J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the century

Christian Century, Nov 21, 2001 by Ralph Wood

J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.

By Tom Shippey. Houghton Mifflin, 328 pp., $26.00.

RECENTLY I GAVE an eight-year-old friend a copy of The Hobbit, promising to send her The Lord of the Rings when she's finished with Tolkien's warm-up to his half-a-million-word heroic fantasy. In a recent doctoral seminar devoted to 20th-century Catholic fiction, I included the Ring epic. How can both children and thoughtful adults read this Tolkien work with profit and delight--so that more than 100 million copies have been sold and it has been translated into 40 languages? This is the question Tom Shippey asks in timely relation to the December release of the first of the Lord of the Rings movies. Perhaps they will arouse an interest in Tolkien comparable to the flurry of attention given to C. S. Lewis after the showing of the film Shadowlands in 1993.

Shippey contends that Tolkien is the quintessential author of the 20th century--the century when perhaps 180 million people were slaughtered, causing Pope John Paul II to speak of our "culture of death." Tolkien, according to Shippey, offers what allegedly greater writers do not: a convincing narrative and mythological confrontation with the unprecedented violence and horror of late-modern life, yet without despairing over the victory of the forces of goodness and life.

When Waterstone, the British bookshop chain, conducted a 1998 survey of its patrons to determine what they considered to be the outstanding books of the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings finished first. Similar surveys by the Folio Society, the BBC and the Daily Telegraph yielded the same result. Shippey believes that literary critics should have been neither surprised nor incensed. If they had a greater regard for the mass readership, they would have noticed that fantasy has become the dominant genre of our time. The reason, for Shippey, is not hard to find: conventional realism cannot deal with the Somme and Ypres, with Bergen-Belsen, with Guernica and Dresden and Hiroshima, with the technocratic dehumanization of modern industries and cities or--we must now add--the terrorism of al-Qaeda. Direct depiction of such monstrous evils often has the countereffect of making them aesthetically acceptable.

Fantasy, by contrast, enables writers to confront the terrors of our time by way of parabolic indirection. Hence the prevalence of the literary fable during the latter half of the 20th century: George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, T. H. White's Book of Merlyn (which defines humanity as homo ferox) and Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (which recounts life in a "civilization" built on the torture of an idiot child). Rather than linking Tolkien to the Oxford Inklings, as another Christian apologist, Shippey puts him in the company of these fantasists of the frightful, these masters of the unreal. He shows that, unlike the works of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, Tolkien's fantasy appeals as much to non-Christians as to Christians.

The irony underlying Tolkien's ability to speak deeply to "all sorts and conditions" of people is that he had no intention of becoming a celebrity-writer at all. He was first and last a philologist, a master of languages. Tolkien had an almost mystical regard for words. He considered articulate breath to be our greatest gift--indeed, to be the very image of God embedded within us. Words (at least in their origins) are never arbitrary or accidental, he believed. They come into being because they reveal the true character of things. Like Adam naming the animals that the Lord God brought before him, words give life to the created order. Our logoi are rooted in the Logos, and mythologies are supreme examples of the ontological character of speech.

Thor, the Norse god of thunder, was not, for example, a naive and pre-scientific attempt to explain the phenomenon which we have come to regard as the clashing of cold and hot air. The word itself was born, Tolkien suggests, as ancient Norsemen experienced three related things at once: human rage in the form of a bellowing, hot-tempered, ox-stout farmer; the raucous noise of lightning and thunder; and the divine wrath before which we are all judged and found wanting. Events and experiences thus called forth their names, beckoning our forebears to give them their true nominative existence. Our modern languages have become largely the detritus of these primeval metaphorical analogies. Thus can mythologies help us regain a right linguistic relation to the world--a relation which for Tolkien is moral and religious as well.

Drawn early in life to the ancient sagas of Northern Europe, Tolkien mastered their difficult tongues: Icelandic, Old Norse, Gothic and Finnish, among several others. He was preeminently the master of Anglo-Saxon, and he became the world's leading authority on Beowulf, the Old English epic poem. Shippey shows that, as a scholar of antique and obscure texts, Tolkien became obsessed with explaining words whose meaning has been lost. He also postulated words that must have once existed--given the existence of cognate words--even though there is no record of them. This led him, in turn, to create languages of his own: three forms of elvish, for example. And speech implies worlds, so Tolkien invented creatures and realms which would have produced such languages. Hence his gradual invention of a massive mythological system that fills more than a dozen posthumously published volumes.