www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/turn03_.html
email_icon tell a friend Reasons for Liking Tolkien Jenny Turner A writer, born around 1890, is famous for three novels. The second, the masterpiece, has the sam e characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingl y interested in myth and language games. Another - The Hobbit (1937), Th e Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) - is JRR Tolkien. A writer, born around 1890, raged against 'mass-production robot factorie s and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic' and 'the rawness and ugliness of modern European life'. Instead he loved the trees and he dgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of 'little, ultimate creatures' he came across in the legends of the North. A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a philologist. He wa s Reader then Professor of English Language at Leeds, then Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 until 1945, then Professor of English La nguage at Oxford from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. In his time, he was recognised as the world's leading expert on Beowulf, and in his tim e, he probably knew more about the Old Norse languages than anyone else alive. It was to do with recoverin g lost worlds from the fragments left to us, and critics may well be rig ht to link this passion to the early deaths of both his parents. It can be life's greatest blessing to stumble on a vocation whose rhythm fits s o nicely with one's most secret preoccupations. Even in Tolkien's time, philology was seen as a dusty, irrelevant subject , especially in comparison to the 20th-century vigour of English literat ure under IA Richards and FR Leavis. Who cares about roots and origi ns when you could be debating the Great Tradition? His Letters, published in 1981, betray no interest at all in the stuff most people think of as modern writing, and a loathing of new fangled phenomena as various as Concorde, Shakespeare and municipal swim ming-baths. A writer, born around 1890, declared himself a monarchist and a Catholic; In form, in content, in everything about it, T he Lord of the Rings is the most anti-Modernist of novels. It is really very funny to think about how similar it is in so many ways to the works of the great Modernists. Unlike Joyce, Lawrence and Pound, however, Tolkien was a writer with a bl ock. He was over 60 by the time The Lord of the Rings was published, and the work he cared about most deeply, some of which is collected in The Silmarillion, did not appear in his lifetime. This explains why a body o f writing largely published in the second half of the 20th century turns out to be so strikingly first-half in its concerns. It's all there, the usual slurry of the 1920s and 1930s: the fear of the masses, the retrea t into archaism, the confusion about race and phylogenesis and so on. On the evidence of his published papers, Tolkien does not appear to have b een half as crackers on these topics as many others were. In The Intellectuals and t he Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century liter ature, John Carey writes about the 'duplicity' of Joyce's Ulysses, a nov el supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbi dding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores. In the late 1990s, Best Book polls conducted for Waterstone's and Channel Four, the Daily Telegraph, the F olio Society and Amazon all had it coming first by a mile. Next month, The Fellowship of the Ring, the fir st in a three-part movie adaptation of Tolkien's masterwork, will have a worldwide release. Unlike the last attempt, Ralph Bakshi's peculiar sem i-animated version of 1978, this new production is a proper live-action global-Hollywood movie, with spectacular digital effects like Gladiator' s, only more so. It has a proper cast, with proper stars in it: Ian McKe llen as Gandalf, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Liv Tyler as Arwen Undmie l (the women's parts have been beefed up somewhat). An acquaintance e-ma iled to say he'd seen an early trailer in a cinema. On the one hand, the prospect of Tolkien as a major motion-picture event suggests that the man and his oeuvre are about to be turned inside out. This most backward-looking and fustily word-bound of popular novels is a bout to become merely a marginal, rather literary-looking advert for a m ultimedia franchise a bit like Star Wars, only bigger. The footnotes, la nguages, scripts, maps and appendices that are so much a part of the Lor d of the Rings experience are about to be replaced with fast-food tie-in s (a deal with Burger King has been announced), a hit pop record, tradin g cards, furry backpacks. The landscapes - what they are prepared to let you see of them - have that digitally enhanced hyper-re al quality more sumptuous than Technicolor, more magical than cartoons: super-icy mountains, mega-scary forests, stormier than the stormiest of skies. The effect, in current parlance, is usually called 'achingly beau tiful': a deep, mysterious mixture of pain and pleasure, a yearning towa rds the impossible, with something delirious in it and something sublime . A deep, mysterious feeling which yet can be commodified and evoked wit h great efficiency by the entertainment industry, like a confection of p ink sugar, like a drug. This is familiar theory-of-Postmodernism territory, but with another curi ous turn. For this strange emotion - what Douglas Adams might have calle d 'the long toothache of the soul' - isn't a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in hi s 1938 lecture 'On Fairy-Stories' as 'a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond t he walls of the world, poignant as grief'. He allegorised it in his 1947 short story, 'Leaf by Niggle', in which the hero paints 'the only reall y beautiful picture in the world', and then gets to walk about inside it . On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who dir ected the movie, portends: 'The technology has caught up with the incred ible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. Like so many people, I spent a lot of time when I was younger lolling abo ut and dreaming in the world to which Tolkien was demiurge in The Lord o f the Rings. Far too much time, and with an intensity I now find scary. That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero's magic t rees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather nois ome (to use a word from JRR's special vocabulary), it still locks wit h my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something fundamen tal passes between us, like when a spaceship docks. In its time, the book has had its admirers - my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and CS Lewis , and Auden was an early fan. A poverty of invention which is almost pathetic,' E dmund Wilson wrote in 1956. The quite funny one-liners abound, but it's much harder to find someone w riting sensibly at length about what exactly is wrong with Tolkien's nov el. Obviously there are problems to do with women, and race and racism, and the general matchstick-cathedral labour- of-madness nature of the project. But if it's really that bad, why do so very many people like it so enormously? Are the intellectuals just flin ging up their hands and saying that it is in the nature of things liked by lots of people that they will be no good? Tolkien's popularity, Tolkien's anathematisation: the dominant strain in Tolkien criticism structures itself around these poles. The pro-Tolkien school takes it upon itself to defend his opus from the snobby literati, but organises its defence according to traditional lit. There's a lot of philological source work - Smaug the dragon is compared to Grendel in Beowulf, the blessed l and of Lothlrien is compared to the blessed land in the Middle English poem Pearl. And tremendousl...
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