Category Archives: Tolkien

We are the Hobbits

The_HobbitI loved this essay from The Rabbit Room because I think it captures the genius of Tolkien’s strategy really well. I elaborate here not because I think it needs additional commentary but because I can’t help myself after reading such a helpful essay.

Lewis like many other fantasy authors before and after wrote about mere mortals finding their way into a magical realm.  The one exception is the story of Shasta, except that Calormene is somehow as secular and magicless as any modern place so that the effect is the same.  So the story of Shasta comes closest to resembling Tolkien’s strategy.

Tolkien starts The Hobbit as well as The Lord of the Rings with a magical creature that is quiet, short, and lives in a hole.  That is all a misdirection.  The Hobbits are actually comfortable English middle class.  They know virtually nothing about the heroic and magical world of great men, elves, dwarves, and dragons (Note to Mozilla: get your spell checker to recognize Tolkien’s revision of the dwarf plural just as you have done for his revision of elves and elven rather than elfin.)

In other words, the Hobbits for all their exoticism are actually just us.  Magic is great for fireworks but the perils are not recognized.  Their general insularity and xenophobia does not actually amount to realistic fear of the dangers around them (it just means that they are over-confident in their self-sufficiency).  As I point out in my forthcoming biography, Tolkien shows the only Hobbits capable of resisting tyranny from the outside are those who left the Shire to face the outside.

Disbelief in dragons just makes you easy prey to them.

Why Lewis Lovers should Read Tolkien’s Letters

By “Lewis lovers” I especially mean people who love his non-fiction, his essays and books

You should read Tolkien’s letters to realize he is every bit as intellectual and deep and thoughtful as Lewis was.  You may claim you have never doubted that this was the case, but I’m skeptical. Some forms of knowledge depend on direct experience and the affirmation from someone lacking that experience just doesn’t seem credible.

I appreciate that Tolkien’s best work is his fiction and that he would be more than satisfied if you stopped with it.  But I really wish more people read his letters.

Tolkien and too good or too evil characters

One criticism of Tolkien was that his good characters were unrealistically good and his evil characters too purely evil.

Tolkien did write a fantasy story with sentient monsters, so in keeping with that setting there are irredeemably evil “persons” (Sauron, Orcs, etc).  And many of these same critics don’t like fantasy stories at all.  So I can see why this springs to mind as a valid criticism.

It is also true that Tolkien had options.  Stephen Donaldson’s anti-hero Thomas Covenant is a great example of another way one can write fantasy.  But not everyone likes Donaldson’s story and it doesn’t make sense to say that Tolkien had to do things in that way.  (By the way, I had forgotten all about all the Thomas Covenant reading I did in college.  I have to thank Tom Shippey for reminding me about him in his excellent J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.)

But while it is true that there are portrayals of mixtures of good and evil missing from Tolkien’s story, and there are heroes like Aragorn who don’t have much of an apparent “dark side,” the criticism is simply wrong.

Is Gollum/Smeagol pure evil?

What about Boromir?

What about Theoden who allowed himself to be lulled and then only awoke to act almost too late?

What about Saruman who was evil in most of the story but only because he was corrupted?

Why can no one safely handle the ring?  Why do Gandalf and Galadrial refuse it?  Because there is darkness in their hearts that can be seduced by the ring.

And the Hobbits are portrayed both a noble and as ridiculous.

Notice how easily the idyllic Shire goes bad and has to be rescued at the end.

I don’t see the issue.

Tolkien’s LOTR as rage against the machine

Tolkien was sent to war when the new age of mechanical weapons were introduced. Machine-guns, tanks and poison gas. He fought in the Battle of The Somme, which is where over a million people were killed. You can see his experiences shine through especially in the fight scenes in the films..

You can also see his anger towards the massive cities that churn out great products in quick succession, and that end up destroying the urban land because of the size of factories. This can be seen in the story when Saruman destroys a wide part of the forest to make way for his new army..

via BackToTheFuture: Tolkien’s Hate of the Mechanical world.

Doug Wilson publishes some of Tolkien’s best

“All right, all right!” said Sam. “That’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead” (The Return of the King, p. 977).

“What’s all this?” said Frodo, feeling inclined to laugh.

“This is what it is, Mr. Baggins,” said the leader of the Shirriffs, a two-feather hobbit: “You’re arrested for Gate-breaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food.”

And what else?” said Frodo.

“That’ll do to go on with,” said the Shirriff-leader.

“I can add some more, if you’d like it,” said Sam. “Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools” (p. 978).

“We’re not allowed to,” said Robin.

“If I hear not allowed much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry” (p. 979).

via Blog and Mablog.

Remember Tolkien’s politics

Not precisely Oxford but still Tolkien relevant

Early student social activity in London tended to be quite serious and worthy in its expression, characterised by programmes of lectures, debates and sporting fixtures. However, this was beginning to change by the 1890s, which witnessed boisterous 'Town and Gown' antics by students that continued into Edwardian times. The first real rag at King's College London occurred in 1912. Angry student anti-vivisectionists complained that a small dog had been vivisected repeatedly and unnecessarily and erected a statue of the animal in Battersea Park. Indignant students from London medical schools quickly moved to destroy the statue, in the course of which a struggle took place with police and some students arrested and fined. They later reconvened in the King's quad with an effigy of the offending magistrate that was set on fire and thrown into the river.

via Mayhem in the Metropolis: King’s College versus University College in Student Rags.

Tolkien’s candle in the dark: from one person’s experience

In the sixties, as Tolkien’s hobbit and elves set sail across the wide Atlantic, I was a child growing up in an American working class family. My stepfather was a truck driver, often unemployed, usually drunk; my mother held the family together working two, or three, or even four jobs at once, all of them underpaid, demoralizing, and exhausting. Our small household was not unique, for this was the industrial Northeast where the steel works and the factories that had sustained the previous generations were now all closing down, one after another, and moving south. Another thing that was not unique was the daily violence in our home — violence that broke bones, left scars, and sent us children to the hospital where jaded, overworked doctors (in those days before child abuse reporting laws) stitched and plastered and bandaged us up and sent us back home again. There was nothing remarkable in this. Neighborhood kids sported black eyes too; their fathers were also out of work. That these men were angry was something we all knew. That they were frightened is something I only later understood. My stepfather had nothing out in the world, but at home he could still rule as king, and the one measure of manhood that he had left lay in his fists. My brothers and I didn’t need Hitler’s bombs to understand how Sauron came to be; we didn’t need the Third Reich to make us feel as helpless as hobbits.

It wasn’t until I turned fourteen that I discovered Tolkien’s books. I began The Fellowship of the Ring on the school bus sometime during that year, reading with pure amazement as Middle–earth opened up before me. Culture, back then, came largely from the radio and the television, where The Brady Bunch strained credulity far more than any fairy–story. But here, here, in this fantasy book I found reality, and truth — for ours was a childhood in which good and evil were not abstract concepts. Here, the mortal battle between the two had become a tangible thing. Darkness spread over Middle–earth, corrupting everything it touched, and yet our hero persevered with the aid of the greatest magics of all: the loyalty of his friends and the courage of a noble heart. I read Tolkien’s great trilogy in one gulp and was profoundly changed .&nbsp. . not, I have to add, because those books truly satisfied me. What they did was to reawaken my taste for magic, my old desire for dragons. But even then, in the years before I quite understood what feminism was, I saw that there was no place for me, a girl, on Frodo’s quest. Tolkien woke a longing in me . . . and then it was to other books I turned — to Mervyn Peake, E. R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, and William Morris, searching through those magical kingdoms for a country where I could live.

Some months after The Lord of the Rings, I discovered Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, a volume containing the expanded text of his essay “On Fairy– Stories.” How, now, can I possibly convey the elation this slender book gave me? To understand, perhaps I must set the scene a bit more clearly. Picture a girl, rather small, quite bruised, frail of health and preternaturally quiet. Nights, at that particular time, when going home was problematic, I often spent in a secret nest I’d made (unbeknownst to anyone except a sympathetic janitor) in a hidden corner of the prop room behind my school’s auditorium stage. Terror and exhaustion have never been known as aids to education, and so it was with laborious effort that I made my way through Tolkien’s prose, my critical facilities strained to their limit by this Oxford scholar. I didn’t understand all of it, not then. But I knew, somehow, this essay was for me. “It was in fairy–stories,” Tolkien said, “that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” Yes, yes, yes, I murmured, excited now, for I’d felt that too. And this: “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood  . . . .But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” And especially this: ” . . . it is one of the lessons of fairy–stories (if we can speak of the lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.”

The thing that I took away from this essay, imperfectly as I understood it then, was that fairy tales had once been so much more than Disney cartoons. So I went back to the fairy tale book that had been my favorite as a young child: The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, translated from the French by Marie Ponsot and exquisitely, deliciously illustrated by Adrienne Ségur. And here it was that I found at last the country that I could settle in, the water that would quench my thirst and the food that would quell the ache in my belly. For I had been very fortunate as a child — this was no bowdlerized collection. These tales, largely taken from the Russian and French, had been shortened for young readers but not simplified. Tolkien himself had never enjoyed the French tales of D’Aulnoy and Perrault, but I found in their rococo imagery exactly what I’d been looking for: intimate stories that spoke, in a coded language, of personal transformation. These were tales of children abandoned in woods; of daughters poisoned by their mothers’ hands; of sons forced to betray their siblings; of men and women struck down by wolves or imprisoned in windowless towers. I read of the girl who dared not speak if she wanted to save her swan–brothers from harm; I read, heart pounding, of Donkeyskin, whose own father desired to bed her. The tales that affected me the most were variations on one archetypal theme: a young person beset by grave difficulties sets off, alone, through the deep, dark woods, armed only with quick wits, clear site, persistence, courage, and compassion. It is by these virtues we identify the heroes; it is with these tools that they make their way. Without these tools, no magic can save them. They are at the mercy of the wolf and wicked witch.

On Tolkien and Fairy Stories by Terri Windling