He and his foul folk are making havoc now. Down on the borders they are felling trees—good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot—orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc. There is always a smoke rising from Isengard these days. Curse him, root and branch! Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn,—many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once were singing groves.27
The recurrence of anti-industrialism in The Lord of the Rings has been singled out for attention by several critics. Roger Sale observed that ‘Tolkien has always spoken. . . as though only fools and madmen would contemplate the twentieth century without horror.’28 On a more positive note, Paul Kocher wrote that ‘Tolkien was ecologist, champion of the extraordinary, hater of “progress”, lover of handicrafts, detester of war long before such attitudes became fashionable.’29 Although such attitudes were certainly ‘fashionable’ in 1972 when Kocher wrote these lines, and were about to become even more so following the publication during the following year of E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Tolkien was ahead of his time. He was in fact merely following a long tradition of opposition to the evils of the industrial age, stretching back to William Blake and William Cobbett almost two centuries earlier, to the very dawn of industrialism itself.
The context in which Tolkien’s own opposition should be seen was discussed by Charles A. Coulombe in his essay on The Lord of the Rings:
The concept of society as an organic whole, without class conflict, with a communal structure, is one that has characterized Catholic social thought since the Roman Empire. In many ways the Shire expresses perfectly the economic and political ideals of the Church, as expressed by Leo XIII in Rerum novarum, and Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno. Traditional authority (the Thain), limited except in times of crisis; popular representation (the Mayor of Michel Delving), likewise limited; subsidiarity; and above all, minimal organization and conflict. It is the sort of society envisioned by Distributists Belloc and Chesterton in Britain, by Salazar in Portugal, by the framers of the Irish Constitution, by Dollfuss in Austria, and by Smetona in Lithuania. How ever far short or close these dwellers in the real world came to their goal, the fact remains that it is something very close to the Shire they had in mind.’30
The linking of the Shire with the Distributism of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc is particularly important. Tolkien’s vision of the Shire was strikingly similar to that espoused during the ‘20s and ‘30s by the Distributist League, of which Chesterton was President. The Distributist credo that private property should be enjoyed by as many of the population as possible, so that people could be freed from the ‘wage slavery’ of Big Business or State Monopoly, was put succinctly into the thoughts of Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings: ‘Deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense. . . The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.’31
The consequences for the Shire when this ‘plain hobbit-sense’ gave way to greed and the desire for power was illustrated when the hobbits returned home to find the land they loved in desolation. Their beloved Shire was becoming a Mordor in microcosm:
‘It all began with Pimple, as we call him,’ said Farmer Cotton,—‘and it began as soon as you’d gone off, Mr Frodo. He’d funny ideas had Pimple. Seems he wanted to own everything himself, and then order other folk about. It soon came out that he already did own a sight more than was good for him; and he was always grabbing more, though where he got the money was a mystery: mills and malt-houses and inns, and farms, and leaf-plantations. . .’32
If Tolkien’s vision of the Shire, threatened by the evils of industrial ‘development’, was similar in many respects to the vision of England held by the Distributists, it is also indicative of other remarkable parallels between the writings of Tolkien and those of Chesterton.
The full extent of G.K. Chesterton’s influence in the first third of this century was considerable, especially among ‘orthodox’ Christians, both Anglican and Catholic, who considered him their champion. As Tolkien was growing up at the very time that Chesterton’s flame was brightest and his powers waxing, it would be inconceivable that the traditionally minded young Catholic would not have read many, if not most, of his books. Certainly, there is much to suggest that Tolkien and Chesterton were kindred spirits.
Like Tolkien, Chesterton saw Merrie England as an idealized view of what England had been and what she could be. It was an England free from post-Reformation Puritanism and post-industrial proletarianism, an England where individuals owned the land on which they lived and worked. It was Blake’s green and pleasant land liberated from the dominion of dark, satanic mills.
Chesterton wrote a study of Blake and also a full-length biography of William Cobbett, the other great early opponent of industrialism. ‘In Mr Chesterton’s view,’ wrote a reviewer of the latter book, ‘Cobbett stood for England: England unindustrialised, self-sufficient, relying on a basis of agriculture and sound commerce for her prosperity, with no desire for inflation.’33 Chesterton considered Cobbett the champion of England’s dispossessed rural population, the last rustic radical: ‘After him Radicalism is urban—and Toryism suburban.’34 He also compared Cobbett to Shelley: ‘Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have called Birmingham what Cobbett called it—a hell-hole.’35 This was certainly a view with which Tolkien would have concurred wholeheartedly, especially as he had seen his beloved Sarehole swallowed up during his own life-time by the ‘hell-hole’ of the West Midlands conurbation. It is also interesting that Chesterton’s description of Cobbett is equally applicable to Tolkien:
What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside. . . the toppling triumphs of machines over men. . . the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles.36
The evident convergence of opinions raises the question of Chesterton’s role in shaping Tolkien’s perceptions. While it is clear from Tolkien’s own writings that he knew and admired Chesterton’s work, it is less clear to what extent this had affected his own philosophical, ideological or creative outlook.
In his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, Tolkien quotes Chesterton on several occasions, always in favourable terms, to reinforce a point he is making. He also quotes Chesterton favourably in one or two of his letters, but on another occasion is critical of Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse. On 3 September 1944 he wrote, in a letter to his son, that his daughter Priscilla, then fifteen, ‘had been wading through’ Chesterton’s Ballad: ‘My efforts to explain the obscurer parts to her convince me that it is not as good as I thought. The ending is absurd. The brilliant smash and glitter of the words and phrases (when they come off, and are not mere loud colours) cannot disguise the fact that G.K.C. knew nothing whatever about the “North”, heathen or Christian.’37 Ironically, these words of criticism serve as evidence of Chesterton’s influence on Tolkien. Since Tolkien had probably read The Ballad of the White Horse shortly after its publication in 1911, it would appear that for more than thirty years he had been under the impression, albeit a largely false impression according to his later revised judgement, that Chesterton’s romantic ballad was ‘good’. This impression may have been reinforced by discussions with C.S. Lewis at the weekly meetings of the Inklings. Lewis knew much of the Ballad by heart, declaring to George Sayer, one of his pupils who later became his biographer, that it was ‘marvellous’ and that ‘here and there it achieves the heroic, the rarest quality in modern literature’.38
There is little to sugg
est that Tolkien’s view was as laudatory as Lewis’s and one wonders whether the critic Christopher Clausen, in his essay on ‘The Lord of the Rings and The Ballad of the White Horse’,39 had overstated the case for Chesterton’s influence. Clausen claims that The Lord of the Rings is ‘heavily indebted’ to Chesterton’s ballad, particularly in the similarity of Galadriel’s role to that of the Virgin Mary in The Ballad of the White Horse. Clausen also sees Tolkien’s Dwarves, Elves and Men as parallels of Saxons, Celts and Romans. The basic structure and conception of the two works are similar, in Clausen’s view, because both tell the story of a war between good and evil forces in which an alliance of the forces of good, despite all the odds, gains the victory against the vastly more powerful forces of evil. In both works the culmination of events is the return of the king to his rightful state. Clausen also alludes to the symbolism implicit in the fact that Gandalf’s horse, Shadowfax, is the archetypal white horse of English legend.
However convincing the parallels, Tolkien’s knowledge and scholarship were so extensive that The Ballad of the White Horse can only be seen, at most, as one of many influences at work in the shaping of The Lord of the Rings.
None the less, and regardless of the alleged nature of Chesterton’s direct influence upon Tolkien, there is considerable evidence of his indirect influence. Tolkien certainly sympathized with Chesterton’s work and, for all their differences of approach, there are clearly discernible links of affinity between the two men.
One of the most notable of these is the over-riding sense of wonder that permeates both men’s work, and indeed both men’s outlook and philosophy. In The Lord of the Rings the enigmatic figure of Tom Bombadil seems to embody this sense of wonder, in which wisdom and innocence are unified, to a sublime degree: ‘Tom sang most of the time, but it was chiefly nonsense, or else perhaps a strange language unknown to the hobbits, an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight.’40
Bombadil is paradox personified. Older than the world, he is perennially young. He has the wisdom to wonder, the wisdom of wonder, which sees through worldly cynicism. He has childlike innocence without childish naivety. These qualities are also present in the character of Quickbeam, an ent who is introduced to the hobbits by Treebeard:
All that day they walked about in the woods with him, singing, and laughing; for Quickbeam often laughed. He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water,—he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees. Whenever he saw a rowan-tree he halted a while with his arms stretched out, and sang, and swayed as he sang.41
T.A Shippey, author of The Road to Middle Earth, referred to the infectious nature of this sense of wonder in Tolkien’s work when he said that Tolkien had ‘turned me into an observer. Tolkien turns people into birdwatchers, tree spotters, hedgerow-grubbers.’42 This was certainly one of Tolkien’s intentions, springing from his belief that one of the highest functions of fairy stories was the recovery of a clear view of reality:
. . . we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. . . This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. . .
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. . . This triteness is really the penalty of ‘appropriation’: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.
Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day,—and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.43
This Chestertonian principle was used by Tolkien when Gandalf was trying to work out the password to the doors of Moria. The wording in Elvish above the doors read: ‘The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter.’ Gandalf spent a long time trying different Elvish incantations but to no avail. The doors to the Mines of Moria remained firmly shut. Suddenly the wizard sprang to his feet laughing. The password had been staring him in the face all the time, too obvious to be seen. The words should have been translated literally as ‘say “friend” and enter’: ‘I had only to speak the Elvish word for friend and the doors opened. Quite simple. Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days. Those were happier times.’44
Tolkien and Chesterton also shared a love for tradition and traditionalism. In 1909 Chesterton had defended Traditionalism by labelling it the philosophy of the Tree:
I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as when it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly by its roots the higher it rises with its branches. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species.45
A sense of tradition was as important to Tolkien as it was to Chesterton and the whole of The Lord of the Rings resonates with its presence. Yet it is interesting that the mythological figure that Tolkien uses to embody Tradition is Treebeard, a tree-like creature who was the oldest living being in the whole of Middle Earth. Treebeard is Tolkien’s personification of Chesterton’s philosophy of the Tree.
When Pippin and Merry had first seen Treebeard they felt that the wisdom of the ages could be glimpsed in the depths of his eyes:
These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.
‘One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.’46
The strong links of affinity between Tolkien and Chesterton, glimpsed implicitly in Middle Earth, are more easily discerned in Tolkien’s lighter and lesser known works. In The Father Christmas Letters, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major and, most notably of all, in Farmer Giles of Ham, one sees more clearly the parallels between his work and the ‘Chestertonian Fantasy’ referred to by Tolkien in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’.
The Father Christmas Letters, though not published until three years after Tolkien’s death, are amongst the earliest of all his writings. Written each Christmas from 1920 until the start of the Second World War, they were not intended for publication but were written solely for the amusement and enchantment of his own children. Above all, as we saw earlier, they display a childlike charm and cheerfulness which helps to dispel the i
mage, portrayed by those who misunderstand The Lord of the Rings, that Tolkien is too serious and gloomy.
The parallels with Chesterton in this instance, both in the meticulous writing and illustrating of books intended not for publication but purely for the amusement of individual children, and also in the love for the mythology surrounding the person of Father Christmas, seem to go beyond the celebrated Chestertonian joie de vivre. Although Chesterton had no children of his own, his life is peppered with incidents of him writing verses, plays, stories, imaginative letters and even entire mini-books as gifts to various children. He was a talented artist and he often added drawings to his handwritten children’s stories, similar to the elaborate illustrations with which Tolkien accompanied his letters from Father Christmas. Chesterton shared Tolkien’s love for Christmas and wrote several poems and essays on the subject. ‘Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus,’ Chesterton wrote in one of his essays for the Daily News, ‘but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.’47 In another of his essays he described an imaginary meeting with Santa Claus in which Santa bemoans the fact that the modern world misunderstands him:
‘How can one be too good, or too jolly? I don’t understand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern people are living and I am dead.’
‘You may be dead,’ I replied. ‘You ought to know. But as for what they are doing—do not call it living.’48
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