Tolkien's Heavenly Old World

[tumhalad2]

Middle Earth, middlebrow JRR Tolkien the author of the 20th century?

Andrew Rissik defends the canon against assault from hobbits and Tom Shippey


Andrew Rissik

Guardian


Saturday September 2, 2000


JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century

Tom Shippey

Buy it here: JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century


JRR Tolkien's chief contribution to the literature of the 20th century was to ignore it almost completely. He wrote, as his Oxford don colleague and fellow Inkling C S Lewis also did, to retrieve something that the discordance of the modern age seemed intrinsically to threaten - the old, secure, prepubertal moral certainties of late-Edwardian England.

Both men were secular mystics who chose to canonise their own tastes. They found in books and mythology less a reflection of life and lived experience than some fulfilment of the mind's sovereign capacity to escape into dream. Lewis might have been happier if English poetry had ended with John Masefield; Tolkien would have preferred it to have finished somewhere between the work of the anonymous Gawain poet, whom he translated, and Chaucer. "Literature stops in 1100," he once said. "After that it's only books."

It was as if, on some primary level, his interests weren't artistic at all. He abandoned Greek and the Classical world after an indolent first year at Oxford, switching to English and linguistics because comparative philology was the only paper in which he'd distinguished himself. One suspects that the undertow of sex and religious doubt and the restless, argumentative probing of human psychology in Euripides, Aeschylus and Homer held little appeal for him. What he liked was the colour and vitality of archaic Northern languages, their hammer-on-anvil gold-and-silver sound, their plainness and lack of introversion.

The danger in writing about him now is to misread this essential simplicity of temperament, taking what's fresh and enjoyable in his work and applying to it wrongheaded standards of traditional literary eminence, so that what he did achieve is falsified by being mistaken for what he didn't. This is the cardinal error made by Professor Tom Shippey in his long and densely packed study, JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century, which - as its title may suggest - is a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic.

Shippey wants to feel that his own enthusiasm, which is for morally serious fantasy of the kind Tolkien pioneered, is worthy of a place up there at the top table alongside the totemic great names of the western canon. Accordingly, he classifies Tolkien as equal with (or ahead of) James Joyce, George Orwell, William Golding and Kurt Vonnegut, and then castigates the "literary snobs" who disagree.

The trouble is, it's not just literary snobs who don't accept Tolkien as one of the greatest writers of the last century. Almost no one does, except the hard-core Tolkien addicts who've elevated his books to the status of a cult. Shippey makes a legitimate case for the enduring commercial popularity of The Lord of the Rings, but if we're talking of "lasting value" I doubt whether popularity has any significance.

People read the tales of Middle Earth the way they've always read cunningly wrought fantasies - the way they read Sherlock Holmes or James Bond or Dracula - drinking in the excitement of the atmosphere, revelling in the hypnotic detail. They don't read them the way the 19th-century public read Nicholas Nickleby or War and Peace, feeling that these books were [Image] somehow inseparable from the life and thought of their age.

It's this absence of common literary horse sense that makes me feel that a critic who tries to raise the creation of Hobbits and Middle Earth above what was achieved by Yeats, Eliot, Conrad, Joyce, D H Lawrence or Auden is either artistically tone deaf or harmlessly dotty. After the annihilating traumas of the last century, it's merely perverse to ascribe greatness to this airy but strangely simplified mock-Teutonic never-never land, where races and species intermingle at will and great battles are fought but there is never any remotely convincing treatment of those fundamental human concerns through which all societies ultimately define themselves - religion, philosophy, politics and the conduct of sexual relationships.

So much of what Shippey says in Tolkien's favour cuts the opposite way. He discourses on the profundity of Tolkien's treatment of evil without appearing to see that Sauron, the Ring Lord, is no more than a compelling melodrama villain. Personified evil, though effective in its intended fantasy-adventure context, can't and doesn't implicate its readers emotionally, as do William Golding's Lord of the Flies or The Inheritors, which use exotic and far-removed settings to throw back at us a prophetically twisted image of our own corruptibility. Nor is it something insidious and institutional, working through structures and organisations in a recognisably sophisticated way, as in Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World.

To praise Tolkien for his archaic authenticity with languages is to miss the point. It's not his Old Norse or High German that's the problem, it's his English - the twee doggerel of Tom Bombadil, the high-falutin' Hollywood-epic inversions of the speeches at Rivendell, and that meandering prose style that is half Old Testament pastiche, half 1920s ripping yarn. The mix of high severity and low bluntness we find in a writer such as Sir Thomas Malory is entirely beyond Tolkien's reach; so too is the great poet's awareness of the inadequacy of language itself, that shrinks the thousand-year gap between us and those Anglo-Saxon masterpieces The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

Tolkien lacked the qualities that might have made The Lord Of The Rings a masterpiece: the language of a poet and the perception of a philosopher. When, at the end of the Morte d'Arthur, Sir Ector enters Joyous Guard to find his comrade Sir Lancelot lying dead, we hear, in the spontaneity and simple stoicism of his grief, some of the finest dramatic speech written in English before Shakespeare. When, in the last pages of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo leaves the Shire and departs for the Grey Havens, all we hear in the suavely allegorical and too sweetly cadenced prose are plagiaristic echoes of other books, other voices - Malory, Tennyson, Andrew Lang, William Morris, the King James Bible.

Yet the moment itself, and its high-aspiring style - "And it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise" - lie at the heart of what Tolkien and Lewis were striving to achieve.

Their vision, for all its limits, was not ignoble. Some faith that had been lost amid the slaughter of 1914-18 is respected in their fiction. Both were devoutly religious, and for both life was largely an intensification of what they'd read and talked about and imagined. Both locate their image of God in the same emotional places: in the sensuous, pre-industrial beauty of an invented natural world and the childlike stillness of the accepting human mind. The tone is lyrical, the meaning apocalyptic. Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis's Narnia were what these men thought and hoped that heaven might be like.




some challenging arguments....