Meditations on Middle-Earth Read online

  Tolkien spent a great deal of time after the success of The Lord of the Rings in trying to recast his “Silmarillion” materials in a publishable form, and in trying to perfect a framework in which he could present these disparate legends and writings. He was, all through his lifetime, deeply concerned with the method of transmission of his tales—with who, within the invented world, wrote them originally, be it either of the elven sages, Rúmil or Pengolodh, and how these tales have survived into modern times, through copies and translations made by hobbits, and preserved among hobbit-lore, or by other means. Tolkien seems never to have satisfactorily resolved this for himself, and in the published version of The Silmarillion, all remarks placing the writings in this sort of historical context were removed.

  As mentioned above, some of the volumes of the History of Middle-earth series are not necessarily easy reading. First of all, the writings cover an enormous span of time, and the Tolkien who wrote in the teens was not yet the talented prose stylist that he would become in the thirties and forties. As well, Tolkien developed certain prose styles for the differing methods in which he attempted to tell his tales. One Tolkien critic, David Bratman, has divided up Tolkien’s prose styles into four main types, and these distinctions are useful in describing the varied materials in Tolkien’s legendarium. The first is Tolkien’s novelistic approach, as is found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The three other prose styles Bratman has labeled as the Annalistic, the Appendical, and the Antique. The Annalistic style is that found in the various “Annals” and in the published Silmarillion—a distant, quick-moving narration of events. The Appendical style is much more essay-like, as is found in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; it is also the predominant style of Tolkien’s letters, and many of Tolkien’s late philosophical writings. The Antique is the most archaic of Tolkien’s styles, found in the “Ainulindalë” (“The Music of the Ainur,” the creation myth at the beginning of The Silmarillion), and in Tolkien’s earliest prose writings, The Book of Lost Tales.

  Within each of these four styles of Tolkien’s prose there are some remarkable writings. But in his narrative mode, which is perhaps the most engaging to the general reader, several of the most interesting examples are found in the volumes covering the writing of The Lord of the Rings, including the otherwise unpublished “Epilogue,” which ties up a number of loose ends from the story. Also of considerable interest is “The New Shadow,” the single, tantalizing chapter that Tolkien wrote for a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. (It appears in the last volume of the History.)

  One thing the History of Middle-earth series makes abundantly clear, which readers only versed with The Lord of the Rings might not have thoroughly grasped, is that at the heart of Tolkien’s great legendarium, of which The Lord of the Rings is but the small concluding part, are the legends of the “Silmarillion.” Tolkien created—or subcreated, to use his own terminology—an entire world, and few aspects of it escaped his scrutiny. From the peoples and places, to the languages, nomenclatures, and writing systems, to the artwork, the textiles, and the calendars, etc.—all sorts of things beyond a simple narrative text. This multiplicity of expression and sheer attention to detail is one of the primary points of appeal for many readers of Tolkien; and in another sense this appeal often extends into a desire for more detail, and for some form of participation with the invented world on the part of the reader.

  As embarrassing as the hobbit drama I wrote at age fourteen might be for me today, it shows this common impulse of many Tolkien readers. Writers are inspired to write. Artists want to illustrate and make paintings of scenes and characters. Musicians write music associated with stories. Linguists interpolate the gaps in the evolution of Tolkien’s languages. And filmmakers want to make movies.

  Readers want to involve themselves, and use whatever interests and talents they possess in order to participate in some way in Tolkien’s world. These writings invite such a participation in a way that few other works of literature do. And therein lies the power of Tolkien’s magnificent creation.

  As Tolkien fans, we stand today at a crossroad. Before us looms Peter Jackson’s three multimillion-dollar films of The Lord of the Rings, the first of which is due for release around Christmas 2001. Beside us stands a worldwide readership of the three-volume novel upon which the films are based. Behind each of us is our personal experience of reading Tolkien, our favorite characters and passages, the scenes and images Tolkien’s words have conjured up in our minds, and our joy in sharing these enthusiasms with others.

  The future is a question mark. Tolkien’s novel has survived one previous attempt at filming, the 1978 Ralph Bakshi “rotoscoped” version, made by intermixing some live action in with what is predominately animation. Even that film was intended as part one of a series of films, but no theatrical follow-ups were ever made after the box office failure of the first part. Another firm, Rankin/Bass, did make an animated musical television production of The Return of the King (1980), as a follow-up to a similar version of The Hobbit (1977). Of the Bakshi movie itself, and of the truly execrable television programs, the less said about them, the better.

  Now Hollywood has opened its considerable pocketbook for a new live-action version, with all three parts filmed before even the first part is released. The promise of the new films is tempered by experience, and by an entirely proper wariness and skepticism over what Hollywood might do to the novel. There is a modicum of solace: whatever the final judgment may be on Peter Jackson’s films, the novel will always be there.

  What is probably more alarming than any prospective film is the fact that Hollywood’s engines of hype and commerce have been whirring along at full throttle for some years already, long before the release of the first film. The juggernaut of action figures, toys, puzzles, games, mugs, cards, stickers, figurines, and things such as Gollum Happy Meals will soon be upon us. These things are licensed not by the Tolkien estate, but by Tolkien Enterprises, a Hollywood firm completely unconnected with the Tolkien family, set up to exploit the movie, trademark, and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien himself sold off a few years before he died. And along with the movie-associated hype will come the inevitable rehashing of stale puns (e.g., “J. R. R. Tolkien is hobbit-forming”) which we will be forced to endure from the ill-informed, smiling, vacuous faces of the media. In my view, all of this simply cheapens what is special about Tolkien—to the general public, at least, whose opinions of Tolkien are not yet shaped or prejudiced. For myself, I’m nearly prepared to go underground for the next few years. (Notice to the media: I mean that metaphorically, not literally—no hobbit-holes for me, please.)

  From this vantage point I wonder how the future will view Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings versus Peter Jackson’s films of it. Are we, as Tolkien fans in the year 2001, doomed to the same inescapable fate as that of the fans of L. Frank Baum in 1939, just before the release of the Judy Garland musical of Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? Today it seems impossible to view Baum’s book in any other way than through the lens of the film, titled more simply The Wizard of Oz. Judy Garland is forever Dorothy Gale, while Margaret Hamilton has become a cultural icon for her superb performance as the Wicked Witch of the West. How will Peter Jackson’s choice of actors and actresses affect future Tolkien reader’s perceptions of the various characters? And what about his choice of New Zealand to be the visual backbone of Middle-earth? Or to put it more generally, will Peter Jackson’s vision become the lens through which our society views Tolkien?

  For good or ill, I hope not. I find I’m rather a purist for the written word, and in particular for the novel The Lord of the Rings. That is the form in which Tolkien envisioned and, in turn, created his masterpiece, and that is the form by which it should be remembered. This view, however, does not mean that I will scorn Peter Jackson’s films. The translation of a novel to the screen is a process fraught with difficulties, and in the case of a really long work,
like The Lord of the Rings, compression and alteration are inevitable. But I do look forward . . . cautiously . . . to the results of Peter Jackson’s efforts.

  HOW

  TOLKIEN

  MEANS

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  When, as a child, J. R. R. Tolkien was inventing Middle-earth, modernism had not yet reared its head. And since Tolkien’s academic career kept him immersed in languages no longer spoken, it is no surprise that his fictions showed no particular awareness of the modernist approach to literature.

  Yet when Tolkien declared his distaste for allegory in all its forms, he was also rejecting modernism’s ways of interpreting the meaning of stories—and, ultimately, of inserting meaning into stories. Certainly the modernists did not embrace the one-to-one correspondence of object and referent that typified medieval allegory. But in the long run, modernism has led to a method of interpreting the meaning of stories that, like allegory, amounts to decoding stories instead of experiencing them.

  Tolkien’s stories resist this method of reading, which is why standard literary methods invariably lead to empty interpretations of Tolkien’s work. What does the invisibility ring “mean” in The Hobbit, and how is that meaning different from the “meaning” of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings? Jigger this question as you will: How do we interpret the metaphor of the ring? To what was Tolkien alluding in the surrounding culture when he used a ring as the embodiment of power? And the problem is still the same: the rings have no “meaning” outside the story in which Tolkien employed them.

  The ring in The Hobbit gave Bilbo Baggins the power to be invisible; it also provided him with a dangerous traveling companion in the form of Gollum, who felt (quite correctly) that he had been cheated in the game of riddles. The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings was forged by Sauron to give its wearer mastery over the rings of elves, dwarves, and men; and those who wear the ring can easily be captured by the evil inherent in its power—not to mention that Smeagol/Gollum still tags along, as dangerous as ever. That is the meaning of the ring in these two works. It is what it does. Tolkien did not intend it to “mean” anything more, because Tolkien did not write his fictions to be decoded, but rather to be experienced and kept whole in the readers’ memory.

  Of course you can “decode” Tolkien’s fiction according to whichever lit-crit lens you happen to be looking through. That’s why these methods have been so popular in the universities for several generations now—you can always find something that you can declare to be a metaphor or symbol or analogy, and, like someone on a psychic hotline, spin out endless interpretations that cannot be contradicted by the text. The postmodern methods—feminism, multiculturalism, deconstructionism—differ in that they look for unconscious encoded messages, and then get angry at or contemptuous of the author for what he is found to have “revealed” about himself in his text. But they still treat the text as something to be decoded.

  Writers who have been trained to think of writing fiction as the process of encoding meanings into a text produce stories in which such symbols are carefully inserted at key points and in ways that careful readers cannot miss. When you find their symbols, you are usually left in no doubt that this is a symbol, which has a clear meaning to the author—and often to the characters as well. Even when the meaning is left ambiguous or vague, you are clearly told by the way these symbols are inserted—usually by their irrelevance to the main line of the story—that this object is fraught with meaning, and attention must be paid. Certainly we recognize the bits they’ve inserted in order to stave off the contempt of the postmodernists—ah, here’s the bit that keeps the feminists from killing this story; and here’s the bit to make sure the multiculturalists recognize the author as acceptable. The story itself is often an afterthought. Certainly that’s the way literature is generally taught in the universities—the value (or lack of value) of the great stories comes from the messages that can be decoded.

  Why, then, are Tolkien’s ring and Gandalf’s staff and the hair on little hobbit-feet and the magical Ent-water that Pippin and Meriadoc drink not “fraught”? Why is it that when literadors skewer these objects and hold them up for display, announcing what they “mean,” we who love these stories turn our heads away in some embarrassment, as if they had just used their soup spoon to eat their mashed potatoes?

  Because Tolkien, like most storytellers in most societies throughout history, values stories as stories, not as essays in disguise. Tolkien does not want you to read his stories, decoding as you go. He wants you to immerse yourself in the tale, and care about what the characters do and why they do it. He wants you to feel frustrated when the Steward tries to burn his son alive, and relieved when his son’s life is saved. He does not want you to start wondering if this is some sort of undoing of the Christ myth, or perhaps an allusion to the Akedah, in which the father offers his son as sacrifice only to have the sacrifice stopped at the last minute, with the father himself serving as “ram in the thicket.” He does not want you to think of how this is really an analogy to the way the authority-loving patriarchy destroys its male children. He wants you to rush headlong through the story to find out what happens next. To find out what these events mean to the characters, what results will come from them, what causes will later be discovered. Aha, he was using the Palantir of Gondor! Aha, Faramir will be unable to step into the role of leader, leaving the road clear for Aragorn without forcing a conflict between these two good men.

  The only meanings Tolkien cares about are the meanings within the story, not extraneous to it. These devices are present in the story for the story’s sake. There is no Freudian imperative to put new names on them in order to understand them. Tolkien has given them their right names from the start; and when he does switch names, it is for practical, not literary, reasons—Aragorn is also Strider, Saruman is also Sharkey, and Smeagol is also Gollum—because their role in society changes in the process of the story, and the revelation of identity is meant to revise the meaning of the story to its participants as well as to the readers. Those revelations change the meaning of the story within the story, and not just in English class.

  There are literadors who recognize this, but regard it as a reason to treat Tolkien’s work as “subliterary.” Because it does not lend itself to being operated on with the tools of the trade, Tolkien’s oeuvre is not worthy of treatment as serious literature. And, apart from the value judgment inherent in this attitude, they are correct. If by “serious” literature, you mean literature whose meaning is to be found upon the surface of the story like an exoskeleton, to be anatomized without ever actually getting into the story itself, then Tolkien’s work is certainly not “serious.’

  What Tolkien wrote is obviously not “serious,” but “escapist.”

  Those who read “seriously” have no possibility of escape. They are never inside the world of the story (or at least cannot admit it in their “serious” discussion of it—God forbid they should be caught committing the misdemeanor of Naive Identification). They remain in their present reality, perpetually detached from the story, examining it from the outside, until—aha!—the sword flashes and the literador stands triumphant, with another clean kill. It is a contest from which only one participant can emerge alive.

  “Escapist” literature, on the other hand, demands that readers leave their present reality, and dwell, for the duration of the story, within the world the writer creates. “Escaping” readers do not hold themselves aloof, reading in order to write of what they have found. Escapists identify with protagonists, care about what they care about, judge other characters by their standards, and hope for or dread the various outcomes that seem possible at any given moment in the tale. When the story is over, escapists are reluctant to return to the prison of reality—so reluctant that they will even read the appendices in order to remain just a little longer in a world where it matters that Frodo bore the ring too long ever to return to a normal life, that the elves are leaving Middle-earth, and that there is
a king in Gondor.

  So there we have it: “serious” literature is a complicated business, requiring experts to extract meanings, while “escapist” literature is so simple it needs no mediation.

  Wait. That’s not how it works at all. On the contrary, “serious” literature is so simple that it can be decoded, its meanings laid out in essay form, while “escapist” literature is so complex and deep that it cannot be mediated, but must be experienced; and no two readers experience it the same.

  AT HELM’s GATE

  The Two Towers

  Chapter IV: “Helm’s Deep”

  That is the great secret of contemporary literature, that to write with “meaning” in mind simplifies a story. Consciously created symbols and metaphors silt it up until it is only a few inches deep, and you can find the fish as they flop around, and pick them up with your bare hands. But those stories written without an extraneous meaning run fast and deep, and those who dive in and are carried along by the current can never, as they say, step in the same river twice.

  The Sirens chapter is always the Sirens chapter, every time you read it. But the Inn at Bree is never the same place for any two readers, or even for the same reader at different times.