A boy's world?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I brought up this subject in another thread, but from comments it inspired it's clear to me that it has the legs to make a discussion in its own right.

On 27th November 1955, Edwin Muir published a review of The Lord of the Rings in the Observer entitled A Boy's World (he had reviewed each volume as it was published). In this article he wrote:

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.

Later in the same article, Muir commented:

The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do.

This article was probably the first to voice this criticism of The Lord of the Rings: that it is sub-adult; that its characters are like schoolboys who have exchanged their school ties for heraldry and their blazers for hauberks. Muir admitted no objection to the medieval atmosphere, and approved of the ents in general (as boys, clearly), but he wanted heroes and heroines who 'knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows': heroes and heroines like Malory's Lancelot and Guinevere.

Tolkien's response was short and caustic. In a letter to Rayner Unwin, he wrote: "Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence. 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." but he really didn't address the issue in any detail, and in fact I can't find any serious response to the charge of 'knowing about women'. I would be very interested to know which women spoke to Tolkien about this issue, and what they had to say.

For many, the very lack of supporting evidence in Tolkien's letter indicates a touched nerve, that it stands as a tacit acknowledgement that Muir had a point. I'm not so certain. Tolkien was writing to a long-time reader and friend concerning a partially related issue (a review of the BBC radio adaptation). He was mainly concerned with debunking W.H. Auden's comment on his book: "If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again". "I also thought Auden rather bad..." he wrote; "and deplored his making the book 'a test of literary taste'. You cannot do that with any work - and if you could you only infuriate". By the time he got to Muir, he was well into his stride and was ready to regale his publisher with a suitably irascible response.

Perhaps Muir did have a point, though. His argument has re-appeared on numerous occasions with modification. Some say that there are no women; others pick up on this to say that the relationships between men and women in The Lord of the Rings are unconvincing. Still more pick up on his lack of suffering, pointing out that of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring who survive the wars, only Frodo has truly become a casualty. In a global war, there are worse things, one might say, than to see a lot of people die.

The issue of women has been covered ad nauseam here already, but strangely relationships seem not to have been discussed in any great detail. Indeed there are few such relationships to cover. The majority of the narrative is concerned with a large medieval war. This is, as Tolkien was acutely aware, a man's affair. He even has Éowyn speak for the women of saga (foreshadowing his later use of Tídwald to argue the old soldier's case against the saga poets in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth), when she says:

All your words are but to say: you are a woman and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.

Of course, on Éowyn's side this conversation has a hidden agenda, of which Aragorn is more than aware. Unlike a boy in this situation, he speaks with understanding and compassion, whilst trying to keep the conversation away from its obvious undertone. This is finally made explicit in Éowyn's parting shot: "Neither have those others who go with thee. They go only because they would not be parted from thee - because they love thee."
Aragorn's later words to Éomer indicate his complete understanding of the situation; quite remarkable in a fifth-former.

This is only one relationship, though; and it is only romantic on one side. A good example of one of Tolkien's more endearing scenes comes in the house of Tom Bombadil, in which we see Tom and Goldberry in their domestic setting:

Then Tom and Goldberry set the table; and the hobbits sat half in wonder and half in laughter: so fair was the grace of Goldberry , and so merry and odd the caperings of Tom. Yet in some fashion they seemed to weave a single dance, neither hindering the other

Surely here Tolkien is in rather a modern sense showing us a successful relationship literally in motion. The two characters do not move in the same manner, or in some choreographed dance, but each as is natural to them, with a common aim and neither impeding the other. Whatever we may say about the setting, the relationship itself as seen here is quite convincing.

It is necessary, I should think, to address here the issue of the most mythic of the relationships of The Lord of the Rings; that of Aragorn and Arwen, which Tolkien claimed was essential to an understanding of his book. That their story was relegated to Appendix A, he explained as a narrative necessity: "...it is part of the essential story, and is only placed so, because it could not be worked into the main narrative without destroying its structure: which is planned to be 'hobbito-centric', that is primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble."

What, one might ask, would a convincing relationship be doing in this sort of deeply symbolic union? One would probably largely be right, but I find that people identify too strongly with Aragorn and Arwen for this to be entirely so. Disregarding the timeless romance of his facing tremendous hardships to be worthy of her, and of her giving up family, race and serial immortality for him (hardly realistic, at least in a conventional sense), there are few hints in the story of what is going on here. The situation does come through in the narrative in places, though: Aragorn's quotation of the Lay of Leithian on Weathertop is the first foreshadowing, although at the time the reader is as in the dark as are the four hobbits. Later in the house of Elrond, Bilbo is confused that Aragorn did not attend the feast, since Arwen was there. Aragorn has been putting business before pleasure again, for he says: "...often I must put mirth aside." Only on reading the Appendices do we discover what an understatement this is.

When we do see Aragorn and Arwen together for the first time in the Hall of Fire in Elrond's house, it is also the first time that we see him as Elessar, future king of Gondor. For the first time Tolkien describes Aragorn as a lord and not a strange wanderer. Later still, and notably in another Elven enclave, we witness the following scene:

And Aragorn answered: 'Lady, you know all my desire, and long held in keeping the only treasure that I seek. Yet it is not yours to give me, even if you would; and only through darkness shall I come to it.'
'Yet maybe this will lighten your heart,' said Galadriel; 'for it was left in my care to be given to you, should you pass through this land.' Then she lifted from her lap a great stone of clear green, set in a silver brooch... 'This stone I gave to Celebrían my daughter, and she to hers; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the house of Elendil!'

On the first reading this is meaningless, but once we know to whom Celebrían was married, and who Galadriel's granddaughter is, it becomes clear that only one person could have sent that brooch for Aragorn. Here he begins to come into his inheritance, and again Arwen is there, if only because he is thinking of her and she of him. Is this convincing? For me the idea that a man and a woman who are in love but separated by necessity might be thinking about one another is an easy one to credit. It is certainly easier to believe than Igraine's joyous reception of her husband's killer as his replacement; and equally joyous acceptance of the story that he slept with her by deceit on the very night his men killed his predecessor.

My time grows short, so I shall have to turn reluctantly to the issue of global warfare and the suffering therein as portrayed in Tolkien's works. The first point should be that The Lord of the Rings was never intended to portray global war in any form. Its entire setting is so overtly medieval, and the military organisation and procedure so antiquated, that for a modern global conflict to take place there would itself be another of many anachronisms. As for there being a global conflict in the book, the action spans a continent, granted; but this is hardly the world. The actual military action takes the form of a number of set-piece battles and minor skirmishes, so the most suffering that I would expect for combatants would be death or maiming. It is interesting to note, though, that Tolkien's characters are either killed or heroically wounded: there are no cripples visible after Middle-earth's battles; although he was well aware of the horrific wounds that could be inflicted by swords and axes.

Is there no suffering, though? We are shown entire civilian populations uprooted; we are shown loyal soldiers forced to choose between treachery against a mad commander or loyally conspiring in the death of his son. We are shown the noble and courageous Boromir snared by his desire to protect his people and then made aware of the fallacy of his trust in men and even in himself; we see the suffering of Éowyn in seeing her beloved uncle killed, and of Éomer when he thinks his sister dead. Tolkien does not flinch from the unpleasantness of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields: Forlong has been hacked to death with axes, however he may put it; people have been trampled to death by elephants; every one of the enemy is dead. These are the comprehensible horrors of medieval warfare. To many ears, those of the war in which Tolkien himself fought are little more than meaninglessly huge statistics. Tolkien picks certain names and describes their owners' deaths precisely in order to give the casualties a personal touch. When Frodo and Sam witness Faramir's men destroying the Haradrim, one particular man is picked out for description; not because he is the only casualty, but because this lends a human element to the dead that was profoundly lacking in the trenches. In a way Tolkien tries to avoid the bald statistics of modern battle reports and the blank glossing of early-medieval poets and show us just war: sometimes heroic, sometimes prosaic, sometimes horrific and always cause for lament. His last comment on The Battle of the Pelennor Fields is in the words of a later singer:

There Théoden fell, Thengling mighty,
to his golden halls and green pastures
in the Northern fields never returning,
high lord of the host. Harding and Guthláf,
Dúnhere and Déorwine, doughty Grimbold,
Herefara and Herubrand, Horn and Fastred,
fought and fell there in a far country:
in the Mounds of Mundburg under mould they lie
with their league-fellows, lords of Gondor
Neither Hirluin the Fair to the hills by the sea,
nor Forlong the old to the flowering vales
ever, to Arnach, to his own country,
returned in triumph; nor the tall bowmen,
Derufin and Duilin, to their dark waters,
meres of Morthond under mountain-shadows.
Death in the morning and at day's ending
lords took and lowly. Long now they sleep
under grass in Gondor by the Great River.
Grey now as tears, gleaming silver,
red then it rolled, roaring water:
foam dyed with blood flamed at sunset;
as beacons mountains burned at evening;
red fell the dew in Rammas Echor.

The very landscape shares in the battle, and afterwards in the sadness: the river is at times red with blood and, afterwards, grey as tears, forming the constant that runs between the reality and the memory of war. It is significant that Tolkien links this memory with tears, and with the river: "Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away" as the hymn runs.

Perhaps he did fail to show the full horror of war. For Tolkien there was always a conflict between the glorious battles of the poets and the grim reality of warfare as he had seen it. He returned to this subject again (and with a good deal more success, since it was the purpose of the narrative) in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and his accompanying essay Ofermod, in which the idealistic young poet Torhthelm's stirring quotations are countered by the down-to-earth pity of the old soldier Tídwald. It is clear that the battles in The Lord of the Rings represent the slight resurgence of the Torhthelm side of this equation, but in the poem I quoted above, Tídwald's cynical old head is certainly looking over the battlements. Certainly the aim of the piece seems to be to rescue the sad battalions of faceless casualties from obscurity and give them names.

Looking back at the length of this post, I think I see why Tolkien was so short. Hopefully there is still plenty of scope for dissent and illustration, although I will add the caveat that if I think that the discussion on any hand is getting nasty I will delete the entire thread.