Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  In fact, it seemed that adolescent boys had become the particular bete noire of feminist writers eager to pour scorn and derision on the Waterstone’s poll. For a writer in the Guardian it was sufficient to point out merely that ‘Tolkein’s [sic] The Lord of the Rings [was] a favourite with adolescent boys.’19 Having made this most damning of all criticisms, no further comment was required. Interestingly, however, the comedy writer Andrew Nickolds remembered travelling on the Northern Line in London in the 1970s: ‘You’d walk up the escalator that had all these girls standing on the right-hand side in big long pea coats from Lawrence Corner, all with a copy of Lord of the Rings bent open at a page.’20

  Probably the most bitter attack on Tolkien’s triumph came from Germaine Greer. Writing in W Magazine, Waterstone’s own literary journal, Greer complained that the enduring success of The Lord of the Rings was a nightmare come true:

  As a fifty-seven-year-old lifelong teacher of English, I might be expected to regard this particular list of books of the century with dismay. I do. Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialised. At the head of the list, in pride of place as the book of the century, stands The Lord of the Rings. Novels don’t come more fictional than that. Most novels are set in a recognisable place at a recognisable time,—Tolkien invents the era, the place, and a race of fictitious beings to inhabit it. The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic.21

  The nature of this and other attacks on Tolkien’s achievement induced Paul Goodman to offer the case for the defence in a review of The Lord of the Rings in the Daily Telegraph. Far from fleeing from reality, Goodman argued, Tolkien was concerned with the ultimate reality of human life. All humanity has one thing in common, ‘the readers and writer of this article, and Ms Greer too: all of us are going to die.’

  Here, surely, lies the most persuasive reason for the enduring success of The Lord of the Rings. That circular journey from the Shire to Mordor and back to the Shire again is all about growing older—or, rather, about growing up.22

  According to Goodman the various aspects of the book’s plot ‘all point to conclusions as true as they are commonplace: that growing up is painful, but cannot be avoided; that it involves hard choices, which we are free to take; that choices have consequences, and that even good ones will not bring back the past.’

  ‘If the book leaves many parts of the human experience unaddressed,’ Goodman continued, ‘it none the less explores the parts that are of the greatest importance. Ms Greer was not quite right in implying that Tolkien has nothing to say about war or politics, though what he does have to say may not please her.’

  Goodman concluded his article by suggesting that ‘the key’ to The Lord of the Rings was its ‘religious sensibility’: ‘a sense that there is a final bliss to be enjoyed, though neither in Middle Earth nor on this earth. And though it has undoubted weaknesses, do they really outweigh its strengths—its scale of vision, its fecundity of invention, the rhythmic power of much of the writing? No: Tolkien’s epic is not the greatest book of the century: but be wary of the judgment of anyone who hates it.’

  Goodman was not the only writer to spring to Tolkien’s defence. Patrick Curry, author of Defending Middle Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, argued that The Lord of the Rings was anything hut a ‘flight from reality’:

  Tolkien did not simply lecture us, like Ruskin and Chesterton, about the dangers of the modern world; instead he wove his anti-modernism into a rich and intricate narrative that presents an alternative. In this version, as in ours, community (the hobbits and the Shire), the natural world (middle-earth itself), and spiritual values (symbolised by the Sea) are all under threat from the pathological union of state-power, capital and technological science that is Mordor. The difference is that in The Lord of the Rings the threat is averted—whereas in ours, the outcome still hangs in the balance. Perhaps it does so perpetually.

  Tolkien addressed the fears of late-20th-century readers. . . and gave them hope. Far from being escapist or reactionary, The Lord of the Rings addresses the greatest struggle of this century and beyond. And Greer, unlike the common reader, has completely missed it: certainly in the book, and perhaps in the world.

  Who, then, is living in a world of fantasy? Tolkien’s critics, not his readers, are out of touch with reality. Never has the intellectual establishment so richly deserved defiance.23

  On the day after Patrick Curry’s article had appeared in the New Statesman, Professor Jeffrey Richards of Lancaster University was writing indignantly to the Daily Telegraph:

  It was deeply disheartening to hear that Chris Woodhead, HM Chief Inspector of Schools, had joined the sneering chorus of intellectual snobs who have denounced the choice by Waterstone’s readers of The Lord of the Rings as the greatest book of the 20th century. . . He said that ‘it militates against the work of the English teachers across the country’. What arrant nonsense!

  The Lord of the Rings is a work of unique power, scope and imagination. Tolkien’s language is rich and allusive, his vocabulary extensive and varied. His descriptive writing is wonderful. His evocation of such invaluable virtues as loyalty, service, comradeship and idealism is inspiring. Above all, he creates a universe of myth, magic, and archetype that resonates in the deepest recesses of the memory and the imagination.

  Angus Wilson once said that most modern novels are about adultery in Muswell Hill. It was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one, for it drew attention to the tyranny of realism, narrowness, self-absorption and ‘relevance’ that holds too many modern writers and critics in thrall. Tolkien is an antidote to all that. The more children, indeed the more people of all ages, who read The Lord of the Rings, the better it will be not only for the literary level of this country but for its spiritual health.24

  A similar, though more specifically Christian, defence of Tolkien was made a week earlier by the writer Anne Atkins on the BBC’s Thought for the Day:

  The Lord of the Rings, we’re told, is not the best book of the twentieth century—though I’d love to know what is. But it’s not bad, is it? It isn’t a blockbuster by a leggy supermodel. Tolkien was a first-rate scholar, drawing on our vital Norse and Anglo-Saxon heritage, their ideology and poetic language. From this, he created an entire imaginary world, consistent within itself, with its own history, mythology, geography and even languages. He then combined this with a thumping good plot, and characters who are thoroughly credible despite being three feet high with hairy toes.

  And his Christianity shines through every page. He understands evil, for instance, and the way it seduces us, as it seduced Gollum, with its promise of goodness. How eventually, if we give in to it, it corrodes our freedom and will and individuality. . . Tolkien was a truly Christian novelist, who wrote a great Christian myth.

  . . . Tolkien’s Christian faith informed all his writing, and his heroes were based on a greater hero still. One who wasn’t flawed, and didn’t give way to evil. One who didn’t have A-levels either, but who is the perfect role model.25

  Perhaps the most enthusiastic response to Tolkien’s triumph was that of Desmond Albrow, writing in the Catholic Herald: ‘There is something truly inspirational in a man such as Tolkien, a true Catholic who stood four square for civilised decency, receiving such an accolade in a century that so often applauds the mean-spirited and the scintillatingly meretricious.’26

  As this mean-spirited and scintillatingly meretricious century draws to a close it seems that Tolkien still has the power to inspire and incite, as well as the ability to divide and conquer. For those he inspired, his work is loved; for those he incited it is loathed. He has divided the critics and has conquered the hearts of large sec
tions of the reading public. The myth he created remains both powerful and enigmatic—and all too often misunderstood. In order to understand the myth it is more necessary than ever to try to understand the man behind it.

  CHAPTER 2

  CRADLE CONVERT TO THE GRAVE:

  THE CHILD BEHIND THE MYTH

  One of my strongest opinions,’ Tolkien once wrote, ‘is that investigation of an author’s biography is an entirely vain and false approach to his works.’1 His view, which was rooted in a distrust of Freudian speculation and subjectivism, was similar to that expressed by his friend C.S. Lewis:

  Another type of critic who speculates about the genesis of your book is the amateur psychologist. He has a Freudian theory of literature and claims to know all about your inhibitions. He knows what unacknowledged wishes you were gratifying. . . By definition you are unconscious of the things he professes to discover. Therefore the more loudly you disclaim them, the more right he must be: though, oddly enough, if you admitted them, that would prove him right too. . . this procedure is almost entirely confined to hostile reviewers. And now that I come to think of it, I have seldom seen it practised on a dead author except by a scholar who intended, in some measure, to debunk him. That in itself is perhaps significant. And it would not be unreasonable to point out that the evidence on which such amateur psychologists base their diagnosis would not be thought sufficient by a professional. They have not had their author on the sofa, nor heard his dreams, and had the whole case-history.2

  A further note of caution was sounded by Tolkien in his foreword to The Lord of the Rings: ‘An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.’3

  None the less, the parameters of possibility within which an author must work are determined by his experience. The Lord of the Rings could not have been written by William Golding any more than The Lord of the Flies could have been written by Tolkien. It is therefore not only legitimate but necessary to examine an author’s life if we are to attain a greater understanding of his work. At the same time, being conscious of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s condemnation of Freudian criticism, the conscientious biographer or critic must seek to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivism and amateur psychology. If one is to understand the man behind the myth one must first avoid turning the man into a myth.

  Who then was J.R.R. Tolkien and what were the key events in his life which effected and affected his development into someone uniquely capable of writing The Lord of the Rings’?

  He was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa on 3 January 1892 and was christened John Ronald Reuel in the local Anglican Cathedral four weeks later. Shortly after his third birthday his mother returned to England, taking Tolkien and his younger brother Hilary with her. Tolkien retained nothing of the first few years of his life in South Africa except a few words of Afrikaans and a dim recollection of a barren, dusty landscape. His father, unable to vacate his post as manager of the Bloemfontein branch of the Bank of Africa, was forced to remain behind, intending to follow his wife and children to England as soon as the opportunity arose. Tolkien remembered his father painting ‘A.R. Tolkien’ on the lid of a family trunk shortly before their departure. It would be the last time he would see him and would be the only clear memory of him that he would retain. Several months after his family’s return to England, Arthur Tolkien contracted rheumatic fever and was forced to postpone his journey home. In January 1896 he was still in poor health and Mabel Tolkien planned to return to South Africa to care for him. Arrangements were made and an excited Tolkien, just turned four years old, dictated a letter to his father which was written out by his nurse:

  My Dear Daddy,

  I am so glad I am coming back to see you it is such a long time since we came away from you I hope the ship will bring us all back to you Mamie and Baby and me. I know you will be so glad to have a letter from your little Ronald it is such a long time since I wrote to you I am got such a big man now because I have got a man’s coat and a man’s bodice Mamie says you will not know Baby or me we have got such big men we have got such a lot of Christmas presents to show you Auntie Gracie has been to see us I walk every day and only ride in my mailcart a little bit. Hilary sends lots of love and kisses and so does your loving

  Ronald.4

  The letter, which was dated 14 February 1896, was never sent. A telegram arrived to say that his father had suffered a severe haemorrhage and that his mother must expect the worst. The next day Arthur Tolkien was dead. He was buried in the Anglican graveyard at Bloemfontein, five thousand miles from his family who were now living in Birmingham.

  Her husband’s death left Mabel Tolkien facing some hard decisions. She and her two young sons could not stay forever in her parents’ overcrowded suburban villa, yet she scarcely had sufficient resources to establish an independent household. Her husband had only amassed a modest sum of capital which would bring an income of no more than thirty shillings a week, not enough to maintain herself and the two boys on even a subsistence standard of living. She began scouring advertisements for local rented accommodation and in the summer of 1896 she found somewhere suitable and cheap enough for herself and the children to live independently. Their new home was a semi-detached brick cottage in the hamlet of Sarehole, a mile or so beyond the southern edge of Birmingham. Traffic in the village was limited to the occasional farm cart or tradesman’s wagon so it was easy to forget the proximity of the industrial city. With memories of South Africa receding into his subconscious and the urban buzz of Birmingham fresh in his mind, Tolkien experienced the contrast of English rural life at a time when his embryonic imagination was most receptive. It was in this tiny hamlet, in days of childhood innocence, that the seeds of the Shire were planted.

  It was also in Sarehole that Tolkien’s love for trees was born, as well as his loathing for those who destroyed them for no good reason. One incident in particular became ingrained in his memory: ‘There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that.’5

  Unable to afford tuition fees, Mabel Tolkien took on the education of her sons herself. She was a capable teacher, with a knowledge of Latin, French and German, and she could also paint, sketch and play the piano. From the beginning she realized that her older son had an aptitude for languages. His favourite subject was Latin, with the sounds and shapes of the words delighting him as much as their meaning.

  In the hours of the day when she was not teaching her children, Mabel Tolkien ensured they had plenty of books to read. The young Tolkien was unimpressed by Treasure Island, The Pied Piper and Hans Andersen, but he enjoyed Alice in Wonderland and was especially enthralled by the ‘Curdie’ books of George Macdonald in which evil goblins and good fairies fought for supremacy in a world where implicit Christian morality prevailed. Twenty years earlier, Macdonald’s books had also enthralled the young G.K. Chesterton who claimed that The Princess and the Goblin had made ‘a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start’. The same could be said of the effect that Macdonald had on the young J.R.R. Tolkien.

  Tolkien’s imagination was also fired by the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang. In particular, the tale of Sigurd, slayer of the dragon Fafnir, was to make a lasting impression. ‘I desired dragons with a profound desire,’ he recalled many years afterwards,6 and at the age of seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon. ‘I remember nothing about it except a philological fact,’ he recalled. ‘My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon”, but had to say “a great green dragon”. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story
again for many years, and was taken up with language.’7

  At around the time that Tolkien’s love affair with language was beginning, his mother was beginning a love affair which would soon estrange her from her family. Since her husband’s death, Christianity had played an increasingly important part in her life. Each Sunday she took her sons on a long walk to a ‘high’ Anglican church. Then one Sunday they were taken by strange roads to a different place of worship. This was St Anne’s, a Roman Catholic church amidst the slums of Birmingham. Mabel Tolkien had been considering conversion for some time and during the spring of 1900 she and her sister, May Incledon, received instruction at St Anne’s. In June of the same year they were duly received into the Catholic Church.

  Immediately they incurred the wrath of their family. Their father, who had been brought up at a Methodist school and subsequently had become a Unitarian, was outraged. Meanwhile, May’s husband, Walter Incledon, considering himself a pillar of his local Anglican church, forbade his wife to enter a Catholic church ever again. Reluctantly May felt compelled to obey, leaving her sister to face the consequences of her conversion alone.

  Having brought his wife into line, Walter Incledon sought to put pressure on his sister-in-law. He had provided a little financial help for Mabel Tolkien since her husband’s death, but this now ceased with no prospect of any further assistance for as long as she remained a Catholic. When it became clear that she was not about to relinquish her new-found faith, she faced increased hostility from Incledon and other members of her family. She also met with considerable opposition from her late husband’s family, many of whom were Baptists and strongly opposed to Catholicism. The emotional strain that this caused, combined with the additional financial hardship, affected her health adversely. Yet nothing could shake her loyalty to the faith she now professed and against all opposition she began to instruct her sons in the Catholic religion.