Words That Sound Like Castles

The Lord of the Rings: I. The Fellowship of the Ring; Il. The Two Towers; III. The Return of the King, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Second, revised edition, with a new foreword by the author. Houghton Mifflin, $6.00 each volume

I AM CONVINCED that the way to approach a criticism of Tolkien, as distinct from an enjoyment of Tolkien, is through the writings of C. S. Lewis. It is an historical accident that I also came to my enjoyment of Tolkien through Lewis—buying the first edition of The Lord of the Rings because of the remark of Lewis’ in That Hideous Strength, “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.” But the at once perceptive and wrongheaded review of Tolkien in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books (by M. J. C. Hodgart) has convinced me that the approach to Tolkien through Lewis’ criticism cannot longer be left to accident. Mr. Hodgart attacks Tolkien because his people are “stock types recombined ingeniously in folkloric and literary shapes.” And he goes on to say that “for a parallel in medieval literature we must look to works written under the inspiration of Christian doctrine: to the Chanson de Roland, with its straight conflict between good Christians and bad Saracens.” In short, he complains that all Tolkien has done is to tell greatly a great story about the conflict of good and evil. Just so. “Good and evil have not changed, nor are they one thing for dwarves and another for men.” There is in that, almost exactly, the ring of “Paiens ont tort et chrétiens ent droit.” And subtle characterization is precisely not Tolkien’s interest. In Lewis’ neglected essay “On Stories,’ he differentiates between those forms of literature “in which Story exists merely as a means to something else” and those “in which everything else is there for the sake of the story.” This second kind he then sub-divides into those with and without “atmosphere”—Njal’s Saga being an example of the first and The Three Musketeers of the second. Or, if Njal’s Saga does not appeal to you, he mentions The Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit, and had the essay not been written twenty years ago, he would have mentioned The Lord of the Rings. According to Lewis, there exists a form of literature (largely neglected since Aristotle’s Poetics), in which character is absolutely subordinate to story, and the story exists to “mediate imaginative life.” This, I think, describes exactly the nature of The Lord of the Rings. To attack it for this reason is to attack the genre, and while that is a permissible proceeding I suppose, it must be realized that the more successful the work is on its own terms, the more bitter will be this kind of attack. Vide Mr. Hodgart. “Dark is the water of Kheled-zaram, and cold are the springs of Kibilnala, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dim in Elder Days before the fall of mighty Kings beneath the stone.” But also, “there were many Bagginses and Boffins, and also many Tooks and Brandybucks; there were various Grubbs (relations of Bilbo Baggins’ grandmother), and various Chubbs (connexions of his Took grandfather) . . .” From the atmosphere of the second to that of the first is more than a merely temporal journey—“It is as if the battle of Toad Hall had become a serious heimsoékn and Badger had begun to talk like Njal.” A long time after reading Tolkien I came upon E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. It is a good story, and in my eyes might be a great one, were it not for one fault, a fault grievous because I have read Tolkien. The English is good and well chosen, but the names are not. To travel from Morna Moruna to Koshtra Belorn is not as fitting a thing as to travel from the Shire to Orodruin, nor are the Lord Gro and Prezmyra to be set beside Grima Worm-tongue or Ar-Pharazén the Golden, last king of Numénor.

JL

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Jared C. Lobdell

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The Lord of the Rings: I. The Fellowship of the Ring; Il. The Two Towers; III. The Return of the King, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Second, revised edition, with a new foreword by the author. Houghton Mifflin, $6.00 each volume

I AM CONVINCED that the way to approach a criticism of Tolkien, as distinct from an enjoyment of Tolkien, is through the writings of C. S. Lewis. It is an historical accident that I also came to my enjoyment of Tolkien through Lewis—buying the first edition of The Lord of the Rings because of the remark of Lewis’ in That Hideous Strength, “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.” But the at once perceptive and wrongheaded review of Tolkien in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books (by M. J. C. Hodgart) has convinced me that the approach to Tolkien through Lewis’ criticism cannot longer be left to accident. Mr. Hodgart attacks Tolkien because his people are “stock types recombined ingeniously in folkloric and literary shapes.” And he goes on to say that “for a parallel in medieval literature we must look to works written under the inspiration of Christian doctrine: to the Chanson de Roland, with its straight conflict between good Christians and bad Saracens.” In short, he complains that all Tolkien has done is to tell greatly a great story about the conflict of good and evil. Just so. “Good and evil have not changed, nor are they one thing for dwarves and another for men.” There is in that, almost exactly, the ring of “Paiens ont tort et chrétiens ent droit.” And subtle characterization is precisely not Tolkien’s interest. In Lewis’ neglected essay “On Stories,’ he differentiates between those forms of literature “in which Story exists merely as a means to something else” and those “in which everything else is there for the sake of the story.” This second kind he then sub-divides into those with and without “atmosphere”—Njal’s Saga being an example of the first and The Three Musketeers of the second. Or, if Njal’s Saga does not appeal to you, he mentions The Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit, and had the essay not been written twenty years ago, he would have mentioned The Lord of the Rings. According to Lewis, there exists a form of literature (largely neglected since Aristotle’s Poetics), in which character is absolutely subordinate to story, and the story exists to “mediate imaginative life.” This, I think, describes exactly the nature of The Lord of the Rings. To attack it for this reason is to attack the genre, and while that is a permissible proceeding I suppose, it must be realized that the more successful the work is on its own terms, the more bitter will be this kind of attack. Vide Mr. Hodgart. “Dark is the water of Kheled-zaram, and cold are the springs of Kibilnala, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dim in Elder Days before the fall of mighty Kings beneath the stone.” But also, “there were many Bagginses and Boffins, and also many Tooks and Brandybucks; there were various Grubbs (relations of Bilbo Baggins’ grandmother), and various Chubbs (connexions of his Took grandfather) . . .” From the atmosphere of the second to that of the first is more than a merely temporal journey—“It is as if the battle of Toad Hall had become a serious heimsoékn and Badger had begun to talk like Njal.” A long time after reading Tolkien I came upon E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. It is a good story, and in my eyes might be a great one, were it not for one fault, a fault grievous because I have read Tolkien. The English is good and well chosen, but the names are not. To travel from Morna Moruna to Koshtra Belorn is not as fitting a thing as to travel from the Shire to Orodruin, nor are the Lord Gro and Prezmyra to be set beside Grima Worm-tongue or Ar-Pharazén the Golden, last king of Numénor.