The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

AFTERWORD

This book’s main purpose has been to provide the material for a more thorough and appreciative reading of Tolkien. Closely associated with that, however, has been a desire to broaden the scope of criticism. Several writers have suggested recently that the toolkit of the professional critic at this time is too small: it does not work at all on whole genres of fiction (especially fantasy and science fiction, but including also the bulk of ‘entertainment’ fiction, i.e. what people most commonly read). Furthermore it has a strong tendency to falsify much of what it does attempt to explain by assimilating it, often unconsciously, to more acceptable models.¹ Tolkien may be a peripheral writer for the theory of fiction. However it seems time to pay more attention to the peripheries, and less to the well-trodden centre. If that extroversion were to encourage a greater interest in pre-novelistic fiction and in ‘philology’ as a whole, I am sure that even ‘literature’, which within the British and American university systems has rejected ‘language’ for so long, would be the gainer.

There are still several reasons for thinking that happy issue unlikely, all of which have become clearer and clearer to me during the writing and rewriting of this book. For one thing, philology, in the sense that Tolkien meant it, has continued to lose its battle for survival in the universities of the English-speaking world. Like Galadriel, Tolkien spent his professional life fighting a ‘long defeat’, the stages of which one could follow by comparing, for instance, his hopeful letter of application for the Oxford Chair in 1925 (Letters, pp. 12–13) with his occasionally angry ‘Valedictory Address’ on retirement in 1959 (Essays, pp. 224–40, and see below). The ‘long defeat’ has only continued since his death. There is a violent and welcome irony, of course, in the fact that, like a vampire, philology has sprung from its staked-out grave and into a wider world full of complaisant victims, entirely as a result of Tolkien’s fiction. However, as one can see all too clearly from the first pages of this work and the whole ‘Foreword’ to my 2001 book Author of the Century, this success has not inspired as much rethinking in the critical consensus as one might have hoped, for several reasons.

One is that, if you read very much at all of what has been written on Tolkien, you cannot help concluding that there is an enormous ‘culture-gap’ between him and his critics, which they cannot bridge and usually have not noticed. The gap often yawns most widely not between Tolkien and his detractors, but between him and his admirers, at least when these happen to be professors of English literature: in some ways it looks like a gap not only of culture but also of temperament. Reference has been made above to two opposing human urges: one towards comprehension of wholes and classification of data under principles and categories, the other towards a grasp of single items, careless of their context or meaning as long as they are there to be fully seen, explored, felt, tasted. The distinction aimed at is the famous one of William James between ‘tender-mindedness’ (interest in abstract schemes) and ‘tough-mindedness’ (interest in concrete particulars).² In this Jamesian sense Tolkien was almost excessively ‘tough-minded’: his temperament, his philological training, and, it may be, something in the ‘pragmatic’ Anglo-Saxon tradition, all drove him to work out from single words, or cruxes, or kernels, or nuggets. There is a perfect example of this ‘tough-mindedness’ –though it is not tough in any aggressive sense at all – in Letters no. 312, which Tolkien wrote in 1969. This ponders mutation in flowers, and remarks that just occasionally one can see a plant which proves the taxonomies of scientists by not fitting into them, by being (he mentions a particular example) ‘foxglove’ and ‘figwort’ at once. He goes on to trace the history of a patch of garden daisies, in his flower-bed, then on the lawn, finally on a patch of bonfire ash. The same seed, he observes, came up different every time; and it was difference that intrigued and delighted him, not similarity.

Many of Tolkien’s professional admirers do not write like that at all, seeming to be ‘tender-minded’ excessively and without qualification. The real horror for Tolkien would probably have come when he realised that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse, and genuinely thought the difference didn’t matter. If he got past that, he would have discovered writers contentedly using those cribs and ‘substitutes for proper food’ he had excoriated in his 1940 ‘Preface’, tracing his thoughts through flattening, second-hand, language-less and usually wildly incorrect ‘Encyclopaedias of Mythology’. The end-product of book after book, meanwhile, is a scheme: The Lord of the Rings reduced to ‘archetypes’, related to solemn trudging plots of ‘departure and return’, ‘initiation, donor and trial’, hutching out banalities like ‘for every good … there is a corresponding evil’. ‘Every good’, Tolkien would no doubt have replied, his mind already turning to a list, ‘maybe to beer there is alcoholism and to pipeweed lung cancer. But what about hot baths? starlight seen in a wood? the Eucharist? a round of hot buttered scones?’ As for the other theses, he observed of W. P. Ker (‘Monsters’, p. 250) that if you read enough plot-summaries everything got to seem similar; but this told you nothing about any particular work. The critical remark for which Tolkien would have had least sympathy is finally Anne C. Petty’s ‘the mythogenetic zone for our times is the individual heart and psyche’. ‘Blast our times!’ (I can imagine Tolkien replying), ‘and if that sentence means we should all try to get in touch with our insides isn’t it obvious myths need to come from outside?’ As for ‘mythogenetic zone’, it sounds like Saruman: vague beneath a claim to precision.³

‘Tough-minded’ literature is as legitimate as ‘tender-minded’, and students of literature ought to have better ways of dealing with it. But even those who appreciate this quality, or say they do, have found Tolkien difficult. I cannot forbear from quoting once more the statement of Professor Mark Roberts that The Lord of the Rings ‘is not moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être’. Had Professor Roberts searched high and low for a work in which world-view and narrative were identical, he could not have found a clearer example! But Tolkien’s detractors repeatedly seem blind to exactly those qualities in him which they had always said they were looking for. Thus Philip Toynbee – whose disobliging remarks on Tolkien were quoted at the start of this study – had preceded them only a little before (Observer, 23 April 1961) by a definition of ‘the Good Writer’. ‘The Good Writer’, he declared, is a private and lonely creature who takes no heed of his public. He can write about anything, even ‘incestuous dukes in Tierra del Fuego’, and make it relevant. He ‘creates an artifact which satisfies him’ and ‘can do no other’, he takes ‘certain perceptions to what would normally be regarded as excess’, he ‘knows much more about certain things than other people do’, and when his work appears it will as a result be ‘shocking and amazing … unexpected by the public mind. It is for the public to adjust’. This self-motivated and daemon-driven perfectionist sounds exactly like Tolkien – ‘as easy to influence as a bandersnatch’, said Lewis. And when one adds to it all Mr Toynbee’s sine qua non, number 1 on his list of qualities, the assertion that ‘the Good Writer is not directly concerned with communication, but with a personal struggle against the intractable medium of modern English’ (my italics), all one can say is that it is a mystery how the critic failed to match such a clear blueprint to such a clear example in the flesh! ‘It is for the public to adjust.’ But not too far. Incestuous dukes in Tierra del Fuego, evidently, were much more acceptable as centrally humane than Sam Gamgee, or Théoden King, or Barad-dûr. Foreign, sexy, and above all gently snobbish: that was the kind of Good Writing the critical profession wanted, and if it shocked ‘the public mind’, so much the better. Shocking the critical mind, however, was definitely not acceptable.

It was no doubt partly Tolkien’s generation which acted as a bar. Not that he was so much older than (the late) Mr Toynbee; rather that, unlike many men of his age, he had not been alienated even by the Great War from the traditions in which he had been brought up. Unlike Robert Graves, his near-contemporary and fellow-Fusilier, he never said ‘Goodbye to All That’. As a result his elementary decencies – over patriotism, over euphemism, perhaps especially over sex and marriage – soon become an object of satire, provoking automatic derision from much of the literary world and preventing a fair reading. As I remark in Author, pp. 316–7, the English literary world from the 1920s on was dominated by the group labelled by Martin Green as the Sonnenkinder, the circle of Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly, frivolous, upper class, often Etonians, often Communists – both Toynbee and the TLS reviewer Alfred Duggan mentioned at the start of this work were members of the circle, and descendants of the circle continue to be influential as editors and reviewers to this day. Their dandyism and romantic xenophilia are reflected exactly by Toynbee’s longing for stories of delicious incest in far-off Tierra del Fuego. The thought stirs, naturally, that if Tolkien got through to so many people who would find no ‘relevance’ in ‘incestuous dukes’ at all, then possibly the preoccupation with licence and self-gratification which that example suggests is not a universal instinct at all, in fact just as culturally determined as Tolkien’s Victorian pieties, if not more so. One of Tolkien’s correspondents told him she had found in The Lord of the Rings ‘a sanity and sanctity’, and he prized the compliment perhaps more than any – though he replied that the ‘sanctity’ was not his, while ‘of his own sanity no man may securely judge’ (Letters, p. 413). He can judge others’ sanity more fairly, though, and Tolkien thought (with good reason) that his reviewers’ nausea and contempt for what he had done was so violent as to be proof of an unnatural one-sidedness: ‘Lembas – dust and ashes, we don’t eat that’.

Such ideological differences are even harder to bridge than the gap between ‘tough’ and ‘tender’ minds. There may be something more hopeful, though, in Mr Toynbee’s remarks about ‘modern English’, that ‘intractable medium’ against which ‘the Good Writer’ is supposed to struggle. Finding English ‘intractable’ is certainly a common opinion, its locus classicus in recent times probably the passage from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1944) about:

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling …⁴

With this one might compare Edmund Wilson’s opinion in Axel’s Castle (op. cit., p. 245) that the meaning of words depends on ‘a web of associations as intricate and in the last analysis as mysterious as our minds and bodies themselves’, while using words inevitably involves ‘pouring them full of suggestion by our inflections, our pauses, our tones’. Wholly new, shabby equipment, mystery, suggestion, empty words being topped up by individual willpower: what these passages share is a conviction that since language is very complicated it is beyond the reach of reason. Inflections are private and personal; what one person means can never be fully understood by another; as in the paradox of ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’, you can only get closer and closer to what you want to say, but never be exactly there.

I do not think Tolkien would have agreed with this. He knew better than Edmund Wilson how hard words were to trace, but he also knew there were techniques for doing so; at the foundation of his art there was the perception of Grimm and Verner and de Saussure and all the other old philologists, that in matters of phonology at least people were strictly controlled by laws of which they were not conscious. T. S. Eliot might not know why he said ‘whole’, ‘heal’, ‘old’, ‘elder’, but he did, and there was a reason for it which could be rendered (see above). Semantic associations, too, could be traced, used, and communicated: see ‘glamour’, spell’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘panache’, ‘worship’, ‘luck’, ‘doom’, and all the rest.⁵ Where ‘lit.’ quailed before English or felt discontented with it, in other words, ‘lang.’ could at least feel at home. Tolkien did not think his equipment was ‘shabby’, nor the Tree of Language leafless. As for modern English being ‘intractable’, that was a failure of education which had left its products historically deaf, deafer even than those uncorrupted ears which might be able to say – not knowing why – ‘Garstang sounds northern’ or ‘Bree-hill and Chetwood have the same sort of style’. All one can say is that this failure at least could be corrected. If there were a will, there would be a way.⁶

The problem remains ‘misology’, hatred of words, the opposite of philology. Tolkien used ‘misology’ and gave it this sense – it is in the OED under other senses – in his ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’: a technical piece, and addressed to a limited audience, but one which summed up much of his career experience. In 1959 he was looking back over thirty-nine years as a university teacher, all of it marked by the feuding between ‘lang.’ and ‘lit.’ which he had hoped to resolve, and his mood was not without a certain bitterness. He did not mind ‘misologists’ being dull or ignorant, he said, but he did feel:

a grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm, the measure of what is good; 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. (Essays, p. 225)

Philology, in short, was a natural state; but where the Powers That Be were ‘misologists’, putting forward the views of Eliot or Toynbee or Wilson with the authority and prestige of ‘modern literature’ behind them, nature could be deformed. From this both sides lost, falling into a state Tolkien labelled bluntly as ‘apartheid’. All he could do was go outside ‘proper channels’ and try to reach an unspoilt audience reading just to suit itself.

He did that successfully; his success goes far to proving his point about the naturalness of philology and the appeal of names, words and linguistic ‘styles’; and in the wider sense of philology as that branch of learning which ‘presented to lovers of poetry and history fragments of a noble past that without it would have remained for ever dead and dark’ (Essays, p. 235), he showed that its appeal too was not confined to antiquity. I do not see how Tolkien can be denied the tribute of having enlarged his readers’ apprehensions (of language), or their human sympathies (with the disciplined, or the heroic, or the addicted, or the self-sacrificing). But most of all I think his utility for the lover of literature lies in the way he showed creativity arising from the ramifications of words: unpredictable certainly, but not chaotic or senseless, and carrying within themselves very strong suggestions of ‘the reality of history’ and ‘the reality of human nature’, and how people react to their world. Fawler, *saru-man, fallow, Quickbeam: in each of these a word created a concept, and the concept helped to generate its own story.⁷ In The Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes’s 1927 study of Coleridge and ‘the ways of the imagination’ (a book of a kind we need only one of, said T. S. Eliot stuffily), Lowes wrote that the ‘hooks and eyes’ of the memory ‘will lead us to the very alembic of the creative energy’.⁸ If he was wrong it was because he thought too passively. Words, ancient words, do not have to be hooked together to make something. They have their own energy and struggle towards their own connections. Observing this impulse and co-operating with it is as good a guide for the artist as turning within oneself to the inarticulate.