Critical Essay by Michael Wood
Tolkien is a Catholic and an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and the theology of his work is an extraordinary synthesis of heroic northern myth and Christian promise. Tolkien believes in Providence, both in and out of his fiction. He never mentions chance without a pious parenthesis—"if such it be"—yet he also believes, as he suggests the author ofBeowulfbelieved, that within Time the monsters win. "We have fought the long defeat," Tolkien's Elf-Queen says, and the elves effectively leave the earth. God, in other words, is pulling his punches, to see how we make out against Sauron and his ilk. The treats come later, in the islands of the blessed.
This view accounts, I think, for two things in Tolkien's work. First, the fascination with the journey—not only inThe HobbitandThe Lord of the Ringspassim, but also in the rather thin stories,Leaf by NiggleandSmith of Wootton Major; the journey becomes a figure or type of death, the happy release, the blessed departure. And secondly, the elegiac tone of the trilogy, which seems strangely at odds with its heroic theme. (p. 168)
Tolkien's "old times" are only half-mythical. They are a magical Arthurian past, certainly; a lost age where lords and ladies dally sweetly on the greensward and talk like Tennyson, where elves and dwarves and hobbits and wizards and other, older creatures are available for chats with mortal men. It is a haunted world where trees move and mountains threaten and the weather is always a metaphor—a world where at least one of what Tolkien calls "primordial human desires" is satisfied: the desire to "hold communion with other living things." It is an elvish Eden, a world seen in the morning, when "al was this land fulfild of fayerye," as the Wife of Bath put it. But Tolkien's old times are also simply historical, a picture of pre-industrial England, a place of unspoiled greenery, fields and forests. Forests especially.
Tolkien writes beautifully about trees—largely, I suspect, because he prefers them to people. At the end of the trilogy, when the quest is over, the heroic hobbits return to the Shire to find that Sauron's agents have been busy there too. There are chimneys belching out black smoke, and mean houses have replaced the picturesque burrows. There is arbitrary imprisonment, and there are distinct unfairnesses in the distribution of beer and tobacco. It's a tame picture of the great darkness: a mingling of a dim view of socialism and a wishful view of Hitler's Germany.
What is there, then, in this Tory daydream to prevent it from being the mishmash that Edmund Wilson thought it was? Why would people like Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C. S. Lewis want to compare Tolkien with Spenser, Malory and Ariosto (respectively)? The answer lies less, I think, in the quality or texture of Tolkien's work than in the extent and variety of it, and in the power of the complex moral fable which he manages to sustain.
Tolkien's borrowings are considerable: lines from heroic lays, a horn from Roland, an interesting case of resurrection fromThe Golden Bough, and a swan from an expensive staging ofLohengrin. Some of his "sources" are less dignified. (pp. 168-69)
But I don't intend these remarks as a criticism of Tolkien—well, only partly. They also give an idea of his range, which is wider than it looks. So that although he is capable of all kinds of archaic awfulness …, he is also capable of this characterisation of Sauron's evil eye, seen in an elf-mirror: "The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing." Roughly, Tolkien is good when the action is moving, and embarrassing when it stops. He is a born storyteller and a bad writer. The battle between Gandalf and the Balrog, for example, an ancient evil awakened from its long sleep under the mountain, is as exciting as anything sinceMoby Dick, but the halt in Lorien, the land of the elves, is more like Maurice Hewlett or Anthony Hope.
Tolkien was born in 1892 (Nabokov and Borges were both born in 1899), but he belongs to an older generation: that of Yeats and the friends of Madame Blavatsky. The enemy is science, or rather the complacency of science, the self-satisfaction of people who think they can explain everything, who have no time for myths, for forms of truth which will not fit within a narrow rationalism. Hence Tolkien's fantasy, his insistence on thepossibilityof "fayerye"; hence Yeats's flirtations with the occult. Frodo the hobbit "looked at maps, and wondered what lay beyond their edges."
This is the striking thing about Tolkien's imagined world: the precision of its geography, the colour of the map beyond the map's edges. Tolkien is not good at creating individuals, but his types, his races, are fascinating. There are dwarves, orcs, elves, hobbits, ents, men, dragons, wizards, trolls, goblins, ghosts, all sharply differentiated, all speaking their own dialects. (pp. 170-71)
But all this still sounds closer toThe Wizard of Ozthan to Ariosto. What else is there? First, there is Tolkien's unrelenting psychologism. There are heroic adventures here, but they are all carefully internalised. The authentic acts of courage—a hobbit deciding to face a dragon, a handful of men deciding to fight against all odds—always take place in the mind. And the authentic conflicts of the trilogy are always telepathic—clashes of wills, combats of concentration. Good and evil are thus not abstractions, they are a confrontation. They are congregations of like-minded creatures lined up in opposition. The recruiting and the battles and the weather are simply metaphors for this.
And then the conflict in any case is not a simple one. The ring which Frodo has to destroy is a ring of power. If Sauron gets it back, nothing will be safe from him. But why shouldn't an enemy of Sauron use it against him, for the good of the world? This is the argument and the temptation offered to several important characters. The answer is that the ring simply is evil. Anyone who tried to use it would either become a servant of Sauron, or if he were very strong, become Sauron himself, a new dark lord. There is no good in the ring, no way of using it well.
Tolkien has said that his work is not an allegory, and it isn't, in any narrow sense. But it certainly isn't just a jolly tale either, and the rings represents something, whether Tolkien knows what it is or not. Ultimately, the ring represents the lure of the modern world itself, which must stain all those who try to change it or use it. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed," as Yeats wrote, and the only answer is high conservatism: war without compromise, and without resort to the engines of the enemy. This is the long defeat the Elf-Queen spoke of, because a modern war on those terms cannot be won. But Tolkien would say, I think, that the war cannot be won anyway, and that the alternatives are death with clean or with dirty hands. The model is a desperate, noble wager which works in romance and inevitably fails in real life.
I don't find this an attractive or a realistic position, but I think it is a powerful and a coherent one—it is the position of Swift and Pope faced with what they saw as the rising darkness—and I think it has a lot to do with Tolkien's success, whether with poets or writers or students or teachers or hippies. "The world withers," Tolkien writes in an alliterating poem based onThe Battle of Maldon, "and the wind rises; / the candles are quenched. Cold falls the night."Beowulf, anyone? (pp. 171-72)
Michael Wood, "Tolkien's Fictions," inNew Society,March 27, 1969 (and reprinted inSuitable for Children?edited by Nicholas Tucker, University of California Press, 1976, pp. 165-72).