Master of Middle Earth
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Master of Middle-Earth
The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien
Paul H. Kocher
Chapter 1 : Middle-earth: An Imaginary World?
IN 1938 when Tolkien was starting to write The Lord of the Rings he also delivered a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in which he offered his views on the types of world that it is the office of fantasy, including his own epic, to "sub-create," as he calls it. Unlike our primary world of daily fact, fantasy's "secondary worlds" of the imagination must possess, he said, not only "internal consistency" but also "strangeness and wonder" arising from their "freedom from the domination of observed fact."1 If this were all, the secondary world of faery would often be connected only very tenuously with the primary world. But Tolkien knew, none better, that no audience can long feel sympathy or interest for persons or things in which they cannot recognize a good deal of themselves and the world of their everyday experience. He therefore added that a secondary world must be "credible, commanding Secondary Belief." And he manifestly expected that secondary worlds would combine the ordinary with the extraordinary, the fictitious with the actual: "Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted."
Tolkien followed his own prescription in composing The Lord of the Rings, or perhaps he formulated the prescription to justify what he was already intending to write. In either case the answer to the question posed by the title of this chapter is "Yes, but—." Yes, Middle-earth is a place of many marvels. But they are all carefully fitted into a framework of climate and geography, familiar skies by night, familiar shrubs and trees, beasts and birds on earth by day, men and manlike creatures with societies not too different from our own. Consequently the reader walks through any Middle-earth landscape with a security of recognition that woos him on to believe in everything that happens. Familiar but not too familiar, strange but not too strange. This is the master rubric that Tolkien bears always in mind when inventing the world of his epic. In applying the formula in just the right proportions in the right situations consists much of his preeminence as a writer of fantasy.
Fundamental to Tolkien's method in The Lord of the Rings is a standard literary pose which he assumes in the Prologue and never thereafter relinquishes even in the Appendices: that he did not himself invent the subject matter of the epic but is only a modern scholar who is compiling, editing, and eventually translating copies of very ancient records of Middle-earth which have come into his hands, he does not say how. To make this claim sound plausible he constructs an elaborate family tree for these records, tracing some back to personal narratives by the four hobbit heroes of the War of the Ring, others to manuscripts found in libraries at Rivendell and Minas Tirith, still others to oral tradition.2 Then, in order to help give an air of credibility to his account of the War, Tolkien endorses it as true and calls it history, that is, an authentic narrative of events as they actually happened in the Third Age. This accolade of history and historical records he bestows frequently in both Prologue and Appendices. With the Shire Calendar in the year 1601 of the Third Age, states the Prologue," . . . legend among the Hob-bits first becomes history with a reckoning of years." A few pages farther on, Bilbo's 111th birthday is said to have occurred in Shire year 1041: "At this point this History begins." And in Appendix F Tolkien declares editorially, "The language represented in this history by English was the Westron or 'Common Speech' of the West-lands of Middle-earth in the Third Age."3
Many writers of fantasy would have stopped at this point. But Tolkien has a constitutional aversion to leaving Middle-earth afloat too insubstantially in empty time and place, or perhaps his literary instincts warn him that it needs a local habitation and a name. Consequently he takes the further crucial step of identifying it as our own green and solid Earth at some quite remote epoch in the past. He is able to accomplish this end most handily in the Prologue and Appendices, where he can sometimes step out of the role of mere editor and translator into the broader character of commentator on the peoples and events in the manuscripts he is handling. And he does it usually by comparing conditions in the Third Age with what they have since become in our present.
About the hobbits, for instance, the Prologue informs the reader that they are "relations of ours," closer than elves or dwarves, though the exact nature of this blood kinship is lost in the mists of time. We and they have somehow become "estranged" since the Third Age, and they have dwindled in physical size since then. Most striking, however, is the news that "those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the Northwest of the Old World, east of the Sea."
There is much to digest here. The Middle-earth on which the hobbits lived is our Earth as it was long ago. Moreover, they are still here, and though they hide from us in their silent way, some of us have sometimes seen them and passed them on under other names into our folklore. Furthermore, the hobbits still live in the region they call the Shire, which turns out to be "the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea." This description can only mean northwestern Europe, however much changed in topography by eons of wind and wave.
Of course, the maps of Europe in the Third Age drawn by Tolkien to illustrate his epic show a continent very different from that of today in its coastline, mountains, rivers, and other major geographical features. In explanation he points to the forces of erosion, which wear down mountains, and to advances and recessions of the sea that have inundated some lands and uncovered others. Singing of his ancestor Durin, Gimli voices dwarf tradition of a time when the earth was newly formed and fair, "the mountains tall" as yet unweathered, and the face of the moon as yet unstained by marks now visible on it. Gandalf objects to casting the One Ring into the ocean because "there are many things in the deep waters; and seas and lands may change." Treebeard can remember his youth when he wandered over the countries of Tasarinan, Ossiriand, Neldoreth, and Dorthonion, "And now all those lands he under the wave." At their parting Galadriel guesses at some far distant future when "the lands that he under the wave are lifted up again" and she and Treebeard may meet once more on the meadows of Tasarinan. Bombadil recalls a distant past, "before the seas were bent." By many such references Tolkien achieves for Middle-earth long perspectives backward and forward in geological time.
One episode in particular, the reign of Morgoth from his stronghold of Thangorodrim somewhere north of the Shire for the three thousand years of the First Age, produces great changes in Middle-earth geography. To bring about his over-throw the Guardian Valar release titanic natural forces, which cause the ocean to drown not only his fortress but a vast area around it, including the elf kingdoms of Beleriand, Nargothrond, Gondolin, Nogrod, and Belagost. Of that stretch of the northwestern coast only Lindon remains above the waves to appear on Tolkien's Third Age maps. The flooding of rebellious Númenor by the One at the end of the Second Age is a catastrophe of equal magnitude.
But Tolkien gives the realm of Morgoth an extra level of allusiveness by describing it as so bitterly cold that after its destruction "those colds linger still in that region, though they lie hardly more than a hundred leagues north of the Shire." He goes on to describe the Forod-waith people living there as "Men of far-off days," who have snow houses, like igloos, and sleds and skis much like those of Eskimos. Add the fact that the Witch-king of Angmar (thereafter called simply Angmar), Morgoth's henchman, has powers that wane in summer and wax in winter and it becomes har
d not to associate Morgoth in some way with a glacial epoch, as various commentators have already done. In his essay "On Fairy-stories" Tolkien refuses to interpret the Norse god Thorr as a mere personification of thunder.4 Along the same lines, it is not his intention, I think, to portray Morgoth as a personification of an Ice Age. However, it would seem compatible with his meaning to consider Morgoth a spirit of evil whose powers have engendered the frozen destructiveness of such an age.
The possibility thus raised of fixing the three Ages of Middle-earth in some interglacial lull in the Pleistocene is tempting, and may be legitimate, provided that we do not start looking about for exact data to establish precise chronologies.5 The data are not there, and Tolkien has no intention whatever of supplying them. The art of fantasy flourishes on reticence. To the question how far in Earth's past the Ages of Middle-earth lie, Tolkien gives essentially the storyteller's answer: Once upon a time—and never ask what time. Choose some interglacial period if you must, he seems to say, but do not expect me to bind myself by an admission that you are right. Better for you not to be too sure.
Tolkien's technique of purposeful ambivalence is well shown too in the Mumak of Harad, which Sam sees fighting on the side of the Southrons against Faramir's men in Ithilien: ". . . indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not now walk in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in the latter days are but memories of his girth and majesty." As compared with its "kin," the elephant of today, the ancestral Mumak was far more massive.8 Is Tolkien hinting that it is a mammoth? Perhaps, but it is not shaggy, it is coming up from the warm south, and it is totally unknown to the hobbits farther north, where that sort of creature might be expected to abound. Tolkien is equally evasive about Angmar's huge winged steed, featherless and leathery: "A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, lingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day ..." A pterodactyl? It certainly sounds like one, but Tolkien avoids naming it, and casts all in doubt with a maybe. If it is a pterodactyl, or a close relative, then the Age of Reptiles in which those species throve is "older" than the Third Age, apparently much older. Gwaihir is an eagle of prodigious size whose ancestor "built his eyries in the inaccessible peaks of the Encircling Mountains when Middle-earth was young." All these half-mythical creatures of Middle-earth are meant to subsist partly in our world, partly in another in which the imagination can make of them what it will.
Tolkien's lifelong interest in astronomy tempts him into observations which have a bearing on the distance of Middle-earth back in Earth's prehistory. Opening in Appendix D a discussion of the calendars devised by its various peoples he remarks, "The Calendar in the Shire differed in several features from ours. The year no doubt was of the same length, for long ago as those times are now reckoned in years and lives of men, they were not very remote according to the memory of the Earth." A footnote on the same page gives "365 days, 5 hours, 8 minutes, 46 seconds" as the period of Earth's annual revolution around the sun according to our best modern measurements. The year length for Middle-earth of the Third Age was the same, Tolkien says. In other words, Earth's orbit around the sun (or vice versa) was the same then as it is now. This bit of information is not as informative as it looks. In the absence of modern technology nobody before today could possibly have calculated the orbit with sufficient accuracy to tell at what epoch.it began being different. But the implication is that at least the Third Age was not many millions of years ago. Tolkien wants for Middle-earth distance, not invisibility.
To strengthen visibility, and also to counterbalance the alien topography of Middle-earth's Europe, Tolkien lights its night skies with the planets and constellations we know, however different their names. Orion is seen by hobbits and elves meeting in the Shire woods: ". . . there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt." Unmistakably Orion. Looking out the window of the inn at Bree, "Frodo saw that the night was clear. The Sickle was swinging bright above the shoulders of Bree-hill." Tolkien takes the trouble to add a footnote on that page- that "the Sickle" is "the Hobbits' name for the Plough or Great Bear." Glowing like a jewel of fire "Red Borgil" would seem to be Mars. Eärendil's star is surely Venus, because Bilbo describes it as shining just after the setting sun ("behind the Sun and light of Moon") and just before the rising sun ("a distant flame before the Sim,/a wonder ere the waking dawn ...").
The heavens of Middle-earth and Earth being not noticeably dissimilar, the lapse of time between the two epochs is short by planetary standards ("the memory of the Earth"), however long it may seem "in years and lives of men." Middle-earth has the same seasons we have in the same length of year, which means that it tilts its northern and southern hemispheres alternately toward and away from the sun as does Earth today. And apparently its days and nights are of the usual duration, which means that Middle-earth rotates on its axis in our twenty-four-hour period. All these are comfortable touches designed not only to show that Middle-earth could not possibly be another planet but also to reassure the reader that fundamentally he is on home territory. I have described the phenomena above in modern heliocentric terms, but they are equally valid for a geocentric view, which there is reason to think the peoples of the Third Age believed in, as will be discussed in a moment.
Strange but not too strange. Further to offset the alienness of the large-scale topography of Third Age Europe, Tolkien makes sure that on the small scale its local terrain, climate, and dominant flora and fauna are much as we know them today. We feel at ease with them at once. Spring in the Shire brings warm sun, a wind from the south, new green "shimmering in the fields" and Sam clipping the grass borders of Frodo's lawn. Tobacco grows in the more sheltered bottomland. The fox that sees the hobbits sleeping out overnight as they leave the Shire sniffs and marvels aloud in intelligent speech, but it is a fox, not a Jabberwock. The travelers are later spied upon by birds but they are crows, ordinary in everything except a heightened consciousness. When the Fellowship depart from Lórien they hear "the high distant song of larks." Fangorn Forest may be dire and mysterious but its trees are the same oaks, chestnuts, beeches, and rowans that make up our woods. As for the day-by-day scenery and climate through which his travelers move on their many journeys, no writer was ever more constantly aware than Tolkien of all the details of mountain, grassland, wood and swamp, of variations in temperature, wind or calm, rain or cloud, the quality of sunlight and starlight, the hues of each particular sunset. He keeps our senses wide awake. Picking out at random almost any one day during Frodo's tramp to Rivendell or Aragorn's pursuit of the ores, a reader is likelier than not to be told exactly what the weather was and what their camping spot for the night looked like. Given this unbroken running account of familiar homely things, he is buoyed by a psychological reassurance that never fails him, and that allows him to absorb very large doses of the marvelous without disbelieving it. This is one of the hallmarks of Tolkien's personal style in fantasy.
As summarized in Appendices A and B the formal history of Middle-earth begins with the temptation and fall of the great elf leader Fëanor in Valinor and extends for about ten thousand years into the start of the Fourth Age. But into The Lord of the Rings Tolkien introduces the two oldest living beings on earth, Bombadil and Treebeard, whose memories stretch much farther back, to the first beginnings of life on the planet. Through them he is able to give his story full chronological depth by opening up the longest possible vistas into the past of its various races. Bombadil lived in unimaginable times before there was any vegetation, before even the rains began to fall. He saw the coming of men, "the Big People," and hobbits, "the little People." Before that the elves, earliest of intelligent peoples, passed him on their way westward from some unknown birthplace to the continent's edge, and thence across the sea to Valinor. All this "before the seas were bent" or Morgoth came to Middle-earth from Outside to breed his loathsome ores.
For his part, Treebeard also antedated the elves, but en
ts did not know how to speak until the first wandering elves taught them. Treebeard has seen the day when the separate patches of forest surviving into the Third Age were joined in one unending woodland that covered the face of primeval Europe. And, along with the other ents, he has suffered the loss of the entwives, the females of his species, who in some prehistoric time left the woods to practice agriculture in the open fields and there taught their arts to primitive men. This is almost a parable of how Earth's originally nomadic tribes settled down in one place when they learned to till the soil.
All these are glimpses into Middle-earth's prehistoric past. At the end of his epic Tolkien inserts also some forebodings of its future which will make Earth what it is today. Apart from gigantic geological upheavals still to come, he shows the initial steps in a long process of retreat or disappearance by all other intelligent species, which will leave man effectually alone on earth. The greater elves are already going home to Eldamar, from which they will not return, while the lesser ones who remain sink into oblivion. Ores shut themselves into their caverns under the mountains. After an estrangement from mankind, as remarked in the Prologue, hobbits will retire from all communication with us, reduced in size, numbers, and importance. The slow reproductive rate of the dwarves foreshadows their gradual extinction, leaving behind them imperishable monuments of stone. Ents may still be there in our forests, but what forests have we left? The process of extermination is already well under way in the Third Age, and in works outside the epic Tolkien bitterly deplores its climax today. The hunger men still feel to converse with birds and animals is a residual trace of the free intercourse between the species prevailing on Middle-earth, and since lost.7
Tolkien is sure that modern man's belief that he is the only intelligent species on Earth has not been good for him. Cut off from nature and its multitudes of living beings, mankind has developed a hard artificial industrialism stifling to that side of him which is sympathetic, imaginative, free. One symptom of our loss is the trivializing in contemporary folklore and fairy tales of the lordly elves and formidable dwarves traditional to them. In Appendix F of his epic Tolkien condemns with angry sadness the "fancies either pretty or silly" which now dishonor those and other great races of Middle-earth. "Smith of Wootton Major," written later, is a short story dealing in part with the scorn of our skeptics for a charming world of fancy that their imaginations are no longer flexible enough to enter. According to the essay "On Fairy-stories," creative fantasy has the power to heal this blindness by "recovery" of fresh knowledge of ourselves and the world about us, and of the kindly insight we once had into other species, other minds.