The word “Tolkien” has come to have many meanings. For a few, it might still signify an Oxford academic, specialising in what to many might seem a dull subject, who loved trees and talk and tobacco and was a devout Roman Catholic with a pretty dim view of the modern world. For far more, it signifies not a man, but a huge body of writing, of varying quality and coherence, much of it curated and published by his son, with at its epicentre the linked stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the one written for children―or at least so presented by its author and first publishers―the other emphatically not. Already the author and the contexts in which he wrote have disappeared. For an even larger number, it calls up a universe they encounter in film, gaming, music, much of which bears scant relationship to the man who was Oxford’s Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and to his work. The proper name can be used in many contexts as an adjective, shorthand for a certain sort of aesthetic experience. “It’s very Tolkien” I have heard said of all sorts of things, from the way people have read a lesson in Church, to story and picture appealing to that hot lust for the strange, the numinous (one might say a latter-day Gothic), which drives so much modern fantasy writing. Tolkien is one of the unwitting founders of that taste and culture, and it is not to overstate to say that for many it has become an interpretative mythology and/or escape to a meta-reality. We can be sure there is much about it he would have heartily disliked, and to which he would have had severe moral objection. And I am sure he would have disliked Peter Jackson’s very successful films, which limit the power of our imagination into the images chosen for us by the director. So, in all this paraTolkien world, where do we begin, where there is no sign, or sense, of an ending to what he started? We begin, I think, with the abstract idea, story: something in which he was deeply and wisely interested.
It is by telling each other stories that we achieve some understanding of the world we live in. Even the Big Bang is a story. Stories, true―whatever that means―or untrue matter: they form our mythology and our values and in so doing affect our actions and decisions. That is one major reason why they matter: they alter the world we see and in which we act.
So let us start at the beginning of literary theory. Aristotle famously remarked that a story had a beginning a middle and an end:
Διωρισμένων δὲ τούτων, λέγωμεν μετὰ ταῦτα ποίαν τινὰ δεῖ τὴν σύστασιν εἶναι τῶν πραγμάτων, ἐπειδὴ τοῦτο καὶ πρῶτον καὶ μέγιστον τῆς τραγῳδίας ἐστίν. κεῖται δὴ ἡμῖν τὴν τραγῳδίαν τελείας καὶ ὅλης πράξεως εἶναι μίμησιν ἐχούσης τι μέγεθος. ἔστιν γὰρ ὅλον καὶ μηδὲν ἔχον μέγεθος. ὅλον δέ ἐστιν τὸ ἔχον ἀρχὴν καὶ μέσον καὶ τελευτήν. ἀρχὴ δέ ἐστιν ὃ αὐτὸ μὲν μὴ ἐξ ἀνάγκης μετ’ ἄλλο ἐστίν, μετ’ ἐκεῖνο δ’ ἕτερον πέφυκεν εἶναι ἢ γίνεσθαι. τελευτὴ δὲ τοὐναντίον ὃ αὐτὸ μὲν μετ’ ἄλλο πέφυκεν εἶναι ἢ ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἢ ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ, μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο ἄλλο οὐδέν. μέσον δὲ ὃ καὶ αὐτὸ μετ’ ἄλλο καὶ μετ’ ἐκεῖνο ἕτερον. δεῖ ἄρα τοὺς συνεστῶτας εὖ μύθους μήθ’ ὁπόθεν ἔτυχεν ἄρχεσθαι μήθ’ ὅπου ἔτυχε τελευτᾶν, ἀλλὰ κεχρῆσθαι ταῖς εἰρημέναις ἰδέαις.[1]
Aristotle implies clearly that a satisfying story, such as he suggested the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos to be,[2] is a whole consciously shaped. So it is, by definition, necessarily not the raw thing we call life in all its confusion and imprecision. But we might question whether any of Tolkien’s fiction, or his idea of story, consciously constructed though it be, would meet his criteria. For, in especial, where Aristotle implies the aesthetic―one might even say architectural―necessity of closure, Tolkien’s closures are so often simply pauses.
It is after all a truism that art, great art especially, simplifies: we do not need to know how good a cook Sieglinde usually was, or what Macbeth liked for his evening drink, or Oedipus for supper. Stories are not like reality―an endless series of interlinked consequences reverberating to the end of Time in dendritic pattern. Can happily ever after ever happen? How could fiction, if really desiring to hold the mirror up to nature, really be configured? How do we represent the reality we inhabit? In Sylvie and Bruno Lewis Carroll has a character say that the only true map is one that is exactly the same size as the countryside, and the farmers would not like it.[3]
Is there a fictional[4] mode which might best reflect the nature of the reality we experience? Mediaeval romance, that most sophisticated, courtly and flexible genre, in which both Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis were deeply learned, often employs the device of entrelacement. This narrative method demands much of audiences as well as of writers. It develops most fully in the thirteenth century and it is analogous to the polyphonic music of the late middle ages, where several independent, equally important, strands of melody are woven into a complex pattern, now one dominant, now another.[5] In entrelace narrative, stories are suspended, often for dozens of pages, by the perfectly plausible interruption of events from another story, and then even a story beyond that. As a description of the actual reality in which we live, where each one of us is the centre of our own world, it is pretty accurate: it recognises that everyone has a story and that all stories somewhere intersect. The narrator’s intervention and direction is often important, and self-referentially noticeable. The satisfying thing is when all the different strands come to a conclusion at the same time in―to use again a musical analogy―a common chord. It is not accidental that many of the chivalric romances are subsets in much larger corpora, what even in the middle ages were called the Matters of Britain (Arthur), of Antiquity (Troy and after) and France (Charlemagne and his peers). Writers will often (so to speak) plug their new work into the existing corpus, as for example the Gawain poet does in the opening laisse of Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight. No individual romance in those Matters, however apparently independent, can escape being read with that background knowledge and experience, and with the awareness of a world, in a remoteness to the present, which had a beginning and is doomed to disappear. Yet, importantly, Romance is fundamentally eucatastrophic―I use Tolkien’s indispensable coinage[6]: its trajectory may include tragedy, or potential tragedy, but its focus is ultimately on the post-tragic: on what happened next―like Shax’s Romances Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, all of which include or presume the tragic as their impetus, but in the end go beyond it into a world different indeed with different problems. That interim resolution does not happen without the trial and test and tribulation that preceded it. It acknowledges that there is real cost. “Was Milan thrust from Milan, that Milan’s heirs should be kings of Naples?” asks the thoughtful Gonzalo in Shax’ Tempest (V.i). But the endings of all those plays―as indeed, for that matter, of all Shakespeare’s plays―unlike (say) Ben Jonson’s―are radically unstable.[7]
Tolkien’s story―I deliberately use that singular―is certainly one of the most influential bodies of fiction of the twentieth century. It has spread into film, cartoon, video games, fanfiction, the vast body of modern fantasy, and we may be quite sure that he would not have liked some of the things he lived to see. What he actually wrote has been so fertile a field for other writers and artists, good and bad―just like in mediaeval romance―to plough, that one could fairly claim that his central work and its dependents have come to constitute a matière, the Matter of Middle Earth, to add to the three great Matters of the Middle Ages. Of the entirety of his own works Tolkien himself used the term legendarium. The word in its original mediaeval Latin connotes a collection of legends, often relating to, or background for, the life of a saint. It is much broader in sense than a canon, and includes the entire corpus, even mutually contradicting versions, in both earlier and later stages of its conception. Using that word legendarium is not simply to restate the idea first popularised by Humphrey Carpenter and Jane Chance Nitze[8] of his corpus being an attempt to create a “mythology for England.”[9] The phrase is certainly his, and he talks of “my country” with love and an old fashioned but not ignoble patriotism. He recognises that a mythology can deliberately be constructed to help form a nation (for example as it was in the case of Elias Lonnröt’s collection of ancient legends to form an epic for a not yet independent Finland in the Kalevala[10]). But nothing so august, and inherently political, seems to have been his intention. Nor could he have anticipated that far more has been written in what I call the umbra of his fiction than he ever wrote himself: and there is no sign of that stopping. For his work has been, in a literal sense, seminal, as he never intended. What grew from seeds he sowed, indeed, is part of what we have to include in the shorthand portmanteau, “Tolkien.”
Far more perhaps than his academic duties, it was the high joy of making and writing fiction that drove him―and he loved reading bits on which he was working to interested people. He once memorably did so to a group of us when we were undergraduates, sitting round a winter fire after dinner when he was on a visit to Queens’ College, Cambridge in 1962. However, in three short pieces he does enunciate a theory of fiction and defend its importance “as a human right” to “Voyage,” as Wordsworth put it, “through strange seas of Thought, alone,” and they provide some sort of lens through which to think about his own work.
In the important 1936 lecture to the British Academy, Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, he is emphatic that the poet’s[11] human story of one man’s trial and triumph and tragedy is far more important than the reductive analytical approach beloved of so many critics and scholars who saw the poem not as a myth by which we comprehend the human condition, but as material for antiquarian and archaeological research―which by definition must ignore the nature and power of story to move us and alter the way we see reality. The whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. He was less than impressed by a lot of scholarship on the surviving Old English literature, which he loved, and which was so powerful an influence on his own writing, and on the worlds he constructed. In that lecture, indeed, he may well have had in his sights R. W. Chambers’ huge 1921 companion to Beowulf.[12] (And perhaps before that the work of the brothers Grimm and other folklorists on Märchen, or J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough[13]) A year after the Beowulf lecture, he published Farmer Giles of Ham,[14] a lighthearted story of the eponymous farmer and Chrysophylax the dragon and Garm the dog. But that delightful tale he prefaces with a brilliant parody of a scholarly introduction[15] which myopically analyses the twigs on the tree rather than seeing the living tree in the forest: the introduction totally misses the ethos of the story, seeing it as simply material for antiquarian speculation. Its stance is quite irrelevant to how the story engages our imagination and makes us inhabit for a while a different world. But his most powerful statement of his understanding of the nature of story is in his Andrew Lang Lecture, “On Fairy Stories” given in St Andrews in 1939 and published with the (literally!) exemplary story “Leaf by Niggle” in Tree and Leaf (1964). I require my new students proposing to read English―it would be better to say “literature”―at my University to read this essay, in order to get them to take what they are doing very seriously indeed. It also helps if they read it before they get bogged down in any currently fashionable literary theory―or indeed to help them to get out of it. It explains with some passion Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy and his thoughts on mythopoeia, or speaking through myth―an issue which had over a long period interested him and his friend C. S. Lewis. It stresses the idea of Creation as an act of speech, of the Divine Word, and mankind, in his measure as a created being, capable of a sub-creation which will have some validity as a shadow of the ultimate reality. As an analysis of fiction set in an imagined world where normal physical rules do not apply, by one of its most important authors, a world which has indubitably altered our world, surely deserves more general attention that it gets. Its key positions are the importance of mythopoeia as a way of apprehending through the imagined world the human imperatives and predicament in this; and, of course, one might spell out the implication that a story can communicate without being understood; second, the way those stories are part of a web, of, if you prefer, Tree of Story far bigger than any one example of them, and, finally, the basic human need, and right, to make the myths by which we can apprehend truth. That last position, on the importance of truth conveyed through literally untrue fable, would have been quite familiar to late Antique philosophers like Macrobius, and the whole lecture has a strongly Platonic cast.
Some serious support for Tolkien’s idea of the Tree of Story, the wood from which each new one is hewn, comes from the work of the Russian Formalist critic Vladimir Propp, first published, in Russian, in 1928. It is most unlikely that Tolkien could have known this, for it was only translated into English in 1958 (and again in 1968),[16] but I think he would have recognised in Propp’s enumeration of the 31 narratemes, the apparently universal elements of story―e.g. the quest, the test etc―and the seven categories of hero e.g. the disguised saviour, the hero’s anagnorisis―something germane to his own metaphor of the central Tree of Story with its almost infinite expression of itself in its multitude of branches and leaves. And just so in philology, Tolkien’s enduring, first and real passion: every word implies some real person who spoke it, and behind that person a history and a people and a place. Nothing is too unimportant to lack a story―much as Tolstoy said of his own work, that no character was so trivial as not to deserve a name.
Tolkien’s extraordinary corpus was almost certainly not planned ab initio. It develops over 50 years in just such a model of things unendingly leading from one to another and then to another. It starts with early pieces like The Fall of Gondolin,[17] but grows out of itself, with ramification―a word I do not choose lightly―after ramification, until we finally glimpse something of the whole lost Tree from which Niggle’s leaf fell. And as all who write know, there is something mysterious in the process: where does it come from? Why should Tolkien’s hand suddenly write ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’, with all that led to, on an exam paper he was marking? The Fall of Gondolin connects with but is not a deliberate prequel to the Unfinished Tales, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Lost Road, the (crucial) appendices to The Lord of the Rings. It is the more like the pebble thrown into a pond from which the ripples spread and spread. No pebble, no ripple: but the ripples go further than the pebble ever did. In fact his fiction is not so much a tree as a mycelium, every bit connecting to and affecting everything else, backwards as well as forwards, and surfacing in unexpected areas. In the end, he was even experimenting with time travel, in order to connect his world of Middle Earth and its invented history with ours―The Lost Road preserves some of the attempt.[18]
Backwards as well as forwards: in the world of Middle Earth almost everyone is aware of the stories of a lost past bearing on the present, demanding choices that reverberate into a future. Sometimes the omniscient narrator (and wearing another hat, editor) “reminds” us of a fictional textual “historical” authority―the Book of Westmarch, for example―or of a tale from deep time that will only be fully revealed in the Simarillion, published much later than The Lord of the Rings. At the Field of Cornmallen, Sam is delighted to find he and Frodo are now canonised in a lay like the poems of the past he has always loved to hear, which will be sung wherever people gather in the long years to come. Characters are aware of a past living in word and myth and song; and almost everyone is conscious that theirs is a small part in an unfinished story that continues into a world their actions have helped change, Even Gandalf and Galadriel can only know so much in the interim, however long, in which they dwell. That consciousness of both perspectives comes sharply into focus where Strider is transformed into Aragorn, Elessar, Isildur’s heir, King in a new world where Elf friendship will one day be only a memory: but keeps his sobriquet and the identity and relationship to the once ignorant hobbits it recalls. It also comes into focus in the way Frodo is growingly aware of the place he holds in a much bigger story in which he will find no final healing, and the increasing dignity of his linguistic register is a measure of this. Almost from the start the story of Lord of the Rings anticipates becoming “history”―the Lay of Cornmallen, or Bilbo’s unfinished Book. The references in The Lord of the Rings’ ostensibly factual and informative Introduction and Appendices distance the narrative in a fictional scholarly and historical frame where a reader is encouraged to accept that that has happened.
With such a perspective, fundamentally Tolkien’s is not just an aesthetic vision but a moral and philosophical one: consequence, consequence, consequence―and in each responsibility. Like his friend Lewis, who constantly asserted the moral value of fiction, Tolkien regarded writing, making worlds in written or spoken word, in theory as well as practice, as inevitably a moral activity. For real feeling about imaginary things changes us for ever. Just as Tolkien smote the critical and scholarly Amalekites hip and thigh in his Beowulf lecture and in his Andrew Lang lecture, so Lewis in his three 1943 Riddell lectures at Durham―a lecture endowed to explore the relation between religion and contemporary thought―attacked the fashionable, post-A. J. Ayer, Logical Positivist philosophy of emptying all abstract and value words of any but adventitious meaning. The lectures, published as The Abolition of Man by Oxford University Press in 1946, are powerful stuff and every politician and every educator[19] ought to read them even if only to consider seriously where they themselves stand on the matters they discuss; but more memorable than any lectures is the fiction in which Lewis explored their ideas, That Hideous Strength―a novel written in 1945 but which in its uncanny and chilling contemporary relevance could have been written yesterday―and even more relevant now that we are waking up, rather late, to the twin dangers of AI and the moral bankruptcy and environmental cost of monopoly capitalism. (The emotional and imaginative power of the book is a good example, incidentally, of the catalysing power of fiction when compared with rational argument.) These two men, in my view, restate a theory of fiction, technically and literally an art of lying (as its opponents have claimed many times over the centuries), as both necessary and moral. This view has been deeply unfashionable for many recent decades―was it because it was uncomfortable and challenging of fashionable certainties?―but it would have received impressive support in earlier and perhaps wiser if not necessarily cleverer times.
Can we guess at why Tolkien was, so to speak, unable not to write his fictions, and unable not to continue to develop it into ever more complex branches? He wrote more than once about stories coming as it were out of nowhere―like the famous anecdote about The Hobbit―and needing to be written. We have no reason to doubt his word, or the truth of his insight: anyone who has written any narrative, even if only a memoir that attempts to catch the polychronicity and polysensuality of experience in the monochrome web of words knows this first hand. It is notable that all his work expresses itself through those Proppian narratemes - the unrecognised hero, the interdiction, the quest, the test, the wound, the homecoming and so on―which speak so powerfully to us as humans in whatever culture we inhabit and express.[20] It is as if they are embedded in our human DNA―which, as one whose thinking has been more than a little influenced by Carl Jung, I do in part believe―just as they are to be found in stories wherever humanity has reached. They are embedded in how we see, as an interpretative tool for how we will react to, conceptualise, experience: for good or ill. A highly emotional man, with a long scholarly perspective from his studies on the old far off forgotten things, and battles long ago, a man who had seen and lived through the industrialised killing of the First World War, through the uneasy peace that saw the rise of first Mussolini and then Hitler, perhaps needed the salve of fiction to ease the pain of knowledge, to acknowledge the human condition and mediate his perception of it. His friend Lewis says that in his own first day in the trenches of Flanders he heard the shells screaming overhead, and thought, “This war. This is what Homer wrote about.”[21] Fiction can make the specific universal, the neutral moral. Tolkien used his own myth to understand his horror at the Allied bombing of Germany: “We are using the Ring to destroy the Ring,” he wrote in a letter in 1944 to his son: and most movingly, the inscription he specified for Edith Tolkien’s and his own tombstone, with simply “Luthien and Beren” carved on it, casts himself and the wife to whom he pledged himself before he went to off to war as the lovers in one of his finest stories: whose flower must fall.
So what happens next, after any action, becomes an imperative question. One fruit of his deeply felt Christianity is that in our fallen world, as in the fallen world of Middle Earth―fallen once more through breaking of a prohibition―only through sacrifice, disaster, catastrophe, is there ultimate a road to the eucatastrophe of the ultimate Salvation. The celebration at the Field of Cornmallen comes at a huge cost, and a world has indeed been lost never to be recovered and much glory has departed across the sundering seas of time and space. But eucatastrophe, which is not Recovery but may be healing, does come: and people make stories about it, as Sam Gamgee wonderingly says. As the children of Narnia are told at the end of Lewis’ The Last Battle,[22] the end of one world is the beginning of another, go “further in and further up”―to a yet fuller and more real reality. How could such a legendarium ever have had an ending?
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The Lord of the Rings was far more successful than Allen & Unwin ever expected, to Tolkien’s delight and their publishers’ profit. Very soon the success of the work at so many levels, its appeal to people of so many different levels of culture and education, won the accolade of parody―the very early Henry Beardsley and Douglas Kenney, Bored of the Rings (New York: Signet, 1969), despite its schoolboy humour, stayed in print for decades. It is not worth parodying something that is not widely recognised and taken seriously. Tolkien’s work opened up a locus for a mode of writing neglected, unfashionable, or indeed scorned, for many years, and it would rapidly become populated with the good, the bad and the ugly, a world of Fandom and fanfiction towards which Tolkien was lukewarm. Much of what was created could never―should never!―have found commercial publication: the Web has been indispensable to many post-LR extrapolations and continuations, and indeed he Web’s ease of use encourages extended filiation. Many offshoots from the Tolkien tree are indeed pretty dire, but there are a few that are not, and to which Tolkien himself might have been sympathetic. One in particular is interesting because it is the work of a man deeply learned in the lore of Middle Earth, who can write good prose, who clearly loves Tolkien’s work and can catch the tone of his writing. Bracketty Jack, as he calls himself―the nom de plume gives a sly clue to the real name of this distinguished scholar, via a scholarly book on punctuation published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press―engages with many of Tolkien’s moral issues, and premises his work on precisely the question Eomer asks: “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” (II.41): he gets the answer, “As he has ever judged. Good and evil have not changed... nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men…” Bracketty Jack also engages with the problem Tolkien knew, that of no sense of a final ending, where story opens off story, perspective after perspective after perspective. And there is no facile sense of recovery: the past has gone forever and whatever glory it had has departed. The entwives are still lost, the Party Tree is still felled. But there remains work to do. When Tolkien on the last page of the Return of the King has Sam say, “Well, I’m back,” that is no closure. It is merely a stop. The burden has to be taken up, and the first volume of Bracketty Jack’s trilogy The Choices of Mayor Samwise seamlessly continues Tolkien’s story into the new world, the lost innocence, of the sullied Shire. For, as in all his stories, Tolkien’s endings are not endings, and there is no going back.
Could living happily ever after ever happen? In the great narratives of humanity they so rarely do. Ulysses has to leave home again, after all, for a journey to lands where men know not the wine dark sea. The Aeneid does not end: it stops. Aeneas’s mastery of his furor has been lost in a moment of rage and grief, and all has to be done again. Arthur’s departure to Avalon is no final end, even if the sword is returned to the lake and the Fellowship of the Table destroyed. But he is to be healed of his wounds: the myth of his return when there shall be need of him was politically useful in the later middle ages in England, especially to those awful Tudors. People glimpse a happy ending, but carry past loss with them to the new world that loss has made, and new problems: nothing is ever what it was before. History cannot be undone. The past is not dead: it is not even over. There is no end in sight while the world endures.
