Having finished the stack
of library books (and having no time to troll the shelves for more) and having
finished the week's magazines, I was desperate for reading material. I can't eat supper without a book propped front
of me and what else is there to do afterwards?
TV has many channels of nothing to watch; the Internet has many more Web
pages of not much at all. I was in the
mood for escape fiction, and fantasy is my favorite type. There are hundreds of new titles out, but as
with the library, so with the bookstore: no time to troll through the
shelves. Besides, so much of the new
stuff seems juvenile lately. More on
that perhaps in another blog.
I took down my dog-eared
paperbacks of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. "The world's only four-book
trilogy," quipped my friend Rick in our college days. Why not read them again? I forgot how many times I’d read them before,
but enough time has passed that many of the details are hazy. One test of a good author is whether you can
discover new things in his work each time you read it, and Tolkein is no
exception. In previous readings, I had
recognized the shift in author tone between The Hobbit and Lord of
the Rings, the similarity between the Lord of the Rings trilogy
and the stages of a chess game, and Tolkein’s focus on vegetation and
terrain. I wondered what would strike me
this time.
This time, I was struck
by the borrowings in Tolkien's tone, sometimes quaintly medieval, sometimes
downright biblical. I was also struck by
the formality of the characters' dialogues.
Their speech patterns were like oratory, not conversation. Suitable for heroic literature, as Tolkein
intended. I looked for Tolkein's
anti-modernist bias, which reviewers and critics had noted. It was there, at some times more subtle than
at others, downright overt in the final volume. In
the second volume, Orthanc, Saruman's tower, and Mordor itself are described in
terms that one might use for an industrial wasteland. The "ruffians" who cause all manner
of sorrow in The Shire in the last volume are a cross between fascist gangs,
industrial union-busters and communist commissars.
As before, I noted the
difference in tone between The Hobbit and the books of LOTR. The Hobbit is whimsical. Its tone reminds me of Kenneth Grahame’s tone
in The Wind in the Willows. In
both works the author occasionally breaks into the third-person narrative to
offer dry observations on the characters and the situations. There is a consummate "Englishness"
about the worlds of both; both authors exalt their characters’ tidy homes and orderly,
ordinary lives. Tolkein’s hobbits abhor
adventure; Grahame’s Mole frantically sets about to rescue Rat from heading off
to sea after his imagination was fired by the stories told him by a wandering seaman
rat.
Like The Wind in the
Willows, there is a stream of wry humor running through The Hobbit, as
if Tolkein himself couldn’t really believe he was writing a story about a small
humanoid dodging trolls and slaying dragons.
My favorite example is the scene in which Bilbo, having rescued the
dwarves and brought them to Lake-town, catches cold and can only say "Thag
you very buch" to the dwarves as they toast his health. The fantastical adventures juxtaposed with
stuffed-nose dialogue—what could be more drily English?
Once we enter the world
of Lord of the Rings though, the mood is quite different: lofty, formal,
elegiac, nostalgic, even gloomy. Although it’s the same world as that of The
Hobbit, we’re given to understand that the civilization which nurtured
Bilbo and his contemporaries is fading away even as its greatest threat,
Sauron, is vanquished. With Sauron's
fall, nothing will be as good as it was before the One Ring was destroyed. Even when the Ring was in play, when all the
good guys of Middle Earth were fretting about Mordor's threats, they told themselves
things weren't as good as they were in the Old Days and were never going to be. Their gloomy prediction is borne out when in
the end, with the One Ring gone, the Elves must leave. Their rings no longer work and their exquisite
forests and dwellings must fade. At the
moment of triumph, Middle Earth loses something unique and noble: the elves,
who are the acknowledged superior to humans and hobbits, not only physically
but also in taste and culture, like the English aristocracy. The humans who remain are a lesser
sort. Aragorn, the only human who comes
close to the elves in stature (and who has the unique privilege of marrying one), is the last of the Dunedain, “supermen” of a
past age. We don't really know where
they came from (unless The Silmarillion provides that information) and
why, exactly, they were so superior, but Tolkein makes it clear that he
considers humans and hobbits a comedown on the Middle Earth evolutionary scale.
Whence comes this
nostalgia for the Good Old Days? This
phenomenon goes back to the Greeks, if not before. The Greeks believed in a first age of gold, followed
by one of silver and now ("now" being 500 B.C.E.) the disappointing,
degraded age of copper. Maybe every
human civilization has tales of a better, more heroic and virtuous past. Anyone who seriously studies history knows
that the old days were not at all wonderful.
Maybe it's a universal human habit to think the past was better. Maybe it originates from thinking about childhood
when everything seemed to be so easy.
But anyone who really reviews his or her childhood will come up against
rough spots: the helplessness, the lack of control, the petty humiliations
visited by siblings and classmates. As
with individual lives, so with history.
The past was rife with incurable diseases, food shortages, hard labor
and little opportunity for individual betterment.
Exalting the past seems irrational,
but Tolkein plays it straight in LOTR, in contrast to his wry irony in The
Hobbit. Perhaps the suspension of
irony is necessary to produce heroic literature. Indeed, there's not a trace of irony in LOTR,
let alone humor. No one cracks a joke;
although there are a few occasions marked by song and merriment, but they are
fleeting. Not even violence merits irony
in LOTR. War in Middle Earth is a means
to achieve glory and to accomplish something worthwhile, as the dying Theoden
says to his nephew Eomer. No
disillusioned pacifism for Tolkein; the epic tale he has to tell must have
drama and what more intense drama than war?
Epics can't be built on economic activity. Heroes don't import and export; glory isn't
accomplished by growing crops. After Sauron’s
defeat, Tolkein must end his tale because he has nothing more of interest to
write about. Aragorn will be presiding
over a kingdom that is no longer under threat, and his subjects will have to
make a living. You can’t make a heroic
fantasy novel about that.
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