by Karen Haber
In this case, as with most elements of The Lord of the Rings, I assume Tolkien to have been writing “escapistly,” without encryption, deciding what happened and why, solely on the basis of what felt important and true to him at the time he was writing or revising. I may well be projecting my own process of storytelling onto Tolkien because, inevitably, I always view the world through my own lens, having no other, no matter how I try to polish it and focus it clearly. But he said there was no allegory here, and I take him at his word, with the broadest reading of the term allegory, to include all methods of encryption and decipherment of extraneous “meaning.”
The Lord of the Rings, like all of Tolkien’s fiction and, I believe, all truly great tales, is a wild tale, untamable. It is the mark of the depth of this great river that sweeps us along when we step into it that there can be variant readings, which are nevertheless consonant with the text. It is as ragged as a river, with sandbars here and there that fetch us up and leave us dry for a moment or two (I’ve never cared about the barrow-wights; and others have their sections or characters that bore or irritate them). But the river flows on, and when we leap back in we are caught up again; and if, in its broad delta, some of us end up in a different place when the story’s over, well, that’s what happens in such wild streams. In fact, that’s what we hope for, that this author’s world is so real that when we immerse ourselves in it, we can never be sure, from one reading to the next, where it will take us, or what we will see along the way.
We have run this river, you and I—more than once, in my case, and quite probably in yours. I keep returning to it precisely because it has never been tamed, and cannot be tamed. It is wild every time, and so the “meanings” of the story, while boundaried by the words on the page and the mind that envisioned the tale, are nevertheless many, each one a current that can tug me here this time, there the next, to see different meanings every time.
Forget the river metaphor. No analogizing now. There is a man’s whole soul in the pages of this tale, a man’s whole life, each stage of it, represented in the elements of its creation. The great storytellers are the ones whose characters become as real in our memories as our friends and family. As ourselves. I have lived in Middle-earth, and so have you; and it matters to us, or you would not be reading this book, and I would not be writing this essay. All these years since Tolkien died, and yet he still reveals the world, the wide and wild world, to us.
THE TALE
GOES EVER
ON
CHARLES DE LINT
My first encounter with Tolkien was through my older sister, Kame, when I was around twelve or thirteen. I’d temporarily put aside the fairy tales and books on myth and folk tales that I’d been reading (not to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter books borrowed from my father’s bookshelf) and had been seduced, hook, line and sinker, by mysteries and spy thrillers. Instead of Donkeyskins and cats in boots and Taliesins, my head was filled with the exploits of the Saint and Modesty Blaise, Shell Scott and Mike Hammer, Nick Carter and James Bond.
What can I say? I was young, I was impressionable.
The day in question was probably on a weekend. A Saturday or Sunday. I came into my sister’s bedroom (without knocking, I’m sure) and was hanging around being a pest when I noticed this book lying on her bed. The Hobbit. I asked her what it was about, and she proceeded, with great enthusiasm, to tell me about Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf, about dwarves and elves and Rivendell and all.
I’d like to say that I was immediately won over and put aside the hardboiled detectives and spies to immerse myself in Middle-earth, but it wouldn’t be true. Instead, I laughed and made fun of her for reading kids’ books (being so mature myself, of course).
And I should have known better. I mean, not only was Kamé first on the mark with Tolkien, she was also the first person I knew to have ever heard of the Beatles and to have gone so far as to get a couple of their 45s long before anybody else was even remotely aware of them. I mention this, because those 45s mesmerized me as much as Tolkien’s stories did when I finally did read them. We used to listen to the Beatles over and over again, and when the band finally showed up on Ed Sullivan (hard to believe now, but back then that was the only show on TV where you could see anything like that), we were in heaven.
But I digress.
On the day she had borrowed The Hobbit from the library, and was almost finished reading it, Tolkien just seemed about the goofiest thing anybody could want to read.
I remember that clearly. I don’t remember exactly when it was that I went on to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings after that, but it had to be a couple of years later—still in the mid-sixties.
I was already familiar with some of Tolkien’s source material, as I’ve mentioned above, but this massive story of his, with all the original touches and sheer veracity he brought to his work, was the point where I fell utterly head-over-heels in love with the idea of magic and wonder, and the effect it could have on an ordinary person (the hobbits, for all their furry feet and other charms, still stood in for everyman when compared to everyone and everything else in those books).
To say that it changed my life would be putting it mildly. It reawoke the child in me—not the innocent, but rather the boy capable of putting aside cynicism and able, once again, to regain his sense of wonder.
I can, and will in a moment, talk about the enduring appeal and value of those two books (I don’t care that publishers created a whole misconception about fantasy and trilogies; in my mind, I follow Tolkien’s lead and consider The Lord of the Rings a single book), but I’d like to explore for a moment what it was like to come across these books at the time I did, and why I reread them so often.
For one thing, there was the Story of it all. My previous experience with such material had only been in short formats—fairy tales, folk anecdotes, mythologies—that weren’t entirely satisfying, though I doubt I could have explained it at the time. What I did know was that here was a huge story, a tapestry within which one could get lost for days. The characters were believable, not only because they were so well-drawn, but because they had reasonable motives for doing what they did. One of the least satisfying aspects of those earlier stories that Tolkien had used as source material (and which I’d also read) was how so much of it was arbitrary. The characters were too often simply archetypes, with no effort made to expand their personalities, their strengths and failings existing solely for the purposes of the story, rather than growing out of their own experience and history.
(An ironic aside here: Nowadays, many of those fresh and vital characters that Tolkien created, or refurbished from old folkloric and mythic material, have become the archetypes for fantasy fiction. The circle turns. . . .)
Because of my own inexperience (I’d yet to hear of Dunsany, Morris, Cabell, et al.), I’d never come across anything like this before. I know that sounds odd, writing this at the tail end of the year 2000, when the shelves of any library or bookstore are sagging with enormous, and too-often, bloated fantasies of a similar ilk. But the classics were still hidden to me, and the subsequent tsunami of Tolkienesque wannabes was still but a gleam in Ian Ballantine’s eye.
Though to be fair, I owe Ballantine Books almost as much a debt of gratitude as I do Tolkien. If Tolkien showed me that fantastical, magical worlds were for all ages, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, under the editorship of Lin Carter, and with the Sign of the Unicorn in the top right-hand corner of each volume, showed me that there was far from one way to tell such stories.
Looking back, I think the most interesting thing about these books was just that: how very different they were from one another. There was no mistaking Clark Ashton Smith’s dark visions for the pastoral worlds of William Morris. Nor William Hope Hodgeson’s Night Land for Hope Mirrelees’ Faerie, even if they shared a given name.
THE DARK TOWER
The Return of the King
Chapter III: “Mount Doom”
This i
s probably the single strongest reason I have so little patience for much of the fantasy being published today. Coming upon those classics in my formative years spoiled me forever. Why would one want to read incessant variations on the same tired story—which, I’m sorry, but don’t try to tell me that most fantasy novels of the past twenty years aren’t pretty much an endless factory line of more-of-the-same—when an author could, and should, have his or her own individual worlds and stories to share with us.
But I’ve jumped ahead of myself.
At the time I first began to read Tolkien, June 1969 (when the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line began to bring the classics to the attention of hungry readers such as myself) was still years away. And while I already had experienced, or was soon to experience, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series (1964 through 1968), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series (1965 through 1977; oddly enough, also a set of five books), Alan Garner’s wonderful fantasies (such as The Weirdstone of Brisingaman, 1960) and others of their like, they were still aimed at a young adult/children’s market—for all that older readers could, and still do, appreciate them.
I remember those books with fondness, and still go back to reread them from time to time, but they pushed different buttons for me. None of them had the scope, nor the truthfulness, of The Hobbit, and especially The Lord of the Rings. There were detailed maps of Middle-earth. Whole languages and histories. One could marvel in the rumor that Tolkien had created these stories simply as a setting for his true interest: creating his elvish languages. Subsequent books such as The Silmarillion and the many others to follow, each a little less readable than the one before for most readers, myself included, only seemed to bear this out.
We didn’t so much feel that Tolkien was making up Middle-earth, as allowing us a glimpse into some alternate reality; and let’s face it, at that time, alternate realities held a great deal of attraction for many of us growing up in what felt to be far too stifling a society. There were rules and regulations in Middle-earth, true, and much of what the books were about was a passing of innocence and Faerie, from this world into the next. But that didn’t invalidate the feeling that there once had been magic in the world, and perhaps, if we looked hard enough, and worked hard enough, it could be regained.
Magic wasn’t simply elves and wizards and spells. Magic also seemed to promise a deeper and more resonant connection with the world and all of us inhabiting it. It’s not so surprising that the peace, love and flowers generation should have taken these books so much to heart. Tolkien was writing about the industrialization of his beloved England, but throughout the world we could find similar analogies. Mordor felt like big business, the companies that had a long history of strip-mining, clear-cutting, and creating pollution.
Those opposing such companies could find a resonance in Tolkien’s books. As could the fledgling environmental movement. As could anyone who wished to preserve some of the natural beauty of the world, who might feel dismayed at the “progressive” concept that change is both necessary and good. I don’t believe we were all Luddites. But we did want to see some balance struck between technological progress and more naturalistic values.
Am I reading too much into a simple pair of fantasy novels? I don’t think so. But at the time, I also don’t think that we were necessarily examining the reasons that Tolkien’s books touched us the way they did. We allowed them into our lives, we were enriched by them on many levels, but we didn’t feel the need to understand why. We were able to appreciate them as wonderful stories that also resonated to the way we felt about the world.
Perhaps the best reason for such appreciation can be found in Tolkien’s own essay, “On Fairy-stories” (Tree and Leaf, 1964):
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific veracity. On the contrary. The keener and clearer the reason, the better fantasy it will make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy would perish, and become Morbid Delusion.
While the cult of appreciation that sprang up in the wake of the publication of Tolkien’s books certainly had its moments of being much too far over the top (remember graffiti written in runes or elvish script, or simply stating “Gandalf Lives!”?), such rabid fans were a minority. There were many other readers who had a quieter and more personal relationship with the books. They understood what Tolkien was getting at in the above quote, that there needs to be a balance between fantasy and reality, how our lives are so much the poorer when the balance becomes uneven—no matter which way it leans.
The Hobbit, and especially The Lord of the Rings, went on to influence generations of young writers, myself being included in the second or third wave. Some us wrote lavish imitations and continue to do so. Some of us began by writing such imitations, but then went looking for our own voices. How many of us would be writers today without Tolkien’s direct or indirect influence, how large an audience for fantasy there would be without the genre he inadvertently created, is hard to say. But frankly, for all the misuse of the tools he popularized and then put in our hands, I still think the world would be a much dimmer place without his gift of Middle-earth.
And the most telling thing is how these books are still so powerful today, easily rising above the crowds of crass imitators and heartfelt tributes with which they share the shelves of libraries and bookstores. Yes, it would have been nice if Tolkien could have had some more strong, well-drawn female characters (though to be fair, how much would a cloistered Oxford don know about such exotic—to him—creatures?). And surely a world as large and diverse as Middle-earth would have been strongly influenced by religion in some form or another.
Yet even such critiques wither before the books themselves—the Story, the wealth of detail, the characters that we are given in its pages.
I can still enjoy these books, and I don’t believe my pleasure is nostalgic. And I don’t believe I’m alone, either. Tolkien might have passed on, but the words remain. And, to paraphrase “The Road Goes Ever On” (the title song from Donald Swann’s folio of Tolkien lyrics set to music back in 1967), the tale goes ever on.
THE MYTH-
MAKER
LISA GOLDSTEIN
I first read J. R. R. Tolkien in the eighth grade, when a classmate of mine gave a book report on The Lord of the Rings. I was impressed by her passion, by her clear delight in the book, and so—despite the fact that she gave away the ending—I borrowed a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring from a friend. (I have remembered the name of the girl who gave the book report from that day to this, and if I ever meet her again I mean to have words with her about giving away that ending.)
My friend was still working on the second volume when I finished the first. I was distraught. What had happened to Gandalf? I ran to the corner drugstore and got The Two Towers. This remains fixed in my mind as one of the first times I ever bought a book.
I ended up reading the series every year of my adolescence. I read it until those first paperbacks wore out; I read it until I practically had it memorized, and—unfortunately—could not look at it again for a long while, having become familiar with every twist and turn, every poetic phrase.
I learned later that I wasn’t the only one to do this. I even read a book once where, to demonstrate what a nerd one of the characters was, the author mentions that the character read The Lord of the Rings every year. Okay, so we’re nerds. I made myself a cloak once; I even went out with a guy who called himself Bilbo. Guilty. But what the author of this book—I can’t remember the title, but it was mainstream, obviously—failed to understand is how powerful The Lord of the Rings actually is.
The question, though, is why. Why do people read and reread these books? Why are they so powerful? What do we get from them that we ca
n’t get anywhere else? How did one man working alone manage to call into being an entire genre, an entire publishing industry?
My guess is that it’s because we need myth. Not just because myths are entertaining stories, or because some of them come attached with a moral. We need them, the way we need vitamins or sunlight.
I read The Lord of the Rings at the tail end of the sixties, when it seemed that everyone was busily searching for a myth, a religion, a way to make some kind of meaning out of their world. My school was overrun with kids carrying the Bible, or books by Alan Watts, or Chairman Mao’s little red book. There was a sense that our parents had failed us somehow, that we had missed something, that there was a larger world out there we had never been told about.
We had grown up in the fifties; our parents had survived the Depression and the horrors of World War II, and now just wanted to make a life for themselves in the midst of America’s new prosperity. Not for them the troubling questions about myth and meaning, the dragons slithering up from the psyche. Fairy tales became comfortable stories told to children; the dwarfs of Snow White were no longer mysterious and sometimes frightening earth-dwellers, but cute little men named Grumpy and Sneezy. Even religion became something we thought about for a few days each year and forgot the rest of the time.
The idea was that science had triumphed, that we lived in an Age of Science. Diseases that had terrified people for centuries had been nearly wiped out; nuclear power was about to give us unlimited sources of energy.
The Age of Science certainly brought a lot of benefits—I’m not saying that smallpox and polio were good things. But somehow the idea grew that science and myth could not coexist, that myth was the same as superstition, and had to be suppressed. And I think this loss of myth was one of the reasons my generation searched so hard and went, some of them, down such disastrous paths.