THE SECRET AFFAIR BETWEEN Lancelot and Guinevere that corrodes the order of the Round Table from the inside, the sheer electricity of the forbidden love of Tristan and Isolde, the purity of Galahad’s heart that will ultimately lead him on the quest for the Holy Grail. With all this mystery, power and poetry ranged on one side, would you choose a rewriting that substitutes these inimitable, towering heroes of medieval romance with wittering creatures called Hobbits? Hobbits have hairy toes and a borderline eating disorder, live in round houses, and break into unbearable faux-minstrelsy at the first sign of a rune. (Surely their name alone is evidence enough of the movement from the sublime to the ridiculous in one sub-imaginative stroke.) Oh, and instead of the Green Knight, who inspires real fear, we get orcs and trolls. The Wampa Ice Creature and Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars are not far away.
Tolkien’s decision to rewrite the medieval romance narrative, with its central quest motif and all the journeys that proliferate from its central path, counts as one of the great wrong turnings in English writing. All he manages to imitate is the length of the medieval stories: we get an endlessly plod-plod-plodding epic, overlong, repetitive and exhausting. This is the textual equivalent of Seconal. Those who persist in thinking that this is the acme of fantasy fiction would be better off looking at Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris or the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, where unimaginably different new worlds are set down on the pages, not shires filled with naff tree dwellers. This is Warwickshire Exoticised, with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inflected names, not a new heaven, new earth.
Then, take Tolkien’s breathtakingly condescending portrayal of the “servant classes” in the figure of Sam Gamgee. Of course, he displays traditional and expected qualities of the class: blind, unquestioning loyalty (read “servility”), unswerving desire to serve the master, and “working class” speech (“I don’t want to see no more magic”). I can almost see the Oxford don’s hand itching to write words such as “ nuffink” in order to give verisimilitude to his work. And what is it with all the eating? As if the compulsive Picnic in the Woods motif is not enough, Tolkien bookends even events of great danger and import with munching and nibbling. What do Merry and Pippin do the minute they manage to escape from the orcs in The Two Towers? They eat elf-biscuits. How bathetic is that? The whole work is shot through with this peculiarly English type of diminution, a kind of provincialism that constantly chafes against the romance mode and lowers the tone. The Enid Blytonisation of the heroic romance is complete.
Finally, where are the women? What is this unmitigated Boys’ Own fantasy? Just as you begin asking these questions, you recall that Tolkien was writing in the toxic Fifties, when ideal women were all cupcakes, kitchen, nappy-changing, nurseries, stove. It is of a piece with the rest of his provincialism that he cannot imagine roles for girls and women in his adventure.
Seeing all these people hunched up on the Tube, their heads buried in The Lord of the Rings, I’m reminded of those ringing lines from Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: “The majority is always wrong.”
JEREMY MARSHALL SAYS
I DON’T DEMAND THAT YOU love The Lord of the Rings, or read it as often as I have, but a book that has ignited imaginations for more thyan half a century cannot be a waste of time. It may not be a perfectly crafted novel — not even, perhaps, a novel at all — but to it the author brought the creative enthusiasm of a natural storymaker, and a highly sensitive and educated love of words.
Tolkien was a passionate philologist and began his professional life as a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, burrowing into the hidden histories of words such as wake and walrus, wan and wold. From fragments of evidence, filed on innumerable 6x4in dictionary slips, he and his colleagues sought to re- create the paths by which a word could reach the English language from the forests of Germany or the sea-roads of Iceland. But his creativity could not be constrained by academic linguistics. From a single word on a musty page he could not only conjure up the Anglo-Saxon world, where warriors sang and fought among crumbling Roman cities, but also draw out the tale of Earendel, mariner of the heavens, or bring to life the Ents, shepherds of the trees.
The skills of his scholarship were carried over into his hobby — the creation of two interrelated languages, and of the world in which they might have evolved. His work carries such resonance because it evokes the same response, the same urge to discover and create, to delve into the roots of things, to look at a leaf and imagine a tree. Yes, some may be inspired merely to dress up as Elves; but some go on to read the sagas, to excavate barrows, to campaign for conservation, to study Old English, Old Norse, even Old Irish or Finnish.
Tolkien’s is not simply an idealised fantasy world. Middle-earth has deeper roots in Warwickshire than in Fairyland. Real motives guide his characters: ordinary folk thrust into a world at war, leaders and their followers faced with conflicts of loyalty, thwarted love, and corrupting desire; and, over all, an elegy for the fading of beauty and the passing of the age of story.
And there is more to Tolkien than The Lord of the Rings. Dip into The Silmarillion, created to underlie his invented languages, drawing Finnish and Norse tales together with his own dreams into a chronicle of breathtaking scope. Though flawed and unfinished (Tolkien could never have finished!), in aspiration it is Blake without the opacity, Morris without the turgidity.
If you are daunted by large books, seek out two tiny gems, Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle, touched with the longing of a man who has glimpsed the Perilous Realm and its unattainable beauties. If really do not read fiction at all, take up Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, or John Garth’s portrait of a lost world in Tolkien and the Great War. But if ever you stood on the shore at dusk, watching the lights of a ship dwindle silently westwards, or mourned a tree felled by builders, or glimpsed a high star from a dark place, or wondered why the days are named after the gods of a lost world, Tolkien may offer something to move you, thrill you, or inspire you. Go, read!
Jeremy Marshall is an associate editor at the OED. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner is published by OUP next month.
READING DAY
In 2002 an American teacher contacted the Tolkien Society to ask if it organised an event to celebrate the author. It did not, but was prompted to organise the first Tolkien Reading Day on March 25, 2003. The date marks the downfall of Sauron at the end of The Lord of the Rings.
Three years on, and the number taking part has kept increasing. “We’re getting good responses from Britain, the US, Poland as well,” according to Ian Collier, a local government employee from Wolverhampton who works for the society. Games, competitions and workshops will be held at schools and libraries, to encourage the reading of Tolkien’s books and emphasise their educational content. www.tolkiensociety.org
- Exclusive from Times Online: a recording from the stage version of The Lord of the Rings, which opened in Toronto this week and comes to London in spring 2007. The track is called Lothlórien and is by A. R. Rahman and Värttinä with Christopher Nightingale.
