Tolkien sought to give theological voice to the sorrow and suffering which are interwoven into the fabric of life in The Silmarillion, embodying its perennial nature in the myth surrounding Nienna, one of the Queens of the angelic Valar:
Mightier than Estë is Nienna, sister of the Fëanturi; she dwells alone. She is acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor. So great was her sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope. . . for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.38
In this passage Tolkien again emerges as a mystic, seeing suffering as the result of an evil beyond the power of man, the work of Satan, ‘the marring of Melkor’. Yet, because God can always bring good out of the evil designs of the Enemy, this suffering, properly understood and accepted, teaches both ‘pity, and endurance in hope’, as well as bringing ‘strength to the spirit’ and turning ‘sorrow to wisdom’. Most profound, and most poetic, is the image of sorrow and suffering as the teachers of selflessness, prompting those who bear the pains of life to seek for the joys beyond the world: ‘The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.’
Tolkien’s wisdom was echoed by another Catholic writer, Maurice Baring, in the words of one of the characters in his last novel, Darby and Joan:
‘One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world. . . A Priest once said to me, “When you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life”.’
There are several other interesting parallels between Baring and Tolkien which help to shed light on the critical reception of Tolkien’s work. Like Tolkien, Baring was also much maligned and misunderstood by the critics, most notably by Virginia Woolf, who attacked what she perceived as his ‘superficiality’. Baring found such criticism frustrating, especially as he felt that failure to understand his work was due itself to superficiality. Both the frustration he felt and the superficiality which caused it were expressed plaintively in his book, Have You Anything to Declare!
It is utterly futile to write about the Christian faith from the outside. A good example of this is the extremely conscientious novel by Mrs Humphry Ward called Helbeck of Bannisdale. It is a study of Catholicism from the outside, and the author has taken scrupulous pains to make it accurate, detailed and exhaustive. The only drawback is that, not being able to see the matter from the inside, she misses the whole point.39
This, of course, was the fate suffered by Baring and Tolkien alike at the hands of critics who had failed to comprehend the philosophical foundations upon which their work was based. G.K. Chesterton, writing to Baring in 1929, shortly after Baring’s novel The Coat Without Seam was published, put the problem succinctly: ‘It is, as you say, extraordinary how the outer world can see everything about it except the point. It is curiously so with much of the good Catholic work now being done in literature, especially in France. . . I am only a vulgar controversial journalist, and never pretended to be a novelist; my writing cannot in any case be so subtle or delicate as yours. But even I find that if I make the point of a story stick out like a spike, they carefully go and impale themselves on something else.’40
In contrast, the Catholic writer Francois Mauriac told the actor and writer Robert Speaight, ‘What I admire most about Baring’s work is the sense he gives you of the penetration of grace.’41 The same could be said of Tolkien’s work, particularly of the theological thread running through the length of The Lord of the Rings. One is reminded of Tolkien’s wholehearted approval of Father Robert Murray’s statement that The Lord of the Rings left him with a strong sense of ‘a positive compatibility with the order of Grace’.42
The stark contrast between the critical assessment of Christians and non-Christians, between those who can see the matter from the ‘inside’ and those who cannot, is exemplified by the views of Father Ricardo Irigaray, an Argentinian priest who has written a full-length study of Tolkien, sadly not thus far translated into English. Father Irigaray’s study is a comprehensive exposition of Tolkien’s world, covering the relationship between myth and truth; the monotheistic principle at the centre of the creation of Middle Earth; the origin and nature of evil; the ways in which moral evil, the result of Original Sin, finds expression in possessiveness and the rejection of hope; the relationship of fate, freedom and providence; the role of humility and the exaltation of the humble; the way to sanctity through the shaping of the personality in the process of maturity, especially in relation to interior tribulation and purification in sacrifice; and concluding with the mystery of faith and the ‘faith atmosphere’ of the Tolkienian world.43
Similar views were expressed by Father Charles Dilke, a priest at the London Oratory, who re-reads The Lord of the Rings regularly, ‘trying to avoid learning it by heart’:
I first read it when I was at Cambridge, about the end of the fifties. . . I was in the process of becoming a Catholic at that time and it seemed to me that the world of Tolkien was a basically Catholic world, so it supported though indirectly what I was doing. . . When I first read it I was impressed by the way that Frodo cannot throw the Ring away without the help of the luckless Gollum. This seemed to me an expression of the doctrine of grace. . . Another highly theological bit is Galadriel and the Land of Lórien, almost transparently a vision of the Immaculate. ‘There is no stain over Lórien.’44
Meanwhile the writer and poet Charles A. Coulombe concluded his essay, ‘The Lord of the Rings: A Catholic View’, with the following overall assessment of the book’s importance:
It has been said that the dominant note of the traditional Catholic liturgy was intense longing. This is also true of her art, her literature, her whole life. It is a longing for things that cannot be in this world: unearthly truth, unearthly purity, unearthly justice, unearthly beauty. By all these earmarks, Lord of the Rings is indeed a Catholic work, as its author believed; but it is more. It is this age’s great Catholic epic, fit to stand beside the Grail legends, Le Morte d’Arthur, and The Canterbury Tales. It is at once a great comfort to the individual Catholic, and a tribute to the enduring power and greatness of the Catholic tradition, that JRRT created this work. In an age which has seen an almost total rejection of the Faith on the part of the Civilisation she created, the loss of the Faith on the part of many lay Catholics, and apparent uncertainty among her hierarchy, Lord of the Rings assures us, both by its existence and its message, that the darkness cannot triumph forever.45
Compared with the posturings and postulations of many of Tolkien’s critics, these deeply Christian perceptions represent a journey from the shallows to the depths, from superficiality to profundity. Yet The Lord of the Rings is still enjoyed by many thousands of readers who are not Christians but who discern in its pages, perhaps unconsciously, a ‘far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world’.46 To many of Tolkien’s millions of readers, Christian and otherwise, the myth he sub-created is not a flight from reality but an escape to reality.
CHAPTER 9
TOLKEIN AS HOBBIT:
THE ENGLISHMAN BEHIND THE MYTH
I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.1
This confession of ‘hobbitness’ by Tolkien is of more than merely amusing significance. The hobbits in his sub-creation are an imaginative incarnation and personification of an ‘Englishness
’ which was rooted deep in his own psyche. ‘The hobbits are just rustic English people,’ Tolkien told an interviewer, ‘made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination—not the small reach of their courage or latent power.’2 The character of Sam Gamgee was, Tolkien wrote, ‘a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself,’3 and he reported in a letter to his son on 28 July 1944 that his intention in characterizing Sam was ‘precisely to bring out the comicness, peasantry, and if you will Englishry of this jewel among the hobbits. Had I thought it out at the beginning, I should have given all the hobbits very English names to match the Shire.’4
On 3 July 1956 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin, his publisher, ‘The Shire is based on rural England and not any other country in the world. . . The toponymy of The Shire. . . is a “parody” of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman. . .’5
The ‘Englishry’ of the hobbits and the Englishness of their creator were explained in a letter to W.H. Auden: ‘If you want to write a tale of this sort you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation.’6
Although his un-English surname derived from an eighteenth-century German ancestor, Tolkien wrote that he was not German, ‘whatever some remote ancestors may have been. They migrated to England more than 200 years ago, and became quickly intensely English (not British).’7 Like his forebears, Tolkien was also ‘intensely English (not British)’, declaring to his son that ‘I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!))’.8
This anti-imperialism found expression in Middle Earth in the incarnation of hobbits as idealized Little Englanders. The localized patriotism of the Shire represents a contented, idyllic and inward-looking Little England, as distinct from the imperialism of Great Britain or the glorification of the British Empire. Indeed, Tolkien’s local patriotism even prefigures the current revival of regionalism in so far as the Shire is not modelled on an abstract, generalized ‘England’ but very specifically on the area of the rural West Midlands which was closest to his heart: ‘I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere.’9 To W.H. Auden he stressed that he was ‘a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)’.10 To his son Christopher he wrote of ‘the origins of our peculiar people. And indeed of us in particular. For barring the Tolkien (which must long ago have become a pretty thin strand) you are a Mercian or Hwiccian (of Wychwood) on both sides.’11 To another of his sons, Michael, he wrote of his maternal ancestors, the Suffields, who were particularly associated with the county of Worcestershire: ‘Though a Tolkien by name, I am a Suffield by tastes, talents, and upbringing, and any corner of that county (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable way “home” to me, as no other part of the world is.’12
Even more specifically, Tolkien drew heavily on the childhood experiences in the Warwickshire village of Sarehole, where he had spent four years that were forever enshrined as a rural and romantic idyll in his memory. Alluding to these years, he wrote that it was ‘really significant’ that he had ‘lived for my early years in “the Shire” in a pre-mechanical age’.13
Tolkien’s memories of ‘a pre-mechanical age’ stayed with him throughout his life, shaping both his view of modern society and his creativity as a writer. ‘He disliked the modern world,’ his son Christopher recalled, ’. . . the modern world meant for him, essentially, the machine. One of the underlying things in The Lord of the Rings is the machine.’14 This implicit anti-industrialism pervades both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so that the ‘evil’ parts of Middle Earth are depicted as polluted industrial waste lands, while the ‘good’ parts which have not been corrupted are modelled iSS on pre-industrial societies. Just as Tolkien’s anti-imperialism had borne fruit in parallels between the Shire and Little England, so his anti-industrialism found fruition in the depiction of the Shire as the Merrie England of mediaeval legend. Thus the Shire is a land in which machine-based mass-production has not been introduced and where individual craftsmanship still prevails.
In The Hobbit the intrinsic worth of traditional craftsmanship is contrasted with the materialism of those who hoard possessions that they do not have the skills to make themselves. This disdain by the craftsman for the possessiveness of the hoarder is voiced by the dwarf Thorin: ‘Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically for ever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; and they can’t make a thing for themselves, not even mend a little loose scale of their armour.’15 A depiction of this possessiveness is given later in The Hobbit after the dragon Smaug notices that a two-handled cup is missing from his hoard: ‘His rage passes description—the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.’16
The possessive nature of the dragon finds its human equivalent in the Master of Lake Town who is criticized for preferring trade to tradition: ‘Nor did he think much of old songs, giving his mind to trade and tolls, to cargoes and gold, to which habit he owed his position.’17 When Smaug attacks Lake Town in his rage, the Master deserts the townsfolk who are bravely trying to defend their homes and makes straight for ‘his great gilded boat, hoping to row away in the confusion and save himself’.18 His betrayal is noticed after the dragon is slain, and some of the Lake-people murmur their contempt: ‘He may have a good head for business—especially his own business. . . but he is no good when anything serious happens!’19 The Master returns and talks himself out of trouble, winning back the trust of the people in a manner which resembles the skilful polemic of Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings but, as with Wormtongue, he eventually receives his just deserts: ‘The old Master had come to a bad end. Bard had given him much gold for the help of the Lake-people, but being of the kind that easily catches such disease he fell under the dragon-sickness, and took most of the gold and fled with it, and died of starvation in the Waste, deserted by his companions.’20
These interlocked themes of morality and economics, sketched in outline in The Hobbit, were further developed in The Lord of the Rings, where the principle of craftsmanship was enshrined in the phrase of the leader of the Elves in Lorien: ‘We put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.’21
On the very first page of the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings Tolkien paints a picture of hobbits and their life in the Shire which is evocative of a Merrie England peopled by rustic craftsmen, peasant farmers and small-holders: ‘Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.’ Furthermore, hobbits enjoy ‘a close friendship with the earth’.22 The idyllic, unspoilt and unpolluted lifestyle of the Shire is contrasted with the industrial wastelands of Mordor:
The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths.
. . . Frodo looked round in horror. Dreadful as the Dead marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loath
some far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. . . here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.
They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter it and wash it with oblivion. I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak.23
As the hobbits pass further into the Dark Lord’s polluted realm, the industrial desolation engulfs them in its stench and ugliness: ‘North amid their noisome pits lay the first of the great heaps and hills of slag and broken rock and blasted earth, the vomit of the maggot-folk of Mordor,. .’24
Tolkien’s rage against the machine surfaces again and again throughout The Lord of the Rings. Sam sees a vision in Galadriel’s Mirror of trees being felled in the Shire and of ‘a large red-brick building’ being put up on the site where the Old Mill had stood: ‘Lots of folk were busily at work. There was a tall red chimney nearby. Black smoke seemed to cloud the surface of the Mirror.’25 Elsewhere, Treebeard complains that Saruman ‘has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment’.26 Treebeard is further angered that Saruman’s ores have been destroying trees:
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