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

by Tom Shippey

  The other question still ‘hanging over’ from above is the (perhaps unanswerable) one of what – if it was not a Grand Design – was the urge which kept pulling Tolkien on to write through decades of discouragement. Here again a hostile critic may have a point to make. The critic on this occasion is one for whom I have considerably more respect than I do for Muir and Brooke-Rose. His name is Leonard Jackson, and he is the author of a distinguished trilogy of works considering the modern masters of literary theory, de Saussure, Marx, and Freud, and the ways in which they have been continually distorted and misinterpreted. In the third of these works, Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the New Sciences of Mind (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), he makes the case for the Freudian argument that the power of literary works is created by their embodiment of unconscious fantasies: fantasy-patterns, unrecognised by the author, are present in the work and are transmitted to the readers, themselves unconscious of what it is they are receiving, but powerfully affected by them just the same. A textbook case of this, Jackson suggests, is The Lord of the Rings. Jackson remarks that all through the 1970s – and of course it must be happening again now – he found himself asking prospective students what they read, and being told ‘The Lord of the Rings’. These prospective students were ‘full of the fashionable opinions of the day: they lived in communes, were anti-racist, and were in favour of Marxist revolution and free love’. Jackson accordingly asked them ‘why their favourite reading should be a book about a largely racial war, favouring feudal politics, jam-full of father-figures, and entirely devoid of sex’, but ‘They never knew the answer’. One answer might have been, though it would have been a bold prospective student who told his interviewer this, that it was a bad question.13 However, Jackson is certainly right in pointing to the total discrepancy, still marked, between Tolkien’s own distinctly old-fashioned values and the radical attitudes of many of his admirers. Is it just the case that a powerful story overleaps political barriers? And even if it is, where does the power come from?

  Jackson’s argument, set out on pp. 77–80 of the book just mentioned, is that The Lord of the Rings is a classic Freudian castration-fantasy. Its climactic scene, of course, is the biting off of Frodo’s finger with the Ring still on it, an image, says Jackson, ‘as clearly Freudian as one could ever hope to get. If this scene is not a reference to the castration complex, then there is no reference to castration anywhere in literature’ (apart from some entirely literal cases). To ensure that this option feels right, Jackson continues, ‘the book is stuffed with father-figures’, Gandalf, Fangorn, Bombadil, and especially Sauron: with the destruction of the Ring, the menacing father-figure is removed from the scene, and Frodo abandons all possibility of growing up to be like him, while ‘all the reassuring fathers are left behind’. One might add, pedantically, ‘except for Théoden’, and wonder how Denethor fits in, but these objections could easily be accommodated. Jackson’s main point is that his teenage readers felt that ‘the very lives they led … presented an enormous unconscious threat’, and the removal of that threat, beneath the surface of The Lord of the Rings, was what drew them to the book. ‘It was and is a very important part of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings that its greatest aficionados are quite incapable of noticing what it says.’ Jackson has the good grace to go on and add, ‘Come to think of it, what psychoanalysis suggests is that it is a very important part of the appeal of all literature that its aficionados are quite incapable of noticing what it says!’

  There are several potential replies to Jackson’s argument, and one is that it does not account for the work’s strong appeal to groups outside his designated audience of young male students: women, children, and middle-aged men, all well-represented in fan groups and fan audiences. Bits of what Jackson has to say are furthermore, and as usual, just de haut en bas, as in his extraordinary belief that literary critics (!) are good judges of emotional maturity. Nevertheless I do feel he has a strong point, though I am not sure, whatever Freud may say, that it is solely and entirely to do with sex. One thing absolutely certain about The Lord of the Rings is that it is about renunciation: it inverts a very familiar narrative pattern, in that it is not a quest to obtain something, but an anti-quest, to get rid of it. The getting rid of it is furthermore something immensely difficult to do, perhaps in the very end impossible to achieve by will-power alone, because the Ring appeals to something deep in the fibre of everyone’s being: these are the very ground-rules of the whole work. Even in Frodo, even in Sam, there is a response to evil deep in the heart. And this is not a criticism – since we are all at least as bad, no one has the moral authority to make such a criticism – just a statement of fact. Where the scene in the Sammath Naur reminded Tolkien (consciously) of the Lord’s Prayer, however, see above, one might put the case that (unconsciously) it plays out another verse of the Bible, already mentioned by me in the same context without prompting from Jackson: ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out’. There is something even in Frodo that responds positively to the Ring and to Sauron; to destroy the Ring he has to lose a part of himself; having lost it he is never the same again, nor can he be healed in Middle-earth.

  But the ‘it’ that he loses does not have to be sex. If one considers the whole history of Tolkien’s youth and middle-age, from 1892 to 1954, a period marked not only by two world wars and the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, but also by – I give them more or less in chronological order – the routine bombardment of civilian populations, the use of famine as a political measure, the revival of judicial torture, the ‘liquidation’ of whole classes of political opponents, extermination camps, deliberate genocide, and the continuing development of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ from chlorine gas to the hydrogen bomb, all of these absolutely unthinkable in the Victorian world of Tolkien’s childhood,14 then it would be a strange mind which did not reflect, as so many did, that something had gone wrong, something furthermore which could not be safely pushed off and blamed on other people. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, which came out in the same year as Lord of the Rings, and like Tolkien a war veteran, remarked à propos of the meaning of his own works, ‘I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head’.15 Now, if the evil-producing organ in the human brain could be identified, or if less fancifully some evil-generating urge in the human psyche could be identified, and if something had to be sacrificed to destroy it: would the sacrifice not be worth while? That seems to me to be a question raised by The Lord of the Rings. The answer is certainly something analogous to castration. Do the power and appeal of the work derive from the unconscious analogy? Since the process, if it exists at all, is unconscious, one naturally cannot say.

  Jackson’s argument furthermore brings into the foreground a major critical charge against Tolkien: that of ‘escapism’. Like several of those just mentioned, this is an interesting word. It did not find its way into the OED till the 1972 Supplement, the year before Tolkien died; and even when it did the editors could find no citation earlier than 1933 (cp. ‘defeatism’, discussed above). The OED says that it means: ‘The tendency to seek, or the practice of seeking, distraction from what normally has to be endured’. And the OED has yet to find a citation which is not pejorative. In 1933 someone was complaining about the ‘escapism’ of Anacreon’s ‘bibulous, aphrodisiac lyrics’ – at least the Songs for the Philologists were not aphrodisiac. Later on Louis MacNeice equated ‘escapism’ with ‘blasphemy’, while Joyce Cary informed his readers that ‘Amanda had a great contempt for escapism’. As for the phrase at the head of this section, it comes from Essays in Criticism: where else? But if the OED is to be taken literally on ‘escapism’, it is hard to see how Tolkien can be convicted of it. Though he could be convicted (like most of us) of feeling an urge towards it.

  I have put the case elsewhere (Author, pp. xxix-xxxii) for saying that the traditional opposition be
tween ‘escapist fantasy’ and ‘realist novel’ has been, throughout the twentieth century and beyond, 180 degrees in the wrong direction: it is the fantasists like Orwell or Golding or Vonnegut or Tolkien who have been confronting the fearful and horrible issues of political life, while the E. M. Forsters and John Updikes stayed within their sheltered Shires. However, there is a deeper, non-political, and still more universal sense in which Tolkien rejects escapism, to which I now turn. Going back to the OED definition above, the experience which above all ‘normally has to be endured’ is Death. It has been suggested already (above) that there would be no surprise in seeing Tolkien, the Lancashire Fusilier, survivor of the Somme, as deeply and early marked by fear of death, starting to write his fables of the Undying Lands and the potentially deathless elves in reaction or compensation. But did these distract him, and his readers? Or focus their attention? There is no doubt that Tolkien often dwelt on the langoth, the heartache endured by those who felt, or hoped, that there was an Undying Land at the other end of the Lost Road. If Tolkien was one of these (and if he was not, why write about it?), then the feeling itself might be called a search for ‘distraction’. Yet in all Tolkien’s fiction, from early to late, the point made again and again is that langoth has no power. No human reaches Valinor without at the least some major reservation or restriction: Frodo does, but it is not clear that he will be healed; he also loses Sam and the Shire. Eriol only reaches Tol Eressëa; Eärendil reaches Valinor, as a great exception, but is ‘stellified’; the Númenórean attempt to conquer immortality kills all those who even sympathise; Fíriel turns back to clay and shadow, work and fading; Beren is resurrected, but only for a time. On a more personal note, few scenes in children’s literature are more likely to make child-readers cry than the death of Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. And death-scenes in Tolkien’s fiction are, if not as common, then at least as carefully-worked as those of Dickens. Perhaps the most multivalent is the scene of Aragorn’s death in one of the despised Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. It is true that one could say there is an element of romance, even of ‘escapist’ fantasy in Aragorn’s immensely-extended life and quasi-saintly ability to choose the moment of his death. But by contrast there is a reverse ‘anti-escapism’ in the figure of Arwen, an immortal for whom death is emphatically not something which ‘normally has to be endured’, but who now realises she will have to endure it without the partner for whom she chose it. Aragorn says to her (it is a familiar topos of consolation in medieval literature)16 that having accepted life one must accept death too, offering her also (not a familiar topos) a hint of escape: ‘to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together’. Arwen rejects the option and also the possibility. She puts into this narrative context a thought Tolkien knew was also universally true: ‘There is now no ship that would bear me hence’. She speaks bitterly of her new sympathy for the ‘escapist’ Númenóreans, and all that Aragorn can say in reply is that sorrow need not be despair. Arwen does not believe him, and dies of despair herself.

  Tolkien did not have a Grand Design, or a guiding star, or a single theme, but I would suggest that he was always a prey to two competing forces. One was the urge to escape mortality by some way other than Christian consolation: so far he was ‘escapist’. The other was the total conviction that that urge was impossible, even forbidden. Just as much of his fiction may be seen as a tension between kind-heartedness and narrative logic, or between ‘realistic hypertrophy’ and the demands of romance, so the impossible attempt to reconcile langoth and knowledge was for him an unfailing resource – the ‘something’ that kept on pulling him, but which of course he could never reach.

  One final point may be made about ‘escapism’. Many a classic novel (Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield) has hanging over its ending the invisible words, ‘And so they all lived happily ever after’. This could be said of The Lord of the Rings as well – Bilbo has had it in mind as an ending from very nearly the start, see p. 32, and his wish does seem to come true. Sam gets married, Merry and Pippin become famous, the Shire enjoys a season of unnatural fertility, good weather and growth. But even inside the fiction many characters (Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli) know and say that all this is going to vanish, because such things always do. There is even a point in the deaths of Aragorn and Arwen being sent off to an Appendix. The Appendices prevent any sense of easy, happy closure, show the whole story fading into memory – and then, like the Third Age, into oblivion. Meanwhile, the actual ending is not the Field of Cormallen, nor in true cinematic cliché the ship sailing into the sunset, but the three companions riding home, along ‘the long grey road’ from the Grey Havens, where the ship sailed down ‘the long grey firth’ in ‘the grey rain-curtain’. Sam returns, like Fíriel, to ‘yellow light, and fire within’, but something has gone out of the world just the same. Michael Swanwick, himself a brilliant writer of the fantastic, calls Sam’s words, ‘Well, I’m back’, ‘the most heartbreaking line in all of modern fantasy’, and backs up his assertion with personal reminiscence.17 More philologically, I would say that what hangs over the end of all Tolkien’s fiction is not ‘And so they all lived happily ever after’, but the line from the Old English poem Déor, þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg. This could be translated bluntly, ‘That passed, this can too’, but Tolkien translated it – see BLT 2, p. 323, for its importance to him and his writing – ‘Time has passed since then, this too can pass’.

  ‘So deeply stirred his generation’

  As the OED so massively points out, words change meaning. They do so over the centuries, as a result of use, often as a result of error: from burg to ‘burglar’, from grammatica to ‘glamour’, from *hol-bytla to ‘hobbit’. But they can change also in another way, not shedding one meaning as they shift to another, but acquiring new meaning, ‘new resonance’ as Christopher Tolkien puts it, as a result of being placed in a new context. The poet of Déor could never have imagined his line of poetry being applied to a massive antiquarian romance a millennium or more after he had written it, by people who had all but forgotten his language and the stories he told. Nevertheless it has happened: and the line, with its two demonstrative pronouns, ‘that’ and ‘this’, available as I translate it for whichever referent we choose to give them, takes on a new force no weaker for one’s awareness that it was never intended.

  I am sure this is the sort of fate Tolkien would have liked for his work: to be subsumed, to be taken into the unpredictabilities of tradition. For that to happen, its context would need to change; and already it is changing. As one looks at the development of Tolkien’s work from 1916 and The Book of Lost Tales to 1967 and Smith of Wootton Major, one fact appears, which would, perhaps, not need saying if his critics had not been so dead sure his writing could not possibly have any relevance to the century he and they lived in. This is, as I suggest above, that The Lord of The Rings in particular is a war-book, also a post-war book, framed by and responding to the crisis of Western civilisation, 1914–1945 (and beyond). It is not at all clear why the response of several English and American writers, themselves personally involved in war, and deeply anxious to write about it, should have been to communicate their thoughts and experience via fantasy. Yet that is what they did: as mentioned above, William Golding, the naval officer, in Lord of the Flies, and subsequently in another fable of a non-human race, The Inheritors (1955); T. H. White, the neutralist, in The Once and Future King, written at much the same time as The Lord of the Rings, nationibus diro in bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’, the whole work appearing in 1958, four years after Tolkien’s;18 George Orwell, shot through the neck in Spain, in the fable/allegory Animal Farm (1945), and then in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); Kurt Vonnegut, the survivor of the bombing of Dresden, in Slaughterhouse-Five (1966). All these men were writing obviously, or even self-declaredly, about the nature of evil, which they thought had changed in their time, or about which the human race had gained new knowledge. Why d
id they have to write fantasy, or science fiction, if they had such an evidently realistic, serious, non-escapist, contemporary theme? No answer has been agreed, and the question has not often even been put. Still, one thing one can say is that Tolkien belongs in this group.

  Or belonged. For books, like words, do not stay where they started. They may be put in new contexts, stir new feelings, have new results. I hope this is what happens to Tolkien, and think it is already happening, via his host of imitators, most of whom have no war experience and no clear sense of what he was writing about: what they get from him is different, not from what he put in, but from what he thought he put in. This is what happens to authors, if they are lucky. Tolkien evidently thought deeply about the story of the author Cædmon, not ‘the father of English poetry’ – Tolkien was quite sure, for reasons of his own, that he could not have been that – but allegedly the originator of Christian English poetry. His story begins near Whitby, near the year 680, when Cædmon, a North of England cowherd, went out to his byre to avoid having to sing at some festivity. There an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him what to sing. Fifty years later, his story was written down by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede wrote in Latin, and gave only a translation of a part of Cædmon’s first English poem. But at a very early subsequent stage someone else, not content with this, added to Bede’s Latin nine lines of Old English verse, in Old Northumbrian – either remembering Cædmon’s lines because they were famous, or else able to translate from Bede’s Latin prose to poetry in his own dialect. The lines wandered all over Europe, as far as Russia: a major manuscript is now in Leningrad, where no doubt the Latin has long been readable, but where the Old Northumbrian must for centuries have been totally impenetrable. They were translated also into West Saxon; and two centuries after Cædmon, King Alfred of the West Saxons ordered the whole of Bede’s Latin work to be translated into Old English – though he seems to have been unable to find a West Saxon to do it, the surviving translation showing signs of having been affected by Old Mercian. Probably the translator came from Worcester, very close to Tolkien. But then his translation too was forgotten for hundreds of years.