the series, even going so far as to have three characters who all look exactly like the “real” Stephen King named Feemalo, Fimalo, and Fumalo meet our ka-tet on the moat-bridge of Le Casse Roi Russe near the Dark Tower; Feemalo identifies himself as
“ego” and refers to Fumalo as “our id” (King, DT-VII 749). The workings of the unconscious are essential to King’s characterization of Roland. King makes clear at the beginning of the 2003 revised The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger and the end of The
Dark Tower: The Dark Tower VII that Roland begins each cyclical journey with no
35 memory of his prior quests. Nevertheless, King invites the Constant Reader to speculate whether Roland’s powerful ‘hunch-thinks’ (how he relies on his hunches to decide which path to take or to make predictions) at times is indicative of Roland’s remarkable perceptiveness or his lack of perceptiveness. Shouldn’t Roland probe his recurring instances of déjà vu given the resulting deaths of so many of his companions? King toys with the question: When is a sixth sense not a sixth sense, but really evidence of repressed memory or predestination? Indeed, we may view King’s depiction of Roland’s intuition as an exploration of “the relationship between the actions characters take and the role destiny plays in our lives” (Russell 108). Unable to die, Roland relives his wrongly chosen path, returning to the Mohaine Desert because it is there that he meets the boy,
Jake Chambers. Roland later abandons Jake in a life-or-death crucible; this abandonment is Roland’s conscious choice of the Tower over the life of an innocent, the life of a loved one, an act that is the apotheosis of Roland’s obsession for the Tower. At the core of
Roland’s actions is his reliance on ‘hunch-think—a kenning denoting meditation Roland never solves.
Other kennings of King present the problem of unintelligibility to later generations. The word for comitatus “ka-tet” is an example. Ka is a word from the High
Speech with multiple meanings: “life, force, consciousness” (Furth 459); as Roland explains to Eddie: “…it means duty, or destiny, or, in the vulgate, a place you must go”2
(King, DT-II 205). One can consider a ka-tet as a kenning juxtaposing metaphorically both the concepts of fate and freewill; Ka-tet is a word which conveys not only the
2 “A place you must go” intimates compulsion. We may consider such compulsion as an urge—like Eddie’s drug addiction or Roland’s obsession with the Tower—and as an obligation—like Roland’s sense of duty as a gunslinger of Eld. I think the most interesting interpretation of this phrase is the idea of a purgatorial journey; this quest to the Tower, in its circular form, is a form of penance.
36 collective and individual destinies of Roland and his comrades but their collective and individual objectives as well; one cannot change a ka-tet because of the intractability of fate, but one may shape a ka-tet through one’s individual acumen. “Each member of a ka- tet is a piece of a puzzle. Each individual piece is a mystery…put together, the collective pieces form a greater picture” (Furth 461). This picture shifts as the members of the ka-tet and as we, as readers, attempt to reflect in the nature of raedan. “Tet” denotes the actions of the band of gunslingers, their individual will. Thus we may think of the kenning as juxtaposing the individual with the group; destiny with free will; and individual karma with the “accumulated “destiny (and accumulated debt) of many existences” (Furth 459).
King’s Constant Reader attempts to decipher the ever-evolving picture formed from the clues in the narrative; the members of the ka-tet decipher their world based upon the greater picture formed from their shared experiences with each other.
Indeed, employing the principle behind khef, the members of the ka-tet often function as parts of a whole. Formally naming their group a ka-tet brings with it a shared sense of belonging because the members of Roland’s ka-tet were all outsiders or Others in their home worlds. Each has felt the sting of isolation in the past. Now, instead, the members of the ka-tet have moments of telepathic understanding, a deep connection that moves beyond bodily boundaries. Roland, despite his role as the leader of the ka-tet, has telepathic limitations however. Much like the Anglo-Saxon scribe may struggle in the attempt to record an earlier Other culture, Roland struggles with the culture within his own ka-tet despite their clairvoyant powers.
Roland’s status as an Other within his own community of gunslingers foreshadows his exclusion from the rewards at the end of the series; indeed, his acts of
37 freewill are characterized by a severe lack of thought. He has been programmed to react quickly in accordance with the Gunslinger codes, and he does so instinctively, mechanically even. Often, King likens Roland to a robot, having the few robots within the novels for instance such as Blaine the Mono and Andy share Roland’s cool blue eyes.
Roland’s mechanical acts may be seen ironically as freewill, though one should consider
Roland’s will as restricted significantly by his conditioning, his Gunslinger narrative. His identification with this oral narrative prevents him from understanding (in the nature of raedan) his fate. By holding onto his role as a Gunslinger of Eld rather than a father to
Jake for instance, Roland “chooses a destiny that is different from those of his companions” (Furth 461) because he doesn’t choose love. He continues on his path toward the Tower instead of going through the portal with Susannah and Oy to the other realm from which Eddie and Jake beckon. Roland Deschain knows how to shut off his emotions; frequently, he shields his thoughts from the members of the group when he feels that open communication would thwart his purposes. For instance, he shields his darker nature from the ka-tet, hiding his knowledge that Susannah Dean has been impregnated during a ritual at the Speaking Ring and carries a creature that is part demon, part Roland.3 Ka-tet is a kenning for Roland to solve, and Roland fails to fully ken, to raedan, the term ka-tet that he introduces to the Others within his group. And he never
3 This creature is Mordred. He is conceived when Susannah Dean is raped in the Speaking Ring during Roland’s sexual relations with the Oracle of the Mountains; each act was committed during Jake’s drawing into Mid-World for the second time through the magical doorways between worlds. Thus, Mordred has two mothers, Mia and Susannah, and two fathers, Roland and the Crimson King, as a result of his mystical conception with comingled demon and human.
38 has a lasting sense of belonging with them because he is fixated on the Tower and in denial about his grief over past loved ones he has lost, even killed.4
Sorg as an Impediment to Raedan
Roland Deschain’s repressed grief inhibits his ability to solve his riddlic quest or question his long-held identity. His denial of his grief may be seen as his greatest flaw because it keeps him in exile. Like the theme of the Anglo-Saxon elegy The Wanderer, a prevalent theme in The Dark Tower is exile. Both The Wanderer and The Dark Tower explore the agony of a life cut off from one’s own kind. Each demonstrates the nakedness of the lone traveler, exposed to the harshness of life without the emotional comfort or physical protection afforded by camaraderie. And both the speaker of The Wanderer and
Roland are suspended souls, caught between the pain and solace of memory in a world which has moved on, a world in which war has stripped each of his culture. Indeed,
Roland is literally a suspended soul, unable to end his purgatorial quest and rest in death unless he embraces his painful memories as a means to avoid repeated mistakes. But
Roland avoids facing this grief, and unresolved, it clouds his judgment, causing him to choose the Tower and abandon those he loves time and time again. Edith Whitehurst
Williams discusses Emily Grübl’s study of the “powerful personification of sorg” in the
AS poems, The Wanderer and Deor; Grübl interprets sorg as “relating to “a deep inward state” which acts as a “gray veil over man’s entire existence” (“The Anglo-Saxon” 76).
Roland’s constant sorg acts as an impediment to his ability to raedan, solidifying his doom.
4 And he is in denial about his role in the deaths of former loved ones. He accidentally shoots his mother. And Roland and Cuthbert kill Alain in a case of ‘friendly fire’ before the battle of Jericho Hill.
39
The idea of grief accompanying a person on life’s journey is omnipresent in
The Dark Tower. Roland’s family unit is broken by the machinations of Marten
Broadcloak, who, acting on behalf of the Crimson King, seduces Roland’s mother,
Gabrielle, and then exposes the affair to the young Roland to goad Roland prematurely into the gunslinger trial. Marten hopes Roland will fail this rite of passage and be sent into exile, but Roland prevails, winning his guns despite his youth. Nevertheless,
Roland’s father, worried that Roland will be “dead by nightfall” at the hands of John
Farson’s men, sends him east to Mejis with Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns. As for
Roland’s mother, his grief for her never subsides. His mother appears in Roland’s dreams throughout the novels; indeed it is the nursery rhyme she sang to him during his childhood naptimes that won’t stop playing in his mind when he is in the Mohaine Desert years later, a memory that evokes “the heavy warmth of blankets, the love of his mother and her red lips, the haunting melody of the little nonsense lyric, and her voice” (King,
DT-I 94). The lyric contains the riddlic line “We walk in love, but fly in chains” (King,
DT-I 94), suggesting that love binds those who attempt to escape its hold. Roland’s memories of the mother whose wave he refused to acknowledge when he left for Mejis, and his grief over the nature of her death haunt him.
While Roland is aware of the nursery rhyme replaying in his mind
“maddeningly, like a dog chasing its own tail in his mind as he walked” (King, DT-I 94), he fails to apply the riddlic lyric to himself or recognize that he is the “dog chasing its own tail” in this circular purgatorial quest. Raedan denotes deliberation or taking counsel; Roland fails to do both by not considering sufficiently the rhyme and ignoring the proverbial qualities of it. When he mistakes Jake the boy for the Man in Black
40 moments later, there was “nothing but the dim, atavistic guilt for the sudden, raging heat of his own blood moments earlier, and the endless ring a rosy of the childhood song…”
(King, DT-I 96). Faced with the boy whose love he tries to outrun, a boy he sacrifices in his quest for the Tower, Roland unconsciously feels the culpability that comes with his blood of Eld as a gunslinger, but he is unable to deal with that remorse: “He couldn’t think yet”; instead he “put[s] his hands over his face to ward off phantoms” and faints, unable to deal with the “pain…dividing his brain like an orange” (King, DT-I 98), unable to see the clues to his riddlic existence. We may read this inability to think as another instance of Roland’s inability to raedan.
Continually, phantoms of the past haunt Roland, and his grief acts as an impediment to insight. Subconsciously, he carries the ghosts of his past victims, however unintentional their deaths; consciously, he longs for his deceased former companions, such as Susan Delgado, his love in Mejis, or Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns, childhood friends and members of his first ka-tet. Roland’s sadness mirrors the lone soul in The Wanderer who we see “having outlived one’s companions…with only sorg to gefaren ‘sorrow as a companion’” (Pollington, The English Warrior 224). As part of his extended “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland, King uses Ralph Stanley’s song “Man of
Constant Sorrow” repeatedly, suggesting Roland’s ongoing grief (King, DT-V 238; DT-
VII 488, 464). Odetta notices Roland’s sorg; she neither likes nor trusts Roland when she initially meets him because she senses his psychological conflicts. She tells Eddie of her instinctive revulsion for Roland, saying:
… I don't want to touch anything that belongs to him. Not anything. For me, I think his things might have what my Ma used to call a hoodoo. I like to think of myself as
41
a modern woman... but I don't want any hoodoo on me when you're gone and the dark lands on top of me. (King, DT-II 321)
Hoodoo means a) the same as voodoo, b) bad luck or misfortune, c) bringer of bad luck, and d) an oddly shaped rock column (“Hoodoo,” def.). It is interesting that
King, who so clearly plays with word origin in his works, chooses to use ‘hoodoo’ instead of ‘voodoo’, most likely because a “rock column” is evocative of the column of a
Tower. Thus we may see the ‘hoodoo’ surrounding Roland as evidence of both his sorg and his obsession for the Tower5, each acting as veils over his existence, impeding his ability to raedan. Roland’s supposed sixth sense leads him to believe that “perhaps the campfires” of the Man in Black “were a message, “but he had no interest in messages”
(King, DT-I 6). From his lack of “understanding of the ideograms” in his campfire in The
Gunslinger (14) to his inability in the final book to realize that Susannah’s dream of
Eddie in Central Park is not a “trick and a glammer…into todash6 space” but a vision of redemptive reunion with the ka-tet he loves (928), Roland continually misreads the signs that could lead him to salvation. Roland’s sorg blinds him because his avoidance of grief prevents him from probing any emotionally-charged memory. He is unable to raedan (to riddle) because he fails consistently at an essential component of that term: meditation.
To solve the major “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland, King gives his
Constant Reader another minor riddle to ponder that is suggestive of Roland’s inability to raedan due to his sorg. King begins The Dark Tower with a quote from Thomas Wolfe's
5 We may also view the Tower as his “accumulated debt” per the definition of khef.
6 Todash is King’s word for “body and mind travel” during a state of coherent dreaming (Furth 464).
42
Look Homeward, Angel A Story of the Buried Life (1929) in his Dedication to the revised
The Gunslinger (2003):
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a leaf, a stone, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb, we did not know our mothers face; from the prison of her flesh, have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent, which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? …O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
Several phrases from Wolfe’s passage are leitmotifs throughout the novels, most notably the “unfound” door of the Dark Tower which changes to “found” as Roland approaches it (King, DT-VIII 1018). However, I am particularly interested in King’s use of the phrase “forgotten faces.” King uses this leitmotif in Roland’s maxim7 from his days in Gilead; he tells a person he deems shameful that he has “forgotten the face of
[his] father” when the person fails to uphold the gunslinger way. Roland uses this maxim repeatedly to train his warrior ka-tet to keep the tenets of the supreme symbolic father,
King Arthur Eld, forefront in their new roles as gunslingers. It is useful to keep this maxim in mind when considering the rhyme Roland recites when he lights a fire. Alone in the Mohaine Desert, Roland tries to light the devil grass:
… muttering the old and powerful nonsense words as he did: “Spark-a-dark, where’s my sire? Will I lay me? Will I slay me? Bless this camp with fire.” It was strange how some of childhood's words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed. (King, DT-I 8)
Just as his sorg weighs on him, these childhood words weigh on him, and
Roland disregards the nagging implications, again failing to raedan. Interestingly,
7 A detailed explanation of maxims will be found in Chapter IV.
43
Chapter Two of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is called “The Way Station,” denoting
Roland’s need to weigh his thoughts and the importance of meeting Jake in Roland’s purgatorial journey. A way station is a point or stopping place on a route or process;
Roland could stop his cyclical quest if he catches the clues and reconsiders abandoning
Jake. By not doing so, he ensure that his penance continues through the questing process.
Given this, we may interpret “spark-a-dark” as not only a plea to create flame from nothing, but a plea to find insight from the darkness of ignorance, to have a Eureka moment. “Where’s my sire?” suggests fathering, denoting not only the maxim, “you have forgotten the face of your father” (a suggestion which brings to mind the gunslinger’s bloodlust given the way of the gun), but also Roland’s abandonment of Jake who regards
Roland as his dinh, his father. This interpretation of this minor riddle indicates siring offspring, a possible reference to Roland’s mortal sin of forsaking his adopted son,
Jake—a sin which will either “lay” Roland to rest (allow him to die) or “slay” him again
(cause Roland to repeat the cyclical quest) depending upon whether Roland changes his ka on his next purgatorial loop through Mid-World.
Interestingly, Furth calls the “Spark-a-dark” rhyme an “old catechism” in her
Concordance (555), a reference to the rhyme’s ending benediction which is a conscious plea for fire and a subconscious plea for perceptiveness. Thus this is yet again another chance for Roland to cast off his blindness, his veil of sorg, by deliberating on those niggling words from childhood, but Roland is unable to let go of his gunslinger mantra, holding fiercely to the notion that “he still ha[s] his guns—his father's guns—and surely there were more important…” (King, DT-I 7). We may see the “Spark-a-dark” riddle as another clue to the ultimate “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland. Through such
44 embedded riddles, King gradually develops the knight-like Roland as an anti-hero, juxtaposing his dogged bravery with his willingness to abandon those he loves in his tenacious quest. His inability to raedan prevents him acknowledging the importance of people, especially the loved ones in his life. By failing to solve the plethora of riddles nagging him such as this nursery rhyme, Roland never gains insight into his own character (the “Who am I” riddle) nor does he fully understand the nature of his own quest (the “What am I”—the Dark Tower riddle). Therefore, his exile and his sorg are ongoing.
CHAPTER IV
THE RIDDLIC WHOLE: IMPORTANCE OF
THE ANGLO-SAXON GUISE OF
THE OTHER
In contrast to Roland who fails because he suppresses childhood memories,
Eddie Dean, a member of Roland’s ka-tet, is able to beat Blaine the Mono1 because Eddie sees a strength within himself that derives from nagging childhood words. Eddie turns toward his painful memories, his sorg, rather than away from it. As a result, he raedans, bonding with the other members of his ka-tet in the process. At the core of his gift for raedan is Eddie’s ability to adopt the guise of the Other.
The ka-tet have agreed to participate in a neck riddle, a classification Craig
Williamson describes as when “the speaker saves his neck by the riddle, for the judge or executioner has promised release in exchange for a riddle that cannot be guessed” (Feast of Creatures 21). Following the Anglo-Saxon tradition “to accept the riddler’s conditions,
1 Blaine the Mono Train, Andy the Robot, and other mechanized characters in The Dark Tower reveal King’s distaste for technology. For instance, the discarnate spirit Mia laments the “how the magic went away,” stating: “Great men of thought…great men of deduction …replaced the magic with machines” (King, DT-VI 147–148). She scolds Susannah Dean: “You doom yourselves…your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in rational thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism” (King, DT-VI 147). This disdain for technology may be seen as part of the “medievalist agenda” which “expresses distaste for technology…but also recuperates [it]…as well as discipline, training, and technique” (Fradenburg 230). Repeatedly, King depicts his robots, including Blaine the Mono, as having Roland’s blue “bombardier” eyes. Thus, King paradoxically glorifies and denigrates the masterful, methodical Gunslinger in the same way that the metaphorical Blaine the Mono awakens powerfully rejuvenated only to quickly deteriorate. Faced with the need to improvise—a uniquely human trait—Roland and Blaine fail because their greatest strength—their programming—is also their greatest weakness.
45 46 and not to impose his own” (Jember np), Roland keeps to a formal and traditional protocol for riddling with Blaine the Mono that is similar to the old, traditional ways of
Gilead. Roland is the key player in this contest because of his childhood training, yet he fails miserably. Unable to remember all the riddles he once knew, he senses that he is disappearing like the rest of his world: “It’s not like forgetting. It’s as if they were never there in the first place” (King, DT-IV 36–37).
Relegated to the sidelines because he is seen as the group’s weakest link,
Eddie meanwhile falls into deep concentration. Just as the Old English riddles “challenge their audience to deeper thought” (Lapidge et al. 210), Eddie quietly takes on the similar challenge to meditate. Williamson suggests that “the riddle solver moves through the traditional phases of the questing hero:
1. Departure from the dead world of reified categories. 2a. Confrontation with the metaphoric world of unknown monsters and shifting shapes. 2b. Recognition…of the Other and its relation to the Self. 3. Return to the old world with rejuvenated eyes. (Feast of Creatures 37)
In his deliberation, Eddie engages in all these stages. Formerly, he allowed the mocking voice of his dead older brother to eat away at his self-esteem, but now he recognizes that
“Henry’s voice had changed; it now sound[s] sober and clear-minded… like a friend instead of an enemy” (King, DT-IV 50). Eddie senses “what was underneath” Roland’s earlier dismissive comment about how Eddie’s dead-baby-crossing-the-road riddle was
“silly” and therefore unacceptable (King, DT-III 390), recognizing “the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry’s favorite weapons”
(51). King’s use of the word “silly” is particularly suggestive here. Edith Whitehurst
Williams notes that the “present meaning” of the word silly is “almost opposite to the
47 original one... descend[ing] from OE saelig ‘blessed, happy, fortunate’ downward to its present day ‘foolish, stupid’ ” (“Auden, Yeats” 18). The occurrences of OE saelig
“sometimes include references to temporal blessings and personal endowments…”
(“Auden, Yeats” 19). Eddie confronts Blaine, who has Roland’s same blue eyes, and thwarts the robotic monster train who intends to kill them all in a suicidal crash because
Eddie recognizes the same contempt in Blaine’s voice for his silly riddles (King, DT-IV
51–53). Eddie knows that silliness will provoke Blaine, and the train will lose the contest by losing control. Gwendolyn A. Morgan states that “to engage in riddling is to become involved in a verbal contest on its most primal level: to confound an adversary... is to gain power” (82). Indeed, here Eddie gains self-worth and recognition from his ka-tet.
Roland, who admits that he “held [Eddie’s] jokes in contempt,” apologizes to Eddie, saying: “there is a kind of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness” (King, DT-IV 60).
Unlike Eddie, Roland never goes beyond Craig Williamson’s first stage—“departure from the dead world of reified categories”—a stage that echoes “the dead world of literal truth” (Feast of Creatures 36). Roland “trot[s] out the golden oldies of his youth” (Feast of Creatures 27), failing to recognize that Blaine the Mono has been programmed with similar information on riddling.
Williamson lists thirteen different categories of riddles, noting “that there are no Old English riddles in this category whatsoever—the Tricky Question Group”;
Williamson describes this group as “joking questions” (Feast of Creatures 22). Eddie, who is silly in the blessed, happy way of OE saelig, has to “hold back laughter” as he riddles Blaine with joking riddles, and his blessed happiness fills Jake with “hope” that feels like “a rose in the full fever of its summer” (King, DT-IV 49–50). Roland, in
48 contrast, is blind; he doesn’t recognize the paradox that, although Blaine is an Other, the train has riddling tendencies similar to his, absent tricky questions. Stephen Pollington states that with Anglo-Saxon riddles “it is the paradox which gives us the important clue—the insight which helps resolve the contradiction” (The Mead Hall 212). Despite his formal riddling training and his position in the group as a wise leader, Roland’s efforts to beat Blaine in the riddling contest are futile because his lack of introspection prevents him from adapting to the situation at hand. Viewed as hopelessly unable to apply himself by the members of his ka-tet, Eddie seriously undertakes his introspection, however, and applies his well-known silliness with purpose to the task at hand. Roland’s
“nature…his very nature” holds him “captive” and blinds him (60), whereas Eddie’s saelig nature allows him to deliberate, and therefore riddle like that raedan.
Like Eddie, the Anglo-Saxon riddles contemplate the concept of the non- human Other. Williamson states that in “half of the riddles” of the AS The Exeter Book
“the reader identifies with the ‘I’ of the human riddler; in half, the ‘I’ of the creature […]
Meaning depends upon our manipulation in images of the Other” (Feast of Creatures 25).
Such metaphorical duality can be found in the imagery of both the AS riddles and the The
Dark Tower series. Thus “the heart” of the supernatural Rose, the center of love and life,
“open[s] for [Jake], exposing a dazzle of light […] It was a sun” while simultaneously this same Rose possesses a “worm…beating like a sick and dirty heart” (King, DT-III
180), denoting the duality of the universe, how evil is toxic to good. Similarly, AS riddles juxtapose opposites as clues to create a paradoxical tension to be resolved by the answer.
49
Let’s consider the Anglo-Saxon Riddle 76, a riddle which generally combines in modern editions two formerly distinct riddles, K-D 79 and K-D 80 (Williamson,
“Texts and Translations”):
Ic eom æþelinges æht ond willa; I am a prince’s property and joy, Ic eom æþelinges eaxlgestealla, Sometimes his shoulder-companion, fyrdrinces gefara, frean minum leof, Close comrade in arms, king’s servant, cyninges geselda. Cwen mec hwilum Lord’s treasure. Sometimes my lady, hwitloccedu hond on legeð, A bright-haired beauty, lays serving eorles dohtor, þeah hio æþelu sy. Hands on my body, though she is noble Hæbbe me on bosme, þæt on bearwe geweox. And the daughter of an earl. I bear in my belly what blooms in the wood, Hwilum ic on wloncum wicge ride The bee’s delight. Sometimes I ride herges on ende; heard is min tunge. a proud horse in the rush of battle— Harsh is my voice, hard is my tongue Oft ic woðboran wordleana sum I bear the scop’s meed when his song is done. agyfe æfter giedde. Good is mine wise My gift is good, my way winning, ond ic sylfa salo. Saga hwæt ic hatte. My color dark. Say what I’m called.
Here a non-human object becomes multiple others with human connotations: a body, a poet, a tongue, a shoulder-companion. Anglo-Saxon scholars agree that the answer to this riddle is a horn. Williamson suggests that the horn is used to drink beer, presumably during a commemorative feast in the Anglo-Saxon great hall. One should note that
“drinking horns” were associated in Anglo-Saxon times with “a royal burial” (Pollington,
The Mead Hall 149). Morgan associates the horn with loss of life, viewing the horn as a
“harbinger of death” as a companion to “fierce warriors” and also as a symbol “of life” with its “association with growth” (78). She interprets line seven as “having in my bosom that which grew in groves” suggesting “not only the wooden parts of the horn itself, but
50 also a cornucopia, in which rest the fruits of the earth,” denoting fertility and growth (78–
79). She concludes: “It may strike fear into any enemy with a battle charge or soothe with music,” expressing “both strife and harmony” (78). Thus, in this riddle, the horn has an
“equal capacity for good and evil” (78), a remark that could apply to Roland and his
“Way of Eld” as well.
Morgan’s conclusions about the horn’s associations with life and death, strife and harmony, bear a striking similarity to the variants of the “Commala Song” sung in the
Calla and in Gilead. The word come derives from the AS cuman meaning ‘come, approach, be born, come to oneself, recover, become, come together, and assemble’ (Hall
76). So, like the horn, the Commala song serves a kind of summons. “Commala, The
Rice Song” suggests both growth and fertility; Eddie understands it to be a song for the
“planting of both rice and children” (King, DT-V 233). “The Rice Song” takes on the connotations of the horn’s battle charge, however, when the townspeople chant,
“Come…Come…Come…” as Roland dances to the “Commala” in preparation for battle with the robotic wolves. Roland, smiling, dances “faster and faster” for a prolonged period of time, “yet his eyes didn’t smile, not those blue bombardier’s eyes; they were as cold as ever” (King, DT-V 238). An Anglo-Saxon warrior’s education included dancing as part of warrior training (Lapidge et al. 172), and Pollington notes that “prolonged dancing was a means of inducing the ecstatic trance state” (The Mead Hall 266). Here,
Roland becomes a horn, calling the “Calla folken” to come to battle, to come fight to the death.
As part of his elaborate “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland, King weaves the concept of sorrow into Roland’s warrior dance to the “Commala” song. Susannah Dean
51 sings a version of the American folk song “Man of Constant Sorrow” during the festivities, substituting the word, “maid” for “man” (King, DT-V 234). Susannah, whose name means ‘lily’ or ‘rose’ in Hebrew, appears to sing on behalf of the Rose here, expressing its sorrow that Roland’s warrior dance has led the Calla folken to choose violence. Like sorg, violence can be a gray veil over human existence; even violence in the name of good leaves victims, as Eddie Dean notes when he speaks about the dead following the battle: “No one seemed to feel that the losses were in any way equal to the gains” as long as “it wasn’t your wife or your son who’d fallen…” (King, DT-V 693).
Again, Eddie demonstrates his capacity to sympathize with the Other—a sign of his maturation.
Roland and Anglo-Saxon Maxims
The version of “The Commala” called “Song of Susannah” is a call to arms as well. It is comprised of many maxims. Many Anglo-Saxon scholars connect riddles to maxims. Craig Williamson says, “each contextual pairing” in a maxim “constitutes half a kenning” (Feast of Creatures 36). Maxims, succinct proverbial expressions, are like riddles because they demand audience engagement resulting in a cultural connection or identity. In Anglo-Saxon culture, maxims were used to demonstrate shared cultural wisdom. The equivalent of a maxim today would be “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
As proverbs, maxims are a part of gnomic poetry, “a special class of Old English wisdom literature...” (Lapidge et al. 210). Like riddles, OE maxims may be demandingly enigmatic. The same holds true for King’s maxims.
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A few of King’s maxims in “The Commala” correspond to the Anglo-Saxon
Maxims II. The song alludes to warrior culture as does Maxims II: “There are numerous references in Maxims II to the Germanic heroic culture out of which the Anglo-Saxons came” (Marsden 296). King’s maxims refer to the heroic culture of a gunslinger of Eld:
Stave: Commala-come-ki, There’s a time to live and one to die. With your back against the final wall Ya gotta let the bullets fly. Response: Commala-come-ki! Let the bullets fly! Don’t ee mourn for me, my lads. When it comes my day to die. (DT VI 344)
There’s a riddlic duality to King’s proverbial songs. At first glance, the lines read like clichéd battle-talk, the kind of inflated machismo typical of Westerns flicks and pithy dime-store war comics. Upon further review, an astute reader sees the irony: Roland’s time to die has never come, and should that time ever arrive, he would not mourn its coming (nor would he want his comrades to mourn his death), because it would mean that his penance is over. Thus, the riddlic stave and response may be seen in light of AS cuman.2 The gunslinger call to arms is underpinned by the notion that Roland can only
“come to [him]self” by “recover[ing]” a natural death. Roland can only come to himself by engaging in introspection (solving his own “Who am I” riddle) and truly examining his quest (solving the “What am I” Dark Tower riddle). Ultimately, we learn that the
Dark Tower is a metaphoric representation of one’s sins, a chronological accounting,
2 Evident in the “Song of Susannah” as well is the AS cuman meaning ‘be born’ as the song is a record of the birth of Mordred, the child who is coming to kill his father, Roland, according to the riddlic Prophecy of Eld.
53 floor by floor, of the ramifications of a wrongful life quest. But Roland gains insights into these ultimate riddles too late.
Maxims operate within a context, and we may see the maxims of The Dark
Tower operating within the context of Roland’s Eld oral traditional narrative and the narrative created by Roland and his new ka-tet. Stephen King peppers the speech of his characters with maxims throughout the series, including “Life for your crop” (King, DT-I
17), “There would be water, if God wills it” (King, DT-I 6) and “One should meditate in purgatory” (King, DT-IV 159). We may see each of these maxims as interconnected parts of the greater “What am I” riddle that is The Dark Tower. This too is similar to Anglo-
Saxon works. For instance, “Beowulf… contains many sentential passages that can be illuminated by comparison” with the larger Old English poetic genre called wisdom poetry (Anderson 167). In other words, they are understood when seen as part of a greater whole. The same holds true for King’s seven-volume epic in which each maxim is multi- faceted and may only be understood in light of The Dark Tower as a structured whole.
The maxims are riddlic for both Roland and the Constant Reader. The maxim
“Life for your crop” not only denotes a wish for growth for an agricultural crop, but it brings to mind the Charyou Tree human sacrifices during the time of Arthur Eld and later in Mejis during Reaping Season. Also, it denotes the purgatorial notion that what you reap in one life will carry over into your karma in the next—a principle Roland tragically discovers upon entering the final door at the top of the Dark Tower. “There would be water, if God wills it” suggests not only the need for water as sustenance for people and crops, but the literal meaning of khef: “the sharing of water.” Within the latter context, the maxim is a cry for the interconnectedness of khef, a cry for embracing the notion that
54 all aspects of life come together in the water, meaning everyone is interconnected including Roland and those he opposes or abandons. Another maxim, “One should meditate in purgatory,” is familiar to Roland, but he fails to realize that he is in fact doing just that, even when Brown answers Roland’s question, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” with: “I think this is it” (King, DT-I 18). The irony of the last maxim is its implication that meditation is something to put off, something that is done after living, when in
Roland’s case, King suggests that meditation is what is needed now to for him to stop living, to rest in peace. Roland seemingly cannot die due to his lack of introspection; thus, his cyclical quest begins anew at the end of The Dark Tower.
Maxims may be viewed as proclamations about the world we inhabit, tenets on how to live. Anderson states that AS maxims as “wisdom poems ambitiously claim to pronounce on every aspect of creation…” (166). One stanza in “The Song of Susannah” in particular has a direct link to AS maxims. King writes:
Stave: Commala-come-call We hail the One who made us all. Who made the men and made the maids. Who made the great and small. Response: Commala-come-call. He made the great and small! And yet how great the hand of Fate. That rules us one and all. (DT VI 402)
Like a maxim, line two calls for all to “hail” God. The response alters the call, however, acknowledging that God is the creator, but placing greater importance on the rule of fate.
In Maxims II, we find a similar structure. Line 4b reads Þrymmas syndan Cristes myccle,
“The glories of Christ are great” yet, line 5a places emphasis on fate, wyrd byð swiðost,
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“Fate is strongest” (Crossley-Holland 302). Just as riddles are like songs,3 and the AS scop connotes both ‘poet’ and ‘singer’, the stave here seems to be singing on the behalf of God. King reinforces this idea when, as a character in the text, he states that writers are not “Gan”—his word for God—they are kas-ka Gan, meaning “prophets of Gan or the singers of Gan” (King, DT-VII 569).
When King the character asks moments later, however, if Roland has been listening for the “Song of Susannah” (King, DT-VII 569), King refers to a variant of “The
Commala” song. This is not the version of the song with dual connotations of good and evil or Fate and God. This is the song of God (or Gan) that is calling “Come…come…” from the supernatural Rose, a call for spiritual rebirth, the return of the circular magic of love that protects as love protected baby Michael from Mia (King, DT-VI 325, DT-VII
569). Tony Magistrale observes that King “employs circle imagery as evidence of supernatural power” throughout his fiction (Stephen King 114). The “Commala” song, once a call to war, takes a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn by becoming a call to
God. Thus, we return to an important premise of half of the Anglo-Saxon riddles: the metaphoric shift of a non-human thing into the guise of an Other. Here it is the beautiful non-human Rose personified as the supreme Other, Gan. This is the solution to the “What am I” riddle regarding the rose; the rose is the lynchpin of creation, a representation of all-encompassing love deriving from God. The rose acts as a clue to the “What am I” riddle regarding the Dark Tower as well for the rose’s resonant song indicates that it should be the ultimate focus of any quest, not the sinister Dark Tower. King reinforces
3 Craig Williamson (“Origins”) calls AS riddles “riddle-songs” based upon his notation that Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter, donated the Exeter Book—the “great English book with variously wrought songs”—to the Exeter Cathedral Library in the eleventh century.
56 this religious interpretation through his depiction of Jake hearing the “angelic voices” saying “so speaks Gan along the Beam” when he is near the Rose.
Jake as the Ultimate Other: Christ
Jake’s connection to the Rose is significant because it provides clues to several of the embedded riddles in King’s series. When Jake is near the Rose, “the joy is so overwhelming that it threatened to burst into pieces, the voice of Yes; the voice of
White; the voice of Always. It was a great course of affirmation, and it sang in the empty lot. It sang for him” (King, DT-III 170). Following the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the Rose is a “What am I?” riddle which becomes a “Who is Jake?” riddle. I see King’s solution to this riddle as the heavenly Rose singing for Jake because Jake is a Christ figure. Other characters may hear the song of the Rose, but King never indicates in the texts that the song is for a particular character, yet the Rose sings specifically for Jake.
That King would single out a child for divine purposes is not unexpected.
“Many of his youthful protagonists come to represent the moral centers of his books, and from them all other actions seem to radiate” (T. Magistrale, “Inherited Haunts” 61).
Indeed, Jake as a Christ figure both drives the plot and redeems King’s ending. Following
T. Magistrale’s observation that Jake is typical of King’s canon as “the nucleus of familial love” and “divinely inspired and painfully cursed with prophetic knowledge”
(“Inherited Haunts” 61), we must see Jake’s religious perceptiveness as part of the larger riddlic whole.
I contend that Jake parallels the Christ in the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the
Rood. In The Dream of the Rood, “Christ is portrayed as a young hero... enduring severe
57 torment […] here man is saved not... by the intervention of the powerful King, but by participating in the suffering of Christ which ends in glory” (Raw 239). Jake, too, is a young hero who suffers repeatedly. Furth states that Jake dies three times in the Series: once when pushed in front of a car, once when Roland allows him to fall into an abyss, and once when Jake steps in front of the van veering toward Stephen King. The latter event Roland calls “Jake’s sacrifice” (566).
Like Christ, Jake knows that he is going to die. One indication is that Jake has
“pale cheeks and wide frightened eyes” on their search for Stephen King as the van nears, and another indication is that Jake withholds his intended bodily sacrifice from Roland4
(King, DT-VII 541). Similarly, at their “Last Supper” together, Roland shares water with his ka-tet because he senses ka-shume, the imminent death of a ka-tet member. Roland gives each member of his ka-tet a “Judas kiss” (318–319). And yet, it is Eddie who dies next, not Jake. It’s a conundrum—or as King would say “Riddle-de-dum” (919).
You may recall from the graph in the introduction that each riddle in The Dark
Tower builds upon another, culminating in the ultimate central riddles: “What is the Dark
Tower?” and “Who is Roland?” The following riddles should be viewed in light of that paradigm. My solution to the “Who is Jake?” riddle stemming from the Rose “What am
I?” riddle is that Jake died and is resurrected a fourth time because he is a Christ-like sacrificial son. To explain my answer, we must look back to the nature of Anglo-Saxon riddling and also to King’s use of the word sigul. King utilizes the word ‘sigul’ for
‘signs’ throughout The Dark Tower; Tick-Tock calls Jake’s watch a sigul (King, DT-III
4 Roland is unable to read Jake’s mind despite being in the ka-tet because Roland is too focused on the safety of the character King whose life is essential to Roland’s quest for the Tower.
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498), and Roland “understood it came to the same” when Nancy Deepneau uses “plaque” instead of “sign or sigul” to describe the tribute in the Garden of the Beam (King, DT-VII
625). King’s ‘sigul’ has a similar spelling to the letter sigel in the AS Futhorc, the runic alphabet. Kevin Crossley-Holland explains that the “runic alphabet was employed as a kind of additional conundrum” to riddles (237). Runes are a fundamental riddle as they can be read as either a sound or a word. For instance, ƿynn can either be pleasure or the sound ‘w’. Greenfield and Calder note that “the word rune (OE run) meant ‘mystery’ or
‘secret’… and had a magico-religious function” (254). They state: “Runes were employed to identify the maker (and sometimes the owner) of instruments of pleasure and warfare,” to signify “prayers said for [one’s] salvation, or transcribe a monument. It might also be used to convey a message…” (253–54). King utilizes runes as signification too. Walter O’Dim “cast[s] the runes” in The Gunslinger to bring about dream visions for
Roland, and King writes of the “thin, fiery heat of the runes engraved on the doorknob” of the floating door on the beach marked “prisoner” in The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (37). Indeed, the plaque that Nancy Deepneau refers to with the runes engraved on it is a monument at the Tet Corporation in honor of “Eddie Cantor Dean and
John ‘Jake’ Chambers” who saved the Rose, the manifestation of love and life. Much like the medieval runes, King’s runes forecast salvation (Roland’s via O’Dim’s divination), identify items of warfare (the floating door used by Roland to draw in his warrior ka-tet), and transcribe a monument (the memorial at the Tet Corporation). The fact that King’s runes function in a “magico-religious” way further establishes the medieval underpinnings of The Dark Tower.
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To establish my contention that Jake is a Christ figure who undergoes a fourth death and resurrection, I ask you to raedan on the letter ‘S’ from the Anglo-Saxon
Futhorc (Figure 2). Consider that sigel also means sun, which is significant if we remember “to accept the riddler’s conditions” and “not to impose” own” (Jember np).
Anglo-Saxon Sigel – S
Fig. 2. The Runic alphabet– Sigel.
King establishes that there is a sun (in fact many suns) visible in the Rose; the sun is the essence of goodness, a place with heavenly angelic voices, a place with a song coming from Gan, the creator. John D. Niles states that the “rune (sigel) originally denoted a sun as an object of reference”; it was a beacon of sorts, “a welcome sight to seafarers” in
Anglo-Saxon times (135). A beacon beckons seafarers homeward much like the Rose beckons people to come back to the familial magic of love.
The shape of the runic sigel is similar to the lightning bolt on the “door marked with no word but a sigul [Mordred] could read well enough” (King, DT-VII 229).
It is significant that King’s ‘sigul’ is recognized by Mordred, Roland’s son, “the were-
60 spider who is the son of two fathers and two mothers” (Furth 198). The King’s sigul is a clue that ‘sun’ is also a homonym of the word ‘son’—reminding us of the mirror imagery
Morgan notes in the Horn Riddle 79.
Mordred and Jake share mirror imagery as in the Anglo-Saxon Horn Riddle
76, and their duality is the answer to King’s riddle of the Prophecy of Eld. King has many instances of twins or doubling throughout his work. For instance, in The Dark Tower V:
The Wolves of Calla, twin children are preyed upon by robotic wolves. And King creates many characters who double one another, including Susan (mother of Roland’s unborn son) who is the twin of Susannah (mother of Roland’s son, Mordred), and Cuthbert
Allgood (silly member of first ka-tet) who is the twin of Eddie Dean (silly member of current ka-tet). As a character within The Dark Tower series, King acknowledges the existence of twinning. While he is under hypnosis, King tells Roland: “Cuthbert and
Eddie are twins,” and later, when Eddie states that he “wasn’t even born” when Cuthbert a child, Roland replies: “Ka is a wheel. You’ve been turning on it under different names for a long time. Cuthbert for one it seems” (King, DT-VI 386, 389). Ka as a wheel evokes reincarnation, but King hints at more here—the wheel as Roland’s purgatorial circle in which the names (the people involved) change, but Roland stays the same, continually coming back around to the beginning of his end at the Mohaine Desert. In this light, twinning is merely part of the puzzle that is Roland Deschain, clues to his “Who am I” riddle.
The title of the second novel, The Drawing of the Three, is a clue to Roland’s
“Who am I” riddle. Roland draws three members for his ka-tet to mirror the ka-tet he had in Mejis. The original ka-tet consists of Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns, and Susan
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Delgado; his second ka-tet consists of Eddie Dean, John Chambers, and Susannah Dean.
When Roland draws members for his ka-tet through the portal door on the beach, he draws individuals with characteristics that match his original ka-tet; King does this for two reasons: to remind Roland of the time in Mejis when he was true to himself before he chose the Tower over Susan; and to remind Roland of his failings since then. Indeed, we may think of the members of his second ka-tet much as we think of characters as personified abstractions in the medieval allegorical drama, Everyman.
Both Everyman and The Dark Tower deal with the struggle for the protagonist’s soul. Just as the abstract characters Fellowship and Goods are representative of what Everyman must abandon in order to be absolved from sin and ready for death,
Eddie and Susannah, when viewed as abstract characters, represent unresolved sins
Roland must confront in order to free his soul for salvation. When the Man in Black does his Tarot card reading for Roland, the Prisoner card represents Eddie; Eddie is the prisoner of drug addiction. And the Lady of the Shadows card is Susannah because she is
“two-faced” with her competing unconscious personalities (King, DT-I 276–77). Roland is a prisoner due to his addiction to and obsession with the Tower, and he is “two-faced” because of his ongoing battle between his unconscious self who knows about the purgatorial loop and his conscious self who is in denial. Thus the drawn members of the ka-tet are essentially fulfilling roles, essential parts necessary to the whole of Roland’s purgatorial quest because each part adds up to a summation of the riddle: Who is Roland?
This returns us to the High Speech concepts of ka-tet and khef—two minor “What am I” riddles embedded in the larger “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland. Given that ka-tet means “collective pieces form[ing] a greater picture” (Furth 461) and khef means “all
62 parts of ourselves, even those aspects we wish not to see” (Furth 462), we may see the abstract characters of Eddie and Susannah combined as revealing pieces of the greater picture of Roland as an anti-hero. Possible answers to the “Who am I” riddle regarding
Roland is that he, though bravely knight-like during battle, is either cowardly reluctant to face his inner demons, incredibly obtuse in the face of pertinent evidence, or stubbornly focused on his quest regardless of the costs. I believe that King posits all three answers as plausible conclusions.
Another vital clue to the “Who am I” riddle regarding Roland involves
Mordred and Jake. Mordred, the horrid were-spider son Roland kills, and Jake, the adorable adopted son that Roland loves, are also twins, and their twinning provides the solution to the riddle of the Prophecy of the Line Eld. The prophecy reads: “He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the breath of the last warrior” (King, DT-VI 252). King’s prophecy is a riddle with a double solution. It gives clues to solve the Jake “Who am I?” riddle. Jake is a Christ-figure, a savior;
Mordred is known “as Roland’s dantete, the ‘little savior’ or ‘baby god’” (Furth 198).
Mordred has a mark on his heel, mirroring the name of Jake, or Jacob, meaning “holds by the heel” in Hebrew. Mordred has two fathers, the Crimson King and Roland. Jake also has two fathers, Elmer, his biological father back in America, and Roland, his adopted father. Mordred has two mothers, Mia a disincarnate spirit, and Susannah, the mother who is implanted by a demon with the sperm of the Crimson King and Roland. Jake has two mothers, Laurie, his biological mother back in America, and Susannah, who by sexually engaging with the demon at the portal helps Jake ‘come’ into another world, ‘be
63 reborn’ as Roland’s son, ‘recover’ his sanity, and ‘become’ a part of the ka-tet as in the various meanings of the AS cuman. And yet Roland kills Mordred, and Jake supposedly dies when he is hit by the van, so how can my claim that both Mordred and Jake are the solutions to the “Who am I?” riddle of the Prophecy of Eld be accurate?
Consider the nature of AS riddling. Sometimes we identify with the ‘I’ of the human and sometimes we identify with the inanimate subject or non-human creature;
“meaning depends upon our manipulation in images of the Other” (Williamson, Feast of
Creatures 25). The non-human horn can transform into a body part, a companion, a poet, and more in AS riddle-songs. Such transformations are “metaphoric because each riddlic creature takes on the guise of another…And metamorphic because in the natural flow all creatures shift shapes... horn to battle-singer or mead-belly” (Williamson, Feast of
Creatures 3). As in AS riddling, King creates a metamorphic shift in shape by having
Jake and his pseudo-dog, the bumbler creature, Oy, switch bodies again, inhabiting one together.
To understand this riddling process we must look at the sequence of clues. In the final book, Jake asks Oy to change places with him because Jake, with his gift of the touch, has accidentally envisioned dinosaurs in his head, and these dinosaurs pose an actual danger to him. He switches minds with Oy because the creature is from a different world and has no concept of dinosaurs, and they both struggle in their new bodily forms
(DT-VII 121–23). Bev Vincent concludes that this is “an amusing scene, but ultimately irrelevant” to the overall understanding of the novels (162), missing the riddlic clue entirely. This scene is the first indication of their metamorphic shape-shifting. Another clue comes when Eddie is on his deathbed, and Jake makes a realization that Roland
64 never does: “the loss of Eddie [is] too great a price to pay” for any goal (King, DT-VII
480). Jake prays to “God, to Gan, and to the Man Jesus” for “a miracle” to save Eddie’s life, finally unknowingly offering his own in sacrifice; Jake prays, “Save my friend’s life, and I will save yours, he prayed to Stephen King, a man he’d never seen. Save Eddie, and we won’t let that van hit you. I swear it” (480). Jake finally realizes that the death of a friend is too costly. Here, King establishes Jake’s willingness to act on behalf of an
Other, namely the character Stephen King.
Just as in AS riddles where “meaning depends upon our manipulation in images of the Other” (Williamson, Feast of Creatures 25), the answer to the riddle that is
The Dark Tower series depends upon one grasping King’s manipulation of images of the
Other. Building upon the human-to-creature shape-shifting he has already created in
Mordred/Little Savior/were-spider and Jake/Savior/Oy, King emphasizes the duality of
Jake and Eddie as Eddie is on his deathbed. King establishes the connection between the two characters throughout the series. They share a keen telepathy as shown in the passage with Blaine the Mono (King, DT-IV 49–50). They both call Roland ‘father’ at times, so they are both pseudo-sons of Roland. In addition, they both have the gift of visions. In
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo Saxon England, it is noted that:
Visions were a genre of literature…a vehicle for contemplation on the achievements of the present life, on a terrifying threat of the Day of Judgment, and on the need for immediate and significant repentance as the Judgment is to be faced. (Lapidge et al. 462)
The threat of the “Day of Judgment” is apparent in Sheemie’s prophetic vision of the Beam which holds the universe together; his vision involves the image of Beam as an Other: a boy who looks like Jake and has one of his eyes put out (411). King’s
65 portrayal of the Beam as a boy reflects the AS The Dream of the Rood. The Beam is a life-force emblematic of God; the tree in The Dream of the Rood connotes the cross which is emblematic of Jesus. It is interesting to note that in Anglo-Saxon, the word for tree is beem. Both the Beam and the tree voice God’s pain and suffering in the face of human failing. And each work depicts a youth as Christ. Christ as a young warrior was a standard feature in the Middle Ages. The atypical feature of The Dream of the Rood is its presentation of a living tree with whom the speaker of the poem is linked; King’s portrayal of the Beam echoes this unique feature. If we consider the Beam boy as another twin of Jake, the implication is another Christ connection. Therefore, in the Dream of the
Rood and in The Dark Tower, a boy is a hǽlend (Christ) and hæleþ (man, hero, fighter).
The image of the boy in Sheemie’s dream has duality, connoting both Jake and Eddie. The Beam boy’s injury emphasizes this connection: Eddie’s fatal injury is a gunshot over his right eye (King, DT-VII 477). And as Sheemie speaks of his vision,
“Jake realized he knew this tale,” and Eddie finishes one of Sheemie sentences as if he too knows the tale (411). Their subconscious awareness of this tale is an indication of their connection to the Beam and therefore to God or Gan. King already establishes
Jake’s savior status in his twinning with Mordred, but Eddie’s spiritual connection goes back to his silly nature and the duality of the OE saelig which originally meant ‘sacred’, but later became the modern definition of ‘silly’. The OE saelig had theological connotations in the pre-literate AS times; Williams says that:
The association of a word with an image was probably very strong. Sacred images were vividly present to the eye… these great carved monuments or representations of biblical scenes, Christ and majesty, the apostles, saints, and often the new lamb. (“Auden, Yeats” 19)
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William suggests that the word saelig was associated with sacred, carved wooden images
(“Auden, Yeats” 18–19). There is a wonderful multiplicity here with saelig and Eddie; he not only has the nature of saelig (as mentioned earlier), but he is a woodcarver—it is he who carves the key to the portal door that draws Jake back into the world of the ka-tet
(King, DT-V 295).
Riddles can be juxtapositions of opposite images, and Jake is Eddie’s mirror opposite. Before he is fatally wounded, Eddie never achieves Jake’s realization about the death of a loved one being too costly. Eddie is entranced in Roland’s warrior dance, placing the quest for the Tower above his love for his wife. He had vowed not to get caught up in the game of “bullets…do[ing] the talking…a replay of [the] same old shitstorm” in the second book of the series, saying: “I’ve been dirty, man. If I found out anything, it’s that I don’t want to die dirty” (King, DT-II 462). Yet he does in fact “die dirty” by showing no mercy in shooting Pimli Prentiss. Eddie executes Pimli because he doesn’t like “his contempt” despite the fact that Pimli is “shot in the chest, bleeding heavily, and clearly dying fast” (King, DT-VII 477). Eddie, following Roland’s lead, stops deliberating as in OE raedan, drifting away from the saelig nature which allowed him to out-riddle Blaine. King indicates Eddie’s folly during Eddie’s fatal shot in which
Eddie slaps a hand over the wound “like a man who’d remembered something of vital importance just a little too late” (King, DT-VII 477). Eddie’s “dirty death” is the opposite of Jake’s deaths on behalf of saving others.
Eddie’s final act could be seen in light of the Anglo-Saxon vision tradition as
“the need for immediate and significant repentance” on Judgment Day (Lapidge et al.
462), and it provides another clue to the “Who am I?” riddle involving Jake, the Rose,
67 and the Prophecy of Eld. From his vision, Eddie gives Jake the instructions for how he can fulfill his Christ-like duty. He says, “Protect... your... Dinh... from Mordred. From
Dandelo. You... Oy. Your job.” His eyes cut toward Roland, then back to Jake. “Shhh.”
Then: “Protect…” (500). Roland is the Dinh, and Eddie’s “Shhh” is indicative that this is meant to be a secret from Roland. Eddie Cantor Dean, who has a gift of talking like an
AS scop and whose middle name derives from AS cantere meaning ‘singer’ (Hall 67,
297), dies with the “Song of Susannah”, the song of the Rose, of God, in his heart; he tells Susannah that he will meet her in “the clearing…at the end of the path” and then says, “Thank you for my second chance… Thank you… Father” (King, DT-VII 500).
Eddie could be thanking Roland. But Eddie’s previous “weak twirling motion” with his hand is curious. Roland interprets Eddie’s gesture and his raspy “You…you” to mean that
Roland “danced the commala”—an acknowledgement of their battles together in the ka- tet. This hand twirling, however, is also a gesture of impatience that Roland often uses to cut off others when they deliberate or analyze aloud in the fashion of raedan. Eddie may be having a dying vision of Roland’s circular journey, with the twirling as his feeble attempt to tell Roland that the violent dance of the Commala brings doom. Thus, Eddie’s final words may express gratitude to God for not arriving at the same fate as Roland
(500).
Roland is an accomplice in the eventual murder of Oy/Jake. The Anglo-Saxon
King Alfred in his adaptation of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy writes that fate is “the consequence of the risk one takes by increasing the distance between himself (or his will) and the divine axel. The farther one is from the right mindedness of God, the more mobile or mutable or unstable he is, the more subject to disaster” (Gatch 108).
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Roland’s axel is the violence he brings to others, “the showdown” that “always came [is] the central fact of his life and the axel upon which his own ka revolved…” (King, DT-III
581). Roland incorrectly thinks that the Tower is “a central linchpin that holds all of existence together” (King, DT-I 179). He retains that belief even though the “Song of the
Susannah” sings to him that the “life and love” are “reason” and “purpose” (King, DT-V
188). Marian of the Tet Corporation tells Roland that his “quest to defeat the forces of the
Crimson King has been successful” to no avail; he is steadfast in his resolve to continue his quest to the Tower, admitting to Marian that he has “sacrificed many friends…and
[his] own soul” simply to reach the Tower (King, DT-VII 627–28). He is blinded by his quest because his axel is misplaced. John M. Hill notes J.R.R. Tolkien’s depiction of the angst of Germanic heroes “caught in the chains of circumstance of their own character”
(81). Roland Deschain of Gilead–whose name is pronounced by King as ‘des-chain’— puts the chain of events in motion that eventually lead to murder of his adopted son, Jake.
As the “young hero” in The Dream of the Rood “who Christ-like suffers for an ending in glory” (Raw 239), Jake too suffers, fulfilling his promise to Eddie. King weaves the metaphoric and metamorphic premises of Anglo-Saxon riddling into science- fiction by having Jake fulfill his Christ-like duty by morphing into the non-human creature Oy. This shift is not unexpected within the context of The Dark Tower. Mia and
Susannah inhabit the same body at times as well, and their shared existence involved shape shifting too: the African-American Susannah, who has severed legs, grows white legs while Mia shares her body. So it is not unanticipated for Jake and Oy to morph.
When Jake fatally injures himself to save the character Stephen King, Roland damns himself further by concerning himself with King. King is essential to Roland’s
69 quest for the Tower, and Roland chooses the writer over his adopted, dying son. In fact,
Jake dies on the side of the road with merely a stranger beside him and the faithful bumbler-dog Oy. Except Jake doesn’t die; he takes on the shape of Oy, sharing bodies and minds, with the vocal Jake acting dominant. King provides clues to this transition: 1)
The bumbler-dog stops doing his trademark echo of the last thing he hears (DT-VII 579);
2) When Roland asks Oy to say goodbye to Jake during the burial, the bumbler says, “I,
Ake” (DT-VII 587), an attempt to identify his presence in the Oy’s body; and 3) When
Roland puts his forehead against the bumbler’s forehead, it is Jake’s voice he telepathically hears passing along Eddie’s warning of Dandelo (DT-VII 646). But Roland, who states that he was never very good at riddling (King, DT-III 391), fails to read the clues, unable to solve the “Who am I” riddle about Jake/Oy.
Similarly, Roland fails to “take counsel”—another aspect of raedan. He dismisses the visions that Susannah has of Eddie and Jake awaiting them in a parallel
American world because Roland refuses to give up his quest. He tells Susannah that her vision of a portal door into a world where their loved ones await them is “a trick,” asking her: “What if you roll right through and into todash space?” (King, DT-VII 928). Furth describes the verb ‘todash’ as “body and mind travel” between the spaces of parallel worlds; to ‘todash’ has inherent risks because “monsters live in the crevices between realities” (465). King’s kenning of “todash space” suggests two AS words: todon meaning ‘to open, unbind” and todal meaning ‘partition, division’ (Hall 343). Susannah chooses to unbind herself from the ka-tet because “Roland’s way was the way of the gun.
Roland’s way was death…” (DT-VII 929). She chooses the path of the Rose, of faith and love, answering Roland’s question about todash space: “Then I will light the darkness
70 with thoughts of those I love” (DT-VII 928). Through introspection, despite her sorg over the loss of Eddie and Jake, and her ability to raedan about the language and lifestyle she has adopted as a gunslinger, Susannah breaks free of Roland’s deadly influence. Before she leaves Roland, Susannah solves the kenning ka-tet: “Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much without knowing what ka-tet was, what it meant? Ka-tet was family. Ka-tet was love” (King, DT-VII 733). Thus the answer to the “What am I” riddle regarding ka-tet reflects the answer to the “What am I” riddle regarding the Rose: the centrality of love. Roland is unable to choose love or view ka-tet in non-warrior terms; even though the doorknob of the portal door “turns easily in his hand” and he
“sees the flakes of snow” from Central Park (DT-VII 931), he cannot see that love (and the end of exile) awaits him beyond the door. His refusal brings continued violence to
Others of his new comitatus, Oy/Jake and Patrick Danville. We will see that Jake/Oy, despite being in the comitatus, represent the love of the Rose through their sacrificial selflessness. This is the antithesis of Mordred, Roland’s own son, whose death is emblematic of Roland’s spiritual death.
Mordred and Jake as riddlic doubles mirror each other while Jake inhabits
Oy’s body. Mordred stops eating because he has developed food poisoning, and Oy/Jake refuses food. When Mordred attempts to kill Roland, it is Jake in the body of Oy who saves Roland. Though Oy/Jake might have run away, the bumbler attacks Mordred instead. The were-spider breaks Oy/Jake’s spine, and then Roland shoots Mordred. Yet,
Mordred does not appear to have “stopped the breath” of his father as the riddlic
Prophecy of Eld indicated—unless we recall that the name of Mordred derives from the
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AS murðor which in line 2055 of the great epic, Beowulf, means ‘secret murder or heinous crime’ according to the OE Dictionary.
Roland brings about the “secret murder’ of his son, a son that represents
Christ. As such, he is a damned man. Roland says that the Tower is his ka, meaning fate—a word known in AS as wyrd (Hall 427). Pollington notes the line in the epic
Beowulf: “Wyrd often saves/ an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good” (lines
572–73), concluding “…if a man is doomed then not even his courage can help him against the course of events” (The English Warrior 167). Roland is “the hanged man” on the riddlic tarot-card shown by Walter in The Gunslinger, and symbolically Jake is the boy who holds Roland upside down by the foot. Walter tells Roland that the card denotes
“strength, not death” and this is indicated by the Mordred/Jake double solution of the
Prophecy of Eld riddle—a key clue to the “What am I” riddle of Roland.
Conclusion
Roland enters the Dark Tower due to his strong courage, but he is friendless soul with no virtue left but courage. Williams notes that the AS freondless is used interchangeably in later [Anglo-Saxon] laws with the term outlaw” (“The Anglo-Saxon”
173). The gunslinger is an outlaw. Just as Anglo-Saxon riddles are a juxtaposition of opposites, the Rose “What am I?” riddle is positioned as the opposite of the The Tower
“What am I?” riddle. Roland’s Tower is revealed to be a metaphorical representation of obsession, blindness, and violent folly—a “place of death” because Roland’s “life had made it so” (King, DT-VII 1026). As Walter suggests in the tarot reading, Roland is denied death because he denies the strength of love by sacrificing others. Roland is
72 forced through the door at the top of the Tower, and he comes full circle, returning to the purgatorial desert at the beginning of his quest (1029).
King hints that Roland may have finally on this last loop the peace of mortality when Roland “touch[es] the horn” on his belt (DT-VII 1030). The horn, as suggested by AS Riddle 76, denotes both good and evil, life and death. If Roland has the requisite strength of character, he can choose a path that is in keeping with the horn’s AS function as a “symbol of the oaths of loyalty and mutual support” (Pollington, The Mead
Hall 149). He can embrace the “Song of Susannah” version of the “Commala” song. He can deny the “Come…come…”chant of the darkness of his soul represented metaphorically by his Tower, and live instead by the AS cuman ‘to recover’. He can start by examining the maxims in his life, maxims that are passed down by oral tradition, remembering that he, like the AS scribes, is an Other, trying to make sense of words from another time. If Roland’s does so, than he may recover the original meaning of The
Gunslinger’s Litany that Roland uses to train his warriors to kill without mercy. He may realize on this loop that the Litany is in fact a riddlic prayer requiring deliberation (King,
DT-VI 252):
I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.
The Others of Roland’s ka-tet ultimately solve the riddle of this dualistic prayer because they see its connection to love, and they embrace the notion of ka-tet as familial love. Eddie Dean, who remembers nearly too late that the path of the gun is the path to ruin, aims with his eye, his vision, to help Jake fulfill his Christ-like duty.
73
Susannah Dean, who realizes that the way of the gun is the way of death, shoots with her mind and deliberates, solving the riddle of how to return to those she loves. Jake
Chambers, whose last name connotes both the chambers of a gun and a heart, ultimately chooses to love with his heart, enough to die to save another. Thus on his “day of judgment” this twin of Eddie of the silly saelig nature is resurrected to another world, a new life in New York. Jake is like the AS sacred terms, gesaelig, ofersaelig, and gesaeligost: “He shall be blessed, exceedingly blessed, the most blessed of creatures world without end (Williams, “Auden, Yeats” 19). When Susannah meets Eddie and Jake in Central Park with the clue of the Christmas song “What Child is This?” playing in the background, she learns that their last name is now ‘Toren’, a name Eddie says is German
(DT-VII 1010). The German word for ‘tower’ is ‘turm’ and it derives from the AS ‘tor’ or tur meaning ‘tower’ (Deutsches Wörterbuch). The lone gunslinger, Roland chooses the path of death and ends up a suspended soul; the “Toren” family constructs a tower of love, a magical, protected circle of love, and “there was happiness” (DT-VII 1010).
At the very heart of the Anglo-Saxon riddle and The Dark Tower novels is meditation. To grasp fully either is to meditate in the fashion of raedan, Deliberation requires not just thoughtful reflection, but review. It is with this in mind that this thesis is called Anglo-Saxon Literature: The Key to The Dark Tower Cycle. To understand fully
Anglo-Saxon riddles and The Dark Tower one must examine the individual parts of the structured whole, a process that mandates that one turn the riddles over in one’s mind— turn, a word much like cycle. Interestingly, King’s characters call the novels “The Dark
Tower Cycle” within the final text, denoting not only the necessity to mull, to turn in one’s mind, but Roland’s cyclical loop.
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Roland of Gilead, his ka-tet, and King’s “Constant Readers” wander a riddlic landscape, one that mirrors the perplexity of human existence. At the heart of both
Anglo-Saxon literature and King’s magnum opus is the fundamental riddle: What is life?
Like the riddler of the Anglo-Saxon Horn Riddle 76, King suggests that the truth of life is found in the paradox, in the juxtaposition of dualistic meaning, in the tension between good and evil, between the Rose and the Tower.
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