R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings

R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings forms a significant part of the substantial canon of works written by the English author and academic J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) set in his invented world of Middle Earth. It consists of three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955). For many readers it forms, with its predecessor The Hobbit (1951), the most accessible and rewarding part of Tolkien's non-academic oeuvre. Certainly The Lord of the Rings is one of the most successful literary works of the twentieth century. The recent film versions of the trilogy have increased its profile in contemporary culture, but long before this most recent large-scale adaptation this epic work had achieved enormous popularity. It is a creation of unique scale and ambition, seemingly the product of the author's determination to become the creative equivalent of an entire people, and to produce both history and mythology on behalf not of a completely imagined world, but of our world, removed to an alternative history.

This paper is concerned with examining the sources of The Lord of the Rings, and particularly with the influence of the turbulent times during which it was written. Tolkien himself explains in his preface to The Fellowship of the Ring that 'the composition of The Lord of the Rings went on at intervals during the years 1936 to 1949' (FR, 9), a period which spans the troubled years of the Spanish Civil War, the increasing aggressiveness of totalitarian fascism in Europe, the crisis of appeasement, the Second World War, and the early stages of East-West tension and the beginnings of the Cold War. Tolkien was an extremely erudite and knowledgeable scholar of northern European literatures and mythologies, and his knowledge of these phenomena was the well-spring of the creativity that fed into his literary creations. The question of how these intellectual sources and influences interacted with the influence of the times in which he lived in shaping The Lord of the Rings is a fascinating and revealing one. A recent critic has described Tolkien as 'a product of one of the most difficult, contradictory times in modern history, his childhood spent in the Edwardian farewell to the nineteenth century and his adulthood coinciding with the two most devastating wars of the twentieth century' (Flieger, 11). It is hard to imagine that there was a complete separation between the imagined world Tolkien created and the real world in which he lived. The Lord of the Rings may be fantasy, but it is not mere escapism.

II. A NEW MYTHOLOGY

Unlike some other writers of fantasy, Tolkien was not backward in discussing the origins and nature of the world he had created. He made many comments, in letters, in published commentaries on The Lord of the Rings, and in observations to many of his friends, family and colleagues. Among these statements is the clear declaration that his ambition was to provide, through his stories of Middle Earth, nothing less than a new mythology for England (Carpenter, 89).

Tolkien was steeped in the legends and ancient stories of England: Anglo-Saxon riddles and epics, Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Chaucer; but he saw England as part of a wider community of northern European culture and folklore, and wanted to develop an epic that would be an expression of the 'genius' of that community. The story of Middle Earth, he commented, should 'be redolent of our "air," by which he meant 'the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe' (Carpenter, 90). Tolkien saw England as part of a 'Nordic' community consisting of the British Isles and Scandinavia, including Iceland, and it was to the myths, legends and folklore of this region that he chiefly looked in composing The Lord of the Rings and the other stories of Middle Earth: 'Particularly important to Tolkien's writings, in fact, are products of Nordic imagination: the Old Icelandic sagas, medieval Old Norse, Elias Lnnrot's Finnish national epic Kalevala, and the Finnish language' (DuBois and Mellor, 35). For Tolkien this northern character within his invented (or perhaps more accurately, his synthesized and re-imagined) mythology was vital, and he explicitly positioned this 'northern' culture of myth and legend, which he saw as both vibrant and neglected, against the 'southern' culture of Greece and Rome, which he believed to be both overrated and intellectually sterile.

The process through which Tolkien created the mythology of The Lord of the Rings from these raw materials was complex and multi-faceted: 'Behind every setting and every character in J.R.R. Tolkien's writings on Middle-earth,' observes a recent scholar, 'lies a history of literary, mythological, and linguistic complexity':

We know that Tolkien drew heavily from other mythologies, from the Celtic and Norse in particular, but the ways in which he did this are not always clear. In The Lord of the Rings, mythological borrowings are often more implied than manifest. The reader catches hints of their influence in setting, characterization, and repeated images; but overall patterns (as well as Tolkien's purposes) are likely to remain obscure. (Flieger and Hofstetter, 219).

There are specific instances of the borrowing of names and attributes from particular mythological sources; the names of the dwarfs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for example - and Gandalf's name - come from the thirteenth-century Icelandic epic The Poetic Edda; and many of the attributes of both Gandalf and Saruman are derived from those of the Norse god Odin (Flieger and Hofstetter, 220-222). The image of a cursed ring reflects the influence of The Saga of the Volsungs (DuBois and Mellor, 36), while the creation epic that underlies the action of The Lord of the Rings (and which is more fully developed in The Silmarillion) echoes the primordial mythology of the Finnish Kalevala (DuBois and Mellor, 37), and elements of the Celtic myths of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany that tell of drowned lands and faerie peoples echo with particular potency through Tolkien's Elvish mythology (Flieger, 154).

Then there are the languages, which formed the starting-point for the creation of Middle Earth. Tolkien regarded himself as a student of languages, a philologist, and into The Lord of the Rings and his other Middle Earth writings he poured his enthusiasm for and deep knowledge of languages from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse to Welsh and Finnish. For Tolkien, language was profoundly significant as a shaper of human culture and consciousness, and in Middle Earth he gave full expression to his belief of the vital role played by language in shaping identity, religion, worldview, ideology, community:

Language was for him the expression of the most profound and ancient beliefs of the human consciousness, both collective and individual. Language was for Tolkien the repository and conveyance of myth through time. He had an almost mystical belief in the relationship of language to human consciousness. (Flieger, 3)

The languages and names of Middle Earth are both a way into the cultures of Tolkien's creation and a key - albeit a highly involved, multi-layered and elusive one - to the complex currents that went into its creation. Their culture is firmly north-west European: Celtic, Norse, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon. The map of Middle Earth resembles a recast European continent in which Great Britain is physically incorporated into the 'Nordic' world of which Tolkien passionately believed it to be culturally a part; the landscape, modes of life, names and languages of this region amount to the 'homeland' upon which the story centers. To the west is the sea, to the north the ice; east and south are lands where men and women live, but they are wild, uncivilized, strange places, where the inhabitants speak strange, harsh-sounding tongues. They are the 'other'. The civilized heartlands of Middle Earth are defined by language, and Tolkien's linguistic inventions were vital in defining the world of which they are part.

III. PASTORAL CONSERVATISM

Middle Earth is a profoundly rural society. The Shire, the home of the Hobbits, is clearly Tolkien's ideal. In seeking to connect Europe, and specifically England, with a legendary 'Nordic' heritage Tolkien was in a sense undoing the Industrial Revolution and all that had flowed from it: machinery, great cities, mass culture, democracy. The Shire, with its division into Farthings, its homely, English-sounding names - Buckland, Bywater, Deephollow, Longbottom - is the antithesis of all that Tolkien disliked about the modern world; and if the influences that shaped Middle Earth are to be understood, it has to be in terms of what they are standing against as well as what they are standing for. The Shire is in many ways a self-contained world; Sam Gamgee, Frodo's faithful companion, we are told early in the first book, 'knew the land well within twenty miles of Hobbiton, but that was the limit of his geography' (FR, 105). The Shire offers a small-scale landscape, contrasting with the vast and often threatening plains and mountains of the lands to the south and east, and it has a distinctly southern English quality of small fields enclosed by hedgerows, copses and woods, streams and rivers, all tamed, bucolic, unthreatening. This is pastoral England restored, the land that Tolkien believed had, in reality, succumbed to the advance of machines and the modern world:

The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. (FR, 13)

One of the most potent influences on The Lord of the Rings, then, is not any land that actually ever was, but an idealized version of they way the author liked to think it was. The description of the lifestyle of Hobbits in the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring provides a concise summary of the pastoral way of living which Tolkien saw as the ideal:

Hobbits... love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools. (FR, 17)

Tolkien was opposed to the basic assumptions of the twentieth century about technological advance, rationalization, planning, progress; his was an 'antimachinery, antitechnology stance... he denounced the exaltation of mechanization and the narrow definition of economic progress that resulted in the degradation of the natural environment' (Veldman, 90). This is dramatized most clearly in 'The Scouring of the Shire', the penultimate chapter of The Return of the King. Frodo and Sam return, after all their wanderings, to the Shire, to find it grievously changed, with 'old hobbit holes' deserted and 'their little gardens... rank with weeds', trees felled, 'ugly new houses' built, and 'a tall chimney of brick... pouring out black smoke into the evening air' (RK, 344). For Tolkien industrialization, the pollution of the natural world, and the violence of the modern age were all of a piece. In January 1944, Tolkien commented that 'the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter' leaving 'only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful' (Letters, 111). Technology, too, becomes a threatening 'other', an agency of the dark that must be opposed and overcome.

IV. LIGHT AGAINST DARK: WAR AND POLITICS

In his preface to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explicitly rejected the notion that the national and international situation at the time of his writing the books had any direct influence on the form they took. In particular, he denied that the Second World War had shaped the story in any way: 'Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels' (FR, 11). However, he conceded that 'An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience' while stressing that 'the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex' (FR, 11). A modern critic has made the same point, arguing that influences from the time are clearly present whether or not Tolkien consciously included them as an intentional act. The associations bound to occur to a reader 'with any memory of recent history' who reads Tolkien's work 'do not mean that The Lord of the Rings is a veiled rewrite of recent history' but 'they do mean the pattern discernible within it... can be applied to recent history and indeed to future action' (Shippey, 174).

Critics of Tolkien have not been slow to draw sometimes simplistic parallels between The Lord of the Rings and events in the real world. As early as 1955, Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis was highly critical of those who identified 'the Ring with the hydrogen bomb, and Mordor with Russia' (Isaacs and Zimbardo, 14), and identifications of Mordor with Nazi Germany, Sauron with Hitler and Saruman with Mussolini are equally superficial and inadequate. The parallels are not of such a direct and obvious kind. There is a more generalized expression of Tolkien's own world-view throughout the work, and since this naturally shaped his responses to the events of his life, there are echoes of his reactions to contemporary events in the text of The Lord of the Rings. In a more general sense the story can be said to embody his views about the conflict between light and dark, the nature of modern society, questions of authority, hierarchy and obedience and of the place of conflict and destruction in the great scheme of things - all of which had a bearing upon his view of war in general and the two world wars through which he lived in particular.

Tolkien saw active service in the 1914-18 war, and - like many of his generation - his experience of the First World War greatly influenced the view he took of the Second: 'One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression... To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years' (FR, 12). The early sections of The Fellowship of the Ring are deeply imbued with a sense of foreboding and looming catastrophe that may appear to echo the troubled state of Europe in the late 1930s; Tolkien himself explicitly rejected any direct connection, claiming that the chapter in question - 'The Shadow of the Past' - was written 'long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster' (FR, 11), but it is notable that he writes 'had yet become', implying clearly that the foreshadow of that time was present during his writing of even this section. A letter of October 1938 appears to confirm this; Tolkien writes to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, that he is working on the sequel to The Hobbit, a more 'adult' and 'terrifying' work than its predecessor, and that 'The darkness of the present days have had some effect on it. Though it is not an "allegory" (Letters, 41). This question of 'allegory' is an important one, not least because Tolkien repeatedly rejected any notion that The Lord of the Rings was any form of allegory, a form to which he was averse. Equally, however, he conceded that while the work was not a conscious allegory there was an allegorical presence in the writing: 'I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth and fairytale must use allegorical language' (Letters, 145). The essential distinction was between an allegorical interpretation forced upon the reader by the author, and a recognition of allegorical applicability on the part of the reader, responding to what the author had written and relating it to his or her own experience and knowledge. Tolkien drew out this point at length in a letter of 1947:

There is a 'moral', I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing [as allegory]... we find... that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. (Letters, 121)

The allegorical meaning which Tolkien believed could be drawn out of The Lord of the Rings was, in short, potentially so widely applicable as to lose any specific contemporary resonance. The same letter goes on to say: 'You can make The Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does so work' (Letters, 121). As a recent scholar has written, 'Attempts to allegorize the trilogy from the First or Second World Wars can only limit, even demean, what has been accomplished' but Tolkien's 'personal feelings' and 'the threat of Nazism' can be recognized as being 'somewhere in its propulsive stirrings' (Hillegas, 95).

The Lord of the Rings, then, is not simply an allegory of the mid-twentieth century conflict through which Tolkien lived. It would be more accurate to see it as echoing its author's convictions about the wider universal meaning of that conflict, influenced in turn by his own personal experiences.

V. NAZISM, ARYANISM, COMMUNISM, AND TOLKIEN'S IDEOLOGY

It has already been made clear that Tolkien's fantasy vision is thoroughly 'Nordic' in its character, reflecting the culture and mythology of that area of north-western Europe encompassing the Anglo-Scandinavian countries. There is thus a connection, if only one of geographical and cultural overlap, between Tolkien and the 'Aryan' project of Nazism which had loomed through the 1930s and was culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War. His profound knowledge and admiration of the northern sagas of Scandinavia and Germanic Europe and his use of that mythology in The Lord of the Rings and elsewhere 'has led some to link Tolkien with those who used those same mythologies for evil purposes, particularly in Germany in the 1930s. The link is an unfair one' (http://www.inklingbooks.com/untangling/lunatic.htm).In fact, Tolkien had no sympathy whatsoever for Nazism. When in 1938 a German publisher wanting to translate his work sought confirmation of his 'Aryanism', as then required by Nazi law, his response dripped scorn. 'I am not of Aryan extraction; that is Indo-Iranian' he wrote, 'but if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people' (Letters, 37); and to his publisher he declared his opposition to 'the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine' (Letters, 37). In 1941 he observed 'I have in this War a burning private grudge... against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler... [for] Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light' (Letters, 55-6). Tolkien's profound abhorrence of Nazism was many-layered. His academic understanding of, and emotional commitment to, the Nordic mythological universe that the Nazis were appropriating and perverting served to strengthen his revulsion at what he saw in Hitler's Germany. As an academic he abhorred the baseless, slipshod, twisted scholarship that underlay the Nazi ideology of 'Aryan' racial superiority, as a Christian he loathed Nazi violence and cruelty, and as a human being he was appalled by the destruction and suffering Hitler had unleashed.

It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that although the war-torn world of Middle Earth is not a representation of the war-torn real world of the 1940s, a conflict about which its creator had such strong feelings must, both consciously and unconsciously, have worked its way through the text. The origins of the frightful servants of Sauron, the Orcs, is a case in point. Tolkien wrote in a letter of 1941 that the Orcs were 'a race of rational incarnate creatures, though horribly corrupted' and that the powers of evil had 'subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves' (Letters, 191).

For Tolkien evil cannot create, only corrupt what already exists; thus the servants of Darkness in The Lord of the Rings are twisted, corrupted forms of elves and men, produced by unspecified torments and, presumably, a program of selective breeding. The parallel with Nazi race theories and racially-inspired policies is clear (http://Tolkien.cro.net/Tolkien/mskeparn.html).

JR.R. Tolkien was not, however, a political liberal of any kind. His personal politics were clearly of a conservative type, although of a 'paternalistic' rather than 'authoritarian' hue. His biographer comments that Tolkien's belief that 'each man belonged or ought to belong to a specific "estate," whether high or low, meant that in a sense he was an old-fashioned conservative', and observes that he 'did not believe in the rule of the people' and 'opposed democracy simply because he believed that in the end his fellow-men would not benefit from it' (Carpenter, 127). In 1943 he wrote that 'My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) - or to "unconstitutional" Monarchy' (Letters, 63), and there is no question but that hierarchical societies ruled by strong but paternalistic monarchs are the ideal form of government as represented in The Lord of the Rings. Even weak and foolish kings are kings nonetheless, and can only relinquish their authority when their own folly catches up with them in the form of defeat in battle and/or death as in the case of Theoden, King of the Mark: 'Needless is Theoden's demand, but it is useless to refuse. A King will have his way in his own hall, be it folly or wisdom' (TT, 140). The very notion that the restoration of cosmic order is embodied (literally) in 'the return of the King' is redolent of such ideas. When Aragon is crowned King of the West he embodies restored harmony and order; he alone, exercising unchallenged authority, heals a broken and divided world:

In the days that followed his crowning the King sat on his throne in the Hall of Kings and pronounced his judgements. And embassies came from many lands and peoples, from the East and the South, and from the borders of Mirkwood, and from Dunland in the west. And the King pardoned the Easterlings that had given themselves up, sent them away free, and he made peace with the peoples of Harad; and the slaves of Mordor he released and gave to them all the lands about Lake Nurnen to be their own. (RK, 299)

This authority rests on heredity and a version of divine right, and has a claim on unquestioning obedience from all, as Aragorn's parting words to the Hobbits make clear: 'do not forget, Peregrin Took, that you are a knight of Gondor, and I do not release you from your service. You are going now on leave, but I may recall you. And remember, dear friends of the Shire, that my realm lies also in the North, and I shall come there one day' (RK, 315-6).

Tolkien's heroes are the pastoral yeomen of the soil, the bourgeois and parochial Hobbits, and the natural aristocrats and rulers, the Elves and the great men of the West. Authority is divinely sanctioned and shown to be rightful by descent, by signs, and by the conduct of those who exercise it. The role of the general population in all of this is to be ruled, to obey, and when the need is there, to die in large numbers. Tolkien had little time for the masses. Accordingly, he was profoundly suspicious of political movements and claims to authority that appeared to gain, or claim, their legitimacy from the masses. In terms of the events of his own lifetime, this suspicion came to the fore in his attitude to the politics of the Left: socialism and collectivism, and communism. Tolkien was deeply hostile to the Soviet Union and what he perceived to be international communism, writing before the war that he had 'a loathing of being on any side that includes Russia' and holding the Soviet Union to be 'more responsible for the present crisis... than Hitler' (quoted in Carpenter, 189). He had sympathy for General Franco's Spain and ascribed hostility to Franco to the success of 'Red Propaganda' (Letters, 96). In 1941 he wrote that 'our dear old friends in the U.S.S.R. are up to some mischief... Meanwhile the "Daily Worker" is cried in the streets unmolested. We shall have some lively times after the War even if we win it as far as Germany is concerned' (Letters, 47-8). Here Tolkien is suggesting that, while the external threat of Germany can clearly be seen and may be defeated, the internal threat posed by communism is being disregarded, and there will be a price to pay for that in the future. The confrontation between Light and Dark goes on; defeated in one form, evil rises up again in another. Once Nazism is crushed, there is the new confrontation between East and West to be engaged with. Tolkien gave no particular primacy to the West in this struggle; he was deeply concerned about the cultural vacuity and sheer ugliness of what he called 'Americo-cosmopolitanism' (Letters, 63) and was thinking, not of the Allies on one side and the Axis on the other but of the West and the East when he expressed the view in 1943 that 'The special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag' (Letters, 64).

Giving extra power to Tolkien's aversion to the illiberal, repressive, uniform world of state socialism or communism is his experience of life in Britain during and immediately after the Second World War. The wartime experience for many civilians was of heavy-handed bureaucracy, over-regulation and government interference in every aspect of life, and Tolkien was by no means alone in fearing for the consequences of this aspect of the war, even as it was won militarily. 'We knew Hitler was a vulgar and ignorant little cad, in addition to other defects' he wrote in late 1944, but there seem to be many v. And i. l. cads who don't speak German, and who given the same chance would shown most of the other Hitlerian characteristics. The Vulgar and Ignorant Little Cad is not yet a boss with power; but he is a very great deal nearer to becoming one in this green and pleasant isle than he was... You can't fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy; but unfortunately Gandalf's wisdom seems long ago to have passed with him into the Far West. (Letters, 93-4)