My principal intention in this book is to tackle the first question, and explore the nature of Tolkien’s books and their success. However, I think I can also explain, by the same token, why his critics have failed so miserably to do so. I have not taken on The Silmarillion here, by the way. The reason is simple: my priority is Tolkien’s meaning and impact in the contemporary world, and there is no doubting that that stems almost entirely from The Lord of the Rings and, as a kind of introduction, The Hobbit. These are his works to which the public has responded, and still does.
My goal means addressing contemporary conditions – cultural, social and political – and readers; and, as far as seems relevant, Tolkien’s own character and intentions. But I try to do so while respecting the books’ internal integrity; that is, without the single-minded reductionism that sees everything in such a story as ‘representing’ something else, in line with a predetermined interpretive program around class, or gender, or the unconscious.
The kind of literature which might be said to describe an important part of Tolkien’s work, fairy-tales, has been subjected to Freudian, feminist, structuralist, Jungian, anthroposophical and Marxist interpretations in just this way. And they have frequently resulted in some real insights. But too often, the price is a depressing nothing-buttery. Every other dimension of the story is ignored, while the meaning of the whole is tacitly assumed to be exhausted. The spirit-to-letter ratio of these accounts is so low that unlike the stories themselves, they are difficult and dispiriting to read. And behind it all lies a woeful blindness to the power, here and now, of the myths and folk– and fairy-tales themselves.
One tiny example, out of a multitude: it has been asserted (with a degree of seriousness which is hard to determine) that The Hobbit represents an alliance between the lower-middle class (Bilbo) and skilled workers, especially working-class miners (the dwarves), in order to overcome a parasitic capitalist exploiter who ‘lives off the hard work of small people and accumulates wealth without being able to appreciate its value’ (the dragon). This is genuinely interesting, as well as enjoyable; but it says at least as much about Marxism as a fairy-tale as it does about The Hobbit, and hardly exhausts either.
I have tried hard to avoid such a practice. It seems to me that every meaningful human discourse has a subjective side as well as an objective one. Relations between the two are complex – for example, the ‘inside’ can be larger than the ‘outside’ – and neither (usually the former) can be reduced to or derived from the other without doing irreparable harm to the whole.
For example, seen from the outside, Tolkien’s Middle-earth derives from the pagan Norse world-view, plus his knowledge and love of Anglo-Saxon history (Rohan) and medievalism (Gondor), and of trees (all the various forests). One can add to this Tolkien’s memories of pre-war rural middle England (the Shire), and of the trenches of World War I, and so on. The result is a complex but ultimately tightly determined and defined place. But for the sympathetic reader, it is not like that at all. He or she stands in an endless dark, damp forest with the light failing; or in a village pub in multiracial company which ranges from the oddly familiar to the distinctly odd; or at the foot of mountains which rear ever higher until stretching out of sight in the unguessable distance. It is effectively unbounded, either in extent or variety.
Any analysis which recognizes only the first world as important, and dismisses or belittles the second, commits the violence of reductionism. And there is another reason for caution. That is Tolkien’s own warning against an allegorical or purely topical reading of his story, in which elements receive a literal or one-to-one interpretation. As he explains in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.’ Quite so; not only is allegory unattractively didactic (at best) and bullying (at worst), but Tolkien is trying here to protect what he had worked so hard to create, namely a book that is non-allegorical. And wisely so, as that is one of the reasons it has lasted, and continues to find new generations of readers with their own concerns. For as Tolkien also noted, ‘That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is.’ My book precisely concerns the applicability of his work; it is not really about how it came to be written, or about the man who wrote it.
In any case, I have too much respect for Tolkien’s work, in all its richness, to sacrifice it on the altar of theory. And I have benefitted from some excellent warnings whenever tempted. There is Gandalf’s, of course: ‘he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.’ But also T. A. Shippey’s: ‘Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it.’ This seems to me to put the matter perfectly, along with the shrewd words of Max Luthi: ‘Everything external, not just in literature but also in reality, can be or become a symbol. It is, however, still itself as well, not only in reality but also in literature.’
So The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are first and foremost, as Tolkien claimed, stories; and ones written by a master story-teller. This is already important for understanding both Tolkien’s popular success and his critical slating. Philip Pullman, upon winning the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in July 1996, put it perfectly: ‘in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no-one expects literary craftsmanship.’ Or children’s books, which The Lord of the Rings is frequently misrepresented as being; or fairy-tales, one of its principal inspirations. ‘But,’ Pullman continued, ‘stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, “events never grow stale.” There’s more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy.’ Most present-day writers, however, are highly anxious to be seen as Grown-Ups. They therefore ‘take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.’ Thus the hunger for stories that’s there in young and adult alike is unmet, and goes by default to Disney, Hollywood and schlock TV, who are happy to oblige.
As stories, Tolkien’s language and style are therefore important. But these have already been tackled in a way I could not better. And imponderables abound. The single greatest obstacle to appreciating Tolkien’s work is sheer literary snobbery. But almost equally important is a capacity and liking for imagination, as opposed to a doctrinaire cast of mind. (It may be something like a musical sense.)
Personally, like Hugh Brogan, I find Tolkien’s writing ‘capable of humour, irony, tragedy, and fast narrative, with only occasional lapses into cardboard grandiloquence.’ But even if everyone else agreed, this alone would not suffice to explain his appeal. To do so we must turn to their content, and ask: why these particular and apparently rather peculiar stories? For example, how many other world bestsellers are almost entirely devoid of sex? (Except possibly the Bible – a debatable point.) Here, of course, some theory becomes indispensable. So my critical practice, however unsatisfactory it may be (in theory), is to bounce back and forth between the inside and outside of Middle-earth, looking for relations, connections and patterns. In so doing, I have used anything that seems to help, including my own personal and ‘subjective’ reactions.
My chief concern, as I’ve said,