J. R. R. Tolkien 9780231884792

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J. R. R. Tolkien by CATHARINE R. STIMPSON

JL }

Columbia University Press N E W YORK &

LONDON

1969

COLUMBIA ESSAYS O N M O D E R N W R I T E R S is a series of critical studies of English, Continental, and other writers whose works are of contemporary artistic and intellectual significance. Editor: William York Tindall Jacques Barzun

Advisory Editors W . T . H. Jackson Joseph A. Mazzeo

/. R. R. Tolkien is Number 41 of the series

C A T H A R I N E R. STIMPSON is an Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College.

Copyright © 1969 Columbia University Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-76253 Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgment is made to George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., and Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

J. R. R. Tolkien Anyone interested enough in the English writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien to read about him really ought to read the man himself. Like the pope, Tolkien inspires disciples, defectors, and plain defamers. Taste, not criticism, ordains one's true response. But simply because Tolkien does attract true believers, the balloon of his reputation has soared ever farther up and farther away. In the basket of the great gasbag ride literary persons, friends, and cultists, their enthusiasm at once prevailing wind and ballast. Some return to earth to join those who have never flown. If you wish, join me among the groundlings. Many children make and then inhabit imaginary kingdoms. A few such children, when grown up, still fabricate whole fantasies. The Brontes and William Blake were such people. Not so Tolkien, born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892. He did not invent Middle Earth, his personal, if derivative, world, until he was an adult. T o amuse his four children, he devised an appealing introduction, The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again, published in 1937. T o bemuse a demon, he laboriously wrote and rewrote, beginning around 1936, the far longer The Lord of the Rings, six-book epic in ambition, encyclopedia in detail. An unsuspected public, largely student, received it far less reluctantly than the original publisher. One of the fascinations of fantasy, whether public or private, is this. Even as we use it to alter and conceal what we fear might be real, we do reveal ourselves. Yet the shadow of Middle Earth often obscures its creator, Tolkien. For language, the raw

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material of literature, not literature itself, first compelled and drew him. As a boy, he invented several languages, until his mother interfered. At Oxford, where he took a degree in 1915, he both studied old languages and went back to mixing up some new ones. His first job, from 1918 to 1920, was that of assistant on the editorial staff of the Oxford English Dictionary. After teaching at the University of Leeds, he returned to Oxford University in 1925. He retired from Oxford in 1959, by then the distinguished Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Tolkien's learning, good will, and courtesy brought him genuine devotion, immense respect, and two honorary degrees. W . H. Auden, once Tolkien's pupil, has praised him as "the bard to Anglo-Saxon." However, being a professor was far more than having a profession. Tolkien speaks of language with the reverence, delight, and emotional esprit that more obviously subjective romantic poets splurge on god, love, and nature. A sign of both a person's and a people's character, language also proves our humanistic rage for harmony and beauty. From language arise ethical values and aesthetic pleasure. Tolkien is, in short, the man whom Gothic took "by storm." It is hardly surprising that such passions consume his long fiction and shorter verse. The Lord of the Rings began, Tolkien half-plausibly confesses, as an exercise in "linguistic esthetics." Not only does he play endless verbal games and make inside philological jokes, but he has created and annotated a series of self-justifying alphabets and languages. Perhaps inevitably, the work is a frequent counterfeit. John Tinkler's essay in Tolkien and the Critics sketches an incestuous familiarity between the speech of the Rohirrim, the Men of Rohan, a horsy Aryan tribe in The Lord of the Rings, and Anglo-Saxon. Tolkien himself admits that many of the names he gives to persons and places [4]

have Welsh models. He also believes that such names have given his readers more pleasure than any other element in his work. Imitation need be no great sin. However, impurities do alloy Tolkien's insatiable desire for the historic Finnish and for his own Elvish, in which he may actually be heard to sing. For language, though flexible and mysterious, is a scheme, and Tolkien, though he delights in puzzles, too often imposes schemes upon the rough contingencies of experience. He also frequently treats a word, neither as reference nor gesture, but as a thing, a dead end, unto itself. At the same time he vaguely implies that specific languages and sounds radiate specific moralities. Speech then shapes up speaker. And so Tolkien's heroes use lots of "1" sounds, his villains lots of "k's" and "z's." The beginnings of a dangerous orthodoxy are apparent. Such enfeebling liabilities are the common property of many scholars, a group from which Tolkien took close friends and allies. Around 1939 an informal club and literary society began to meet on Thursday nights in the Magdalen College rooms of C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the scholar, novelist, and author of children's tales and popular theological tracts. Conscious of the cute pun, they named themselves the Inklings. Overly conscious of their significance, critics now call them the Oxford Christians or the Anglo-Oxford group. Some Inklings also gathered an hour or so before lunch on Tuesdays at one Oxford pub or another. Smoking pipes, drinking beer from an enamel jug, delighting boyishly, even fatuously, in each other's company, they talked and read their manuscripts aloud. During nearly every meeting in 1946, Tolkien offered up a chapter from The Lord of the Rings. Other Inklings, to whom the completed work was partly dedicated, referred to it as Tolkien's "new Hobbit." Perhaps the spiritual dynamo of the group was Charles Wil-

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liams (1886-1945), an editor, biographer, novelist, playwright, critic, and image-clotted poet. T h e Inklings blotted on until 1954, when Lewis moved to Cambridge. However, the death of Williams and the end of W o r l d W a r II, in the same season, dissipated, for different reasons, their most ardent fraternal spirit. T h e Inklings were a brilliant, but condescending and oddly silly, group. Within Oxford, where they held court, they perpetuated a tradition of learned, witty, humane, curious, writing dons. Lewis Carroll and Walter Pater were their towering literary ancestors. Although their university forbade the teaching of contemporary poetry, they reflected within Oxford the congenial spirit, if larger talent, of T . S. Eliot. Though verbally eloquent, the Inklings often stammered emotionally. Several of them endured lonely, guilty, obligation-ridden boyhoods, which fiction alone had consoled. As men, they preferred other men who created, as a public mask, a vivid dramatis personae. In Sprightly Running, an autobiography, John W a i n observes shrewdly that the Inklings shared a corporate mind. Hostile to much of art and history after the Industrial Revolution, they were Tories in politics, classicists in education, and patronizing gentlemen in behavior. T h e y seemed to think themselves a company of noble, gorgeous knights, besieged in their tower of virtue by the dank forces of evil and intrigue, vulgarity and commerce, pragmatism and neurotic secularity. And the Inklings were Christian. Both Anglo- and Roman Catholics, they felt their faith intensely glamorous because they might, despite its misty medievalism, defend it rationally. W h o l e men, they would find the wholeness of finite and infinite, physical and metaphysical, inner and outer light. In fact, Tolkien helped C. S. Lewis, at first suspicious because Tolkien was both philologist and papist, back to his knees to prav again. [6]

Williams, symbol of the appetite for faith, called himself a romantic theologian. If the Inklings sought romance in theology, they also thought literary romance useful for theology. The romance was, however, but one of several forms they exploited to popularize their belief in a divine omniscient spirit. They wanted to persuade God the fantastic to reveal Himself through fantasy and fairy story, myth and Arthurian legend, science fiction and detective story. Their literary gods were such writers as George Macdonald (1824-1905), a sweet Scots minister, who used the supernatural as a vehicle of holiness, and the far more vital William Morris (1834-96), who, among other brilliant accomplishments, forced England to recognize the bleak grandeur of Norse myth. Whether clamoring or criticizing, the Inklings liked narrative. The skeleton of a literary work, a story hinted at more sacramental structures. It might well violate mere natural law. Natural law, after all, often violated supernatural truth. A narrator himself, as inventor, might even imitate God the Creator, though in an admittedly modest way. As one might think, the Inkling inventions have many family resemblances. The Lord of the Rings and Lewis' science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938, a magnificent psychedelic space trip; Perelandra, 1944; That Hideous Strength, 1945) even share some names. They also share the themes of cosmic war between good and evil, the quest and rebirth of a chosen hero, and the material reality of mvthic matter. Yet the Inkling influence on Tolkien was more likely temperamental than literary. Reading aloud to his friends doubtless sharpened his prose rhythms and facile rhetoric. Talking to his friends doubtless encouraged him. But Tolkien's real response to criticism was one of two extremes: to ignore it or to begin all over again. Lewis, in a letter, once wrote that it would be easier to influence a bandersnatch than Tolkien. [7]

Lewis is both misleading and mildly hostile. A Lewis Carroll creation, the bandersnatch is a ferocious, ominous beast. In "The Hunting of the Snark," he even frightens a banker into a faint. Tolkien, if beyond the Inklings, is hardly beyond influence. He has rummaged through nearly all Western culture and literature for his morality and motifs, his plots and persons, his props and properties. In brief, his substance and his style. Like many of his sources, he finds the supernatural no anthropological relic, but a vivid reality and controlling gear in the moral machinery. He takes from Norse mythology, preserved in such works as The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (11791241), the concept of Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil; much emotional geography; and many characters and symbols. He takes from Germanic and Anglo-Saxon culture, his own blood heritage, life styles; a bitter concept of heroism; and rhetorical attitudes and devices. Celtic sources—mythologies such as the Irish Tuatha De Danaan, easy interminglings of fact and fiction such as the Irish Ulster Cycle—give stories, symbols, a sense of natural beauty, and a compelling tone of mystery and bravura. Medieval romances tell of feudal chivalry, courtly love, and questers. An incorrigible nationalist, Tolkien also celebrates the English bourgeois pastoral idyll. Its characters, tranquil and well fed, live best in placid, philistine, provincial rural coziness. Finally, the Christian tradition offers a controlling cosmology and patterns of ethical loss and gain. While the reticent Tolkien never makes Middle Earth explicitly Christian, his faith glues the place together. Tolkien prefers adaptation to plagiarism. He fuses and reuses his material as casually as less scholarly men might eat. A minor, but suggestive, example? In The Fellowship of the Ring, Part I, [8]

Elrond, a wise and ageless son of High Elves and Men, talks about the Old Forest. There was a time, he reminisces, "when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard." In his edition of Sir Gaivain and the Green Knight, Tolkien himself cites an old saying about an English forest, the Wilderness of Wirral, "From Blacon Point to Helbree/A squirrel may leap from tree to tree." The name Isengard itself telescopes the Anglo-Saxon isen, iron, and geard, court or dwelling. Generously Tolkien wishes to preserve old myths and literary forms, magic swords and battle cries, for the hapless present. A kindly man, he also makes himself accessible to anyone without real knowledge of his sources and allusions. Ironically, many may safely wander through Tolkien in blissful, sleepy ignorance of all he so conscientiously is trying to transmit. It is also unfortunate for Tolkien that wonderful, but outworn, sources fail to ensure excellence. A writer's energy alone forges borrowed elements together to make his work transcendent. James Joyce had such energy. Tolkien, despite erratic originality and perpetual persistence, does not. As a result, his earnest vision seems syncretic, his structure a collage, and his feeling antiquarian. Properly he praises the mythical mode of the imagination: the ability to feel the prophetic meaning of material, including the supernatural. Yet Tolkien's exercise of the imagination has brought forth a hollow, inscribed monument, with many, many echoes. Such faltered urgency helps to account for failures of controlling tone. T o his credit, Tolkien likes to conjure up various voices. He gives many characters their own idiosyncratic speech. He, too, has several voices. First, he can be witty, playful, whimsical. His books are much more of a donnish game than sober critics, who explicate the influence of St. Augustine, [9]

let on. Exaggerating form, he often brilliantly parodies his sources and scholarship. Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, a fine spoof of annals like The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the "Preface" to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil prove that those who burlesque best also do the real thing best. A chatty story, Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), shows Tolkien's humor. T h o u g h a common farmer, Giles defeats a giant, a dragon, and Augustus Bonifacius, his king. In a burst of joyous reversals, the good rise from mediocrity to glory. T h e bad fall from pomp to straitened circumstance. Public posture and private worth are finally, pleasingly, aligned. T h e comic narrative also delights because the wicked lack the awful dimension of real evil. T h e clumping giant, whose power has frightened us in more atavistic stories, now has anxiety attacks about copper cooking pans. T h e worm (Anglo-Saxon for dragon), whose fiery breath has scorched us in other legends, literally turns for Giles. Taking the droll Tolkien too seriously is as clunky as wearing real armor to a dinner party. Still Farmer Giles is more than agreeable diversion. Tolkien deliberately traces the change of bluff English yeoman into brave English hero, darling of the land, celebrant of song, lord. King of the Little Kingdom. Giles needs magic and good luck, alcohol and bluster, a wise parson and Garm, a talking dog (in Norse myth the most ferocious hound). Yet Giles is also innately good. He is sensible and shrewd, decent and courageous. Lacking cruel and grueling ambition, he founds a benevolent state. But Tolkien wishes, not simply to exalt, but also to expose. His village miller, a common folk and literary villain because of historic social ambition and corrupt business dealings, personifies the vices of envy and backbiting. More important, the nervous Augustus and his effete court show the unhappy arrogance of power. Given to [10]

ceremonial tournaments, but not to real battle, they substitute empty chivalry for justice, greed for generosity. Less explicitly, Tolkien hints at the process by which men may become gods. In the eloquent, persuasive essay "On FairyStories," he rather casually announces that he is a partial euhemerist. He thinks history, rather than a divine womb, has mothered many mythological figures. The Norse god Thor might well have begun as a loud, red-bearded, heavy-handed farmer. A logical sequel to Farmer Giles might well show the loud, red-bearded, heavy-handed Giles transformed from Lord of Tame, Count of Worminghall, and King of the Little Kingdom into a deity. Tolkein, superficially, but nicely, also talks about the fate of words. Languages, like gods, must rise and fall. Driving out the old politics, bringing in the new, Farmer Giles inevitably expels book Latin in favor of vernacular. Some fantasies, like science fiction, take place in future time. Other fantasies take place in the past. Still others frankly occur in legendary time. People in legendary time may look like us. They may even lecture us. Nevertheless, they are simply, wholly apart from us. Tolkien works with legendary time. Farmer Giles takes place after King Coel but before King Arthur. So doing, Tolkien frees himself from the restraints of chronology and of sequential time, the known record of which we call history. Yet the result is less daring than it might be. Tolkien returns again and again to history to shuffle a series of scenes. He alludes at once to kingship, a now uncommon form of government, and to pacts of nonaggression, a now common form of self-defense. For no matter how much Tolkien loves and enjoys fantasy, history absorbs him. Tolkien's theory of history is both lucid and conventional. He seems to visualize human time as a series of cycles. Swords are forged, then broken, then reforged. Seasonal time is also a

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cycle. Spring gives way to summer, summer to autumn, autumn to winter, winter to spring. The struggle betwen good and evil controls each cycle. Indeed, the temporary triumph of the good ends one revolution and initiates the next. Tolkien constructs Three Ages for Middle Earth. The overthrow of the wicked Morgoth has finished off the First. Being legendary, its duration is unknown. The downfall of Sauron, Morgoth's servant, has dropped the curtain on the Second, after 3,441 years. The second defeat of Sauron ends the Third, in 3021. Most of The Lord of the Rings, the obsessive obituary of the Third Age, takes place during its last few years. Tolkien is hardly neutral about time's enormous turnings. Each cycle, he laments, is smaller than the last. Between the Second and Third Ages, the druidic Elves become faded and diminished. Their forest home, once Laurelindorinan, the Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, becomes Lothlorien, Dreamflower, symbolically a shorter word. After the Third Age the last of the elves gravely sail to their lands in the Uttermost West. The Fourth Age, ours, is the Dominion of Men. In Tolkien's moral conjugation men have fallen, do fall, and will still fall. The Third Age does end magnificently. However, its political and moral fireworks, its meals of strawberry and cream, are less prophecies of future glory than the preparation of glorious memories. We, the people of the present, have those memories. However, Tolkien, our contemporary, is too angry to be wistfully nostalgic. Instead, he takes up a crossbow to fire arrows of explicit social criticism. Modern man is intellectually sloppy and morally shoddy. Trampling on the greensward, he builds a smoking furnace. Ripping off the thatched roof, he jerry-builds a house. His talent is for ugliness, and Tolkien utterly distrusts him. Much of the most powerful writing in The Lord of the [12]

Rings, where villains have the spirit of modern robber barons, describes Tolkien's despair. The desolation around the vicious realm of Mordor literally makes good men sick. However, despite his wrath, Tolkien wants the blessings of technology. Although a wicked wizard has invented a weapon similar to dynamite, Middle Earth has neither organized economies nor real industry. Neither checking accounts nor radios exist in the Third Age. But Tolkien sneaks in magical objects to do what our machines do. A palanttr, a sinister crystal version of Merlin's glassy globe in The Faerie Queene, works like a television-telephone. A king's hands and herbs play at penicillin. Tolkien's stubborn, self-deluding conservatism also demands that we respect families and dynasties. Since, he admits, there must be a future, at least let the past shape it. The personal consequence? Chromosomes are destiny. The political consequence? Hereditary power. The social consequence? A rigid class system. Tolkien does distrust too much hereditary power. Some of the blood of his rulers runs bad. Less wisely, he consistently permits himself the unappetizing luxury of class snobbery. Bilbo Baggins, the hero of The Hobbit, has trouble with three trolls. He speaks standard English, but they speak filthy, rough, working-class Cockney. Recently, of course, musical groups have shown us the wit and poetry of working-class English speech. But Tolkien's pessimism is more than spasmodic, Blimpish, bad temper. Its equivalent is, not Kafka, but the literary Victorians. While Tolkien could never cry, "Ah, love, let us be true. T o one another," he has the same cosmic dolor, the same sense of earthly decay, as the speaker in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach." The source of Tolkien's feeling is partly his own experience. In 1896 he left South Africa for England. His father, a bank manager, whom he never saw again, died a [13]

year later. A sickly boy, Tolkien was raised by teachers, priests, and his mother, once a part-time missionary, who died in 1910. Happily married in 1916, though thought a bad match because he was a poor Catholic, he went immediately to war, to be invalided out in 1918. The harrowing memories of battle darken much of his serious work. World War I immersed Tolkien and his entire generation in suffering and waste. In a deceptively quiet paragraph in the "Foreword" to the Ballantine edition of The Lord of the Rings, he says that by 1918 all but one of his close friends were dead. Little more than thirty years later his son Christopher went off to another war. His faith and learning reinforce such temperamental bleakness. Christianity may teach that redemptive death releases the lucky among us into eternal life, but it also preaches the necessity of our redemption. We are, after all, the children of willful Adam and of willful, murderous Cain. In a scholarly essay, Tolkien even quotes one of Chaucer's descriptions of our quotidian world, "litel erthe that heer is . . . so ful of torment and of harde grace." Anglo-Saxon culture, both pagan and Christian, is also a perpetual lament. Bound in sorrow, people expect woe. Doom or death (metodsceaft) devours all men and their work. Night consumes all glory. On November 25, 1936, Tolkien gave a Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, "Beoivulf: The Monsters and the Critics." A classic study of the AngloSaxon poem, the essay also beautifully reveals Tolkien's mind. He rejects Beowulf as a quarry for arid linguists and historians. His Beoivulf is instead a brilliantly written elegy. It shows the forces of chaos and unreason, of malice and blind fortune, which the monsters symbolize, driving doomed man to defeat. But, Tolkien insists, Grendel and his mother have victory without honor. That belongs to man, unyielding of will, abso[14]

lute in courage. Beowulf, the heathen warrior, using strength (maegen) to earn glory (dom) and praise among men today and tomorrow (/of), is heroic. The battle cry, "Courage shall be the bolder, heart the keener, spirit shall be the greater, as our strength grows less," is wholly noble. The more certain defeat, the more defiant a hero becomes. He also knows that his excellence only stirs his enemies to greater fury. As Tolkien points out, the harps of Heorot, the regal hall Beowulf purges, madden the hideous Grendel, prowling outside in the dark. Tolkien's heroes have courage, fortitudo. They must also have wisdom, sapientia. A closet drama, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorkthelm's Son (1953), openly debunks the ethic of limitless courage. The play also shows Tolkien playing both artist and scholar. Part I of The Homecoming gives sources. In 991 Viking invaders and English defenders, under the command of Beorhtnoth, Duke of Essex, fought the Battle of iMaldon. Trapped on an island in a river, the Vikings asked for safe passage to the shore in order to have a battle. Proud to the point of vanity, militant to the point of suicide, Beorhtnoth let them come. The result? An English defeat and the death of Beorhtnoth and his loyal household, their memorial the magnificent, anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem "The Battle of Maldon." Part II of The Homecoming is the play itself. It uses three verse forms: a free version of the Old English alliterative line; a brief rhyme; and a Latin dirge. Self-consciously Tolkien manipulates styles to give a sense of period. As new literary forms are replacing old, so is Christianity transforming paganism. Tolkien also toys with archaic diction (like "hoar" and "mirk") to create the atmosphere of past agonies. Unfortunately, those agonies are dreadful. The abbot and monks of Ely, Tolkien imagines, have dispatched two servants to search [15]

for the body of the Duke, their protector, on the battlefield. The two servants, as schematized as the play as a whole, have different, but complementary, sensibilities. The first, young Torhthelm, or Totta, is imaginative. He loves ancient songs and visions. The second, old Tidwald, or Tida, is sensible. He likes rough wisdom and facts. As Totta and Tida pick their way among the bodies, Totta undergoes a macabre rite of initiation. Using the headless Beorhtnoth's own sword, he kills a shape who apparently wishes to loot the already despoiled corpses. But, as Tida knows, Totta overkills. The earth already has its fill of graves. For The Homecoming, while an elegy, also bitterly condemns needless death. Men must fling courage at the dark face of doom, but they must also act responsibly. During the play Tida mutters that the men of Maldon have been criticizing Beorhtnoth. During Part III of The Homecoming, a prose commentary, Tolkien expands on Tida's hints. Refusing the temptations of chivalry, the genuine hero refuses to go beyond necessity. Beorhtnoth, like Beowulf, but far worse, wrongly sacrifices his men for his own reputation. His pride is, in effect, murderous. Wiglaf, though Beowulf's faithful follower, gives Beorhtnoth's real epitaph: "By one man's will many must woe endure." In contrast, the Duke of Essex's household is superbly heroic. They do what they must: they obey their master, even unto death. In recognizing the limits of courage, Tolkien's favorite characters also are wise enough to accept the limits of their own excellence. In The Lord of the Rings, wizard Gandalf and elf queen Galadriel refuse to take a ring of power. Though sorely tempted, they rightly doubt their strength. The good also doubt their influence on the cycles of time. As Gandalf, a totally reliable moral mouthpiece, says: [16]

. . . it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. W h a t weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

The quasi King James Version rhythms, the banal natural imagery, and the portentous seriousness are, unfortunately, qualities of Tolkien's earnest prose. However, his demand for humility is unexceptionable. Humility, the self-willed abdication of the self, is a necessary condition of charity, the selfwilled elevation of others. Tolkien's charitable figures freely make the spiritual gift of mercy and of pity and the physical gift of things. Because they do extend themselves to others, they are able to predict what evil beings might be like. The evil, on the other hand, being wholly egocentric, cannot predict what the good might be like. In the war between good and evil, the strategic consequences have the power of an ICBM. Gandalf and Frodo surprise Sauron, to his dismay. Sauron cannot surprise them. Tolkien's paradigmatic heroes have a final weapon. The wicked, like the swarthy Ores (the Latin orcus means infernal regions, their lord, or death), betray each other. Yearning for peaceable kingdoms, the good respond to each other. Three kinds of allegiance most attract Tolkien's pets. The first, fealty, is the service men swear to their lords. A lord protects, a man obeys. Fealty creates a strong social, political, and psychic chain. The second, fellowship, is the companionship men give to each other. Now great men swear fealty, not just to a lord, but to a task. Warm, rich, and generous, fellows help each other to fulfill their moral fealties. Finally, some groups, like families, and some men, like Frodo and the faithful servant Samwise Gamgee, have bonds that marry fealty and fellowship. Indeed, [17]

Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick's servant, whose "steady and reciprocal attachment" to his master "nothing but death will terminate," is a model for Sam Gamgee. Many find Tolkien's moral vision serious and impeccable. Surely men ought to be both courageous and charitable. Surely men ought not to be haughty and selfish. O f course, the good is creative. O f course, evil is corroding, then corrupting, and finally canceling. However, Tolkien seems rigid. He admits that men, elves, and dwarfs are a collection of good, bad, and indifferent beings, but he more consistently divides the ambiguous world into two unambiguous halves: good and evil, nice and nasty. Any writer has the right to dramatize, not to argue, his morality. However, Tolkien's dialogue, plot, and symbols are terribly simplistic. A star always means hope, enchantment, wonder; an ash heap always means despair, enslavement, waste. Readily explicable, they also seem to conceal intellectual fuzziness and opaque axioms. Moreover, Tolkien gives way to a lust for miracles. Wizards, weapons, and thaumaturges, leaping in and out of the action at Tolkien's will, are as sophisticated as last-minute cavalry charges in the more old-fashioned Westerns. Behind the moral structure is a regressive emotional pattern. For Tolkien is irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine. Not only does he apparently place more faith in battles than in persuasion, but he makes his women, no matter what their rank, the most hackneyed of stereotypes. T h e y are either beautiful and distant, simply distant, or simply simple. Although the adoration of dwarf Gimli for elf queen and mother figure Galadriel neatly parodies the excesses of courtly love, some of Tolkien's men do worship their women. However, their devotion is callow, shallow, and mawkish. More often women are ignored, unless, like the hobbit Rosie Cotten, they are a [18]

necessary adjunct to a domestic scene, or, like the warrior lass fiowyn, a necessary fillip for the plot. The domestic parable of the Ents (an Anglo-Saxon word for giant) and of the Entwives is revealing. Tree-shepherds, the oldest of living creatures on Middle Earth, speech pupils of the Elves, the Ents are fond of wandering. They also respect other things. Less spiritually refined, the Entwives are fond of order and prosperity. They also push other things around, including, one presumes, the fourteen-foot-high Ents. Anticipating divorce decrees on the grounds of mutual incompatibility, the Entwives settle down to garden. The Ents visit them less and less. Then, the Entwives lose first their Entmaiden charms, and next their fertile waves of grain. Justice, the Ents imply, has been done. Yet, moping in the safety of nostalgia, the Ents now search for their ladies and fancy a reunion in the West. Only sadly do they blame the Entwives for Ent unhappiness and the general void of Entlings. Even more suggestive of Tolkien's subtle contempt and hostility toward women is the atavistic tale of Shelob, the terrible, poisonous spider. (The Anglo-Saxon word for spider is lobbe.) Lurking in the mountain fastnesses of Mordor, Shelob, who has the moral worth and grace of Sin on guard at the Gates of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost, personifies profoundly malicious death. A jubilant, exultant Tolkien tells how Sam forces Shelob, who has wounded Frodo, to impale herself, somewhere in the region of the womb, on his little knife. The scene, which has a narrative energy far greater than its function, oozes a distasteful, vengeful quality as the small, but brave, male figure really gets the enormous, stenching bitch-castrator. It is hardly surprising that Tolkien generally ignores the rich medieval theme of the conflict between love and duty. Nor is it startling that the most delicate and tender feelings in Tolkien's [19]

writing exist between men, the members of holy fellowships and companies. Fathers and sons, or their surrogate figures, also receive attentive notice. When Tolkien does sidle up to genuine romantic love, sensuality, or sexuality, his style becomes coy and infantile, or else it burgeons into a mass of irrelevant, surface, descriptive detail. Unlike many very good modern writers, he is no homosexual. Rather, he simply seems a little childish, a little nasty, and evasive. T o give Tolkien the credit he deserves, his work is still incomplete. He has not yet published The Silmartllion, begun even before The Hobbit. A collection of epic poems and stories about the legendary Elder Days of Middle Earth, The Silmarillion tells of the Valar, guardian spirits, and of The One, Eru in Elvish, a god hovering over all. (The One also appears in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings.) Perhaps The Silmarillion will strengthen Tolkien's moral vision and sense of emotional realities. But if these seem badly defined, his choice of genres does not. People choose those modes which most please them. Literary fantasies, more consciously crafted for a public than those we devise every day, differ from political fantasies. The latter, doing things like predicting the end of Asian wars, seek, honestly or dishonestly, to control men and events. Thankfully, literary fantasies are far less publicly ambitious. Tolkien writes them for several reasons. Among them is his belief in eternity. Like Shelley, whom he paraphrases in a letter later printed in "On Fairy-Stories," he thinks: The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. ("Adonais," Stanza 52) [20]

Fantasy uses the supernatural, an analogy of and a glimpse into the eternal. Though no picture of Utopia, fantasy demands the same imaginative leap out of the present. Tolkien's own fiction, a far safer trip than most, warns us against ignoring any fiction. Eomer and his men from Rohan learn the foolishness of dismissing even children's songs and prattle. In the Christmas, 1967, issue of an American woman's magazine, Tolkien published a particularly clear account of his thinking about the supernatural and the natural, the fey and the ordinary, the sprightly and the mortal. The story, "Smith of Wootton Major," has two chief characters: Alf, a cook, who brings Fairy to man, and Smith, a smith, who takes man to Fairy. Every twenty-four years, Wootton Major hosts a special party. When he is ten, Smith, eating a slice of Great Cake at the party, swallows a fairy star. Alf, then Prentice Cook, is largely responsible for the pastry. When he grows up, Smith becomes, not just singer and craftsman, but explorer of Fairyland. His talisman is the star, worn now on his forehead. Eventually, however, he must choose an heir. Alf, now Fairy King, helps Smith pass the star along. When the story ends, the lines of blood and spirit are secure. Tolkien's slender narrative is charming and whimsical. Yet he adamantly insists that reality is what the myopic call fantastic. His villain, a sly and greedy potbelly, refuses to believe in the fairy star. Those who do believe receive visions of fairy queens and the blessings of magic. Magic, which makes daggers shine when Ores draw near, is the ability to transform the physical world. However, Tolkien carefully distinguishes between physical and moral transformations. The growth from bad to indifferent, from indifferent to the good, and from good to saintliness is far more profound and difficult than the metamorphosis of an ordinary flower to one which never wilts. [21]

Written in 1938, revised in 1947 and issued in a book dedicated to the memory of Charles Williams, Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" also efficiently explains his concept of fantasy. Fluent and flexible, the prose evokes a three-act response: (1) relief, because decisive answers to difficult questions are given; (2) suspicion, because the answers begin to feel slippery; and (3) cautious acceptance. The second act is the most complex. Tolkien's terms and diction seem exhausted and vague. For example, he speaks—not of emotions, psychic entities, or the irrational—but of "the heart." The assumptions upon which he builds his argument are either dogmatic or trite. What, he asks rhetorically, are great human needs? What, we respond anxiously, are they? To survey the depths of time and space, he tells us, to communicate with other living beings, to delight in art. Sound, perhaps, but lifeless. Possibly the worst intellectual failure is trying to apply the Christian faith to the twentieth century without understanding the twentieth century. If neither C G. Jung, who thought fairy stories might release archetypal images submerged in the unconscious, nor Paul Tillich, who thought Christianity might release the worth submerged in our age, Tolkien is valuable. He prefers the word "fairy" or "faerie" to fantasy. A fierce, wonderful place, Fairy holds all supernatural beings, like trolls; all natural things, like stars; all earthly things, like bread; and all men, if they be enchanted. A fairy story may be adventurous, moral, or satirical. (The Lord of the Rings is all three.) No matter what its purpose, it must take place in the Perilous Realm. A teller of fairy tales uses the materials of the Primary (phenomenal) world to invent a Secondary (story) world. Or, as Tolkien also says, a sub-creator, foraging around God's creation, makes a sub-creation. He writes, not for children, but for adults. He concentrates, not on character, but on narrative. [22]

(Tolkien never regrets his thin, neo-Aristotelian sacrifice of person to action. His own fiction, of course, suffers accordingly.) The good sub-creator needs a rational mind and a sense of fact. Even the most brilliant of unconscious ravings is suspect. Only the person who knows the difference between frog and man can give us the imagined wonder of a frogman. A real taskmaster, Tolkien burdens his sub-creators as heavily as his heroes. The narrator must make a genuinely plausible secondary world. He must completely enchant his reader. One false note, one internal inconsistency, brings disbelief. Then both narrator and art have failed. If the narrator succeeds, if he gives us a coherent vision of Fairy, he offers great rewards. Such returns, by which, Tolkien sniffs, the modern age does badly, are (1) fantasy, the natural right of any reader's secondary imagination to create images in a secondary world; (2) recovery, the splendid ability to see the commonplace, the brown of a friend's eyes, freshly and anew; (3) genuine escape, the temporary release, not simply from contemporary meanness, but from the harsher, universal facts of hunger, thirst, disease, physical limitation, and death; and (4) consolation. Tolkien's theory of consolation is perhaps his most controversial. Christian in bias, it assumes that a secondary world is actually an aspect of a larger "Reality." Tragedy, Tolkien suggests obviously, offers dyscatastropbe, sorrow and failure. Fairy stories, he continues more originally, incarnate Eucatastrophe, a happy ending, a good "turn." As unexpected as the gift of grace, a Eucatastrophe inspires a sharp and poignant joy. Now, Tolkien suggests, the Christian story is the most magnificent eucatastrophic tale imaginable. It also happens to be true. The Gospels, which tell of Christ and of man's salvation, brilliantly fuse fairy story and fact. Consider, Tolkien invites us, the wonderful possibility that a fairy story might [23]

offer a vision as real as that of the Gospels. Believe, he urges us, that the swinging happiness we feel at the end of a fairy story is like Christian joy, Gloria. So believing, he wrote during 1938 or 1939 the story "Leaf by Niggle." It dramatizes both the argument of "On FairyStories" and a concept of a quest for holiness. Regretfully, its hopes are greater than its actual literary glory. Though tightly structured, the story is fussy and uneven, its faults particularly apparent when Tolkien actually tries to write about contemporary institutions such as hospitals and housing inspectors. Niggle, a harmless, silly bachelor, has three responsibilities. The first, to his fellows, is to help Mr. Parish, a whiny, but lame and needy, neighbor. The second, to his imagination, is to paint a huge picture. The canvas, which began as a leaf and grew to become a tree, then a Tree, then a forest, then some mountains, is unfinished. A final responsibility, to his soul, is to prepare for a journey beyond death. Like all of Tolkien's fictive journeys, it is appointed, not chosen. As Eliot teaches in Four Quartets, the traveler must fare forward. Moving is proving worth. A black-garbed Driver snatches Niggle from his home, where, having caught cold helping Parish in a storm, he has been ill. Niggle first goes to an unpleasant place of testing, a prisonlike hospital. There he corrects his earthly self. A Court of Inquiry, consisting of a voice of justice and a voice of mercv, at last commends Niggle to a pleasant place of testing. A decisive fact in Niggle's favor is his earlier care for the demanding Parish. By train and bicycle, a homely touch, Niggle next goes to a lovely country beyond time and space. Happily enough, the landscape is exactly like his old painting. Sub-creation, Tolkien announces heavily, has predicted spiritual reality. Parish soon joins Niggle. Together the men create the happy fellow[24]

ship they were too weak to have on earth. Niggle also has learned Parish's old virtue: the ability to get things done. Parish has learned Niggle's old virtue: the capacity for wonder. As the Great Tree blossoms, as birds and men spontaneously sing, as Tolkien scatters his symbols of spiritual health, the time comes to choose patterns of eternal life. Domestic Parish decides to wait for his wife. Imaginative Niggle decides to wander toward unknown, distant mountains. Despite their separation, the two continue to share the virtues of good will, serenity, and joy. Told their landscape has been named "Niggle's Parish," they laugh and laugh and laugh. On earth, however, men are neither purged nor saved. Quarrelsome, boorish, materialistic, they ignore the adventures of the spirit. Moreover, Tolkien implies austerely, mortality defeats even men of good will. A local schoolmaster has tried to preserve a leaf of Niggle's painting. Even this fragment goes up in flames in a museum fire. The tree is Tolkien's controlling metaphor. A symbol on earth, it embodies the promises of heaven. In heaven, it need do nothing more than exist. Indeed, trees loom over Tolkien's entire tidy scheme of symbols. Similarly, the ash Yggdrasil spreads over Norse mythology. Trees incarnate the fruitful, the good, in politics and nature, language and art. Aragorn, a king restored in the final book of The Lord of the Rings, replaces a withered trunk in a courtyard of his principal city, Minas Tirith, with a new, sacramental sapling. Sam, a gardener restored in the same volume, plants new roots in his old home, the Shire. Villains, like the Ores, show their moral colors when they wantonly lop limbs and chop at trunks. It was, in fact, the mutilation of a real tree that angered Tolkien enough to write "Leaf by Niggle." [25]

The protagonists of "Leaf by Niggle" learn about fantasy and spiritual recovery. They go beyond the need for escape and consolation. The story is probably too weak to give many readers any of the four joys of fairy stories. Perhaps most poignantly it reveals Tolkien himself. Like Niggle, Tolkien began with a detail. Supposedly he was once correcting examinations. On the back of a blank page he inadvertently wrote, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." Like Niggle's Leaf, Tolkien's sentence grew until it enmeshed its creator. For Tolkien's huge secondary world, Middle Earth, is no less than a revision of Western history and mythology, literature and theology. Middle Earth is also a physical place. W. H. Auden, in "The Quest Hero," reprinted in Tolkien and the Critics, thinks it runs 1300 miles from the Iron Hills in the east to the Gulf of Lune in the west; 1200 miles from the Bay of Forochel in the north to the mouth of the Great River Anduin in the south. T o the west of the Great River the Misty Mountains make an abbreviated backbone for Middle Earth. Not only wastes, waters, and hills cover the realm, but also cities and dominions. The northwest region, Eriador, holds both the ruined kingdom of Arnor and the smug, contented Shire, a little smaller than West Virginia. T o the northeast are Mirkwood, haven for both elves and evil, and the Lonely Mountain, a dwarf kingdom. T o the southwest are the fabled turrets of Gondor, the plains of Rohan, and the depths of the forest Fangorn. And in the southeast, behind the Ash Mountains and the Mountains of Shadow, is Mordor. The word telescopes morbid, mortal, an Anglo-Saxon word for murder and sin, and Modred, King Arthur's son born out of incest, who fatally wounds his regal father. Tolkien, whose imagination is pictorial, loves and lists pre[26]

cisely the details of nature. His vividly realistic geography has several origins. Physically the western territories resemble much of Wales; the Shire, the rich English Midlands near Birmingham where Tolkien spent his boyhood. Conceptually Middle Earth is like the Norse Midgard, a serpent-encircled world, and the Anglo-Saxon middan-geard or rmddle-erd. T o the Old English, Eormengrund, the Great Earth, surrounded both middle-erd and islands to the west. Garsecg, the shoreless sea, circled everything. Morally Middle Earth is surprisingly fixed. Not only are the good in harmony with nature, but good flows from and returns to the west. Evil lurks in the south and to the east. Hammering up his moral road signs, Tolkien again draws on both mythology and English history. For example, Scandinavians once believed that, when Ragnarok began, the Sons of flaming Muspell to the south would ride out to harry men. Giving each species its own history, language, lore, and physique, Tolkien lavishly peoples his land. As systematic as a medieval theologian, he also classifies his creatures. He measures their degree of civilization; their authority within their own species and over Middle Earth as a whole; and, finally, their moral being. Thus his characters are either primitive or urbane; high or low; powerful or powerless; and, finally, actively good, actively bad, or the tempted and the fallen. Outward and visible signs show inward, invisible states. Thus, the wizard Saruman, after his corruption, puts on a robe of many colors. His old white clothes were better. (In Anglo-Saxon searuman means man of treachery.) Probably the most compelling character in Middle Earth is a ring. Around 1200 years after the beginning of the Second Age, Satanic Sauron seduces some Faustian Elven-Smiths in the Misty Mountains to the north. (The Old Norse element sour is filthy.) Three hundred years later the Elves begin to forge [27]

the rings of power: three for elves, seven for dwarfs, and nine for mortal men. A ring gives man the long life of Tiresias, at the risk of fading to the substance of a shadow. Then treacherous Sauron forges the One Ring in the fires of Mt. Doom, a volcano in Mordor that works like Mammon's hill in Hell in Paradise Lost. T h e One Ring grants the gift of complete dominion. Nearly all fall victim to its lure. When they do, fire, a symbol of hell, burns in their eyes. Proud of his cursed toy, Sauron, of course, tries to dominate. The nine beringed mortals fall first into his clutches. Transformed into the hideous Ringwraiths, they exhale the Black Breath, among their other charms. At the end of the Second Age, noble Isildur cuts the ring from Sauron's finger before the beaten monster vanishes, temporarily, into Mirkwood. Then, murdered near the Great River Anduin, Isildur lets the golden circle slip into the water. Telling his story, Tolkien calls on legends, particularly those of the Ring of the Nibelung, and other works, particularly the operas of Richard Wagner. He also plays a highly organized game of "Let's Pretend." T h e extremely complex apparatus of the game—appendices, family trees, and maps—is one of the weird, but harmless, attractions of Middle Earth. I am, Tolkien asserts, only a sober, hard-working scholar. My chief sources are the surviving records of Middle Earth, particularly the Red Book of Westmarch, begun by the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. The Lord of the Rings is a summary of my documents. Harnessing phony history is an old joke. Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100?—1154), writing the record of the kings of Britain, including Arthur, fooled generations. But Tolkien wants to do more than to jest and to parody academic practice. Like the Beowulf poet, whom he admires, he hopes to frame and then regain a vanished past. T o do so, he seizes upon lan[28]

guage. Like a director dressing an actor in doublet and hose to play Hamlet, he puts the English language into costume. The rhetoric, while recognizable, is hopefully archaic enough to give a sense of both antiquity and freedom from trivia. Shunning ordinary diction, he also wrenches syntax. If we expect, "They got angry," he will write, "Wrathful they grew." If we expect, "He came to an island in the middle of the river," he will write, " T o an eyot he came." Moreover, he mimics old literary conventions such as the kenning, a stock figurative phrase, and the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line. An example: much of the Battle of Gondor scene in The Return of the King. Tolkien vows that the purpose of his Perilous Realm is to amuse, to delight, to evoke emotion. Both he and his friends vow that he despises simple allegory, in which characters and plot signify one thing other than themselves. Bluntly, The Lord of the Rings is not about the hydrogen bomb. Tolkien sets his readers free to find what they want and to take him as seriously as they need. Yet even genuine mythologies, which have the shape of art and the endless resonance of truth, embody themes. Tolkien's pastiche, wittingly or unwittingly, also makes explicit statements. Condemning selfishness and greed, it praises sacrifice and generosity. Ridiculing complacency, it magnifies sensitivity. Fearing evil, it exalts good. Most obviously, Tolkien, eloquently, rightly, lambasts power. Sorrowfully, often contemptuously, he records our initial desire for possession; next our rage for rule, be it over cities, time, or death; and the final, endless emptiness. Yet his attack is oddly flawed. Both more and less than a symbol, the ring itself becomes a transferable band of active ill will. Tolkien's prose takes on a rollicking glee when the home team wins, surely an exercise of power. Finally, Tolkien approves of authority. Kings legitimately have subjects, some masters legitimately have servants. Even the Shire, [29]

self-governing and spontaneous democracy, has a hereditary thain. If Tolkien really believes that hierarchies do not use fear and power to cement themselves together, he labors under the most distressing illusion. He also edges suspiciously near to a theory of the divine right to rule, surely another tremor of the politics of fantasy. The Hobbit only nibbles around Middle Earth, but it is a genial, attractive book. Next to the grandiose symphony of the more threatening The Lord of the Rings, it is an adventure ballad. The writing often suffers from the double faults of stiffness and schoolroom kitsch. "Naughty," "flummoxed," and "Bless me" are hard to take, especially from a "Big Person." However, the whole narrative has the lilt and zest of fresh inspiration. Characters, even if stock, and their deeds are genuinely related. The primary characters, the hobbits, are Tolkien's best invention. They are now a dwindling race, even if Tolkien archly guesses that the Inklings might have hobbit blood. Between two and four feet high, they have the heritage and manners of little English countrymen. Edmund Wilson suggests that their name fuses the words hob (a rustic) and rabbit. Quick, nimble, they disappear when blunderers stumble near. Since their feet are leathery of sole and curly of hair, they need no shoes. Their nature is peaceful, domestic, generous, and kindly. Their delights are food, bright colors, gossip, genealogy, tobacco, and security. Indeed, they have forgotten that the boundaries of their luscious Shire, divided like a penny into four farthings, are not the boundaries of the world. Hobbits amuse adults and reassure the young. At the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, though fifty, is like a child. The sea, forests, and lands beyond the Shire are as frightening to Bilbo as the adult world to children. But little Bilbo copes [30]

and grows, heroically. Not only does he survive the malice of bad parent figures, but he finds new, marvelously wise, good parent figures. In The Lord of the Rings, Peregrin Took (Pippin) and Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry) also give the point of view of an aging child. In 2941 of the Third Age, Thorin Oakinshield and twelve dwarf companions decide to expel the dragon Smaug from the Lonely Mountain. If successful, they will restore Thorin to his treasure and to the title of King under the Mountain. Gandalf, brusque and wise, insists that Bilbo, restless in his sumptuous hobbit hole, join the expedition. (Tolkien takes the names of the thirteen dwarfs and one wizard from Sturluson's Prose Edda.) Bilbo, the lucky fourteenth, will provide the stealth of a burglar and the tough bravery of a hobbit. However, the Perilous Quest is more than it first seems. Smaug hurts, not just Thorin, but much of Middle Earth. All living beings must take sides for or against the questers. Helping them are the creative and good: Elrond; the strong bearman Beorn (his name a poetic Anglo-Saxon word for prince, warrior, and bear). Opposing them are the sterile and deadly: trolls, goblins, slavering wargs (Anglo-Saxon for wolf). As the quest goes on, Gandalf and the White Council are fighting an even bigger battle against the wicked Necromancer in the south of Mirkwood. Unfortunately, the dwarfs are themselves imperfect. Their sins—disobedience, greed, and cowardice—pollute themselves and others. During the journey, which begins and ends in summer, the season of fruitfulness, the dwarf conscience withers. Happily, Bilbo's virtue grows. Traveling through shifting salvation and terror, Bilbo has two vital adventures. Lost on the shore of a dark lake at the roots of goblin mountain, he meets the lean, lank, lamp-eyed Gollum. In The Hobbit a comic grotesque, in The Lord of the Rings Gollum becomes a preter[31]

natural moral lesson. His name comes from the swallowing sound he makes in his throat. He was once Smeagol, a daring, inquisitive member of a matriarchal, river-dwelling clan. (Anglo-Saxon rmeagan means to examine, to peer in, to seek opportunity.) His clan, ironically, is related to the hobbits. The Gollum is, in fact and theme, the darker self of both Bilbo and his nephew Frodo. Smeagol's best friend, Deagol, has accidentally found the One Ring. (Anglo-Saxon deagol means hidden, secret.) Playing Cain to Deagol's Abel, the covetous Smeagol murders his friend. He then convinces himself that Deagol meant the ring to be his birthday present. The rationalization barely works. Ravaged by the ring, Smeagol is lost in malice. Symbolically hating the light, even of the moon, he wanders into the goblin mountain. There, a divided self, quite mad, he lives miserably. His speech, sibilant and hissing, shows how much the ring has destroyed him. The horrified Gollum loses his ring, "My preciouss," to Bilbo in a parody of primitive riddle games. Knowing only that the ring makes him invisible, the hobbit escapes from the mountain. But before he goes, he refuses to stab the Gollum. His instinctive choice of the good has the unpredictable result of any act of human grace: it eventually creates more good. Unaware of this, Bilbo marches on to his next great trial. In autumn, the time of desolation, within the Lonely Mountain he confronts Smaug alone. Tolkien creepily delights in setting rites of initiation within the dark, narrow bowels of the earth, a symbol of both death and rebirth. Bilbo is cunning and courageous. However, he also succumbs to temptation. Like the thief in Beowulf, he steals a jeweled cup from the dragon's hoard. Smaug, who has the power of the dragon in Beowulf and the craftiness of Chrysophylax Dives in Farmer Giles, is aroused to war. [32]

Bilbo plays little further part. Tolkien, his narrative energies stimulated, expands the tale. Bard, the tall, grim man of Esgaroth, to be King of the Dale, a Teutonic hero, shoots down the fiery Smaug. However, the forces of good and evil, stirred by greed for the dwarfs' gold, must act out their necessary roles. They all join in the raging Battle of the Five Armies, which the good barely win. Thorin, the dwarf king, who has helped start the battle, must pay with his life for his vanity and irresponsible rule. As Boromir does later in The Fellowship of the Ring, he redeems himself only through courage. After the battle, Middle Earth finds temporary respite and harmony. Tolkien, as conventional romancers do, rewards the just. A year after he has left without his pocket handkerchief, Bilbo wanders back to the Shire, richer far in money and in spirit. He now even writes poetry. The Shire treats Bilbo badly. Tolkien's rebuke of their ignorance, in contrast to his earlier sunny praise of their innocence, predicts the mood of The Lord of the Rings. Its design is that of a vast struggle, an exhausting cosmic wrestling match, between the grave hosts of the good and the darkling armies of the damned. The prize is Middle Earth itself. The end is triumphant. Honor wins, and most wounds will heal. Scar tissue is tough and hardy stuff. Yet, because sacrifices must be made, because moral dialectics never really end, Tolkien's tone is often melancholy. The titles of his work reveal the tension between pattern and pervasive feeling. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, tells of virtue and its danger. The second volume, The Two Towers, focuses on the symbols and source of danger. Barad-dur, the tower of Sauron in Mordor, and Orthanc, the tower of Faustian Saruman. The third volume, The Return of the King, celebrates the restoration of mutable and immutable harmony, of personal and public virtue. Yet [33]

the title of the epic as a whole is The Lord of the Rings, the evil figure in the land where shadows lie. Interweaving without quick cutting, Tolkien tells a complex of stories. His subjects are several. Some characters are either supernatural or natural spirits. They include the glimmering, shimmering, musical High Elves, given to extrasensory perception, and Gandalf, the emissary from the Sacred Lands to the west. One of the most abrupt changes on Middle Earth is that of Gandalf from a helpful old man in a big hat, to Gandalf the Grey Pilgrim, to Gandalf the White, the angelic Leader of the White Council, Mithrandir to the Elves (Zoroastrians think Mithra the reincarnated savior). Gandalf's transformation, achieved through Christlike suffering, a fight with the dreadful Balrog, a descent into the watery depths of the world, an ascent to icy mountain peaks, a further period of annihilating pain, shows most clearly Tolkien's growing religious concern and use of obvious Christian parallels. Other characters are like those of literary romance. Though men, they violate, to a degree, the dictates of natural law. Of them the most prominent is Aragorn, the princely valiant. Though he begins as Strider, the cloaked and lonely ranger, he ends as King Elessar, the crowned and honored monarch, courageous in war, just and healing in peace. On Midsummer Day he weds Arwen Undomiel to unite High Men and the Elves. Aragorn, whose name echoes that of King Arthur and of Sir Artegall, the figure of justice in The Faerie Queene, is a traditional hero. His birth crossed, his legacy mysterious, his boyhood innocent, he must wander, in exile, through ordeal, before he claims what is his. Like Horn, a common romantic figure in English and Germanic legend, Aragorn wins a bride and wins back his own lands. (However, Horn loves the daughter of Almair, King of Westernesse. Playing with his [34]

material, Tolkien makes Aragorn himself a Man of Westernesse. His people's history includes versions of both the Eden and the Flood myths.) Like Sigurd the Volsung, Aragorn reforges a broken ancestral blade to publicize the beginning of his return to power. Still other characters are like those of history. Simply men, they must obey the dictates of natural law. At best, they are heroic. The Rohirrim, led by Theoden (the Anglo-Saxon f>eoden means chief of a tribe), are like the men of Beowulf. Heathens, they were born too soon for grace, but they are too splendid for damnation. At worst the Middle or Twilight Men have the pride of Lucifer. They suffer accordingly. Denethor, Steward of Gondor, though noble, aspires to be a wizard. As punishment, he goes mad and immolates himself. More often, Twilight Men flaunt either the ordinary bouncing virtues or the ordinary squinty vices. Tolkien also mentions, but fails to develop, a third category of men: the Wild, who are either rapacious brutes or primitive, but innately honorable, savages. Of the other races, the beasts of wisdom and the beasts of prey, the wild Huorns of the woods and the stocky, efficient dwarfs of the mountains, bones of the earth, the most necessary are the absurd hobbits. When Bilbo is ninety-nine, he adopts his promising nephew Frodo. The word has several meanings. Its root in both Old Norse and Old English connotes wisdom, knowledge, and instruction. Before 1150 A.D. Old Icelandic chroniclers took an appellation derived from frodr. Frodo, of course, writes the primary chronicle of the Third Age. In Old Norse legend, one Frodi, descendant of the god Odin, ruled over a peaceful, fertile kingdom around the time of Christ. Ironically, during his reign, a golden ring lay untouched on a heath in Jutland because there were no robbers. During Frodo's brief life, he must take the One Great Ring to the Plateau of Gor[35]

goroth in Mordor. Once there he must cast the wretched gold into the fires of Mt. Doom. Only this will stop Sauron, who has been collecting what rings he can, from ruling Middle Earth. A mysterious doom has chosen Frodo's burden for him. Yet he freely, if reluctantly, accepts the task. Conventional questers seek a precious object. Frodo seeks to discard a hideous one. His journey consists of a conflict, a death struggle at the Cracks of Doom, and the final discovery of his heroism. And he is himself the object of a chase. Satchel Paige, the fabled baseball player, once allegedly remarked, "Never look behind you. You never know what might be gaining." Gaining on Frodo are the Ringwraiths or Nazgul, first snuffling on black horses, then circling on shuddery pterodactyls. Describing the Nazgul, "the sign of our fall and the shadow of doom," Tolkien again blends Christian and Anglo-Saxon concepts. Even more eager in pursuit is the Gollum. Racked with desire to regain the ring, which he also loathes, the Gollum has made his hatred of thief Baggins as much Frodo's legacy as Bilbo has made the ring itself. Tolkien's narrative, often tedious and weary, is intricate in texture. Frodo's quest is the most colorful and vital strand. Unless he succeeds, nothing else—the throne of Gondor, the beer of Bree, the staff of Gandalf, the posies of Lothlorien— much matters. If he fails, nothing else much matters either. Tolkien's prose is strong and sure when he talks about things. W h e n he talks about people, he lapses into catch phrases and stock invocations. Terrible errors of taste, such as "And lo and behold!," are infrequent. More accurately, the style as a whole is inorganic. Its seeming eloquence is the sheen of deceptive facility. T h e ambitious Tolkien, however, tries a handful of narrative devices. Poetry summarizes action and compresses mood and character. Indeed, characters even seek to be the subject of a song. [36]

The Lord of the Rings, lacking a complete eschatology, makes poetry a version of the afterlife. A competent technician, if an erratic poet, Tolkien gives each race an apt prosody. The elves have complex metrical patterns, the dwarfs martial iambic tetrameters. Scimitar-swinging Ores only grumble, swear, and fight in harsh and prosy gutturals. While no Freudian, Tolkien also uses dreams, the curse of seeing deep into ourselves, and visions, the gift of seeing far into time and space. Yet action perpetually controls character. Frodo's dreams are no shaft into the lavish chaos of the unconscious, but prophecies of the future, which time will clarify, or pictures of the present, which reason will unravel. The Lord of the Rings begins, as it ends, in Hobbitown. The circle symbolizes the circle of time itself. As he writes, Tolkien expands his scene to include the whole panorama of Middle Earth. Creating suspense, he makes each book stop on an apparent disaster, which the next book resolves, until the final happiness of Book VI. Patterns of imagery, natural and numerical, carefully unify the whole. For example, three and its multiples signify potential death, but actual rebirth. Although Frodo suffers three punishing wounds, they also prepare himself for his sainthood. Fire symbolizes energy. The good, like Gandalf, use it for light, a sign of wisdom and of holiness, and for self-defense. The evil, like Sauron, use fire for burning and for offense. On September 22, 3001 Third Age, Bilbo gives a party to celebrate his 111th birthday (another number of renewal) and Frodo's 33d birthday, a hobbit's coming-of-age. Using the ring to disappear, Bilbo then wanders off to Elrond's hall, Rivendell, to muse, to write, and to play with the elves. Before he leaves, he unwillingly, but freely, gives the ring to Frodo. For the next seventeen years the Shire goes about its sleepy business. [37]

But Gandalf and Aragorn are also doing their far more dangerous business: tracking down Gollum, learning about the ring, watching Sauron, protecting the helpless Shire. In 3018, a long-gathering storm, a favorite Tolkien image, signifying natural chaos before peace, finally breaks. On September 23, Frodo, now alert to his role of ring-bearer, leaves his home, Bag End. He takes with him the first member of the Fellowship of the Ring, his servant Sam. Morally correct but emotionally obsequious, Sam personifies obedience, sacrifice, and love. A faithful Peter to Frodo's Christ, he is solid and whole. Sufficiently strong to survive the Third Age, he helps to govern the Fourth. Frodo's journey has four stages. Each mingles good and bad, aid and discomfort. The first ends in Rivendell. On the way, when a Black Rider stabs him in the shoulder, on October 6, Frodo reaps the first part of his harvest of pain. However, he also collects three more fellows: Merry, Pippin, and the trusty Aragorn. The second stage begins on December 25, a date the meaning of which most Westerners might know. At Rivendell, the free and the good have reasoned together. After Frodo has freely, as paradoxically he must, assumed the burden of the ring, still other companions join him. Including Boromir, heir to the Steward of Gondor; Legolas, a tall, attractive elf; Gimli, a brave, stubborn dwarf; and Gandalf, the Fellowship numbers nine. So do the opposing Ringwraiths. During the second period, the Company loses Gandalf, but it gains the friendship of the High Elves in golden Lothlorien, an Eden with a shrewder Eve, Queen Galadriel. She gives Frodo the dubious honor of his one glimpse of Sauron. In a magic basin, the hobbit sees the Eye of Evil, the pupil a black slit, gazing into nothing. The breaking of the Fellowship, before the Falls of Rauros, an ironic name, ends this stage of the quest. Boromir, confusing [38]

means and ends, lusting for the ring, tries to snatch it away from Frodo. He fails. Given, like Roland, to self-love and tardy horn-blowing, he redeems himself in death, trying to defend Merry and Pippin from a horde of Ores. The Ores kidnap the little hobbits anyway. As Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas begin their hot pursuit, Frodo and the faithful Sam slip off to attempt the third phase of the terrible journey to Mt. Doom. Tolkien must now divide his attention. West of the Great River Anduin, the forces of good, the restored Gandalf their general, fight the pitched battles of Helm's Deep, Isengard, and Gondor. They are won, not only by arms, but by sheer physical courage and resolute will. East of the Great River Anduin, Gollum joins Frodo and Sam. On their quest, they must strip, like lesser Lears upon the heath, to their essential selves. Symbolically they discard their clothing. They must also literally crawl starving through cesspools, graveyards, and slag heaps, all homes of the dead. The journey to Mordor is perhaps Tolkien's single best extended work. His prose, precise and plain, is free of troubling anachronisms. His capacity for characterization, if never strong, grows immeasurably. A weeping Sam is cloying, but the sensible Sam, the enduring Sam, who gives Frodo back the ring, is an appealing figure. Frodo, caught in the burning circle of the ring, becomes a stronger and stronger symbol of torment. The Gollum, wanting the ring, almost loving Frodo, fearing Mordor, almost obeying Frodo, is a skillful enough study in psychic damage. Less fortunately, Tolkien uses a crude animal imagery to show the Gollum's conflict. Approaching the good, he looks like an old hobbit. Returning to malice, he resembles a spider, a direful metaphor in Tolkien's moral lexicon. Good luck, like the coming of Faramir, Boromir's good brother; acts of mercy, like permitting the Gollum to live; and the self-destructive [39]

nature of evil are the weapons of the ring-bearer. A distracted Sauron misses Frodo and Sam's entrance into Mordor. March 25, a single day, is the last stage of the quest. Three months after the Fellowship has left Rivendell, 7000 of the warrior good, hideously surrounded, stand before Mordor on the Battle Plain of Dagorlad. Frodo and Sam, struggling to transcend their essential selves, crawl into Mt. Doom. There Frodo breaks. Putting on the ring, he refuses to fulfill the quest. However, the investment in the good is suddenly returned. T h e Gollum appears to attack the crazed Frodo. Biting off a hobbit finger, Gollum reclaims the ring. As Isildur once mutilated Sauron to let evil linger on, Gollum mutilates Frodo to preserve unwittingly the good. For, dancing in his triumph, Gollum falls into the flames. Sauron and his Mordor, in a technicolor earthquake, break into awful pieces. Hand in hand on a little hill, the now serene Frodo and the joyous Sam stand by for a rescue by the eagles. Using biblical cadences and greeting-card diction, Tolkien concludes his narrative. After some mopping up operations, which include the liberation of the Shire, fallen victim to an industrial economy and a totalitarian government, the good preserve the best of the past, soothe the present, and prepare for the future. All find their proper places: kings their kingdoms; gardeners their gardens; Sams their Rosie Cottens. Those from the most mysterious places and those who have endured the most mysterious suffering ride to the Grev Havens to sail. to the Uttermost West. Either born, like Gandalf, out of history in order to enter it, or born, like Frodo, in history in order to surpass it, they all, having served history, are now released from its toil. Gravely, Arwen sacrifices her place in the Uttermost West to stay with Aragorn. Frodo, who has sacrificed his place in the Shire, accepts it. Though the lands the boats of [40]

Cirdan seek are heathen in name, they signify the Christian concept of redemption. After such visions, after such frights, the poetry Tolkien has published apart from his prose is mildness itself. In form and content it combines the lesser virtues of an Old Father Goose and a pale and chaste Algernon Charles Swinburne. Usually narratives, the poems are about courage and cowardice, friendship and isolation, conflict of obligations, and the supernatural and the natural. Delighting in strange words and in metrical play, Tolkien also likes to unify the different. He will marry rhythmic and alliterative verse, or, as he does in "Imram," Christian and pagan materials. "Imram" (1955) is a dialogue between a dying saint and a young man seeking wisdom. The manipulation of the hackneyed symbols of cloud, mountain, tree, and star; plastic religiosity; and wistful romanticism are its most notable features. In feeling, the poetry, even the long neo-Arthurian "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (1945), is usually impersonal. But now and then, particularly in poems with dark themes or squishy settings, like Poem 9 in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, an authentic response seeps through. The effect is like biting into quinine beneath spun sugar icing. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil itself, ostensibly a collection of sixteen poems from The Red Book of Westmarch, is at best quaint. Since most of the poems are of Shire origin, since hobbits lack elvish skill at verse, Tolkien has built in an excuse for their pervasive ickiness. They are about Tom Bombadil, both pagan deity and English squire; his consort, the river-lady Goldberry; various quests; animals; and flowers. Imagery is conventional and boring. Nearly all fey creatures wear jewels; nearly all earthbound men drink beer. T o execute his formal schemes, Tolkien wrenches syntax, lets feminine endings deflate lines, and makes forced, degenerate rhymes. "Dearer-sneerer" [41]

and "awallowing-aswallowing" are typical. Coyness plasters a few frail attempts at complexity. "Princess Mee," a lovely little thing, suffers from a sense of the divided self. Gazing at her reflection in her very own starlit dancing pool, she finds only "Princess Shee." Still Tolkien, despite all this, is obviously popular. In 1967 he led the New York Times Book Review paperback best-seller list for months. Paper editions, cheap and easily distributed, make writers as accessible as movie stars. Part of Tolkien's recent fame has been yet another sign of America's efficient ability to light the fires of Instant Stardom. In 1967 the Tolkien Journal, the house organ of the Tolkien Society of America, founded by an industrious high school boy, also reported that a member of the Green Berets had translated The Lord of the Rings into Vietnamese. Perhaps something was lost in translation, because a South Vietnamese division immediately adopted the Eye of Sauron, the great symbol of evil, as its emblem. Tolkien's massive and sincere narrative also obviously pleases more than the usual human delight in self-sufficient fictive worlds. As he entertains, he also restores confidence. If we are measly Jacks, he gives us giant killers. More than that, he offers simple, vivid things and people just to talk about. A kindly pediatrician to the soul, he furnishes a hole for private escape and the stuff of public gossip. T o scholars, who debate whether to teach The Lord of the Rings in Medieval or Contemporary Literature classes, who construe Middle Earth's ethical patterns, Tolkien presents a very special bonus. As he relaxes, he also satisfies even the most snobbish need to work with an able man with really impeccable credentials. A brilliant young English critic and historian has said that the appeal of Tolkien is far more explicable in England than in America. The English have a strained capacity for suppressed [42]

unhappiness. Their marvelous tradition of literary fantasy helps show their need for refuge. Some writers, like Rudyard Kipling, had wretched youths. When they grew up, they gave their own children fantasy as a shield against misery. Other writers, like Lewis Carroll, had wretched adult experiences. They wrote fantasy in order to recapture their more blissful youth. Tolkien, more like Kipling than Carroll, also comforts specific English discomforts. The hobbit yearning for good food is very real to anyone who lived in Great Britain during rationing. However, the appeal of Tolkien to Americans is explicable. It is simply disquieting. For reading Tolkien is not like reading real books, like Alice in Wonderland or Finnegans Wake, or real myths, like a collection of Norse tales, which Tolkien has adapted, or real romances, like Sir Gawatn and the Green Knight, which Tolkien has edited, or real epics, like Beowulf, which Tolkien has so brilliantly analyzed. For Tolkien is bogus: bogus, prolix, and sentimental. His popularization of the past is a comic strip for grown-ups. The Lord of the Rings is almost as colorful and easy as Captain Marvel. That easiness is perhaps the source of Tolkien's appeal. His intellectual, emotional, and imaginative energies are timid and jejune. Yet to those who have puzzled over the ambiguous texts of twentieth-century literature in the classroom, he offers a digest of modern despair: The Waste Land, with notes, without tears. T o those who pride themselves on cynicism, an adolescent failure, he spews forth a reductive, yet redemptive, allegory of the human urge to fail. For those who actually long for security, he previews a solid moral and emotional structure. His authoritarianism is small price for the comfort of the commands: Love thy Aragorn; fear the Nazgul. American presidential politics often give evidence of the selfrighteous longing for a velvet totalitarianism which curls in the [43]

American character. In this, Americans are no different from many people. T h e y are simply more self-deceptive. Moreover, the contemporary American political myth of the cold war has clamped over the public consciousness a sense of cosmic conspiracy. W e , the besieged, defend virtue against Them, the dark warriors in the East. Unfortunately, the white knights of television, galloping across suburban kitchens, help to make fantasy seem as simple as ultimate political truths. Perhaps Tolkien the patriarch, stern enough to give us rules, nice enough to make them bromides, satisfies some inarticulate sense of what both the Primary World of politics and morality and the Secondary World of the imagination are really all about. Oddly, though Tolkien, Hermann Hesse, and William Golding are three very different writers, they have two suggestive common denominators. First, they caused student literary fads, which the adult world then acclaimed. Next, they offered the seductive charm of moral didacticism, cloaked in remote and exotic settings. Tolkien offers as credible a vision of choral harmony among the single person, the state, nature, the supernatural, and guardian spirits. He has a fine talent for wishful thinking. However, one of the joys of both thinking and reading is freedom. T o l kien ought to be what he wants to be. His audience is free to be what it wants to be. Yet readers might cultivate some critical awareness. If they do, they might find, not only midnight rides and unfurled banners, but weak prose and pernicious thought. T h e y might begin by asking just one simple question. What does it mean that Tolkien so blandly, so complacently, so consistently, uses the symbol of light and of white to signify the good and the symbol of dark and of black to signify evil? He is, of course, following an enormously complex literary tradition. N o arbitrary decision, but the physical heritage of Northern [44]

and Western Europe has shaped that tradition. Men, dependent upon the day, nervous of the night, necessarily welcomed sunrise and mourned sunset. Today, however, we do have electric lights. Our writers must, if they are honest, confront the appalling moral, political, and human devastation wrought because Western culture so happily, so stupidly, dressed its Gandalfs in white robes and put its Sarumans in black towers. Once men thought alchemy might transform base metals into gold. Tolkien takes both gold and base metals to make his Middle Earth. Like all alchemists, he appeals to us. His very ambition is attractive. Like all alchemists, he has his deceptive triumphs. But history has made alchemy remote. Science has fulfilled its more marvelous predictions. One might wish that history will make much of Tolkien remote. W e need genuine myth and rich fantasy to minister to the profound needs he now is thought to gratify. Frodo lives, on borrowed time.

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SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P R I N C I P A L W O R K S OF J . R. R. T O L K I E N

A Middle English Vocabulary: Designed for Use with Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1922. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. with E. V. Gordon. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1925, reprinted with corrections, 1930. "Ancrene Wisse and Halt Meidhad," Essays and Studies, X I V (1929), 104-26. "Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale," in Transactions of the Philological Society, 1934. London, David Nutt, 1934, pp. 1-70. "Beovmlf: The Monsters and the Critics," Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII (1936), 245-95. Reprinted in Lewis E. Nicholson, An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Notre Dame, Notre Dame Univerity Press, 1963. Songs for the Philologists. With E. V. Gordon and others. London, Privately printed in the Department of English at University College, 1936. The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1937; Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1938; New York, Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965, rev. ed., 1966. "Leaf by Niggle," Dublin Review, CCXVI, No. 432 (January, 1945), 46-61. "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun," Welsh Review, IV, No. 4 (December, 1945), 254-66. "On Fairy-Stories," Andrew Lang Lecture, University of St. Andrews, 1938, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Oxford, University Press, 1947. Quoted at length in Horn Book, X X X I X , No. J (October, 1963), 457. Farmer Giles of Ham. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1949; Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1950. "Prefatory Remarks," Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment. 2d and rev. ed., trans, by John R. Clark Hall, rev. with notes and introduction by C. L. Wrenn. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1950. "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son," Essays and Studies, n.s., Vol. VII (1953). [46]

"Middle English «Losenger» : Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry," Essais de Philologie Moderne (Liege, 1951 ). Paris, Société d'édition «Les Belles Lettres», 195J, pp. 6J-76. The Lord of the Rings. 3 vols. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1954-55; Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1954-56; New York, Ace Books, unauthorized edition, 1965; New York, Ballantine Books, rev. ed. with Special Foreword by author, 1965. "Imram," Time and Tide, XXXVI, No. 49 (December 3, 1955), 1561. Adventures of Tom Bombadil. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1962; Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1963. Editor. Ancrene Wisse: English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Introduction by N. R. Ker. London, Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1962. "English and Welsh," in Angles and Britons: O'Donnell Lectures. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1963, pp. 1-41. Tree and Leaf. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1964; Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1965. (Reprint of "Leaf by Niggle" and "On Fairy-Stories.") Collaborator. The Jerusalem Bible. Ed. Alexander Jones. Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday & Co., 1966. The Tolkien Reader. New York, Ballantine Books, 1966. The Road Goes On Forever: A Song Cycle. Music by Donald Swann. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1967. "Smith of Wootton Major," Redbook, CXXX, No. 2 (December, 1967), 58-61. Published also in book form. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1967. Poems and Songs of Middle Earth. With William Elvin and Donald Swann. Caedmon Records, 1968. CRITICAL WORKS AND

COMMENTARY

Useful collections of essays are Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, Tolkien and the Critics (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), and "The Tolkien Papers: Mankato Studies in English, No. 2," Mankato State College Studies, Vol. II, No. 1 (February, 1961). The Tolkien Journal, 111, No. 1 (1967), 12-13, lists little magazines devoted to Tolkien and his work.

NOTE:

Auden, W . H. "At the End of the Quest, Victory," New York Sunday Times Book Review (January 22, 1956), p. 5. Davis, Norman, and C. L. Wrenn, eds. English and Medieval [47]

Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1962. Ellmann, Mary. "Growing Up Hobbitic," New American Review, No. 2. New York and Toronto, New American Library, 1968, pp. 217-29. Hodgart, Matthew. "Kicking the Hobbit," New York Review of Books, VIII, No. 8 (May 4,1967), 10-11. Lewis, C. S. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Ed. with a Memoir by W. H. Lewis. London, Geoffrey Bles, Ltd., 1966. Parker, Douglass. "Hwaet, We Holbytla," Hudson Review, IX, No. 4 (Winter, 1956-57), 598-609. Ready, William. The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry. Chicago, Henry Regnery Co., 1968. Roberts, Mark. "Adventure in English," Essays in Criticism, VI, No. 4 (October, 1956), 450-59. Wain, John. Sprightly Running. London, Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1962. Wilson, Edmund. "Oo, Those Awful Ores!," Nation, CLXXXII, No. 15 (April 14, 1956), 112-14.

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