Tolkien furthermore had distinguished predecessors in the previous century. In the 1830s Elias Lonnrot, the Finn, put together what is now the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, from scattered songs and lays performed for him by many traditional singers; he ‘reconstructed’, in fact, the connected poem which he believed (probably wrongly) had once existed. At much the same time Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, in Germany, took up their enormous project of compiling at once a German grammar, a German dictionary, a German mythology, a German cycle of heroic legends, and of course a corpus of German fairy-tales – literary and linguistic study pursued without distinction, just as it should be. In Denmark Nikolai Grundtvig had set himself to re-creating Danish national identity, with passionate attention to the saga and epic literature of old, as to the ballad-literature of later periods, eventually brought together by his son Sven. But in England there had been no such nineteenth-century project. When Tolkien then said, as he did (see Letters, p. 144), that he had once hoped ‘to make a body of more or less connected legend’ which he could dedicate simply ‘to England; to my country’, he was not saying something completely unprecedented; though he did admit ruefully, in 1951, that his hopes had shrunk. Ten years later he might have felt much closer to success.
Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’ (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called ‘misologists’ – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:
grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order.
Behind this grievance and this anger was, of course, failure and defeat. It is now very hard to pursue a course of philology of the kind Tolkien would have approved in any British or American university. The misologists won, in the academic world; as did the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy.
But they lost outside the academic world. It is not long since I heard the commissioning editor of a major publishing house say, ‘Only fantasy is mass-market. Everything else is cult-fiction.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘That includes mainstream.’ He was defending his own buying strategy, and doubtless exaggerating, but there is a good deal of hard evidence to support him. Tolkien cried out to be heard, and we have still to find out what he was saying. There should be no doubt, though, that he found listeners, and that they found whatever he was saying worth their while.
The author of the century
After this preamble, one may now consider the claim, or claims, made in this book’s title. Can Tolkien be said to be ‘the author of the century’? Any such claim, ambitious as it is, could rest on three different bases. The first of them is simply democratic. That is what opinion polls, and sales figures, appear to show. The details are given immediately below, along with some consideration of how they should be interpreted, and how they have been; but one can say without qualification that a large number of readers, both in Britain and internationally, have agreed with the claim, and that they have done this furthermore without prompting or direction.
The second argument is generic. As the commissioning editor said, fantasy, especially heroic fantasy, is now a major commercial genre. It existed before Tolkien, as is again discussed below, and it is possible to say that it would have existed, and would have developed into the genre it has become, without the lead of The Lord of the Rings. This seems, however, rather doubtful. When it came out in 1954-5 The Lord of the Rings was quite clearly a sport, a mutation, lusus naturae, a one-item category on its own. One can only marvel, looking back, on the boldness and determination of Sir Stanley Unwin in publishing it at all – though significantly enough, he hedged his bet by entering into a profit-sharing agreement with Tolkien by which Tolkien got nothing till there were some profits to share, a matter clearly of some doubt at the time. Unwin had moreover continued to support and encourage his author over a seventeen-year gestation period which in the event delivered quite a different birth from what had been intended. It is true that he never had to pay over the large sums which James Joyce’s backers did, for instance, while Joyce was producing Ulysses, but then neither he nor Tolkien ever had the kind of support from a professional literary elite which Joyce and his benefactors could count on. However, while Ulysses has had few direct imitators, though many admirers, after The Lord of the Rings the heroic fantasy ‘trilogy’ became almost a standard literary form. Any bookshop in the English-speaking world will now have a section devoted to fantasy, and very few of the works in the section will be entirely without the mark of Tolkien – sometimes branded deep in style and layout, sometimes showing itself in unconscious assumptions about the nature and personnel of the authors’ invented fantasy worlds. The imitations, or emulations, naturally vary very widely in quality, but they all give pleasure to someone. One of the things that Tolkien did was to open up a new continent of imaginative space for many millions of readers, and hundreds of writers – though he himself would have said (see above) that it was an old continent which he was merely rediscovering. An acceptably philological way of putting it might be to say that Tolkien was the Chretien de Troyes of the twentieth century. Chretien, in the twelfth century, did not invent the Arthurian romance, which must have existed in some form before his time, but he showed what could be done with it; it is a genre whose potential has never been exhausted in the eight centuries since. In the same way, Tolkien did not invent heroic fantasy, but he showed what could be done with it; he established a genre whose durability we cannot estimate.
The third argument has to be qualitative. Popularity does not guarantee literary quality, as everybody knows, but it never comes about for no reason. Nor are those reasons always and necessarily feeble or meretricious ones, though there has long been a tendency among the literary and educational elite to think so. To give just one example, in my youth Charles Dickens was not regarded as a suitable author for those reading English Studies at university, because for all his commercial popularity (or perhaps because of his commercial popularity) he had been downgraded from being ‘a novelist’ to being ‘an entertainer’. The opinion was reversed as critics developed broader interests and better tools; but although critical interest has stretched to include Dickens, it has not for the most part stretched to include Tolkien, and is still uneasy