Artistic appreciation comes first

I was revisiting Chesterton’s Everlasting Man over the weekend and was struck by this passage in the opening paragraph of Chapter V, “Man and Mythologies”:

It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticize it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.

That last line is gold.

What I found striking was that Chesterton is essentially making the same point about understanding and interpreting mythology in general that Tolkien was in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Crtiics.”

“Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.”

— GK Chesterton

Early on Tolkien asks “why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical document?” And after summarizing the many prevailing angles of scholarship—and sometimes mere prejudice—from which Victorian and early 20th century scholars dismissed Beowulf as worthy of study, he argues: “[I]t is plainly only in consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view of conviction can be reached or steadily held.”

And he makes his point about the misunderstood—or simply missed—artistic purpose of the poet in a famous allegory:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

This is not to deny the value of doing the historical, cultural, and linguistic spadework to gain better understanding of mythology and its place in a given culture. That would be an overcorrection, as Tom Shippey has argued, in Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, that Tolkien’s lecture unintentionally swung the pendulum too far away from studying Beowulf for its history, so that Beowulf and Hrothgar are assumed to have the historicity of Leda and the swan.

These things require balance, but the artistic and imaginative—what Chesterton elsewhere in the same book called “the inside of history”—must come before historical parsing and sociological datamining. Once the artistic purpose is understood, what the myth-makers were hoping to see or show us from the top of their construction, the rest will fall more clearly into place.

The Hobbit on The Rest is History

Earlier today The Rest is History debuted a new Friday feature, “book club” episodes in which the hosts will talk about favorite or otherwise worthwhile books. Dominic Sandbrook and producer Tabby got things off to a good start with a wonderful discussion of The Hobbit. Their insight into the book, Tolkien’s life, and the historical context—especially the First World War and the Somme—that informed his writing made for good listening, but hearing their personal histories with the book was a joy and their evident love for it infectious. Dominic thinks he was about six when he discovered The Hobbit; I was sixteen, as I’ve recently related. (Dominic is also exactly right that The Hobbit is one of those books where you always remember where and when you first read it.)

I enjoyed this discussion especially enthusiastically, as I just finished reading The Hobbit to my kids for the second time earlier this week, on the anniversary of Tolkien’s death in 1973. A couple of nice coincidences.

Or are they? Dominic quotes Gandalf’s wry and powerful final words in the book:

Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!

This is, as Dominic suggests, a poignant reminder right at the end of the story of the breadth and depth of the world in which the story takes place, something palpable even to a young reader. But it’s also a hint of grace and providence in Middle-Earth. There are things afoot none of the characters can know much less comprehend, and they are more consequential than returning the King Under the Mountain to his throne or getting Mr Baggins home to his larders and spoons. Thanks to The Lord of the Rings we know some of what that is.

I was an adult reading The Hobbit for the nth time before I really grasped the import of Gandalf’s words. It was longer yet before I understood the humble wisdom—and accidental precision—of Bilbo’s reply: “Thank goodness!”

I also enjoyed Dominic and Tabby’s discussion of Smaug, who, in the novel, is more a silken Bond villain than the rather obvious, overdone villain in Peter Jackson’s movies, their noting the linguistic hint in the Sackville-Bagginses’ name that they’re striving and pretentious, and Dominic’s rightful critique of those who claim Tolkien’s moral vision is one of simplistic black-and-white. Tolkien believed in Original Sin and the Fall, after all, and had seen their results firsthand—not only in the trenches but in his own heart. Would that more modern novelists had that insight.

I’m a great fan of The Rest is History but I can’t recommend this episode enough. Do check it out on whatever podcasting platform you use. Their next read is The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ll almost certainly skip out on, but I’m quite excited about this feature and loved this first installment.

I wrote about reading “Riddles in the Dark,” the best chapter in the book, to my kids early this summer, and reflected in more detail on my first reading of the book as a teenager for the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death two years ago this week. I’m also excited to say that, following some relatives’ recent trip to Switzerland, I have a German-language edition (Der Hobbit) on its way to me soon. A great way to brush up my German.

Riddles in the Dark

I’ve previously mentioned here the precise moment I knew I loved The Hobbit—reading “Riddles in the Dark” in the car on the way to the MLB Home Run Derby in Atlanta, July 10, 2000. I had just turned 16 the month before and The Hobbit was my first Tolkien, picked up on a friend’s recommendation and read with uncertainty. That car ride made me a devoted fan.

It’s unusual to be able to date one’s love for a favorite book so precisely. The special event associated with this one helps it stick in the memory, I’m sure, but it’s that chapter specifically that is so powerful. Up to Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum I had enjoyed The Hobbit, but that chapter was a revelation, the moment I became aware that I was reading something great. To this day, rereading that chapter brings back that feeling of breathless anticipation.

The special character of this chapter has been on my mind this week because I just read “Riddles in the Dark” aloud to my kids. I’ve read The Hobbit to them once before, a few years ago. They enjoyed it, but, being much younger, I think what they enjoyed most was simply that I was reading to them.

This time through has been different. From beginning to end of “Riddles in the Dark” they showed the same breathless anticipation I felt as a teenager. They were scared for Bilbo, creeped out by Gollum, wanted to guess the answers to the riddles, and thrilled with suspense as Bilbo finally made his escape, minus his brass buttons. They loved it, and it’s been one of the best bedtime story experiences I’ve had with them. I’ve also enjoyed the excuse to reflect on one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books.

So: Why is “Riddles in the Dark” so good? A few thoughts:

• After several chapters with a crowd of dwarves, Bilbo is alone. The reader can focus on the protagonist again, and because he finds himself alone in a dangerous situation it is up to him to get out. For the first time since Bag End, he cannot simply (and literally) be carried along by the others.

• Kids can identify with Bilbo. Put-upon, scolded, not often understanding what’s going on, ordered around by seemingly everyone, he now finds himself alone in the dark, and it’s a rare child that doesn’t mind that.

• Further, this chapter confirms every child’s fear—there’s something in the dark! And it turns out to be one of Tolkien’s greatest creations.

• Bilbo and Gollum’s encounter, a surprise followed by mutual curiosity, need, and hostility, feels exceptionally real, especially in the way it moves from one mood into another.

• Games are great to read about if they’re well written and used as extensions of character—even games we don’t understand, like all the baccarat in James Bond—and Tolkien makes the riddle game instantly clear, engaging, and reflective of Bilbo and Gollum as characters.

• Often overlooked, I think, is that despite the atmosphere and the threat posed by Gollum, this part of the story is funny. The tone is perfectly balanced.

• Structurally, this chapter is a perfect story within the overall story.

• Narratively, Tolkien uses omniscience with great skill, shifting back and forth between Bilbo and Gollum so that the stakes of the riddle game are raised and the reader feels tension through dramatic irony, knowing before Bilbo does that Gollum means to eat him.

• I’m not usually one to talk psychology in fiction, but Bilbo and Gollum’s personalities are sharply realized and believable. I’m not sure Tolkien gets enough credit for the truthfulness of the people in his books. A line that stood out this time, when Gollum returns to his island and searches with increasing desperation for the ring: “Utterly miserable as Gollum sounded, Bilbo could not find much pity in his heart, and he had a feeling that anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.” So simple, so much going on.

• I’m also not one to invoke “character arcs” or the dreadful “Hero’s Journey,” but Bilbo’s experience in “Riddles in the Dark” is noticeably transformative. As I noted above, it’s all on him. He has to stick up for himself both through force of arms and his wits (combining the strengths of the warlike dwarves on one hand and the intellect of Gandalf on the other). In the next chapter we learn that he’s earned the respect of the dwarves for the first time and—again, something a child will understand—that Gandalf sees through at least part of his version of the story.

• The whole thing is just brilliantly written, down to the basic level of word choice and sound. Tolkien manipulates both for maximum atmosphere. The darkness of the tunnels, the weight of the stone above, and the cold and damp of Gollum’s cave are tactile.

• Related: last night, after finishing the chapter with the kids, my wife complimented my voices. I couldn’t take credit: reading Gollum’s dialogue aloud almost creates his voice on its own. Tolkien loads it with sibilants, most obviously, but also lots of breathy, open-throated sounds. And unlike the smooth, respectable Bilbo, Gollum speaks with a jarring, sprung rhythm that reads naturally as disturbed and aggressive.

I should make a more formal study of Tolkien’s work in this chapter here sometime. In the meantime, the short version: This chapter of The Hobbit is the work of a great writer at the peak of his imaginative powers and technical skill. A model worth studying—and enjoying for many years.

Tolkien and Buchan

JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) and John Buchan (1875-1940)—authors, scholars, men of impeccable tailoring

It is a truth universally acknowledged that JRR Tolkien loved reading John Buchan. While one could infer this from the praise of friends of Tolkien’s like CS Lewis, who loved Buchan’s thriller The Three Hostages and his historical folk-horror novel Witch Wood,* much of this assumption is down to biographer Humphrey Carpenter. From Holly Ordway’s study Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages:

Although Carpenter states that Buchan was a favorite of Tolkien’s, he gives no specifics, and hitherto critics have operated without knowledge of which particular titles Tolkien read. Such has been the influence of Carpenter that there are more scholarly analyses of Buchan’s influence than of some authors whom Tolkien himself names as sources. Indeed, Carpenter’s description of Buchan as a “favourite” has led to certain critics falling over themselves in an attempt to find connections with the legendarium[.]

Such speculations are legion. It’s hard not to love both authors and wonder about this. I’ve guessed myself that there is something of Buchan’s lesser-known hero Dickson McCunn, retired Glasgow grocer, in Tolkien’s hobbits. And here, in a post from 2016, another blogger makes some good educated guesses, for example: “I read that a good case has been made that Buchan may have influenced The Lord of the Rings, via the historical novels The Blanket of the Dark (1931, Oxfordshire under a Sauron-like tyrant)** and Midwinter (1923, a model for Strider and the Rangers), which are historical adventure novels set in olde England.”

These are likely enough, and certainly better than some of the contrived connections Ordway goes on to criticize. But the blogger linked above concludes his post by noting that some Tolkien fans who have also read Buchan don’t see obvious similarities. “Possibly,” he writes, “the academic who was making the connections was seeing things in them that a general reader would miss.”

Ordway would probably agree. Her discussion of Buchan’s influence on Tolkien centers on the second Richard Hannay novel, Greenmantle, which she argues is the only one of Buchan’s novels “that we can identify with absolute certainty as having been read by Tolkien.”

Being unable to say with certainty which Buchan books Tolkien read, any discussion of Buchan’s influence must necessarily be thematic and, secondarily, stylistic. Ordway makes a good case that several aspects of Buchan’s work must have resonated with Tolkien or harmonized with his spiritual and artistic sensibilities:

• Rootedness—Settings matter not only as the places where the plot occurs but in a deeper sense. They have meaning. Buchan’s novels “are set in fully realized locations, both geographically and historically. This sense that the setting is organically connected to a particular, real place, rather than being a mere abstraction or amalgam of miscellaneous scenic elements, would have appealed to Tolkien’s appreciation for genuine love of country, his own and others’.” Not only “fully realized” but beautifully and coherently described, an understanding of their geography being necessary to the action. (Here’s Ken Follett on that point.) The parallel with Tolkien here is obvious, especially in The Lord of the Rings.

• Mythopoeic adventure—Not only is an understanding of the landscape integral to understanding the characters and action in both Buchan and Tolkien, in both authors the physical world is shot through with a mythic dimension, “a broad streak of the fantastic.” For Buchan, this is especially evident in books like The Dancing Floor, The Gap in the Curtain, and especially Witch Wood, which Lewis praised highly as organically and believably introducing the supernatural into a realistic setting. Ordway cites Tom Shippey’s observation that Buchan’s “readiness to see the mythical coexisting with the everyday and to sense fairyland . . . as forever present on the margins” accords well with Tolkien’s sensibilities.

• Language—In a footnote, Ordway quotes another scholar on Buchan’s “recurring use of untranslated Afrikaans” in his South African stories and novels as something that probably “caught Tolkien’s attention,” both because of Tolkien’s South African background and his personal and professional interest in linguistics. One might also mention Buchan’s background in classics, allowing him to drop Greek and Latin into his work, or—even better suited to Tolkien’s interests—his much more frequent use of Scots dialect, actual workaday speech with many archaisms, Celtic vocabulary, and relict forms of Old English words. Cf. again Witch Wood.

• Moral heroism—I think this, more than anything else, is key. Buchan’s and Tolkien’s heroes operate on nearly identical wavelengths of a Christian heroic ethos, even in tough spots that tempt them with amoral, pragmatic solutions. Hannay repeatedly spares enemies who are at his mercy and who, ungratefully, often return to do him harm again. Shades of Bilbo and Gollum. And Hannay never gives in to despair. Ordway: “Hannay’s attitude . . . is never fatalistic: his response to an apparent dead end is to determine to do the best that he can, and to act morally, even if a positive outcome seems unlikely.” She goes on to an extended comparison with Théoden that is well worth reading.

Ordway does not explore this, but that final point, “heroism with purpose” even in the face of likely defeat, makes room in both writers for eucatastrophe. In Buchan this has often been criticized as an overreliance on coincidence or deus ex machina, a slight sometimes but less often successfully leveled at Tolkien.*** What it shows in both writers is a firm belief in grace and providence.

I haven’t read all of Tolkien’s Modern Reading yet but I need to get on that, since Ordway has since released another study of Tolkien through Word on Fire: Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. That’s going to be a must-read for me.

* All Buchan titles in this post are linked to my John Buchan June reviews here on the blog if you’re interested.

** N.B. That would be Henry VIII.

*** If Buchan and Tolkien resonate with each other in these areas, they have also been hit with strikingly similar accusations of racism, jingoism, and simplistic black-and-white morality. The most striking similarity in these criticisms is that they are all totally wrong.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

Andvari's ring vs Sauron's ring

A happy coincidence: Yesterday morning saw the arrival of the latest episode of The Rest is History, in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk through Tolkien’s life and work. This was the morning after I read my two older kids the story of the cursed ring and the tragedy of Sirgurð and Brynhild in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen.

So I was primed to think about magic rings. (Not that it takes much.) Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion is excellent and thought-provoking, especially as they point out the ways in which Tolkien was essentially modern. Tolkien came of age among the World War I generation, and Holland and Sandbrook point out some interesting resonances of his work with that of more obviously modern writers like Eliot and Joyce, with whom Tolkien shares some surprising interests, sympathies, concerns, and suspicions—not least his suspicion of technology. That suspicion permeates Tolkien’s work but he articulates the dangerous allure of technology most fully and clearly as the Ring, and thanks to Green the original was already on my mind from the night before. That’s Andvaranaut, the cursed ring of the dwarf Andvari.

In the Volsunga saga, Regin relates a story to the hero Sigurð regarding the origins of the treasure guarded by the dragon Fáfnir. Having unwittingly killed Ótr, one of the three sons of Hreiðmar, the god Loki agrees to pay Hreiðmar for the killing and funds the repayment by stealing it from Andvari. He captures Andvari and will only ransom him for his entire hoard. Here’s the key moment in Jackson Crawford’s translation:

Loki saw all the gold that Andvari owned. And after he had taken all of it, Andvari still had one single ring, and Loki took that from him as well. The dwarf then hid inside a stone and said that this ring and the gold would cause the death of everyone who owned it.

In Reginsmál, a poem in the Poetic Edda, Andvari utters this in verse:

This gold
that Gust used to own
will cause the death
of two brothers,
and cause grief
for eight kings.
No one will enjoy
my treasure.

True to Andvari’s curse, the ring immediately works its baleful magic upon Loki, Óðin, and Hreiðmar and goes on to cause, in Green’s phrase, “ruin and sorrow” for many more.

This may be the original inspiration for Sauron’s One Ring, but, as I noted recently, Tolkien was annoyed by suggestions that his ring was merely the sum of his inspirations. (Per Tom Shippey, “People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases.’”) These passages highlight the key difference.

Both rings work evil: Andvari’s ring because it is cursed and Sauron’s ring because of what it is—what it was designed and made to do. It is an instrument, a technology designed to achieve certain ends. And like any technology, its relationship with its users is not one-way. As all technologies subtly warp their users’ needs and preferences to conform to what the technologies can provide, Tolkien brilliantly depicts the way the ring foreshortens and limits the options of those who use it, so that they only begin by using it and end up desiring it. As he wrote in 1944 regarding the methods used even by the Allies during World War II: “[w]e are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.”

Technologies are not neutral. The danger of technologies to all who use them rather than the danger of a curse—this insight is both the most modern thing about Tolkien and among the greatest lessons he can still teach us.

You can read some related thoughts—on the possibility of using Twitter for good—from back in the spring here, and here’s an excellent essay on Tolkien by Sandbrook at UnHerd. Here’s a seven-minute summary from Crawford of the whole complicated Andvari incident. And Roger Lancelyn Green is, for my money, the most underappreciated Inkling and his Myths of the Norsemen has been the ideal bedtime read for my seven- and five-year old. Do check it out.

Tolkien and true tradition

Jackson Crawford’s video on The Hammer and the Cross yesterday morning got me leafing back through my Tom Shippey, and having recently reread the Nibelungenlied got me looking for it in the index of The Road to Middle Earth. The most interesting reference to the poem in this particular book came in an appendix, “Tolkien’s Sources: The True Tradition.”

Shippey begins with a caveat:

Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else.

This is exactly right. Understanding the sources, inspirations, and influences behind a work of literature can be instructive, but the Quellenforschung too easily turns from an inquiry into the past of a living specimen to the dismemberment of a corpse. The once-living creature—not to mention its creator—is often lost from sight in the process.

Before turning to the sources, inspirations, and influences of Tolkien’s work, Shippey elaborates upon the difference in Tolkien’s attitude toward the use of sources for modern retellings and the way he used them for that work:

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic, which is why I use the phrase ‘true tradition’. Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of ‘the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring’, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

This is a remarkably insightful passage, and helped give me the language for something I’ve felt within myself for many years: that same irritation with modern reinterpretations that “get something important not quite right,” that are “failures of tone and spirit.” This might as well be the thesis statement, for example, of my review of The Green Knight a year ago, and it also helps me understand why despite my love for Tolkien I’ve hardly ever liked any other fantasy fiction I’ve read. The few I have—The Lord of the Rings, The Prydain Chronicles—are animated by at least something of a discernible “true tradition.” The ones I have not—A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time—have the trappings but not the tradition, the form but not the spirit. If only Tolkien could see the use his work has been put to, now.

Devotion to a true tradition demands hard work and a lifetime of dedication, but it’s worth it. Food for thought.

If you want to dive into some of Tolkien’s true tradition, the version of the Nibelungenlied I just reread is the verse translation of Burton Raffel. I also recently read the prose translation of William Whobrey, which was quite good and included excellent scholarly apparatus. And the two translations of the Elder or Poetic Edda, also mentioned by Shippey above, that I have most enjoyed are those by Carolyne Larrington and the aforementioned Jackson Crawford. These are good places to start in the tradition that informed Tolkien.

I posted a meditation on the perversion of virtue in the Nibelungenlied two weeks ago here. And as it happens, I wrote something about misleading “surface similarities” just yesterday.

Difficult art and striving upward

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I recently read about the collapse of “cultural aspiration,” the desire of people to seek out, encounter, and enjoy the excellent in literature, music, art, architecture—you name it. Sooner or later I’m going to write at length about that essay and some of my thoughts on what has brought about this collapse. But part of it is surely resentment, the envy endemic to populism.*

Two items I’ve been reflecting on re. that essay and this cultural trend:

Item one—this blog post on “accessibility” in literature. The key passage:

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand—repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

Item two—from Letter 215 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, an incomplete draft of a letter on children’s books and aiming higher than one’s station, so to speak, in one’s reading:

We all need literature that is above our measure—though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time. But the energy of youth is usually greater. Youth needs then less than adulthood or Age what is down to its (supposed) measure. . . . Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life. But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in the right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Charges of “elitism” have always seemed, to me, to be a Trojan horse for becoming complacent. It begins by assuring yourself that failing to measure up to the standards of snobs is okay and ends with denying that there is any qualitative difference between the bad and the excellent. And so people who could enjoy the best are not only happy but congratulate themselves for staying put and reveling in the mediocre (or worse).

A final note: All my favorite books I have discovered either by 1) intentionally finding something reputed as good and stretching myself to understand it or 2) taking the recommendations of good friends who have already done #1.

Food for thought.

*Cf. CS Lewis in his essay “Democratic Education”: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you,’ is the hotbed of Fascism.”