Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  Narnia and Middle-earth are worlds of this kind, and so is the Land of Oz and the wizarding community of the Harry Potter series. But the main characters in these books are not always capable of marvelous actions or singled out from the ordinary run of mortals. Harry, it’s true, has much in common with King Arthur in his boyhood; he is a hero with a special destiny as well as a past shrouded in mystery. But Dorothy Gale is no more than a plucky little American girl of unexceptional descent, and Milo, the listless hero of The Phantom Tollbooth, is distinguished only by the enigmatic package he receives at the moment when his chronic boredom seems about to blossom into full-fledged depression.

  As for the Pevensie siblings, we do learn of a prophecy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a poem predicting that evil won’t be driven from the land until “Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone” sit at “Cair Paravel in throne.” However, Lewis believed people ought to be discouraged from thinking of themselves as singled out for an extraordinary, exalted fate; that way lies the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride. In the Chronicles, it’s the selfish villains like Jadis and Digory’s uncle Andrew who talk of having “a high and a lonely destiny.” Narnia is meant to be ruled by human beings, and the Pevensies are simply the human beings who happen to come along to do it. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are ordinary children, much like the readers for whom the Chronicles were intended; it is Narnia that makes kings and queens out of them. In Frye’s terminology, the Pevensies are low mimetic characters, the kind of people routinely found in novels, but somehow they have stumbled into the realm of romance.

  The same could be said of Tolkien’s hobbits. They aren’t technically human, but they’re more like us, really, than the majestic human heroes of Middle-earth. Tolkien used the hobbits as a way of, as he once expressed it, “putting earth under the feet of ‘romance,’” injecting “colloquialism and vulgarity” into a story otherwise dominated by “the highest style of prose.” “High” was the word Tolkien used to describe the sort of thing he most enjoyed writing and reading, the lofty myths and epics of The Silmarillion. Characters like Aragorn and the elves belong to this part of his legendarium, and so does the grand dialogue that readers like Edmund Wilson find so silly.

  The result, Tolkien’s trilogy, is a hybrid, a winning formula combining the low mimetic characters that readers had grown comfortably accustomed to in novels with the grandeur and archetypal mystery many of them missed from the old romances. Morris hadn’t thought of this when he attempted to revive the romance, but in children’s fiction the combination was less remarkable; Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit had already inserted modern, middle-class English children into magical lands and situations. Tolkien himself had created an irresistibly bourgeois protagonist in his children’s book, The Hobbit, and sent him off on a Wagnerian quest involving dwarves, dragons, and a magic ring.

  The main point Tolkien tried to get across in “On Fairy Stories” was that he saw no reason to restrict such fictions to an audience of children. “Fairy stories,” he wrote, “have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery,’ as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.” He recast the hand-me-downs as newly desirable antiques.

  But this mixture of literary modes does not sit easily with everyone. For some it will always seem fatally juvenile, and for others merely dissonant. When a friend wrote to Tolkien complaining of the way certain characters in The Lord of the Rings spoke, he responded as a philologist, by explaining that King Theoden of the Rohirrim (for example) must say things like “I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better,” instead of the less archaic “I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed home”; Theoden speaks differently from people like us because he thinks differently. The events and actions that occur in The Lord of the Rings could happen only in a world where people talk, and therefore think, in the way Theoden does. The kind of man who would say something like “Not at all, my dear Gandalf” would never behave with the Rohirric king’s doomed nobility when confronting certain death in battle: “‘Heroic’ scenes do not occur in a modern setting to which a modern idiom belongs,” Tolkien insisted.

  This means that the hobbits, who speak like Edwardian countryfolk, not only talk differently from the elves, but also think differently — they live, in effect, in another world. They resemble the denizens of the twentieth century enough to provide the modern individual with a sympathetic bridge to Middle-earth. They are us, much like the contemporary reader in Tolkien’s eyes: anti-Romantic, inflexible, incurious, unimaginative — a reader, like Eustace Scrubb, of the wrong kind of books, but secretly attracted to the old magic. As Tolkien imagined the distant past of Europe, time went by and the invented history of Middle-earth segued into the real history of our own world; hobbits and men became more and more alike and eventually merged. The last of the elvish blood is by now almost gone from the human race and the hobbitish mind-set has become universal. The age of romance ended. The age of the novel began.

  This transition is a source of the great sorrow underlying The Lord of the Rings; the world it describes is on the cusp of a transformation; its heroic past is slipping away and another era, one of “colloquialism and vulgarity” is taking its place. “Associations with sunset and the fall of the leaf linger in romance,” Frye writes, and this decline “evokes a mood best described as elegiac … often accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one.” This so exactly describes the tone of The Lord of the Rings that I half suspect Frye of having Tolkien in mind when he wrote those words. But, in truth, it is the mood of all heroic epics. As a form, the romance is retrospective. The epic poet is forever lamenting that the titans of the past — Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf — have left this earth. We shall not see their like again.

  Frye writes further of the “extraordinarily persistent nostalgia” of the classic romance, “its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space.” Deliberate archaism comes with the territory, which is why Spenser (however objectionably in Tolkien’s eyes) adopted an old-fashioned diction for The Faerie Queene. Though very fond of his hobbits, Tolkien did much prefer writing lays and sagas, like the ones collected in The Silmarillion, stories written in “the highest style of prose.” His publishers, however, didn’t regard this material as salable, and they were probably right. Nearly everyone who reads The Silmarillion comes to it only after being smitten with The Lord of the Rings, and many are disappointed. What they find are old-fashioned epics very much like the prose romances of William Morris. If it were not for the popularity of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Silmarillion, if published at all, would now likely be as obscure as The Well at the World’s End.

  Tolkien’s publishers, however, wanted him to repeat the success he’d had earlier with The Hobbit, a story that, when very first conceived, had not been set in Middle-earth. It was hobbits that sold, hobbits like Bilbo Baggins that readers loved and identified with; The Lord of the Rings was for a long time referred to by Tolkien and Lewis as “the new Hobbit,” as if it were merely the sequel to the earlier children’s book. Tolkien had to be pushed into presenting his private mythology as the backdrop to further hobbit adventures. The hybridization that has made the romance so resilient, that has allowed it to return in new forms and to triumph again and again with new audiences, did not come naturally to him. He was no great reader of novels.

  But Lewis was. As much as the defensive Tolkien fan dislikes comparing Middle-earth to Narnia — The Lord of the Rings is not a children’s book, the author himself would have to insist, over and over again — it was children’s fiction, with its giddy disregard of genre boundaries and other forms of decorum, that first showed writers how to cross the line. The Chronicles cross the line so often that they effectively rub it out. And that, for Tolkien, w
as a problem.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A Too-Impressionable Man

  Tolkien began with The Hobbit, and then backed his way into the solemnity of The Lord of the Rings. Narnia, of course, was different. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its sequels were begun and remained books for children, their background a gossamer and sometimes contradictory improvisation. These were mere “fairy tales,” as Lewis freely called them, although there was nothing “mere” about fairy tales as far as he was concerned. Still, classic fairy tales are set in a world that’s everywhere and nowhere, and in fairy tales it is always now. As Lewis continued to write more Chronicles, Narnia inevitably acquired a history, a geography, even a national identity of sorts, if never so extensive a one as Middle-earth’s.

  The Chronicles are not elegiac — what could be more pointless than trying to arouse nostalgia in children? — but from the very beginning Narnia had at least a sketch of a past. The good old days that Mr. Tumnus reminisces about with Lucy are a woodland idyll that the Pevensies help to restore and then get to live in. Their reign as kings and queens becomes Narnia’s golden age, and by the time they find themselves grown up and back at the lamppost, they no longer speak as they once did. Even the narrator adopts the shift in diction: “‘Sir,’ said Queen Lucy. ‘By likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old.’ And they stood looking upon it.”

  This is how aristocrats in chivalric romances talk, and the hunt that brings the siblings to the Lantern Waste (for a white stag who gives wishes to whoever catches him) is just the sort of pastime Chrétien de Troyes’s characters would pursue on a summer afternoon. The Pevensies have graduated from fairy tale to romance. The transition is natural because the genres enjoy a familial relationship. When Lewis writes of one of his favorite books, The Faerie Queene, “what lies beneath the surface in Spenser’s poem is the world of popular imagination: almost, a popular mythology,” he refers to a common technique of the great romances: the combination of folk traditions with the sophisticated literary amusements of aristocrats. Why does the lady Una, when she first appears with the Redcrosse Knight in The Faerie Queene, lead a “milkwhite lambe” on a string (hardly a practical companion for a long trip by horseback)? Because in Spenser’s time, English village pageants celebrating Saint George always included a local woman who played the part of the lady rescued by the saint, and she would customarily lead a white lamb.

  From its early days, the romance, like the novel, was promiscuous and adaptive, read for entertainment more than the elevation of the soul. It blended religious symbolism with love poetry, instructions on manners for elegant courtiers with folklore borrowed from old wives and nursemaids. The great Italian romances of the Renaissance — Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato — were, Lewis observed, written by educated men who approached traditional fairy tales with “a smile half of amusement and half of affection, like men returning to something that had charmed their childhood,” only to find that “their pleasure is not only the pleasure of mockery. Even while you laugh at it, the old incantation works.”

  Tolkien did not agree, at least not when it came to the mockery. He took fairy tales very seriously. Mutual friends of the two men have offered various explanations for why Tolkien disliked the Narnia books so much, and this is one likely reason. Tolkien himself rarely elaborated on the subject. In a letter he wrote the year after Lewis died, he simply laments that “all that part of CSL’s work” had remained “outside the range of my sympathy.”

  Roger Lancelyn Green recalls running into an indignant Tolkien in Oxford not long after both men had read the manuscript of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “It really won’t do!” Tolkien fumed. “I mean to say: Nymphs and Their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun! Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?” The note of parody in the titles of Mr. Tumnus’s books seems to have particularly irked Tolkien, to have struck him, even, as improper. There is no book called The Love-Life of a Faun mentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (that’s a joke no child could be expected to get), but Tolkien’s mistake is revealing. His memory nudges Lewis’s gentle teasing closer to raciness than his friend would ever have come himself. To Tolkien, Nymphs and Their Ways was just as bad as a mildly smutty joke, really, tantamount to desecration.

  “I have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome),” Tolkien once wrote to a reader. There’s not much comedy in The Lord of the Rings, but what there is comes mostly from the hobbits, sticking to their comfort-loving, yokel ways in the midst of all the “high” adventures and noble speeches. Theirs is a rustic humor but not an earthy one, and in that The Lord of the Rings does feel very much a children’s book.

  By contrast, the wit of the Chronicles is positively worldly. There are the excerpts from Eustace’s shipboard diary that appear in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, shrewdly drawn little cameos of deluded self-justification (“Heaven knows I’m the last person to try to get an unfair advantage but I never dreamed that this water-rationing would be meant to apply to a sick man”). Reading those passages was my first experience with that refined literary device, the unreliable narrator, and with irony. Irony was a specialty of Lewis’s. The most successful of his books during his own lifetime, The Screwtape Letters, is entirely ironic. Purporting to be the advice sent to a trainee devil by his supervisor, it is instruction by inversion, in which the reader comes to understand the lineaments of Christian virtue by flipping everything the demonic narrator says on its head.

  Irony — especially the ironic social comedy Lewis relished (he was a great admirer of Jane Austen) — is a cultured humor. You can find amusement in the differences between what we would like to happen and what usually does happen only if you are already in possession of a variety of stories, official and otherwise. Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a particular favorite of Lewis’s, is about a young woman who has read too many gothic novels too credulously but who inhabits the world of a novel of manners; only an author familiar with both types of narratives could have written it. Irony, satire — Tolkien didn’t care much for this kind of thing; he had invented an alternative world in part to escape a society that struck him as repellently cosmopolitan and complex. The broad humor of the hobbits was a plain dish that suited him just fine. Still, hobbit humor is curiously lacking in what most people would regard as an indispensable ingredient of broad, rustic jokes around the world: sex.

  Tolkien, it must be said, was a terrible prude. There is more eroticism — however peculiar and sublimated — in the Chronicles than in The Lord of the Rings, even though Lewis was purposely trying to avoid sex in deference to the youth of his readers. The White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are evil, but they are also unmistakably alluring; Susanna Clarke, in response to complaints about the “misogyny” in those depictions, says, “I see it as [the witches] being too attractive, as if he were saying, ‘If someone were to tempt me to do bad things, it would be a woman like this.’” The old romances often took the power and danger of sexual desire as one of their major themes; that’s one reason why the modern romance genre inherited the label. The Lord of the Rings may be intended for adults, but the rare occurrences of romantic love in the book are bloodless and melancholy affairs. If Lewis often gives the impression that he’s having a hard time keeping eroticism out of the Chronicles (it swirls below the surface), Tolkien never seems quite able to get it in.

  This discomfort with sex was really only another facet of Tolkien’s fastidiousness, his preoccupation with purity and corruption. Languages, in particular, could be either virginal or defiled. Once, when fantasizing about some pocket of Anglo-Saxon culture that might have survived unsullied by the francophone Normans, Tolkien pictured a community speaking a language that “had never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troubled times to maintain the air of
a gentleman, if a country gentleman.” How a language can be “lewd” is a puzzle, but that image of a good country gentleman signifies a lot: he is a man free of both the decadence of urbanity and the coarseness of the peasant. This is a pretty narrow strip of territory to occupy. It also bespeaks a delicacy you would hardly expect to find in human societies like those of Middle-earth, which Tolkien himself described as existing in the “simple ‘Homeric’ state of patriarchal and tribal life.” He must have forgotten that The Iliad begins with two heroes squabbling over a concubine.

  Beowulf was the standard Tolkien aspired to. In that poem, the women characters make only brief appearances, and then as dignified or tragic queens. Loyalty between a chieftain and his followers is the emotion that most interests the Beowulf poet, far more so than erotic passion. A sentimental reader of The Lord of the Rings wrote to Tolkien in the 1960s, expressing dismay at how quickly the warrior maiden Éowyn abandons her unrequited love for Aragorn and pairs off with another man at the book’s conclusion. Tolkien wrote back, “This tale does not deal with a period of ‘Courtly Love’ and its pretenses; but with a culture more primitive (sc. less corrupt) and nobler.” Courtly love, after all, was an invention of the detested French, an adulteration of the heroic epic perpetrated by the middle and late medieval romancers who came after the Beowulf poet. It was yet another example of the deplorable tendency of cultures to intermingle, forsaking their immaculate roots.