The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

by Tom Shippey

  Saruman nevertheless does have one distinctively modern trait, which is his association with Socialism. His men say they are gathering things ‘for fair distribution’, though nobody believes them – a particularly strange compromise of evil with morality, for Middle-earth, where vice rarely troubles to be hypocritical. It is worth saying accordingly that Denethor, contrasted with Saruman as he is in other ways with Théoden, is an arch-conservative. In almost his last speech he declares:

  ‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life … and in the days of my longfathers before me … But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.’ (p. 836)

  ‘I will have naught’ is a particularly ominous expression. As The Lord of the Rings was coming to the end of its gestation it became possible for the first time for political leaders to say they wanted nothing and make it come true. Denethor clearly will not submit to the Enemy, as Saruman did, but he also cares nothing in the end for his subjects, while his love even for his sons would take them both to death with him. ‘The West has failed’, he says. ‘It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended! Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!’ He does not say ‘nuclear fire’, but the thought fits. Denethor breaks his own staff of office as Saruman does not. He mingles an excess of heroic temper – the ancient Ragnarök spirit, one might say, which Tolkien with significant anachronism twice calls ‘heathen’22 – with a mean concern for his own sovereignty and his own boundaries: a combination that unusually and in this one particular case makes no sense at all before 1945 and the invention of the ‘great deterrent’.

  It is a risky business finally to draw a Tolkienian ‘inner meaning’ from these various ‘applicabilities’. Tolkien himself insisted that he had not intended one; and finding one need not be the ultimate necessity for the critic, since after all political messages add nothing to Tom Bombadil, or the Ents, or the Riders of Rohan, or the entrelacements, or most of the things discussed in this chapter and the ones around it. The real point is that Tolkien’s theories about nature, evil, luck and our perception of the world generated as a sort of by-product modern applications and political ones. His attachment to the ‘theory of courage’ made him believe that the Western world in his lifetime had been short not of wit or of strength, but of will. His readings of heroic poems made him especially scornful of the notion that to say ‘evil must be fought’ is the same as saying ‘might is right’.23 He thought that England, in forgetting her early literature, had fallen into liberal self-delusions. Naturally all these ‘morals’ or ‘meanings’ can in themselves be accepted or rejected, depending very much on the varied experience of readers. What cannot be denied is that they emerge from much experience in the author, and much original thought, that they are moreover integrated in a fiction which has a power independent of them. Tolkien was not writing to a thesis. A good deal of what he wrote may be taken as a rejection of the ‘liberal interpretation of history’, and indeed of the ‘liberal humanist tradition’ in literature;24 nevertheless the centre of his story is the Ring and the maxim that ‘power corrupts’, a concept unimpeachably modern, democratic, anti- though not un-heroic.

  Eucatastrophe, realism, and romance

  It should be clear by this time that if there is one critical statement entirely and absolutely wrong, it is the one quoted at the start of this chapter, about The Lord of the Rings not being ‘moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être’. The ‘vision of things’ is there in the Ring, in the scenes of conflict and temptation, in the characters’ words and attitudes, in proverbs and in prophecies and in the very narrative mode itself. Naturally this ‘understanding of reality’ can be ‘denied’: so can they all. But not to see that it exists shows a surprising (and therefore interesting) blindness. It is matched only by Alfred Duggan’s insistence in the TLS that in The Lord of the Rings all the good and bad sides do is try to kill each other, so that they cannot be told apart: ‘Morally there seems nothing to choose between them.’25 The difference is at the very heart of the plot. As W. H. Auden saw, in his piece for The New York Review of Books (22 January 1956), it is vital that Sauron does not guard the Cracks of Doom and discover Frodo because he is sure Aragorn will take the Ring:

  Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.

  Not to see points like that (and there are more obvious ones) is in a way shameful. The repeated blindnesses of critics can only be explained by a deep dissatisfaction in them with the very data of ‘fairy-story’, an inhibition against accepting the conventions of romance.

  Of these the greatest must be the ‘happy ending’ (one brought about, more often than not, by ‘hap’ or ‘chance’ or ‘luck’). Tolkien, of course, being a Christian, did in absolute fact believe that in the end all things would end happily, that in a sense they already had – a belief he shared with Dante, and a matter of faith beyond argument. It needs to be said though that he was capable of envisaging a different belief and even bringing it into his story. Frodo and Sam debate it after they have destroyed the Ring and are caught in the fall of the Dark Tower:

  ‘I don’t want to give up yet’ [said Sam]. ‘It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.’

  ‘Maybe not, Sam,’ said Frodo; ‘but it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.’ (p. 929)

  He does not change his mind, nor his perception of how ‘things are in the world’. They are changed for him by the eagles who come and take him in his sleep to a new world – which Sam, with a resurrected Gandalf in front of him, very nearly perceives as Heaven. The difference between Earth and Middle-earth, one might say, is that in the latter faith can, just sometimes, be perceived as fact. And while this is an enormous difference, it is not the same as that between the adult and the child.

  It cannot be denied that there is a streak of ‘wish-fulfilment’ in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would have liked to hear the horns of Rohan blow, and watch the Black Breath of inertia dissolve from his own country. If his work has an image inside itself, it is I think the horn that Éomer gives to Merry, only a small one, but one from the hoard of Scatha the Worm and brought from the North by Eorl the Young. It is a magic one, though only modestly so: ‘He that blows it at need shall set fear in the hearts of his enemies and joy in the hearts of his friends, and they shall hear him and come to him.’ When Merry blows it in the Shire the revolution against sloth and shabbiness and Saruman-‘Sharkey’ is on: no doubt Tolkien would have liked to be able in his own person to do the same. He got closer to his goal than many, however, at least when it came to bringing ‘joy’. At the same time his portrayal of Frodo quietly sliding down to sleep, dismissal and an oblivion which would include ents, elves, dwarves and the whole of Middle-earth, shows that he recognised the limits of his own wishes and their non-correspondence with reality. The last word on the relationship between his literary mode and that of realism may perhaps go to Professor Frank Kermode, who wrote:

  Romance could be defined as a means of exhibiting the action of magical and moral laws in a version of human life so selective as to obscure, for the special purpose of concentrating attention on these laws, the fact that in reality their force is intermittent and only fitfully glimpsed.

  Professor Kermode made those remarks however à propos of Shakespeare’s Tempest.26 And one has to say that while both Prospero and Gandalf are old men with staffs, Prospero brushes aside the oppositions of reality with an ease which Gandalf is never allowed to aspire to.

  *Tolkien wrote this in a letter of 12 December 1955 to Mr David I. Masson, who kindly showed it to me and has given me permission to quote from it here
. Irritated evidently by the TLS review of 25 November 1955 (to which Mr Masson had written a reply, published TLS 9 December 1955), Tolkien remarked that the reviewer should not have made such a fuss over giving quarter to orcs. ‘Surely how often “quarter” is given is off the point in a book that breathes Mercy from start to finish: in which the central hero is at last divested of all arms, except his will? “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”, are words that occur to me, and of which the scene in the Sammath Naur was meant to be a “fairy-story” exemplum …’ See also Letters, p. 252.

  *There is a text and translation of this poem, and an introduction to it, in my Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Press, 1976; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976). Tolkien certainly studied the poem, for it is the best riddle-contest in Old English, and most like the Old Norse ones from the Elder Edda and The Saga of King Heidrek. Gollum’s ‘Time’ riddle in The Hobbit is based on Saturn’s ‘Old Age’ one.

  *It is the only instance, out of 63 occurrences in the poem, where the word þá as an unsupported demonstrative takes alliteration and stress, so gaining unusual if not unnatural prominence.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘WHEN ALL OUR FATHERS WORSHIPPED STOCKS AND STONES’

  Stylistic theories: Tolkien and Shakespeare

  Mentioning Tolkien in the same breath with Shakespeare will seem to many rash, even perverse. If there is one image which biographical criticism has projected powerfully, it is that of Tolkien the Philistine, hater of literary mainstreams. He read little modern poetry and little modern fiction, taking ‘no serious notice’ even of what he read. He liked as much as anything the works of John Buchan. In 1931 he succeeded in eliminating Shakespeare from his part of the Oxford English syllabus. In childhood he found that he ‘disliked cordially’ Shakespeare’s plays, remembering especially an early ‘bitter disappointment and disgust … with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill”’.1 Many critics have felt that these strongly anti-literary or anti-poetic attitudes have found suitable reflection in Tolkien’s own style, described variously as ‘Brewer’s Biblical’, ‘Boy’s Own’, irresistibly reminiscent of ‘the work of Mr Frank Richards’ (the creator of a sequence of school stories about a fat boy, Billy Bunter). It is a common critical stance to praise Tolkien’s conception, often somewhat vaguely, or with even more vagueness his ‘mythological’ or ‘mythopoeic’ powers; but then to declare that the words do not live up to the things, the style ‘is quite inadequate to the theme’.2 There are however immediate reasons for thinking that this stance is imperceptive. Tolkien said that he ‘disliked’ Shakespeare ‘cordially’, but he used exactly the same phrase of allegory too, where it concealed an opinion of some subtlety. On a larger scale one might observe that his lifelong preoccupation with words gave him a kind of sensitivity to them, even if it was an unorthodox one; and further that it is strange that a myth should so make its way if enshrined and embodied in words as inappropriate as critics have made out. ‘Style’ and ‘mythology’ are in fact not to be separated, though they may be disentangled. A concept which helps one to see Tolkien’s view of both is that of ‘loose’ or ‘tight’ semantic and dramatic ‘fit’.

  The beginnings of this idea emerge well from a passage in The Lord of the Rings which has been singled out for especially ferocious criticism: the parting of Treebeard from Celeborn and Galadriel in The Return of the King, p. 959:

  Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’ he said. ‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.’

  And Celeborn said: ‘I do not know, Eldest.’ But Galadriel said: ‘Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell!’

  These two paragraphs are quoted in his book Modern Fantasy by Dr C. N. Manlove, who then goes straight on as usual to spearhead the critical assault and declare:

  The overworked cadences, the droning, monotonous pitch, the sheer sense of hearts charged not with lead but gas, can offer only nervous sentimental indulgence or plain embarrassment to the reader.

  Compare this with, say, Ector’s lament over Arthur in Malory, or the ‘Survivor’s Lament’ in Beowulf, or this from ‘The Wanderer’ …

  and Dr Manlove goes on to cite a well-known Ubi sunt passage from the Old English poem and to observe that ‘This is real elegy, for it has something to be elegiac about’.3 Considered as criticism, much of this is mere rudeness, but it does have the merit of introducing medieval comparisons: not on the whole good ground for a Manlove to fight a Tolkien on.

  Exactly that passage from The Wanderer, for instance, is paraphrased by Aragorn in chapter 6 of The Two Towers: a candid mind might have looked to see what Tolkien could make of it. As for Ector’s lament, it was in fact over Lancelot, not Arthur. If one reads even more attentively, one cannot help noting a curious stylistic feature not entirely dissociated from Treebeard. What Malory actually wrote was:

  ‘And now I dare say,’ sayd syr Ector, ‘thou sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande. And thou were the curtest [i.e. most courteous] knyght that ever bare shelde! And thou were the truest frende to thy lovar that ever bestrade hors, and thou were the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kyndest man that ever strake with swerde.4

  The kindest man that ever struck with sword?, modern readers reflect. The truest lover that ever bestrode a horse? In modern contexts phrases like this could only be funny. Strong belief in the virtues of stylistic and semantic consistency urge us to keep kindness and sword-strokes, loved women and bestridden horses, in separate mental compartments. But clearly Malory did not feel this urge towards exactness at all. Did Tolkien? Tolkien furthermore no doubt noted that Malory’s insensitivity in this respect (a common thing in medieval writers) had not led necessarily to failure. His emulation of ‘loose semantic fit’ does however puzzle many modern readers – those especially who have been sophisticated by modern literary practice.

  To go back to Dr Manlove and Treebeard: it is actually hard to make out what bits of the text have caused the irritation. It could be the boldly untranslated fragment of Quenya,5 or the triple repetition of ‘feel … feel … smell’, or the sudden change to less plain language in Galadriel’s speech, with its elvish place-name (and also its typical echo of wartime English popular song).6 However all these are easily defensible. If the paragraphs quoted do contain anything to gripe at seriously, it must be Treebeard’s opening sentence, with its oddly redundant phrase, ‘by stock or by stone’. What have stocks and stones got to do with the matter? Isn’t the phrase just meaningless, flung in for the rhythm, meaning no more than ‘by pillar or by post’, ‘by night or by day’, ‘by hook or by crook’? So one might feel. But it is exactly in phrases like this that one sees Tolkien playing with medieval notions of style, with ‘loose semantic fit’, with a personal view of poetry.

  ‘By stock or by stone’ is certainly a deliberate echo of the fourteenth century poem Pearl, written by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and probably the most powerful of all medieval elegies. Under its image of the jeweller who has lost his pearl in an orchard, this describes a father lamenting his dead infant daughter in the graveyard where she is buried. He falls asleep with his head on her grave mound, to be taken away in spirit to a strange land where all his grief suddenly fades – and where to his utter delight he sees his lost child facing him, on the other side of a river. But she has grown up strangely, and she treats him with a cold formalit
y, calling him ‘Sir’ but correcting him almost every time he speaks. How sad he has been, he says; he had no need to be, she replies. Quite right, he agrees, for (praise God) he has found her and will live with her in joy from now on; no, she says, she is not there, he cannot join her, he cannot cross the river. Don’t send me away again, he pleads, to ‘durande doel’. Why are you always talking about sorrow? she asks fiercely. At that the father gives up his attempt to take an active role, humbles himself, but repeats his grief in his apology:

  ‘My blysse, my bale, ye han ben bothe,

  Bot much the bygger yet watz my mon;

  Fro thou watz wroken fro vch a wothe,

  I wyste neuer quere my perle watz gon.

  Now I hit se, now lethez my lothe.

  And, quen we departed, we wern at on;