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

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.