Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

The charge that the book was juvenile in character, belonging to the ‘Boy’s Own Paper’, was caused in part by Tolkien’s connection with C.S. Lewis whose ‘Narnia’ stories were being published at the time to a discordant chorus of popular acclaim and critical hostility. Lewis’s ‘smuggling of theology’ into his children’s fiction had made him unpopular in secular circles, and his works of popular Christian apologetics provoked a great deal of hostility. In fact, when Tolkien’s publisher had asked Lewis to contribute a short piece for the dust jacket of the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, Lewis wrote the following cautionary words to Tolkien: ‘Even if he and you approve my words, think twice before using them: I am certainly a much, and perhaps an increasingly, hated man whose name might do you more harm than good.’4 Lewis’s warning was prophetic. More than one critic reviewing the book in August 1954 displayed ‘an extraordinary personal animosity to Lewis, and used (or wasted) a good deal of space in mocking Lewis’s comparison of Tolkien to Ariosto’.5 Edwin Muir, writing in the Observer on 22 August, was typical of those who scoffed at Lewis’s praise: ‘This remarkable book makes its appearance at a disadvantage. Nothing but a great masterpiece could survive the bombardment of praise directed at it from the blurb.’

  On 9 September, Tolkien wrote to his publisher about the hostility that Lewis had provoked:

  As for the reviews they were a great deal better than I feared, and I think might have been better still, if we had not quoted the Ariosto remark, or indeed got involved at all with the extraordinary animosity that C.S.L. seems to excite in certain quarters. He warned me long ago that his support might do me as much harm as good. I did not take it seriously, though in any case I should not have wished other than to be associated with him—since only by his support and friendship did I ever struggle to the end of the labour. All the same many commentators seem to have preferred lampooning his remarks or his review to reading the book.6

  The reason that Tolkien believed the reception of The Fellowship of the Ring to be ‘a great deal better’ than he had feared was the presence among the sneers of a few genuinely positive reviews. ‘It is an amazing piece of work,’ wrote A.E. Cherryman in Truth on 6 August. ‘He has added something, not only to the world’s literature, but to its history.’ Howard Spring, in Country Life on 26 August, concurred with this view: ‘This is a work of art. . . It has invention, fancy and imagination. . . It is a profound parable of man’s everlasting struggle against evil.’ A reviewer in the Manchester Guardian on 20 August had described Tolkien as ‘one of those born storytellers who makes his readers as wide-eyed as children for more’. The Oxford Times review on 13 August was perceptive in its belief that Tolkien’s book would divide opinion into opposing camps: ‘The severely practical will have no time for it. Those who have imagination to kindle will find themselves completely carried along, becoming part of the eventful quest and regretting that there are only two more books to come.’

  Those in the pro-Tolkien camp did not have long to wait for the next book. The second volume, The Two Towers, was published in mid-November, accompanied by a similar selection of mixed reviews. In America, where The Fellowship of the Ring had been published in October and The Two Towers shortly after, the reviews were even more negative than in England. Tolkien’s champion in the United States was the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote enthusiastic articles in the New York Times. Auden’s view that ‘no fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy’ helped to boost sales, and a large number of copies were bought by American readers in the ensuing year.

  The second volume ended abruptly with Frodo imprisoned in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, prompting a reviewer in the Illustrated London News to declare that ‘the suspense is cruel’, but it would be nearly a year before the third and final volume, The Return of the King, was published on 20 October 1955. Following its publication, the critics were able to judge The Lord of the Rings in its entirety and C.S. Lewis, its greatest champion, was as affirmative as ever in his praise. ‘When I reviewed the first volume of this work,’ he wrote in a review for Time and Tide on 22 October, ‘I hardly dared to hope it would have the success which I was sure it deserved. Happily I am proved wrong.’ In his conclusion to the same review Lewis made a prediction which subsequently has been proved right in the eyes of millions of readers throughout the world: ‘The book is too original and too opulent for any final judgment on a first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our re-readings, I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.’

  Meanwhile, W.H. Auden continued his vociferous support for Tolkien, declaring in the course of a radio talk on The Lord of the Rings on 16 November, ‘If someone dislikes it I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again.’7 Bernard Levin added his own formidable voice to the chorus of praise, writing in Truth that he believed Tolkien’s book to be ‘one of the most remarkable works of literature in our, or any, time. It is comforting, in this troubled day, to be once more assured that the meek shall inherit the earth.’8

  Others begged to differ and were as damning in their indictments as Lewis, Levin and Auden had been fulsome in their praise. Edmund Wilson dismissed The Lord of the Rings as ‘juvenile trash’ in The Nation on 14 April 1956 and a similar line of attack was employed by Edwin Muir in a review in the Observer, headed ‘A Boy’s World’, on 27 November 1955: ‘The astonishing thing is that all the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes. The hobbits, or halflings, are ordinary boys,—the fully human heroes have reached the fifth form,—but hardly one of them knows anything about women, except by hearsay. Even the elves and the dwarfs and the ents are boys, irretrievably, and will never come to puberty.’

  ‘Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence,’ Tolkien wrote in a letter to his publisher on 8 December. ‘He is old enough to know better. It might do him good to hear what women think of his “knowing about women”, especially as a test of being mentally adult.’9

  It was ironic that Edwin Muir should become one of Tolkien’s most outspoken critics, especially as the two men had much in common. Muir’s Autobiography, published at the same time as The Lord of the Rings, expressed the author’s belief that there was a transcendent mystery at the heart of life which meant that truth was best expressed in the language of Story and Fable. This, of course, was remarkably similar to the beliefs behind Tolkien’s work. Neither did the similarities end there. Like Tolkien, Muir had been wrenched from the halcyon days of a rural childhood into an alienating existence in an industrialized city (Muir’s parents had migrated from his native Orkney to Glasgow in 1901, at about the same time that Tolkien and his brother had been uprooted to Birmingham from their rural idyll in Sarehole). Like Tolkien, this uprooting experience had left an indelible mark on his psyche, shaping his creative outlook to a profound extent. Like Tolkien, the experience led him to traditional Christian conclusions.

  Yet if Tolkien had found in Muir an unlikely enemy, Muir’s criticism that The Lord of the Rings was ‘childish’ was also levelled against the book by several other critics. Tolkien had previously made his own defence to such criticism in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, and C.S. Lewis clearly had this essay in mind when he wrote an article entitled ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said’ for the New York Times Book Review on 18 November 1956:

  You will notice that I have throughout spoken of Fairy Tales, not ‘children’s stories’. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings has shown that the connection between fairy tales and children is not nearly so close as publishers and educationalists think. Many children don’t like them and many adults do. The truth is, as he says, that they are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it. . .

 
The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalise while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more,—it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it. . .

  ‘Juveniles’, indeed! Am I to patronise sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?10

  In spite of the best endeavours of Tolkien and Lewis to counter the charge of immaturity, it has remained one of the most common criticisms of their work. This inability on the part of many modern critics to recognize the universal value of myth was put into a psychological context by Ursula Le Guin, who wrote of the ‘deep puritanical distrust of fantasy’ by those who ‘confuse fantasy, which in the psychological sense is a universal and essential faculty of the human mind, with infantilism and pathological regression’.11 This distrust of Tolkien’s medium has resulted in ‘serious’ reference works downplaying his importance as a writer of influence. Patrick Curry, in his unpublished study of ‘Tolkien and His Critics’, highlighted the anomaly inherent in the space given to Tolkien in leading reference works compared with his undoubted position as one of the most popular and influential writers of the twentieth century. Curry points out that Margaret Drabble’s The Oxford Companion to English Literature gives Tolkien ‘exactly thirteen lines out of 1154 pages’; the Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature devotes twelve lines to Tolkien,—while Andrew Saunders’s The Short Oxford History of English Literature fails to mention Tolkien at all in any of its 678 pages. Curry calls this ‘an unconscionable dereliction of duty on the part of people whose profession is supposedly to comprehend literature’.12

  Those who have not simply wished Tolkien away by refusing to acknowledge his importance have gone to the other extreme, resorting to either ridicule or vitriolic abuse. Curry has listed the following epithets amongst those which have been employed in describing The Lord of the Rings: ‘paternalistic, reactionary, anti-intellectual, racist, fascistic and, perhaps worst of all in contemporary terms, irrelevant.’13 Coupled with this abuse is ridicule. John Goldthwaite, in his recent book, The Natural History of Make-Believe, which claimed to be ‘a guide to the principal works’, dismissed The Lord of the Rings as ‘Faerie-land’s answer to Conan the Barbarian’.14 In similar, though more amusing, vein the poet John Heath-Stubbs remarked that Tolkien’s epic was ‘a combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh’.15 Finally, besides ridicule and abuse, there is, to cap it all, the juvenile combination of both: ridiculous abuse. In this category, Patrick Curry quotes the example of Humphrey Carpenter: ‘Even Tolkien’s own biographer [Et tu, Brutel) has fatuously opined that “he doesn’t really belong to literature or to the arts, but more to the category of people who do things with model railways in their garden sheds”.16

  A more serious allegation, because more damning if true, is the claim that Tolkien and his sub-creation are in some way ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’. The claim can be easily disposed of in Tolkien’s own words. He discussed his political opinions rarely, but when he did it is clear that he was very much a libertarian, distrusting the encroachments of central government: ‘My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to “unconstitutional” Monarchy.17 These words were written in November 1943 when Tolkien was in the middle of writing The Lord of the Rings. It is, therefore, scarcely surprising that Mordor is depicted as a fascist—or communist-style slave-state under the tyrannical control of Sauron the Dictator, whereas the lands beyond his dominion are happily rustic and free from ‘state planning’ or ‘direct government control’. This aversion to state interference found expression in a letter he wrote in 1956: ‘I am not a “socialist” in any sense—being averse to “planning” (as must be plain) most of all because the “planners”, when they acquire power, become so bad. . . The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case. But our chief adversary is a member of a “Tory” Government.’18 Clearly Tolkien was unprepared to take part in what the Catholic writer Christopher Derrick has called the ‘damn-fool dichotomy of left and right’.19

  Neither was Tolkien an imperialist. He despised both British imperialism and the cultural imperialism of the United States, as is clear from a letter he wrote to his son shortly after the war-time leaders of Britain, America and Russia had met at the Teheran Conference in November 1943:

  I must admit that I smiled a kind of sickly smile. . . when I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny and intolerance!. . . The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster.

  Referring to a newspaper report that one-eighth of the world’s population now spoke English, Tolkien continued in plaintive terms:

  If true, damn shame—say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say “baa baa”. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian. But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. . . I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much the better for the world as a whole in the long run. . . I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)), and if I was of military age, I should, I fancy, be grousing away in a fighting service, and willing to go on to the bitter end—always hoping that things may turn out better for England than they look like doing.20

  These are strong words but scarcely the words of a ‘fascist’. In fact, Tolkien reserved some of his strongest words for an attack on fascism. ‘I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this “Nordic” nonsense,’ Tolkien wrote in a letter to his son Michael on 9 June 1941, shortly after the latter had become an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst:

  Any way, I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler. . . Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized. . .21

  Years later, when two writers suggested that Tolkien’s Middle Earth ‘corresponds spiritually to Nordic Europe’, Tolkien was at pains to put the record straight:

  Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike,—it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. . .

  Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction’. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not ‘sacred’, nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a ‘Nordic’.22

  Tolkien’s most convincing defence against the charge of ‘f
ascism’ or ‘racism’ dates back to 1938. In the summer of that year the German publishers, Rutten 61 Loening of Potsdam, were showing an interest in publishing a German translation of The Hobbit and had written to Tolkien, via his British publishers, asking if he was of ‘arisch’, i.e. aryan, origin. Tolkien’s publishers, Allen & Unwin, forwarded the letter and Tolkien replied to Rutten 61 Loening on 25 July:

  I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian,—as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: and the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient.23

  Referring to the letter from the German publishers in a letter to Allen & Unwin, Tolkien asked: ‘Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of “arisch” origin from all persons of all countries?’ Clearly incensed, Tolkien told his publishers to ‘let a German translation go hang’. ‘In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.’24

  The lack of evidence, and indeed the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary, has not deterred some critics from labelling Tolkien as a fascist or, where the label will not stick, as a fellow traveller. Fred Inglis, in his essay ‘Gentility and Powerlessness: Tolkien and the New Class’, was at pains to prove that The Lord of the Rings was a proto-fascist myth: