FANTASY NOVELISTS.vp

by Rollyson, Carl E.

  Saxon epic poem from an entirely new perspective and is considered a landmark in criti-

  cism of Western Germanic literature. As he was shaping his linguistic career, however,

  Tolkien was also formulating an imaginary language that, as early as 1917, had led him to explore its antecedents, its mythology, and its history, all of which he molded into the tales of The Silmarillion. Over the years, he shared these stories with friends, but he never finished putting them into a unified structure.

  His preoccupation with Middle-earth and the practical demands of his teaching dis-

  tracted Tolkien from scholarship, and between his celebrated essay On Fairy Stories in 1939 and his edition of the Middle English Ancrene Wisse in 1962, Tolkien published only fiction, a circumstance acknowledged with polite forbearance by most of Oxford’s scholarly community, although his novels eventually met with astonishing popular success.

  The Hobbit, originally a children’s story, was published in 1937 after a six-year gestation, and by 1949, The Lord of the Rings was complete. Its sales, though steadily increasing after its publication in 1954-1955, did not soar until 1965, when an unauthorized American printing proved a disguised blessing, resulting in a campus cult responsible for the sale of three million copies by 1968.

  Most critics of The Lord of the Rings have not achieved moderation. As W. H. Auden observed, “People find it a masterpiece of its genre, or they cannot abide it.” Auden himself and C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s Oxford friend, headed the “masterpiece” faction, while Edwin Muir in England and Edmund Wilson in the United States deplored Tolkien’s style and aims.

  Honorary fellowships, an honorary doctorate of letters from Oxford, and the honor of

  being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II all de-

  scended on Tolkien with the unexpected wealth of his last years, which were nevertheless darkened by his reluctance to complete The Silmarillion. His reputation rests not on his academic talent or his scholarly production, or even on his brilliant linguistically oriented

  “mythology for England,” but on the novels that began as tales for his children and blossomed into a splendid imaginative tree of fiction whose roots feed on the archetypes of

  northern European civilization and whose leaves shelter its finest aspirations.

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  Biography

  John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3,

  1892. The piano-manufacturing firm of his father’s family, originally descended from

  German aristocracy, had gone bankrupt, and the elder Tolkien had taken a South African

  bank position in the hope of improving his shaky finances. Tolkien’s mother, Mabel

  Suffield, joined her husband at Bloemfontein, but when the climate strained Ronald’s

  health, she took their two sons home to England in 1895. Less than a year later, Arthur

  Tolkien died in South Africa, leaving his widow and children nearly penniless.

  In the summer of 1896, Mabel Tolkien rented a rural cottage at Sarehole Mill, close to

  Birmingham, and for the next four years she taught her boys French, Latin, drawing, and

  botany, to save school expenses. Much later, Tolkien called these “the longest-seeming

  and most formative part” of his life. Mabel Tolkien’s attraction to Roman Catholicism led to her conversion in 1900, and she moved to a Birmingham suburb from which Ronald attended one of England’s then leading grammar schools, King Edward’s, on a scholarship.

  Already, he was demonstrating the fascination with ancient languages that was to deter-

  mine his career. He was involved in learning such northern European languages as Norse,

  Gothic, Finnish, and Welsh, as well as the Old and Middle English in which he achieved

  his academic reputation. He later claimed this philological bent dated from the time he

  was five or six years old.

  In 1904, his mother died at the age of thirty-four, leaving her children in the care of Father Francis Morgan, her friend and pastor. Tolkien’s devotion to his mother was inextricably intertwined with his own Catholic faith, and both played vital roles in the development of his fiction. Thus at sixteen, Ronald Tolkien looked back on a series of grievous losses: his father, whom he considered as “belonging to an almost legendary past”; the Sarehole

  countryside he loved; his mother, whom he considered a martyr to her faith. Not surpris-

  ingly for a lonely boy, Tolkien fell in love early when he met Edith Bratt, another orphan, in his Birmingham boardinghouse. She was three years older than he, and she had just

  enough inheritance to support herself modestly while she dreamed of becoming a musi-

  cian. Recognizing the boy’s scholarly talent and fearing for his future, Father Morgan finally stopped all communication between Ronald and Edith until Ronald was twenty-one.

  Tolkien himself commented thirty years later, “Probably nothing else would have hard-

  ened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) perma-

  nence.” When he and Edith were reunited in 1913, they seemed to have little in common,

  but on the eve of his military departure to France in 1916, they were married.

  By this time Tolkien had won a scholarship to Oxford University and had graduated

  with first-class honors in 1913. He enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915, embarking for France in 1916. He survived the Battle of the Somme but was invalided back to England suffering from trench fever. While in a military hospital in 1917, Tolkien began The Book of Lost Tales, the genesis of The Silmarillion, although he dated the original ideas for the complete oeuvre from as early as 1910 and the original story of Beren and Tinuviel

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  back to 1913. By 1918 he had read a version of “The Fall of Gondolin” to a college group.

  After demobilization, Tolkien gained employment working on the new Oxford Eng-

  lish Dictionary, until in 1921 he was appointed to the University of Leeds in Yorkshire to lecture in Old English. While there he began to establish his academic reputation with A Middle English Vocabulary and an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight done with Professor E. V. Gordon. On the strength of these and his connections back at Oxford, he

  was appointed the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies at Oxford

  in 1925, a post he held until 1945, when he was appointed Merton Professor of English

  Language and Literature at the same university. He held this post until his belated retirement in 1959. Various honorary degrees were bestowed on him, and in 1938 he was An-

  drew Lang Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, where he gave his famous lectures

  on fairy stories.

  The central part of Tolkien’s life, however, lay in his secret creation of the mythology of Middle-earth. It was initially the demands of his growing family (three sons and a

  daughter) that brought any of this to light, particularly in The Hobbit, which was first drafted, according to his close friend and science-fiction novelist C. S. Lewis, by the beginning of 1930. Then it was through the influence of the Inklings, a group of like-minded university friends that included Lewis and Tolkien, that The Hobbit was reformulated and sent for eventual publication in 1937. The importance of the Inklings cannot be stressed enough, especially the friendship of Lewis, who encouraged Tolkien’s work on The Lord of the Rings during World War II and immediately after, and who reviewed it in glowing terms. In a sense, Lewis was repaying the enormous debt he owed Tolkien for his conversion to Christianity. The Inklings continued until Lewis’s death in 1963, though the two men had drifted apart somewhat by then.

  Even so, the vast bulk of Middle-earth mythology lay in a
constant state of revision, expansion, and rearrangement, and despite the best efforts of friends and publishers, it was unpublished at his death. In fact, after the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1956, he concentrated again on his academic work, and only after retirement did he make any serious inroads again into the mythology. In the end, it was left to his third son, Christopher, also an academic, to order the material and have it published, as he did with a number of incomplete academic studies. Tolkien’s death in 1973 had been preceded by his wife’s in

  1971. They were both buried outside Oxford, their graves suitably inscribed with the

  names Beren and Lúthien. The year before his death he had been made a Commander of

  the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

  Analysis

  Looking back on his Middle-earth around 1951, J. R. R. Tolkien commented, “I do not

  remember a time when I was not building it . . . always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of inventing.” He conceived of fantasy as a profound and powerful form of literature with intense philosophical and spiritual meaning, serious 235

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  purposes, and eternal appeal. He believed the imagination, the mental power of making

  images, could be linked by art to “subcreation,” the successful result of image making, and so he regarded the genuine artist as partaking in the Creator’s divine nature.

  Three major factors of Tolkien’s personality and environment combined to shape the

  theory of fantasy underlying his novels, as first enunciated in the essay “On Fairy-Stories”

  (1938). His love of language for its singular rewards, his delight in the English countryside, and his shattering experience of trench warfare during World War I all provided the seeds for his three longest pieces of fiction. They also contributed to the points of view, astonishingly nonhuman and yet startlingly convincing, of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, where Elves and Hobbits illuminate the world of Men.

  Even as a boy, Tolkien had been enchanted by Welsh names on railway coal cars, a sign

  of his unusual linguistic sensitivity, and as a mature scholar, he devoted himself to the mystery of the word in its northern manifestations. In “On Fairy-Stories,” he wrote that

  “spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.” Tolkien cast his spells in the building blocks of words drawn from the imaginary languages he had been

  constructing as long as he could remember. The two languages he formulated for his

  Elves, the Elder Race, both derived from a common linguistic ancestor as human lan-

  guages do, and this “nexus of languages” supplied the proper names for his fiction, so that despite their considerable length and complication they possess “cohesion, consistency of linguistic style, and the illusion of historicity.” The last was possibly the greatest achievement of Tolkien’s mastery of language in his novels, fostering vital credence in his imaginary world. He felt that the finest fairy stories “open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through . . . we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.” In his own childhood, a “troublous” one Tolkien said, he had “had no special ‘wish to believe’”; he instead

  “wanted to know,” as, perhaps, do his readers, aided by the resonance of his masterful use of words.

  The memory of his years at Sarehole, the happiest of his boyhood, gave Tolkien an

  abiding love of nature, “above all trees,” which formed the basis for one of his principal concepts, “the inter-relations between the ‘noble’ and the ‘simple.’” He found “specially moving” the “ennoblement of the ignoble,” a theme that recurs throughout his fiction.

  Tolkien’s Elves practice love and respect toward nature, as do his Hobbits, “small people”

  connected closely to “the soil and other living things” who display both human pettiness and unexpected heroism “in a pinch.” The Elves, Hobbits, and good Men are countered in

  Tolkien’s Middle-earth by the threat of the machine, by which he meant “all use of external plans or devices,” as opposed to “the development of inner powers or talents.” The evil of the machine in Tolkien’s eyes (he did not own a car after World War II) derived from the misguided human desire for power, itself a rebellion against the Creator’s laws, a Fall

  from Paradise, another recurring theme in his fiction.

  The horrors of World War I must have struck Tolkien as evil incarnate, with new mili-

  tary technology that devastated the countryside, struck down the innocent, and left no

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  place for chivalry, heroism, or even common decency. Unlike Andrew Lang, an early

  Scottish collector of fairy tales, who felt children most often ask, “Is it true?,” Tolkien declared that children far more often asked him of a character, “Was he good? Was he

  wicked?” Tolkien shared G. K. Chesterton’s conviction that children “are innocent and

  love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” The child’s stern perception of right and wrong, as opposed to the “mercy untempered by justice” that leads to “falsification of values,” confirmed Tolkien’s long-held inclination toward the steely world of the northern sagas, where human heroism faces inevitable defeat by the forces

  of evil, and the hero, according to Edith Hamilton, “can prove what he is only by dying.”

  From his basic distrust of the machine and his firsthand memories of the Somme, Tolkien

  drew one of the major lessons of his fiction: “that on callow, lumpish and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.”

  Reconciling this harsh northern Weltbild with his Roman Catholic faith did not seem to be difficult for Tolkien. An indispensable element of his theory of fantasy is the “sudden joyous ‘turn’” of a “eucatastrophic” story, a moment in fiction accompanied by “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.” By inserting the “turn” convincingly into his tale, the subcreator “denies universal final defeat”

  and gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

  Hence, Tolkien believed that such a joy was the “mark of the true fairy story,” the revelation of truth in the fictional world the subcreator built. It might even be greater, “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.” Tolkien was able to see the Christian Gospels as “the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe,” believing that in fantasy the human subcreator might “actually assist in the effoliation and multiple

  enrichment of creation.”

  Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings form, as he always hoped, one coherent and archetypal whole. His “creative fantasy” effectively shows the

  three dissimilar faces his theory demanded: “the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the

  Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity toward Man.” Humanity’s “old-

  est and deepest desire,” the “Great Escape” from death, is satisfied in Tolkien’s major fiction, not by denying Mortality but by accepting it gracefully as a gift from the Creator, a benefit to humankind that Tolkien’s immortal Elves envied. The Elves’own magic is actually art, whose true object is “subcreation” under God, not domination of lesser beings

  whose world they respectfully share. Scorn for fallen people (and fallen Elves and

  Hobbits as well) abounds in Middle-earth, but pity, too, for guiltless creatures trapped in the most frightful evil Tolkien could envision, evil that he believed arises “from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others—speedily—and according to

  the benefactor’s own plans.”
Middle-earth lives forever in Tolkien’s novels, and with it an affirmation of what is best, most true, and most beautiful in human nature.

  For almost fifty years, mostly in the quiet academic atmosphere of Oxford, Tolkien

  built his resounding tales of “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the 237

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  large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story.” He consciously dedicated the work simply “to England; to my country.” The intellectual absorption with language he

  had always enjoyed gave him the starting place for his mythology, which he implemented

  in The Silmarillion, whose unifying theme is the Fall of Elves and Men. His happiness in the English countryside seems to have provided him the landscape from which The

  Hobbit grew, perhaps his most approachable “fairy-story” for both children and adults, illustrating the happiness to be gained from simplicity and the acceptance of the gift of mortality. The chivalric dreams of noble sacrifice shattered for Tolkien’s generation by World War I were redeemed for him by his realization that the humble may effectively struggle

  against domination by the misguided technological values of modern civilization. The he-

  roic legend of The Lord of the Rings best illustrates Tolkien’s resolution of the conflict between the northern values he had admired from youth and the Roman Catholic religion of

  hope and consolation to which he was devoted. Tolkien wanted to illuminate the simplest

  and the highest values of human existence, found in a human love that accepts and tran-

  scends mortality. Tolkien’s “mythology for England,” a unique gift of literature and language, has earned its immense popular success by appealing to humanity’s eternal desire

  to understand its mortal lot. As Hilda Ellis Davidson commented of the great northern

  myths, so like Tolkien’s own, “In reaching out to explore the distant hills where the gods dwell and the deeps where the monsters are lurking, we are perhaps discovering the way