Chapter VI takes up some of the reasons for this sadness, and considers what some of Tolkien’s minor works tell us (and for all his dislike of biography, were intended to tell us) about his inner life. A feature of this chapter is the claim that at least two of his minor published works, ‘Leaf by Niggle’ and Smith of Wootton Major, are in their different ways ‘autobiographical allegories’. The case may seem a hard one to make, since Tolkien’s expressed disapproval of allegories is well-known. I hope nevertheless to have made it, even within Tolkien’s own deliberately narrow definition of allegory. My view is that he felt allegory had its place, and its rules, and that his scorn was reserved for those who insisted on using it and detecting it outside that place. In between my readings of those two works, one early, one late, I consider the small corpus of poems which Tolkien published, and sometimes republished, in his own lifetime, relating them in some cases to his personal myth of ‘the Lost Road’, expressed in two separate abortive attempts to write another major fiction. Besides The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s only other entirely successful narrative published in his own lifetime was the unusually light-hearted novella Farmer Giles of Ham. I attempt further to fit this, along with two other poetic narratives, into Tolkien’s again idiosyncratic but well-informed view of literary history.
In the Afterword, finally, I take up once more the criticisms of Tolkien which underlie the outrage mentioned at the start of this Foreword. It is to a large extent a guessing-game. Very few of Tolkien’s critics (there are some honourable exceptions) have been prepared to put their dislike into an organized shape which can be debated; one of the most vehement indeed confessed to me, in private, in the lift taking us out of BBC House after a radio debate, that he had never actually read The Lord of the Rings which he had just been attacking. I find myself accordingly sometimes making the case against so that I can make the case for, not an ideal procedure. Still, the repeatedly expressed dislike of an influential and easily-identifiable section of the literary world is part of the phenomenon. Very probably the reason for the dislike has a good deal to do with the reasons for the success. Tolkien has challenged the very authority of the literati, and this is never forgiven.
The obverse of this exercise is to look in slightly more detail at Tolkien’s emulators. We may not be sure exactly what people have liked in Tolkien’s work, but we can see what writers have tried to imitate, as also what they have shied away from. Some of them, of course, may have superseded him, used his work only as a starting-point for quite different directions, even in some respects outdone him. It could be said that this latter is one of the best things that can happen to an innovative writer: Tolkien indeed wrote (see Letters, p. 145) that he had hoped once that his story-cycles would ‘yet leave scope for other minds and hands’. He then immediately and self-deprecatingly dismissed his hope as ‘Absurd’ (this was in 1951, The Lord of the Rings still unpublished).
However, similar results have been achieved by other philologist-creators. Lönnrot’s Kalevala is now viewed with suspicion by scholars, because Lönnrot, like Walter Scott with the Border Ballads, did not just collect and transcribe, but wrote, rewrote and interpolated, so that you cannot tell what is by him and what is ‘authentic’. Just the same, the date of publication of the Kalevala remains a national holiday in Finland, and the work has become a cornerstone of national culture. Very similar accusations of interference and meddling have been made about the Grimms and their Fairy-Tales; but for two centuries the tales have enriched not just national but international culture, and delighted hundreds of millions of child and adult readers. Nikolai Grundtvig, the Dane, insisted on the concept of levende ord, ‘the living word’. It is not enough for the philologist, the ‘word-lover’, to be scholarly. The scholar also has to transmit his results into the life and speech and imagination of the greater world.
In 1951 Tolkien, like Théoden King when we first meet him, can have had little hope of such success. By his death-day, however, he could well have said that, like Théoden, when he went to join his (philological) fathers, ‘even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed’. Tolkien left a legacy as rich as any of his predecessors’.
THE HOBBIT: RE-INVENTING MIDDLE-EARTH
A moment of inspiration?
The story of how J.R.R. Tolkien came to be launched on his career, not as a writer of fiction – this had begun many years before – but as a writer of published fiction, is a familiar one. According to Tolkien’s own account, he was sitting one day, after he had become Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford, in his home in Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate papers: something, one should note, which was no part of his university duties, but which many academics then undertook as a summer-time extra to supplement their incomes. A boring job, then, engaging Tolkien’s intellect at well below its top level, but at the same time one which in decency to the candidates had to be done conscientiously, with full alertness: academic piece-work, but piece-work which, unlike sewing or standing on a production line, gave no opportunity for the mind to wander. In this circumstance (the strain of which only those who have marked, say, five hundred handwritten scripts on the same subject will fully appreciate) Tolkien turned over a page to find that a candidate:
had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.
(Biography, p. 172; see also Letters, p. 215)
Beginning it was, but it was also for Tolkien, as for Bilbo finding the ring on the tunnel-floor in chapter 5 of The Hobbit, ‘a turning-point in his career’. We know now that Middle-earth, in a sense, already existed in Tolkien’s mind, for since at least 1914 he had been writing the elvish and human legends which would appear, many years later and after his death, as the published Silmarillion and Book of Lost Tales. But Middle-earth would never have caught the public attention without hobbits.
So, what are hobbits? And how did Tolkien come to write the seminal sentence in that momentary gap when an alert concentration on tedium suddenly slackened, and allowed, one might imagine, something long repressed or long incubating to break free? Where did hobbits come from, as an idea?
To this last question there are several answers, of increasing levels of interest and complexity. Perhaps the simplest and least satisfying one is gained by looking the word ‘hobbit’ up in the dictionary – specifically, in the Oxford English Dictionary, a gigantic collective project more than a century old, which Tolkien had himself worked for and contributed to in his youth, but which he perhaps as a result continually disagreed with and even went out of his way (in Farmer Giles of Ham) to mock. The second edition of the OED, published in 1989, says only, ‘In the tales of J.R.R. Tolkien…one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name’ (etc.), which gets us no further. However Robert Burchfield, former chief editor of the OED, reported with some pride in the Times for 31st May 1979 that hobbits had at last been run to earth. The word did exist before Tolkien. It is found, once, in a publication called The Denham Tracts, a series of pamphlets and jottings on folklore collected by Michael Denham, a Yorkshire tradesman, in the 1840s and 1850s, and re-edited by James Hardy for the Folklore Society in the 1890s. ‘Hobbits’ appear in Volume 2 (1895). There they come, by my count, 154th in a list of 197 kinds of supernatural creature which includes, with a certain amount of repetition, barguests, breaknecks, hobhoulards, melch-dicks, tutgots, swaithes, cauld-lads, lubberkins, mawkins, nick-nevins, and much, much else, along with the relatively routine boggarts, hob-thrusts, hobgoblins, and so on. No further mention is made of hobbits, and Hardy’s index says of them, as of almost all the items in the list, only ‘A class of spirits’. Tolkien’s hobbits, of course, are anything but ‘spirits’. They are