Meditations on Middle-Earth (4 page)

This was classic stuff. This was right up there with Wagner’s
Twilight of the Gods
and
Beowulf
. It was heroic in a fashion similar to the Arthurian stories of Malory and Tennyson, of the tales of the Mabinogion, yet with a decidedly modern patina.

Frodo is no one’s first image of a “hero.” Lancelot and Orlando would tower over him. He is gentle, like the rest of his kind, fond of food, drink, and comfort. In many respects, he is the surrogate for Tolkien’s expected audience, the secure, well-educated, contented British upper-class and upper middle-class readers of the pre-World War II era.

Much scholarly enquiry has gone into the cautionary aspects of Lord of the Rings as a metaphor of Britain’s travails before and during World War II. This resonates across time as Frodo, the “everyman” of the saga confronts the mounting evil threatening his native soil. He and his companions return home as heros after the destruction of the One Ring, and that heroism and its impact is demonstrated by the cleansing of the Shire; no timid little men here, but battle-hardened veterans who take things in hand and free their homes of the domestic tyrants who have come to plague their families while the heroes were saving the world.

It was delicious and compelling and a story that demanded rereading time and again.

And how did it impact me as a writer?

First of all, indirectly. The world of Midkemia, in which the preponderance of my work is set, is a gaming world, that is, one created by my friends in college as an environment in which we could play our personal variant of Dungeons & Dragons. As such, it’s got a lot of “Tolkien stuff” in it. Ores, for example, along with Balrogs, to name two clearcut lifts. For the purposes of the books I’ve written in Midkemia, I’ve omitted most of the obvious critters that originated with Tolkien, but the influence, the “flavor” lingers.

Midkemia has elves and dwarves, like Middle-earth, but with my own peculiar twist on them. My elven races are a little more rawbone, less mystical than Tolkien’s, and my dwarves bear far more resemblance to the hard-working Scottish coal miners who settled in western Pennsylvania than they do to dwarves in Middle-earth. My choice was for less mythic, more recognizably human variants of his prototypes; and I’m content with my choice, but I chose names right out of Tolkien’s lexicon on the language of elves, in the
Silmarillion
. Elves of light are eledhel, dark elves are moredhel, to cite two borrowings. It was my “tip of the hat” to the grand old master.

For me, as a working writer, the major influence of J. R. R. Tolkien on my work was his impact on the publishing industry. He is the source of all wealth from which my bounty flows.

Before Tolkien, there were no international bestsellers written by fantasy authors, at least not in the sense we think of “bestseller” today.

The success of The Lord of the Rings began slowly, and crested in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Looking back, we can now see it as a monolithic, time-compressed “event,” marked by the publication of the
Silmarillion
. If memory serves, the brilliant promotion by Random House/Del Rey books at the time created a demand for an American “first edition,” which resulted in a print run of around a million copies in the United States alone.

This was an heroic feat of publishing in the mid-1970s. It was followed by calendars, art books, other merchandizing tie-ins, a TV special, films, and the rest. The Middle-earth franchise is today one of
Star Wars
proportions. It was not always thus.

A slow, word-of-mouth growth, mostly on college campuses, was what I remember about The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s. For a while it was almost a sign of being “hip” that you’d read the trilogy, because the books weren’t mainstream bestsellers.

They were, to put it simply, cool.

But today my success is to a large degree the result of that desire by scattered college students, hippies, and fans of literature to read something that was “cool.” To be able to go to that party where the jocks and frat guys weren’t going to show up, and to talk about that “cool” story, The Lord of the Rings.

More than the works of those authors I’ve named above, J. R. R. Tolkien’s brilliantly realized story of Frodo and his companions sparked an appetite for fantasy that led to many writers being “discovered” by readers who had missed them the first time around.

Lin Carter had edited a series for Random House under the Ballantine Adult Fantasy banner, with works by James Branch Cabell and Lord Dunsany, among others, and suddenly they were flying out of the used bookstores, eagerly devoured by the newly converted fantasy buffs. The great writers of “pulp” fantasy, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge, Robert E. Howard, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger books, and the non-Tarzan work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, were embraced decades after their original publication due to the thirst for fantasy created by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Of those writers, Robert E. Howard enjoyed a renascence that ended up surpassing his original modest success in manyfold fashion, as his Conan stories found new readership; spawned follow-up works by no less a pair of talents than L. Sprague De Camp and Robert Jordan; and created its own franchise, including two films and a TV series. And my personal hero, Fritz Leiber, found new readers for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

But the tales of lost civilizations, ancient gods, and wandering barbarians lacked the grandeur and mythic underpinnings of Tolkien. Certainly, H. P. Lovecraft’s stories of the Ancient Ones dealt with centuries-spanning evil, lurking below the surface of our mundane world, but the conflicts were always on a personal scale, a poor soul who by circumstances found himself confronting horrors beyond imagining. And there were never stories of triumph, merely of surviving the confrontation.

H. Rider Haggard and A. Merritt wrote of great civilizations, but they were always fallen, discovered centuries later by contemporary characters of the early twentieth century who were confronting timeless evils, immortal goddesses or spirits in possession of their fellow explorers.

Only Burroughs got close with his John Carter stories, but even the heroic former Confederate officer transported to Mars, with its seven-foot-tall, six-armed Martians, and exotic princesses, was still not in the same category as Tolkien. This was still clearly “pulp” fantasy.

Tolkien stood alone atop the publishing pyramid when it came to fantasy. He had contemporaries of worth—E. R. Eddison, T. H. White, and C. S. Lewis—but somehow Tolkien had hit the mark with his mix of lore, ancient back story, and characters.

His Third Age, his “Myth for Britain,” echoed with reverberations of ancient majesty. That oddest of beings, a British Christian mystic, Tolkien possessed personal beliefs that clearly influenced his cosmology, the sense of ultimate good and evil, the timeless conflict, and the temptations of dark powers luring even the most innocent and pure. Yet it was clear that in the end, good would be triumphant.

While the pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s dealt with modern man blundering into dangers and terrors of ancient origin, exploring lost tombs in the heart of ancient jungles or buried under the shifting sands of remote deserts, Tolkien changed that paradigm. He created a world both alien and familiar. The Shire was “home.” No matter that the reader lived far from the green meadows of the West Counties of England, or had never seen the sunset from the banks of the Thames, the Shire felt like home.

Frodo and the hobbits were “people,” simple, graceful, peaceful, and humble. They were archetypes bordering on stereotypes: Frodo the Plucky Hero, Sam the Good and Faithful, Gandalf the eminence who could not possibly be more grise, Merry and Pippin, as hale a pair of well-met fellows as you’d find in Percival C. Wren’s
Beau Geste
or Alexander Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
, uncertain as to why they were a part of the drama but willing to put aside personal safety for friendship. They were two of my favorites in the series, two callow youths who found strength and purpose through adversity and who emerged as heros.

Tom Bombadil, the Ents, the Nazgûl, the Balrog, and the elves were the otherworldly entities within the structure of that universe that created a supernatural element in an already fanciful story. Even the human characters were made somehow alien so that the hobbits could be realized as all the more familiar to the reader.

It’s all there, heroism and humility, fear and triumph, a mysterious king returning to rule with wisdom and generosity, a princess destined to fight alongside her betrothed; it’s stuff right out of Richard Wagner.

This wondrous story created an appetite in readers for future works of truly epic proportion. While it’s an overused word in ad copy, “epic” in this context is well used, for The Lord of the Rings is a story of profound changes within a culture/society as a result of the tale. The hobbits will never quite be the same, and we can see the foreshadowing of the coming of the Fourth Age, the one we assume Tolkien meant to be our own.

My own work is more character-driven, with contemporary “actors” in costume, as it were. But the backdrop of my universe’s cosmology, the titanic struggle between ancient gods, is as large a back story as Tolkien’s. It runs through every book I write, sometimes a major part of the narrative, other times as a distant echo, but always there.

That desire for the Wagnerian, the grand opera, as opposed to the grand guignol of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, was the single most tangible legacy to me, as a writer, from Tolkien. I’ll leave it to posterity to decide if I’ve met the test.

In any event, no matter how we get there, we’re all obliged to admit that while Tolkien may not have truly been “the father” of modern heroic fantasy, he was certainly the grandfather, and as such his direct influences on style, readership, and market were in many ways more important to my career than the direct influences of other writers might have been to my writing. In my own humble opinion, of course.

So while I’ll point to the others as being my spiritual “fathers,” especially to Fritz, I’ll once again tip my hat to J. R. R. Tolkien as being our collective, spiritual grandfather.

Thanks, Granddad. I couldn’t have done it without you.

AWAKENING
THE ELVES

PAUL ANDERSON

W
e are all deeply in J. R. R. Tolkien’s debt, writers perhaps even more than readers. He gave us the greatest fantasy of our time, which also stands tall in the whole of world literature. Only Lord Dunsany is comparable, and Tolkien’s influence has been vastly stronger.

Both drew on our literary and cultural wellsprings, from Homer and the Bible onward. A little more about that anon. First I’d like to reminisce a bit. The aim is not to brag, but to offer a personal example of how that influence has worked. Many other people must have such stories to tell, in wide variety, and I hope that some of them do.

Back in the early 1950s, my wife and I met the late Reginald Bretnor and his own wife. It led to a lot of lively conversations, with considerable benefit to the California wine industry, and a friendship that endured through her untimely death, until his, eight or nine years ago. The friendship grew close enough that he not only told us about
The Hobbit
but lent us his first-edition copy. Thereupon we had to find one for ourselves, and presently, having heard about The Lord of the Rings, acquire and devour it.

That was the initial English publication, three volumes appearing over a period of more than a year. The time felt longer. Readers today may have trouble imagining what that was like—waiting months to learn how Frodo and Sam fared in the Land of Shadow, then months again wondering what would happen to Frodo in the hands of the enemy!

(This led to the common mistake of calling The Lord of the Rings a trilogy. It isn’t. It’s a unified novel, issued in pieces for commercial reasons.)

Even so, we were not alone in our enthusiasm. People discussed it eagerly at science fiction conventions. The songs were set to music and sung, like those in that other splendid fantasy, John Myers Myers’
Silverlock
. It is actually a sign of esteem and affection that a very funny ballad version, “The Ores’ Marching Song,” evolved; it goes to the tune of “Jesse James.”

Thus, word got around. In those days, the paperback house Ace Books was under entirely different ownership and management from now. The United States had not yet joined the International Copyright Convention, and indeed copyright law generally was in sore need of amendment. Ace saw a broad loophole, and put out an American softcover edition without so much as a by-your-leave.

This raised indignation among those who realized what it meant; but they were few compared to the ordinary readers who in all good faith bought the volumes. Tolkien spoke to the young people of the sixties—with images of peace and natural beauty, their desecration, the struggle of a dauntless handful against an evil that looked overwhelming—and, to be sure, glamor, strangeness, a narration that grabbed hold and didn’t let go till the end, a whole world so fully and vividly imagined that it felt altogether real.