by Karen Haber
Myths had started their decline long before the fifties, though. Tolkien himself, in his famous essay “On Fairy-stories,” puts the beginning somewhere around the Elizabethan Age. Once upon a time, fairies had been called the Fair Folk to placate them, and people thought of them as capricious and unpredictable, beautiful and terrifying, anything but fair. But in the works of Michael Drayton and Shakespeare himself, they became tiny, dainty, merely pretty. They lost their power to astonish and frighten; they dwindled, both in stature and importance. They became a subject for children and, eventually, as Tolkien puts it, were “relegated to the nursery.”
Not surprisingly, this happened at about the same time that people were beginning to understand certain things about their world, were beginning to experiment, were starting on the road that would take them from alchemy to chemistry, from astrology to astronomy.
The need for myth became especially acute after World War I, when all the certainties of the old values were swept away, when, not coincidentally, Tolkien began his tale. Part of his genius was that he realized this hunger still existed, despite all the marvels of the modern world. He knew that people need epic stories of journeys, dragons, treasure, magic, wonders, terrors, loss, and redemption, of heroes stretched nearly beyond their capacity for endurance. We need them because they’re magnificent stories, of course, tales that have been told as long as people existed. But we also need them because they are stories about the hero who journeys into a dark place and comes out transformed, and that is a story we all know intimately, a story each of us experiences in his or her life. Those dragons are our dragons, those magical helpers our helpers. And sometimes the dragons are inside us, a part of us, and this is the most terrifying struggle of all. No wonder an entire generation wanted nothing to do with myth.
If that was all, we’d probably never have heard of this man Tolkien. But his genius also showed itself in the way he was able to satisfy that hunger. Working in the twentieth century, at a time of cars and airplanes and radios, he revived an old form and somehow made it speak to the present. He spent, literally, decades constructing his world, making it consistent, giving it languages and poetry and history and art, making it so real we might believe that he had discovered it rather than invented it. He gave it characters of stature—metaphorical if not literal—people who fit the grandeur of the place. And he set in motion a story that we read again and again.
How did he do it? How was he able to write an epic in a time when epics were all but forgotten? How did he tap into the collective unconscious of so many people? I don’t know. Sorry. You might check Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, another response to the lack of myth in the twentieth century. Campbell gives a template for the hero’s journey, from the Call to Adventure to the Descent into Darkness—the Night-sea Journey—and finally the Emergence of the Hero Reborn, and you might note that there are at least three of these descents in The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf in Moria, Frodo’s and Sam’s journey into Mordor, and Aragorn in the Paths of the Dead. But Tolkien, of course, didn’t use a template—for one thing, The Lord of the Rings was nearly finished when Campbell’s book came out. More importantly, the unconscious does not follow rules; it cannot be forced into a template.
Tolkien himself, in the introduction to The Lord of the Rings, says that he was writing a story “that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving. . . .” I think that’s the closest we’ll come to understanding how he did it. Somehow he went deep into his unconscious—another Descent into Darkness—went into the part of his mind where the stories come from, and he returned to the everyday world with this one. That’s why he was a genius; there’s really no explaining them.
There is one explanation for his success I can give, though, one small piece of the mystery I can illuminate. I think some of it has to do with language. An epic tale needs an epic voice, a poetic voice, a voice raised above the babble and trivia of the everyday world. There should be a hint of the ancient world in this voice, an understanding that the storyteller is dealing with a heroic age, with people who were, if not better than, more than us. (But only a hint. A little archaism can go a long way.)
Tolkien, a professor of languages and a connoisseur of words, knew all about this; so did Homer, and the author of Beowulf, and whoever wrote the more poetic parts of the Bible. He turned to these examples as he wrote, an achievement that is all the more impressive when you realize that he was writing in a time that worshiped Hemingway and his stripped-down, no-nonsense prose. (Geniuses, of course, pay no attention to fashions.) Listen to these lines, to the rhythms, to the spell he is weaving here:
CIRITH UNGOL
The Return of the King
Book 4, Chapter I: “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”
He [Frodo] stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvellous and yet not strange. “Fair lady Goldberry!” he said again. “Now the joy that was hidden in the songs we heard is made plain to me.”
The Fellowship of the Ring
“Gibbets and crows!” he [Saruman] hissed, and they shuddered at the hideous change. “Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs? Too long have they escaped the gibbet themselves. But the noose comes, slow in the drawing, tight and hard in the end. Hang if you will!”
The Two Towers
“Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace.”
A cold voice answered: “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.”
A sword rang as it was drawn. “Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.”
“Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!”
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. . . .
The Return of the King
If none of that makes you shiver, you might be dead.
The first example describes a small part of the beauty of Middle-earth, the other two its terror. (Tolkien, unlike many writers, was adept at both.) And I wasn’t joking about these pieces making you shiver. The last is especially shiver-inducing to me, a description of heroism against all odds, of triumph, made even sweeter because it is about one of Tolkien’s few female characters. You don’t even have to know what “dwimmerlaik” means; it’s one of those archaisms I talked about earlier, an authentic reminder that we are in another time, another place. By the sound of it (say it out loud), and in context, we understand that it means something foul, something terrifying.
But, you say, there have been many followers of Tolkien, some who slavishly imitated him, and some who went their own way, and these people do not use poetic language. Sometimes the opposite, in fact; sometimes the ineptness of their writing can make you wince. I haven’t kept up with all the writers of epic fantasy—I don’t think anyone can, these days—but the only ones I know of who understand the importance of language are Ursula Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, and Greer Gilman. (Le Guin even wrote a wonderful essay on this subject, called “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”) This is a matter very near and dear to my heart, so I hope you will permit me a small rant here.
(But first, a digression. There are some books that are marketed as epic fantasy but are in fact histories, though histories of imaginary places. These have little or no magic, and are concerned with the stuff of history, intrigues and invasions and the like. They are, and should be, written in the language of history. So I can read Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels with pleasure and w
ithout ranting—much to the relief of my husband, who’s heard the rant a few times too many—and I’m having a very good time with George R. R. Martin’s series.)
After I read The Lord of the Rings, I looked around for more of the same. At the time there seemed to be very little that provided the same thrill: some children’s books, the Earthsea series, Lin Carter’s amazing Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Finally, at the end of the seventies, a number of books came out that were strongly influenced by The Lord of the Rings.
“Strongly influenced” may be understatement; there are scenes in at least one of these that seem to have been lifted in whole from Tolkien. I was working in a bookstore when this book came out, and I was very excited at the advanced publicity. As I said, I was starved for fantasy, and there are only so many times you can reread Tolkien. We ordered a display, what publishers call a “dump” (which gives you some idea of how publishers feel toward their books), containing, I think, eighteen copies. I got an advanced reading copy, settled down to be enchanted, and found myself reading a pale imitation of The Lord of the Rings.
I once felt very bitter toward this book; I thought (and still think, somewhat), that it is at least partly to blame for all the cheap tripe that came later. Now, though, I have a different view, a view I incline to in my less cynical moments. A myth is a story of a hero’s journey into darkness, and his or her return. All myths are the same in this way; it is only the trappings that are different. Perhaps the author of this book, like all of us, was moved by this story, and moved to retell it; perhaps in retelling it he was more like a bard of old, singing a story he had heard to a transfixed audience around a fire. Myths were once told and retold, changed and rechanged; intellectual property is a fairly recent concept. That he proved to be such a poor bard compared to the master does not change the nature of the tale.
But when I read my advanced copy I despaired, and not just because I thought the book was derivative and the language clunky. I feared that no one would buy this thing, that we had ordered far too many copies and that they would all have to be returned, with us paying the postage on what was, after all, a fairly hefty tome (though nothing like the toe-crushers that followed). The bookstore had just opened, and a little thing like postage was a huge expense in those days.
To my absolute surprise, the book began to sell, and sold without ceasing. We got rid of the entire dump and had to pick up more copies at our local book distributor. I was in a bit of a quandary, though, when our customers asked me if it was any good, and ended up saying something like, “If one of the things you enjoyed about Tolkien was his language, you won’t like this. But if you read Tolkien only for the story, you will find this very much like that, maybe too much so.” To a man and a woman, they bought the book.
Then the floodgates opened. Hundreds of epic fantasies, maybe even thousands, have been published since then. People realized that they could write them without paying attention to style, that they didn’t have to spend decades building a world, but could make one out of cheap cardboard, or, even simpler, could borrow it from a better writer. Some of these books were so bad they wouldn’t even make decent landfill. And these, too, were bought and eagerly devoured.
It’s the story: the story is the important thing. People are so hungry for these tales that they will read them and make them best-sellers no matter how badly written they are. Some of them are poor retellings, but such is the power of the hero’s journey that people will read them anyway. Even Hollywood has gotten into the act. Because of the success of Star Wars, which was inspired in part by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you can hear Armani-suited, sunglass-wearing, cell-phone-toting producers talk with straight faces about the hero’s journey. Or, as someone I know who works there said, “If I have to hear Joseph Campbell’s name in this town one more time . . .”
So am I wrong about epic language? I still don’t think so, though I admit to being crochety about the subject. People do enjoy a well-written book, even if they don’t realize why they are getting that bit of extra enjoyment at the time. (A sort of subliminal suggestion, you might say.) More importantly, though, how many of these recent fantasies will stand the test of time? How many will people be reading a hundred years from now?
Very few, I think. But if the twenty-second century has any taste at all, they will still be reading Tolkien. They will marvel at his gift for storytelling, his solidly constructed world, his understanding of beauty and terror. And at his language. That language is one of the things that make him a true mythmaker. We have had precious few mythmakers in our time, and we should honor him. I’m glad we are.
“The Radical
Distinction. . .”
A CONVERSATION
WITH TIM AND GREG
HILDEBRANDT
GLENN HURDLING
Tim: It was 1967, so I was twenty-eight. Greg and I were making films on world hunger for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen for the Society of the Propagation of the Faith in New York City. I had done a watercolor painting of a dwarf skipping over a bridge by a tree when a girl in the office—her name was Winifred Boyle—saw it and said that it reminded her of Tolkien. I said, “What’s a Tolkien?”
The next day she handed me The Hobbit. I was totally hooked the moment I began to read it. I devoured The Lord of the Rings next. I had never read anything like it in my life—before or after. To me, it is still the alpha and the omega of the fantasy genre.
Vivid pictures would pop into my head every time I turned a page. Greg and I weren’t illustrators yet, so the possibility of illustrating the The Lord of the Rings seemed a bit absurd. But something about the thought stuck in my head, and I said, “I’ve got to paint this some day.”
Then we got into illustrating, and one thing led to another. On Christmas morning, 1974, my wife Rita gave me the 1975 Tolkien Calendar, illustrated by Tim Kirk. A blurb on the back of the calendar announced that Ballantine Books was seeking new artists to illustrate the following year’s calendar. I leaped out of my slippers.
I began to spend most of my free time painting castles and gnarled trees, always with Tolkien in the back of my mind.
Greg: I didn’t read the books until 1975, despite Tim’s insistence that I do so over the years. Up till then we had been doing illustrations for kids’ books—for Disney and Sesame Street, panda and hippopotamus books for Golden Books, and even a book on toilet training! None of these things had any bearing on fantasy whatsoever. But at least by then we had become illustrators. We weren’t necessarily doing the subject matter we wanted to do, but we were making a living doing what we did best.
I had been concentrating on painting my own images, with dreams of having my own gallery show in New York City. I wanted to break away from illustrating someone else’s ideas, so I had no desire to read The Lord of the Rings at all.
When Tim showed me the announcement on the back of that calendar, I put my desire for a gallery show on hold. I realized that I had a family to feed, so I finally gave in and read the trilogy. I was blown away! For the next three years, I immersed myself in a world of hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and elves.
Tim: We started to do sample sketches to show Ballantine right after I showed Greg the announcement. After a month and a half of sketching, we headed into New York. We didn’t have a portfolio big enough to put any of our sample character sketches into, so we put them into these big green garbage bags. We brought them in expecting to get an appointment with the art director at Ballantine. We hung around all day and badgered the receptionist until we finally got to see Ian Summers, Ballantine’s art director.
Very few people had illustrated Tolkien up to that point. Ian said that he had looked at a lot of samples, but they had all been submitted by amateurs, kids in school, or fans who scribbled their interpretations of the characters without illustrating any of the classic scenes. No professional artists had come forward except Greg and me. Can you imagine how many remarkable artists would be lined up around the block if a publisher made that announce
ment today? The line would be a mile long!
Greg: Tim and I had always read the same things growing up—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pelucidar stuff, all of H. G. Wells, most of Jules Verne, and Jack London. We also loved comic books and comic strips, such as Prince Valiant. But other than that, we weren’t big readers. We were into the visual stuff; we taught ourselves painting and animation by watching Disney films and 1950s science-fiction films. We also loved medieval films, the ones with the cheesy swords and cardboard-aluminum armor. Robert Wagner and James Mason starred in a screen version of Prince Valiant that was quite exceptional. The scene in which Vikings attack the castle was one of our inspirations for “The Siege of Minas Tirith” in the 1977 Tolkien Calendar.
Tim: When we were kids, we believed in flying saucers. We would sit in the basement and create Martians. We also blew up model buildings in my parents’ barn and filmed the blaze with our 8mm movie camera.
Greg: People thought we were pyromaniacs. And who could blame them? We’d spend a year building a model set, then blow it up!
Tim: I know our relatives thought we were strange. Our Aunt Gertie believed that we had an idol of Disney in our bedroom and that we burned a candle in front of it every night.
Greg: With the exception of our parents, our family didn’t get the idea of special effects or visual expression. But we were completely freaked out over Disney and science fiction. Rocket Ship X-M was the first science-fiction film we ever saw, then The Man from Planet X.
Tim: That was all visual stimulation, but Tolkien’s work resided in the imagination. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings four times each, and doing so painted good images in my imagination. We wanted to do justice to the books when we illustrated them by paying attention to all of Tolkien’s detailed descriptions.