A maker of moral myths

The fact that bien pensant critics despise Tolkien is all the more reason to read him, says Margot Lawrence
R R Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey, HarperCollins £16.99
SINCE THE PUBLICATION ofiRR Tolkien's great work Lord of the Rings in 1944-45, and even more since his death in 1973, a curious paradox has prevailed toWards the writer and his work. Most of the literary establishment, led by such figures as Alfred Duggan, Edwin Muir and Germaine Greer, have taken a sneering attitude, verging on genuine hostility, refusing to see him as a mainstream figure in 20th century English writing. Yet contrary to what usually happens after an author dies, his creative works of fiction and myth have never gone out of print. have won thousands of new admirers over three generations of readers, In a recent poll, Lord of the Rings was acclaimed as Book of the Century.
How to explain this paradox is Tom Shippey's purpose and he accomplishes it with the scholarship and panache befitting one who is himself. like Tolkien, a professor of English Language and Medieval Literature and who was for a time at Oxford a colleague of the writer.
He effectively demolishes this "curious phenomenon of seemingly irrational hatred", and describes Tolkien as a supreme master of both myth and language who produced popular works expressing a special truth about the universe and the nature of created beings in a way no-one else, not even Shakespeare, has ever attempted or achieved. (Shippey makes the point that Shakespeare knew nothing of Beowulf or Gawain as these mythic epics were only recovered after his time.) Shippey considers each of Tolkien's works in detail and shows the author groping, often for years, towards the solutions of the problems, linguistic, historic, and plotwise, that he was setting himself. He admires Tolkien's ability to suggest cultural differences by variation in speech — "his linguistic control is one of his least appreciated qualities".
That astute publisher Stanley Unwin identified a public demand for "more of the same" after the first publication of The Hobbit in 1937, and Tolkien wished to comply, but was rightly a perfectionist, taking seemingly endless time to complete his work. Then, owing to post-war paper rationing, publication of Lord of the Rings had to be spaced out in successive volumes. (How well I remember the keen anticipation with which my husband and I awaited the later installments after we had
read the first books on publication. There's been nothing like it until the Harry Potter phenomenon).
TOLKIEN HOPED ALL HIS LIFE to bring together the Christian religion (he was a lifelong devout Catholic) and the relics in myth and language of the ancestors he had spent all his professional life studying. He hated heathenism but was not prepared to dismiss everything pre-Christian as unhelpful or irrelevant. He aimed to restore to England a body of legend
that had been lost, and in The Silmarillion, his final work and closest to his heart but only published posthumously, he deals with the problem of pain and death and evil in a way that is beyond anything normally tolerated in 20th century fiction.
This work is related to the Christian myths of the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels, but the resemblance is not unduly pushed. The work, says Shippey, makes demands on its readers which no other modern work has ventured. No really perceptive person, Shippey believes, could possibly take such works as anything but highly relevant to the 20th century. The major disillusionment of our times has been over good intentions which have led to evil consequences, a point made over and over in Lord of the Rings.
Perhaps it is because his creative work is so much a mythology for today, centred on our era's prevailing sins of greed, desire for power and mastery, and the egoistic wish to exercise skill whatever the cense
quences (think of genetic cloning or the recent controversy over Siamese twins) that Tolkien has appealed so strongly yet subliminally to our own generation and been so detested by the bien pensants. His ultimate message, implicit rather than directly spelled out, is that it is morally wrong to think there is no point in trying any further, a moral we desperately need today. Most of the characters in Lord of the Rings are staring "universal final defeat" in the face at times, and in this connection it must not be forgotten that Tolkien himself had I fist most of his friends in the Battle of the Somme.
Shippey devotes much consideration to Tolkien's treatment of evil. The Manichean heresy declared evil tu be a positive force (The "Dark Power" of Lord of the Rings) but the Christian writer Boethius, in 584 AD. postulated that what we call evil is really the absence of good ("The Shadow" in Tolkien's book). This contradistinction drives much of Tolkien's plot. When Frodo puts on the Ring for the last time we need to know whether he has been compelled by an outside Power, or succumbed to an inner desire. One of the work's enormous strengths is us examination of what we call chance — "the snowball that starts the avalanche" as Shippey graphically puts it Frodo himself is a figure of contemporary significance to a society like ours which has largely lost its religious faith and found nothing to take its place. As a scholar of pagan literature, Tolkien could not help seeing there had been virtue in some pagans and he implicitly invoked in all his work a "theory of courage" which he had first identified in a 1935 lecture on Beowulf. The character of Sam presents a simple version of this theory of courage.
TOLfUEN INSERTED "a kind of signature, a mark of personal piety" into Lord of the Rings, says Shippey, when he made Gandalf tell Sam that the 25th of March could be celebrated as "the day you were brought out of the fire to the King". Tolkien was well aware of the Old English tradition that 25th March was the date of Good Friday. It is of course still reverenced as the Festival of the Annunciation to Our Lady.
Shippey's scholarly and thorough examination of Tolkien and his works is a truly definitive study which will surely make many converts to the "writer of the century" as well as giving his admirers much that is fresh to ponder over.