[Daily Tolkien/Lord of the Rings]Kicking the Hobbit

When it comes to the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is a truism that critics either love the books or hate them: Concerning Middle Earth, there is no middle ground. Such has been the case ever since Tolkien, an Oxford philologist, first published his epic novel The Lord of the Rings in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) between 1954 and 1955. In 1956 W.H. Auden wrote in The New York Times that, in some respects, Tolkien's story of the hobbit Frodo's quest to destroy the Dark Lord Sauron's "One Ring" of power surpassed even Milton's Paradise Lost. But that same year, Edmund Wilson, at the time America's pre-eminent man of letters, dismissed The Lord of the Rings as "balderdash" in a review for The Nation titled "Ooh, Those Awful Orcs." Wilson also swatted at Tolkien defenders like Auden and C.S. Lewis, observing that "certain people--especially, perhaps, in Britain--have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash."

Wilson's derisive review inaugurated an estimable tradition of hobbit bashing, but the enduring success of Tolkien's fiction has bedeviled his literary detractors. In 1961 Philip Toynbee wrote optimistically in The Observer of London that Tolkien's works had "passed into a merciful oblivion." Forty years later, The Lord of the Rings has sold 50 million copies in numerous languages, influencing everything from Star Wars to Led Zeppelin and single-handedly spawning the genre of fantasy fiction in the process. (Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit has sold almost as many copies.) These days, Tolkien fans are counting down the weeks until December, when The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of New Line Cinema's three projected Tolkien blockbusters, is to appear in theaters.

In Britain, Tolkien's literary merits have been the subject of very public debate. In 1996 a poll of 26,000 readers by Waterstone's bookstore crowned The Lord of the Rings "book of the century." Writing in W: The Waterstone's Magazine, Germaine Greer expressed her displeasure at the poll results.

In his curt introduction to last year's Chelsea House critical edition J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," Harold Bloom--the famously Falstaffian Yale English prof who has designated himself the gatekeeper of the Western literary canon--calls Tolkien's romance "inflated, over-written, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme." Bloom concludes: "Whether [Tolkien] is an author for the coming century seems to me open to some doubt."

Yet the very fact that Harold Bloom has edited two books of Tolkien criticism suggests that The Lord of the Rings may be on the verge of some form of canonicity. There's certainly enough Tolkien scholarship out there to sustain that. Tolkien's phalanx of adoring literary defenders insist that his story of hobbits and Middle Earth is an outstanding, original, and, above all, thoroughly modern literary work that has been unjustly maligned by snobbish literati.

Though still marginal in the academy, the Tolkienists may be gaining ground. In May Houghton Mifflin published J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, a comprehensive defense of Tolkien's fiction by St. Louis University professor T.A. Shippey. Shippey is a serious scholar, and in fact has held the very chair of English language and medieval literature at Leeds University that Tolkien vacated in 1925. Shippey's book was released a year ago in the United Kingdom and sparked some typically vituperative debate: One reviewer dismissed it as "a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic."

Earlier in the month, the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo--whose annual meeting is ground zero for professional medievalists--devoted three full sessions to Tolkien for the first time. Tolkien's scholarship has long appealed to medievalists; his famous 1936 essay "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics" was recently anointed by Harvard University poet (and Beowulf translator) Seamus Heaney as the "one publication that stands out" in Beowulf criticism. "People are starting to take Tolkien seriously," says University of Maryland English professor Verlyn Flieger, a presenter in Kalamazoo who has published two books on Tolkien. "He's been dead long enough."

In some ways, Tolkien scholarship resembles scholarship on James Joyce, say, or William Faulkner. Critics pore over Tolkien's correspondence and unpublished papers and sketches--many of which have been posthumously released by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien--for clues into the writer's mind and imagined universe. There are Tolkien biographies and bibliographies; there are Tolkien-studies organizations; there are university-based Tolkienists as well as numerous independent ones.

Not unlike what has happened with Joyce, the line between Tolkien scholarship and Tolkien fandom can get rather blurry. Consider Rice University English professor Jane Chance, who organized the Kalamazoo Tolkien panels, has published two books on Tolkien, and teaches "English 318: J.R.R. Tolkien." The syllabus sounds like many other college lit classes: "The course will trace the tension between the exile ... and the community, otherness and heroism, identity and marginalization, revenge and forgiveness."

But when I asked Chance what it's like teaching Tolkien, her response was startling: "I can only speak very personally, from having taught Shakespeare and Tolkien: I don't see any difference." Certainly, The Lord of the Rings is a rich and multilayered text; its author was a man of deep learning and imagination who created a mind-bogglingly vast and detailed fictional world, complete with its own history, civilizations, and languages. Touring Middle Earth with Tolkien can be like touring the Mediterranean with Herodotus. Still, when Tolkienists claim "author of the century" honors and swing for the fences by comparing their man to the Bard, it's small wonder that the likes of Harold Bloom are withholding their seal of approval.

Moreover, part of the trouble for some of Tolkien's more jaundiced critics is the political culture that surrounds him. Certain detractors, like Greer, cannot forget the 1960s, when "Frodo Lives!" graffiti and T-shirts abounded. Despite Tolkien's conservative--some would say reactionary--Catholic politics, The Lord of the Rings became required reading for counterculturists during the Vietnam era. In the wizard Gandalf's counsel that the powerful but corrupting Ring be destroyed, rather than used as a weapon against Sauron, antiwar activists saw a clear allusion to the scourge of nuclear weapons. Environmentalists, meanwhile, pointed to Tolkien's beloved Ents, the ruminative tree-creatures who are "roused" to protect their forest of Fangorn from the ax-loving wizard Saruman--who, with his "mind of metal and wheels ... does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment." And then there are the hobbits' frequent time-outs to enjoy mushrooms and "pipe weed." Pot smokers felt they knew exactly what Tolkien was driving at.

Tolkien himself was no fan of these fans, some of whom to this day take his famous comment "I am in fact a hobbit" as an invitation to get together and dress up as characters from the novel. David Bratman, former editor of the Tolkien studies newsletter Mythprints, says Tolkien's "deplorable cultus" (in the author's own words) should not be held against him. "Artists should not be blamed for attracting a following of fools," concurred another British critic in 1992, "--or if they should, we should downgrade Blake, Byron, and D.H. Lawrence."

Elf-besotted fans aside, why shouldn't Tolkien be granted admission to the literary pantheon? Well, for one thing, his detractors argue, his prose is unbearably archaic. "Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon," writes Bloom. Tolkien's verse--which litters the text of The Lord of the Rings--is generally accepted to be even worse.

But the critical objections to The Lord of the Rings aren't merely stylistic; many find Tolkien's sensibilities to be premodernist, even retrograde. Tolkien's worldview was hardly forward-looking. On the contrary, his youthful traumas in World War I left him reclusive and devoutly antimodern for the rest of his life. "One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel its oppression," wrote Tolkien. "By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." And so Tolkien buried himself in the study of ancient languages and the construction of a theory of fantasy--expounded in his influential essay "On Fairy Stories"--emphasizing its power to access profound and perhaps mythic realities beneath the surface of everyday life.

Again and again, this theory--and the literature that is supposed to embody it--has been derided as escapist. Thus, the burden has tended to rest with Tolkienists to show that despite his archaisms, Tolkien was nevertheless a modern author. Shippey, for example, sees The Lord of the Rings as an unfailingly modern work in its attempt, through the fantasy mode, to grapple with the greatest trauma of the twentieth century: the evidence of radical human evil presented by the two world wars. During the siege of the city of Minas Tirith by the forces of Mordor in The Return of the King, Tolkien presents this scene of a catapult volley:

Though this rain of heads takes place in a fantasy world, the sense of the brutally horrific conveys Tolkien's experience as a World War I trench veteran. Indeed, Shippey groups Tolkien with George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Golding as authors who turned to fantasy or imagined worlds in order to grapple with traumatic war experiences. Neither 1984 nor Animal Farm--which occupied second and third place, respectively, behind The Lord of the Rings in the Waterstone poll--could be described as works of literary "realism." Yet we accept both as deeply serious and political responses to Orwell's experiences of fascism and communism.

Tolkien claimed that he never stooped to allegory in his writings, but he did not deny "applicability." Thus, The Lord of the Rings can be read as his response to modernity, to the world of catastrophic wars, terrible weapons, and industrialization that Tolkien felt was destroying his beloved rural, Edwardian England (represented in his books by the hobbits' peaceful, if parochial, homeland of "the Shire"). And if Tolkien's One Ring represents technology, or humanity's hubristic capacity to tamper with nature, then the message is: Destroy it forever.

Some scholars see in Tolkien's strongly anti-technology views a powerful enviro-Luddite strain. In his 1997 book Defending Middle Earth: Tolkien, Myth, and Modernity, Patrick Curry treats Tolkien as a kind of Green movement precursor--a literary Lorax. "In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies," Tolkien wrote in 1972. But there's more than just an admiration of nature in Tolkien; there's the converse, a deep distrust of all things "unnatural." When the wizard Saruman presumes to tinker with nature, the Ent Treebeard reacts by saying, "That would be a black evil!" The Jeremy Rifkins and Kirkpatrick Sales of the world--along with other opponents of human-genome research, cloning, and biotechnology--would find a kindred spirit in Tolkien. So, for that matter, would the Unabomber.

But probably the main reason Tolkien has not been accepted by most critics is that his writings do not conform to the tenets of literary modernism. Tolkien's language largely eschews irony, his imagery tends to be generic, and, with some exceptions, his characters go unexplored. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster's blueprint of modernist literary theory, story and plot are gently derided. But in The Lord of the Rings, plot is probably the most compelling literary element. Readers steeped in modernist literature simply don't know how to respond to Tolkien's prose.

They also have trouble understanding Tolkien's philological approach: He studied literature and the history of languages with equal emphasis. Tolkien once wrote of his novels that "the invention of languages is the foundation... . To me a name comes first and the story follows." Reading this, critics have understandably accused Tolkien of swapping word games for the composition of literature. Shippey observes sadly that this is simply because in the battle for ascendancy among competing literary paradigms within the academy, philology lost out.

And this is what Tolkienists cling to. In celebrating Tolkien's enduring bestsellerdom, they implicitly claim a popular mandate to retrieve from the past the values, academic modes, and literary tastes that would allow us to better appreciate his writings. And yet given his sweeping attack on modernity, it may be that the case for Tolkien as a writer for this century must inevitably fail.

Still, Tolkienists have the staggering popularity of The Lord of the Rings on their side--a key factor in the literary reputation of Charles Dickens, for example. Some Tolkienists observe knowingly that the upcoming films will no doubt hook the Harry Potter generation on The Lord of the Rings (though purists may secretly be a bit nervous about Hobbit Happy Meals). Meanwhile, Tolkien criticism is already a substantial body of work, much of which cannot be dismissed outright as fan pamphleteering. When it comes to Tolkien, says Jane Chance, "the popular has become canonical"--or at any rate, it is becoming more and more so. Ultimately, Tolkien's literary stature may be assured by sheer momentum.

Copyright © 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Chris Mooney, "Kicking the Hobbit," The American Prospect vol. 12 no. 10, June 4, 2001. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

Hey guys,

Here is Wilson's original (infamous) 1956 review in case you're interested.

Tolkien, of course, was equally disdainful of Mr. Wilson, as those of you who own his Letters no doubt know.

Interestingly, Tolkien was of the opinion that the glowing endorsements for LOTR by C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden did him as much harm in some circles as good.

And of course: Wilson wrote for The Nation. So there you are.

At least he could have spelled "Gandalf" right.

---

From The Nation, April 14, 1956.
A review of The Fellowship of the Ring
(Version originale)

Oo, THOSE AWFUL ORCS !
By Edmund Wilson

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings, Allen and Unwin. 21s.

In 1937, Dr. J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford don, published a children's book called The Hobbit, which had an immense success. The Hobbits are a not quite human race who inhabit an imaginary country called the Shire and who combine the characteristics of certain English animals – they live in burrows like rabbits and badgers – with the traits of English country-dwellers, ranging from rustic to tweedy (the name seems a telescoping of rabbit and Hobbs.) They have Elves, Trolls and Dwarfs as neighbours, and they are associated with a magician called Gandalph and a slimy water-creature called Gollum. Dr. Tolkien became interested in his fairy-tale country and has gone on from this little story to elaborate a long romance, which has appeared, under the general title, The Lord of the Rings, in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. All volumes are accompanied with maps, and Dr. Tolkien, who is a philologist, professor at Merton College of English Language and Literature, has equipped the last volume with a scholarly apparatus of appendices, explaining the alphabets and grammars of the various tongues spoken by his characters, and giving full genealogies and tables of historical chronology. Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years. Mr. Richard Hughes, for example, has written of it that nothing of the kind on such a scale has been attempted since The Faerie Queen, and that "for width of imagination it almost beggars parallel."

"It's odd, you know," says Miss Naomi Mitchison, "one takes it as seriously as Malory." And Mr. C. S. Lewis, also of Oxford, is able to top them all: "If Ariosto," he ringingly writes, "rivalled it in invention (in fact, he does not), he would still lack its heroic seriousness." Nor has America been behind. In The Saturday Review of Literature, a Mr. Louis J. Halle, author of a book on Civilization and Foreign Policy, answers as follows a lady who - " lowering," he says, "her pince-nez" -has inquired what he finds in Tolkien: "What, dear lady, does this invented world have to do with our own? You ask for its meaning – as you ask for the meaning of the Odyssey, of Genesis, of Faust – in a word? In a word, then, its meaning is 'heroism.' It makes our own world, once more, heroic. What higher meaning than this is to be found in any literature?"

But if one goes from these eulogies to the book itself, one is likely to be let down, astonished, baffled. The reviewer has just read the whole thing aloud to his seven-year old daughter, who has been through The Hobbit countless times, beginning it again the moment she has finished, and whose interest has been held by its more prolix successors. One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children's book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children's book – a children's book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the « juvenile » market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake; and it ought to be said at this point, before emphasizing its inadequacies as literature, that Dr. Tolkien makes few claims for his fairy romance. In a statement prepared for his publishers, he has explained that he began it to amuse himself, as a philological game: "the invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. I should have preferred to write in 'Elvish'." He has omitted, he says, in the printed book, a good deal of the philological part; "but there is a great deal of linguistic matter... included or mythologically expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in 'linguistic esthetic,' as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what it is all about.'... It is not 'about' anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political." An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity – that is, then, what The Lord of The Rings really is. The pretentiousness is all on the part of Dr. Tolkien's infatuated admirers, and it is these pretensions that I would here assail.

The most distinguished of Tolkien's admirers and the most conspicuous of his defenders has been Mr. W. H. Auden. That Auden is a master of English verse and a well-equipped critic of verse, no one, as they say, will dispute. It is significant, then, that he comments on the badness of Tolkien's verse – there is a great deal of poetry in The Lord of the Rings. Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive – through lack of interest in the other department.- to the fact that Tolkien's prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness. What I believe has misled Mr. Auden is his own special preoccupation with the legendary theme of the Quest. He has written a book about the literature of the Quest; he has experimented with the theme himself in a remarkable sequence of sonnets; and it is to be hoped that he will do something with it on an even larger scale. In the meantime – as sometimes happens with works that fall in with one's interests – he no doubt so overrates The Lord of the Rings because he reads into it something that he means to write himself. It is indeed the tale of a Quest, but, to the reviewer, an extremely unrewarding one. The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by few problems. What we get is a simple confrontation – in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama – of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remote and alien villain with the plucky little home-grown hero. There are streaks of imagination: the ancient tree-spirits, the Ents, with their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the Elves, whose nobility and beauty is elusive and not quite human. But even these are rather clumsily handled. There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language that might have come out of Howard Pyle, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph, who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. For the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good little Englishman, Samwise, his dog-like servant, who talks lower-class and respectful, and never deserts his master. These characters who are no characters are involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention displayed in which is, it seems to me, almost pathetic. On the country in which the Hobbits, the Elves, the Ents and the other Good People live, the Forces of Evil are closing in, and they have to band together to save it. The hero is the Hobbit called Frodo who has become possessed of a ring that Sauron, the King of the Enemy, wants (that learned reptilian suggestion – doesn't it give you a goosefleshy feeling?). In spite of the author's disclaimer, the struggle for the ring does seem to have some larger significance. This ring, if one continues to carry it, confers upon one special powers, but it is felt to become heavier and heavier; it exerts on one a sinister influence that one has to brace oneself to resist. The problem is for Frodo to get rid of it before he can succumb to this influence.

NOW, this situation does create interest; it does seem to have possibilities. One looks forward to a queer dilemma, a new kind of hair-breadth escape, in which Frodo, in the Enemy's kingdom, will find himself half-seduced into taking over the enemy's point of view, so that the realm of shadows and horrors will come to seem to him, once he is in it, once he is strong in the power of the ring, a plausible and pleasant place, and he will narrowly escape the danger of becoming a monster himself. But these bugaboos are not magnetic; they are feeble and rather blank; one does not feel they have any real power. The Good People simply say "Boo" to them. There are Black Riders, of whom everyone is terrified but who never seem anything but specters. There are dreadful hovering birds-think of it, horrible birds of prey! There are ogreish disgusting Orcs, who, however, rarely get to the point of committing any overt acts. There is a giant female spider – a dreadfu1 creepy-crawly spider! – who lives in a dark cave and eats people. What one misses in all these terrors is any trace of concrete reality. The preternatural, to be effective, should be given some sort of solidity, a real presence, recognizable features – like Gulliver, like Gogol, like Poe; not like those phantom horrors of Algernon Blackwood which prove so disappointing after the travel-book substantiality of the landscapes in which he evokes them. Tolkien's horrors resemble these in their lack of real contact with their victims, who dispose of them as we do of the horrors in dreams by simply pushing them or puffing them away. As for Sauron, the ruler of Mordor (doesn't the very name have a shuddery sound.) who concentrates in his person everything that is threatening the Shire, the build-up for him goes on through three volumes. He makes his first, rather promising, appearance as a terrible fire-rimmed yellow eye seen in a water-mirror. But this is as far as we ever get. Once Sauron's realm is invaded, we think we are going to meet him; but he still remains nothing but a burning eye scrutinizing all that occurs from the window of a remote dark tower. This might, of course, be made effective; but actually it is not; we never feel Sauron's power. And the climax, to which we have been working up through exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine large close-printed pages, when it comes, proves extremely flat. The ring is at last got rid of by being dropped into a fiery crater, and the kingdom of Sauron « topples » in a brief and banal earthquake that sets fire to everything and burns it up, and so releases the author from the necessity of telling the reader what exactly was so terrible there. Frodo has come to the end of his Quest, but the reader has remained untouched by the wounds and fatigues of his journey. 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.

Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser - both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched.

As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell's Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of this twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology.

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