by Karen Haber
And knowing instinctively that the bar had been raised, my first two sensations were all the more disheartening. I’d finished reading The Lord of the Rings, and there was no more of it to devour. And I feared I’d never again find anything that would satisfy me as it had.
A bit of digression: I was not alone in this reaction. The most common comments I’ve heard from readers of my generation who were likewise thunderstruck by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are that they had never read anything like it, and that they immediately tried to find more books like it. Some even immediately sat down and tried to write books “just like that” in the hopes of satisfying their own hunger for more. So, in a sense, he sent a whole generation of us forth on a quest. We were doomed to fail, of course. There was not, and simply is not, anything that is “just like” The Lord of the Rings. But because I didn’t know that, I and others like me plunged into the search wholeheartedly. Like many a quest for the magnificently elusive, the ultimate significance was not that I didn’t find my grail, but that I went forth, wholeheartedly seeking.
Of course, I read Tolkien’s “lesser” works: Farmer Giles of Ham and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Tree and Leaf, and Smith of Wooton Major. I researched the works that Tolkien said had inspired him: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Icelandic Sagas. I was suddenly mining whole new sections of the public library. I had been a voracious and indiscriminate reader all my life. English teachers had sought in vain to instill in me some appreciation for “literature.” Required reading lists and formulaic book report requirements hadn’t done it. But with one shot, J. R. R. Tolkien had injected it straight into my heart. I think that by stepping back, past the recent layer of American literature, even past what I had been introduced to as English literature, I suddenly came to a place where I was connecting with Story itself. Stripped of setting and literary devices that had become too familiar to me, I suddenly came to traces of the raw essence that had powered Tolkien’s work.
Earlier, I mentioned that I feel I read Tolkien at precisely the right time in my life. Prior to that time, he would have touched me, but not as deeply. I would not have been ready to hear him. Later, I might perhaps have been too jaded and disaffected to take the stories into my heart. But he struck a chord with me, and sent me on my quest. I carried his stories with me into high school, a difficult four years for me, where they were both my armor and my retreat.
I began to encounter other Tolkien readers who had also claimed the books as their own. I recall a birthday tea held one September 22 in honor of Bilbo’s birthday. The school, somewhat puzzled, allowed us to use the nurse’s room, for no other space was free for us. (We certainly could not be allowed to take tea into the library!) It was attended by two other Tolkein aficionados, the school librarian and myself. It was a self-congratulatory in-group of people who had discovered the finest of literature. I did not know any of the other attendees well, and yet it was very easy to acknowledge that a strong bond existed nonetheless.
In college, I encountered a different phenomenon. I was sent “outside” for college, off to Denver University in the “lower forty-eight.” Culture shock was pretty jolting for this Alaskan kid. The smog made my eyelashes fall out. The dining-hall diet, bereft of moose and caribou, and with what seemed to me only a modicum of red meat, left me anemic. But most shocking of all were those people who seemed to think that Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings belonged to them. Foolish mortals. I knew it was mine, all mine, in a way they could never even comprehend. A girl who insisted her friends should call her Galadriel, and a short young man who tried to convince himself and others that he was likely part-hobbit, appalled me. Were they out of their minds? It was literary sacrilege.
You could not enter Tolkien’s world that way, smearing its glory onto yourself and attempting to take it over. The only possible entry was to come into it as reader, as honored guest. The words were to be experienced as Story, not tried on like ill-fitting Halloween costumes. The depth of offense I felt still comes back to me after all those years. It was not, I told myself, at all the same as the way I signed notes to myself as Smeagol. Even if my more-knowing friends occassionally referred to me by that name, I knew I was not Smeagol. Smeagol was simply one of the keys, a character that opened the story to me. I would never think of dressing as Smeagol or publicly proclaiming that I truly was Smeagol.
It is strange to think that, in some ways, my love of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings became a barrier. I couldn’t talk about Tolkien to those people, any more than I could discuss his work with those benighted fools who insisted that it was all symbolism, that Frodo was Christ sacrificed by Bilbo the Father. Refused to be distracted by such ridiculous notions. I knew I had to keep my focus. The Lord of the Rings was The Lord of the Rings, not a pattern for my life or an alternate religion.
I had to understand it as Story.
All through those years, and throughout my college experiences, my quest continued. Like a gold-panner, following that elusive trace of “color” up-stream, I sifted my reading for the bits and pieces of pure element, looking for the mother lode of Story. I don’t know when it happened, but after a time the object of my quest shifted and became, not to find something “just like” Tolkien, but to tap the sources from which this magical work had come.
It is a quest that continues for me, up to this very day and hour. In the thirty-odd years of that seeking, I’ve slowly come to discover that the shards of Story that I am looking for are not necessarily buried in the literature of the distant past, or even on the shelves of libraries. With my painstakingly assembled templates, I can now discern those elements in any number of disparate places. I’ve collected pieces from the old fairy tales that were always so dear to me, and heard the clear ringing of Story in the bragging tales told in sailor bars.
Even more thrilling to me is when I pick up a new book by one of my contemporaries and discover that someone else not only has succeeded at tapping that ultimate Story source, but has deployed it with the trifold foundation of solid plot, detailed setting, and genuine characters. Almost without exception, I discover that I have just encountered someone who, like myself, embarked on a quest after reading Tolkien. The quest has borne fruit for me, not in that I ever found anything “just like” Tolkien but that I had his works as a touchstone to help me distinguish True Story from the Verbiage of the Week.
In the long years since I first hid in a meat cache and journeyed all through Middle-earth, I’ve heard a great deal of criticism of Tolkien. That he has “no strong female characters,” that the books move too slowly, that he does not tell us enough about what the characters are feeling and thinking are perhaps the most common complaints. Some of this strikes me, quite frankly, as the criticism of those who want writers of a different time and place to miraculously conform to what is considered politically correct now. Some strike me as a complaint of readers wishing that all writers wrote in what we consider to be a “simple, modern style.” I continue to be astonished by people who tell me that they couldn’t get past the third chapter, or that they were bored, or could find no character to identify with. Sometimes I am left wondering if we have read the same books at all. But perhaps in the end it all comes down to discovering his magic at the right place and time in your own life. If that is so, then all I can say is that I am grateful that I was the recipient of that miraculous coincidence of time and situation.
He has left his mark on me. Even after all the years, the bar he raised for my writing is still as high. I am still striving to leap it as effortlessly and cleanly as he did. I still come away with bruised shins, but the drive to attempt it has not diminished. Likewise, I continue to quest for Story, though these days I accept that I will never find anything “exactly like” J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The only possible fix for that hunger is to pick up those worn hardbacks again and once more enter into a world that has perhaps become more familiar but no less wondrous to me over the years.
And as I wonder whether I have
said all I want to say here, the perfect coincidence occurs. It is one of those deus ex machina happenings that good editors throw out and life throws at us near constantly. A sharp hammering at the door downstairs interrupts my quiet morning with my computer and my cup of coffee. No sign of dwarves nor wizards with staffs denting my front door, but only the UPS man who has thoughtfully left a package just far enough away from the threshold that I have to go out barefoot on the frozen porch to claim it.
I don’t hesitate. Stenciled down the side of it is “TITLE: J. R. R. Tolkien.” It has come from overseas. I drag it in and haul it upstairs to my office before tearing into it. Treasures long awaited come to light. HarperCollins hardbacks with the Alan Lee illustrations; The Hobbit and a delicious fat single hardback containing The Lord of the Rings in one volume with gleaming dust jackets in a sturdy box. Slit the wrap with a thumbnail and pull them out to heft the books. I open one, testing the sturdiness of the binding. Ah. A good print size. I lean closer and smell the delicious scent of new book. Well, these should get me through another thirty years. What else? A paperback of Farmer Giles of Ham, embellished exactly as it should be with Pauline Bayne’s art. And at the bottom a boxed edition of The Hobbit, in a very portable size, including postcards with Tolkien’s art and an unfolding map with images by John Howe. It also includes a CD of Tolkien reading from his work, which could become a supplement to my well-preserved LP of him reading Elvish. I think I intended this last one as a Christmas gift for someone, but at the moment I can’t recall for whom, and the CD is already playing. The familiar rich voice fills my office, and suddenly Gollum is “looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes” as he paddles his little boat on the underground lake. Too late. This is mine, My Precious, and I doubt it will ever be gift-wrapped and placed under a tree.
I open the handy little edition of The Hobbit and thumb through it. Hmm. They have appended the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring to the end, as a teaser. I am not sure I approve. Yet there, on the last page of the book, like a benediction, is a promise for me. Gandalf speaks to me: “Good-bye now! Take care of yourself! Look out for me, especially at unlikely times!”
Indeed. I think I always shall.
RHYTHMIC
PATTERN IN
THE LORD OF
THE RINGS
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Since I had three children, I’ve read Tolkien’s trilogy aloud three times. It’s a wonderful book to read aloud or (consensus by the children) listen to. Even when the sentences are long, their flow is perfectly clear, and follows the breath; punctuation comes just where you need to pause; the cadences are graceful and inevitable. Like Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf, Tolkien must have heard what he wrote. The narrative prose of such novelists is like poetry in that it wants the living voice to speak it, to find its full beauty and power, its subtle music, its rhythmic vitality.
Woolf’s vigorous, highly characteristic sentence-rhythms are purely and exclusively prose: I don’t think she ever uses a regular beat. Dickens and Tolkien both occasionally drop into metrics. Dickens’s prose in moments of high emotional intensity tends to become iambic, and can even be scanned: “It is a far, far better thing that I do/than I have ever done . . .” The hoity-toity may sneer, but this iambic beat is tremendously effective—particularly when the metric regularity goes unnoticed as such. If Dickens recognized it, it didn’t bother him. Like most really great artists, he’d use any trick that worked.
Woolf and Dickens wrote no poetry. Tolkien wrote a great deal, mostly narratives and “lays,” often in forms taken from the subjects of his scholarly interest. His verse often shows extraordinary intricacy of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, yet is easy and fluent, sometimes excessively so. His prose narratives are frequently interspersed with poems, and once at least in the trilogy he quietly slips from prose into verse without signaling it typographically. Tom Bombadil, in The Fellowship of the Ring, speaks metrically. His name is a drumbeat, and his meter is made up of free, galloping dactyls and trochees, with tremendous forward impetus: Tum tata Tum tata, Tum ta Tum ta. . . . “You let them out again, Old Man Willow! What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!” Usually Tom’s speech is printed without line breaks, so unwary or careless silent readers may miss the beat until they see it as verse—as song, actually, for when his speech is printed as verse Tom is singing.
As Tom is a cheerfully archetypal fellow, profoundly in touch with, indeed representing, the great, natural rhythms of day and night, season, growth and death, it’s appropriate that he should talk in rhythm, that his speech should sing itself. And, rather charmingly, it’s an infectious beat; it echoes in Goldberry’s speech, and Frodo picks it up. “Goldberry!” he cries as they are leaving, “My fair lady, clad all in silver green! We have never said farewell to her, nor seen her since that evening!”
If there are other metric passages in the trilogy, I’ve missed them. The speech of the elves and noble folk such as Aragorn has a dignified, often stately gait, but not a regular stress beat. I suspected King Théoden of iambics, but he only drops into them occasionally, as all measured English speech does. The narrative moves in balanced cadences in passages of epic action, with a majestic sweep reminiscent of epic poetry, but it remains pure prose. Tolkien’s ear was too good and too highly trained in prosody to let him drop into meter unknowingly.
Stress units—metric feet—are the smallest elements of rhythm in literature, and in prose probably the only quantifiable ones. A while ago I got interested in the ratio of stresses to syllables in prose, and did some counting.
In poetry, the normal ratio is about 50 percent: that is, by and large, in poetry, one syllable out of two has a beat on it: Tum ta Tum ta ta Tum Tum ta, etc. . . . In narrative, that ratio goes down to one beat in two to four: ta Tum tatty Tum ta Tum tatatty, etc. . . . In discursive and technical writing, only every fourth or fifth syllable may get a beat; textbook prose tends to hobble along clogged by a superfluity of egregiously unnecessary and understressed polysyllables.
Tolkien’s prose runs to the normal narrative ratio of one stress every two to four syllables. In passages of intense action and feeling the ratio gets pretty close to 50 percent, like poetry; but only Tom’s speech can be scanned.
Stress beat in prose is fairly easy to identify and count, though I doubt any two readers of a prose passage would mark the stresses in exactly the same places. Other elements of rhythm in narrative are less physical and far more difficult to quantify, having to do not with an audible repetition, but with the pattern of the narrative itself. These elements are longer, larger, and very much more elusive.
Rhythm is repetition. Poetry can repeat anything—a stress-pattern, a phoneme, a rhyme, a word, a line, a stanza. Its formality gives it endless liberty to establish rhythmic structure.
What is repeatable in narrative prose? In oral narrative, which generally maintains many formal elements, rhythmic structure may be established by the repetition of certain key words, and by grouping events into similar, accumulative semi-repetitions: think of “The Three Bears” or the “Three Little Pigs.” European story uses triads; Native American story is more likely to do things in fours. Each repetition both builds the foundation of the climatic event, and advances the story.
Story moves, and normally it moves forward. Silent reading doesn’t need repetitive cues to keep the teller and the hearers oriented, and people can read much faster than they speak. So people accustomed to silent reading generally expect narrative to move along pretty steadily, without formalities and repetitions. Increasingly during the twentieth century readers have been encouraged to look at a story as a road we’re driving, well paved and graded and without detours, on which we go as fast as we possibly can, with no changes of pace and certainly no stops, till we get to—well—to the end, and stop.
“There and Back Again”: in Bilbo’s title for The Hobbit, Tolkien has already told us the larger s
hape of his narrative, the direction of his road.
The rhythm that shapes and directs his narrative is noticeable, was noticeable to me, because it is very strong and very simple, as simple as a rhythm can be: two beats. Stress, release. Inbreath, outbreath. A heartbeat. A walking gait. But on so vast a scale, so capable of endlessly complex and subtle variation, that it carries the whole enormous narrative straight through from beginning to end, from There to Back Again, without faltering. The fact is, we walk from the Shire to the Mountain of Doom with Frodo and Sam. One, two, left, right, on foot, all the way. And back.
What are the elements that establish this long-distance walking pace? Which elements recur, are repeated with variations, to form the rhythms of prose? Those that I am aware of are: Words and phrases. Images. Actions. Moods. Themes.
Words and phrases, repeated, are easy to identify. But Tolkien is not, after all, telling his story aloud; writing prose for silent, and sophisticated, readers, he doesn’t use key words and stock phrases as storytellers do. Such repetitions would be tedious and faux-naïve. I have not located any “refrains” in the trilogy.
As for imagery, actions, moods, and themes, I find myself unable to separate them usefully. In a profoundly conceived, craftily written novel such as The Lord of the Rings, all these elements work together indissolubly, simultaneously. When I tried to analyze them out, I just unraveled the tapestry and was left with a lot of threads, but no picture. So I settled for bunching them all together. I noted every repetition of any image, action, mood, or theme, without trying to identify it as anything other than a repetition.
I was working from my impression that a dark event in the story was likely to be followed by a brighter one (or vice versa); that when the characters had exerted terrible effort, they then got to have a rest; that each action brought a reaction, never predictable in nature, because Tolkien’s imagination is inexhaustible, but more or less predictable in kind, like day following night, and winter after fall.
