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

by Tom Shippey

  Meanwhile the related theme of mis-diagnosed coincidence is indeed present, but relatively vestigially. In the shortened presentation of Sam and Frodo’s approach to Mount Doom, the two look out across the plain of Gorgoroth, and see the camp-fires of the Orcs going out as Sauron’s armies move away to the Black Gate. Sam thinks and says that this is a stroke of luck, but he is wrong, because Aragorn and Gandalf have led their remaining forces to the Black Gate precisely in order to draw Sauron’s attention. But other ‘coincidences’ have been removed. In Tolkien, it was a fortunate coincidence that the sword with which Merry stabs the chief Nazgûl had been made long ago for use against ‘the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king’ (LOTR, p. 826), who is now the Nazgûl; but the film, having eliminated the barrow-wight sequence, makes nothing of this. Similarly, there is no doubt in Tolkien that Denethor’s attempted murder of Faramir is what dooms Théoden, for as Pippin draws Gandalf away, Gandalf says, ‘if I do [save Faramir], then others will die’ (LOTR, p. 832). But this demonstration that there is always a price to pay for weakness is also no longer visible. In general, Tolkien’s painstaking double analysis both of the dangers of speculation and of the nature of chance, which between them express a highly traditional but at the same time markedly original view of the workings of Providence, is not reflected in Jackson’s sequence of movies. In that sense, much of the philosophical ‘core of the original’ has indeed been lost in the movie version.

  However, and here I query Tolkien’s statement cited at the start of this essay, this may be because the ‘canons of narrative art', while certainly not ‘wholly different’ in a different medium, are identifiably different. For one thing, the film medium has more trouble dealing with distorted time sequences than does prose fiction. Film makers can easily cut from one scene to another, and Jackson often does so with strikingly contrastive effects.8 The implication, though, is always that the different scenes (more of them, shorter, much more broken up)9 are happening at more or less the same time. Simply by having chapter and book divisions, with all the familiar devices of chapter-tides and fresh-page starts, a novelist like Tolkien can in effect say to his reader, ‘I am now taking you back to where I left off with this group of characters’. One result is that the reader is much more aware of what he or she knows, from another plot-strand, that the characters in the plot-strand being narrated do not know, with obvious resultant effects of irony or reassurance. This is a major difference between the two versions we now have of The Lord of the Rings.

  Does it matter? Jackson may not have been able to cope with all the ramifications of Tolkien on Providence, but then few if any readers do. It is very difficult to say whether some part of Tolkien’s intention gets through even to careless or less-comprehending readers: he would have hoped so, but there is no guarantee that he was correct. And meanwhile Jackson has certainly succeeded in conveying much of the more obvious parts of Tolkien’s narrative core, many of them quite strikingly alien to Hollywood normality – the difference between Prime and Subsidiary Action, the differing styles of heroism, the need for pity as well as courage, the vulnerability of the good, the true cost of evil. It was brave of him to stay with the sad, muted, ambiguous ending of the original, with all that it leaves unsaid. Perhaps the only person who could answer the question posed above – do the changes affect the nature of the entire work? – would be a person with an experience quite opposite to my own: someone who had seen the films, preferably several times over, and only then had read Tolkien’s original. It would be interesting to gather from such a person a list of ‘things I hadn’t realised before’, as also ‘things Tolkien left out'. Perhaps the most heartening thing one can say is that there will certainly now be many millions of people in exactly that position, new readers facing a new experience, and finding once again Tolkien’s road to Middle-earth.

  * References to the first two Jackson films are by scenes as numbered in the extended DVD versions put out by New Line Cinemas in 2002 (The Fellowship of the Ring, here JTT) and 2003 (The Two Towers, here JTT). At the time of writing the extended version of the third film has not yet been released, though I have been fortunate enough to see it, and scene references cannot be given.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1 We now know that it was the historical novelist Alfred Duggan. Duggan, stepson of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, and in his youth immensely rich and well-connected, was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and a member of his group at Oxford between the wars, as was Philip Toynbee mentioned below. For the literary allegiances and antipathies implied, see Afterword, and further Author, pp. 316–17.

  2 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York and London: Scribners, 1931), p. 252.

  3 C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1975), p. 206.

  4 For further, if barely credible examples of the same phenomenon, see above, and in truly painful detail, Patrick Curry, ‘Tolkien’s Critics: A Critique’, in Thomas Honegger, ed., Root and Branch: Approaches Towards Understanding Tolkien (Zurich and Berne: Walking Tree Publishers, 1999), pp. 81–148.

  5 See further note 5 to chapter 8, and the discussion above.

  6 Holger Pedersen, The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. J. W. Spargo, 1931 (reprinted ed. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1962), p. 79.

  7 L. Bloomfield, ‘Why a Linguistic Society?’, Language vol. 1 (1925), p. 1.

  8 J. C. Collins, The Study of English Literature, 1891, but quoted here from D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (London: Oxford U.P., 1965), pp. 83–4.

  9 See L. Bloomfield, Language (London: George Allen & Unwin, rev. ed. 1935), p. 12 ff.

  10 See Pedersen, op. cit., pp. 263–4.

  11 See Pedersen, op. cit., especially chapters 1, 2 and 7.

  12 Max Müller, ‘Comparative Mythology’, 1856, in Chips from a German Workshop (4 vols., London: Longmans, 1880), vol. 2, p. 26.

  13 There is an account of the affair in Peter Ganz’s ‘Eduard Sievers’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur, vol. 100 (1978), pp. 76–8.

  14 See D. J. Palmer, op. cit., p. 97.

  15 R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), pp. 342–3.

  16 The phrase was coined by Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford 1904–29 and quoted as evidence in The Teaching of English in England (London: HMSO, 1921), p. 218.

  17 Pedersen, op. cit., p. 108.

  18 Wïdsith: a study in Old English Heroic Legend, ed. R. W. Chambers (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1912), pp. 1–2.

  19 Die beiden ältesten Gedichte aus dem achten Jahrhundert, ed. W. and J. Grimm (Cassel: Thumeisen, 1812), p. 31.

  20 Axel Olrik, The Heroic Legends of Denmark, trans. Lee Hollander (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919), p. 85.

  21 Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ed. G. Vigfusson and F. York Powell (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), vol. 1, p. xcvii.

  22 See Pedersen, op. cit., pp. 277–92, and O. Jespersen, Language (London: George Allen 8c Unwin, 1922), pp. 80–3.

  23 Text and translation are those of Thomas Jones, ‘The Black Book of Carmarthen “Stanzas of the Graves”’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 53 (1967), pp. 125–7.

  24 See R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 15.

  25 Palmer, op. cit., pp. 66–117.

  26 Peter Ganz, ‘Jacob Grimm’s Conception of German Studies’, Inaugural Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 7–9.

  27 J. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. J. S. Stallybrass (4 vols., London: George Bell, 1882–8), vol. 3, p. lv.

  28 Remarks quoted in the preceding paragraph come respectively from Edmund Wilson in the review already cited, p. 312; Lin Carter, Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings (New York: Ballantine, 1969), pp. 93–4; Neil D. Isaacs, On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism’, in Tolkien and the Critics, ed. N. D. Isaacs and Rose A.
Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 7; and Robert J. Reilly, ‘Tolkien and the Fairy Story’, Isaacs and Zimbardo anthology, p. 137.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘For W.H.A.’, Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, vol. 18 no. 2 (Winter 1967), pp. 96–7.

  2 See W. Grimm, Die deutsche Heldensage, 3rd ed. (Gütersloh: Bertelmann, 1889), p. 383, and ‘OFS’, Tree p.30. In conversation, Tolkien noted that his aunt Jane Neave’s surname might derive from the hero-name Hnæf, while that of Hnæf’s avenger, the hero Hengest, might survive in the Oxfordshire place-name Hinksey (Hengestes-ieg). Legend was still preserved in perfectly familiar everyday surroundings, if no longer consciously.

  3 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Goblin Feet’, in Oxford Poetry 1915, ed. G. D. H. C[ole] and T. W. E[arp] (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1915), pp. 64–5. I quote from this first published version, which differs slightly from that used by Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, pp. 106–7. It is most conveniently found in The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Douglas A. Anderson (2nd edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) p. 113.

  4 G. B. Smith, ‘Songs on the Downs’, Oxford Poetry 1915, p. 60.

  5 See Biography, pp. 101–9, 125–33.

  6 A list of published poems appears in Biography, p. 352 ff., though nothing in print has yet disclosed their serpentine intertwinings. Several poems were clearly rewritten several, or many, times.

  7 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Name “Nodens”’, Appendix I to Report on the Excavation … in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries, no. 9 (London: Oxford U.P., 1932), pp. 132–7.

  8 Since writing this I have noticed that one of the Inklings, the Rev. Adam Fox, actually did write a narrative poem on Old King Coel (the proper spelling), which Tolkien knew, see Letters, p. 36.

  9 There is an edition of it, with translation, in Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 71–3.

  10 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Sigelwara Land: Part II’, Medium Aevum vol. 3 (1934), pp. 110–11.

  11 Tolkien used allegory several times in his academic articles, to make a point, always a comic or satirical one, as for instance in the story of the man and the tower cited just below – a clear case of the reductio ad absurdum. Strict allegory, the sort in which every item in the story corresponds exactly to an item in the hidden meaning, is however notoriously hard to keep up for long, while moral allegory rapidly becomes dreary, which probably accounts for Tolkien’s expressed dislike.

  12 See Biography, pp. 186, 259–60, 318–21. He calls himself ‘a natural niggler, alas!’ in Letters, p. 313. See further Author, pp. 267–8, and above.

  13 There is doubt about the details here. The first version of ‘Leaf by Niggle’ seems to have been written in 1939 (see Bibliography, p. 348), at which point The Lord of the Rings might not have been advanced enough to be a convincing ‘Tree’. Possibly the ‘Tree’ here should represent, as I remark in the ‘Preface’ to this book, ‘something much more extensive’ in Tolkien’s growing mythology, the whole developing story of First, Second, and Third Ages including the many stages of the ‘Silmarillion’. The idea of something growing unexpectedly as the artist works on it does sound, however, very like Tolkien’s own experience with the hobbits, so I have let the equation stand.

  14 I have to admit no source for this other than Oxford gossip. There is however a highly characteristic anti-Tolkien conversation presented in fictional form in J. I. M. Stewart’s A Memorial Service (London: Methuen paperback, 1977), p. 176. In this a Regius Professor writes off ‘J. B. Timbermill’ – evidently Tolkien – as ‘A notable scholar’ who ‘ran off the rails’.

  15 I discuss its repeated revisions and reprintings in ‘The Versions of “The Hoard”’, published in Lembas, newsletter of the Dutch Tolkien Society, no. 100 (2001). The earliest version, from 1923, is again most readily available in Douglas Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit, pp. 335–7. A revised version appears in TB as ‘The Hoard’.

  16 There are extensive accounts of the dragon concept in Joyce Lionarons, The Medieval Dragon: the Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1998), and in Jonathan Evans’s article ‘“As Rare as they are Dire”: Old Norse Dragons, Beowulf, and the Deutsche Mythologie,’ in The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, ed. Tom Shippey (Tempe: Arizona State U.P., forthcoming 2005).

  17 For the quotations above, see The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, ed. and trans. C. Tolkien (London: Nelson’s, 1960), pp. xxiii and 45.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 The gloss, to the poem ‘June’, was not written by Spenser himself, but by a friend known only as ‘E.K.’ – someone even prouder than Spenser of his Classical learning and so the more likely to make unbelievable errors over non-Classical matters.

  2 ‘Elfin’ is in the poem ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’, but has become ‘elven’ in the revision given to Aragorn, LOTR, pp. 187–9; ‘fairy’ occurs once in all editions of The Hobbit, ‘gnome’ in the first edition only. ‘Goblin’, a Latin-derived word, is used throughout The Hobbit, but relatively rarely in LOTR. For ‘dwarfish’, see the letter cited above – another printer’s correction?

  3 This is a modernised form of a ballad recorded in Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser (12 vols., Copenhagen: Thiele, 1853–1976), Vol. II, 105–9, by Svend Grundtvig – son of the Beowulfian scholar Nikolai Grundtvig.

  4 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940, London: Fontana Books reprint, 1957, p. 13). This was clearly an Inkling theory, cp. Tolkien’s ‘supremely convincing tone of Primary Art’ (‘OFS’, in Tree, p. 72).

  5 See the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál sections 35 and 39. There is a full translation by Anthony Faulkes in the Everyman series (London: Dent, 1987).

  6 Preface to J. and W. Grimm, Haus- und Kindermärchen (3rd edn., Göttingen: Dieterichische Buchhandlung, 1849), p. xxviii.

  7 Snorri, Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál section 49.

  8 As a youth (by dwarvish reckoning) he kills Azog in revenge for his father, and looks into Moria, LOTR p. 1049; as an old man he is killed fighting, p. 1053. In between he is seen bandying words with Sauron’s messenger, p. 235; and sticking to the letter of Thorin’s bargain in The Hobbit, p. 268.

  9 Tolkien tells the same story in a letter to W.H. Auden, Letters, p. 215, and there is a more extensive account of what is known about the book’s genesis in Bibliography, pp. 7–8.

  10 Quoted in Ganz, Inaugural Lecture, p. 5.

  11 I am indebted for this point to an article by Jessica Kemball-Cook, in Amon Hen: the Bulletin of the Tolkien Society, no. 23 (December 1976), p. 11. See also Bibliography, pp. 29–33.

  12 See Paul Kocher, Master of Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), Penguin Books edition, 1974, p. 24.

  13 As remarked in the ‘Preface’, this was a mistake as originally written. We now know that Sauron had come into Tolkien’s fiction well before The Hobbit. However, The Hobbit does not make the equation between Sauron and ‘the Necromancer’ eventually made by Gandalf in ‘The Council of Elrond’, so once again I have let the comment stand.

  14 See Bibliography, esp. pp. 21–4. It should be noted that The Hobbit continued to hold misprints and errors through many editions, caused sometimes by printers ‘corrections’ at an early stage, sometimes by incomplete revision. Till the 1990s, for instance, Durin’s Day had one definition at the end of chapter 3, ‘last moon’, and another at the start of chapter 4, ‘first moon’. See further Douglas A. Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit, pp. 384–6 and passim.

  15 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 42.

  16 See ‘The Wreck of the Birkenhead’, Annual Register 1852, pp. 470–3.

  17 See The Vinland Sagas, trans. M. Magnusson and H. Pálsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 104.

  18 Since this is a contentious piece, I have not given my own translation but that of Clark Hall and Wrenn, to which Tolkien wrote the ‘Prefatory
Remarks’ in 1940.

  19 Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 62.

  20 As remarked in the text just above, the phrase had had special meaning for Tolkien since 1923, see further note 15 to chapter 2 and note 9 to chapter 8.

  21 Gollum’s original name, Sméagol, comes from the same root, as does modern ‘smuggle’. Sméagol and Déagol could be translated as ‘Slinky’ and ‘Sneaky’.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 The best account of what happened is given by Christopher Tolkien in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 364–7.

  2 This is another late change in the text, see once more Bibliography, p. 29. But in all editions Gandalf’s staff appears in the first scene. He uses it to scratch the sign on Bilbo’s door.

  3 Paul Kocher, Master of Middle-Earth, p. 161, notes that the definition of ‘blunderbuss’ ascribed in Farmer Giles to ‘the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford’ is that of the OED, the Four Wise Clerks being the four editors, J. A. H. Murray, H. Bradley, W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions. Giles’s blunderbuss, like Tolkien’s dwarves, does not fit the OED definition.

  4 When I first thought of this, in my article ‘Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings’ in Memoriam Essays, I wrote it off as ‘entirely adventitious’. It has grown on me since, which may be no more than furor allegoricus or allegorist’s mania. However I did not at that time realise how well Farmer Giles fitted the other allegories of 1935–43.