Meditations on Middle-Earth Page 17

  In his Andrew Lang Lecture (named for one of these very Victorian editors, although certainly not the worst of them), Tolkien decried this bowdlerization of the older fairy-story tradition. “Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from a full adult-art, would in the end be ruined; indeed, in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined.” Tolkien would have been discouraged indeed had he known that worse was still to come, for Walt Disney would do more damage to the tales than all Victorian editors put together. Just the year before, Disney had released Snow White, his first feature-length cartoon, making sweeping changes to this story of a mother and daughter’s poisonous relationship. Disney expanded the role of the prince, making the square-jawed fellow pivotal to the plot; he turned the dwarves into comically adorable (and thoroughly sexless) creatures. In this singing, dancing, whistling version, only the queen retains some of her old power. She’s a genuinely frightening figure, and far more compelling than the giggling, simpering Snow White—who is introduced in Cinderella’s rags, downtrodden but plucky. This gives Disney’s rendition of the tale its peculiarly American flavor, implying that what we are watching is an Horatio Alger–type rags-to-riches story. (In fact, it’s a story of riches to rags to riches, in which privilege is lost and then restored. Snow White’s pedigree beauty and class origins, not her housekeeping skills, assure her salvation.) Although the film was a commercial triumph, and has been beloved by generations of children, critics through the years have protested the broad changes Disney Studios made, and continues to make, when retelling such tales. Walt himself responded, “It’s just that people now don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. They were too rough. In the end they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.” Regrettably, time has proved him right. Through films, books, toys, and merchandise recognized all around the world, Disney, not Tolkien, is the name most associated with fairy-stories today.

  Disney, and the imitative books he spawned, bears a large part of the responsibility for our modern ideas about fairy tales and their fitness only for small children. And not all children at that, Tolkien argues persuasively in “On Fairy-Stories.” Children, he says, cannot be considered a separate class of being with tastes all formed alike. Some children, like some adults, are born with a natural appetite for marvels, while other children, even those raised side by side, simply are not. Those of us born with this appetite usually find that it doesn’t diminish with age, unless society teaches us to repress or sublimate it. Tolkien, of course, was the kind of child who hungered for marvels and magical adventures. “I desired dragons with a profound desire,” he tells us eloquently. And yet, he notes, fairy tales had not been his only interest in childhood. There were many things that he liked just as much, or more: history, astronomy, botany, grammer, and etymology. A deeper passion for fairy-stories developed “on the threshold of manhood,” where it was “wakened by philology.” And, he adds almost as an aside, it was “quickened to full life by the war.”

  I desired dragons with a profound desire. Most Tolkien readers, I suspect, have felt that very same sentiment. I certainly did, and yet I, too, desired many other things as well; and music, not books, played a far more dominate role in my early years. A stronger interest in fairy-stories wakened, like Tolkien’s, “on the threshold of adulthood,” and was, like his, “quickened to life by war,” of a peculiar sort. Before I leave the good green hills of Tolkien’s England for my own America, I’d like to take a moment to look at war in relation to fairy-stories. Tolkien himself does not dwell on this subject in the text of his Andrew Lang Lecture, and yet (as Tolkien scholars have argued) the experience of a world at war, of evil that threatened the land he loved, informs every single page of Frodo’s journey through Middle-earth. It is this—along with the elegant framework of myth and philology on which his tale is constructed—that lifts The Lord of the Rings from entertainment into literature.

  Another great fantasist, Alan Garner,2 has written about his own experience as a child in England during World War II, and how such experience affects the writing of magical fiction. “My wife,” Garner notes, “claims to find, in recent children’s literature, little that qualifies as literature. She asked herself why this should be, after a Golden Age that ran from the late Fifties to the late Sixties. And she found that generally writers of this Golden Age were children during the Second World War: a war raged against civilians. The atmosphere these children and young people grew up in was one of a whole community and a whole nature united against pure evil, made manifest in the person of Hitler. Parents were seen to be afraid. Death was a constant possibility. . . . Therefore, daily life was lived on a mythic plane: of absolute Good against absolute Evil; of the need to endure, to survive whatever had to be overcome, to be tempered in whatever furnace was required. . . . Those children who were born writers, and would be adolescent when the full horrors [of the concentration camps] became known, would not be able to avoid concerning themselves with the issues; and so their books, however clad, were written on profound themes, and were literature. The generation that has followed is not so fueled, and its writing is, by comparison, effete and trivial.”3

  While I agree with Garner that the “tempering furnace” of war has resulted in fine works of fantasy, I’d like to suggest that mythic themes can be found in other areas of life—including the domestic sphere that has been the historical province of women. Let’s take a look at the field of magical fiction published during the twentieth century, a field that, thanks to Tolkien, expanded rapidly from the sixties onward. It is possible to divide these books into two related but different kinds of tales: those rooted in the themes, symbols, and language of myth, epic, and romance, and those rooted in the humbler stuff of folklore and fairy tales. The first category includes tales epic in scope, full of sweeping heroic adventures and battles on which the fate of worlds, or at least kingdoms, depend. The later category includes much smaller tales, more intimate in nature—stories of individual rites of passage and personal transformation.4 Historically, epic literature was composed by men of the privileged classes, and preserved by highly educated bards, monks, scholars, and publishers. The oral folk-tale tradition, on the other hand, was a peasant tradition, and a largely female one. Even its male literary proponents (Basile, Straparola, Perrault, and the Grimms) acknowledged that the bulk of their source material came from women storytellers. What interests me here is that Tolkien’s clear preference for the first category was “quickened” by his experience of war in its most epic form: the great horrors of World War II. My own preference for the second category grew out of a different kind of war—an intimate war, a tempering furnace confined to the home front.

  In the sixties, as Tolkien’s hobbit and elves set sail across the wide Atlantic, I was a child growing up in an American working-class family. My stepfather was a truck driver, often unemployed, usually drunk; my mother held the family together working two, or three, or even four jobs at once, all of them menial, underpaid, demoralizing, and exhausting. Our small household was not unique, for this was the industrial Northeast where the steelworks and the factories that had sustained the previous generations were now all closing down, one after another, and moving south. Another thing that was not unique was the daily violence in our home—violence that broke bones, left scars, and sent us children to the hospital, where jaded, overworked doctors (in those days before child abuse reporting laws) sutured and plastered and bandaged us up and sent us back home again. There was nothing remarkable in this. Neighborhood kids sported black eyes too; their fathers were also out of work. That these men were angry was something we all knew. That they were frightened is something I only later understood. In the world my stepfather had nothing, but at home he could rule as a king, and the one measure of manhood that he had left lay in his fists. My brothers and I didn’t need Hitler’s bombs to understand how Sauron came to be; we didn’t need the Third Reich to make us feel helpless as hobbits.

  It wasn’t un
til I turned fourteen that I discovered Tolkien’s books. I began The Fellowship of the Ring on the school bus sometime during that year, reading with pure amazement as Middle-earth opened up before me. Culture, back then, came largely from the radio and the television, where The Brady Bunch strained credulity far greater than any fairy-story. But here, here, in this fantasy book I found reality, and truth—for ours was a childhood in which good and evil were not abstract concepts. Here, the mortal battle between the two became a tangible thing. Darkness spread over Middle-earth, corrupting everything it touched, and yet our hero persevered, armed with the greatest magics of all: the loyalty of his friends and the courage of a noble heart. I read Tolkien’s great trilogy in one gulp, and was profoundly changed . . . not, I have to add, because those books truly satisfied me. What they did was to reawaken my taste for magic, my old desire for dragons. But even then, in the years before I quite understood what feminism was, I saw that there was no place for me, a girl, on Frodo’s quest. Tolkien woke a longing in me . . . and then it was to other books I turned—to Mervyn Peake, E. R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, and William Morris, searching through those magical kingdoms for a country where I could live.

  THE PUNKEL-MAN

  The Return of the King

  Chapter HI: “The Muster of Rohan”

  Some months after I finished The Lord of the Rings, I discovered Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, a volume containing the expanded text of his essay “On Fairy-stories.” How, now, can I possibly convey the elation this slender book gave me? To understand, perhaps I must set the scene a bit more clearly. Picture a girl, rather small, quite bruised, frail of health and preternaturally quiet. Nights, at that particular time, when going home was problematic, I often spent in a secret nest I’d made (unbeknownst to anyone except a sympathetic janitor) in a hidden corner of the prop room behind my high school’s auditorium stage. Terror and exhaustion have never been known as aids to education, and so it was with laborious effort that I made my way through Tolkien’s prose, my critical faculties strained to their limit by this Oxfordian scholar. I didn’t understand all of it, not then. But I knew, somehow, this essay was for me. “It was in fairy-stories,” Tolkien told me, “that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” Yes, yes, yes, I murmured, excited now, for I’d felt that too. And this: “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood . . . But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” And especially this: “. . . it is one of the lessons of fairy-stories (if we can speak of the lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.”

  The thing that I took away from this essay, imperfectly as I understood it then, was that fairy tales had once been so much more than Disney cartoons. So I went back to the-fairy tale book that had been my favorite as a young child: The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, translated from the French by Marie Ponsot, and exquisitely, deliciously illustrated by Adrienne Segur. And here it was that I found at last the country that I could wander in, the water that would quench my thirst, and the food that would quell the ache in my belly. For I had been very fortunate as a child—this was no bowdlerized collection. These tales, largely taken from the Russian and the French, had been shortened for young readers but not simplified. Tolkien himself had never enjoyed the French tales of D’Aulnoy and Perrault, but I found in their rococo imagery exactly what I’d been looking for: intimate stories that spoke, in a coded language, of personal transformation. These were tales of children abandoned in woods; of daughters poisoned by their mothers’ hands; of sons forced to betray their siblings; of men and women struck down by wolves, or imprisoned in windowless towers. I read of the girl who dared not speak if she wanted to save her swan-brothers from harm; I read, heart pounding, of Donkeyskin, whose own father desired to bed her. The tales that affected me the most were variations on one archetypal theme: a young person beset by grave difficulties sets off, alone, through the deep, dark woods, armed only with quick wits, clear sight, persistance, courage, and compassion. It is by these virtues we identify the heroes; it is with these tools that they make their way. Without these tools, no magic can save them. They are at the mercy of the wolf and wicked witch.

  A year later, my own life reached the inevitable crisis of a classic fairy tale. I asked for a dress the color of the moon, the color of the sun, the color of the sky, but nothing I did kept evil at bay, and so I fled. Living on the streets of a distant city, my possessions fit into one small sack: two pairs of jeans; two flannel shirts; some letters from my first, lost love; a travel-stained sleeping bag; and The Golden Book of Fairy Tales. Like Frodo Baggins, I discovered I had the gift of making true friendships; and like the heroes of fairy tales, as I traveled onward through the woods, I learned that no kindness, however small, goes unrewarded. I learned how to tell friend from foe, and met helpers along the road, animal guides and fairies cloaked in the most unlikely disguises.

  A year later, by magic as powerful as any enchanted ring, I found myself in the safe harbor of a small midwestern college. It was here that I discovered the legacy J. R. R. Tolkien had left behind: a whole new publishing genre called fantasy, rooted in myth and magic. It was deeply important to me that some of these books were written by women authors: Ursula Le Guin, Patricia A. McKillip, Joy Chant, Susan Cooper, C. L. Moore, and many others, blazing trails into the lands where I longed to make my home. I studied literature, folklore, and women’s studies, and satisfied my hunger with the scholarly works of Katherine Briggs, the fiction of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Angela Carter, the fairy-tale poetry of Anne Sexton, the fairy-tale art of Jessie M. King . . . all of which proved that Tolkien had been right: fairy-stories could rise to Art. And that even I, a working-class girl, could add to the soup of story.

  College, for me, marked my emergence from the dark woods to a brighter place, the fertile lands where life could now be lived happily ever after. This does not mean, of course, a life free of difficulties and challenges, but one that partakes of the qualities that Tolkien required in a fairystory’s ending: the consolation of joy and what he called “a miraculous grace.” As fond as I am of this brighter land, there are times when I journey back into those woods, back into the dark, back once upon a time into the endless story. Now, however, I have a different part to play. I’m not the hero struggling through; I’m the one waiting by the side of the road, disguised, and ready to the light the way for those who come behind me.

  Wherever I stand waiting on that road, Tolkien has usually been there before. If I ever come face to face with him in that forest, I shall shake his hand.

  1. In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Oxford University Press, 1947.

  2. Author of The Owl Service, Elidor, Red Shift, Strandloper, and other fine books.

  3. In his essay collection The Voice That Thunders, The Harvill Press, 1998.

  4. Some authors write in both modes, of course. Tolkien himself adopted the fairy-tale voice in his shorter fiction.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Haber is the author of eight novels including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts (Pocket Books) and a three-book series for Daw Books, Woman Without a Shadow, The War Minstrels, and Sister Blood. She is co-author of Science of the X-Men. Her short fiction has appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many anthologies, including Sandman: Boofe of Dreams and Alien Pets. She lives in Oakland, California.

  George R. R. Martin is the award-winning author of five novels, including Fever Dream and The Armageddon Rag. For the last ten years, he has been a screenwriter for feature films and television and was the producer of the TV series Beauty and the Beast as well as a story editor for The Twilight Zone. Aft
er a ten-year hiatus, he has now returned to writing novels full-time and is presently at work on A Dance with Dragons, the fourth book of his Song of Ice and Fire series.

  Raymond E. Feist’s latest book, Krondor the Asssassins, is the second book of his Riftwar Legacy series, following on the heels of Krondor, the Betrayal. His previous novels include Magician, Silverthron, Faerie Tale, Prince of the Blood, and The King’s Buccanner, as well as the four books of his New York Times bestselling Serpentwar Saga. He is the creator of the immensely popular computer game Betrayal at Krondor—which won Computer Magazine’s Best Game of the Year Award—and the follow-up game, Return to Krondor.