The Road to Middle-Earth
- Book Review,
by Tom Shippey
Review
"Shippey is a rarity, a scholar well schooled in critical analysis whose writing is beautifully clear."
Review
"Shippey is a rarity, a scholar well schooled in critical analysis whose writing is beautifully clear."
Book Description
The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey"s classic work, now revised in paperback, explores J.R.R. Tolkien"s creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien"s professional background led him to write The Hobbit and how he created a timeless charm for millions of readers. Examining the foundation of Tolkien"s most popular work, The Lord of the Rings, Shippey also discusses the contribution of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales to Tolkien"s great myth cycle, showing how Tolkien"s more "difficult" books can be fully appreciated. He goes on to examine the remarkable twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, written by Tolkien"s son and literary heir Christopher Tolkien, which traces the creative and technical processes by which Middle-earth evolved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITIONMy involvement with Tolkien"s fictionnow goes back almost fifty years, to a first reading of The Hobbit some time inthe mid-1950s. My first attempt to comment publicly on Tolkien did notcome, however, till late 1969 or early 1970, when I was recruited, as a veryjunior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, to speak on "Tolkien asphilologist" at a Tolkien day organised by some now-forgotten association. Itwas my good fortune that Tolkien"s secretary, Joy Hill, was in theaudience, and asked me for a copy of my script to show the Professor. It was myfurther good fortune that he read it, perhaps out of good will to Birminghamand to King Edward"s School, Birmingham, which we both attended, he(with a gap) from 1900 to 1911, and I from 1954 to 1960. Tolkien furthermorereplied to it, with his habitual courtesy, in a letter dated 13 April1970, though it took me a very long time to understand what he meant, as Idiscuss below. It was not till 1972 that I met Tolkienin person, by which time I had been promoted from Birmingham to aFellowship at St. John"s College, Oxford, to teach Old and Middle Englishalong the lines which Tolkien had laid down many years before. Just afterI arrived in Oxford, Tolkien"s successor in the Merton Chair of EnglishLanguage, Norman Davis, invited me to dine at Merton and meet Tolkien,who was then living in college lodgings following the death of hiswife. The meeting left me with a strong sense of obligation and evenprofessional piety, in the old sense ofthat word, i.e. "affectionate loyalty and respect,esp. to parents", or in this case predecessors. After Tolkien"s death Ifelt increasingly that he would not have been happy with many of the thingspeople said about his writings, and that someone with a similar background to hisown ought to try to provide—as Tolkien and E. V. Gordon wrote in the"Preface" to their 1925 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—"asufficient apparatus for reading [these remarkable works] with an appreciationas far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired". In 1975, accordingly, I contributed anarticle on "Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings" tothe volume of Essays in Memoriam edited by Mary Salu and R. T. Farrell,essentially an expansion of my 1970 script. In 1979, however, I followedTolkien"s track yet again, this time going to the Chair of English Language andMedieval English Literature at the University of Leeds, which Tolkien hadheld more than fifty years before. This only increased the sense of professionalpiety mentioned above, and the result was the first edition of thepresent work, which appeared in 1982. I assumed at the time that that would bemy last word on the subject. But since then, of course, the whole"History of Middle-earth" has appeared, twelve volumes of Tolkien"s unpublisheddrafts and stories edited by his son Christopher, as well as a volume ofacademic essays including some new material, and the "reconstructed"editions of the Old English Exodus and Finnsburg poems: each separatepublication a valuable source ofinformation, but also of some trepidation to thewriter who has committed himself to explaining "how Tolkien worked" or "whatTolkien must have been thinking". A second edition of The Road toMiddleearth, in 1992, accordingly triedto take some of this material into account. A further thought, however, had slowlybeen growing upon me, first expressed in thearticle on "Tolkien as a Post-War Writer", delivered as a lecture at the "Tolkien Phenomenon"conference at the University of Turku, Finland, in 1992, and printed in theproceedings of that conference, Scholarship and Fantasy, edited by KeithJ. Battarbee. This thought was that I had from 1970 always thought ofTolkien as a philologist, a professional ancestor, one of a line of historicallinguists descended essentially from Jacob Grimm, of "Grimm"s Law" and"Grimms" Fairy Tales". I had in other words habitually seen him, to use thelinguists" term, "diachronically". But language can and should also be viewed"synchronically", and so could Tolkien. What happened if one consideredhim in the literary context of his time, the early to mid-twentiethcentury? My unconsidered assumption had been that he had no literary context,that he was a "one-off "—certainly the impression one would get from readingany literary histories of the period which happened to mention him. But ifone reflected on Orwell and William Golding, Vonnegut and T. H. White, C. S.Lewis and even Ursula Le Guin, several of them close to him in age orexperience or date of publication, a different picture emerged: one of agroup of (as I have called them) "traumatised authors", writingfantasy, but voicing in that fantasy the most pressing and most immediatelyrelevant issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century—questions ofindustrialised warfare, the origin ofevil, the nature of humanity. This "synchronic"view of Tolkien took shape in my book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century(2000). (Grammarians will note the absence of an article before the firstword of the sub-title.) I hope that my two books now complement each other throughtheir different approaches, though they present essentially the sameexplanations of the central works. The present, third edition of The Roadto Middle-earth naturally allows and obliges somereconsiderations, especially as a resultof the new information contained in "The History ofMiddle-earth". On the whole I feel my first edition got off relatively lightly, confirmed as often asdisproved. The rolling years and volumes have allowedme some clear hits: "angel" as Tolkien-speech for messenger (see note 11 tochapter 5 below, and c.p. Treason of Isengard, p. 422), or the importance ofOld Mercian (see below p. 123 and c.p. Sauron Defeated, p. 257). Of coursewhen it comes to philology, a real discipline, one ought to get thingsright. I was pleased when Anders Stenström, staying with me in Leeds in1984, found in a Leeds journal for 1922 an anonymous poem in Middle Englishwhich we concluded was by Tolkien; but almost as pleased when theemendations I proposed to the text as (mis)printed were confirmed byChristopher Tolkien from his father"s manuscript (see the journal of theSwedish Tolkien Society, Arda, vols. 4 [for 1984] and 6 [for 1986], for the poem andStenström"s account of his search). Meanwhile, some unmistakable wides havealso been called: in my allegorisation of "Leaf by Niggle",on p. 44 below, I should not have written "his "Tree" = The Lord of theRings", but have put down something much more extensive; despite p. 76,Sauron was not part of Tolkien"s "subsequent inspiration" butthere already; while on p. 271, writing "There is, in a way, no more of"middle-earth" to consider" was just tempting Providence. Even moresignificantly, my 1982 discussion of"depth" in Tolkien, pp. 308–17 below, wasextensively answered by Christopher Tolkien a year later in his "Foreword"to The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1, pp. 1–5, with a further note in Part 2, p. 57.It is clear that all my discussions of Tolkien were affected by reading hisworks (as almost everyone does) in order of publication, not order ofcomposition. It is a temptation to try to remedy this retrospectively, but I havenot done so. Studying Tolkien"s fiction as it developed in his own mind,possible now as it was not in 1982,would be a different book. In general, then, I amhappy to stand by what I published in 1982, and again in 1992, remembering thedata I had, and expanding or updating wherever necessary. Yet I do turn back to the letterProfessor Tolkien wrote to me on 13 April 1970, charmingly courteous andeven flattering as it was from one at the top of his profession to one then atthe bottom ("I don"t like to fob people off with a formal thanks . . . one ofthe nearest to my heart, or the nearest, of the many I have received . . . I amhonoured to have received your attention"). And yet, and yet . . . What I shouldhave realised—perhaps did half-realise, for I speak the dialect myself—was thatthis letter was written in the specialised politeness-language of OldWestern Man, in which doubt and correction are in direct proportion tothe obliquity of expression. The Professor"s letter had invisible italicsin it, which I now supply. "I amin agreement with nearly all that you say,and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper:especially about design as it appears or may be found in a large finished work,and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind inthe course of actual composition". It has taken me thirty years (and theperusal of fifteen volumes unpublished in 1970) to see the point of the italics.Tolkien, however, closed his letter to me with the proverb: "Need brooks no delay,yet late is better than never?" I can only repeat his saying, question-markand all.Copyright © 2003 by Tom Shippey.Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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