 |
 |
|
| From
the March/April 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine There and Back Again
"Hwæt!" he cried. . . . we Gar-Dena in
gear-dagum Professor Tolkien had been beginning his lectures by reciting the first lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon since before I was born; he'd held the Chair of Anglo-Saxon Literature for almost thirty years. For the last fifteen of those years, on and off, he had been writing The Lord of the Rings, the epic in six books which was published — for reasons of convenience rather than artistic shape — in three volumes, starting in 1954. Nobody had any idea that he would be starting a passionate worldwide cult. We read The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of The Lord of the Rings, with astonishment, and waited impatiently for its successors to come out. Tolkien's Middle-earth, like his prose, was full of echoes of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Icelandic literature we were studying, and its firm delineation of good against evil had a more personal appeal. Whether or not we had any religious beliefs, we had all spent a noisy childhood under the bombings of World War II, and our imaginative growth had been rooted in the reality of Allies versus Nazis, Us versus Them, Light versus Dark. We were familiar with Mordor; when we were children, it had been ruled by Adolf Hitler, and peopled with concentration camps — and reproduced by our own side at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than forty-five years later, in New York City this time, I began re-reading The Lord of the Rings. It was the autumn of 2001, and the rumbling skies of my childhood were so far in the past that Middle-earth seemed much less familiar than once it had. Until September 11, when I stood looking out over Manhattan at the great plume of smoke rising from the stricken towers of the World Trade Center, and knew suddenly that I was back — that the whole world was back — in Mordor. That we had never really left, and never shall. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien discovered the horror of war for himself when he was twenty-four and was drafted into the Lancashire Fusiliers after graduating from Oxford. He took part in the appalling trench warfare of World War I for three months in 1916, before being sent home with "trench fever," and although recurrent symptoms kept him from ever going back, the hopeless, muddy, death-ridden desolation of the front lines had infiltrated his imagination. Born in South Africa to English parents, he had spent his childhood in the Midlands: a brilliant, precocious boy who lost his father when he was four years old and his mother when he was twelve. He and his brother came under the wing of their mother's parish priest, a flamboyant, pipe-smoking Catholic with whom they served Mass and ate breakfast every morning. At King Edward's School, Birmingham, young Ronald studied Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon and philology, and started inventing imaginary languages. By the time he reached Oxford he was addicted to linguistic studies, northern European myth, pipe-smoking, and the company of a close group of intellectual male contemporaries — four things that framed his life for the rest of his days, with few additions except his wife and children. He had already begun writing verse, though perhaps he should have burned some of it; one extract reads: O! I hear the tiny horns When he came back from World War I he resolved to write a "body of legend" dedicated to England, particularly the northwest of England, and began a notebook called "The Book of Lost Tales" that eventually grew into The Silmarillion. This mammoth myth compendium, the seedbed for The Lord of the Rings, was his real lifework — "always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,' somewhere: not of ‘inventing,'" he said — and he never stopped tinkering with it. (He loved tinkering; the invented language in which he wrote his diary, according to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, "looked like a mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman's shorthand" and changed so continually that pretty soon its inventor had trouble reading his own earlier entries.) Publication of The Silmarillion had to wait until after Tolkien's death, when his son Christopher edited it into a large book in 1977 — the first in a long list of posthumously published Tolkieniana including a twelve-volume History of Middle-earth. Tolkien's first major teaching post was at the University of Leeds, which created a Chair of English language specially for him when he was thirty-two. Together with "my devoted friend and pal" E. V. Gordon, he produced the definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and founded an undergraduate group known as the Viking Club, whose members gathered once a week to drink beer, read sagas, and sing comic songs. It was a hobbitish activity which Tolkien found again after he came to Oxford as Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925; this time a group called the Coalbiters met to read sagas, and into their company Tolkien brought a lecturer seven years younger than himself, C. S. Lewis. They talked and talked, these friends, and the devoutly Catholic Tolkien talked the doubting Lewis into acceptance of Christianity, with certain wellknown aftereffects. The Coalbiters evolved into the Inklings, whose scholarly members — Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, and others — used to meet in an Oxford pub called the Eagle and Child, also known as the Bird and Baby, and drink, talk, and read to one another. "Tollers," said Lewis to Tolkien one day, "there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves." So one day in the early 1930s J. R. R. Tolkien sat down and wrote at the top of a sheet of paper, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." In the course of the next few years, Lewis wrote the first of his adult science-fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, reading them to the Inklings as he went along, but Tolkien took longer over the story of Bilbo Baggins, and read it to nobody but his children. It finally became The Hobbit only at the urging of the publishers Allen & Unwin, and was published in 1937 — and reviewed, glowingly, by Lewis in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit, like Farmer Giles of Ham and assorted other stories that Tolkien made up to amuse his children, might be described as the froth on the surface of The Silmarillion. It comes out of the same myth-haunted imagination, but it is altogether lighter than the serious stuff of The Lord of the Rings, and the "tiny ring of cold metal" that the hobbit Bilbo Baggins unwittingly carries away from the "small slimy creature" Gollum has not yet grown to full Tolkien stature. At the end of the book, one sentence dismisses it: His magic ring he kept a great secret, for he chiefly used it [to make himself invisible] when unpleasant callers came. The Hobbit was an instant success. Tolkien hoped this might lead to the publication of his beloved Silmarillion, but his publisher wanted a hobbit sequel instead, so before the end of 1937 he wrote a first chapter called "A Long-Expected Party." In the company of Bilbo's nephew Frodo — initially named Bingo — Tolkien was setting off on the road that would lead to The Lord of the Rings, though without knowing at all where he was going. Through that wonderful and infrequent circumstance familiar to all storytellers, his imagination took charge, reaching into his unconscious mind for unexpected characters and elements that would guide him through his story. A Black Rider turned up, to be recognized later as a Ring-wraith; the power and peril of the ring became clear ("Bilbo's ring proved to be the one ruling Ring," wrote Tolkien in an excited note to himself); and a mysterious traveler called Trotter/Strider developed later into the high king Elessar/Aragorn. Before he was halfway through the book that would become The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien had moved from his earlier selfconscious "for children" idiom ("Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each") into the darker world of high heroic romance, so that The Lord of the Rings would become a sequel not so much to The Hobbit as to The Silmarillion. The basic story of The Lord of the Rings is a clash of absolutes: Evil, once driven out, has returned to Middle-earth, and is finally driven out by Good. As the film-going public now knows, along with all longtime Ring-readers, Elves, Dwarves, Men, Hobbits, and other species join in a series of battles to vanquish the evil lord Sauron, but his final defeat can be made possible only by the destruction of the Ring of Power which would give him dominion over all. "Middle-earth is our world," wrote Tolkien. "I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different." What is it like to re-read The Lord of the Rings after a gap of forty-five years? Some backward looks can be a glorious rediscovery of joy, others a sad disillusionment. Mine was neither, and both. The scope of Tolkien's imagined world is still astonishing; the overall mythic structure that I found so powerful when I was a war-bred adolescent still holds strong. The quest of Frodo and his fellows, through marvelously pictorial incident, still has a sense of threat, of hovering doom, that sweeps you along to the moment when the frenzied Gollum falls with the Ring into the all-consuming fires of Mordor. But — For old times' sake, I wish I reacted today to Tolkien's trilogy as I do to Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea sequence, whose wise, moving history of an invented world is satisfying on so many levels. But I don't; instead, my critical faculties whine ungratefully in complaint. For one thing, there are all those poems, most of which hold up the action and some of which are really awful. The great treelike Ents might be awe-inspiring as they march to war, but not when they're singing like Gilbertian policemen: We come, we come with roll of drum: And Gollum, possibly the most interesting character in the whole trilogy, is a creepy hissing menace — but not when he starts caroling about lunch: So sleek, so fair! Too often, Tolkien halts the narrative of The Lord of the Rings for the indulgence of verse; it's like sitting through a musical with an enjoyable book and very bad music, when one's heart sinks every time a character bursts into song. The poems are powerful only when they truly fit into the story, like the verse from which two magical lines are engraved inside the Ring: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find
them, Tolkien read The Fellowship of the Ring chapter by chapter to the Inklings as he wrote it. C. S. Lewis apparently disliked all the poems but the alliterative verse, and other Inklings were critical of the high style of Tolkien's prose, which rose higher and higher as the trilogy went along. Tolkien, long marinated in the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, was unmoved by the criticism. As he wrote in the preface to the Clark Hall translation of Beowulf, "The things we are here dealing with are serious, moving, and full of ‘high sentence' — if we have the patience and solidity to endure them for a while. We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity and just to the solemn temper of the original, if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer ‘striking' and ‘smiting'; talk and chat and prefer ‘speech' and ‘discourse' . . . " The same principle is at work in much of the prose of The Lord of the Rings. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun . . . Now as all writers of high fantasy know, it's hard not to become sonorous when you reach certain crises in your story, but you must try not to go over the top. Tolkien seems to have tried to keep a balance in his prose by maintaining the everyday idiom of his hobbits alongside the grand bits, and — unsuccessfully — by slipping a little low-comedy relief into Aragorn's solemn crowning in the person of the prattling old serving-woman Ioreth. His earliest critics, however, didn't find the balance effective. Peter Green commented that Tolkien's prose style "veers from pre-Raphaelite to Boy's Own Paper," and John Metcalf wrote, "Far too often Mr Tolkien strides away into a kind of Brewers' Biblical, enwreathed with inversions, encrusted with archaisms." John Goldthwaite went still further in his 1996 book The Natural History of Make-Believe. After quoting the above passage from The Lord of the Rings, he wrote, "Very seldom does one encounter emotion this fraudulent and writing this bad in any genre. And there will be a hundred pages more of flashing and breaking like thunder before Tolkien brings the pother to its last, breathless gasp of cliches. The little adventure that began in The Hobbit and ran along well enough through Book One of the sequel founders in the end in a gathering sea of what [Edmund] Wilson summarized as ‘balderdash.'" And that's over the top, as criticism, but it's a free country. Adverse criticism of The Lord of the Rings seems to have become a scholarly cottage industry since I last read the trilogy. One common complaint is that sex, like religion, is totally absent from the books. This is true. Not only are there no notable female hobbits in Middle-earth, there are next to no women, and those who do appear are ludicrously sketchy. The glowing elven Galadriel is as remote and iconic as the Virgin Mary, and Goldberry, the blonde consort of jolly Tom Bombadil, has no character at all. Then there's the unfortunate Éowyn, King Théoden's niece, who falls for Aragorn and, when he forbids her to follow him to Gondor, dresses as a man, rides into battle, and nearly gets slaughtered trying to defend the king from a Ring-wraith. She does not, however, get Aragorn, but has to settle for the patient Faramir. And Aragorn turns out to have been waiting all along for a lady named Arwen whom we have not met before (though Tolkien knew all about her from The Silmarillion, and explains her in an appendix). Almost at the end of the story Arwen comes riding in "upon a grey palfrey . . . with stars on her brow and a sweet fragrance about her," and within nine lines Aragorn has married her. In the filmed version of The Lord of the Rings, not yet released as I write this, perhaps Galadriel and Arwen will have rather more dimension than they have in the books. But Tolkien seems to have had no interest in depicting relationships between men and women, even though his long and devoted, if apparently sometimes rocky, marriage to his wife Edith produced four children. Perhaps he really only enjoyed writing about chaps. Or perhaps he was simply stuck in the hero-tale tradition, which holds, as Ursula Le Guin points out, that "strength lies in abstinence — the avoidance of women and the replacement of sexuality by non-sexual male bonding." Then again, perhaps Tolkien would have argued that there was no need for sexual romance in a work that was itself romantic on a loftier scale — as in his curious explanation, to a Jesuit priest, of the equally striking absence of religion in the books. "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," he wrote, in 1953. "That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,' to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." This is an odd statement from a man who claimed to loathe allegory. Quibble quibble, complain complain. I'm not mad about the battle scenes, either; they're full of stylized hacking and hewing. And the high elves can be very boring, especially in triumph and celebration . . . Yet in the long run and in spite of everything, there is good reason why Tolkien's work remains so popular, why the film-makers have spent all that money on it, and why it has influenced so many fantasy writers in one way or another, even those of us who prefer to root our fantastic conflicts in the real world, and in the minds of human beings. Push aside all those appendices and subcreated myths and there is tremendous narrative force in the central story of Frodo and Sam struggling on through Middle-earth, facing danger in order to do their part in saving good from evil. And Tolkien's wonderful ability to convey the power of evil, and the fear and horror that it creates and feeds on, still takes me back to the dark emotions of my wartime English childhood. In the English-speaking world, perhaps you have to be over sixty-five to have experienced the deep connection between the reality of living in a world under attack, and the fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps you only need to read any newspaper published after September 11, 2001, to rediscover Mordor, and to find new identities for the evil wizard Sauron. It isn't hard to find contemporary echoes in Aragorn's words of challenge: "I serve no man, but the servants of Sauron I pursue into whatever land they may go . . . .You may say this to Théoden son of Thengel: open war lies before him, with Sauron or against him. None may live now as they have lived . . . ." It hardly even seems surprising that those words occur in the volume entitled The Two Towers. Mordor and its creatures will always be with us, in one form or another, and we shall always have to cope with them. I cling to the hope that fantasy can help prepare its readers to face evil, and to survive — but we live in the real world, where there is no Ring of Power that can be cast into the Crack of Doom, to make all well.
From the March/April 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
first set eyes on J. R. R. Tolkien when I was eighteen years old,
a first-year undergraduate at the University of Oxford, sitting
in a cavernous lecture hall with pen poised hungrily over notebook.
For those first few seconds, however, nobody took notes; we were
gazing startled at the chunky gray-haired figure hitching up his
academic robe over his tweed jacket. We were listening.
 |
  
 
  |
||||||||
