Meditations on Middle-Earth Read online

  The first major publication was The Silmarillion in 1977, an editorially constructed version of Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” legends. (Here I follow the convention in Tolkien scholarship in referring to the published volume in italics, as The Silmarillion, while the “Silmarillion” in quotations marks refers to the evolving legends more generally.) This was followed by a collection of Unfinished Tales in 1980. From 1983 through 1996, Tolkien fans were given a new collection of Middle-earth writings nearly every year, the sum total being twelve large volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s series on The History of Middle-earth. The resulting fourteen volumes—for one must include Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion as part of the whole History—span nearly sixty years of Tolkien’s creative work on his invented world. These volumes contain a multitude of fascinating things—a few completed, though most are not—varying in form from stories, essays, and annals to grammars, maps, illustrations, and poems (short ones, as well as long narrative poems in rhyming couplets or in alliterative verse). These works will be discussed below, but for now, suffice it to say that these fourteen posthumously published volumes contain roughly four times the amount of writing that is to be found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Admittedly there is duplication and repetition, as well as some overlapping of contents (particularly in the volumes of the History, which cover the writing of The Lord of the Rings); nevertheless the simple amount of material on Middle-earth that Tolkien produced in his lifetime is staggering.

  A few additional posthumous publications are worth noting here. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981) is an enormously significant compilation in the field of Tolkien studies, for Tolkien’s letter-writing style is in itself very engaging, and the letters (often written to fans, answering specific questions about his writings) reveal many otherwise unknown details of Tolkien’s creation and his literary intentions. Taken together with Humphrey Carpenter’s J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), an authorized account for which Carpenter was given access to all of Tolkien’s papers, the Letters and the biography are the two best starting points for an understanding of Tolkien as a literary writer. To highlight just one additional book, J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (1995), by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, shows another facet of Tolkien’s skills, collecting a large number of his own drawings and paintings, many of which depict scenes and landscapes of Middle-earth, thereby giving another, visual, means to appreciate Tolkien’s world.

  LEGOLAS, ARAGORN AND GIMLI

  The Two Towers

  Book 3, Chapter II: “The Riders of Rohan”

  To turn finally to the critical response, from the very beginning Tolkien’s writings have evoked an initial reaction more emotional than intellectual. The reviews for The Hobbit at the time of its first publication are mostly pleasant, if occasionally a bit bewildered in trying to find a book to which to compare it. (In truth, none of the comparisons really work, for Tolkien was breaking new ground.) Farmer Giles of Ham, published twelve years after The Hobbit, didn’t garner much attention at all. But a few years later, with the publication of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, the polarization of response to Tolkien began in earnest. Though The Lord of the Rings is in fact a single novel, it was split up into three volumes for marketing reasons, as the publisher hoped that three volumes, priced competitively, would get three sets of reviews, while a much higher-priced single volume would be reviewed only once, and probably sell fewer copies. The publishing strategy worked.

  Some very big names, including W. H. Auden, Naomi Mitchison, and C. S. Lewis (who was also Tolkien’s close friend), reviewed the books with high praise in high-profile periodicals, but others with equally big names did not like the books, and said so quite volubly. The single most notorious anti-Tolkien review is the one by Edmund Wilson entitled “Oo, Those Awful Ores!” that appeared in The Nation in April 1956. In it, Wilson claims to have read the whole novel out loud to his seven-year-old daughter (yet he curiously misspells the name of a major character as “Gandalph”) and calls The Lord of the Rings “essentially a children’s book—a children’s book that has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the ‘juvenile’ market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake.” Herein lies the basic charge that most other detractors of Tolkien have leveled against him in the years following. The problem, for Wilson, is that the book is fantasy, and he thereby attempts to marginalize it by saying it is for children. A study of Wilson’s other critical writings shows that he had a marked dislike for almost any fantasy, although he did admit to liking the writings of James Branch Cabell, whose stories of Poictesme, a small imaginary kingdom of southern France, exhibit just the sort of risqué naughtiness and sexual innuendo that Wilson clearly expected to find in novels for “adults.”

  The controversy about The Lord of the Rings raged again in the mid-1960s, after the books were published for the first time in paperback in the United States, and they reached the bestseller’s lists. But the basic argument against Tolkien remained mostly unchanged. The critic Harold Bloom has recently taken a slightly different tack in his dismissal of Tolkien, mistakenly confusing the widespread growth of Tolkien’s popularity in the 1960s with the idea that Tolkien’s works are thereafter to be considered as rooted in those times, culturally and historically. Bloom considers The Lord of the Rings to be what he calls (with capital letters) a “Period Piece”—presumably something that was once popular for some (to him) unfathomable reason, but was soon afterward forgotten. Bloom could not be more wrong.

  The posthumous publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 was heralded by the media as an event, but aside from a few reviewers (notably Anthony Burgess and John Gardner), most critics compared The Silmarillion to The Lord of the Rings, and found it lacking in any of the charms of the latter book. Unfinished Tales, published in 1980, fared no better, and the subsequent twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth have been studiously ignored by literary reviewers. In retrospect, one can see that, after the success of The Lord of the Rings, most serious criticism of Tolkien moved away from the mainstream newspapers and magazines and into specialist journals and books.

  The critical antipathy to Tolkien is not merely a matter of genre but also of style and tone. The Lord of the Rings is really not, by more exacting critical definitions, a novel, but it is, as Tolkien himself called it, a “heroic romance.” The Lord of the Rings is an example of a genre that had its origins thousands of years earlier, in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in Beowulf, and in the Arthurian tales—a genre that by the early twentieth century had been marginalized, particularly after the rise of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre of romance didn’t die out by any means, but had limped along quietly for a few decades. Tolkien’s work is firmly rooted in this romantic tradition, but it is also a development of that tradition along the lines of modern novelistic conventions.

  Just at the time when the proponents of realism had begun to dominate the literary world, along came Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, his refashioning of the old genre. And as regards tone, Tolkien’s writings are markedly different from the predominantly ironic trend in modern works. Tolkien was not incapable of irony, but he did not write in a largely ironic tone. Thus Tolkien’s work represents much of what the modernists (and after them, the postmodernists) simply detest—and what is perhaps to them the worst offense of all, Tolkien’s works have become popular.

  To the book-buying public, the success of The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1960s inspired a revival of the older romance genre under the new name of fantasy literature. Tolkien’s paperback publisher in America, Ballantine Books, responded to the increased demand for more things like Tolkien with a new series of Ballantine Adult Fantasy. The Ballantine series reprinted a large number of obscure books from earlier in the century, showing indeed that the genre of romance had by no means died out, but had moved along in the shadows of the more dominant literary forms. The series brought to a new audience the w
ritings of such authors, now considered among the titans of the genre, as E. R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, David Lindsay, and Mervyn Peake. And the market for new works of fantasy grew in leaps and bounds. The consideration of these post-Tolkienian fantasies I will leave for others, but I do note that many of the problems of these works have to do with the commercial success of fantasy, and of the genre thereby becoming an industry or commodity. As Ursula K. Le Guin has aptly written: “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.”

  The academic response to Tolkien has been nearly as problematic as the critical one, for in many instances the critics and the academics are the same people. As well, much of the modern literary education at universities has become so narrowly focused that one can without exaggeration say that readers are educated away from Tolkien by the conventional literary establishment.

  Yet Tolkien has over the years made small inroads into the curriculums of some English departments. And his writings have been more widely appreciated in the specialized field of medieval studies, where a significant number of today’s medieval scholars credit Tolkien with having been an inspiration in their choice of careers.

  Academic criticism of Tolkien began in the sixties, and reached its highest point in the period before Tolkien’s death with Paul Kocher’s Master of Middle-earth (1972), a critical book that was also a popular success. Kocher’s book has long been superceded, but it retains merit. In the years since, there have been quite a number of scholarly books on Tolkien. The best of these books are Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth (1982), and Verlyn Flieger’s A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (1997). The Road to Middle-earth is a comprehensive look at Tolkien’s use of language and at how medieval languages and literatures influenced him, while A Question of Time explores comprehensively some smaller aspects of Tolkien, specifically his concerns with time and with dreams and how he used these elements in his fiction to deal with issues of the times in which he lived. But even these highly intellectual studies of Tolkien are for readers already sympathetic to him—in effect, they preach to the converted. Not so Tom Shippey’s newest book, contentiously entitled J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), which discusses Tolkien in relation to other modern writers such as George Orwell and James Joyce. Shippey presents a strong case for Tolkien being studied as a major modern writer, but whether the anti-Tolkien faction will even read this book remains a major question.

  What is distressing is not the fact that these critics have dissenting views about Tolkien (and about fantasy), but that in the competition over the syllabuses at universities, and in the proposing of a literary canon, they seek to exclude anything that doesn’t fall within their own narrow range of sympathies. And thereby they attempt to exclude Tolkien.

  Leaving the critics aside, it is time to turn attention to just what understanding of Tolkien we gain from all of the posthumous publications, including his Letters and the History of Middle-earth series. First, it is worth pointing out a fact that is often overlooked, which is that Tolkien was not a writer by profession, and that he did not make his living by writing stories. He was a distinguished professor at Oxford University, where he held two chairs successively, first as the Rawlinson Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925-1945, second as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 until his retirement in 1959.

  Tolkien’s contributions to his own scholarly field were not especially numerous during his lifetime, but they were of a high quality. Among them are A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), designed for use with Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921), an edition (co-edited with E. V. Gordon) of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), and an edition of the Ancrene Wisse (1962), a thirteenth-century guide for women who lived as religious recluses in cells adjoining churches. Tolkien’s lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” delivered to the British Academy in 1936, is a landmark in the study of Anglo-Saxon poems.

  A number of his academic works have also come out posthumously, including his translations of three Middle English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (1975), and a volume of scholarly essays, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1983). Some of Tolkien’s lecture notes and working editions have also been published, including The Old English Exodus (1981), edited by Joan Turville-Petre, and Finn and Hengest (1982), edited by Alan Bliss.

  Tolkien’s posthumous writings on Middle-earth, it must be admitted, are not always easy reading. Within the invented world, Tolkien’s writings begin with legends of the creation of the world, moving forward in time from there through three full ages of history. These writings tell of the wars with the first dark lord, Morgoth, which span the entire First Age; of the Atlantis-like story of Nûmenór, and its sinking near the end of the Second Age; and of the stories of the Third Age, including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which tell of the eventual downfall of Sauron, a follower of Morgoth who set himself up as a second dark lord. Some of Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings transcend the age structure, as do some of his works on the languages, and the extraordinary short cosmological essay with diagrams, “Ambarakanta” (“The Shape of the World”).

  Tolkien’s writings on Middle-earth range in date from around 1915 until his death in 1973; and in Christopher Tolkien’s presentation, they are arranged mostly in a chronological order as to when they were written or worked on. With the publication of these writings we can now view as if from above the development of Tolkien’s entire legendarium, which began, as Tolkien himself frequently recalled, as a vehicle for his invented languages. Tolkien felt that for his languages to live and evolve like real languages, they must have a people to speak them. He began with his Gnomish and Qenya (later, Quenya) languages, the speakers being elves. Tolkien envisioned a framework whereby an Anglo-Saxon mariner would sail overseas and be told stories by the elves, which he would later write up as “The Book of Lost Tales” after his return. Tolkien worked on these “Lost Tales” from around 1916-1920, after which time he concentrated on telling two of the major “Silmarillion” stories, those of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien, in narrative verse. His “Lay of the Children of Húrin” reached more than 2,000 lines of alliterative verse, while “The Lay of Leithian” grew to more than 4,000 lines of octosyllabic couplets. Both are considerable expansions of their respective stories as told in “The Book of Lost Tales,” and both remained unfinished.

  Around 1926, Tolkien wrote out a prose “Sketch of the Mythology,” which was for him the original “Silmarillion,” later expanded and rewritten a number of times. By this time the essential core of stories related in the “Silmarillion” had been achieved, despite the fact that these stories would be rewritten in various forms over many years.

  In the early 1930s, Tolkien wrote for his children the story The Hobbit, and in it, Tolkien freely used some characters (such as Elrond), places, and stories from his already existing mythology. He would later refer to this development as “the world into which Mr. Baggins strayed.” For The Hobbit was intended to be a separate work, but as he wrote it, elements from the “Silmarillion” crept in. After The Hobbit was published and proved successful, Tolkien was asked for a sequel. The resulting novel, The Lord of the Rings, is as much a sequel to The Hobbit as it is a sequel to the whole “Silmarillion” legendarium.

  Initially, Tolkien’s invented mythology had been a closed thing, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, like the Gylfaginning, the first part of the thirteenth-century prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, which sums up the Old Norse mythology, and which was an inspiration to Tolkien. Gradually, however, the end to Tolkien’s mythology receded, and his invented history grew with the stories of later ages, including that of the Third Age, whose end is related i
n The Lord of the Rings.

  Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings in 1937, and reached the end of the narrative twelve years later, in 1949. For a few years he worked diligently on the “Silmarillion,” hoping to be able to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings as one large “Saga of the Three Jewels and the Rings of Power.” In the end, only The Lord of the Rings came out at that time, and much of Tolkien’s extensive writings intended for the appendices had to be omitted.

  The volumes of the History of Middle-earth series, which cover the writing of The Lord of the Rings, are a special treat, for in them we learn a great deal about how Tolkien worked as a writer. Christopher Tolkien’s account—in essence the history of the writing of a book—is unlike any other literary history, for in it we see the authorial process itself at work, and in great detail. Tolkien made many hasty notes to himself, and lengthy outlines, about the direction of the story, about why it could or couldn’t go such and such a way. All these thoughts and arguments are written out. We literally see Tolkien thinking on paper, and we can share with Tolkien the wonder and bewilderment of new characters appearing as if from nowhere. What a privileged viewpoint this is.

  After The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien turned a considerable amount of attention to parts of the internal philosophy of his invented world. He examined in great detail many aspects of the nature of the elves, their marriage customs and ceremonies, and their nature within the world, their spirits, and the idea of elvish reincarnation. He explored ideas on the nature of evil, and the origins of ores. Tolkien also worked on some of the external aspects of Middle-earth, particularly on its cosmology, for he came to view that the setting of his invented world must be within the physical universe as understood by modern minds. Thereby he came to feel that he should discard his genuinely moving myth of the creation of the Sun and Moon as the last fruits of the Two Trees in Valinor. Christopher Tolkien, in sorting through the various versions of his father’s writings, wisely retained this legend in the published Silmarillion.