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I've recently discovered this essay, and I thought it captured a unique Christian take on fantasy. This is only a small portion of the essay, please follow the links to read the entire thing. Of a fair evening in the mythical but true world of Middle Earth, towards the end of the Third Age, a young hobbit named Frodo is holding private counsel with Galadriel. She is the queen and lady of Lothlórien, the most secret and beautiful reserve of the Elves. Frodo has been gazing into her Mirror, a shallow basin of silver filled with water from the stream, and there he has seen clouded predictions of the future, terrifying in their uncertainty. But these uncertainties are followed by an absolute certainty, and an unwelcome one at that. For Frodo, as the bearer of the Ring, the bewitching and irresistible work of the evil Sauron, recognizes on the finger of the Lady Galadriel another Ring—sister to his own, Nenya by name, but not evil. It is one of the three Rings belonging to the Elves, the source of their safety and peace, skill and elegance; yet these Rings are beholden to the one Ring, Frodo’s Ring. Therein lies the sad certainty. “Do you not see now,” Galadriel says to Frodo when he has espied the lady’s Ring, hidden from the sight of others, “wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away.” Already in this the third of six volumes in The Lord of the Rings—J. R. R. Tolkien’s much–acclaimed fantasy that twice has been proclaimed the book of the century (admittedly by a self–selecting group of people, Waterstone patrons in Great Britain and Amazon.com users)—the end is near. The end of the Ring bodes well for the future of Middle Earth, unquestionably: the power to conduct unchecked devastation of lands and peoples in pursuit of wicked goals will forever be lost. Sauron, the lidless Eye, will be no better off than an angry orc on an empty stomach. There is no chance that he, or any equal to him, will rise again; evil is no longer concentrated in one deadly place in the land of Mordor. And yet, just as evil is no longer concentrated, good is forced into diffusion as well. When the final battle has been fought and the Ring dissolves into the fires of Mount Doom, the Elves will pack their remaining treasures and leave in necessary exile from their homes, Lothlórien and Rivendell and all the rest, bastions of the lovely and the right and the kind. With them will go Gandalf, the wizard, whose skills are no longer required as the Fourth Age dawns. So will Bilbo and Frodo, hobbits indelibly marked by the enchantments of the Ring. Their hard–won wisdom belongs to a world governed by magic, but the fulcrum of power in Middle Earth is shifting. It is no longer in the moral certainties and magical assurances of ages past. Now it is in the morally ambiguous governance of men, who shortly will take center stage in the unfolding drama of the planet. The Elves leave for the Grey Havens of their own volition, but the hobbits will be marginalized, the dwarves swallowed up by the earth, and even Tom Bombadil will be seen no more. For a tale of heroism and virtue, The Lord of the Rings is deeply sad. With good reason: all the struggles of the story, all the adventures in a much–loved world, build up to its own abolition. All the same, the ending is inevitable. Magic is too much to maintain. In a world of magic, this Ring—any Ring—is a possibility; an ever–present possibility, a continuing threat and temptation to all its inhabitants, whether bloodthirsty Nazgûl or retiring, domestic hobbits. The Ring is an addiction, a demon, a torment, a granter of favors, a precious. It will not go away on its own. The world cannot sustain it; the imagination cannot either. And so the magic must come to an end. The following articles are reviews of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy which appeared in the NY Times when Tolkien's books were first released. It is hard to imagine a time before Tolkien. Hobbits in Hollywood is one author's response to the idea that Tolkien is the "author of the century."
This review first appeared in The New York Times on October 31, 1954 By W. H. AUDENSeventeen years ago there appeared, without any fanfare, a book called "The Hobbit" which, in my opinion, is one of the best children's stories of this century. In "The Fellowship of the Ring," which is the first volume of a trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien continues the imaginative history of the imaginary world to which he introduced us in his earlier book but in a manner suited to adults, to those, that is, between the ages of 12 and 70. For anyone who likes the genre to which it belongs, the Heroic Quest, I cannot imagine a more wonderful Christmas present. All Quests are concerned with some numinous Object, the Waters of Life, the Grail, buried treasure etc.; normally this is a good Object which it is the Hero's task to find or to rescue from the Enemy, but the Ring of Mr. Tolkien's story was made by the Enemy and is so dangerous that even the good cannot use it without being corrupted. The Enemy believed that it had been lost forever, but he has just discovered that it has come providentially into the hands of the Hero and is devoting all his demonic powers to its recovery, which would give him the lordship of the world. The only way to make sure of his defeat is to destroy the Ring, but this can only be done in one way and in one place which lies in the heart of the country; the task of the Hero, therefore, is to get the Ring to the place of its unmaking without getting caught. The hero, Frodo Baggins, belongs to a race of beings called hobbits, who may be only three feet high; have hairy feet and prefer to live in underground houses, but in their thinking and sensibility resemble very closely those Arcadian rustics who inhabit so many British detective stories. I think some readers may find the opening chapter a little shy-making, nut they must not let themselves be put off, for, once the story gets moving, this initial archness disappears. For over a thousand years the hobbits have been living a peaceful existence in a fertile district called the Shire, incurious about the world outside. Actually, the latter is rather sinister; towns have fallen to ruins, roads into disrepair, fertile fields have returned to wilderness, wild beasts and evil beings on the prowl, and travel is difficult and dangerous. In addition to the Hobbits, there are Elves who are wise and good, Dwarves who are skillful and good on the whole, and Men, some warriors, some wizards, who are good or bad. The present incarnation of the Enemy is Sauron, Lord of Barad-Dur, the Dark Tower in the Land of Mordor. Assisting him are the Orcs, wolves and other horrid creatures and, of course, such men as his power attracts or overawes. Landscape, climate and atmosphere are northern, reminiscent of the Icelandic sagas. The first thing that one asks is that the adventure should be various and exciting; in this respect Mr. Tolkien's invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, "The Fellowship of the Ring" is at least as good as "The Thirty-Nine Steps." Of any imaginary world the reader demands that it seem real, and the standard of realism demanded today is much stricter than in the time, say, of Malory. Mr. Tolkien is fortunate in possessing an amazing gift for naming and a wonderfully exact eye for description; by the time one has finished his book one knows the histories of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and the landscape they inhabit as well as one knows one's own childhood. Lastly, if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than "The Fellowship of the Ring." Mr. Auden's most recent poetical work is "Nones." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company This review first appeared in The New York Times on May 1, 1955 Shadowy World of
Men and Hobbits
By DONALD BARRIn 1937 J. R. R. Tolkien wrote "The Hobbit," intended for a children's book but touched here and there with terrors which had the darker involvements of myth, and at times even with that "clang and groan of great iron" which Chesterton heard in the medieval chansons de geste. Now, in a trilogy called "The Lord of the Rings," Mr. Tolkien continues somewhat differently his story of the third age of Middle Earth, a world inhabited by wizards, men, hobbits (courteous little oddities, like English householders three feet high with long hairy feet), elves and dwarves; and by the gorging orcs and blind Black Riders and their lord. It is a scrubbed morning world, and a ringing nightmare world. It seems, as any very distant age does, to be especially sunlit, and to be shadowed by perils very fundamental, of a peculiarly uncompounded darkness. "The Two Towers" is the second part. The Dark Lord of Mordor has begun his assault on the sanity and grace of the world. The Fellowship of the Ring, the tiny band on whom rests all the hope of the resistance, is scattered; the hobbit Frodo plunges toward the frontiers of Mordor itself, carrying the fatal Ring that must be unmade in the fires of the Enemy domain. This, whatever that summary may sound like, is not for children; nor is it for whimsy-lovers and Alice quoters. Neither is it a dead moral apparatus festooned with poesy, like "The Faerie Queen." It is an extraordinary work-pure excitement, unencumbered narrative, moral warmth, barefaced rejoicing in beauty, but excitement most of all; yet a serious and scrupulous fiction, nothing cozy, no little visits to one's childhood. This work is much admired by certain critics who have always practiced a highly conscious and proud intellectualism. Mr. Tolkien's fantasy is not metaphysical like E. R. Eddison's, nor theological like George MacDonald's; his appeal to the intellectuals is therefore interesting. After the first World War serious fiction tended toward literary Platonism or Berkeleyism. With a kind of brilliant tedium (called "sensitivity") novels refined on mental states. The authors assumed that the thought was the real act, of which the action was only a dubious copy. Plots gave way to insights. The clashing of multifarious big rhetorics, which had made Dickens and Scott, was replaced by the inner voice, very small but not still. Never had the distance between the popular appetite and serious art been so great as it then inevitably became. Many people, of what we might call the middle taste, turned to detective stories, which at least had plot; recently they have been reading science fiction, which has strong action. That "The Lord of the Rings" should appeal to readers of the most austere tastes suggests that they too now long for the old, forthright, virile kind of narrative. Mr. Tolkien is a distinguished British philologist, and the language of his narrative reminds us that a philologist is a man who loves language. His names are brilliantly appropriate; the tongues he has devised for the elves and orcs perfectly express, just by their rhythms and phonemic systems, the natures of these races; his style is full of joy, the joy that follows the making of a perfect gesture. But more than this, the author has had intimate access to an epic tradition stretching back and back and disappearing in the mists of Germanic history, so that his story has a kind of echoing depth behind it, wherein we hear Snorri Sturluson and Beowulf, the sagas and the Nibelungenlied, but civilized by the gentler genius of modern England. Mr. Barr teaches English at Columbia University. Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company This review first appeared in The New York Times on October 31, 1954 At the End of the
Quest, Victory
By W. H. AUDENIn "The Return of the King," Frodo Baggins fulfills his Quest, the realm of Sauron is ended forever, the Third Age is over and J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" complete. I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect. A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien's forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light "escapist" reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking. The difficulty in presenting a complete picture of reality lies in the gulf between the subjectively real, a man's experience of his own existence, and the objectively real, his experience of the lives of others and the world about him. Life, as I experience it in my own person, is primarily a continuous succession of choices between alternatives, made for a short-term or long-term purpose; the actions I take, that is to say, are less significant to me than the conflicts of motives, temptations, doubts in which they originate. Further, my subjective experience of time is not of a cyclical motion outside myself but of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made by my decisions. For objectifying this experience, the natural image is that of a journey with a purpose, beset by dangerous hazards and obstacles, some merely difficult, others actively hostile. But when I observe my fellow-men, such an image seems false. I can see, for example, that only the rich and those on vacation can take journeys; most men, most of the time must work in one place. I cannot observe them making choices, only the actions they take and, if I know someone well, I can usually predict correctly how he will act in a given situation. I observe, all too often, men in conflict with each other, wars and hatreds, but seldom, if ever, a clear-cut issue between Good on the one side and Evil on the other, though I also observe that both sides usually describe it as such. If then, I try to describe what I see as if I were an impersonal camera, I shall produce not a Quest, but a "naturalistic" document. Both extremes, of course, falsify life. There are medieval Quests which deserve the criticism made by Erich Auerbach in his book "Mimesis": "The world of knightly proving is a world of adventure. It not only contains a practically uninterrupted series of adventures; more specifically, it contains nothing but the requisites of adventure... Except feats of arms and love, nothing occurs in the courtly world-and even these two are of a special sort: they are not occurrences or emotions which can be absent for a time; they are permanently connected with the person of the perfect knight, they are part of his definition, so that he cannot for one moment be without adventure in arms nor for one moment without amorous entanglement... His exploits are feats of arms, not 'war,' for they are feats accomplished at random which do not fit into any politically purposive pattern." And there are contemporary "thrillers" in which the identification of hero and villain with contemporary politics is depressingly obvious. On the other hand, there are naturalistic novels in which the characters are the mere puppets of Fate, or rather, of the author who, from some mysterious point of freedom, contemplates the workings of Fate. If, as I believe, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded more completely than any previous writer in this genre in using the traditional properties of the Quest, the heroic journey, the Numinous Object, the conflict between Good and Evil while at the same time satisfying our sense of historical and social reality, it should be possible to show how he has succeeded. To begin with, no previous writer has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail. By the time the reader has finished the trilogy, including the appendices to this last volume, he knows as much about Tolkien's Middle Earth, its landscape, its fauna and flora, its peoples, their languages, their history, their cultural habits, as, outside his special field, he knows about the actual world. Mr. Tolkien's world may not be the same as our own: it includes, for example, elves, beings who know good and evil but have not fallen, and, though not physically indestructible, do not suffer natural death. It is afflicted by Sauron, an incarnate of absolute evil, and creatures like Shelob, the monster spider, or the orcs who are corrupt past hope of redemption. But it is a world of intelligible law, not mere wish; the reader's sense of the credible is never violated. Even the One Ring, the absolute physical and psychological weapon which must corrupt any who dares to use it, is a perfectly plausible hypothesis from which the political duty to destroy it which motivates Frodo's quest logically follows. To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the good side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our historical experience tells us that physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. At the same time most of us believe that the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good. The battles in the Apocalypse and "Paradise Lost," for example, are hard to stomach because of the conjunction of two incompatible notions of Deity, of a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his love and of a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand. Mr. Tolkien is not as great a writer as Milton, but in this matter he has succeeded where Milton failed. As readers of the preceding volumes will remember, the situation n the War of the Ring is as follows: Chance, or Providence, has put the Ring in the hands of the representatives of Good, Elrond, Gandalf, Aragorn. By using it they could destroy Sauron, the incarnation of evil, but at the cost of becoming his successor. If Sauron recovers the Ring, his victory will be immediate and complete, but even without it his power is greater than any his enemies can bring against him, so that, unless Frodo succeeds in destroying the Ring, Sauron must win. Evil, that is, has every advantage but one-it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil-hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom. Further, his worship of power is accompanied, as it must be, by anger and a lust for cruelty: learning of Saruman's attempt to steal the Ring for himself, Sauron is so preoccupied with wrath that for two crucial days he pays no attention to a report of spies on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, and when Pippin is foolish enough to look in the palantir of Orthanc, Sauron could have learned all about the Quest. His wish to capture Pippin and torture the truth from him makes him miss his precious opportunity. The demands made on the writer's powers in an epic as long as "The Lord of the Rings" are enormous and increase as the tale proceeds-the battles have to get more spectacular, the situations more critical, the adventures more thrilling-but I can only say that Mr. Tolkien has proved equal to them. From the appendices readers will get tantalizing glimpses of the First and Second Ages. The legends of these are, I understand, already written and I hope that, as soon as the publishers have seen "The Lord of the Rings" into a paper-back edition, they will not keep Mr. Tolkien's growing army of fans waiting too long. Mr. Auden is the author of "Nones" and "The Shield of Achilles" among other volumes of verse. Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company Hobbits in Hollywood (The opinions of this author
are not necessarily shared by webmeister.) Tolkien wasn't just a
scholar of dead languages; he was possessed by them.
By JUDITH SHULEVITZIf ever you need an image to illustrate the phrase ''victim of one's own success,'' try this: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the tweediest and most persnickety of Oxford philologists, a translator and annotator of Old English, Old Norse and Welsh poetry, being forced to sit through a screening of the soon-to-be-released movie version of ''The Lord of the Rings.'' Imagine: A teenage actor playing Frodo Baggins, a hobbit 50 years old! New Zealand as a location for Middle Earth, whose geography was explicitly modeled on the hills and forests of Tolkien's beloved England! Tolkien, besides being a patriot, was a conservative Roman Catholic who never quite approved of his fans -- many of them American hippies, at least in his day -- let alone the industry of ancillary products that mushroomed around his work. He once despairingly described his own following as a ''deplorable cultus.'' Tolkien's deplorable cultus is now woven so deeply into mass culture that you can hardly imagine what life looked like before ''The Hobbit'' and the ''Lord of the Rings'' trilogy became four of the most popular books of the 20th century. Go into any bookstore; the extensive fantasy section you'll find there is a direct result of Tolkien's works having become a staple of early adolescence. So are the runic typefaces, the paperbacks festooned with magicians and omens of doom and the Welsh-sounding titles, all of which can be traced back in one way or another to Tolkien. His wizards and dwarfs and dark forces have as firm a grip on our imaginations as the stock characters of commedia dell'arte or vaudeville once did. The roles we play in Dungeons & Dragons are based on Tolkien heroes and villains. The Harry Potter juggernaut is inconceivable without Tolkien. J. K. Rowling's evil narcissist, Lord Voldemort, is a descendant of Tolkien's prideful Sauron; her uncanniest characters, the dementors -- guards who terrorize prisoners by feeding off their happy thoughts, leaving them prey to their grimmest imaginings -- are close cousins of Tolkien's Black Riders, ominous wraiths who prevail over their victims by inducing in them paralyzing fear. Isn't influence like this a sign of greatness? T. A. Shippey thinks it is. Shippey is a Tolkienist who is also a professor of Old English philology and literature, and once taught at Oxford alongside Tolkien. In his book scheduled to be published next month, ''J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century'' (the subtitle is not ironic), Shippey offers up a bouquet of explanations for his subject's enduring popularity. They range from what you could call the theopolitical -- that Tolkien's Christian-inspired views of good and evil are relevant to a world still reeling from Hitler and Stalin -- to the allegorical, in which Frodo is featured as a savior not unlike Christ. Shippey's more persuasive argument, though, is philological. The reason Tolkien's work resonates so deeply, he says, is that it rings true to the ear of the English speaker. Tolkien wasn't just a scholar of dead languages; he appears to have been possessed by them. When he was a student at Oxford, his hobby was creating new ones out of Gothic and Finnish grammar and roots (some of these authentic-sounding languages later appeared in his books). He did the same thing with the names of his characters, basing them on actual ancient English and Norse words. He viewed storytelling as a form of textual archaeology. His job as author was to resurrect names, personalities, events and, most of all, creatures -- elves, dwarfs, dragons, goblins, orcs, Wargs -- buried deep within the strata of linguistic prehistory. Take Wargs, preternaturally intelligent and malevolent wolves who live past the Edge of the Wild. Shippey believes Tolkien came up with them by reflecting on two words, the Old English ''wearh,'' which means ''outcast,'' and the Old Norse ''vargr,'' which means both ''wolf'' and ''outlaw.'' Vargr is a philological puzzle: Why would Old Norse have needed another word for ''wolf'' when it had the common word ''ulfr''? Tolkien's creation implies an answer: There must have been an animal similar to a wolf, only outcast and evil. Or Gandalf, the wizard who watches over hobbits and dwarfs like an anxious lesser deity. His name and those of most of the dwarfs in ''The Hobbit'' can be found in a section of an Old Norse poem that consists of a list of dwarfs' names; the passage is called ''Dvergatal,'' or ''Tally of the Dwarfs.'' Gandalf's name, though, is another philological problem. It contains the word for ''elf'' -- alfr.'' But what's an elf doing in the ''Tally of the Dwarfs,'' when ancient tradition made a clear distinction between the two creatures? Given that the first syllable of Gandalf could be interpreted as ''wand,'' Shippey writes, Tolkien ''seems to have concluded at some point that 'Gandalfr' meant 'staff-elf,' and that this must be a name for a wizard.'' Shippey speculates that Tolkien viewed the ''Dvergatal'' as ''the last fading record of something that had once happened,'' and wrote ''The Hobbit'' as a gloss on that long-forgotten incident. It is heady to know that a book you loved as a child conforms to such meticulous standards of mythical realism. Now I know why I felt that Tolkien ushered me into a world that had palpable existence, and why, when I visited Wales as a teenager, the street signs and village names felt so familiar. By basing Middle Earth on the shards of recovered languages and stories, he rooted it in something very like a collective preconscious. The question remains, however, whether this accomplishment is tantamount to literary greatness, as Shippey claims it is. If you asked me, I'd say no. ''The Hobbit,'' which was written for children, came out almost 20 years before the trilogy. It's a light and charming book, and hobbits are refreshingly sane, middle-class creatures, especially compared with the powermongers and extremists they fall in among. But by the time you get to ''The Fellowship of the Ring,'' the first volume of ''The Lord of the Rings,'' Tolkien's tone has grown somber, even leaden. The villain of ''The Hobbit'' was a sarcastic and flirtatious dragon. The villain of ''The Lord of the Rings'' is absolute evil, which is distinctly less amusing. The farther into the trilogy you read, the less playful it gets. ''There lie the woods of Lothlorien!'' is the sort of thing characters say to one another a lot. To which the response is likely to be, ''Let us hasten!'' ''The Lord of the Rings'' was written for adults, but
unless you're a child it's difficult to accept its mounting portentousness
without protest, as the price of entry into the longed-for past. One of the best
things about growing up is realizing that grandeur doesn't have to be grandiose,
nor does historical dialogue have to bristle with fusty archaisms. Tolkien
dominates fantasy today because he gave his imaginings the aura of
inevitability. But as a storyteller, he was betrayed by the very pedantry that
made his creations memorable. He wandered over to the dark side, like an
Elf-Lord gone bad. He formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his
mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature
itself. |
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