Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism
- Book Review,
by Rose A. Zimbardo (Editor)
Review
Fans will find much in these essays to enjoy and ponder.
Book Description
When first published, The Lord of the Rings stood far from the mainstream: no one had seen anything like it for decades. Tolkien's almost stridently antimodern tale needed valiant defenders, vocal admirers who understood its sources and relished its monumental scale. While such champions of modernism as Edmund Wilson mocked Tolkien's archaic structure and language, W. H. Auden -- a great modernist poet in his own right -- rose to his defense with a spirited essay on the true nature of the Hero Quest. Edmund Fuller's essay collected here discusses the nature of the fairy tale, returning to the roots of the term to remove the treacle of Disney and restore the value of realistic enchantment. Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis takes up the question of why, if you have a serious comment to make about real life, you would drape it in a never-never land of your own. He shrewdly argues that it is because real life does have mythic and heroic qualities -- in abundance. This collection also includes, among others, essays by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Verlyn Flieger, Paul Kocher, Jane Chance, and each of the editors, as well as a brand-new essay by Tom Shippey that shows us how to process all this vast learning, adding to it the many delights of the film versions of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, so we can relish his achievement all the more.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Neil D. IsaacsOn the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing)Tolkien CriticismIt is almost forty-three years since Rose Zimbardo pointed metoward Middle-earth. I was a relatively late arrival, the phenomenalsuccess of The Lord of the Rings having already been well established—to the dismay of some establishment defenders of the traditionalcanon.Throughout the sixties, three aspects of that phenomenonseemed to dominate perceptions of the value of the book. One wasthe persistent resistance by the arbiters of literary taste to afford criticalrecognition to a work that had proven its abundant appeal to awide popular and, worse, youthful audience. Another was the fact thatthe book"s commercial success was not the product of hype: the earlypopularity of The Lord of the Rings was produced by a word-ofmouthgroundswell that preceded the reactive attention of the massmedia. It was a matter of reporting the phenomenon rather than precipitatingit, though the reportage added fuel to the fire.The third was that some of the features and attractions of thebook and its created world inevitably elicited an infectious outbreakof "faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism," as I called it in "Onthe Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism." In that introduction toour first collection of critical essays I was lamenting that these factors,particularly "the feverish activity of the fanzines," were counterpro-ductive to the development of a climate for serious critical attentionto Tolkien"s masterpiece.More than a decade after the novel"s appearance, as an exampleif not a proof of the shocked attention still being paid to a literaryphenomenon by an uncomprehending coterie of critics (includingEdmundWilson, Germaine Greer, and Philip Toynbee), the New YorkHerald Tribune"s Book Week published on its front page (February26, 1967), beginning in large type and accompanied by a cartoon,what amounted to a confession of ignorance by a prominent critic,Paul West. Part of my response in "On the Possibilities of WritingTolkien Criticism" neatly summarizes, I think, the nature of the problem:On what bases does West attack The Lord of the Rings?1. He is baffled by it, baffled into numbness. I cannot argue withthis; he demonstrates both bafflement and numbness throughout.2. With a nostalgia for the last century"s discarded theories, he lamentsthat Tolkien created his world and its creatures alone,without some folksy community origin. But if Tolkien is soleowner and proprietor of Middle-earth, I would prefer to givehim all my admiration than to betray any envy for his creativeimagination.3. The Lord of the Rings is a game, only a game, and has no bearingon humanity. Now this is a serious objection, to which I wouldoffer a pair of categorical adversatives: first, without the sense ofplay as an essential element in literature, we would have to dowithout much of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Proust, Nabokov—for in a sense all art is a game, the game of putting form tomatter; second, the game of The Lord of the Rings is miraculouslydesigned to be played and won by anyone who takes part,but the reader who doesn"t see the significance of its urgentbearing on humanity will always be a loser.4. The society from which people must escape into Tolkien"s worldis very bad indeed. I offer no comment on this argument, but Iwonder if West hasn"t simply used Tolkien"s popularity as a wayto make this last general point; it has no direct (or logical) bearingon the relative excellence of the book.It may be unfair to hold West up as epitomizing the negative attitudestoward Tolkien. After all, few attentive readers had actuallybeen driven to the simplistic notions that the book features "a virtuethat triumphs untested," an "evil that dies uninvestigated," and oneprotagonist, Frodo, who is "the goodie hobbit." But even West acknowledgedthat the cultism and clubbism were irrelevant to—indeedbarriers to—considerations of literature, that is, serious criticism.In such a climate, Rose Zimbardo and I designed Tolkien andthe Critics as a small contribution toward a major project, savingwhat we believed was a great novel from the "faddists and buttonmakers" whose enthusiasm contributed to clouding some criticaljudgment.An obligatory if presumptuous request to Professor Tolkien toconsider supplying a brief foreword for the collection brought a gentlebut firm response:I am very grateful for your attention and interest. But I amwholly occupied, or should be, with new work of my own, and Iam obliged to say "no" to all requests for articles in reviews,opinions, forewords, or anything of the kind. I think it is essentialto a writer who is still writing to avoid the distraction of externalcriticism, however sensitive or well-informed.That the contributions to our book were to varying degrees"sensitive and well-informed" may be attested to by the warm welcomeit received from reviewers. The fourteen essays, about equallydivided between original pieces and reprints of the best available material,formed what one review (perhaps the least flattering of all)called "largely an unstructured dialectic on the meaning and value ofthe whole trilogy." What was most gratifying to us about its success(as measured within the limited aspirations of academic, universitypress publication) was its threefold accomplishment: its samples ofgeneral appreciations by prestigious writers, its examples of illuminationsof specific aspects of the novel by critics with focused interests,and its anticipations of an abundance of critical attention yet tocome. In a way, the collection was an announcement of assurancethat, in due course, The Lord of the Rings would have to be given itsrightful place among the major fictional works of our time.Within the following decade an astonishing amount of criticalwork on Tolkien appeared. The variety of critical approaches thatMiddle-earth had spawned was as great as that of the imagined speciesin Tolkien"s world, a kind of secondary "sub-creation." Therewere doctoral dissertations and papers at professional meetings,guides for innocent readers, collections of learned essays, memoirs,bibliographies, explorations of source material, and contextualizingsfromone perspective or another. The enormous appeal of The Lord ofthe Rings had spread to include not only its increasing mass audiencebut also a cottage industry of scholarly study. Medievalists and philologistshad a field day mining the rich veins of their disciplines" orewith tools both venerable and au courant. Allegorists of many persuasions,especially of the Christian and historical orientations, hadtheir innings. And the psychological, the archetypal, and the structuralistschools were staking their claims.Into this thick growth Zimbardo and Isaacs ventured once more,proposing a second collection. Dissuaded from calling it "Tolkienand the Critics II" or some variation of "The Second Generation," wesettled for Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives. If we had been motivatedthe first time around by the wish to justify Tolkien"s admission to thecanon, we now faced the more formidable task of separating well-intentionedappreciations of The Lord of the Rings and the proliferatingattention to extraneous, external, tangential, devotional, and personalmatters from what we regarded as appropriate approaches to thebook that would foster substantial literary criticism.In most ways, the second collection was as good as the first.Equally divided, again, between reprinted and original material, itmay have lacked the clout of contributions by C. S. Lewis and W. H.Auden. But it made up for that, in part, by including a chapter fromPaul Kocher"s Master of Middle-earth, at that point the best booklengthstudy of Tolkien"s work, and an original essay by Verlyn Flieger,her first published work on her way to a distinguished career as ascholar of Tolkien in particular and of fantasy and Faërie in general.Our second collection received much less attention from reviewers,but one astute critic, in an otherwise favorable notice, took me to taskfor an "ill-tempered" introduction, "On the Need for Writing TolkienCriticism."He was right; the book was marred by my approach, whichfocused not on the strength of the collected contributions but oncarping critiques of material we had deemed unworthy of inclusion.Looking back, I find this indefensible, but I believe I know the reasonfor my critical distemper (though I would leave the differential diagnosisof mood disorder or personality disorder to others). It was thatthe publication of The Silmarillion, some four years before our secondcollection, had altered both the public perception of, and thecritical climate for, Tolkien"s work.The problem was a double-edged sword. On one hand, criticswith negative attitudes toward The Lord of the Rings used The Silmarillionto bolster their positions, disregarding the wholly differentnatures of the two works and illogically applying their distaste for thelatter to the former. On the other hand, devotees used The Silmarillionto range far beyond The Lord of the Rings in their enthusiasm forTolkien"s created world, thereby deflecting attention from, and appreciationfor, a major work of fiction, in precisely the ways we hadfeared. Of the provision of new scripts for video games to come I willnot speak here.There may well have been as much sadness as anger in my moodvis-à-vis Tolkien scholarship and readership at the time, as a coupleof short passages from my review of The Silmarillion featured in theWashington Star on Sunday, September 11, 1977, will attest:The Silmarillion is a sacred text. It is an editor"s attempt to setforth in an orderly way a great body of traditions, lore, and mythologythat stands behind the great narrative of The Lord of theRings. It is cosmogonical, cosmological, and apocalyptic. It is alsoa seemingly endless series of names (personal and place) andevents chronicled without the distinction of detail that wouldtemper the repetitiveness. Above all it is solemn, as befits a sacredtext.Readers who love The Lord of the Rings for its narrative power,its droll charm, its intricate playfulness, and the physical andpsychological details that give life to its fully realized world willnot be very happy with The Silmarillion. Its style will stun many,particularly those who know Tolkien as the author of "Beowulf:the Monsters and the Critics," still the most lucid and readableessay in all Old English scholarship. This book is persistentlyBiblical. The Book of Numbers comes most often to mind. Andso it is that, beyond all hope, Christopher son of J.R.R. hasbrought the new Tolkien to light in the world of men.That the ill temper faded over time I attribute not to any mellowingbut to an appreciation for later developments. With ChristopherTolkien"s gathering, editing, and publishing of successive volumesof the history, legends, lore, and mythology of Middle-earth,there came a plethora of rewards for the devotees. But the voices ofcarping critics faded in large part, I think, because the attention of seriousliterary scholarship to The Lord of the Rings reinforced thebook"s importance and won its canonical recognition even as it attractednew generations of a mass readership.One great fear remained. Translated to the screen, I thought, thebook would be reduced and its meaning lost to serious readers.However,as soon as we saw Peter Jackson"s The Fellowship of the Ring allsuch fears dissipated. Indeed, the monumental triumph of Jackson"smovies has given us a road back to Middle-earth, a road already welltraveled by yet another generation of appreciative readers.From the moment Rose Zimbardo first suggested to me that itwas time for us to conclude our own trilogy of Tolkien essay collections,I have thought of this edition as a "greatest hits album." Such anenterprise has its own built-in pitfalls for the compilers, not to mentionthe writer of the liner notes. Why the obvious "Pretty Woman"for the Roy Orbison selection and not the more representative"Ooby-Dooby"? Why the Licia Albanese reading of Puccini"s "Vissid"arte" and not a remastered Claudia Muzio? In any case we are obligatedto spell out our general criteria for choices—which are certainto be challenged.Our first decisions were nearly automatic. We intended to collectthe best critical work available that focused on The Lord of theRings. Moreover, we had no intention of presenting a "balanced"view. There would be no representative of those voices—strident,cynical, sardonic, dismissive, supercilious, condescending—that articulatednegative views of the book. All the naysayers had one thingin common. Whether they objected to prose style, poetic insertions,assumed allegorical simplicities, self-indulgent allusiveness, characterstereotyping, derivative clichés, sociopolitical bias, Christian apologetics,or puerile taste, to make their case they all had to shift focusaway from the story.The Lord of the Rings is an adventure story par excellence, and assuch it is one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction. If it haselements of myth, archetype, epic structure, and adolescent fantasy,not to mention deep moral, psychological, and geopolitical insights,so much the better for its performance as narrative. This collectionassumes that argument about the value and power of The Lord of theRings has been settled, certainly to the satisfaction of its vast, grow-ing, persistent audience, but also of a considerable body of criticaljudgment. (For a summary of the case, with explicit refutation of thelosing arguments, we refer readers to Tom Shippey"s book J.R.R.Tolkien: Author of the Century.)Another early decision was to eschew biographical approaches,of which there are many available. From personal memoirs to carefullydocumented accounts, this material is often charming or illuminating,particularly when it places Tolkien"s experience in suchbroader contexts as the group of his fellows called Inklings, his experiencesin World War I, and his immersion in medieval languages andliterature.Without denying the validity of the many connections betweenthe author"s life and his work, we determined to focus on thelatter. That decision has cost us the option of reprinting an excerptfrom Humphrey Carpenter"s estimable biography, but that book isstill available in print.We extended that principle of focus into a much broader criterionof exclusion. Many worthy pieces of individual scholarship exploringspecific aspects of Tolkien"s work—linguistic discoveries, individualsources and analogues, the poetics of the interpolated verse,the evolution of invented flora and fauna, the rich realms of the namingof things and creatures, and even a herd of hobbyhorses riddenby idiosyncratic interpreters—can provide insight into particularfeatures of the novel. But the typical tendency in them is toward digression,and our intention was to choose the work of critics whokept their focus on the main chance, whose eyes were ever on theprize: general appreciation of Tolkien"s narrative art. This decisionmay have cost us some intriguing slants upon the work, but it alsoshielded us from the onslaught of continuing allegorical interpretationsand assumptions.We were ever mindful of the need to avoid superficiality and redundancy.The final choices, however, should exemplify our standardsof importance, timeliness, and the likelihood of enduringvalue. In other words, we have chosen essays that we believe alreadyare, or are likely to become, classics of Tolkien criticism. The final se-lections speak for themselves. They all maintain focus on the centralissues of the artistry of The Lord of the Rings. (Rose Zimbardo"sheadnotes to the essays provide precise indications of that focus andconcise accounts of the context of each.)We were faced, however, with a thorny problem in the presenceof serious book-length studies of Tolkien"s work. Those of JosephPearce, Patrick Curry, Verlyn Flieger, and, preeminently, Tom Shippeywill come to mind. Of particular interest to us was Jane Chance"sTolkien"s Art, originally published in 1979, for it persuasively arguedtwo major points: that Tolkien"s creative and scholarly work was all ofa piece, a comprehensive, coherent, cohesive, interrelated corpus; andthat the central intention of his art was to construct, in the phrase ofher subtitle, "a mythology for England." The revised edition (2001)supports her argument with extensive documentation derived fromwork published in the decades since the first publication of her book,including Tolkien"s letters. Chance"s chapter on The Lord of the Ringscan stand alone; we reprint it here, with minor adjustments, from therevised edition. It was rare in our experience to find a separable chapterthat could be isolated and retain the integrity of its critical focus.Let me demonstrate the essence of the problem. I studied Shippey"sRoad to Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Centuryin an attempt to isolate passages that met our criteria. I foundthree that were tantalizingly close: from Road, the first fifteen pagesof chapter 5, "Interlacements and the Ring," and from Author, thesubsections "the ironies of interlace" and "the myth of Frodo" plus"Timeless poetry and true tradition." But the very presence of theword "interlace" in the titles of two of these selections identifies theproblem, because a critical analyst attempting to do justice to Tolkien"swork will inevitably produce works structured by critical interlace.And such excerpting as I contemplated would do great injusticeto Shippey"s accomplishment. It is the nature of great works of literatureto attract critics of the first rank and criticism of the highestquality, which becomes essential accoutrement to the works themselves.Dostoevsky has found his Joseph Frank, James Joyce his Rich-ard Ellman and Stuart Gilbert, Nabokov his Brian Boyd, and Tolkienhis Tom Shippey.In the case of Flieger, while Splintered Light: Logos and Languagein Tolkien"s World and A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien"s Road toFaërie are justly admired books of Tolkien scholarship, we bridgedthe dilemma by reprinting her earliest published essay, "Frodo andAragorn: The Concept of the Hero,"which appeared in our New CriticalPerspectives. In the case of Shippey, we found a most promisingsolution.We commissioned an original essay, the only one in the collection."Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson"s Movie Trilogy" exploresthe process by which the screen version of the novel wouldlead to new generations of readers.Here, then, in one volume, in addition to the Kocher, Chance,and Shippey pieces, is a great deal of material unavailable elsewherenow: essays by C. S. Lewis, Edmund Fuller, W. H. Auden, PatriciaMeyer Spacks, Rose Zimbardo, Marion Zimmer Bradley, R. J. Reilly,J. S. Ryan, Verlyn Flieger, Patrick Grant, and Lionel Basney. Besidesproviding handily packaged availability, the book offers some happyunintended results of our criteria of selection. It contains works ofcriticism from Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. It containsworks of criticism, not only by general critics, medievalist scholars,and another Inkling, but also by a world-class poet, an acclaimedwriter of science fiction/fantasy, a prominent folklorist, a devoted environmentalist, and two esteemed scholars of eighteenth-century literature.And among its fourteen contributors are six who are nolonger with us, so that part of their legacy lives on in their appreciationof yet another sub-created world.We have passed from the "possibilities" of Tolkien criticism(now richly fulfilled but viably open to enrichment), through the"need" for Tolkien criticism (now satisfied by a commonly acceptedrecognition of The Lord of the Rings as a masterwork), to the "pleasures"of what is gathered here (with the promise of more to come).Enjoy.Copyright © 2004 by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs.Introduction copyright © 2004 by Neil D. Isaacs. Published by permission of Houghton Mifflin.
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