J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the Century

Afterword

THE FOLLOWERS AND THE CRITICS

Tolkien and the critics

In the preceding chapters I have tried, here and there, to mention the serious criticisms of Tolkien which have been made sufficiently openly to enable a reply–criticisms of his morality, style, characters, and narrative method (see, for instance, pp. 117, 147, 158, 224). A subject which has however for the most part been shunned since the opening pages has been the general phenomenon of intense critical hostility to Tolkien, the refusal to allow him to be even a part of ‘English literature’, even on the part of those self-professedly committed to ‘widening the canon’. One reason is that while the hostility is open enough, the reasons for it often remain unexpressed, hints and sneers rather than statements. Many critics are very ready to express their anger, to call Tolkien childish and his readers retarded; they are less ready to explain or defend their judgements. The assumption seems to be that those of the right way of thinking (Susan Jeffreys’s literati) will know without being told, and those of the other party do not deserve debate: classic tactics of attempted marginalization. Recurrent features have been wild prediction (silly, because easily proven false by later events), and self-contradiction (which is self-revealing). Thus the anonymous reviewer of The Fellowship of the Ring for the Times Literary Supplement back in 1954–we now know he was the historical novelist Alfred Duggan–predicted confidently, ‘This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once’. It must have seemed a safe prediction at the time–few adults read any work as long as The Lord of the Rings even once, let alone more than once–but it was wrong, indeed it could not have been more wrong: of all popular best-sellers, The Lord of the Rings is the one most likely to be read over and over again. In the same way Philip Toynbee a few years later in 1961 (a friend of Duggan’s, and another member of the literary coterie to be discussed below as the Sonnenkinder) made the equally confident prediction, quoted already on p. xx above, that the wave had passed, that Tolkien’s supporters were beginning to ‘sell out their shares’, that the whole craze was passing into ‘merciful oblivion’. It had not in fact got properly started, for popularity in the USA did not take off till the ‘pirate’ Ace edition of 1965 and the authorized Ballantine one that followed it in the same year.

In any case Toynbee in 1961 was contradicting himself with a curious mixture of insight and blindness. Just a few months before he had written a piece in the Observer for April 23rd, ‘The Writer’s Catechism’, defining his image of ‘the Good Writer’. The Good Writer he declared (N.B., the masculine pronouns in what follows are all Toynbee’s) is a private and lonely creature who takes no heed of his public. He can write about anything and make it relevant, even ‘incestuous dukes in Tierra del Fuego’. He ‘creates an artifact which satisfies him’ and ‘can do no other’. When his work appears it will be ‘shocking and amazing…unexpected by the public mind. It is for the public to adjust’. Nearly all of this is a perfect description of Tolkien: ‘private and lonely’, writing in his converted garage; concerned only with his artifact, or one might say his Tree; his work utterly unexpected on publication, and yet capable of making anything ‘relevant’, even fantastic creatures in an invented world. And when one adds to Toynbee’s list his coup de grâce, his crowning identifier, that ‘the Good Writer is not directly concerned with communication, but with a personal struggle against the intractable medium of modern English’ (my emphasis), it is hard to see how he could miss the connection: Tolkien saw deeper into and reacted harder against the nature of specifically modern English than any other writer this century, as can be said without qualification.

And yet Toynbee was not alone in this strange inability to see what (he said) he was looking for. In 1956 Edmund Wilson, then doyen of American modernist critics, had dismissed The Lord of the Rings as ‘balderdash’, ‘juvenile trash’, a taste which he thought was specifically British (once again a prophecy about to crash in flames as the American market conversely took off). In his 1931 critical classic Axel’s Castle, however, he had sternly if pompously rebuked exactly this tendency towards dismissal:

it is well to remember the mysteriousness of the states with which we respond to the stimulus of works of literature and the primarily suggestive character of the language in which these works are written, on any occasion when we may be tempted to characterize as ‘nonsense’, ‘balderdash’ or ‘gibberish’ some new and outlandish-looking piece of writing to which we do not happen to respond. If other persons say they do respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.

The last sentence could not be put better. But when the event happened, Wilson was first in line with ‘balderdash’, exactly the word he had outlawed. He had completely forgotten his own rule.

What is the psychology of this, one wonders? Do these people not mean what they say? And why can’t they say what they mean? Another feature of response to Tolkien has been what I can only call simple snootiness, and what Orwell called the ‘automatic snigger’ of the English-speaking Establishment intellectual. Susan Jeffreys’s remark about ‘literati’ was mentioned at the start of this book. It is matched by Anthony Burgess twenty years before (in the Observer for 26th November 1978) dismissing ‘allegories with animals or fairies’ in favour of the ‘higher literary aspirations’. By the allegories he meant, I think, Watership Down and The Lord of the Rings (neither of them an allegory)–I doubt he would have had the nerve to castigate Animal Farm, which certainly is an allegory with animals. But what he meant by the ‘higher literary aspirations’ he does not say: if we were literati, presumably, we would know already. I am never able to refrain from citing Professor Mark Roberts’s judicious and total rejection of The Lord of the Rings–as suggested above, p. 156, possibly the single most imperceptive statement ever made about Tolkien:

It doesn’t issue from an understanding of reality which is not to be denied, it is not moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être.

If there is one work of which one can be sure this is true, it is The Lord of the Rings, indeed it would be possible to criticize it for its author’s utter single-mindedness. But somehow Roberts, like Toynbee, like Wilson, missed seeing it. They were looking for a literary revelation, but when one came they denied it. It was not what they expected. Populist, not elitist. It did not provide that comfortable sense of superiority to the masses without which the English-speaking literary intellectual, it seems, cannot cope at all (a point made in much more detail by John Carey’s iconoclastic book from 1993, The Intellectuals and the Masses).

Several attempts have been made to explain this deep and seemingly compulsive antipathy. I have suggested in The Road to Middle-earth that it is at bottom professional, a reflex of the ongoing language/literature war which has preoccupied university departments of English for a century: this is perhaps too narrow an explanation. Patrick Curry argues in his Defending Middle-earth that it stems from a kind of generation war, as a group devoted to ‘modernism’, and to thinking themselves up-to-date, find themselves pushed aside by ‘postmodernism’: the argument gains a lot of force from Tolkien’s surging popularity with protest movements in the West and even more in Eastern Europe, but Curry’s definition of ‘postmodernism’ is a personal and tactical one (he considers the ‘hostility’ phenomenon much more widely in his 1999 article). Joseph Pearce’s 1997 book Tolkien: Man and Myth implies that the antipathy is a reaction if not to Tolkien’s Catholicism specifically, then to his ‘religious sensibility’: again not impossible, but not often overtly mentioned. That there is a class basis to the critics’ reaction is strongly suggested, for instance, by Humphrey Carpenter’s contemptuous dismissal of Tolkien’s followers as ‘anorak-clad’ (cited by Pearce): obviously Carpentercannot know what proportion of Tolkien-readers habitually wear anoraks, nor would it say anything about their literary tastes if he did. But the reference to anoraks is easily understood, is intended to be understood, as class-hostility from those who habitually carry umbrellas: a very clear case of the haute bourgeoisie insisting on retaining its monopoly of culture. To balance matters, Jessica Yates points out that Tolkien often triggered extreme hostility from consciously left-wing academics (though the haute bourgeoisie is often theoretically left-wing, see the account of the Sonnenkinder below).

There is some truth in all the theories just proposed, nor do they necessarily exclude each other. However, they are all in their way arguments from off the page. It would be better if some kind of literary case could be made out to explain this curious phenomenon of seemingly irrational hatred.

Tolkien and Joyce

Comparing Tolkien and Joyce, The Lord of the Rings and Ulysses, may well inflame the situation rather than cool it. To critics like Germaine Greer, whose view is cited on p. xxii above, the comparison would probably be all but blasphemous. However, the general opinion that Tolkien knew nothing of literary history, was unswervingly hostile to Shakespeare and Milton and the entire post-medieval canon, has been shown to be false in chapter IV. I can see no sign that he read or admired Joyce. Nevertheless, something can be learned by putting the two men, and the two works, into relation with each other. They were, after all, both authors of the same century, close contemporaries, not dissimilar in background.

There are some immediate points of similarity. The two men’s careers are more like each other’s than most other major writers: each with one obvious main work, each of these to some extent a development of an earlier and shorter one with which it shares some characters (The Hobbit, Portrait of the Artist), the two sequences supported only by some short pieces and by collections of poems, and extended by posthumous publication of first drafts (like Joyce’s Stephen Hero, and the volumes of the James Joyce Archive). It is true that Joyce’s magnum opus came out when he was only forty, while Tolkien waited till he was sixty-two. Tolkien might have replied that he did not have the massive financial support Joyce received for his writing–it has been calculated, some £23,000 between 1915 and 1930, certainly more than Tolkien earned from being a professor in the same period. Joyce was in fact in the situation that Niggle could only dream about: in receipt of a pension given to him entirely so that he could get on with his writing, with no garden to neglect and no threat of an Inspector.

But there are less accidental connections. Joyce never achieved Tolkien’s academic stature nor his learning, but he was a philologist of sorts. We know he took a course in the subject at University College, Dublin; the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ sequence in Ulysses shows him putting it to use; and the ‘Proteus’ section is assigned overtly to ‘Philology’ in Joyce’s own scheme for the book. Probably Joyce was the kind of ‘Good Writer’ Philip Toynbee was thinking of when he wrote about personal struggles against ‘the intractable medium of modern English’. More subtly, both Ulysses and The Lord of the Rings are evidently works of the twentieth century, neither of them readily describable as novels, which are engaged in deep negotiation with the ancient genres of epic and romance (the structure of Ulysses parallels that of the Odyssey, generally agreed to be the more romantic of the two epics ascribed to Homer). More comically, both of them got something of the same treatment from sections of the intelligentsia when they eventually appeared. The class-reactions to Tolkien are noted above, but one might compare with them Virginia Woolf’s nettled dismissal of Joyce’s work in her diary as ‘illiterate, underbred’. ‘Underbred’ is exactly the same sort of sneer as ‘anorak-clad’–the haute bourgeoisie insisting on its monopoly of culture again–but what could she have meant by ‘illiterate’? No doubt, ‘not pleasing to the literati’, though as far as Joyce was concerned she was wrong even about that. The joking dismissal of the Silma-rillion as ‘a telephone directory in Elvish’ has been mentioned above (p. 242). It may add to the joke that Ulysses has been shown to depend heavily on just that, the 1904 edition of a Thoms’s Dublin Directory. Both works are deliberately schematized, as we know because their authors’ schemes survive; and they are also very clearly in intention encyclopaedic.

The differences, of course, are even more striking than the similarities. The action of Ulysses is confined within a single day, 16th June 1904, and a single city, Dublin: the scope of The Lord of the Rings is both historically and geographically much greater. Indeed it is not too much to say, and it is not even a criticism to say it, that in the main action of Ulysses nothing much happens. It could be called, ‘One Day in the Life of a Nobody’; and such a title makes possible a further comparison. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote another work about a nobody, very nearly a non-person, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1963); but it is nothing like Ulysses. Solzhenitsyn takes one day in one life as a sample, significant because it is just like so many millions of other days in other lives. The whole point of the work is a public one, bitterly satirical, aggressively political. Ulysses by contrast is nothing if not private and personal. What it shows above all is the complexity and individuality even in the inner life of a nobody. It becomes at times literally a Babel of voices, but many of those voices are the same voice, from a self which is intrinsically heterogeneous. To it (T.S. Eliot suggested) the only possible response is silence–perhaps because another of its distinctive features is that, unlike The Lord of the Rings, it refuses to follow even the most conventional of plot outlines. E.M. Forster (not much of an artist with plots himself) observed that in most novels there is a moment when complication turns towards resolution, and in The Lord of the Rings one might well be able to pinpoint exactly when this is–when Ghan-buri-Ghan cries out ‘Wind is changing!’, perhaps (V/5) or maybe, closer to the physical centre, when Gandalf says ‘The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned’ (III/5). There is no sign of any such centre-point or change of direction in Ulysses. Its flux continues to the end.

Tolkien and modernism

Rather the same phenomenon of superficial similarity and deeper opposition appears if one widens the scope of the argument to considering the whole phenomenon of ‘modernism’, of which Ulysses is accepted as a definitive work. Authoritative recent accounts of modernism–I use here primarily the entries in The Oxford Companion to English Literature compiled by Margaret Drabble (1998), and in Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth’s Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1994)–often seem immediately applicable to Tolkien. Modernist style, we are told, is characteristically local, limited, finding beauty not in abstractions but in ‘small, dry things’. I am not sure about ‘dry’, but Tolkien appears to present himself in ‘Leaf by Niggle’ as essentially a miniaturist (see p. 268 above), and the impression is confirmed not only by the many passages of close natural description in all his works (the ‘purple emperor’ butterflies in Mirkwood, the falling willow-leaves by the Withywindle), but by, for instance, his long, careful, deeply absorbed study of hybrid flowers from a single plant in his garden (see letter to Amy Ronald in Letters). Modernism was said furthermore, by T.S. Eliot, to have made it possible to replace narrative method by ‘mythical method’; and the whole drive of Tolkien’s work, as one can see, was towards creating a mythology which his major narrative was there to embody. When one reads also (this time in Drabble) that modernism is distinguished by experiments with the representation of time; by rejection of the ‘realist illusion’; by the use of multiple narrators; and by experiments with language, one might well check them off by remarking, respectively: ‘yes, see ‘The Lost Road’ and ‘The Notion Club Papers’; the experiments with interlaced narrative, the use of ‘threads’ of story alternating and contrasting; and, of course, the deliberate creation of unknown languages and unrecorded dialects’. As for a liking for irony, also cited as characteristically modernist, Tolkien’s whole developed narrative method is ironic, as also anti-ironic (see pp. 110-11 above). Why is it unacceptable to see Tolkien, then (12 lines in the Drabble Companion), as a modernist author parallel to Joyce (76 lines), and a ‘Good Writer’ of exactly the sort imagined by Toynbee?

The answer is clear enough if one looks at some of the other features itemized. Modernist works tend to rely very heavily on literary allusion–as, for instance, in Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ or Joyce’s Ulysses. If the reader does not follow the allusion, does not realize the contrast between the words in their original context (in Homer, say, or Dante) and in their modernist context, then the point is lost. Tolkien by contrast was as well read as anyone and more so than most, and he alludes frequently to works of what he regarded as his own tradition, the ‘Shire tradition’ of native English poetry. It is absolutely characteristic of his uses of tradition, however, that the source of the allusions does not matter. The words work best when they have become quasi-proverbial, common property, merged with ordinary language, ‘as old as the hills’. Many of the works he used most are anonymous. Tolkien never subscribed to the cult of the Great Author, the person raised above the common clay, so evident for instance in E.M. Forster’s again definitive short story ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ (a work deliberately parodied, I believe, in Lewis’s study of death already mentioned, The Great Divorce). Though he started by reading Classics at Oxford, Tolkien was also determinedly hostile to ‘the Classical Tradition’, as Eliot called it. Joyce’s schema depends on Homer, Eliot alludes continually to the tales of Agamemnon and Tiresias, Oedipus and Antigone. Milton attempted to supersede these (though he knew them better than anyone alive) by the heroes of the Bible. But Tolkien’s heroes and his major debts came from the native and Northern tradition which Milton never knew and Eliot ignored: Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Sigurd, the Eddie gods–a tradition seen by most modernists as literally barbarous (the possession of people who speak incomprehensible languages).

A final contrast is the modernist love of introspection, of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, of the characteristic trick of even the simplest of modern novels of telling you what the characters are thinking. Tolkien does this too, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (much more rarely in The Silmarillion); it may be impossible to present a narrative successfully to modern readers without it, though this is an experiment which no devotee of ‘experimental fiction’ has to my knowledge tried. Tolkien was however well aware of works which had tried it, and tried it successfully. There is only one moment in Beowulf when the narrator hesitates, as it were, on the brink of entering his character’s mind, when he says of his hero, ‘his breast boiled with dark thoughts, as was not his custom’, because the dragon has just burned down his hall and he does not know what he has done to deserve it. But the poem goes on, ‘He ordered a splendid war-shield to be made all of iron…he knew wood would not help him, linden-wood against fire’, with no more words wasted on the dark thoughts. Sir Gawain has dark thoughts too, but they are allowed out only when he mutters in his sleep (Tolkien’s translation), ‘as a man whose mind was bemused with many mournful thoughts’. We never learn what they are, because Gawain too resumes his public face immediately. In the cultures Tolkien admired, introspection was not admired. He was aware of it, in a way his ancient models were not, but he did not develop it.

Once one sees this utter opposition of literary philosophy, even the superficial similarities listed above are exposed. Tolkien’s approach to the ideas or the devices accepted as modernist is radically different because they are on principle not literary. He used ‘mythical method’ not because it was an interesting method but because he believed that the myths were true. He showed his characters wandering in the wilderness and entirely mistaken in their guesses not because he wanted to shatter the ‘realist illusion’ of fiction, but because he thought all our views of reality were illusions, and that everyone is in a way wandering in a ‘bewilderment’, lost in the star-occluding forest of Middle-earth. He experimented with language not to see what interesting effects could be produced but because he thought all forms of human language were already an experiment. One might almost say that he took the ideals of modernism seriously instead of playing around with them. But what he forfeited in the process–like Bilbo Baggins, who was never regarded as respectable again–was the underlying and, one has to say, always potentially snobbish and elitist claim of so much modernist writing, that it was produced for and could only be appreciated by the thoroughly cultivated individual, the fine and superior sensibility.

This is probably at the heart of the critical rage, and fear, which Tolkien immediately and ever after provoked. He threatened the authority of the arbiters of taste, the critics, the educationalists, the literati. He was as educated as they were, but in a different school. He would not sign the unwritten Articles of the Church of Literary English. His work was from the start appreciated by a mass market, unlike Ulysses, first printed in a limited number of copies designedly to be sold to the wealthy and cultivated alone. But it showed an improper ambition, as if it had ideas above the proper station of popular trash. It was the combination that could not be forgiven.

The lack of perception shown by Philip Toynbee and Alfred Duggan is, finally, interesting in more than one way, for both were members of the literary coterie which ruled and defined English literature at least for a time, between the wars and after World War II, and which the critic Martin Green has called, in his 1977 book The Children of the Sun, ‘the Sonnenkinder. They were committed modernists, upper class, often Etonians, often professed Communists, often (like Duggan) extremely rich, well-entrenched as editors and reviewers in the literary columns, though with a pervasive problem of failure to produce–Toyn-bee’s mentor Cyril Connolly’s one classic work remains his long excuse for failure, Enemies of Promise. Their leading literary figure was Evelyn Waugh (also high up the Waterstone’s rankings), whose son Auberon continues to figure prominently in the attacks on Tolkien. In the 1960s, when Toynbee was writing, though they still in Green’s phrase ‘staffed the Establishment’, they were becoming passe, a dreadful if ultimately inevitable fate for those committed to being avant-garde: this accounts for the venom of some of their attacks.

However, I would give at least the next-to-last word on this subject to Martin Green, a conspicuously fair-minded writer with almost no interest in Tolkien (whose name in early editions of his book he invariably misspells). The Inklings, he wrote–Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers, Lewis and (sic) Tolkein–avoided the poses of the Sonnenkinder, and centred their thinking on orthodox Christian theology, and on the problem of evil. Green admits that ‘Most aspects of their ideological and imaginative behaviour’ strike him as:

more generous, intelligent and dignified than those of either Leavis [doyen of mid-century English critics] or Waugh–or Orwell, for that matter, if considered in the abstract. But considered in the concrete, the ideas of the last three have at various times meant everything to me, while the others mean, in that sense, nothing. I approve what they did, but theoretically; I read the books it resulted in approvingly, but I am not really at all engaged by them.

And one reason surely is that these writers removed themselves from the cultural dialectic. Undignified as that often was, both personally and intellectually, that was where the action was…

(Green, 1977, pp. 495-6)

I understand and respect Green’s position, though it is not mine. His last remark however reminds me of a famous music-hall joke, a kind of sub-literary Waiting for Godot. On a darkened stage, a single light is burning. A man is down on his hands and knees, crawling round in silence, obviously looking for something. Eventually a second man comes on, and says, after watching for a while, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m looking for a sixpence I dropped’, replies the crawler. The second man gets down on his hands and knees and starts to help him. After a while the second man says, ‘Just where did you drop it, anyway?’ ‘Oh, over there’, says the first one, getting to his feet and walking over to the other side of the stage, in the dark. ‘Then why are you looking for it here?’ cries the second man in exasperation. The first one walks back to his original place and starts crawling round again. ‘Because’, he replies, ‘that’s where the light is’.

In this allegory of mine, the light = modernism, the crawling searcher = Toynbee (or Greer, or Susan Jeffreys from the Sunday Times, any of the critical multitude). I am not at all sure what the sixpence may =, but Tolkien was out there in the dark, looking for it.

Tolkien’s legacy

It is a relief to turn from hate and fear to love and admiration. Any full study of Tolkien’s many imitators would have to be at least book-length–incidentally, and to be fair, the entry on ‘Fantasy Fiction’ in the Drabble Companion is just as long as the one on ‘Modernism’: modesty prevents me from recommending it. But there is some interest in recording what a few of his most evident emulators have found inspirational in Tolkien, as in noting what they leave alone, or cannot approach.

At the most elementary level, reading Tolkien produced a strong desire for more stories about hobbits–a desire which Sir Stanley Unwin had identified as far back as 1937. Writing stories about hobbits pure and simple has remained difficult, however, as hobbits (in spite of The Denham Tracts and the OED) remain so clearly a Tolkien invention. Various evasions have been tried: there is an anthology called, rather unfortunately, Hobbits, Halflings, Warrows, and Wee Folk; the Martin Greenberg anthology of stories in honour of Tolkien, After the King, contains Dennis McKiernan’s ‘The Halfling House’. None of these efforts is very successful at catching the hobbit flavour, of course increasingly anachronistic even in its ‘modern’ or Edwardian aspect, especially for American writers and readers.

At a slightly higher level, some fans seem just to want to write (and read) The Lord of the Rings all over again. In Diana Wynne Jones’s excellent and not at all Tolkienian fantasy Fire and Hemlock (1984), the girl-heroine discovers The Lord of the Rings at the age, seemingly, of about fourteen, and reads it through four times running. She then immediately writes an adventure story about herself and her own mentor/father-figure:

how they hunted the Obah Cypt in the Caves of Doom, with the help of Tan Thare, Tan Hanivar, and Tan Audel [the other members of her mentor’s string-quartet]. After The Lord of the Rings it was very clear to her that the Obah Cypt was really a ring which was very dangerous and had to be destroyed. Hero did this, with great courage.

But when she sends her story to Tarn Lynn, he only writes back, ‘No, it’s not a ring. You stole that from Tolkien, use your own ideas’. The deflating comment seems appropriate to a good deal of Tolkien imitation, whose drive is to have the same thing again, only more of it.

The most obvious example is Terry Brooks’s generally derided, but still commercially successful, The Sword of Shannara. Rumour has it that when this came out in 1977 it had been commissioned by astute editors who knew they could sell anything sufficiently Tolkienian. If so, the editors were right. The ‘Shannara’ sequence is still running twenty years later, and is up to eight volumes. Yet the strange thing about the first volume at least is the dogged way in which it follows Tolkien point for point. A group is assembled to retrieve a talisman from the power of a Dark Lord. It is ‘retrieve’, not ‘destroy’, which is one point of dissimilarity. But the group assembled matches Tolkien’s Fellowship very nearly person for person. There is a Druid, or wizard, Allanon (= Gandalf); a dwarf, Hendel (= Gimli); two youths, central characters, who take the place of the four hobbits; two elves, one more than Tolkien’s Legolas, but then one of them is called Durin, a Tolkien name; and two men, Menion and Balinor, corresponding closely (Balinor too has a younger brother) to Aragorn and Boromir. Gollum is reincarnated in the person of Orl Fane, a gnome who gets possession for a time of the Sword of Shannara and dies trying to regain it. The Ringwraiths re-appear, ‘deathlike cry’ and all, as flying Skull Bearers, while the phial of Galadriel is replaced as a weapon against them by the Elfstones. As if that were not enough, the plot-outline is followed very nearly point for point as well: first journey to a ‘homely house’, Culhaven = Rivendell; pause in a hallowed forest, Starlock = Lórien; loss of Allanon, who is dragged into a fiery pit by a Skull Bearer, just like the Bridge of Khazad-Dum (though like Gandalf he reappears); and even, ambitiously though on a very small scale, the separation of the company when the hobbit-analogues are captured and led away by orc-analogues, only to be re-united later (after the expected tracking-scene). There are analogues to Sauron, Denethor, Wormtongue. The hobbit-analogues are attacked by ‘Mist Wraiths’ (like the barrow-wight), a tentacled creature in a pool (like the Watcher by Moria-gate), by a malevolent tree (Willow-man). Individual scenes are quite closely imitated, like the slamming down of the stone door at the end of The Two Towers, the death and withering of Saruman, or the arrival of the Riders of Rohan on the Pelennor Fields. The similarity is so close that in a way it is hard to tell how good or bad the result is. Anyone who had not read The Lord of the Rings might find it highly innovative–but I doubt that many of its original readers fell into that category. What The Sword of Shannara seems to show is that many readers had developed the taste (the addiction) for heroic fantasy so strongly that if they could not get the real thing they would take any substitute, no matter how diluted.

This is not the case with Stephen Donaldson’s ‘Thomas Covenant’ series, a work generally agreed to be much more original, and to have become in the end something like a critique and even an attempted rebuttal of Tolkien (see the entry for Donaldson in Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy already mentioned, and the full-length study of Donaldson by W.A. Senior). Nevertheless, the Tolkien impression is there, deep-stamped. A major and deliberate difference is that this time the central character is nothing like a hobbit, is in fact a modern adult American, who happens however to be a leper and becomes a rapist (about as far from Bilbo and Frodo as one could get). Nor, this time, does the anti-hero accumulate a Fellowship, as in the Brooks imitation. The similarity between Tolkien and Donaldson is rather in the landscape, or the people-scape, through which the anti-hero passes. The first volume in the sequence, Lord Foul’s Bane (also 1977), starts with a Cavewight recovering a talisman (like Gollum with the Ring), with in the background a story of a maimed hero, Berek Halfhand (cp. Beren the One-Handed). The Ringwraiths re-appear as ‘Ravers’ (not a fortunate choice of name); invocations of Elbereth are paralleled by invocations of Melenkurion (‘You have spoken a name which no Raver would call upon’, Donaldson, cp. Sam Gamgee, ‘Elbereth I’ll call. What the Elves say. No orc would say that’); the tree-houses of Lórien figure once again as ‘Soaring Woodhelven’, the wood of the strangling Huorns comes back as the forest of ‘Garroting Deep’, a troop of riders appears as ‘the Third Eoman’ (Éomer’s was the third éored), there is even a biting-off-finger scene. Especially close is the invention of the Giant Saltheart Foamfollower and his people, who correspond to Tolkien’s Ents once again virtually point for point: Saltheart looks ‘like an oak come to life’, has ‘deep-set eyes’ which ‘flashed piercingly, like gleams from his cavernous thoughts’; and he sings ‘in a language Covenant could not understand’, explains that Giantish is hard to translate, because the Giants’ tales take too long to tell, and regrets that ‘we have so few children’.

Yet Donaldson has said, and I for one believe him:

Tolkien influenced me powerfully by inspiring in me a desire to write fantasy. But when I actually began writing the Covenant books, I stayed as far away from Tolkien’s example as the exigencies of my own story allowed.

(Senior, Donaldson, p. 250)

Reconciliation of the observed facts and the author’s statement may be gained by noting that Donaldson uses several words which were to say the least extremely uncommon (especially in America) before being used by Tolkien: for instance, ‘gangrel’, ‘eyot’, and ‘dour-handed’, the latter surely a borrowing. Yet people often do not remember where or when they learned particular words, nor do they regard them as a debt. My suggestion is that in some cases–many cases, like Diana Wynne Jones’s heroine–Tolkienian words, and images, are learned so early and so thoroughly, possibly by compulsive re-reading, that they become internalized, personal property rather than literary debt. The phenomenon was common enough in the days of ballad culture or oral-formulaic epic; passive bearers of a tradition merged readily with active extenders of it. It is a strange but not entirely unwelcome thing to see in an age of individual authorship and defended copyright.

My last example of the relationship between Tolkien and later admirers is again a first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner (1960). Garner is at once the most like and the most unlike Tolkien of the authors mentioned here. Garner is English, has written several ‘young adult’ novels of great distinction and originality, and a recent adult novel, Strandloper. He is a native of Cheshire, and most of his books centre on Alderley Edge, as personal and as full of mythic potential to him as the West Midlands were to Tolkien. In Strandloper Garner interweaves overt and overt quotations from the works of the Gawain-poet, whom he and most critics (myself not included, see p. 199 above) take to be also a Cheshire man. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, then, is set on Alderley Edge, in modern times, though it starts off from an old local legend. It has no hobbits, its central characters being two children. But like Frodo they have come by accident into the possession of a vital talisman being sought for by a Dark Lord who (a reversal of the Tolkien theme) wishes to destroy it to put an end to the protective magic of the white wizard, Cadellin. In their association with Cadellin the children find themselves in contact with dwarves, a troll, and orc-analogues called ‘the morth-brood’ (‘orc’ is another word very closely identified with Tolkien, though not quite as definite an invention as ‘hobbit’). The similarities of plot are not strong (unlike Brooks), the book’s personnel could come as easily from traditional fairy-tale as from Tolkien’s re-creation of it (unlike Donaldson). Yet the Tolkienian influence remains pervasive, on the level of scene and even more of phrase–something which could well again be unconscious. Fenodyree the dwarf tells the children, as they crawl through the tunnels:

‘so deep did men delve that they touched upon the secret places of the earth…There were the first mines of our people dug, before Fundindelve: little remains now, save the upper paths, and they are places of dread, even for dwarfs.’

It seems a half-memory of Gandalf speaking of Moria, the Dwar-rowdelf, ‘too deep they delved, and woke the hidden dread’. In similar fashion Cadellin says of an earlier defeat of The Weird-stone’s ‘Dark Lord’ that when he fled ‘all men rejoiced, thinking that evil had vanished from the world for ever’; but he has returned, ‘pouring black thoughts from his lair in Ragnarok’. Elrond also remembers the time ‘when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so’, and Gandalf corroborates him, saying that already in Bilbo’s time the Necromancer was ‘sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood’. The ‘thin cry, like the plaintive voice of a night-bird, yet cold and pitiless as the fangs of mountains’ is in Garner that of a she-troll, but it is like the ‘long-drawn wail…the cry of some evil and lonely creature’ which signals a Ringwraith. The children are tracked by black crows in scenes strongly reminiscent of the spying crebain in ‘The Ring Goes South’.

What Garner has learned here is perhaps only the trick of varying style, allowing a proportion of archaic (or in Garner dialectal) language to tinge some characters’ speech and some narration, to make it strange but still comprehensible; and there are some things he does, reaching past Tolkien to Tolkien’s own sources, so to speak, which are quite un-Tolkienian. I do not think Tolkien would have approved, for one thing, of Garner’s trick of taking genuine Old Norse words out of their context and using them just as names, like Nastrond–in Garner, the name of the Dark Lord, but in Snorri’s Edda Náströnd, the ‘Corpse-beaches’, the place where sinners go after death–or Ragnarok–in Garner, again, the Dark Lord’s stronghold, but in Norse Ragnarök, Doomsday, the Destruction of the Gods. Brisinga men (two words) is the name of the goddess Freya’s necklace in Norse: Garner uses it only for strangeness. And yet in making these borrowings Garner is following a Tolkienian theory, that people can tell the genuine from the fake, even when it comes to making up names. Do not make them up, therefore. If you cannot embed them in a language (like Quenya or Sindarin), borrow them from an existing language. Garner shows a certain respect for his predecessor even in disagreement or deviation.

Having looked at what authors have taken from Tolkien, consciously or unconsciously, it may be worth finally considering what they have not. Has Tolkien proved to be in any way like his popular predecessor Dickens, ‘the Inimitable’? One interesting feature which no one has attempted to copy in any detail has been Tolkien’s continual insertion of poems, in very different styles and often complex metres. It could be that this is too much trouble, but another factor is probably the sheer depth of Tolkien’s involvement with literary tradition: fantasy writers are not brought up the way he was any more. Along with this goes a lack of interest in literary gaps, errors, contradictions. Fantasy authors are very ready to raid works like the Elder Edda or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for material, but not to rewrite them, point out their mistakes, ‘reconstruct’ narrative which is no longer there. The collapse of philology as a university discipline makes it likely that this will remain permanent. A further feature which as far as I know no one has ever tried seriously to copy is Tolkien’s structuring of The Lord of the Rings, his use of narrative threads. For one thing the very careful chronological positioning, the cross-checking of dates and distances and phases of the moon would be hard to do accurately, something best left to a ‘natural niggler’. For another, it seems likely that no modern author feels able to accept Tolkien’s highly Boethian ideas of fortune, chance and Providence, even when checked and balanced by the anti-Boethian suggestions also present. The underlying sadness of his work, its many death-scenes and avoidance of the unmodified happy ending, presents a further challenge to the world of commercial publishing.

Nevertheless, it would not be true to say that Tolkien’s imitators have responded only to surface features. Once again, as far as I know no contemporary writer has gone as far as Tolkien did in the creation of imaginary languages, and probably no one could, but what have been very well digested are his views about the importance of language, the importance of names, and the necessity for a feeling of historical depth. I think Tolkien himself would have had to raise an appreciative eyebrow at the amount of linguistic knowledge packed into the works of, for instance, Avram Davidson. I remarked in the Foreword that not everyone responds to Gothic, but Davidson, in his Peregrine Secundus (1982) expects his readers to relish Ancient Oscan, and clearly many of them do. Michael Swanwick’s brilliantly inventive The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) meanwhile seems to me to show that the author has been reading, if not The Denham Tracts, then something very like them. Authors like Swanwick, and Davidson, and Jack Vance, and many others including those mentioned below, value authenticity and what Tolkien called the ‘flavour’ that ‘rooted works have’, because they have been shown their value. No one, perhaps, is ever again going to emulate Tolkien in sheer quantity of effort, in building up the maps and the languages and the histories and the mythologies of one invented world, as no one is ever again going to have his philological resources to draw on. Just the same, modern authors of fantasy probably accept that they have to work much harder than their predecessors from the nineteenth century, the William Morrises and Lord Dunsanys.

Such parallels could be drawn out at great length, and could be applied, in different ways and to different extents, to writers such as George R.R. Martin, Michael Scott Rohan (his name is a coincidence), Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay (Christopher Tolkien’s assistant with The Silmarillion), and literally scores of others. I do not think any modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried. Most of them would probably not see it as a mark, or would accept the word only in the sense of something to aim at. Naturally all of them want to write individually, and very often they do–the differences in basic philosophy between Tolkien and Donaldson have for instance been powerfully brought out by William Senior’s study already mentioned. But one might still think that, like Diana Wynne Jones’s girl-heroine at a much simpler level, what all of them want to do is to produce the same result, satisfy the same appetite, as that achieved or satisfied by Tolkien.

Relevance and realism

A final attempt may be made to put together the negative and the positive views of Tolkien glanced at in this Afterword. The bedrock reason for ignoring Tolkien and disliking fantasy may be the sense that it is just plain not true. An affecting statement of this position comes from the great realist George Eliot, in Adam Bede (1859). ‘I am content to tell my simple story’, she says, ‘dreading nothing…but falsity’. Falsity is easier than truth, if more ambitious. And so:

I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner.

Or, one might say, from Valar, Maiar, elf-lords and Rangers, to days in the lives of nobodies. Eliot’s view is a strong and dignified one, but one could respond to it in three ways. First, of course, hobbits are at least as close to the old woman and her flower-pot as they are to prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors. Second, Eliot makes the claim for truth and for a simple story, but she then goes on to write fiction. The argument that fantasy is intrinsically less truthful than realistic fiction could be extended to say that realistic fiction is intrinsically less truthful than biography. But we all (now) know that fiction allows a writer to express something, perhaps metaphorically or by analogy, which could not be expressed by history. The same argument should be extended to fantasy. That is surely why so many writers of the twentieth century, including the ones most closely concerned with real-world events, have had to write in the fantastic mode.

The final argument follows on from the above. One of the things that fiction allows its creators to do is to express pattern. One might say, ‘create pattern’, but it is clear that in many cases the authors believe that they did not create it, they merely perceived it, and are now trying to make it clear to others. This is true of George Eliot, whose Silas Marner (1861) is a work which follows exactly the same kind of Providential interlacing as we see in The Lord of the Rings, if on a much smaller scale, and which furthermore climaxes in a speech (the old countrywoman Dolly Varden’s) which is a deliberate dialect paraphrase of Boethius, dissimilar to Gandalf’s statements only in style, not content. If this authorial patterning is acceptable and desirable in realistic fiction, why should the same freedom not be extended to fantasy? Both forms are literally ‘not true, just made-up’. But no one has to read everything literally.

I believe that it is our ability to read metaphorically which has made Tolkien’s stories directly relevant to the twentieth century. We do not expect to meet Ringwraiths, but ‘wraithing’ is a genuine danger; we do not expect to meet dragons, but the ‘dragon-sickness’ is perfectly common; there is no Fangorn, but Sarumans are everywhere. It may indeed be the readiness with which these points are taken which has made Tolkien seem, not irrelevant, but downright threatening, to members of the cultural Establishment. Be that as it may, what Tolkien certainly did was introduce a new, or possibly re-introduce an old and forgotten taste into the literary world. A taste, a trace-element, perhaps a necessary literary vitamin? Whatever one calls it, to use the words of Holo-fernes, Shakespeare’s pedant-poet in Love’s Labour’s Lost, if not in the way that Holofernes meant them:

‘The gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.’