Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity

Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity Patrick Curry A spirited defence of Tolkien’s mythological creation and its increasing relevance for the real world.Acclaimed by the largest readers’ survey ever conducted as ‘the greatest book of the century’, J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has cast the spell of its storytelling for over 40 years and continues to enthral new generations of readers. Yet it has also been widely labelled as reactionary and escapist by hostile critics.Patrick Curry’s book shows just how mistaken they are. He reveals Tolkien’s profound and subtle advocacy of community, ecology and spiritual values against the destructive forces of runaway modernity. Tolkien’s remedy, and the project implicit in his literary mythology, is a re-enchantment of the world. In helping us to realize that living nature, including humanity, is sacred, his writings draw on ancient magical mythology, but at the same time resonate closely with the ideas of contemprary radical ecology.Quoting extensively from Tolkien’s works, Patrick Curry argues that Tolkien addresses hard global realities and widely justified fears. In this way, his story has transcended its English roots to achieve universal relevance, and his imaginary world gives people everywhere hope for the future of the real world. DEFENDING MIDDLE-EARTH: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity Patrick Curry Table of Contents Title Page (#udb21e1aa-f4a9-5105-b62c-c509dc9f1d7b) Preface (#u820b156f-6f4c-591c-a0fb-ede81861af96) · 1 · INTRODUCTION: RADICAL NOSTALGIA (#u73650422-366f-59d4-9b57-841a2472ae9b) The Story (#ulink_494e1ccd-534e-5654-82f4-6adca57669e4) Readers vs. Critics (#ulink_24f89b94-1abd-56ba-b998-bb6c6f36a0ca) Postmodernity in Middle-earth (#ulink_3dfbe69d-43c8-5c74-afcc-b3082bdc0278) Middle-earth in Postmodernity (#ulink_94b5881c-70ea-593f-8c0e-d61f521bc6dc) Three Worlds in One (#ulink_f49f7c0d-d76f-54eb-b084-6698233916fb) A Mythology for England? (#ulink_e15be4d8-fad6-511c-9393-493c7da68fee) A Great Book? (#ulink_83505083-cd18-5460-8c49-88f84acc66af) · 2 · THE SHIRE: CULTURE, SOCIETY AND POLITICS (#u01624ec3-80ce-55d0-a3c2-4f68b81cdcb5) Englishness (#ulink_283db9cc-3a9b-50bd-a479-b7aac6b5eb5c) Country Folk (#ulink_1662cfd9-227b-59f1-88df-03513a6cc8a0) Nation and Class (#ulink_7f114988-db24-568d-a470-f95f29291ad3) A Pastoral Fantasy? (#ulink_c292f2ce-5bbd-56ea-9c24-891c791ff4ee) Fascist? (#ulink_f3beed2d-10c1-532d-9b4d-b88cd43f91db) Politics in Middle-earth (#ulink_5a25f975-2d64-5680-969e-aff0fab795e0) Radical Nostalgia (#ulink_1e654218-e75c-5800-b894-ed6519d266bd) Activum (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Escapism’ (#litres_trial_promo) · 3 · MIDDLE-EARTH: NATURE AND ECOLOGY (#litres_trial_promo) Place (#litres_trial_promo) Nature in Middle-earth (#litres_trial_promo) Forests, Woods and Trees (#litres_trial_promo) The War on Trees (#litres_trial_promo) The Tree of Life (#litres_trial_promo) Tolkien and Trees (#litres_trial_promo) The Ring (#litres_trial_promo) Magic vs. Enchantment (#litres_trial_promo) The Ring as Megamachine (#litres_trial_promo) Mordor on Earth (#litres_trial_promo) The War on Life (#litres_trial_promo) Selling Ourselves (#litres_trial_promo) On ‘Sentimentality’ (#litres_trial_promo) Life’s a Beech (#litres_trial_promo) Save Us from the Experts (#litres_trial_promo) · 4 · THE SEA: SPIRITUALITY AND ETHICS (#litres_trial_promo) The ‘Problem’ of Evil (#litres_trial_promo) Death (#litres_trial_promo) Luck, Fate, Providence (#litres_trial_promo) A Christian Work? (#litres_trial_promo) A Pagan Work? (#litres_trial_promo) Wizards and Stars (#litres_trial_promo) All and None (#litres_trial_promo) Post-Christian/Neo-Pagan/New Times (#litres_trial_promo) From Religion to Myth to Fantasy (#litres_trial_promo) · 5 · FANTASY, LITERATURE AND THE MYTHOPOEIC IMAGINATION (#litres_trial_promo) Loss and Consolation (#litres_trial_promo) Myth (#litres_trial_promo) Local Mythology (#litres_trial_promo) Universal Myth (#litres_trial_promo) Back to Myth (#litres_trial_promo) Other Approaches to Myth (#litres_trial_promo) Story (#litres_trial_promo) Fantasy (#litres_trial_promo) The Lord of the Rings as Fantasy (#litres_trial_promo) Disney World (#litres_trial_promo) Angela Carter (#litres_trial_promo) Discworld (#litres_trial_promo) Tolkien’s True Company (#litres_trial_promo) · 6 · CONCLUSION: HOPE WITHOUT GUARANTEES (#litres_trial_promo) The Elements (#litres_trial_promo) Place (#litres_trial_promo) Wonder (#litres_trial_promo) Hope (#litres_trial_promo) Afterword (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) References (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Preface (#ulink_aade49ac-2392-5c78-9258-1ea0c3d69809) Like The Lord of the Rings, if in no other way, this tale too grew in the telling. It began life as what was intended to be a short paper for the 1992 Centenary Conference in Oxford. But I found I couldn’t stop, and before long it had grown to nearly 30,000 words. Eventually, without really setting out to do so, I spent a good deal of the last five years researching and writing it. Part of the problem was that Tolkien’s work impinges on so many complex and profound concerns, each with its own centrifugal tendency, that trying to exert some editorial control has been (I imagine) like riding a wild horse. For whom is the book intended? According to Tolkien, one face of fairy-stories is ‘the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.’ Scorn and pity is certainly what I feel for one section of humanity I encountered while working on it, namely all those editors, critics and authors who look down their nose at Tolkien, usually without ever having really read or thought about him. They exhibited disturbing signs of a group ‘mind’ based entirely on snobbery and prejudice. I would therefore be astounded, albeit pleasantly so, if my book persuades any of them otherwise; but in any case, it is not really meant for them. May it rather provide a way in for those who come to Tolkien’s books with an open mind, send former readers back to them again, and help those who already love them to appreciate them still more. (And if any of the latter have felt ashamed to admit it, may it help you understand why you need do so no longer!) I may as well also mention that alongside this book another text has sprung up willy-nilly. Too long for an article, too short for a book – although still growing – it takes the via negativa of tackling Tolkien’s Marxist, modernist, feminist and psychoanalytic critics directly. This enables some things to be discussed that were not appropriate to include here. I am thinking of calling it something like, ‘The Discursive Dynamics of Tolkien’s Fantasy: A Post-Axiological Critique,’ and seeing what happens. (Academic editors: please confound my expectations, and form an orderly queue.) As a result of my experience with the ‘experts’ to date, I am all the more grateful to Christopher Moore, of Floris Books, for his thorough, sensitive and patient editorial guidance; and to Suzanna Curry, for her support, wisdom and forbearance. They have made it a much better book than it would have otherwise been. It is also a pleasure to thank these others who have helped. Michael Winship, Clay Ramsay, Jesper Siberg, Virginia Luling, Simon Schaffer, Elaine Jordan, John Seed and Angus Clarke read and commented on early drafts. Stratford Caldecott, Tony Linsell, Kathleen Herbert, Charles Coulombe, Raphael Samuel, Dwayne Thorpe, Ray Keenoy and my mother, Noreen Curry, provided valuable moral support and encouragement in discussions or correspondence. Tom Shippey, Ursula Le Guin and Brian Attebery also made encouraging noises early on in correspondence, which I greatly appreciated. Charles Noad kindly read the whole penultimate draft and saved me from many small and some not-so-small errors; so did Nicola Bown, who made some excellent suggestions. (None of these people, obviously, have any responsibility for what I have finally said.) I would also like to thank Warwick and Linda of the Q.E.L. Cafe, in Notting Hill Gate, for their hospitality; and Skr?t, Filip and Karel of the Brno Tolkien Society, whom I met in Oxford in 1992, for reminding me what it’s all about. (May you too be lucky enough to be reminded, when you have almost forgotten.) I am also grateful to HarperCollins UK for permission to quote from the published works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memories of three people, very different but all with a place in my heart, who died while I was still writing it: my father, Peter D. Curry (1912–1996), the writer P. L. Travers (1899–1996), and the historian Raphael Samuel (1934–1996). R.I.P. · 1 · INTRODUCTION: RADICAL NOSTALGIA (#ulink_a917b853-5c1a-5d7c-ac57-bc32f2808513) People who Like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. (#litres_trial_promo) It could be a literary fairy-story. A reclusive Oxford don, best-known for his scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon, unexpectedly produces a popular children’s story. Seventeen years later, he follows this up with a very long story, published in three volumes. Set entirely in an imaginary world, it centres on a quest involving a magic ring and some members of a three-and-a-half-foot-tall rustic race called ‘hobbits.’ His book is variously described as romantic epic or juvenile fantasy; but whatever it is, it is certainly not a modern novel, and the critics are divided between bafflement and visceral dislike. The general opinion in the academic and critical neighbourhood is that, rather like one of his characters, its author, ‘who had always been rather cracked, had at last gone quite mad …’ Yet just over ten years later, his books become runaway bestsellers; and after forty years, they count among the most widely read in the global history of publishing. The author is, of course, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (#litres_trial_promo) (1892–1973). Born, in South Africa to English parents, he moved back to England, just outside Birmingham, at the age of three-and-a-half. He developed a childhood passion for languages into a lifelong academic career, interrupted by service in the war of 1914–18. He became Professor first of Anglo-Saxon, then of English Language and Literature, at Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life. Despite co-editing a respected edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and writing a paper on Beowulf acclaimed for its brilliance, it was an unremarkable life by many standards … except for those books. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but as far as I can tell, total worldwide sales (#litres_trial_promo) of Tolkien’s books are as follows. The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), at about 50 million copies, is probably the biggest-selling single work of fiction this century. The Hobbit (1937) is not far behind, at between 35 and 40 million copies. And one could add the considerable sales, now perhaps over 2 million, of his dark and difficult posthumously published epic The Silmarillion (1977). The grand total is thus well on its way to 100 million. Tolkien’s books have been translated (#litres_trial_promo) into more than thirty languages, including Japanese, Catalan, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Finnish, Indonesian and Vietnamese (#litres_trial_promo). (This last, unofficial translation appeared in 1967, whereupon the South Vietnamese II Corps was rather perceptively f?ted by tribesmen with shields bearing the Eye of Sauron.) Furthermore, this is no flash-in-the-pan phenomenon, riding on the heels of the 1960s; Tolkien (#litres_trial_promo) has outlived the counter-culture in which he first flourished. No longer fashionable, he nonetheless still sells (#litres_trial_promo) steadily. That was undoubtedly the main reason for the purchase in 1990 of his publisher, Unwin Hyman (originally George Allen and Unwin), by HarperCollins. Every other index points to the same conclusion. In England, for example, since figures began to be kept in 1991, Tolkien’s books have been taken out of public libraries (#litres_trial_promo) around 200,000 times a year; he is one of only four ‘classic authors’ whose annual lending totals have exceeded 300,000 (well ahead of Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare). The Hobbit spent fifteen years as the biggest-selling American paperback, and The Lord of the Rings is still the most valuable first edition (#litres_trial_promo) published in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the latter – laboriously typed out on a bed in suburban war-time Oxford, and expected by its first publisher to lose money – is now universally acknowledged as largely responsible for the subsequent money-spinning genre of ‘fantasy literature.’ Then there are the extra-literary phenomena. In the 1960s and 70s, buttons and graffiti proclaiming ‘Frodo Lives!’ sprouted (in Quebec, it was ‘Middle-earth Libre’). The title of The Silmarillion provided the name of an early heavy-metal band, while on the more establishment side, ‘hobbit’ is now entrenched in the Oxford English Dictionary, and a thousand ‘Lothl?riens’ and ‘Rivendells’ can be found on house-signs in suburban lanes. There is now even an area of submarine features off the southwest coast of Ireland named after Tolkien characters: hence, ‘Gollum’s Channel (#litres_trial_promo),’ and so on. In other words, we are talking about a massively popular and successful publishing phenomenon; all the more so when one of the books in question is half-a-million words long, and neither involves any big money (#litres_trial_promo) or sex, explicit or otherwise – two ingredients now normally considered essential for bestsellers – let alone cannibalism, serial murder, sadomasochism or lawyers. (And how many such books will still be in print half a century after publication? The fate of Jackie Collins beckons.) The Story (#ulink_7d80762e-1bf8-52b0-8547-37b9a8943bef) This book will undoubtedly make more sense if you have already read The Lord of the Rings; but if you have not, or need reminding, here is a very brief synopsis. It takes place in the Third Age of Middle-earth – our Earth, but in an imaginary period a very long time ago. Frodo Baggins of the Shire, where the hobbits live, inherits a magic ring from his uncle Bilbo, who had acquired it from a fallen hobbit, Gollum, in the course of adventures recounted in The Hobbit. Gandalf the Grey, a wizard, realizes that it is the One Ring, eagerly sought by its maker Sauron, the ruler of Mordor and the greatest power in Middle-earth. With the Ring, Sauron would be invincible. The only hope is to try to smuggle the Ring into Mordor and cast it into the furnace of Mount Doom where it was forged; for it cannot be destroyed in any other way, and anyone who tries to use it against Sauron would simply become another Dark Lord. Frodo and his devoted companion Sam therefore begin the quest to return the Ring to its source. Initially, they are accompanied by the Company, including and representing the ‘free peoples’ of Men, Elves and Dwarves, as well as Gandalf and two other hobbits, Pippin and Merry. But the Company is soon dispersed, and from then on (most of the book), the reader follows two parallel stories: the adventures of its remaining members in the War of the Ring, as they struggle to keep Sauron occupied and distracted, and the agonizing journey of Frodo and Sam, accompanied by the treacherous Gollum. Although Gandalf has always been its chief strategist, the war against Sauron is increasingly led by Aragorn, the hitherto unknown heir to the thrones of Arnor (now vanished) and Gondor (still the chief kingdom of resistance among Men). In its course, followed principally through the fortunes of Merry and Pippin, we meet some extraordinary places and people, both human and otherwise – including Lothl?rien, the last remaining stronghold of pure Elvish ‘magic,’ where the powerful elven lady Galadriel lives; the fierce feudal Riders of Rohan; the Ents, sentient, talking and moving trees; Shelob, a malevolent spider-being; the nine Ringwraiths, Sauron’s lieutenants; and Saruman, a corrupted wizard. When Frodo does arrive, he is mastered at the last moment by the Ring, and claims it; but Gollum bites it off his finger, loses his balance, and falls into the Crack of Doom holding it. The works of Sauron come to a cataclysmic end, and Frodo and Sam are just saved from the wreck. Eventually, after Aragorn’s coronation and wedding, and together with Pippin and Merry, they return to the Shire to find their struggles not yet over. But order is finally restored, and after a few years Frodo (who never really recovers from his ordeals) is allowed to pass over the Sea to within sight of Elvenhome, together with some of the last and greatest Elves and Gandalf. Sam remains in the Shire with his wife and family. The Lord of the Rings is not really a trilogy, that being merely the publisher’s device for breaking it up into manageable-sized volumes; it is written in six ‘books,’ largely following the two parallel stories. Middle-earth’s languages (both written and spoken), the histories of its various peoples, calendrical systems, and some family trees are discussed in detailed appendices – all too briefly for those readers who have fallen in love with the book en route. (Those who haven’t won’t have gotten that far.) Readers vs. Critics (#ulink_660bf434-7342-5354-919c-e2c76102b673) The first and chief riddle I want to try to unravel is therefore this: how could such a remarkably unlikely book, written by someone so removed from (and indeed hostile to) mainstream cultural and intellectual life, achieve such a huge and lasting popular success? Or, to put it another way, what are millions of readers from all over the world getting out of reading these books? Meanwhile, the critical incomprehension (#litres_trial_promo) continues. Among professors of English literature and readers in cultural studies, sociologists of popular culture, literary critics, and editors both journalistic and commissioning – in short, all the class of professional literary explainers – Tolkien and his readers are a no-go zone. There are a very few honourable and excellent exceptions (which, incidentally, my own work is intended not to replace but to complement). They have, however, been largely ignored within the literary community, whose silence on Tolkien – even among those whose chosen subject is fairy-tales or fantasy – is broken only by an occasional snort of derision which seems to pass for analysis. The pattern was set by an extended sneer about Tolkien’s ‘juvenile trash’ in 1956 by Edmund Wilson (#litres_trial_promo), the champion of modernism; pompously obsessed, as a contemporary put it, ‘with being the Adult in the room,’ Wilson is a good example of what Ursula K. Le Guin called ‘a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy.’ He was joined by others, notably Philip Toynbee, who in 1961 celebrated the fact that Tolkien’s ‘childish’ books ‘have passed into a merciful oblivion.’ Rarely has a death been so exaggerated. But Tolkien is still routinely accused of being variously ‘paternalistic (#litres_trial_promo), reactionary, anti-intellectual, racist, fascistic and, perhaps worst of all in contemporary terms, irrelevant’ by people who, upon examination, have made so many mistakes that one cannot but wonder if they have read the books at all. Other ‘experts’ expend themselves in fatuous witticisms (#litres_trial_promo) like ‘Fa?rie-land’s answer to Conan the Barbarian,’ and ‘Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic.’ This, then, is the second riddle. My principal intention in this book is to tackle the first question, and explore the nature of Tolkien’s books and their success. However, I think I can also explain, by the same token, why his critics have failed so miserably to do so. I have not taken on The Silmarillion here, by the way. The reason is simple: my priority is Tolkien’s meaning and impact in the contemporary world, and there is no doubting that that stems almost entirely from The Lord of the Rings and, as a kind of introduction, The Hobbit. These are his works to which the public has responded, and still does. My goal means addressing contemporary conditions – cultural, social and political – and readers; and, as far as seems relevant, Tolkien’s own character and intentions. But I try to do so while respecting the books’ internal integrity; that is, without the single-minded reductionism that sees everything in such a story as ‘representing’ something else, in line with a predetermined interpretive program around class, or gender, or the unconscious. The kind of literature which might be said to describe an important part of Tolkien’s work, fairy-tales, has been subjected to Freudian, feminist, structuralist, Jungian, anthroposophical and Marxist interpretations (#litres_trial_promo) in just this way. And they have frequently resulted in some real insights. But too often, the price is a depressing nothing-buttery. Every other dimension of the story is ignored, while the meaning of the whole is tacitly assumed to be exhausted. The spirit-to-letter ratio of these accounts is so low that unlike the stories themselves, they are difficult and dispiriting to read. And behind it all lies a woeful blindness (#litres_trial_promo) to the power, here and now, of the myths and folk– and fairy-tales themselves. One tiny example, out of a multitude: it has been asserted (with a degree of seriousness which is hard to determine) that The Hobbit represents an alliance (#litres_trial_promo) between the lower-middle class (Bilbo) and skilled workers, especially working-class miners (the dwarves), in order to overcome a parasitic capitalist exploiter who ‘lives off the hard work of small people and accumulates wealth without being able to appreciate its value’ (the dragon). This is genuinely interesting, as well as enjoyable; but it says at least as much about Marxism as a fairy-tale as it does about The Hobbit, and hardly exhausts either. I have tried hard to avoid such a practice. It seems to me that every meaningful human discourse has a subjective side as well as an objective one. Relations between the two are complex – for example, the ‘inside (#litres_trial_promo)’ can be larger than the ‘outside’ – and neither (usually the former) can be reduced to or derived from the other without doing irreparable harm to the whole. For example, seen from the outside, Tolkien’s Middle-earth derives from the pagan Norse world-view, plus his knowledge and love of Anglo-Saxon history (Rohan) and medievalism (Gondor), and of trees (all the various forests). One can add to this Tolkien’s memories of pre-war rural middle England (the Shire), and of the trenches of World War I, and so on. The result is a complex but ultimately tightly determined and defined place (#litres_trial_promo). But for the sympathetic reader, it is not like that at all. He or she stands in an endless dark, damp forest with the light failing; or in a village pub in multiracial company which ranges from the oddly familiar to the distinctly odd; or at the foot of mountains which rear ever higher until stretching out of sight in the unguessable distance. It is effectively unbounded, either in extent or variety. Any analysis which recognizes only the first world as important, and dismisses or belittles the second, commits the violence of reductionism. And there is another reason for caution. That is Tolkien’s (#litres_trial_promo) own warning against an allegorical or purely topical reading of his story, in which elements receive a literal or one-to-one interpretation. As he explains in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.’ Quite so; not only is allegory unattractively didactic (at best) and bullying (at worst), but Tolkien is trying here to protect what he had worked so hard to create, namely a book that is non-allegorical. And wisely so, as that is one of the reasons it has lasted, and continues to find new generations of readers with their own concerns. For as Tolkien also noted, ‘That there is no allegory (#litres_trial_promo) does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is.’ My book precisely concerns the applicability of his work; it is not really about how it came to be written, or about the man who wrote it. In any case, I have too much respect for Tolkien’s work, in all its richness, to sacrifice it on the altar of theory. And I have benefitted from some excellent warnings whenever tempted. There is Gandalf’s, of course: ‘he that breaks (#litres_trial_promo) a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.’ But also T. A. Shippey’s (#litres_trial_promo): ‘Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it.’ This seems to me to put the matter perfectly, along with the shrewd words of Max Luthi (#litres_trial_promo): ‘Everything external, not just in literature but also in reality, can be or become a symbol. It is, however, still itself as well, not only in reality but also in literature.’ So The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are first and foremost, as Tolkien claimed, stories; and ones written by a master story-teller. This is already important for understanding both Tolkien’s popular success and his critical slating. Philip Pullman, upon winning the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in July 1996, put it perfectly: ‘in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no-one expects literary craftsmanship.’ Or children’s books, which The Lord of the Rings is frequently misrepresented as being; or fairy-tales, one of its principal inspirations. ‘But,’ Pullman continued, ‘stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, “events never grow stale.” There’s more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy.’ Most present-day writers (#litres_trial_promo), however, are highly anxious to be seen as Grown-Ups. They therefore ‘take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.’ Thus the hunger for stories that’s there in young and adult alike is unmet, and goes by default to Disney, Hollywood and schlock TV, who are happy to oblige. As stories, Tolkien’s language and style (#litres_trial_promo) are therefore important. But these have already been tackled in a way I could not better. And imponderables abound. The single greatest obstacle to appreciating Tolkien’s work is sheer literary snobbery. But almost equally important is a capacity and liking for imagination (#litres_trial_promo), as opposed to a doctrinaire cast of mind. (It may be something like a musical sense.) Personally, like Hugh Brogan (#litres_trial_promo), I find Tolkien’s writing ‘capable of humour, irony, tragedy, and fast narrative, with only occasional lapses into cardboard grandiloquence.’ But even if everyone else agreed, this alone would not suffice to explain his appeal. To do so we must turn to their content, and ask: why these particular and apparently rather peculiar stories? For example, how many other world bestsellers are almost entirely devoid of sex? (Except possibly the Bible – a debatable point.) Here, of course, some theory becomes indispensable. So my critical practice, however unsatisfactory it may be (in theory), is to bounce back and forth between the inside and outside of Middle-earth, looking for relations, connections and patterns. In so doing, I have used anything that seems to help, including my own personal and ‘subjective’ reactions. My chief concern, as I’ve said, is the meaning of the work rather than its author. Of course, there is a relationship between the two. But this too is highly complex, and the one does not follow simply from the other. The significance of the work is neither entirely determined nor limited by the life and times that produced it. And as Tolkien himself reminds us of fairy-stories (#litres_trial_promo), ‘when we have done all that research … can do … there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are.’ That effect – and only in so far as they are significant for it, Tolkien’s sources, influences and so on – is what interests me. It is boring and pointless to spill ink on whether Tolkien was ‘reactionary’ or not. Nor can the work itself be pigeonholed in such a ridiculously simplistic way; its meaning is not forever fixed, but rather whatever it presents itself as, in ways that cannot be pre-determined. Indeed, I am going to argue that The Lord of the Rings has a life of its own to an extent far exceeding what Tolkien himself expected or could have anticipated. That life is integral to understanding its enduring appeal. Postmodernity in Middle-earth (#ulink_a23d9086-f166-540d-8c61-34dd097402fc) I have derived aid and support from postmodernist theories of meaning and reading that probably would have inspired mixed feelings in Tolkien himself. These offer the starting-point that meaning is tied to shared linguistic and cultural understandings, on the one hand – so that not anything goes – yet meanings are always open, in principle, to reinterpretation along new and different lines, including ones unsuspected by the author. Tolkien can hardly have known when he was writing, for example, that the 1960s were around the corner, and would take up his books with such enthusiasm. In a way, I myself am another example in this context. Tolkien was a deeply conservative (with a small c) English Roman Catholic with a highly specialized scholarly interest in the early Middle Ages. The best label for me, on the other hand, might be ‘Radical Eclectic’; I grew up many generations later in mid-Western Canada and the United States, and was deeply influenced by the intellectual, left-libertarian and mystical aspects of the 1960s … including The Lord of the Rings. Without the relative independence of the text, my abiding love of it would be impossible to understand. Postmodernism also holds that while every discipline will have its own set of critical standards for assessing good and bad work, such standards cannot be grounded in any kind of indisputable foundations or ultimate objectivity. They ‘are’ whatever it is agreed that they are, which of course changes and is never unanimous. So although I have tried to be rigorous and coherent, I make no apology for occasionally explicitly including myself. That is better than pretending to have a total overview from a standpoint that is wholly outside its subject-matter, and therefore supposedly comprehensive and impartial. The contents of books cannot be separated from the sense that particular readers make of them. Finally, postmodernism has also influenced my account in another important respect. It suggests that we are now living in a time when the project of modernity is approaching exhaustion. What do I mean by modernity? Basically, a ‘world-view’ that began in late seventeenth-century Europe, became self-conscious in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and was exported all over the world, with supreme self-confidence, in the nineteenth. It culminated in the massive attempts at material and social engineering of our own day. Modernity (#litres_trial_promo) is thus characterized by the combination of modern science, a global capitalist economy, and the political power of the nation-state. All of these things are now controversial. They used to be justified by the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity – secularized versions of divine revelation, which were supposed to supply essentially complete accounts of our progress towards the realization of the truth (as laid down by Marx, or Freud, or Darwin). But these no longer command widespread respect or assent. There have been too many broken promises, and too many terrible ‘successes’: the gulags of universal liberation through class struggle, modern science’s showcases at Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and the ongoing holocaust of the natural world at the behest of rational economic development. And while I am as grateful as anyone for the benefits of modernity, and wish to throw out no babies with the bathwater, it is impossible now to avoid the fact that the costs have been horrendous, and are, unlike the benefits, increasing. Modernity carries on, of course. The power of the state still extends to doing whatever it likes to its (willing or unwilling) citizens, restrained here and there only by the fragile conventions of representative democracy. The development of a superstate ideal in Europe has added further to the load. The highly mixed blessings of ‘free’ trade are forced on to weaker countries by stronger through GATT and other menacing acronyms. Scientists, following the logic of ‘pure knowledge’ but backed by big business, are careering ahead with genetic engineering and biotechnology. And when state, science and capital all get together, the result is what Lewis Mumford called ‘the Megamachine.’ Thus, the same people who brought you nuclear energy, agribusiness and the drug and chemical industries are now pursuing the fantastic corporate profits promised by patenting and selling life itself, under the protection of international law. What price a ‘life-form’? What has changed, with postmodernity, is simply the widespread appearance of questions about the legitimacy and desirability of all this – together with unsettling new reasons and theories for such questions. And people do have questions – more people, with more and deeper fears and worries, than perhaps ever before. Only a fool (or convert, or perhaps employee) would say they are groundless. And one of the things being questioned – not a moment too soon – is the value of the kind of deranged, totalizing rationality, epitomized but by no means restricted to modern science, that produces disenchantment. To quote Zygmunt Bauman (#litres_trial_promo), postmodernity, above all, can be seen as restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity had tried hard to disenchant … The war against mystery and magic was for modernity the war of liberation leading to the declaration of reason’s independence … world had to be despiritualized, de-animated: denied the capacity of subject … It is against such a disenchanted world that the postmodern re-enchantment is aimed. Middle-earth in Postmodernity (#ulink_2677953e-dda0-570e-9c7b-b022c0beac8b) I believe Tolkien’s books speak to precisely these conditions. Drawing on the power of ancient Indo-European myth, they invite the reader into a compelling and remarkably complete premodern world, saturated with corresponding earlier values, which therefore feels something like a lost home – and by the same token, offers hope for its recovery. They are just the values whose jeopardy we most now feel: relationships with each other, and nature, and (for want of a better word) the spirit, which have not been stripped of personal integrity and responsibility and decanted into a soulless calculus of profit-and-loss; and practical-ethical wisdom (#litres_trial_promo), which no amount of economic or technological ‘progress’ will ever be able to replace. As John Ruskin (#litres_trial_promo) wonderfully asserted, in the face of Victorian materialist triumphalism in full flood: To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray – these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have the power to do more. The world’s prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise. But as we begin The Lord of the Rings, this is exactly the world that is under severe threat from those who worship pure power, and are its slaves: the technological and instrumental power embodied in Sauron (after whom the book itself is named, after all), and the epitome of modernism gone mad. We thus find ourselves reading a story about ourselves, about our own world. That is one reason why so many readers have taken it so to heart. This analysis has recently found remarkable confirmation. As Bauman (#litres_trial_promo) also observed, ‘people who celebrate the collapse of communism, as I do, celebrate more than that without always knowing it. They celebrate the end of modernity actually, because what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed. It failed as blatantly as the attempt was blatant.’ Now, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were already underground ‘cult’ classics in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before 1989. Since then they have boomed there in a way reminiscent of the late 1960s in the West. But the exhilaration of liberation is already fast succumbing to the discovery that ‘free market’ capitalism, as such, is simply a more efficient version of the same economic logic as its former state form. I fear Tolkien will have no shortage of newly disillusioned readers there. Tolkien himself, of course, was deeply hostile to modernity, root and branch – capitalism (especially industrialism), unrestrained science, and state power alike. For him, they were idols whose worship had resulted, in our century, in the most efficient ever devastation of both nature and humanity alike. He once remarked that ‘I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (#litres_trial_promo) (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind) …’ And he described the detonation of the atom bomb in 1945 as ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists.’ But that is not a very original observation, and neither so interesting nor significant as what has become of his anti-modernism, lovingly and skilfully embodied in a literary artefact, in postmodern times. As he himself put it, ‘it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive (#litres_trial_promo) whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered, that is the most interesting thing to consider.’ Now, it is perfectly possible to imagine Tolkien’s books ‘being’ truly reactionary: racist, nationalist, etc. I contend, however, that as it happens – as things have actually turned out – his implicit diagnosis of modernity was prescient; and his version of an alternative, progressive. That is, in the context of global modernization and the resistance to it, his stories have become an animating and inspiring new myth. It joins up with a growing contemporary sense, represented in postmodernism, of history’s sheer contingency: a liberating perception that things might have been different, and therefore could be different now. It suggests that just as there was life before modernity, so there can be after it. In short, Tolkien’s books are certainly nostalgic, but it is an emotionally empowering nostalgia, not a crippling one. (The word itself means just ‘homesickness.’) One contemporary writer, Fraser Harrison (#litres_trial_promo), goes straight to the heart of the matter: ‘While it is easy to scoff at the whimsicality and commercialism of rural nostalgia, it is also vital to acknowledge that this reaching-out to the countryside is an expression, however distorted, of a healthy desire to find some sense of meaning and relief in a world that seems increasingly bent on mindless annihilation.’ Accordingly, says Harrison, ‘it becomes meaningful to talk of “radical nostalgia”.’ Only those who cling to the modernist myth of a singular universal truth (as opposed to myth and story and indeed interpretation as such) which is somehow directly accessible to those with the ‘correct’ understanding – only such people will look at Tolkien’s glorious tree and see, to use an apt image of William Blake’s, nothing more than ‘a Green thing that stands in the way.’ To the modernist, the choice is between truth and myth (or falsehood), whereas the postmodernist, giving up the pretence of a direct line to the Truth, sees the choice as between different truths; or to put it another way, between myths and stories that are creative and liberating, and those that are destructive and debilitating. As Tolkien put it, ‘History often resembles “Myth,” (#litres_trial_promo) because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.’ Ironically, therefore, it is Tolkien’s critics who have been overtaken by events. Behind their instinctive antagonism lies an uncomfortable sense that here is a coherent fictional critique and an alternative, in every major respect, to the exhausted myth of modernity which has so far underwritten their own professional status; and worse, it is a popular one! Not for the first time, those who claim to know better than and even speak for ‘the people’ are lagging behind them. Three Worlds in One (#ulink_c43ad120-a584-5b1c-b7b8-32726fe1c49e) I have said that Tolkien’s literary creation presents a remarkably complete alternative world, or rather, alternative version of our world. I myself only realized its depth and complexity when I tackled it in a spirit of determined but non-reductionist analysis. There are almost no threads that can be tugged without them leading on to others, almost indefinitely. But I found I could make sense of most of it in terms of three domains, each one nesting within a larger: the social (‘the Shire’), the natural (‘Middle-earth’), and the spiritual (‘the Sea’). I was encouraged in this by Tolkien’s own remark in his superb essay on the subject, that ‘fairy-stories (#litres_trial_promo) as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.’ Thus, The Lord of the Rings begins and ends with the hobbits, in the Shire. This is the social, cultural and political world. It includes such things as the hobbits’ strong sense of community, their decentralized parish or municipal democracy, their bioregionalism (living within an area defined by its natural characteristics, and within its limits), and their enduring love of, and feeling for, place. In all these respects, the ultimate contrast is with the brutal universalism and centralized efficiency of totalitarian Mordor. Now this sphere is indeed crucial, but it nests within a larger and weightier world, just as the Shire itself does: namely the extraordinarily varied and detailed natural world of Middle-earth. Note that this therefore includes the human world. Tolkien plainly had a profound feeling for nature, and perhaps especially its flora; his love of trees shines through everywhere. The sense in The Lord of the Rings of a tragically endangered natural world, savaged by human greed and stupidity in every corner of the globe, is confirmed for us in every daily newspaper. But this ‘nature’ is neither romantic nor abstract. There are plenty of dangerous wild places in Middle-earth; but they are all, like their blessed counterparts, very specific places. Indeed, Tolkien’s attention to ‘local distinctiveness (#litres_trial_promo)’ is one of the most striking things about his books. It contributes greatly to the uncanny feeling (#litres_trial_promo), shared by many of his readers, of actually having been there, and knowing it from the inside, rather than simply having read about it – the sensation, as one put it, of ‘actually walking, running, fighting and breathing in Middle-earth.’ Above all, Tolkien’s is no add-on environmentalism. It suggests rather that whatever their differences, humans share with other living beings a profound common interest in life, and whatever aids life. Thus Middle-earth’s most distinctive places defy the separation, so beloved of modernist scientific reason, into ‘human or social and therefore conscious subjects’ and ‘natural and therefore inert objects.’ They are both: the places themselves are animate subjects with distinct personalities, while the peoples are inextricably in and of their natural and geographical locales: the Elves and ‘their’ woods and forests, the Dwarves and mountains, hobbits and the domesticated nature of field and garden. And some of the most beautiful places in Middle-earth are so, in large part, because they are loved (#litres_trial_promo) by the people who share them. Tolkien’s prescient ecologism is therefore radical, in the modern sense as well as the old one of a return to roots. It anticipates, in many ways, both ‘social’ and ‘deep’ ecology, and retraces a premodern way of understanding the world which is still that of surviving indigenous tribal peoples. Time is running out for the rest of us to re-learn it. Following this up, I then found myself at the edge of the second circle too. In Tolkien’s terms, I had been brought up short by the Sea. This third sphere proved to be the most encompassing of all: an ethics rooted, so to speak, in spiritual values as symbolized by the Sea. Here we shall discover the way Tolkien deals with the problem of spirit in a secular age; a problem with, as Salman Rushdie once put it, a God-shaped hole in it, but equally, with some very good reasons to resist any simple reinsertion of God. Indeed, despite his personal religious convictions, Tolkien was acutely aware of writing in and for a divided post-Christian audience – just as one of his heroes, the author of Beowulf, had been at the beginning of the same era. His book therefore makes no explicit references to any organized religion at all, and (unlike those of his sometime friend C. S. Lewis) offers no hostages to a religiously allegorical interpretation. As we shall see, the spiritual world of Middle-earth is a rich and complex one. It contains both a polytheist-cum-animist cosmology of ‘natural magic’ and a Christian (but non-sectarian) ethic of humility and compassion. Tolkien clearly felt that both are now needed. The ‘war against mystery and magic’ by modernity urgently requires a re-enchantment of the world, which a sense of Earth-mysteries is much better-placed to offer than a single transcendent deity. (As Gregory Bateson (#litres_trial_promo) once remarked, when the loss of a sense of divine immanence in nature is combined with an advanced technology, ‘your chance of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.’) But the Christian dimension of humility and ultimate dependency, exemplified by Frodo, is the best answer to modernity’s savage pride in the efficiency, and self-sufficiency, of its own reason. Rising above the dogmas of his own religious upbringing, Tolkien has thus made it possible for his readers to unselfconsciously combine Christian ethics and a neo-pagan reverence for nature, together with (no less important) a liberal humanist respect for the small, precarious and apparently mundane. This is a fusion that couldn’t be more relevant to resisting the immense and impersonal forces of runaway modernity. In what follows, I shall be looking at the social, natural and spiritual aspects of Tolkien’s world in turn, and their crucial overlap. That is where their heart is to be found, and any meaning found in or derived from his work must embody all three concerns to be considered essential. Taken together, they comprise the whole implicit project of his literary mythology, and a remedy for pathological modernity in a nutshell: namely, the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature, in the local cultural idiom. I am not at all suggesting, of course, that were everyone to read Tolkien everything would be fine; just that his books have something, however small, to contribute to a collective healing process. More modestly still, critical recognition of this project and contributions to it like Tolkien’s might help restore a pathologically, almost terminally jaded (#litres_trial_promo) critical community. To quote Ihab Hassan (#litres_trial_promo), ‘I do not know how to give literature or theory or criticism a new hold on the world, except to remythify the imagination, at least locally, and bring back the reign of wonder into our lives.’ Such a response to modernity is no mere escapist sentimentality. In fact, as we ought to know at the end of this bloody century, it is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters, but sleepless reason. Tolkien (#litres_trial_promo) realized this, with implications I shall discuss in relation to ‘mythopoeic’ literature: Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason … On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy it will make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish … For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. A Mythology for England? (#ulink_d0d08d46-ac81-5cd5-8e45-3f1e1aefebce) For Tolkien himself, of course, and for English readers, the native cultural idiom happens to be an English one. Part of Tolkien’s ambition was ‘to restore to the English an epic tradition (#litres_trial_promo) and present them with a mythology of their own’ – something that he felt was lacking in their national literature. (The Arthurian myth-cycle was, he felt, powerful but ‘imperfectly naturalized’: more British, that is, Celtic, than English, with its faerie ‘too lavish,’ and in addition – what struck Tolkien, for reasons we shall explore, as ‘fatal’ – it explicitly contains Christianity.) Tolkien was not the only one to feel such a lack. In 1910, E. M. Forster (#litres_trial_promo) wrote: ‘Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our countryside have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and fairies …’ Tolkien blamed this on the brutality of the Norman occupation beginning in 1066, and not without reason. It was a savage assault on a relatively peaceful land, which eventually left one person in ten there dead from war or starvation. It also imposed a new phenomenon on the British Isles: a foreign and highly centralized ruling class, including secular, ecclesiastical and educational ?lites. The new Norman archbishop, bishops and abbots regarded their Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical predecessors as rudes et idiotas (uncouth and illiterate), dropped the worship of many pre-conquest saints and even destroyed some of their shrines. Education now demanded Latin, and ‘culture,’ as well as power, French; for as long as two hundred years later, the nobility still did not speak the native tongue. And Tolkien’s modern critics today are the heirs of precisely the same caste, almost as divorced now from the common reader as their forebears were from the common people, and no less lofty in attitude. For our purposes here, however, the point is the way biography can transmute, through art, into contemporary relevance. For Tolkien’s deep dislike of the Norman virtues of bureaucracy, efficiency and rationalization, as it manifests itself in The Lord of the Rings, provides the contemporary reader with an instant ‘recognition’ of the global modernization which the Normans (#litres_trial_promo), as it happens, anticipated in these important respects. But Englishness is not inscribed in the text. This is something I finally realized after talking to Russian and Irish and Italian readers, and discovering that each one had found in the hobbits an accessible native tradition, centred on a ‘small,’ simple and rural people – and self – with which to begin, and end renewed. I am not just talking about long-vanished peasants, either. I know one man living within a few minutes of both the diabolical London motorway ring-road and Heathrow Airport whom Farmer Maggot (#litres_trial_promo) could have been modelled on: ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open.’ Of course, he was living there before these monstrosities appeared; but they haven’t driven him out. Such people in such places may have gone to ground, but they’re still around, and there are even some younger ones coming up. As the Donga ‘tribe’ (named after the ancient trackways on Twyford Down, Hampshire) sing, ‘We are the old people, we are the new people, we are the same people, stronger than before.’ Nor are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ethnocentrically limited to northwestern Europe – even though the qualities of their peoples, lands, seasons, the very air belong to that part of the world. The reason is another of Tolkien’s master-strokes. The anthropologist Virginia Luling (#litres_trial_promo) has pointed out that he presents us with a northwestern Europe, the home and heartland of the industrial revolution, as a place where it has never happened; and by the same token, with the birthplace of colonialism and imperialism as an unstained ‘Fourth World’ of indigenous tribes. Accordingly, the cultures of Middle-earth’s peoples are pre-modern or ‘traditional,’ and indeed pre-Christian, while their religions and mythologies are animist, polytheist and shamanist. But Tolkien’s choice of a ‘Norse’ mythology for his tale as a whole, over the usual Graeco-Roman one, situates his story still more precisely. (It also effectively bypasses all the ?lite critical apparatus of Greek and Latin references which many ordinary readers might find either boring or alienating.) In fact, the only place in Middle-earth which is industrial, imperialistic, and possessed of an all-powerful state is Mordor – admittedly the most powerful force of all, as such, but essentially an alien invader (as Sauron originally was) rather than a native. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is thus a Europe, as Luling puts it, that has never been ‘Europeanized,’ or, what amounts to the same thing, ‘modernized.’ And the story of The Lord of the Rings – as reflected in its very title – is about the resistance to just that. The potential relevance of these books consequently opens out not only to anyone living in ‘the West,’ but to anyone affected by it; which is to say, nearly everyone anywhere. A Great Book? (#ulink_5d628d2b-cd68-51f2-b6aa-a69eb825d797) We shall also consider The Lord of the Rings as literature. That involves considering why Tolkien chose ‘fantasy,’ with its affinities with fairy-tale and myth, as the appropriate form and strategy; and why the wisdom of that choice has been so roundly confirmed by readers, although ignored or condemned by critics. There is also the question of comparable books. I shall suggest that there are indeed a few other works of literary myth, or ‘mythopoeic’ fiction, which also reveal its true power, feed the soul, and escape the modernist critical compass. There are others, also apparently ‘fantasy,’ which are completely different. Here I am obliged to be unkind to some sacred cows: from the pernicious productions of The Walt Disney Company, and pseudo-fairy-tales like The Wizard of Oz, to some of the authors and critics now canonized by literary feminism. Given how unavoidably subjective and personal it must be, compiling lists of ‘great’ books is a game we can all play. I have no doubt that The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, even if not always for purely ‘literary’ reasons. But I am not too concerned to persuade the reader to agree; just to realize that it is fully deserving of affection and respect, and even some passionate attention. Written with love, learning, skill and sacrifice, it is a cry (as someone once said of religion) from ‘the heart of a heartless world (#litres_trial_promo), the soul of soulless conditions,’ but also something more. It offers not an ‘escape’ from our world, this world, but hope for its future. · 2 · THE SHIRE: CULTURE, SOCIETY AND POLITICS (#ulink_a2052eae-9dc3-5cbd-8166-415f4072c6c7) It is as neighbours, full of ineradicable prejudices, that we must love each other, and not as fortuitously ‘separated brethren.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Hobbits, according to Tolkien (#litres_trial_promo), were more frequent ‘long ago in the quiet of the world …’ They ‘love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom … Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking.’ They thought of themselves as ‘plain quiet folk’ with ‘no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!’ ‘Nonetheless,’ their chronicler notes, ‘ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill …’ In other words, they manifested ‘the notorious Anglo-hobbitic inability to know when they’re beaten.’ Hobbits (#litres_trial_promo) were also inclined ‘to joke about serious things,’ and ‘say less than they mean.’ Indeed, they ‘will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.’ Similarly, they preferred speeches that were ‘short and obvious,’ and ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.’ They were ‘a bit suspicious … of anything out of the way – uncanny, if you understand me.’ It wasn’t difficult to acquire a reputation for peculiarity in the Shire. But as Tolkien notes, in addition to their wealth ‘Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves.’ The nephew of ‘mad Baggins,’ as he eventually became known, Frodo (#litres_trial_promo) was something of an aesthete and intellectual, who, ‘to the amazement of sensible folk … was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight.’ None of this was usual among their peers, and Sam the gardener, although recently and exceptionally lettered, was a more typical hobbit than his fellow Companions – or as Tolkien put it, ‘the genuine hobbit.’ Like some readers, Tolkien himself sometimes found Sam (#litres_trial_promo), as he wrote: very ‘trying.’ He is a more representative hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he has consequently a stronger ingredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity – by which I do not mean a mere ‘down-to-earthiness’ – a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional ‘wisdom.’ … Imagine Sam without his education by Bilbo and his fascination with things Elvish! Even with this kind of conservative peer pressure, however, your behaviour had to be extreme to land you in any real trouble, for the Shire (#litres_trial_promo) at this time had hardly any government: ‘Families for the most part managed their own affairs. … The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving,’ and ‘almost his only duty was to preside at banquets …’ Otherwise there were only hereditary heads of clans, plus a Postmaster and First Shirriff – the latter less for Inside Work than ‘to see that Outsiders of any kind, great or small, did not make themselves a nuisance.’ Englishness (#ulink_43fcb8f8-56e0-5191-a548-0194915bc9b4) Now it doesn’t take any great perceptiveness to see in ‘these charming, absurd, helpless’ (and not-so-helpless) hobbits a self-portrait of the English, something which Tolkien admitted: ‘“The Shire (#litres_trial_promo)” is based on rural England and not any other country in the world,’ and more specifically the West Midlands: Hobbiton ‘is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’ (i.e. 1897). Compare the portrait by George Orwell (#litres_trial_promo) writing in 1940, and one still instantly recognizable, albeit sadly altered in some respects, of a conservative people neither artistically nor intellectually inclined, though with ‘a certain power of acting without thought;’ taciturn, preferring tacit understandings to formal explication; endowed with a love of flowers and animals, valuing privateness and the liberty of the individual, and respecting constitutionalism and legality; not puritanical and without definite religious belief, but strangely gentle (and this has changed most, especially during the 1980s), with a hatred of war and militarism that coexists with a strong unconscious patriotism. Orwell summed up English society as ‘a strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency.’ True, these attributes are inextricably mingled with ones that the English have wanted to find in the mirror; nor are they eternal and immutable. Because this image partakes of a national pastoral fantasy, however, it does not follow that it has no reality. A social or literary criticism that is afraid to admit the relative truth of clich?s and stereotypes is hamstrung from the start. Also, it is worth noting that Tolkien’s portrait is not altogether a flattering one; it includes greed, small-minded parochialism and philistinism, at least – even if Frodo, Sam and the other hobbits of his story were able to rise above these regrettable characteristics of the English bourgeoisie. However, although Tolkien drew on the tiny corner of the world that is the West Midlands of England, readers from virtually everywhere else in the world connect the hobbits with a rustic people of their own, relatively untouched by modernity – if not still actually existing, then from the alternative reality of folk– and fairy-tale. Doubtless this has been made possible by setting his books in a place that, while it feels like N.W. Europe, is made strange and wonderful by its imaginary time. Otherwise, I have no doubt, they would have suffered from the same limitations of time and place as Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and G. K. Chesterton’s poems, however wonderful these otherwise may be. Tolkien’s tale, in contrast, has probably achieved as close to universality as is given to art. Country Folk (#ulink_d221a854-d288-54ba-aa77-d7554b56a14f) The hobbits are recognizably modern in important respects, especially in their bourgeois and anti-heroic tenor. Thus, one famous hobbit, when asked by a large eagle, ‘What is finer than flying?,’ only allowed his native tact, and caution, to overrule suggesting ‘A warm bath (#litres_trial_promo) and late breakfast on the lawn afterwards.’ As several commentators have noticed, it is crucial that Bilbo and Frodo be modern, in order to ‘accommodate modernity (#litres_trial_promo) without surrendering to it,’ by mediating between ourselves and the ancient and foreign world they inhabit. But in other ways, the hobbits have much older roots. They remind us of ‘the archetypal pre-Industrial Revolution English yeomen (#litres_trial_promo) with simple needs, simple goals, and a common-sense approach to life,’ and also of the English before their defeat in 1066, when the ‘Norman Yoke’ imposed centralized autocratic government, a foreign language and an alien cultural tradition. The bucolic hobbits also clearly fall within the long tradition in English letters of nostalgic pastoralism, celebrating a time ‘when there was less noise (#litres_trial_promo) and more green.’ As Martin J. Weiner (#litres_trial_promo) notes, ‘Idealization of the countryside has a long history in Britain.’ It extends from Tennyson’s mid-Victorian English Idylls and William Morris’s ‘fair green garden of Northern Europe,’ through the rural essays of Richard Jefferies and the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin’s Haunts of Ancient Peace (1902) – which could easily be the title of a song by Van Morrison today – to Kipling’s ‘Our England is a garden,’ and George Sturt listening to his gardener (note), ‘in whose quiet voice,’ he felt, ‘I am privileged to hear the natural fluent, unconscious talk, as it goes on over the face of the country, of the English race.’ In short, a deep cultural gulf had opened between England’s southern and rural ‘green and pleasant land’ and her northern and industrial ‘dark satanic mills’; or as Weiner (#litres_trial_promo) puts it, with unintentional aptness, ‘The power of the machine was invading and blighting the Shire.’ The irony is, of course, that since 1851 over half the population on this island has lived in towns, and by then England was already the world’s first urban nation. Thus, as Weiner writes, ‘The less practically important rural England became, the more easily could it come to stand simply for an alternative and complementary set of values, a psychic balance wheel.’ But few things are that simple, and when applied to Tolkien, such glib simplification has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. The related charges commonly laid at Tolkien’s door are several, and severe. They are also almost entirely mistaken, so I shall use them to arrive at the truth of the matter. Nation and Class (#ulink_68fc3d08-5f58-5d7e-8322-1ed18c6d568e) One of the first critics to attack Tolkien was Catherine Stimpson (#litres_trial_promo), in 1969. ‘An incorrigible nationalist,’ she wrote, Tolkien ‘celebrates the English bourgeois pastoral idyll. Its characters, tranquil and well fed, live best in placid, philistine, provincial rural cosiness.’ Now it is true that the hobbits (excepting Bilbo and Frodo, and perhaps Sam … and Merry and Pippin) would indeed have preferred to live quiet rural lives, if they could have. Unfortunately for them, and Stimpson’s point, there is much more to Middle-earth than the Shire. By the same token, any degree of English nationalism that the hobbits represent is highly qualified. Tolkien himself pointed out that ‘hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident (#litres_trial_promo) – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view.’ It is also possible, as Jonathan Bate suggests, to draw a distinction between love of the local land, on the one hand, and patriotic love of the fatherland (#litres_trial_promo) on the other. In The Lord of the Rings, the lovingly detailed specificities of the natural world – which include but far outrun those of the Shire – far exceed any kind of abstract nationalism. Stimpson (#litres_trial_promo) also accuses Tolkien of ‘class snobbery’ – that is, the lord of the manor’s disdain for commoners, and, by extension, the working class. Well, in The Hobbit, perhaps; but only zealous detectors of orcism and trollism would ignore its other virtues, such as any quality as a story. And its hero, if no peasant, is plainly no lord. But with The Lord of the Rings – if this charge means anything worse than a sort of chivalrous paternalism, appropriate to someone growing up at the turn of this century, which now looks dated – then it fails. There is certainly class awareness. But the idioms of Tolkien’s various hobbits only correspond to their social classes in the same way as do those of contemporary humans. The accent and idiom of Sam (arguably the real hero of the book) and most other hobbits are those of a rural peasantry, while those of Frodo, Bilbo and their close friends range through the middle classes. Or take Orcs (#litres_trial_promo); their distinguishing characteristics are a love of machines and loud noises (especially explosions), waste, vandalism and destruction for its own sake; also, they alone torture and kill for fun. Their language, accordingly, is ‘at all times full of hate and anger,’ and composed of ‘brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse.’ In the Third Age, ‘Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy,’ writes Tolkien, ‘than I have shown it.’ As he adds, too truly, ‘Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt …’ But Orc speech is not all the same; there are at least three kinds, and none is necessarily ‘working-class (#litres_trial_promo).’ And it can be found today among members of any social class; nor is money a bar. In fact, virtually all of Tolkien’s major villains – Smaug, Saruman, the Lord of the Nazg?l, and presumably Sauron too – speak in unmistakably posh tones (#litres_trial_promo). After all, the orc-minded are mere servants of Mordor; its contemporary masters (or rather, master-servants) much more resemble the Nazg?l, although today they probably wear expensive suits and ride private jets rather than quasi-pterodactyls. And although many fewer than Orcs (who knows? perhaps there are exactly nine (#litres_trial_promo)), they are infinitely more powerful, and to be feared. There is also the obvious and fundamental fact of The Lord of the Rings as a tale of ‘the hour of the Shire-folk (#litres_trial_promo), when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.’ Nonetheless, the charge of pandering to social hierarchy has proved durable. Another unpleasant and related accusation (#litres_trial_promo) sometimes made is racism. Now it is true that Tolkien’s evil creatures (#litres_trial_promo) are frequently ‘swart, slant-eyed,’ and tend to come from the south (‘the cruel Haradrim’) and east (‘the wild Easterlings’) – both threatening directions in Tolkien’s ‘moral cartography (#litres_trial_promo).’ It is also true that black – as in Breath, Riders, Hand, Years, Land, Speech – is often a terrible colour, especially when contrasted with Gandalf the White, the White Rider, and so on. But the primary association of black here is with night and darkness, not race. And there are counter-examples (#litres_trial_promo): Saruman’s sign is a white hand; Aragorn’s standard is mostly black; the Black Riders were not actually black, except their outer robes; and the Black Stone of Erech is connected with Aragorn’s forebear, Isildur. Overall, Tolkien is drawing on centuries of such moral valuation, not unrelated to historical experience attached to his chosen setting in order to convey something immediately recognizable in the context of his story. As Kathleen Herbert (#litres_trial_promo) noticed, Orcs sound very like the first horrified reports in Europe of the invading Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries: ‘broad-shouldered, bow-legged, devilishly effective fighters, moving fast, talking a language that sounds like no human speech (probably Turkic) and practising ghastly tortures with great relish.’ (Th?oden may well have been modelled on Theodoric I, the aged Visigothic king who died leading his warriors in a charge against Attila’s Huns in the Battle of Chalons.) Perhaps the worst you could say is that Tolkien doesn’t actually go out of his way to forestall the possibility of a racist interpretation. (I say ‘possibility’ because it is ridiculous to assume that readers automatically transfer their feelings about Orcs to all the swart or slant-eyed people they encounter in the street.) But as Virginia Luling (#litres_trial_promo) has pointed out, the appearance of racism is deceptive, ‘not only because Tolkien in his non-fictional writing several times repudiated racist ideas, but because … in his sub-creation the whole intellectual underpinning of racism is absent.’ In any case, such an interpretation, as the story in The Lord of the Rings proceeds, would get increasingly harder to maintain – and this relates to another common criticism, also voiced by Stimpson (#litres_trial_promo), that Tolkien’s characters divide neatly into ‘good and evil, nice and nasty.’ But as anyone who has really read it could tell you, the initial semi-tribal apportioning of moral probity increasingly breaks down, as evil emerges ‘among the kingly Gondorians (#litres_trial_promo), the blond Riders of Rohan, the seemingly incorruptible wizards, and even the thoroughly English hobbit-folk of the Shire.’ (Incidentally, hobbits appear to be brown-skinned (#litres_trial_promo), not white.) By the same token, Frodo, Gollum, Boromir and Denethor all experience intense inner struggles over what the right thing to do is, with widely varying outcomes; and as Le Guin (#litres_trial_promo) has noted, several major characters have a ‘shadow.’ In Frodo’s case, there are arguably two: Sam and Gollum, who is himself doubled as Gollum/Stinker and Sm?agol/Slinker, as Sam calls him. ‘If you want to write a tale of this sort (#litres_trial_promo),’ Tolkien once wrote, ‘you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation: with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East.’ Thus, as Clyde Kilby (#litres_trial_promo) recounts, when Tolkien was asked what lay east and south of Middle-earth, he replied: ‘“Rh?n is the Elvish word for east. Asia, China, Japan, and all the things which people in the West regard as far away. And south of Harad is Africa, the hot countries.” Then Mr. Resnick asked, “That makes Middle-earth Europe, doesn’t it?” To which Tolkien replied, “Yes, of course – Northwestern Europe … where my imagination comes from”.’ (In which case, as Tolkien also agreed, Mordor ‘would be roughly in the Balkans.’) He reacted sharply to reading a description of Middle-earth as ‘Nordic,’ however: ‘Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories …’ He also contested Auden’s assertion that for him ‘the North is a sacred direction’: ‘That is not true. The North-west of Europe (#litres_trial_promo), where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not “sacred,” nor does it exhaust my affections.’ It is also striking that the races in Middle-earth are most striking in their variety and autonomy. I suppose that this could be seen as an unhealthy emphasis on ‘race’; it seems to me rather an assertion of the wonder of multicultural difference. And given that most of Middle-earth’s peoples are closely tied to a particular geography and ecology, and manage to live there without exploiting it to the point of destruction, isn’t this what is nowadays called bioregionalism? But no kind of apartheid is involved: one of the subplots of The Lord of the Rings concerns an enduring friendship between members of races traditionally estranged (Gimli and Legolas), and the most important union in the book, between Aragorn and Arwen, is an ‘interracial’ marriage. As usual, the picture is a great deal more complex than the critics, although not necessarily the public, seem to see. A Pastoral Fantasy? (#ulink_450e462b-7b5d-545f-b89b-de6c0fd69f9d) A major stream of hostile Tolkien criticism can be traced back to Raymond Williams (#litres_trial_promo), who fathered British cultural studies, and called his method ‘cultural materialism.’ In The Country and the City, Williams noted the ‘extraordinary development of country-based fantasy, from Barrie and Kenneth Grahame through J. C. Powys and T. H. White and now to Tolkien …’ and concluded, ‘It is then not only that the real land and its people were falsified; a traditional and surviving rural England was scribbled over and almost hidden from sight by what is really a suburban and half-educated scrawl.’ Williams has been massively influential. One could produce many other commentators since who have lambasted pastoralism in the same way. One writes of ‘the ultimate, deeply conservative, ambition of pastoral’ that it ‘falsifies the actual relations of non-city communities just as much and for the same reason that it falsifies city communities.’ For another, ‘The Pastoral (#litres_trial_promo) allows for a direct opposition to social change, a reactionary clinging to a static present, and an often desperate belief in future improvement.’ And it fades away with ‘the possibility of social mobility and of economic progress.’ (How dated this now sounds, as we face increasingly insurmountable problems as a direct result of ‘economic progress’!) Let us put cultural materialism to the test by seeing how well it applies to Tolkien. According to Williams (#litres_trial_promo), ‘In Britain, identifiably, there is a precarious but persistent rural-intellectual radicalism: genuinely and actively hostile to industrialism and capitalism; opposed to commercialism and the exploitation of the environment; attached to country ways and feelings, the literature and the lore.’ This sounds generous, until you get to the punch-line: ‘in every kind of radicalism the moment comes when any critique must choose its bearings, between past and future … We must begin differently: not in the idealizations of one order or another, but in the history to which they are only partial and misleading responses.’ By the same token, according to Williams, in our current crises myth and revolution are opposites rather than complementary: we must have ‘real history’ oriented to a revolutionary future, not ‘myth’ dreaming of the past. But this emperor now has no clothes, if indeed he ever had. The mythical ‘vs.’ the actual, the ideal ‘vs.’ the real – this is a set of choices which postmodern sensibilities have exposed as cruelly misleading. The ‘material (#litres_trial_promo)’ is meaningless except as structured by ideas; conversely, ideas have highly material effects. Revolutions – before, during and after – are saturated with myth. Nor is the political character (#litres_trial_promo) of traditions and positions inherent and fixed for all time; look how Marxism-Leninism, supposedly ‘left-wing,’ became crudely authoritarian; or how ‘conservative’ parties today have become vehicles of sweeping radical change. Williams doesn’t even seem to realize that people do not live by factual and physical bread alone, but also by ideas, values and visions of alternatives (#litres_trial_promo). It is not surprising, then, that his treatment of pastoralism terminates in mere abuse of Tolkien’s work as, absurdly, ‘half-educated’ and ‘suburban.’ Oxford professors may be many things, but they are not yet half-educated; and Tolkien actually complained to his son in 1943 that ‘the bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb (#litres_trial_promo).’ Nor has Williams noticed that the hobbits’ pastoralism is dominated and subverted by other themes. As Gildor said to Frodo, ‘it is not your own Shire (#litres_trial_promo) … Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’ As Merry too admitted, ‘It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not.’ The Lord of the Rings could thus better be seen as an extended argument that pastoralism alone is not enough – doomed, even: ‘The Shire is not a haven, and the burden of the tale is that there are no havens (#litres_trial_promo) in a world where evil is a reality. If you think you live in one, you are probably na?ve like the early Frodo, and certainly vulnerable.’ Perhaps the political problem is the richness and centrality of the natural world in Middle-earth (and not just pastoral nature). But if so, it only serves to confirm that the Left of Williams and his followers remains stuck in a modernist and economistic world-view (#litres_trial_promo). Had Marxist socialism accepted William Morris’s generous offer to meet halfway (as E. P. Thompson (#litres_trial_promo) put it), this tragedy never would have happened. Thompson himself is a good counter-example: Morris’s biographer, a passionate critic of economism and class reductionism, defender of William Blake’s mythos, and, perhaps not so coincidentally, a passionate gardener. Here, in a catalogue that would have impressed even Samwise, is Thompson’s account of his garden (#litres_trial_promo) on his fiftieth birthday: ‘there is: rasps, strawbs, red, white and black currants, worcester berries, wineberries, gooseberries, loganberries, lettuces, radishes, asparagus, tomatoes, globe artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, marrow, cucumber, broad beans, peas, runner beans, french beans, rhubarb, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, leeks, spring onions, celery, CORN, apples, peaches, nectarines and weeds.’ Thompson is one powerful reminder that in order to be progressive it is not helpful, let alone necessary, to adopt the po-faced dogma of materialist and rationalist modernism. George Orwell (#litres_trial_promo) (also a gardener), is another. In ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946), he asked: Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring? … is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? Fascist? (#ulink_51bf46b7-5230-5652-bd8a-69049b21e8aa) Williams (#litres_trial_promo) says that nostalgic ‘celebrations of a feudal or aristocratic order’ embody values that ‘spring to the defence of certain kinds of order, certain social hierarchies and moral stabilities, which have a feudal ring but a more relevant and more dangerous contemporary application … in the defence of traditional property settlements, or in the offensive against democracy in the name of blood and soil.’ Williams’ disciple and biographer Fred Inglis (#litres_trial_promo) has made the unpleasant implications of this passage explicit in relation to Tolkien, whose ‘schmaltz-G?tterd?mmerung’ (he wrote) is such that ‘for once it makes sense to use that much-abused adjective, and call Tolkien a Fascist.’ He later (#litres_trial_promo) retracted this outrageous slur only to claim the same thing of The Lord of the Rings: ‘instead of Nuremberg, Frodo’s farewell.’ So let us consider the politics (in the narrow sense) of both Tolkien and Middle-earth. Before doing so, however, I would like to point out that there is simply no Wagnerian ‘G?tterd?mmerung’ in The Lord of the Rings; ‘Victory (#litres_trial_promo) neither restores an earthly Paradise nor ushers in New Jerusalem.’ In addition, Tolkien disliked Wagner’s (#litres_trial_promo)Der Ring des Nibelungen, with which his work has often been bracketed – ‘Both rings were round,’ he once snapped, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ – and all the more so for drawing directly on some of the same mythological material that Wagner only knew second-hand, and used to such very different ends. (Interestingly, Ragnarok (#litres_trial_promo) was a relatively late aspect of Germano-Scandinavian mythology that never caught on in the pagan Anglo-Saxon England that so influenced Tolkien. Even then, it was, apparently, un-English in its melodrama.) Politics in Middle-earth (#ulink_14ffdd5e-e7c3-5392-96e2-3d2e05621cac) Tolkien noted in 1943 that ‘My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) – or to “unconstitutional” Monarchy.’ I have already mentioned his hostility to the state. Actually, whiskered or not, Tolkien arguably anticipated the eco-sabotage of the group Earth First!; his approval stretched to the war-time ‘dynamiting [of] factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as “patriotism (#litres_trial_promo),” may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.’ Some years later, Tolkien wrote: I am not a ‘socialist’ (#litres_trial_promo) in any sense – being averse to ‘planning’ (as must be plain) most of all because the ‘planners,’ when they acquire power, become so bad – but I would not say that we had to suffer the malice of Sharkey and his Ruffians here. Though the spirit of ‘Isengard,’ if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case. But our chief adversary is a member of a ‘Tory’ Government. (He was referring to a narrowly-defeated proposal in 1956 to put a ‘relief road’ through Christ Church Meadow – something with a distinctly contemporary ring.) So Tolkien himself can be classed as an anarchist, libertarian, and/or conservative – not at all in the contemporary sense of the last (which has been almost entirely taken over by neo-liberalism), but in the sense of striving to conserve what is worth saving. None of these categories can easily be assimilated to either Left or Right, which is itself usually sufficient cause to be dismissed by those who like to have these things cut and dried. In a consistently pre-modern way, Tolkien was neither liberal nor socialist, nor even necessarily democrat; but neither is there even a whiff of ‘blood and soil’ fascism (#litres_trial_promo). In this, he contrasts strongly with modernists (#litres_trial_promo) such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis: writers to whose work that of Tolkien is frequently unfavourably compared. But this is no surprise; Tolkien was trying to do something completely different. Consider too that besides imperialistic nationalism, of which Tolkien was very suspicious, something common to all strands of fascism (but especially Nazism) is the worship of technological modernism (#litres_trial_promo), which he positively hated. That antipathy is obvious throughout his works, down to the background detail of, say, the fall of N?menor (Tolkien’s Atlantis) through hubris, which consisted of both domestic political autocracy, including the suppression of dissent, and a foreign policy based on technological and military supremacy. Actually, German Nazism was a particular tragedy for Tolkien. In 1941, he wrote to his son Michael that ‘I have in this War a burning private grudge (#litres_trial_promo)’ against Hitler, for ‘ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.’ It is also noteworthy that when the German publishers of The Hobbit wrote to Tolkien in 1938 asking if he was of ‘arisch’ (aryan) origins, and could prove it, he refused to do so, indignantly replying that ‘if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’ He consequently advised Allen & Unwin that he was inclined to ‘let a German translation (#litres_trial_promo) go hang.’ Nor is Middle-earth fascist, let alone Nazi. The Shire, for example, functions by a sort of municipal (not representative) democracy, which Tolkien himself accurately described as ‘half republic (#litres_trial_promo) half aristocracy.’ The former half has, typically, been ignored by Tolkien’s critics in their eagerness to assail the latter; but even here, their case is mixed at best. On the one hand, there is undeniably a certain amount of quasi-feudal paternalism and deference in the Shire, which is particularly evident, and sometimes annoying, as in the case of Sam. To me (and I doubt I am alone in this), it reads like a relic, and is far too hard to take seriously to offer any kind of model whatsoever. Similarly, of the three positions of authority in the Shire, two are hereditary and only one elected. But these officers’ powers, and duties, are minimal. True, by the end of The Lord of the Rings there is again a King; and one whose kingly qualities Tolkien goes out of his way to establish. But Aragorn merely grants to the Shire, and other areas, the kind of effective independence they already had. Note too that his accession was only with the approval of the people of the City (#litres_trial_promo). In other words, local self-government or ‘subsidiarity’ obtains: most decisions are taken at the lowest possible level, closest to those who are most affected by them. The Shire as a yeoman-republic thus has strong links to the tradition of civic republicanism (#litres_trial_promo), with its emphasis on a self-governing citizenry and its fear of corruption by clique and commerce. As Donald Davie (#litres_trial_promo) noticed, the implication of The Lord of the Rings points firmly ‘towards the conviction that authority in public matters’ – as distinct from self-government – ‘… can be and ought to be resisted and refused by anyone who wants to live humanely.’ This tradition has pre-modern roots, in Aristotle, Cicero and Machiavelli, but its contemporary relevance is none the less for that; and it reminds us that modern parliamentary liberalism has no franchise on democracy and community, or on solutions to our problems – particularly when it has withered to casting a ballot every four or five years for one of two largely overlapping parties. (I once asked Gregory Bateson which political system he thought was best and most humane; he replied, at least half-seriously, ‘An inefficient monarchy.’) The Shire also has clear resonances with other postmodern and ecological values that are returning to the fore as modernity turns sour. In sharp contrast to our possessive individualism, the hobbits are intensely communal – The Lord of the Rings rarely follows the story of less than two together – and live in a relatively simple and frugal way. Rediscovering the difference between quality of life and standard of living, something hobbits have never forgotten, is becoming urgent. Collective voluntary simplicity is becoming the only positive alternative to collective immiseration. The Netherlands currently requires an area seventeen times its own size to sustain itself; if everyone on Earth lived like an average Canadian (#litres_trial_promo), two more Earths would be required to provide the energy and materials needed. And these two places are not the worst. Yet on the whole, most people are not even happier for it! Other societies in Middle-earth function differently, although mostly under the aegis of non-autocratic royalty. Each is distinct, even those among humans: the Gondorians, the Riddermark and the Men of Bree are not interchangeable. Even if we want to regard hobbits, elves, dwarves and so on as different human ‘races’ (which would be a crude simplification), none of them suggests that it is possible or even desirable for people to live as ‘fortuitously separated brethren,’ with their first loyalties to an abstract ‘humanity’ over and above their own kind and communities. Perhaps such realism too has offended some defenders of this tattered liberal shibboleth. On the other hand, The Lord of the Rings certainly does hold out the hope that different kinds and communities can respect one another’s differences, and live at peace with each other. And none of them resembles Mordor (#litres_trial_promo): an utterly authoritarian state, with a slave-based economy featuring industrialized agriculture and intensive industrialism – ‘great slave-worked fields away south,’ while ‘in the northward regions were the mines and forges’ – all of which is geared towards military production for the purpose of world-wide domination. And it is noteworthy, recalling the intense cults that surrounded such men as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, even in an officially secular state, that Mordor is also an ‘evil theocracy (for Sauron is also the god of his slaves) …’ To confuse Sauron with the pre-industrial kingships of Gondor or Rohan would be absurd. As Madawc Williams (#litres_trial_promo) remarks, ‘if one king feels morally bound to respect your existing rights while the other is planning either to enslave you or feed you to his Orcs, you’d have little trouble knowing which side you ought to be on!’ Furthermore, what is ‘The Scouring of the Shire,’ politically speaking, but an account of local resistance to fascist (#litres_trial_promo) thuggery and forced modernization? That leaves the ‘approval of traditional property settlements.’ Well, I doubt if Tolkien’s approval could have been taken for granted; it would probably have depended a great deal on what was proposed for the land in question. And as Jonathan Bate (#litres_trial_promo) points out, redistributing ownership is not going to be much use if the land in question is poisoned beyond use. As I mentioned earlier, Bate (#litres_trial_promo) makes another important point: a distinction between love of the land and love of the fatherland. The former, which is clear both in Tolkien’s personal life and in his books, involves a fierce attachment to highly specific and local places and things. As such, it offers little foothold to the inflated emotional abstractions that are so essential to fascist nationalism. This is vividly illustrated in Sam’s saving realization, when tempted by the Ring of Power, that: ‘The one small garden (#litres_trial_promo) of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.’ Radical Nostalgia (#ulink_4cf61215-babe-5b94-9bce-8cfc4058686e) Cultural materialism not only seems to produce an inability to read, or to recognize other dimensions than power (narrowly meant) and its effects. Remarkably, even in that realm it falls down. Take nostalgia, for example. Fraser Harrison, whom I quoted earlier, agrees with Raymond Williams that ‘nostalgia recognizes no duty to history.’ He asks us to recognize, however, that: there is another dimension to nostalgia and that it should not be dismissed as simply a self-indulgent, escapist and pernicious failing. Whereas its account of history is patently untrue, and more ideological than it would pretend, it does none the less express a truth of its own, which reflects an authentic and deeply felt emotion … Our addiction to it is surely a symptom of our failure to make a satisfactory mode of life in the present, but perhaps it can also be seen as evidence of our desire to repair and revitalize our broken relations. The pastoral fantasy nostalgia invented is after all an image of a world in which men and women feel at home with themselves, with each other and with nature, a world in which harmony reigns. It is an ideal … Now Tolkien gives us to understand, as strongly as possible while still writing a story and not a tract, that nostalgia pure-and-simple will not suffice. In Middle-earth, it is the Elves whose nostalgia is the strongest – both in the sense of yearning for the past and attempting to maintain that past now, in places like Lothl?rien and Rivendell. But the aristocratic and artistic Elves, despite their valiant resistance, plainly offer no real solution to the central problem of the Ring. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/patrick-curry/defending-middle-earth-tolkien-myth-and-modernity/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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