Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting – all this came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century.
Graves’s language is deliberately anachronistic: ‘platoon’, ‘billet’, ‘staff-tent’, ‘cosh’, are all modern words with immediate World War I meanings, while promenade is a soldiers’ euphemism. ‘Thanes’ on the other hand is completely archaic. Yet Graves’s point is precisely to deny any sense of anachronism. In its way – a much more complex and extensive way – The Hobbit carries out the same exercise. It takes its readers, even child readers, into a totally unfamiliar world, but then indicates to them that it is not totally unfamiliar, that they have a birth-right in it of their own. The book operates frequently through a clash of styles – linguistic, moral, behavioural – but ends by demonstrating unity and understanding on a level deeper than style.
With Middle-earth in imaginative existence, it might have been thought relatively easy to produce the sequel which Tolkien’s publisher immediately requested. Chapter II deals with Tolkien’s problems in creating The Lord of the Rings, both of invention and of organization, problems which have become much clearer with the publication of much of his early drafts. The drafts are almost dismaying to enthusiasts, for one of the things they reveal is that the neat thematic patterns recognized by so many critics (myself included) seem always to have been afterthoughts. When he started writing Tolkien had literally no idea at all of where he was going. Yet by the end not only are there unmistakably tight patterns of cultural contrast and cultural parallel, not only is the work marked by continuing deliberate dramatic irony, its entire structure depends on a chronology which Tolkien developed with great care, and printed in his Appendix B. I argue that this is one of the major differences between The Lord of the Rings and (as far as I can tell) all its emulators. No professional or commercially-oriented author would ever have tried anything as difficult or as demanding of its readers’ attention. Yet Tolkien, both in overall organization and in the organization of major sections like the chapter ‘The Council of Elrond’, successfully presented an immensely complex pattern of narrative ‘interlace’ – which works, like the best narrative strategies, even on those unconscious of it, but which nevertheless deserves proper appreciation.
Chapters III and IV take up the two most immediately contemporary themes in The Lord of the Rings – evil, and myth. As was again remarked above, it is possible to see Tolkien as one of a group of ‘traumatized authors’, all of them extremely influential (they mostly rank high in polls like Waterstone’s), all of them tending to write fantasy or fable. The group includes, besides the names mentioned on p. viii (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut), others such as Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, and Joseph Heller. Their experiences include being shot (Orwell and Lewis were both all but fatally wounded on the battlefield), and being bombed (Vonnegut was actually in Dresden the night it was destroyed). Ursula Le Guin, though without similarly direct experience of violence, is the daughter of Theodora Kroeber, who wrote three different accounts of ‘Ishi’, the last survivor of the eventually total elimination of the Yahi Indians of California. Most of these authors, then, had close or even direct first-hand experience of some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, horrors which did not and could not exist before it: the Somme, Guernica, Belsen, Dresden, industrialized warfare, genocide.
Their very different but related experiences left all of them, one may say, with an underlying problem. They were bone-deep convinced that they had come into contact with something irrevocably evil. They also – like Graves in the quotation above, but far more seriously – felt that the explanations for this which they were given by the official organs of their culture were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself. Orwell returned from Spain to find his own personal experience, including being shot, dismissed as a non-event, a political aberration. Vonnegut spent twenty years wondering how he could write about the central event of his life, the destruction of Dresden, in a way that could possibly be appreciated, while dealing with people who preferred to deny or ignore it. By contrast the dominant moral philosophers of these authors’ time and culture included people like Bertrand Russell (an author, like Tolkien, published by Stanley Unwin, and according to his 1967 festschrift, the ‘philosopher of the century’). But what could Russell tell Lewis, say, about what he had experienced in Flanders? In World War I Russell was a pacifist: an honourable stance, but for ‘traumatized authors’ not a helpful one, and as Russell came painfully to realize at the outbreak of World War II, in some circumstances an untenable one. One of the aspects of the trauma for the authors I have mentioned was that when it came to finding explanations, they were on their own.
All of them responded with highly individual images, and theories, of evil. I mention here only Le Guin’s ‘The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas’ (a civilization which rests on the torture of an idiot child); Orwell’s interrogator-figure O’Brien (the future as a boot stamping on a human face, for ever); White’s Book of Merlyn (humanity redefined not as homo sapiens but as homo ferox). Obviously the list could be extended. In Tolkien’s case I see his central image of evil as that of the ‘wraith’, an old word, but one which has been given terrible new force. Round this ambiguous image there revolves the concept of the Ring, which itself embodies two distinct and competing theses about the nature of evil, the one officially accepted (but hard to credit), the other threateningly heretical (but all too easy, in modern circumstances, to accept). Tolkien not only poses questions about evil, he also provides answers and solutions – one of the things which has made him unpopular with the professionally gloomy or fashionably nihilist. Nevertheless, although his concern and the concern of the authors I mention is not with the private and the personal (the themes of the ‘modernist’ novel), but with the public and the political, it should be obvious that to all but the sheltered classes of this century, the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political. It is those who turn away from that thought, who prefer to remain in what Graves called the ‘drawing-room’ areas of literary tradition, who are in ‘flight from reality’.
Chapter IV extends the discussion of evil to consideration, first, of the evident connections between The Lord of the Rings and modern history (Tolkien denied ‘allegory’ but conceded ‘applicability’); and second, of the attempt to reach out beyond contemporary relevance and beyond archaism to something which governs both – timelessness, ‘the mythic dimension’, and Tolkien’s own idiosyncratic but well-informed view of literary tradition. This chapter also takes up one of the major apparent paradoxes of The Lord of the Rings. It was written, we know, by a devout and believing Christian, and has been seen by many as a deeply religious work. Yet it contains almost no direct religious reference at all. Returning to the theme taken up in chapter I, I argue that The Lord of the Rings can be taken in itself as a myth, in the sense of a work of mediation, reconciling what appear to be incompatibles: heathen and Christian, escapism and reality, immediate victory and lasting defeat, lasting defeat and ultimate victory.
The last two chapters set Tolkien’s two major works in the context of his other continuing literary activities, both those published and. those unpublished in his own lifetime. A major aim of chapter V is to provide a guide to reading the published Silmarillion, a work which is quite outside any modern reading or writing conventions, but which has never received the credit normally extended to the ‘experimental’. However, it considers also the growth and development of the (non-italicized) ‘Silmarillion’, by which I mean the many parts of the overall legendarium eventually published in the twelve-volume sequence, The History of Middle-earth. Two dominant ideas in this chapter are, first, Tolkien’s own complex notion of literary ‘depth’, by which a work – like Lord Macaulay’s famous Lays of Ancient Rome – gains added charm from having a sense behind it of an older history now lost, as well as of a later and less truthful history now more familiar; and second, the deep sadness which infuses all ‘Silmarillion’ versions,