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

Foreword

AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY

Fantasy and the fantastic

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.

This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut.

A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

The continuing appeal of Tolkien’s fantasy, completely unexpected and completely unpredictable though it was, cannot then be seen as a mere freak of popular taste, to be dismissed or ignored by those sufficiently well-educated to know better. It deserves an explanation and a defence, which this book tries to supply. In the process, I argue that his continuing appeal rests not on mere charm or strangeness (though both are there and can again to some extent be explained), but on a deeply serious response to what will be seen in the end as the major issues of his century: the origin and nature of evil (an eternal issue, but one in Tolkien’s lifetime terribly re-focused); human existence in Middle-earth, without the support of divine Revelation; cultural relativity; and the corruptions and continuities of language. These are themes which no one can afford to despise, or need be ashamed of studying. It is true that Tolkien’s answers will not appeal to everyone, and are wildly at odds with those given even by many of his contemporaries as listed above. But the first qualification applies to every author who has ever lived, and the second is one of the things that make him distinctive.

However, one of the other things that make him distinctive is his professional authority. On some subjects Tolkien simply knew more, and had thought more deeply, than anyone else in the world. Some have felt (and said) that he should have written his results up in academic treatises instead of fantasy fiction. He might then have been taken more seriously by a limited academic audience. On the other hand, all through his lifetime that academic audience was shrinking, and has now all but vanished. There is an Old English proverb that says (in Old English, and with the usual provocative Old English obscurity), Ciggendra gehwelc wile pœt hine man gehere, ‘Everyone who cries out wants to be heard!’ (Here and in a few places later on, I use the old runic letters þ, ð and 3. The first usually represents ‘th’ as in ‘thin’, the second ‘th’ as in ‘then’. Where the third is used in this book, it represents -3 at the end of a word, -gh- in the middle of one.)

Tolkien wanted to be heard, and he was. But what was it that he had to say?

Tolkien’s life and work

For a full account of Tolkien’s life, one should turn to Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized Biography of 1977 (full references to this and other works briefly cited in the text can be found on pp. 329-36 below). But one could sum it up by noting Carpenter’s surprising turn on p. Ill: ‘And after this, you might say, ‘nothing else really happened’. The turning-point Carpenter refers to as ‘this’ was Tolkien’s election to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford University in 1925, when he was only thirty-three. The exciting events of Tolkien’s life – the stuff most biographers draw on – happened before then. He was born in 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, of English parents. He returned to England very soon, but his father died when he was four, his mother (a convert to Roman Catholicism) when he was twelve. He was brought up in and around Birmingham, and saw himself, despite his foreign birth and German-derived name, as deep-rooted in the counties of the English West Midlands. He met his future wife when he was sixteen and she was nineteen, was eventually forbidden by his guardian to see or correspond with her till he was twenty-one, and wrote proposing marriage to her on his twenty-first birthday. They married while he was at Oxford, but immediately on graduation, in 1915, he took up a commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He served as an infantry subaltern on the Somme from July to October 1916, and in that year lost two of his closest friends, killed outright or dead of gangrene. He was then invalided out with trench fever, worked for a short while after the War for the Oxford English Dictionary, received first a Readership and then a Chair at Leeds University, and then in 1925 the Anglo-Saxon Chair at Oxford.

And after this nothing else really happened . Tolkien did his job, raised his family, wrote his books, pre-eminently The Hobbit, which came out in 1937, and The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes in 1954-5. His main purely academic publications were an edition of the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which he co-edited with E.V. Gordon in 1925, and his British Academy lecture on Beowulf in 1936, still accepted as the most significant single essay on the poem out of the (literally) thousands written. He retired from his second Oxford Chair in 1959 (having transferred from the Chair of Anglo-Saxon to the Merton Chair of English Language in 1945). He remained all his life a committed Christian and Catholic, and died, two years after his wife, in 1973. No extra-marital affairs, no sexual oddities, no scandals, strange accusations, or political involvements – nothing, in a way, for a poor biographer to get his teeth into. But what that summary misses out (as Carpenter recognizes) is the inner life, the life of the mind, the world of Tolkien’s work, which was also – he refused to distinguish the two – his hobby, his private amusement, his ruling passion.

If Tolkien had ever been asked to describe himself in one word, the word he would have chosen, I believe, would be ‘philologist’ (see, for instance, the various remarks made in Carpenter’s edition of Tolkien’s Letters, especially p. 264). Tolkien’s ruling passion was philology. This is a word which needs some explanation. I have to state here strong personal involvement. I attended the same school as Tolkien, King Edward’s, Birmingham, and followed something like the same curriculum. In 1979 I succeeded to the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds which Tolkien had vacated in 1925. I confess that I eventually abolished at Leeds the syllabus which Tolkien had set up two generations before, though I think that in the circumstances of the 1980s I got a deal which Tolkien would himself have reluctantly approved. In between Birmingham and Leeds I had spent seven years as a member of the English faculty at Oxford, teaching again almost exactly the same curriculum as Tolkien. We were both enmeshed in the same academic duties, and faced the same struggle to keep language and philology on the English Studies curriculum, against the pressing demands to do nothing but literature, post-medieval literature, the relevant, the realistic, the canonical (etc.). There may accordingly be a certain note of factionalism in what I have to say about philology: but at least Tolkien and I were members of the same faction.

In my opinion (it is one not shared, for instance, by the definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary), the essence of philology is, first, the study of historical forms of a language or languages, including dialectal or non-standard forms, and also of related languages. Tolkien’s central field of study was, naturally, Old and Middle English, roughly speaking the forms of English which date from 700 AD to 1100 (Old) and 1100 to 1500 (Middle) – Old English is often called ‘Anglo-Saxon’, as in the title of Tolkien’s Chair, but Tolkien avoided the term. Closely linked to these languages, however, was Old Norse: there is more Norse in even modern English than people realize, and even more than that in Northern dialects, in which Tolkien took a keen interest. Less closely linked linguistically, but historically connected, are the other ancient languages of Britain, especially Welsh, which Tolkien also studied and admired.

However, philology is not and should not be confined to language study. The texts in which these old forms of the language survive are often literary works of great power and distinctiveness, and (in the philological view) any literary study which ignores them, which refuses to pay the necessary linguistic toll to be able to read them, is accordingly incomplete and impoverished. Conversely, of course, any study which remains solely linguistic (as was often the case with twentieth century philology) is throwing away its best material and its best argument for existence. In philology, literary and linguistic study are indissoluble. They ought to be the same thing. Tolkien said exactly that in his letter of application for the Oxford Chair in 1925 (see Letters, p. 13), and he pointed to the Leeds curriculum he had set up as proof that he meant it. His aim, he declared, would be:

to advance, to the best of my ability, the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both; and to continue in a wider and more fertile field the encouragement of philological enthusiasm among the young.

Tolkien was wrong about the ‘growing neighbourliness’, and about the ‘more fertile field’, but that was not his fault. If he had been right, he might not have needed to write The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s fiction is certainly rooted in philology as defined above. He said so himself as forcefully as he could and on every available opportunity, as for instance (Letters, p. 219) in a 1955 letter to his American publishers, trying to correct impressions given by a previous letter excerpted in the New York Times:

the remark about ‘philology’ [in the excerpted letter, ‘I am a philologist, and all my work is philological’] was intended to allude to what is I think a primary ‘fact’ about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration…The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.

The emphasis in the passage quoted is Tolkien’s, and he could hardly have put what he said more strongly, but his declaration has been met for the most part by bafflement or denial. And there is a respectable reason for this (along with many less respectable ones), for Tolkien was the holder of several highly personal if not heretical views about language. He thought that people, and perhaps as a result of their confused linguistic history especially English people, could detect historical strata in language without knowing how they did it. They knew that names like Ugthorpe and Stainby were Northern without knowing they were Norse; they knew Winchcombe and Cumrew must be in the West without recognizing that the word cŵm is Welsh. They could feel linguistic style in words. Along with this, Tolkien believed that languages could be intrinsically attractive, or intrinsically repulsive. The Black Speech of Sauron and the orcs is repulsive. When Gandalf uses it in ‘The Council of Elrond’, ‘All trembled, and the Elves stopped their ears’; Elrond rebukes Gandalf for using the language, not for what he says in it. By contrast Tolkien thought that Welsh, and Finnish, were intrinsically beautiful; he modelled his invented Elf-languages on their phonetic and grammatical patterns, Sindarin and Quenya respectively. It is a sign of these convictions that again and again in The Lord of the Rings he has characters speak in these languages without bothering to translate them. The point, or a point, is made by the sound alone – just as allusions to the old legends of previous ages say something without the legends necessarily being told.

But Tolkien also thought – and this takes us back to the roots of his invention – that philology could take you back even beyond the ancient texts it studied. He believed that it was possible sometimes to feel one’s way back from words as they survived in later periods to concepts which had long since vanished, but which had surely existed, or else the word would not exist. This process was made much more plausible if it was done comparatively (philology only became a science when it became comparative philology). The word ‘dwarf’ exists in modern English, for instance, but it was originally the same word as modern German Zwerg, and philology can explain exactly how they came to differ, and how they relate to Old Norse dvergr. But if the three different languages have the same word, and if in all of them some fragments survive of belief in a similar race of creatures, is it not legitimate first to ‘reconstruct’ the word from which all the later ones must derive – it would have been something like ^*dvairgs – and then the concept that had fitted it? [The asterisk before ^*dvairgs is the conventional way of indicating that a word has never been recorded, but must (surely) have existed, and there is of course enormous room for error in creating ^*-words, and ^*-things.] Still, that is the way Tolkien’s mind worked, and many more detailed examples are given later on in this book. But the main point is this. However fanciful Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth was, he did not think that he was entirely making it up. He was ‘reconstructing’, he was harmonizing contradictions in his source-texts, sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits), but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination: and for this he had a very great deal of admittedly scattered evidence.

Tolkien furthermore had distinguished predecessors in the previous century. In the 1830s Elias Lonnrot, the Finn, put together what is now the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, from scattered songs and lays performed for him by many traditional singers; he ‘reconstructed’, in fact, the connected poem which he believed (probably wrongly) had once existed. At much the same time Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, in Germany, took up their enormous project of compiling at once a German grammar, a German dictionary, a German mythology, a German cycle of heroic legends, and of course a corpus of German fairy-tales – literary and linguistic study pursued without distinction, just as it should be. In Denmark Nikolai Grundtvig had set himself to re-creating Danish national identity, with passionate attention to the saga and epic literature of old, as to the ballad-literature of later periods, eventually brought together by his son Sven. But in England there had been no such nineteenth-century project. When Tolkien then said, as he did (see Letters, p. 144), that he had once hoped ‘to make a body of more or less connected legend’ which he could dedicate simply ‘to England; to my country’, he was not saying something completely unprecedented; though he did admit ruefully, in 1951, that his hopes had shrunk. Ten years later he might have felt much closer to success.

Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’ (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called ‘misologists’ – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order.

Behind this grievance and this anger was, of course, failure and defeat. It is now very hard to pursue a course of philology of the kind Tolkien would have approved in any British or American university. The misologists won, in the academic world; as did the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy.

But they lost outside the academic world. It is not long since I heard the commissioning editor of a major publishing house say, ‘Only fantasy is mass-market. Everything else is cult-fiction.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘That includes mainstream.’ He was defending his own buying strategy, and doubtless exaggerating, but there is a good deal of hard evidence to support him. Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while.

The author of the century

After this preamble, one may now consider the claim, or claims, made in this book’s title. Can Tolkien be said to be ‘the author of the century’? Any such claim, ambitious as it is, could rest on three different bases. The first of them is simply democratic. That is what opinion polls, and sales figures, appear to show. The details are given immediately below, along with some consideration of how they should be interpreted, and how they have been; but one can say without qualification that a large number of readers, both in Britain and internationally, have agreed with the claim, and that they have done this furthermore without prompting or direction.

The second argument is generic. As the commissioning editor said, fantasy, especially heroic fantasy, is now a major commercial genre. It existed before Tolkien, as is again discussed below, and it is possible to say that it would have existed, and would have developed into the genre it has become, without the lead of The Lord of the Rings. This seems, however, rather doubtful. When it came out in 1954-5 The Lord of the Rings was quite clearly a sport, a mutation, lusus naturae, a one-item category on its own. One can only marvel, looking back, on the boldness and determination of Sir Stanley Unwin in publishing it at all – though significantly enough, he hedged his bet by entering into a profit-sharing agreement with Tolkien by which Tolkien got nothing till there were some profits to share, a matter clearly of some doubt at the time. Unwin had moreover continued to support and encourage his author over a seventeen-year gestation period which in the event delivered quite a different birth from what had been intended. It is true that he never had to pay over the large sums which James Joyce’s backers did, for instance, while Joyce was producing Ulysses, but then neither he nor Tolkien ever had the kind of support from a professional literary elite which Joyce and his benefactors could count on. However, while Ulysses has had few direct imitators, though many admirers, after The Lord of the Rings the heroic fantasy ‘trilogy’ became almost a standard literary form. Any bookshop in the English-speaking world will now have a section devoted to fantasy, and very few of the works in the section will be entirely without the mark of Tolkien – sometimes branded deep in style and layout, sometimes showing itself in unconscious assumptions about the nature and personnel of the authors’ invented fantasy worlds. The imitations, or emulations, naturally vary very widely in quality, but they all give pleasure to someone. One of the things that Tolkien did was to open up a new continent of imaginative space for many millions of readers, and hundreds of writers – though he himself would have said (see above) that it was an old continent which he was merely rediscovering. An acceptably philological way of putting it might be to say that Tolkien was the Chretien de Troyes of the twentieth century. Chretien, in the twelfth century, did not invent the Arthurian romance, which must have existed in some form before his time, but he showed what could be done with it; it is a genre whose potential has never been exhausted in the eight centuries since. In the same way, Tolkien did not invent heroic fantasy, but he showed what could be done with it; he established a genre whose durability we cannot estimate.

The third argument has to be qualitative. Popularity does not guarantee literary quality, as everybody knows, but it never comes about for no reason. Nor are those reasons always and necessarily feeble or meretricious ones, though there has long been a tendency among the literary and educational elite to think so. To give just one example, in my youth Charles Dickens was not regarded as a suitable author for those reading English Studies at university, because for all his commercial popularity (or perhaps because of his commercial popularity) he had been downgraded from being ‘a novelist’ to being ‘an entertainer’. The opinion was reversed as critics developed broader interests and better tools; but although critical interest has stretched to include Dickens, it has not for the most part stretched to include Tolkien, and is still uneasy about the whole area of fantasy and the fantastic – though this includes, as has been said, many of the most serious and influential works of the whole of the later twentieth century, and its most characteristic, novel and distinctive genres (such as science fiction).

The qualitative case for these genres, including the fantasy genre, needs to be made, and the qualitative case for Tolkien must be a major part of it. It is not a particularly difficult case to make, but it does require a certain open-mindedness as to what people are allowed to get from their reading. Too many critics have defined ‘quality’ in such a way as to exclude anything other than what they have been taught to like. To use the modern jargon, they ‘privilege’ their own assumptions and prejudices, often class-prejudices, against the reading choices of their fellowmen and fellow-women, often without thinking twice about it. But many people have been deeply and lastingly moved by Tolkien’s works, and even if one does not share the feeling, one should be able to understand why.

In the following sections, I consider further the first two arguments outlined above, and set out the plan and scope of the chapters which follow, which form in their entirety my expansion of the third argument, about literary quality; and my answer to the question about what Tolkien felt he had to say.

Tolkien and the polls

Tolkien’s sales figures have always been an annoyance for his detractors, and as early as the 1960s commentators had been predicting that they would soon fall, or declaring that they had started to fall, so that the whole ‘cult’ or ‘craze’ would pass or was already passing into ‘merciful oblivion’ (so Philip Toynbee wrote in the Observer on 6th August 1961), just like flared jeans or hula hoops. The commentators were wrong about this – a surprise in itself, since Tolkien never followed up with either a Hobbit-sequel for the children’s market nor a Lord of the Rings-sequel for the adult market. But the whole issue of his continuing popularity was brought forward dramatically during 1997.

Very briefly – there is a more extensive account in Joseph Pearce’s book of 1998, Tolkien: Man and Myth, to which I am indebted – late in 1996 Waterstone’s, the British bookshop chain, and BBC Channel Four’s programme Book Choice decided between them to commission a readers’ poll to determine ‘the five books you consider the greatest of the century’. Some 26,000 readers replied, of whom rather more than 5,000 cast their first place vote for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Gordon Kerr, the marketing manager for Waterstone’s, said that The Lord of the Rings came consistently top in almost every branch in Britain (105 of them), and in every region except Wales, where James Joyce’s Ulysses took first place. The result was greeted with horror among professional critics and journalists, and the Daily Telegraph decided accordingly to repeat the exercise among its readers, a rather different group. Their poll produced the same result. The Folio Society then confirmed that during 1996 it had canvassed its entire membership to find out which ten books the members would most like to see in Folio Society editions, and had got 10,000 votes for The Lord of the Rings, which came first once again. 50,000 readers are said to have taken part in a July 1997 poll for the television programme Bookworm, but the result was yet again the same. In 1999 the Daily Telegraph reported that a Mori poll commissioned by the chocolate firm Nestle had actually managed to get a different result, in which The Lord of the Rings (at last) only came second! But the top spot went to the Bible, a special case, and also ineligible for the twentieth-century competition which had begun the sequence.

These results were routinely and repeatedly derided by professional critics and journalists (the latter group, of course, often the products of university literature departments). Joseph Pearce opens his book with Susan Jeffreys, of the Sunday Times, who on 26th January 1997 reported a colleague’s reaction to the news that The Lord of the Rings had won the BBC/Waterstone’s poll as: ‘Oh hell! Has it? Oh my God. Dear oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear’. This at least sounds sincere, if not deeply thoughtful; but Jeffreys reported also that the reaction ‘was echoed up and down the country wherever one or two literati gathered together’. She meant, surely, ‘two or three literati’, unless the literati talk only to themselves (a thought that does occur); and the term literati is itself interesting. It clearly does not mean ‘the lettered, the literate’, because obviously that group includes the devotees of The Lord of the Rings, the group being complained about (they couldn’t be devotees if they couldn’t read). In Jeffreys’s usage, literati must mean ‘those who know about literature’. And those who know, of course, know what they are supposed to know. The opinion is entirely self-enclosed.

Other commentators meanwhile suggested that the first poll by Waterstone’s must have been influenced by concerted action on the part of the Tolkien Society. The Society denies this, and points out that even if every one of their five hundred members had voted, this would still have been less than the margin of victory (1,200 votes) over the runner-up, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Germaine Greer took another tack by declaring angrily in the Winter/Spring 1997 issue of W: the Waterstone’s Magazine, that ever since her arrival at Cambridge in 1964, ‘it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized’. She added, ‘The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic’. It seems strange to see novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four and fables like Animal Farm castigated for ‘flight from reality’, though of course they are not novels of mainstream realism: as I remark above, it seems that some themes, including public and political ones, are best handled as fable or as fantasy. And calling something that has after all happened a ‘bad dream’ does not suggest too strong a grip on reality by the critic. Tolkien in any case had his own view on the modern development of words like ‘reality, real, realist, realistic’, see p. 76 below: Saruman, the collaborator, the wizard who goes over to the other side because it seems the stronger, would no doubt have called himself a ‘realist’, though that would not make him one.

It remains perfectly sensible, of course, to say that popular polls are no guide to literary value, any more than sales figures, and indeed both statements are no doubt true. The figures ought however to have produced some sort of considered response, even explanation, from professional critics of literature, rather than the nettled outrage which they got. To quote the critic Darko Suvin (writing primarily about science fiction, but extending his point to all forms of ‘paraliterature’ or commercial literary production):

a discipline which refuses to take into account 90 per cent or more of what constitutes its domain seems to me not only to have large zones of blindness but also to run serious risks of distorted vision in the small zone it focuses on (so-called high lit.)

(Suvin, 1979, p. vii)

This ‘noncanonic, repressed twin of Literature’, he adds, is ‘the literature that is really read – as opposed to most literature taught in schools’. And this indicates a further oddity about the polling results above. If one looks at the Waterstone’s list overall, it is very easy to detect what a correspondent in the Times Educational Supplement called ‘the formative influence of school set texts on a nation’s reading habits’. Even leaving aside the Welsh preference for Joyce’s Ulysses – the work most intensely promoted by academics and educationalists – the leading places after The Lord of the Rings were taken by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, with Golding’s Lord of the Flies not far away: all very familiar school set texts, routinely taught and examined, and for the most part comparatively short. The Lord of the Rings is however rarely if ever set as a text in schools or universities. Apart from the dislike of the educational establishment, it is too long, at over half a million words. The following it has acquired has all been the result of personal choice, not institutional direction.

A further thought which ought to have struck commentators is this. It is quite possible, as said above, to separate the evidence of mass sales from claims for lasting or literary value. There are several authors now who out-sell Tolkien on an annual basis, or who have done so in the recent past – Barbara Taylor Bradford, Tom Clancy, Catherine Cookson, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King – to offer a mere selection from the first half of the alphabet. None of them could achieve their popularity without virtues of some kind, and as Suvin implies above, critical reluctance even to look for these virtues says more about the critics than the popular authors. Just the same, the works of those listed above are not much like Tolkien’s. It is in fact hard to think of a work (except perhaps in their different ways The Silma-rillion and Finnegans Wake) written with less concern for commercial considerations than The Lord of the Rings. No market researcher in the 1950s could possibly have predicted its success. It was long, difficult, trailed with appendices, studded with quotations in unknown languages which the author did not always translate, and utterly strange. It had, indeed, to create its own market. And two further striking points about it are, first, that it did, and second, that unlike most of the works of the authors mentioned above (to whom I mean no disrespect) it has had a continued shelf-life. The Hobbit has stayed in print for more than sixty years, selling over forty million copies, the Lord of the Rings for nearly fifty years, selling over fifty million (which, since it is published usually in three-volume format, comes to close on a hundred and fifty million separate sales).

Tolkien and the fantasy genre

To take up my second argument, and to return to the point about creating a market, it would not be true to say that there was no such thing as epic fantasy before Tolkien: there was a tradition of English and Irish writers before him, such as E.R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany, and a parallel tradition also of American writers appearing in pulp-magazines such as Weird Tales and Unknown. (I discuss and exemplify these in my anthology The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, 1994). The Lord of the Rings however altered reading tastes rapidly and lastingly. Several hundred English-language fantasy novels are currently being published annually. The influence of Tolkien on them is often apparent from their titles – I note the ‘Malloreon’ sequence by David Eddings, whose first title is The Guardians of the West, with The Fellowship of the Talisman, The Halfling’s Gem and Luthien’s Quest coming from other authors. Most writers do better at concealing their literary ancestry, but the first works even of authors who have found their own highly distinctive voices, like Stephen Donaldson or Alan Garner, habitually betray deep Tolkienian influence, as is discussed at greater length below (see pp. 321-4). Terry Pratchett, whose works have now been reliable best-sellers for almost twenty years, began with what is obviously in part an affectionate parody of Tolkien (and of other fantasy writers), The Colour of Magic. Tolkien furthermore provided much of the inspiration, the personnel and the material, for early fantasy games and for role-playing games of the ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ type: the article on ‘Fantasy Games’ in John Clute and John Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy lists, among others, Battle of Helm’s Deep, Siege of Minas Tirith, and The Middle Earth Role Playing System. Spin-offs from these into computer games are still developing and multiplying. Middle-earth became a cultural phenomenon, a part of many people’s mental furniture.

Nor were these admirers, despite what Tolkien’s critics have said, simply uneducated or retarded. The division in tastes was never between low/popular and high/educated, it lay rather between generally-educated and professionally-educated. It appears that people have to be educated out of a taste for Tolkien rather than into it. Some, of course, say that that is what education is supposed to do, ‘lead out rather than put in’, to quote the familiar educationalists’ motto. Tolkien would have replied that he was satisfying a taste – the taste for fairy-tale – which is natural to us, which goes back as far as we have written records of any sort, to the Old Testament and Homer’s Odyssey, and which is found in all human societies. If our arbiters of taste insist that this taste should be suppressed, then it is they who are flying from reality. As proper literati might put it, Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret – Latin for, ‘you can chuck out nature with a pitchfork, but it’ll come back just the same’.

An author of the twentieth century

The creation, or re-creation, of a whole publishing genre is a strange result for a book written without the slightest commercial awareness; in a style which is frequently professorial; and which appeared as a first adult novel when its author was already sixty-two (an event not entirely dissimilar, one might note, to the appearance of Joyce’s Ulysses as a first and last major work when its author was forty).

Whatever one thinks of the last parallel (and there are other parallels between Joyce and Tolkien which might be drawn, see pp. 310-14 below), there can at least be no doubt that – to sum up what has been said above – The Lord of the Rings has established itself as a lasting classic, without the help and against the active hostility of the professionals of taste; and has furthermore largely created the expectations and established the conventions of a new and flourishing genre. It and its author deserve more than the routine and reflexive dismissals (or denials) which they have received. The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, have said something important, and meant something important, to a high proportion of their many millions of readers. All but the professionally incurious might well ask, what? Is it something timeless? Is it something contemporary? Is it (and it is) both at once?

This book attempts accordingly to explain Tolkien’s success and to make out the case for his importance. It follows my earlier book on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1982, revised edition 1992), but with several differences of emphasis and of understanding. The main one is that The Road to Middle-earth was to some considerable extent a work of professional piety – using piety in the old sense of respect for one’s forebears or predecessors. In it my concern was above all to set Tolkien’s work in a philological context, as outlined above, but in much greater detail. I still feel that the piety was justified, and that the point needed to be made. However, in the first place I have reluctantly to concede that not everyone takes to Gothic, or even (in extreme cases) to Old Norse. Moreover, even professional linguists accept that while one can study language ‘diachronically’, i.e. historically, across time, there is also much to be gained by studying it ‘synchronically’, i.e. as it exists at any given moment. In the same way, while I remain convinced that Tolkien cannot be properly discussed without some considerable awareness of the ancient works and the ancient world which he tried to revive (awareness which I try to promote in the following chapters), I now accept that he needs also to be looked at and interpreted within his own time, as an ‘author of the century’, the twentieth century, responding to the issues and the anxieties of that century. This latter is the way that most people read him, and it is only reasonable to try to follow suit.

Plan and scope of this book

The six main chapters which follow try accordingly not only to discuss Tolkien’s many sources of inspiration for ‘Middle-earth’, but also to show why Middle-earth has been a vital contemporary inspiration for so many readers. They are in one sense not chronological. We now know – as we did not when I wrote the first version of The Road to Middle-earth – that Tolkien spent most of his life working on the complex of legends which eventually appeared, posthumously, as The Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales, and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth. Much of this existed before the writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he turned back to it during the long composition of both works, and again after they were published. If one were tracing Tolkien’s own development as an author, it would make sense to start from the beginning, and to treat The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as the offshoots which in a way they are. However, if one is considering his impact on and his relationship to his own time, the influential works are clearly the two of the hobbit-sequence, and I accordingly begin with them.

In chapter I I consider in particular the literary function of hobbits, and of Bilbo Baggins, their representative. I argue that they are above all anachronisms, creatures of the early modern world of Tolkien’s youth drawn, like Bilbo, into the far more archaic and heroic world of dwarves and dragons, wargs and were-bears. However Tolkien, as a philologist, and also as an infantry veteran, was deeply conscious of the strong continuity between that heroic world and the modern one. Much of the vocabulary of Old English is exactly the same as that of modern English; many of its situations seem to recur. Meanwhile Robert Graves, an almost exact contemporary of Tolkien’s, remarks in his 1929 memoir Goodbye to All That that when he arrived at Oxford in 1919 his Anglo-Saxon lecturer (one wonders who it was) disparaged his own subject, and said it had no interest or relevance. Graves disagreed. He thought that:

Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting – all this came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century.

Graves’s language is deliberately anachronistic: ‘platoon’, ‘billet’, ‘staff-tent’, ‘cosh’, are all modern words with immediate World War I meanings, while promenade is a soldiers’ euphemism. ‘Thanes’ on the other hand is completely archaic. Yet Graves’s point is precisely to deny any sense of anachronism. In its way – a much more complex and extensive way – The Hobbit carries out the same exercise. It takes its readers, even child readers, into a totally unfamiliar world, but then indicates to them that it is not totally unfamiliar, that they have a birth-right in it of their own. The book operates frequently through a clash of styles – linguistic, moral, behavioural – but ends by demonstrating unity and understanding on a level deeper than style.

With Middle-earth in imaginative existence, it might have been thought relatively easy to produce the sequel which Tolkien’s publisher immediately requested. Chapter II deals with Tolkien’s problems in creating The Lord of the Rings, both of invention and of organization, problems which have become much clearer with the publication of much of his early drafts. The drafts are almost dismaying to enthusiasts, for one of the things they reveal is that the neat thematic patterns recognized by so many critics (myself included) seem always to have been afterthoughts. When he started writing Tolkien had literally no idea at all of where he was going. Yet by the end not only are there unmistakably tight patterns of cultural contrast and cultural parallel, not only is the work marked by continuing deliberate dramatic irony, its entire structure depends on a chronology which Tolkien developed with great care, and printed in his Appendix B. I argue that this is one of the major differences between The Lord of the Rings and (as far as I can tell) all its emulators. No professional or commercially-oriented author would ever have tried anything as difficult or as demanding of its readers’ attention. Yet Tolkien, both in overall organization and in the organization of major sections like the chapter ‘The Council of Elrond’, successfully presented an immensely complex pattern of narrative ‘interlace’ – which works, like the best narrative strategies, even on those unconscious of it, but which nevertheless deserves proper appreciation.

Chapters III and IV take up the two most immediately contemporary themes in The Lord of the Rings – evil, and myth. As was again remarked above, it is possible to see Tolkien as one of a group of ‘traumatized authors’, all of them extremely influential (they mostly rank high in polls like Waterstone’s), all of them tending to write fantasy or fable. The group includes, besides the names mentioned on p. viii (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut), others such as Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, and Joseph Heller. Their experiences include being shot (Orwell and Lewis were both all but fatally wounded on the battlefield), and being bombed (Vonnegut was actually in Dresden the night it was destroyed). Ursula Le Guin, though without similarly direct experience of violence, is the daughter of Theodora Kroeber, who wrote three different accounts of ‘Ishi’, the last survivor of the eventually total elimination of the Yahi Indians of California. Most of these authors, then, had close or even direct first-hand experience of some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, horrors which did not and could not exist before it: the Somme, Guernica, Belsen, Dresden, industrialized warfare, genocide.

Their very different but related experiences left all of them, one may say, with an underlying problem. They were bone-deep convinced that they had come into contact with something irrevocably evil. They also – like Graves in the quotation above, but far more seriously – felt that the explanations for this which they were given by the official organs of their culture were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself. Orwell returned from Spain to find his own personal experience, including being shot, dismissed as a non-event, a political aberration. Vonnegut spent twenty years wondering how he could write about the central event of his life, the destruction of Dresden, in a way that could possibly be appreciated, while dealing with people who preferred to deny or ignore it. By contrast the dominant moral philosophers of these authors’ time and culture included people like Bertrand Russell (an author, like Tolkien, published by Stanley Unwin, and according to his 1967 festschrift, the ‘philosopher of the century’). But what could Russell tell Lewis, say, about what he had experienced in Flanders? In World War I Russell was a pacifist: an honourable stance, but for ‘traumatized authors’ not a helpful one, and as Russell came painfully to realize at the outbreak of World War II, in some circumstances an untenable one. One of the aspects of the trauma for the authors I have mentioned was that when it came to finding explanations, they were on their own.

All of them responded with highly individual images, and theories, of evil. I mention here only Le Guin’s ‘The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas’ (a civilization which rests on the torture of an idiot child); Orwell’s interrogator-figure O’Brien (the future as a boot stamping on a human face, for ever); White’s Book of Merlyn (humanity redefined not as homo sapiens but as homo ferox). Obviously the list could be extended. In Tolkien’s case I see his central image of evil as that of the ‘wraith’, an old word, but one which has been given terrible new force. Round this ambiguous image there revolves the concept of the Ring, which itself embodies two distinct and competing theses about the nature of evil, the one officially accepted (but hard to credit), the other threateningly heretical (but all too easy, in modern circumstances, to accept). Tolkien not only poses questions about evil, he also provides answers and solutions – one of the things which has made him unpopular with the professionally gloomy or fashionably nihilist. Nevertheless, although his concern and the concern of the authors I mention is not with the private and the personal (the themes of the ‘modernist’ novel), but with the public and the political, it should be obvious that to all but the sheltered classes of this century, the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political. It is those who turn away from that thought, who prefer to remain in what Graves called the ‘drawing-room’ areas of literary tradition, who are in ‘flight from reality’.

Chapter IV extends the discussion of evil to consideration, first, of the evident connections between The Lord of the Rings and modern history (Tolkien denied ‘allegory’ but conceded ‘applicability’); and second, of the attempt to reach out beyond contemporary relevance and beyond archaism to something which governs both – timelessness, ‘the mythic dimension’, and Tolkien’s own idiosyncratic but well-informed view of literary tradition. This chapter also takes up one of the major apparent paradoxes of The Lord of the Rings. It was written, we know, by a devout and believing Christian, and has been seen by many as a deeply religious work. Yet it contains almost no direct religious reference at all. Returning to the theme taken up in chapter I, I argue that The Lord of the Rings can be taken in itself as a myth, in the sense of a work of mediation, reconciling what appear to be incompatibles: heathen and Christian, escapism and reality, immediate victory and lasting defeat, lasting defeat and ultimate victory.

The last two chapters set Tolkien’s two major works in the context of his other continuing literary activities, both those published and. those unpublished in his own lifetime. A major aim of chapter V is to provide a guide to reading the published Silmarillion, a work which is quite outside any modern reading or writing conventions, but which has never received the credit normally extended to the ‘experimental’. However, it considers also the growth and development of the (non-italicized) ‘Silmarillion’, by which I mean the many parts of the overall legendarium eventually published in the twelve-volume sequence, The History of Middle-earth. Two dominant ideas in this chapter are, first, Tolkien’s own complex notion of literary ‘depth’, by which a work – like Lord Macaulay’s famous Lays of Ancient Rome – gains added charm from having a sense behind it of an older history now lost, as well as of a later and less truthful history now more familiar; and second, the deep sadness which infuses all ‘Silmarillion’ versions, and which may be seen with hindsight to underlie even the cheerful hobbits and their epic, The Lord of the Rings.

Chapter VI takes up some of the reasons for this sadness, and considers what some of Tolkien’s minor works tell us (and for all his dislike of biography, were intended to tell us) about his inner life. A feature of this chapter is the claim that at least two of his minor published works, ‘Leaf by Niggle’ and Smith of Wootton Major, are in their different ways ‘autobiographical allegories’. The case may seem a hard one to make, since Tolkien’s expressed disapproval of allegories is well-known. I hope nevertheless to have made it, even within Tolkien’s own deliberately narrow definition of allegory. My view is that he felt allegory had its place, and its rules, and that his scorn was reserved for those who insisted on using it and detecting it outside that place. In between my readings of those two works, one early, one late, I consider the small corpus of poems which Tolkien published, and sometimes republished, in his own lifetime, relating them in some cases to his personal myth of ‘the Lost Road’, expressed in two separate abortive attempts to write another major fiction. Besides The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s only other entirely successful narrative published in his own lifetime was the unusually light-hearted novella Farmer Giles of Ham. I attempt further to fit this, along with two other poetic narratives, into Tolkien’s again idiosyncratic but well-informed view of literary history.

In the Afterword, finally, I take up once more the criticisms of Tolkien which underlie the outrage mentioned at the start of this Foreword. It is to a large extent a guessing-game. Very few of Tolkien’s critics (there are some honourable exceptions) have been prepared to put their dislike into an organized shape which can be debated; one of the most vehement indeed confessed to me, in private, in the lift taking us out of BBC House after a radio debate, that he had never actually read The Lord of the Rings which he had just been attacking. I find myself accordingly sometimes making the case against so that I can make the case for, not an ideal procedure. Still, the repeatedly expressed dislike of an influential and easily-identifiable section of the literary world is part of the phenomenon. Very probably the reason for the dislike has a good deal to do with the reasons for the success. Tolkien has challenged the very authority of the literati, and this is never forgiven.

The obverse of this exercise is to look in slightly more detail at Tolkien’s emulators. We may not be sure exactly what people have liked in Tolkien’s work, but we can see what writers have tried to imitate, as also what they have shied away from. Some of them, of course, may have superseded him, used his work only as a starting-point for quite different directions, even in some respects outdone him. It could be said that this latter is one of the best things that can happen to an innovative writer: Tolkien indeed wrote (see Letters, p. 145) that he had hoped once that his story-cycles would ‘yet leave scope for other minds and hands’. He then immediately and self-deprecatingly dismissed his hope as ‘Absurd’ (this was in 1951, The Lord of the Rings still unpublished).

However, similar results have been achieved by other philologist-creators. Lönnrot’s Kalevala is now viewed with suspicion by scholars, because Lönnrot, like Walter Scott with the Border Ballads, did not just collect and transcribe, but wrote, rewrote and interpolated, so that you cannot tell what is by him and what is ‘authentic’. Just the same, the date of publication of the Kalevala remains a national holiday in Finland, and the work has become a cornerstone of national culture. Very similar accusations of interference and meddling have been made about the Grimms and their Fairy-Tales; but for two centuries the tales have enriched not just national but international culture, and delighted hundreds of millions of child and adult readers. Nikolai Grundtvig, the Dane, insisted on the concept of levende ord, ‘the living word’. It is not enough for the philologist, the ‘word-lover’, to be scholarly. The scholar also has to transmit his results into the life and speech and imagination of the greater world.

In 1951 Tolkien, like Théoden King when we first meet him, can have had little hope of such success. By his death-day, however, he could well have said that, like Théoden, when he went to join his (philological) fathers, ‘even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed’. Tolkien left a legacy as rich as any of his predecessors’.