Big Hollywood
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February 19, 2011
“Oh f***, not another elf!”
Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.
Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.
In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”
And yet, he also possessed shadowed hope: “At the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible beauties of word or deed or face — not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there.”
Finding that quiet sanctity amidst clangorous wickedness and despair would become the defining characteristic of The Lord of the Rings.
To his youngest boy, Christopher (b. 1924, and then stationed in South Africa with the Royal Air Force), he regularly sent new chapters of his burgeoning magnum opus, along with news that, when he read each aloud to C. S. Lewis, the author of Mere Christianity and so many other kindly, bracing works would sometimes be moved to tears. “[Lewis] was for long my only audience,” Tolkien wrote later with deep appreciation. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”
**********
All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgûl the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms.
**********
“I have not been nourished by English Literature,” Tolkien once wrote, “. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”
While browsing through a dusty old college library as a teen, young “Ronald” Tolkien discovered a veritable Ring of Power in the form of a book on Finnish grammar. Learning that language, he would later marvel, was “like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.” Soon his study of other languages gave him a “sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music,” and he began penning stories and poems in a genuine, rigorously applied archaic mode, deeming our more garish modern idiom as possessing “an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning” whenever it was applied to tales of high romance. In Tolkien’s view, you couldn’t drink vintage spirits out of a soda pop can without it fatally marring the taste and experience.At the same time, many old myths were missing something important. “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh),” he once explained by way of example, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am.”
He thus “set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”
By the time the 1930s gave way to the 40s and then the 50s, Tolkien began to quietly despair at ever accomplishing his quest. “I have produced a monster,” he wrote to one correspondent, “an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” In 1953, while checking galley-proofs, he admitted that it “seems, I must confess, in print very long-winded in parts.” Over fifteen years after beginning his “arrogant” task, he was left to grimly muse that:
Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all its features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered. I do not say this in recommendation. It is, I feel, only too likely that I am deluded, lost in a web of vain imaginings of not much value to others — in spite of the fact that a few readers have found it good, on the whole.
The first print run of The Fellowship of the Ring was limited to 4,500 copies. “I am dreading the publication,” he wrote, “for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.” Many in the entrenched Ivory Towers of academia and literary criticism did just that, offering up scathing critiques that — all too typical of such people — frequently got whole portions of the book (characters, events, dialogue) embarrassingly wrong. In response Tolkien could only sigh, having told his publisher, “It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.”
But one man above all others was determined to (I use a phrase coined by Robert E. Howard) “not be backward when the spears are splintering.” C. S. Lewis took up his pen like a Crusader and, in a review titled “The Gods Return to Earth,” shouted out to the world a written manifestation of the same tears he had shed while first hearing the story read in manuscript:
[The Fellowship of the Ring] is like lightning from a clear sky. . . To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism, is inadequate. . . Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. . . .
It is sane and vigilant invention, revealing at point after point the integration of the author’s mind. . . Anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone. . . . But with the anguish comes also a strange exaltation. . . when we have finished, we return to our own life not relaxed but fortified….
Even now I have left out almost everything — the silvan leafiness, the passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps also its deepest: “there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Not wholly vain — it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.
Over the ensuing decades Tolkien’s “long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance” sold millions of copies, and immeasurably enriched the lives of millions of souls, many of whom felt lost and alone in a mad world seemingly bereft of the sanity and the sanctity that his tale embodied. By the time the indispensable scholar and philologist Tom Shippey published his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2001, with a title meant to be taken as a comment on Tolkien’s thematic essence as much as his popularity) his remaining detractors resembled nothing so much as the routed forces of Mordor, running “hither and thither mindless. . . wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope.”And from the cimmerian gloom of those dark, lightless places, oh how they snarl! “The Lord of the Rings is racist,” wrote John Yatt in the Guardian in 2002:
It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. . . the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP [British National Party] leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced — it’s amazing he doesn’t go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm. . . .
[LG -- actually, it was the 1980 Bakshi cartoon that did that: "Where there's a whip!" (ssss...crack!) "There's a way!"]
Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it’s shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.
What gall. The Guardian is a paper, after all, that later praised fantasy author George RR Martin for his unflinchingly graphic portrayal of a world in which “the old are tortured and humiliated, women are raped, suffering is everywhere,” for his “unsettling passages of bracingly weird sex” and for his myriad scenes of “inventively unpleasant killing.” It’s a paper that later recommended Joe Abercrombie’s first book for its “delightfully twisted and evil” torturer “who can shorten a man’s arm from fingers to elbow in neat little slices,” and for its young hero possessing “no redeeming qualities whatsoever.” Hey, if that’s all to your taste, fair enough.
But does anyone really expect the rest of us to take that same paper seriously when it draws a courageous line in the sand against a mild-mannered Christian professor and his exquisitely rendered masterpiece? To meekly agree that Tolkien sitting on the shelf next to the books of Mssrs. Martin and Abercrombie is “frankly unacceptable” in this evolved new century of tolerance and diversity, lest we be branded racists and throwbacks ourselves? Or to renounce The Lord of the Rings in favor of books overflowing like a backed-up commode with torture-porn, sadism, and nihilism? (Apparently so: the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia has a meaty entry dedicated to RACISM, CHARGES OF.)
After a lecture, Shippey (whose wonderful Author of the Century book was itself trashed in the Guardian as “a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic”) was once asked what motivated people to spit such abject nonsense onto Tolkien’s self-professed “life-blood.” A man of eloquence and erudition, he responded with exactly the tone, and at exactly the length, that such diatribes deserve.
“They’re bastards!” he said cheerfully.
Or perhaps we should translate that into words Tolkien would have ruefully recognized, and that adequately express what people with intellectual standards think whenever they open a typical newspaper these days:
“Oh f***, not another liberal critic!”
To be continued. . . .
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lgrin/2011/02/19/sanity-and-sanctity-the-ennobling-fantasy-of-j-r-r-tolkien-part-1/#more-447368
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