Tree by Tolkien (3 page)

This brings us back to the assertion in the essay on fairy stories, that it is not possible to preserve an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason 'without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual)'. That is fine; but what offensive action? As far as I can see, Tolkien nowhere suggests an answer to this problem. His own 'defensive action' was justifiable enough if we accept Connolly's view that the artist's business is to produce a masterpiece. For all its sentimentality and its flaws,
The Lord of the Rings
is a masterpiece. Whether it has any practical significance for the present discussion of the artist and society is a different matter.

It seems to me that if we reject Edmund Wilson's view that Tolkien's work is an overgrown children's story of no significance, and accept that it is a part of the great European romantic tradition, attacking the same problems as the tales of Hoffmann, Goethe's
Faust
, De L'Isle Adam's
Axel
, Hesse's
Steppenwolf
, Eliot's
Waste Land
, then we must admit that Tolkien has weakened his own case by sticking too close to fairy tale traditions. I believe that
The Lord of the Rings
is a significant work of twentieth century literature, as significant as
Remembrance of Things Past
or
The Waste Land.
Its extraordinarily wide appeal—on American campuses, for example—is not due to purely 'escapist' elements. It strikes a chord, as
The Waste Land
did in the twenties, because its symbols constitute a kind of
exploration
of the real world. We still live under a threat of a great oppressive evil; in the west, we identify it with communism; in Russia and China, they identify it with capitalist imperialism; the hydrogen bomb serves as a symbol for both sides. But all imaginative people feel that there are solutions that no politician is far-sighted enough to grasp. Our hope for the future lies in the capacity of the human imagination to reach beyond the present, in our capacity to glimpse vistas of meaning that stretch out endlessly around us. Tolkien's work performs the important function of stimulating this wild, Chestertonian hope for the future. For all I know, Tolkien may think of himself as a pessimist, in the strictly historical sense; i.e. he may see no practical hope for our civilisation. Many intelligent men of his generation feel the same; T. S. Eliot did; the historian A. L. Rowse does; and Arnold Toynbee once told me that he was glad that he was near the end of his life instead of the beginning, because the next few decades were going to be hell for everybody. But in the fairy tale essay, Tolkien states that one of the most important functions of the fairy tale is to aid 'recovery'; that is to say, the work of fantastic imagination may be regarded as a kind of hospital, a place where exhausted people can regain strength and hope.

But, I repeat, Tolkien has, to some extent, undermined his own case: primarily, by sticking to the tradition of 'the little man'. Presumably there is a psychological reason for this: Tolkien feels that the quiet, modest chap, who is capable of heroic exertion under stress, is a more satisfactory hero than Siegfried or Lancelot. There may be some truth in this: but in the way it is worked out in
The Hobbit
and
Lord of the Rings
, it furnishes ammunition for critics who accuse him of sentimentality. In fact, I suspect that Tolkien's choice of the 'little' hero may have been largely a matter of pure chance. Tolkien's work 'snowballed'; it grew by accident. One can see this process clearly in the various books from
The Hobbit
to
Smith of Wootton Major
(1967).
The Hobbit
, like
Alice in Wonderland
, began as a story for children—literally a story told to his own children. Stylistically, it has a casual, careless air. 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit- hole, and that means comfort.' This style is very different from the slightly pretentious style of
Smith of Wootton Major
, which is a little too obviously biblical and poetical.

The story is also distinctly tailored for children. The comforts of the hobbit-hole are listed, and Tolkien enjoys talking about tea and toast and cakes in front of a roaring fire; it is very much a Walt Disney kind of world. When the dwarfs (or dwarves, as Tolkien prefers to call them, for some philological reason) start arriving one by one, until the house is overflowing with them, you can imagine the children squealing with laughter, and saying 'How many more?'

The basic Tolkien formula emerges very quickly. There is a certain realism in the descriptions of difficult journeys, reminiscent of
The Thirty Nine Steps
or
Kidnapped.
He likes describing travels through imaginary landscapes, and he produces the same blend of poetry and adventure and discomfort that one finds in Belloc. He has an excellent imagination for sudden adventures, like the scene with the trolls in the second chapter of
The Hobbit
, where the whole party nearly ends up being eaten by these hairy monsters. The grown up reader finds it exciting because the trolls are sufficiently like gangsters or Nazi thugs to produce the sense that we are talking about something real. Already, Tolkien is showing the ability to write on two levels—for children and adults—that makes
The Lord of the Rings
so successful. One might say that Tolkien had made the important discovery that there is really no need to assume that children and adults have different tastes; what will excite one will excite the other. Also worth noting is that the scene with the trolls is pulled back from the edge of being too 'scarey' for children with the comic climax out of 'The Brave Little Tailor'—the trolls being induced to fight among themselves by imagining that one of their number is playing tricks on the others.

Towards the end, the book begins to lose impetus as a 'fairy story'; the events slow down; the wait on the Lonely Mountain is altogether more 'real' than the earlier scenes. In the conventional fairy story, Bilbo Baggins would kill the dragon by a clever strategem; in
The Hobbit
, the dragon is killed almost arbitrarily 'off stage' by Bard, one of the lake men. The quarrel that then follows—between the dwarves, who have now regained their treasure, and the lake men—is again a realistic touch, indicating that Tolkien is beginning to enjoy the adventure—and battle—for its own sake. Any good literary psychologist might have prophesied that
The Hobbit
would be followed by a more carefully realistic novel. And from the unflagging invention of
The Hobbit
, he might also have guessed that it would be longer.

According to Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings
was begun shortly after publication of
The Hobbit
(1938-9). He says (in the preface to
Tree and Leaf
), 'At about the time we had reached Bree (i.e. Chapter 9), and I had then no more notion than (the Hobbits) had of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was.'
The Fellowship of the Ring
appeared in 1954, so its genesis was lengthy. This is apparent in the book itself, which gradually changes tone as it goes along. The opening, with the great birthday party, might have been written by Edith Nesbit, or even Enid Blyton; it is still very much in the spirit of a tale told for children, with all the effects children enjoy—descriptions of food and drink, and the rivalries among various relatives. One gets the feeling that Bilbo's sudden disappearance—as he slips on the ring—was not really a calculated part of the story; it is still in the jolly, slapstick spirit of the opening of
The Hobbit.
One can also understand perfectly why it was that Tolkien had no ideas about the development of the plot. His heroes were Setting Off, walking into the unknown, like Belloc or the heroes of Jeffrey Farnol, or Hermann Hesse. The spirit here is very close to Farnol; all the talk about the Brandywine river and the pleasant home comforts of Hobbits are all rather sentimental and 'twee'. Tolkien seems to have invented a kind of secular paradise, a lazy man's heaven, where people have nothing to do but smoke their pipes in the twilight and gossip about the courting couples and next year's May Fair. This paradisial quality is underlined by the information that Hobbits live a great deal longer than human beings—Bilbo is celebrating his eleventy-first birthday. I suspect that it may well be this element, specifically, that jarred on Edmund Wilson, who had harshly criticised T. S. Eliot for escapism. For there can be no doubt that Tolkien himself is emotionally committed to this fairy tale picture of peaceful rural life; it is not intended solely for the children. The 19th century romantics loved painting this kind of a picture—it can be found in Eichendorf, Morike, Gotthelf, Tieck, Jean Paul, and probably derives from Rousseau. The 'realist' objection to it is no longer a matter of 'escapism'. Johnson created a 'happy valley' in
Rasselas
, but the prince finds it boring, and wonders about the nature of the strange urge that makes him want to turn his back on this drowsy peace and seek out conflict and excitement. The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for
more
life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.) And yet one might say, in defense of Tolkien, that this evolutionary urge is quite clearly symbolised in the urge that all his characters experience—to seek adventure, to 'go on a journey'. And at the end of
The Return of the King
, Frodo does not 'live happy ever after' in Hobbit land, but has a further journey to make to 'the grey havens'. Besides, naive or not, this Rousseau-ist nostalgia
is
a part of the charm of the book. The rural comforts of the pub at Bree or Tom Bombadil's house provide the right contrast to the Barrow Downs with their walking dead. It is much the same combination as in the James Bond novels—plenty of the good things of life, with a sharp smell of danger in the air to freshen the appetite.

I imagine that a critic like Wilson would find the first book enjoyable enough, but might begin to grow restive at the Council of Elrond, where one feels that Tolkien is at last beginning to take himself seriously, interposing his own values and writing imitation Norse-saga. He seems to be facing his critics and asking, 'Wasn't their world preferable to ours?' And it is purely a matter of personal feeling. Like Auden, I do not mind sharing the fun, and agreeing for the sake of argument. Another reader may find the style of the speeches unbearably bogus: 'If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower, we have played another part. Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay. You know little of the lands beyond your bounds ...' and so on. It brings to mind a literary trick perfected by Chesterton, the understatement designed to make your hair tingle, fake simplicity, as in the last sentence of
The Man Who Was Thursday:
'There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.' One feels this sentence ought to begin 'And lo!' It led to all the careful heroic understatement of Bulldog Drummond, and the Saint's careless smile as he faces a dozen villainous Chinamen. Robert Graves reacted against it in his historical novels, particularly the Claudius books, making his characters speak in a blunt, colloquial style, to assure the reader that people in ancient Rome were very like people today. So when Tolkien makes his characters talk a language that might be called Heroicese, some readers feel distinctly 'turned off'. In fact, I found myself skipping these long speeches when I read the book to my children.

All the same, they do not occupy all that much space. The excitement of the book lies in the journey, and in Tolkien's invention. Like the painter Niggle, Tolkien is definitely a creator of scenery. This is all so strongly realised that one feels he ought to collaborate with an illustrator of genius, or perhaps a whole series of illustrators (as in some editions of Shakespeare that have painting by practically every major Victorian artist). If admirers of the book were asked to choose their favourite scenes for illustration, I imagine there would be hundreds, involving forests, rivers, waterfalls, mountains, nearly all of them with some great view into the distance. Wilson objects that none of the characters come alive, and this may be true; but the scenery makes up for it. Tolkien obviously has a very unusual faculty of visualising places: Helm's Deep, Lorien, the White Mountains, the Dead Marshes, the plain of Gorgoroth. Purely as an imaginary travel book,
The Lord of the Rings
is a very remarkable work.

Either you become involved in the fantasy or you don't. If everything in the book 'came off' as Tolkien intends it to, it would certainly be one of the masterpieces of all time. And on a first reading, most of it
does
come off, because the suspense keeps the reader moving so fast that he hardly notices when effects fall flat. On second reading, as he lingers over some of the excellent descriptions of forests and rivers, he begins to notice that Tom Bombadil is rather a bore (which one might expect of a man who goes around yelling 'Hey dol, merry dol' etc.), that Lothlorien and its elves are a sentimental daydream, that Minas Tirith and its brave fighting men would like an Errol Flynn movie. The core of the book remains Frodo's journey, and this continues to be exciting even after several readings. Edmund Wilson says: 'An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly.' Obviously, a reader's response is very much his own affair; but I cannot help feeling that Tolkien has somehow caught Wilson on the raw in some early page of the book, and that this has induced a mood of bad tempered, carping incredulity that has genuinely made him loathe the whole thing. Where literature is concerned, there
ought
to be some disputing about tastes; it is not enough to say that one man's meat is another man's poison. Some of Wilson's criticisms are valid; Mordor
is
disappointing after the build-up, and one feels that the non-appearance of Sauron is rather an evasion. One might add that Tolkien could have given the story greater depth by working out why the rings exercise such power and how Sauron's kingdom depends upon them. All great art is about the difference between illusion and reality, the everyday world as it appears to us and the reality that lies beneath. The philosopher starts from the sense that there is a lot of illusion about this world, and that his task is to probe to the reality. It is like a bullfighter's cloak that continually misleads us. Great art somehow produces a sense of glimpses into a deeper order of reality, what lies behind the cloak of the present, and beyond our general narrowness of consciousness. And in spite of all the criticisms, Tolkien's book obviously does this for a very large number of people. So it is hard to see how one can accept Wilson's description of the book as 'long winded volumes of balderdash' as a fair, objective assessment.