Meditations on Middle-Earth (5 page)

Oh, yes, these remarks are truisms, and barely graze the whole truth. The Lord of the Rings is far more. It deals with questions fundamental and timeless, the nature of good and evil, of man, and of God. Because of that, over and above its sheer readability, it endures, and undoubtedly will endure, as the plays of Shakespeare, or
Alice in Wonderland
, or
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, do and will.

Whatever respect I had had for Edmund Wilson evaporated when, at windy length, he dismissed The Lord of the Rings as childish. Granted, my opinion of critics never was especially high. “They who can, do. They who can’t, teach. They who can’t even teach become critics.” In fairness, it must be admitted that several of Wilson’s colleagues saw the matter otherwise, and today Tolkien is fully accepted by the literary establishment.

THE THREE TROLLS TURNED TO STONE

The Hobbit

Chapter II: “Roast Mutton”

This crotchet of mine is beside the point. Let’s get back to events.

The rip-off didn’t make me indignant, it made me goddamn furious. I vowed in the hearing of friends that Ace would publish nothing more by me until the issue had been settled to the satisfaction of Professor Tolkien. This was put to the test when the company made me a reprint proposal. My then hardback publisher, Doubleday, although entitled to half the payment, went along with my refusal. I like to think that this added some slight force to the pressure on Ace. It’s an amusing footnote that shortly afterward another softcover house tendered my agent a higher bid on the same book.

Be this as it may, Ace eventually gave in and made a settlement, which included turning American rights over to well-regarded Ballantine Books. To secure the copyright, Tolkien did a few revisions of his text. I’m not sure what they were, but they can’t be important. Since then, The Lord of the Rings has never been out of print.

Another footnote: I declared peace with Ace, and they took a couple more of my books—
faute de mieux
on both sides—before the firm was acquired by Tom Doherty. He’s a highly ethical man, who among other things paid authors half a million dollars in royalties that an audit showed had gone unreported when due, in spite of being under no legal requirement to do so. Ace again bears an honorable name.

Naturally, the success of The Lord of the Rings led to a revival of
The Hobbit
and of everything else Tolkien wrote—aside from strictly scholarly papers, and maybe they too have become readily available. Some is profound, some is utter delight, and some, frankly, leaves me a little cold. This merely shows that Tolkien’s work ranges more widely than my mind, and I needn’t bore you with specifics.

Equally naturally, The Lord of the Rings roused a fresh interest in out-and-out fantasy. That interest had always existed. Likely the first stories ever told were fantasies. Besides Ung, the caveman’s account of the big one that got away, humans must have wondered about the world, its days and nights, seasons and creatures, life, birth, death, luck, love, all the mysteries. They had nothing but imagination to help them try to understand. So arose religion, the magical arts, and folklore.

At least since Homer, probably earlier and certainly not only in the West, until recent times, fantasy was the mainstream of literature. Granted, “realistic” stories, that is, stories without anything in them that we today consider impossible, also go far back. They became the dominant and most reputable sort in the course of the nineteenth century, when an ascending bourgeoisie was more interested in reading about itself than about faerie lands forlorn. (No reverse snobbery here. After all, the genre includes many such works as
War and Peace
. Furthermore, it isn’t absolutely distinct from fantasy. Where, for example, would you place
Moby Dick?)

Quite a few authors, writing about the here and now still did occasional fantasies. To name just one, Rudyard Kipling’s are among his finest creations. Several, such as James Branch Cabell, are remembered chiefly for their works of this kind. E. R. Eddison’s first appeared in the 1920s, and
Silverlock
, already mentioned, did in 1949. Nonetheless, however much appreciated by connoisseurs, they gathered no large following. (
Jurgen
did, but as a
succès de scandale
, and nothing else by the author enjoyed anything like those sales in that brief moment.)
The Saturday Evening Post
, weekly voice of the middle class, published almost no fantasy unless by Stephen Vincent Benét. And so on.

Even markets catering to the imaginative devoted themselves mainly to science fiction, or at any rate what they could label science fiction. This was not the sea change one might think. During his editorship of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, Anthony Boucher once remarked to me that, to judge by the mail he got, most of his readers preferred fantasy to science fiction, but didn’t know it. You can, for instance, in terms of present-day scientific knowledge, make a somewhat better case for a life after death, and at least one God than you can for the possibility of time travel or travel faster than light.

In other words, the reading public kept an unexpressed desire for pure fantasy. And then Tolkien burst upon the publishing world. The rest is history.

The revival included what its devotees call heroic fantasy. In this, heroes, usually male but occasionally female, do battle against terrible odds in an archaic setting. That setting may be historical, but is most often imaginary; there has been no scientific or industrial revolution; supernatural forces and beings are real. Eddison wrote it on a high level, Robert E. Howard for the pulps. As always, borderline cases occur, for exmple, certain stories by L. Sprague De Camp and/or Fletcher Pratt, but I shan’t elaborate on those except to give these particular ones my highest recommendation.

The Lord of the Rings is heroic fantasy. It is much else as well, but such elements are definitely integral to it. Its astonishing popularity revealed the latent demand for more. Supply was quickly forthcoming, and has been pouring out ever since.

We can pass by the derivatives, the derivatives of the derivatives, and whatnot, stuff that has prompted the scornful term “generic.” They have been hilariously satirized by Esther Friesner and Diana Wynne Jones, among others. Let’s simply recall Theodore Sturgeon’s dictum, “Ninety percent of
everything
is crud,” and judge the field by its best rather than its worst, as we judge the love story by
Romeo and Juliet
rather than by the soap operas. First-rate work has been and is being done in it.

Some old-timers have benefited, too, perhaps most notably Jack Vance and Robert Silverberg. Now let me get personal again, because my experience leads back to Tolkien himself.

Long, long ago, I think probably in 1948, I wrote a heroic fantasy novel,
The Broken Sword
, which drew on Northern myth, saga, and folklore. Editor after editor rejected it, a few with regret, because they didn’t believe it could sell. At last it found a publisher, who gave it one printing—coincidentally, in 1954, the same year that
The Fellowship of the Ring
came out—and let it die.

The post-Tolkien boom enabled the late Lin Carter to reprint a series of older fantasies with Ballantine. Among them eventually was
The Broken Sword
. Having meanwhile learned more about writing and, for that matter, medieval combat, I took the opportunity to revise it—same story but, I hoped, better told. The new version first appeared in 1971. Subsequently, I’ve been free to roam the fantasy field whenever I like. That’s a reason close to home for acknowledging a debt to Tolkien.

A major source of his was identical with mine. He drew on others as well, especially the Bible and Christian tradition. More about that later. Still, in his professorial capacity he was a scholar and translator of Old and Middle English literature. His long essay “On Fairy-stories” explores the meaningfulness and power of the folk tales from that era, which likewise inspired him.

His ores and trolls come straight out of the North. I don’t think his elves do, quite, and this seems worth examining.

I return to
The Broken Sword
only for comparison. Elves and trolls figure in it too. In fact, the story turns on a war between them. But these elves are very different, a difference that Tolkien would immediately have recognized.

Let me paraphrase my introduction to the revised edition. In the year 1018, the skald Sighvat Thordarson made a winter journey into Sweden at the behest of his lord, King Olaf of Norway, afterward known as St. Olaf. Most of Sweden was then pagan. Seeking overnight shelter, Sighvat was turned away from three successive homesteads—behavior extraordinary in that day and age, with religious cause. As he related in a poem he made about it:

“That Odin be not angered,

keep off!” the woman said.

“We’re heathen here and holding

a holy eve, you wretch!”

The carline who unchristianly

cast me from the garth

gave out that they would offer

at evening to the elves.

The sagas mention other sacrifices to them, and a law that warships approaching a friendly shore must dismount their ferocious figureheads, lest the land-wights take offense.

Thus we see that they began as local gods or demi-gods. The
Heimskringla
tells of a petty king in a region of what was not yet Norway, buried with lavish grave-goods in a huge barrow. He came to be looked on as a tutelary spirit, given offerings and the posthumous name Olaf Geirstad-Elf. Legends about Elf Hill must spring from such happenings.

The Eddas speak of “light” and “dark” elves, though rather vaguely. It seems as if at least some of the light elves served in Asgard, and the dark ones may have been the dwarves—who are themselves prominent in Tolkien. But this may be the invention of poets and yarn-spinners in the Christian era, who continued for two or three centuries to use the old motifs. In any case, it has little to do with the concept of elves either as godlings or as roughly equivalent to classical dryads and oreads or Japanese kami.

They meant much to the early Germanic peoples. Probably they were far more real and immediate to most dwellers on heaths and lonely farms than were the great gods, of whom these outliers may well have heard only fragmentarily, if at all. Traces of their importance linger in names; for example, “Alfred” means “elf counsel.”

Now, pagan gods were originally as ruthless as the natural forces and mortal conflicts they embodied. Homer, in the edited form we have him, and Hesiod can’t entirely cover this up. For instance, we see Achilles slaughtering Trojan captives at the funeral of Patroclus, both to honor him and to get help for him in the Otherworld. Human sacrifices were sometimes made directly to Odin, Thor, and Frey. The elves lived on in folk belief long after the conversion to Christianity. They kept the ancient heartlessness and trickiness. And so, in the medieval Danish ballad “Elfshot,” when a knight comes upon their moonlit dance and declines to join it, he returns home a dying man.

It was this idea of the elves to which I harked back, beautiful, entrancing, pleasure-loving, richly rewarding their human favorites—as in the border ballad of True Thomas—but ultimately without souls or much if any compassion.

As the centuries passed, they became ever less formidable. By the time of Elizabeth I, they were the impulsive but civilized fays of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and by the time of Victoria, they had shrunk to cutesy-poo manikins. However, those of us who love the Northern tradition remember what they once were.

Tolkien drew on it himself, not in mere imitation but creatively. He kept trolls and ores unsympathetic. He made the dwarves less ambiguous, more reliably helpful, than they are in the old stories. The elves underwent a complete transfiguration.

Of course he knew exactly what he was doing, and succeeded nobly. His elves are as real as everybody else in the epic, grave and brave, powerful and poetic, wonder-working and wistful, an unattainable yet incontestable ideal. In my opinion, here his source was most clearly the Bible, and he was expressing his own faith. As my wife Karen says, these elves are like seraphim.

Scholars, including him, have found that
Beowulf
is not a pagan tale with monkish glosses, but profoundly Christian from start to finish, even though set in an earlier era. Nine-fingered Frodo can stand side by side with Grendel’s bane.

A
CHANGELING
RETURNS