The Riddles of The Hobbit (24 page)

But I know of no version of the story that spins things this way. Our investment in Sigurd’s dull Heroic Nobleness and absolutely unimpeachable honour is, perhaps, too profound. And something of the same marionette-like logic rusts Tolkien’s Brynhild too: her only motivation her own wounded pride, her method dependent upon an assumption of absolute truthfulness.

This is where the comparison with
Hamlet
comes in. The story that Shakespeare worked into his celebrated play is an ancient one, and found in many cultures. In the sources that Shakespeare used it is fairly straightforward. Hamlet is the king’s son. His father is killed by his uncle in a palace
putsch
. There is nothing secret about this palace revolution—it is an open
coup d’état
. To consolidate his power the usurper executes key figures of the old guard. Hamlet, as the old king’s son and heir, is evidently at danger of death, and to avoid this he lights on a clever plan. He pretends insanity, hoping that his uncle will consider him harmlessly beneath contempt as a madman. The ruse works, and Hamlet is able, under the disguise of madness, to kill his father’s murderer.

Now what is crucial here is the way Shakespeare
adapts
this story. In his version Hamlet is still the son of a royal father killed by his uncle in a palace
putsch
. But the
coup d’état
is secret; Claudius murders Old Hamlet in his garden and everyone thinks the old king died of natural causes in his sleep. Claudius’s succession to the throne is
regarded as legitimate. Moreover, one of the first things Claudius does in Shakespeare’s play is announce to the whole court that young Hamlet is next in line to the throne, effectively adopting him as his son. So rather than facing his imminent death, Hamlet finds himself royal heir and a prince of the realm. He has no need to protect his life by pretending to be mad.

He pretends to be mad anyway.

Why? In Shakespeare’s play it is hard to say exactly; or more precisely it is hard to say why in the terms of the play’s
sources
, because those sources treat characters as logical and rational agents. If characters in those sorts of stories do a certain thing or act in a certain way, there must be a straightforward reason why. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a much more profound piece of characterisation. The play precisely requires us to try and puzzle out
why
Hamlet acts the way he does. To what extent is his madness play-acting, and how far has grief forced an actual irrationality to the surface in his behaviour? Shakespeare understood what Freud, centuries later, was to build a career elaborating: that often our motives are hidden even from ourselves; that our subjectivity is made up as much of the irrational as the rational (of the unconscious as the conscious). That, moreover, this is particularly true with respect to traumatic events such as bereavement; and it is equally so with regard to repressed and taboo desires. Even Hamlet does not really understand why he gets so very furious with his mother in her bedroom. He rationalises his rage as a commitment to public chastity, especially for the over-forties, but that is not the
real
reason he gets so murderously het-up. Where sex is concerned it can be hard for us to untangle our motives.

Shakespeare turns Hamlet from a scheming two-dimensional character into an immensely complex, nuanced three-dimensional individual. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the first properly modern figures in world literature. This, indeed, is in large part why this play enjoys the titanic reputation it does. Medieval literature has its fair share of colourful and engaging characters (and much more than a fair share of blank ciphers and cardboard heroes); but there is no one in it like Hamlet; and
we
are much more like Hamlet than we are like Chaucer’s knight.

How does this relate to Tolkien?
Sigurd and Gudrún
is an exercise in conscious archaism not just in subject matter, and not just in poetic form and idiom. It treats its characters in flat, archaic ways. It
did not have to do so. What makes
The Lord of the Rings
much more than an exercise in reheating old mythology under an invented nomenclature and geography is the way its main conceit parses a much more interesting and much more contemporary dilemma. Of course some of Tolkien’s players are as brightly coloured and as stiffly static as any from the
Edda
—Aragorn, say; or Elrond. But at the heart of the narrative are three figures that are as modern, in their way, as Hamlet: Frodo, Sam, and above all, Gollum. Frodo is, as a character, acted upon by various forces—his sense of duty, his awareness of a kind of family belatedness, his love of home and his draw to the excitements of otherness; and all these things are written over, in complex ways, by his increasing dependence on the ring. Sam appears to be a more straightforward individual: deeply attached to his home, loyal to his master, yet fascinated by the un-Shire-like glamour of the elves. But out of his three-way internal struggle the story renders a kind of stubbornness of purpose, and heroism, that is all the more effective for being pitched at so ordinary a level. Gollum, as Aldiss noted, is the most interesting of all. His possession of the ring is of longer duration, and his addiction to it more deeply rooted, than any other character we encounter in Tolkien’s storytelling (with the possible exception of Sauron himself). Yet Gollum’s character has not been flattened or homogenised by his ring possession. In a sense he is a kind of anti-Sam, as stubborn and purposeful (in his way) as the hobbit, devious where Sam is straightforward, wicked where Sam is virtuous. And despite all this his character is as much a mode of apprehending pity as it is part of the ethical binarism of the larger narrative. With Gollum the unimaginable and sustained pressure of evil upon an ordinary soul has resulted in a kind of bizarre eversion, a forcing of what is inside out, such that Gollum’s odd little mannerisms, his habit of referring to himself in the third person, his toddler-like verbal tics and evasions, his self-pity and the remnants of his sense of duty and courtesy—all these things enact a kind of excavation of character (in the modern sense) itself.

In other words, what makes
The Lord of the Rings
particularly valuable as fantasy is the way it bridges old Anglo-Saxon fascinations with heroism, doom and catastrophe with modern fascinations with guilt, desire, power, compromise and the hidden springs of psychological life. And although there is nothing so nuanced, or complex in
Sigurd
and Gudrún
, it is a revealing text so far as Tolkien’s understanding of characterisation is concerned.

Does Bilbo change during the course of
The Hobbit
? We might say that for Tolkien personality—character, behaviour, subjectivity—is determined by soul. We are not automata, merely performing our programming; for we have ‘free will’. But saying so is not to concede, from a traditionalist Catholic point of view like Tolkien’s, that human subjectivity is in a state of continual and radical flux. People may change a little, but they do not change much, and in the mass they hardly change at all. ‘Free will’ is, as it were, a horizontal freedom: we may choose to do good or evil, to live in accordance with our Creator’s will or to seek to thwart it. But we do not have the vertical freedom implied by ‘
Bildungsroman
’: to change in any radical sense, since the ‘we’ entailed in such a change is determined not by brain chemistry, genetics or environment but by an eternal spirit donated by God. We may choose to act in one way or another, but we may not choose to be other than who we are.

The changes to Bilbo’s ‘character’ in
The Hobbit
, in other words, are external. He becomes a little less sedentary, a little less stay-at-home, a little less bourgeois.
3
As a function of this he becomes less timid and less existentially myopic; but these are figured not as alterations to his subjectivity so much as the uncovering of more heroic values that were always present. Adventures are more than diverting ways of passing the time; they are opportunities for us to test ourselves, to bring out aspects of ourselves that have been hidden.

Another way of saying this would be to suggest that there is an
inertia
in Tolkien’s conception of how ‘character’ works. To say so is not necessarily to denigrate his writerly approach to the question; for too much fluidity and flux in the representation of a character is as distorting as too immovable a rigidity. Moreover, this inertia cuts both ways. We might suggest that an individual who has been traumatised may suffer, but can be healed. For Tolkien, it appears, this is not so. Frodo’s experiences carrying the ring through
The Lord of the Rings
mark him in ways that cannot be expunged by a happy ending followed by decades of contented, uneventful living. Even Sam, who only had the ring for a short space of time, is indelibly traumatised
by it. The novel suggests only one remedy: that both characters leave Middle-earth altogether, and travel to a magical westward realm.

There is another reason, of course, why Tolkien conceives of ‘character’ in this way; and to discuss it I return, yet again, to the
Exeter Book
. Writing to his son Christopher (8 January 1944), Tolkien copies out three lines of Anglo-Saxon verse:

Longað þonne þy læs þe him con leoþa worn,

oþþe mid hondum con hearpan gretan;

hafaþ him his gliwes giefe, þe him god sealed.
4

He adds, translating the passage:

From the
Exeter Book
. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of ‘glee’ ( = music and/or verse) which God gave him. How these old words smite one out of the dark antiquity! Longað! All down the ages men (of our kind, most awarely) have felt it, not necessarily caused by sorrow, or the hard world, but sharpened by it.
5

‘Longað þe him’; ‘this man languishes’; ‘longing defined this man’. This is at the heart of Tolkien’s sense of character: longing defines us. It is longing that makes us what we are. Not
Bildungsroman
, derived from the German word
Bildung
(meaning ‘growth’ or ‘education’) but
Longingsroman
is what Tolkien writes.

The
problem with Realism is that it is almost inevitably superficial. But the problem with the metaphorical modes of fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, ‘magic realism’ and the like, is almost that they are
too
deep
.

(Pierre Delalande)

I do not intend, in this chapter, to try and generate an itinerary of every author who has been influenced by Tolkien or written a sub-Tolkien Fantasy novel: this book does not have the space to encompass such a survey. Indeed, a lifetime is too short (and eternity barely long enough) for such a task, for post-Tolkien fantasy has proved astonishingly fertile, and most of its texts are very lengthy. Nor do I intend here to attempt a discussion of the various sub-genres post-Tolkienian fantasy is sometimes divided into by fans: Heroic Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery, Gritty Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Weird fiction and the like. Some fans, and some critics too, spend a great deal of time upon such taxonomies. But it seems to me that taxonomy itself is a poor way of apprehending what it is about Fantasy that has made it so successful. Quasi-structuralist attempts to fit the larger body of Fantastic literature into a grid miss the point of the mode—which is, of course, the desire to escape the grid altogether.

I do not say so wholly to dismiss taxonomic studies of the form. Of course, there is pleasure to be had in spotting similarities and parallels between things, and grander totalising pleasure in disposing of a large body of diverse individual texts into a small number of
pigeonholes. The pleasure, to put it bluntly, has to do with control; and when it is applied to the world (as Linnaeus did) there is some point to it, for the world, for most human history, has been hostile and even dangerous. But when it is applied to SFF it misses the crucial thing that draws us to these texts in the first place: not the illusion of control (power), but the sense of
transport
.

Broadly speaking, this is what is distinctive about the appeal of Fantasy texts to fans of Fantasy. The technical vocabulary of criticism, by talking about ‘novums’ and ‘estrangement’ and ‘structural fabulation’, although they are talking about this thing, do not sound as if they are, which may be a distraction. Closer to the money-shot is the descriptor ‘Fantasy’ itself: a word which has a spread of meanings, not all of them negative or merely escapist in connotation. Why ‘fantasy’, then? Or, perhaps it would be better to say: what is behind the desire for fantasy?

Again, speaking very broadly, readers of Fantasy pick up their favourite books because those books give them something missing from the world as it actually is—and missing, too, from artistic representations of the way the world actually is; or ‘realism’ as it is sometimes called. We might call this thing ‘enchantment’, a sense of magic. Readers of SF are in search of something similar in their preferred genre: a newness that the actual world lacks, except that it is too easy to imagine that this newness inheres in one or other prop or physical item (a time machine, a ray gun, a spaceship). But this is to reduce SF to gadgets. This is not the right way of thinking about the problem, however, for the world itself has no lack of gadgets—is, indeed, rather over-supplied with gadgets. Better to talk in terms of ‘sense of wonder’, provided we realise that this in practice is a slightly less rebarbatively awe-inspiring quality than the eighteenth-century ‘Sublime’. It might, in fact, be best to think in terms of ‘cool’ if that did not carry with it the odour of imprecision. Heroic Fantasy, we know, takes as its setting a pre-industrial world, in which some of the conveniences according to modern humanity by machines fall within the purview of magic, whilst others are dispensed with altogether. The former strategy enables escapist fantasy about the empowerment of magical skill; but the latter strategy also enables escapism, by giving the readers access to an earthier, more authentic, more empowered, more physical existence than they have trapped as pale wageslaves by the webs of Civilisation and Its Discontents.