SOURCE: St. Clair, Gloriana. “The Lord of the Rings as Saga.” Mythlore 6, no. 2 (spring 1979): 11-16.

[In the following essay, St. Clair presents arguments against placing The Lord of the Rings as a fairy story, an epic, and a romance, and instead contends that the trilogy is most similar to the genre of the traditional saga.]

One of the most useful aspects of literary criticism is to establish and to assign genres. Placing a modern work, like The Lord of the Rings, in its proper categories helps the reader to understand both the mechanics and the meaning of the work. Various critics have designated The Lord of the Rings a fairy-story, a traditional epic, a romance, and a novel. Each of these terms has some relevance, but none is, I believe as comprehensive and appropriate a genre for The Lord of the Rings as the saga. In this paper then, I wish to point out the weaknesses in the other assignments, to define the saga, and to demonstrate its pertinence to the structure and spirit of The Lord of the Rings.

I. THE FAIRY-STORY

In 1938 at the University of St. Andrews, J. R. R. Tolkien delivered as an Andrew Lang Lecture an essay “On Fairy-Stories,” which was later printed in Essays Presented to Charles Williams.¹ Tolkien's critics have used this essay to measure his artistic achievement in The Lord of the Rings. However, not all the components Tolkien assigned to the fairy-story are appropriate for the trilogy.

The argument of these critics for The Lord of the Rings as fairy-story follows the structure of Tolkien's essay. Mark Roberts in a review notes that “Now it seems clear that The Lord of the Rings is fairy-story according to Professor Tolkien's understanding of the term.”² Michael Straight especially defends The Lord of the Rings as an illumination of the essay's doctrine of the sub-creator and thus of “the inner consistency of reality,”³ elements that Tolkien says the fairy-story usually offers. Dorothy K. Barber in “The Meaning of The Lord of the Rings” also refers to Tolkien's essay with its theory of the sub-creator and its doctrine of Eucatastrophe.⁴ And in “Tolkien and the Fairy Story,” R. J. Reilly states that “I will try to ‘place’ the trilogy in its proper genre—the fairy story mode as Tolkien conceives it.” (Ibid, p. 129) Reilly continues, “That is to say, in dealing with fantastic things rather than with real ones it attempts the purest form of narrative art, and succeeds to the extent that it induces in the reader the state of mind called Secondary Belief.” (Ibid, p. 144) Barber and Reilly also believe that Tolkien has created in The Lord of the Rings a Secondary World, which is believable and which has its own laws. They apply to the trilogy Fantasy, Recovery, Escape and Consolation.

However, these critics have failed to consider all the strictures that Tolkien places on the fairy-story. Although many of the terms apply in part, the comprehensive definition for a fairy-story is not appropriate. For example, in Reilly's discussion of Fantasy, he employs only half of Tolkien's definition; the remainder of the definition cannot be applied. Tolkien defines Fantasy: “For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Subcreative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I purpose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose …” (Tolkien, Op. Cit., p. 47) Reilly, as well as other admirers of the trilogy, states that it contains a Secondary World, which is both consistent and credible. But as Reilly fails to discuss, Tolkien also requires a special kind of presentation for the fairy-story: he demands “a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression.” Now, it seems to me that one of “Tolkien's most effective methods for creating the sense of reality present in The Lord of the Rings is the matter-of-fact, chronicle-like reporting of events. No imaginative story-teller has spun or invented or embellished this tale; it is presented to the reader as a narrative history of events recorded in the chronicle, Red Book of Westmarch. This invocation of the aura of history is, as will be discussed later, characteristic not of fairy-story but of saga.

After recreating the term Fantasy, Tolkien defines Recovery as the regaining of a clear view, and Escape as the constructive ability of the prisoner to focus his attention on something outside his prison rather than as the cowardly flight of the deserter to avoid Real Life. (Ibid, p. 57-60) Even though Roberts says that he can find no value or clear view in The Lord of the Rings, he charges this inadequacy to the writing style, which offends his tastes and prevents his participation.⁵ Despite Roberts' opinion, these terms do seem to apply to the trilogy and equally well to many types of literature other than the fairy-story.

Reilly, Barber, and Roberts all believe that the trilogy illustrates consolation, for they all agree that it ends happily in Eucatastrophe, the antithesis of tragedy. Tolkien says of this kind of happy ending that “it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” (Tolkien, Op. Cit., p. 68.) However, Tolkien's definition of Eucatastrophe does not quite explain the ending of The Lord of the Rings. Although the One Ring has been destroyed, Gandalf warns that evil is not destroyed. If the story had ended with the great climax consisting of the Ring's destruction and the subsequent rescue of Frodo and Sam, then the ending might be considered joyful. But, in fact, as the story continues, evil is discovered thriving in the Shire. This evil is, in turn, overcome, and the magic dust that Galadriel gave Sam erases its scars. At this point, too, the story might have ended happily. But the ending Tolkien chose for the story shows Gandalf, Frodo, Elrond and the other elves setting out for the Grey Havens. Those characters who are the most valiant and imaginative can no longer linger in the world of Middle-earth: the Third Age is at an end.

These critics see in the Grey Havens the Christian Heavenly City: they see the ending as the joyful ascension, without death, of the heroes into heaven. However, in “The Hobbit-Forming World of J. R. R. Tolkien,” Henry Resnik reports that “Tolkien's long acquaintance with Norse and Germanic myths inspired the chillier, more menacing landscapes of Middle-earth, and he makes no secret of having deliberately shaped the two major interests of his life—rural England and the northern myths—to his own literary purposes. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien says, ‘I have tried to modernize the myths and make them credible.’”⁶ Consequently, if the Grey Havens is to be associated with Valhalla rather than the Christian Heaven, then the ending must reflect that interpretation. The Valkyries take the heroes from this life to Valhalla, to a magnificent banquet, sports, and fighting. But Valhalla is not an eternal refuge, only a waiting place until that final confrontation between good and evil. In this final battle, the Gods and the heroes will fight valiantly, but they will fall. The joy of Valhalla is the promise of one more combat, not the infinite Gloria of Christian salvation and everlasting life. The voyage to the Grey Havens is not a eucatastrophic event.

Furthermore, proponents of The Lord of the Rings as fairy-story have ignored Tolkien's comments on the concept of time and the problem of length. Of fairy-stories, Tolkien says that “they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.” (Tolkien, Op. Cit., p. 32) He comments further on time in the fairy-story in a note on Andrew Lang's “The Terrible Head”: “Namelessness is not a virtue but an accident, and should not have been imitated: for vagueness in this regard is a debasement, a corruption due to forgetfulness and lack of skill. But not so, I think, the timelessness. That beginning (‘once upon a time’) is not poverty-stricken but significant. It produces at a stroke the sense of a great unchartered world of time.” (Ibid, p. 84) The fairy-story, as Tolkien sees it, is a world outside of time: yet an awareness of time pervades The Lord of the Rings. The natural time sequence of the story proper is even supplemented by time-oriented appendices, such as “A” “The Annals of the Kings and Rulers,” “B” “The Tale of Years (Chronology of the Westlands),” “C” “Family Trees,” and “D” “Shire Calendar.”

A final disparity between Tolkien's prototype of the fairy-story and the trilogy is length. The examples on which “On Fairy-Stories” relies are drawn mainly from Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, Jakob Grimm's Fairy Tales, and George Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse. The longest story in Lang's The Brown Fairy Book is forty-seven pages,⁷ in a translation of Grimm's work fifteen pages,⁸ and in Dasent's volume twenty pages⁹ while The Lord of the Rings in three volumes runs 1,215 pages including the appendices. With his essay on the fairy-story, Tolkien had printed “Leaf by Niggle” noting that the two are related “by the symbols of Tree and Leaf, and by both touching on what is called in the essay subcreation.’” (Tolkien, Op. Cit., p. 2) This story, which seems to display Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation, covers twenty-five pages.

Thus, because the style of the trilogy does not follow Tolkien's suggestion for the style of Fantasy, because the ending is not Eucatastrophe, because the trilogy is in time, not outside of it, and because the work is far beyond the usual length of the fairy-story, The Lord of the Rings should not be assigned to the genre of the fairy-story.

II. THE TRADITIONAL EPIC

Another genre suggested for The Lord of the Rings is the traditional epic. In “Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings,” Bruce A. Beatie argues that the trilogy is a traditional epic: “That is, a work of the genre which includes the Epic of Gilgamesh (from the third millennium B.C.), the Homeric poems and perhaps the Aeneid, the Medieval epics Chanson de Roland and Nibelungenlied, the Russian bylini recorded in the nineteen-thirties …”¹⁰ The difficulty with Beatie's assignment is that he is unclear about what actually constitutes an epic. He is particularly confused about the differences between traditional epic and saga.

Beatie bases his conception of the traditional epic more on Rhys Carpenter's Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics than on the examples quoted above. Carpenter distinguishes the elements in his title as follows: “Saga, which purports to be true fact and happening held fast in popular memory; fiction, which is the persuasive decking out of circumstance with trappings borrowed from contemporary actuality; and folk tale, which is utterly unreal but by no means utterly irrational—all these can be sewn together in the rhapsode's glittering fabric.”¹¹ Carpenter bases his definition of saga on the questionable concept that all but the most fantastic portions of the saga were to be regarded either as historical or only slightly exaggerated.

Beatie's confusion about epic and saga stems from Carpenter's lack of understanding of the saga: Carpenter employs only the Volsunga saga and the Grettis saga as examples. Of the latter, he says “Folk tale and historic saga and literary fiction all blend harmoniously into the reality of the bleak Icelandic world wherein the sagateller lived.”¹² Thus, if the Grettis saga is a blend of folk tale, fiction, and saga, as the Iliad and the Odyssey are, then for these two critics no distinction between the saga and the traditional epic is possible.

However, Carpenter's definition is not quite representative of all the concepts of the epic genre. For instance, M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms defines epic as “a long narrative poem on a serious subject, related in an elevated style, and centered about a heroic figure on whose actions depends to some degree the fate of a nation or a race.”¹³ Only two parts of the definition apply to The Lord of the Rings: the serious subject and the fate of the whole race. The trilogy does not have an elevated style, does not center on one heroic figure, and is not a poem. Some of the conventions of the epic are also lacking: the Muse is not invoked, the narrative does not begin in medias res, and the catalogues are relegated to the appendices.

Thus, Beatie's special definition of the traditional epic obscures the difference between epic and saga rather than placing The Lord of the Rings in the epic genre. And the traditional definition and conventions cannot be fully applied to the trilogy. Furthermore, it seems best to keep the distinction between prose (even that which contains some poetry) and poetry intact especially since the high ceremonial style seems so germane to the conventions and traditions of the epic.

III. THE ROMANCE

Another genre considered in connection with The Lord of the Rings is the traditional romance. William Blissett in “The Despots of the Rings” has called it a heroic romance and charted some of its similarities to the Wagnerian Ring of the Nibelung.¹⁴ In “The Lord of the Rings: The Novel as Traditional Romance,” George H. Thomson has done a more comprehensive study of the motifs and structures of the trilogy in terms of those of the romance. His thesis is that “With respect to its subject matter, the story is an anatomy of romance themes or myths: with respect to its structure, the story is a tapestry romance in the Medieval-Renaissance tradition.”¹⁵ Using the six phases of romance identified by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, Thomson notes the major occurrences of themes quite effectively.

What Blissett and Thomson fail to recognize is that a saga can be a prose Northsea-oriented romance, which has undergone certain stylistic alterations. Frye considers the saga a variation of the romance. He says that “The romance, which deals with heroes, is intermediate between the novel, which deals with men, and the myth, which deals with gods. Prose romance first appears as a late development of Classical mythology, and the prose Sagas of Iceland follow close on the mythical Eddas.”¹⁶ As Margaret Schlauch in The Romance in Iceland demonstrates, the romance accounts for two types of sagas: the fornaldarsögur, which deal with the old Norse gods and heroes, and the lygisögur, which were mainly retellings of romances imported from the Mediterranean area.¹⁷

These lygisögur naturally display the six phases of traditional romance. In the chapter “Recurrent Literary Themes,” Schlauch takes an imaginary hero Helgi and suggests what the typical course of his adventures might have been in one of these sagas. He is frequently jeopardized at birth by being exposed or offered as a sacrifice to a god. His innocent youth may be spent as a menial: at best he is slow-witted and will not work. His innocence may be threatened by an amorous and evil stepmother whose advances he stoutly refuses. His quest may involve love and/or fortune and/or fame, and he will have to deal with dragons, trolls, and miscellaneous monsters. As his quest forms the main part of the saga, the comedic phases of the romance are frequently quite brief. But the conclusion is usually merry with the traditional proliferation of marriages of the hero and his companions to numerous rescued princesses. Helgi is left, then, “happily married to a princess whom he has won with great effort, and serene in the assurance that his descendants will be no less famous than he.”¹⁸ His adventures have followed the pattern that Frye establishes for the traditional romance. (Frye, Op. Cit., p. 198-203)

Frye's third phase of romance, the quest, deserves particular attention since W. H. Auden has so thoroughly established its relevance to the structure and meaning of The Lord of the Rings. Thomson points out, and I concur, that the quest is not a genre in itself but is rather a most “frequent and important form of the romance story.” (Thomson, Op. Cit., pp. 57-58) However, this quest form is not limited to the romance or even to the lygisögur. The quest also occurs in the fornaldarsögur and the family sagas. For example, Auden's essential elements of the typical quest appear in fornaldarsaga, such as Hrólfs saga Kraka, and in family saga, such as Kormáks saga.

The saga also illustrates the tapestry style that Thomson assigns to the medieval romance and The Lord of the Rings. For instance, Snorri uses this skillful movement from one center of interest to another effectively in the Heimskringla.

The stylistic points at which the saga diverges from its predecessor, the romance, are the points which make saga a more appropriate genre for The Lord of the Rings. Both the saga and the trilogy pretend to be history: this pretension to history more adequately explains the beginning and end of The Lord of the Rings than the romance's conventions do. Furthermore, the connotations of romance are a work in poetry related to the Mediterranean culture, but those of the saga are a prose work related to the Northsea culture. The connotations of romance are not applicable while those of saga are.

IV. THE NOVEL

No investigation of the genres assigned to The Lord of the Rings could be complete without a discussion of the prevalent twentieth-century prose form, the novel. Nevertheless, the problematic nature of the novel complicates this endeavor. Definitions of the novel vary with E. M. Forster's pronouncement in Aspects of the Novel that “any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words will be a novel,”¹⁹ and Northrop Frye's declaration that since we have no word from the Greeks for prose fiction, the term “novel” has been used for everything and has thus lost its only true meaning. The terms Frye finally suggests are novel, romance, autobiography, and Menippean satire. (Frye, Op. Cit., pp. 306-310) Handbooks such as Abram's Glossary of Literary Terms and Thrall and Hibbard's A Handbook to Literature, supplant definition with discussions of predecessors, of types, and of elements. Clearly, The Lord of the Rings qualifies as a novel under Forster's definition, but if the modern analysis of the fictitious nature of most sagas is accurate, then they qualify as novels, too.

Thus, a work of the unusual nature of The Lord of the Rings only complicates the long-standing problem of defining the novel. And a knowledge of the sagas further confuses both the definition of the novel and that of The Lord of the Rings. Hopefully, a workable definition of the saga itself will distinguish the sagas from the novels and will illuminate the nature of The Lord of the Rings.

V. THE SAGA

Establishing the definition of the saga is difficult. Unfortunately, not all the confusion between the saga and the novel lies in definitions of the novel. Saga specialists have also made the comparison. For instance, Margaret Schlauch in the preface to her translation of the Volsunga saga says that “In taking over this variegated material from the poems of the Edda and transforming it into a prose saga—the equivalent of a modern novel—the Sagaman shows no little literary skill.”²⁰ Halvdan Koht in The Old Norse Sagas speaks of two kinds of popular stories, “pure fiction and historical novels.”²¹ And, in the “Introduction” to Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Lee M. Hollander's translation of Njála, the editors refer to “the medieval novels we call sagas …”²² Handbook definitions, such as the one by Thrall and Hibbard, stress the place and period of creation rather than the characteristics of the saga. Authorities like Stefan Einarsson in A History of Icelandic Literature devote a chapter to the question.

Therefore, in order to show how The Lord of the Rings fits the saga form, I must commit myself to a statement on what I believe a saga is. Thus, I have compiled from various sources the following definition: A saga is an extended, prose, chronological narrative with these conventions: a concrete impression of location, a protracted interest in genealogy, a zeal for capsule character description, an abundance of action and adventure, and some pretensions to a historical basis. The term “saga” connotes an affinity for the cultural heritage of the North Atlantic peoples.²³ Although such a definition should ideally be supported with as many examples as possible, I am going to confine my illustrations of these conventions mainly to some critical commentaries and to the family saga Njáls saga (Njála). At the same time, I shall provide corresponding examples from The Lord of the Rings.

In the body of the definition, the term “extended” is, of course, open-ended: no one wants to say precisely how many pages would be necessary, but in general, scholars call shorter pieces of Icelandic literature þættir, and the longer works sagas. Njála, a trilogy of sorts, is 390 big pages, and the Heimskringla is 854 pages. The three volume 1,215 page The Lord of the Rings is extended.

Similarly, both the sagas and the trilogy are in prose, although most of the sagas, and The Lord of the Rings, too, are embellished with verse. However, as verse is absent or minimal in some kings and family sagas (parts of the Heimskringla and Hrafnkatla, for example), I did not require it as a characteristic in the definition.

Further, all the saga authors try to keep their stories as chronological as possible. Naturally, when they use more than one strand, they must go back in time to the point where they can join the other story line. Tolkien uses this technique especially in volumes two and three where various members of the Fellowship are separated from each other. And even though aphoristic phrases and bits of dialogue do come from their speakers, the saga is, in its essence, a story being told. The word “narrative” in the definition would exclude much that the novel genre may encompass: the sagas and the trilogy are stories told as stories without apology.

The first convention of the saga is the importance of the location to the telling of the story. Many of the Icelandic family saga writers lived in the area they wrote about, and the audience would have immediately noticed any errors. Modern foreign editions of the sagas inevitably contain maps so that the reader can more easily follow the movement of the story. Njála, for instance, has a map of Iceland and on the verso a large scale map of Southwest Iceland. Similarly, The Fellowship of the Ring provides its readers with a two page map of Middle-earth and an enlarged map of the Shire. The Two Towers repeats the map of Middle-earth, but The Return of the King has an enlarged map of Gondor, Rohan, and Mordor. All these maps of Middle-earth show the path taken by the adventurers just as the map of twelfty-century Iceland in Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse shows the routes of Hrafnkel and Sam to Alding.

A second convention, the interest in genealogy, seems tedious to modern readers, but the Icelanders' love for genealogies is shared, Tolkien assures us, by the hobbits. “All Hobbits were, in any case, clannish and reckoned up their relationships with great care. They drew long and elaborate family trees with innumerable branches. In dealing with Hobbits it is important to remember who is related to whom, and in what degree … The genealogical trees at the end of the Red Book of Westmarch are a small book in themselves and all but Hobbits would find them exceedingly dull” (I, 16-17).²⁴ Nevertheless, the hobbits would have loved Njála, for it begins with “Mord, Hoskuld, and their Kin” and mentions families for most of its cast. Thus, the Appendix “C” “Family Trees” of The Lord of the Rings has its parallel in the genealogical appendices which modern editors frequently supply for the sagas: Turville-Petre's edition of Vïga-Glúms saga has two, for example.

Capsule character description is a third convention of the saga. Although some characters are studies in great psychological depth (Gudrun in Laxdoela, Grettir, and Glúm are examples), most are limited to a briefer treatment. In his introduction to the Saga of the Jómsvikings, Lee Hollander describes this technique:

The family sagas present us with a wealth of sharply etched and individualized portraits: but this author, in consonance with the highly fictive nature of his work, gives us characters which are types rather than individuals. Thus, Bui, Vagn, Sigvaldi are all seen in the one plane of their dominant traits—manly intrepidity, reckless heroism, foxy shrewdness, respectively. Only one character may be said to exemplify all the ideals of heathen Norse antiquity: Palnatoki, warrior and born leader, founder and kingmaker. But contrary to most of the purely fictitious sagas of the North, and in agreement here with the cool objectivity of the family sagas, there is no one “hero” around whom events are centered and whose part we take. Our sympathies are not exclusively engaged on one side, even in the great battle, but veer now to the one, now to the other.²⁵

Much that Hollander observes about The Saga of the Jómsvikings also fits other sagas and The Lord of the Rings. For instance, Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf are the central characters, but Meriadoc, Peregrin, Samwise, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Eowyn, and Faramir are each heroes in separate spheres.

With so many important characters, the individualized portraits must be handled rather summarily. For instance, in Njála, the sagaman describes Skarphedin: “Now Njál's sons must be named. The oldest was Skarphedin. He was tall, strong, and well skilled in arms. He swam like a seal and he was an excellent runner. Skarphedin was quick in his decisions and absolutely fearless. He spoke trenchantly, (but often) rashly. Yet for the most part he kept his temper well under control. He had brown curly hair and handsome eyes. His features were sharp and he had a sallow complexion. He had a hook nose, his teeth were prominent, and he had a rather ugly mouth, but he looked every bit the warrior.”²⁶

Although Tolkien does not give us the trenchant clues to character that the sagaman often supplies, he does suggest something of the manner of the man along with his initial description of the character's appearance. For example, at the Council of Elrond, Tolkien reveals something of Boromir's character: “And seated a little apart was a tall man with a fair and noble face, dark-haired and grey-eyed, proud and stern of glance. He was cloaked and booted as if for a journey on horseback: and indeed though his garments were rich, and his cloak was lined with fur, they were stained with long travel. He had a collar of silver in which a single white stone was set: his locks were shorn about his shoulders. On a baldric he wore a great horn tipped with silver …” (I, 253). Tolkien allows Boromir's most important characteristic—his hubristic thirst for power—to develop through the action and dialogue of the story, but Tolkien does foreshadow it by mentioning Boromir's pride.

The fourth convention, the abundance of action and adventure, is prevalent in the sagas and The Lord of the Rings. In Njála, for instance, sea voyages, fights, murders, battles, revenge, stealing, horsefights, ambushes, escapes, and burnings follow in close sequence. Action and adventure predominate in The Lord of the Rings, too. There, land and sea journeys, barrow descent, battles, wars, suicide, and attacks by monsters are frequent.

Lack of any emphasis on love or sex is almost a corollary to that much adventure. Even sagas, such as Kormáks saga and Gunnlaugs saga that are primarily love stories, emphasize neither sex nor sentiment. And along with the love story, holmgang, battles, viking raids, and sea voyages form a major part of the story. Similarly, although The Lord of the Rings ends with a triple marriage, sex and romance are not extensively explored.

Finally, the saga conventionally pretends to be history. Students of the saga have argued long and fervently about which sagas are historical and to what degree the historical ones are accurate. For stories that have perhaps boiled long in Tolkien's pot of “oral tradition,” the answer must always be a relative supposition. However, even the blatantly artificial sagas pretend to be historical. Einarsson says that “These types [riddara sögur (knight's tales) and lygi sögur (lying tales)] range from pure history to wild fiction, but practically all the fictitious sagas purport to be historical and deal with semi- or pseudo-historical figures.”²⁷ Thus, every story from the settlement of Greenland to the wildest adventure with a genie in Axia presents itself as history.

With Einarsson's statement in mind, Beatie's blatant dismissal of the “saga-aspect of Tolkien's work” becomes ridiculous. Beatie says that “The saga-aspect of Tolkien's work can be dealt with more briefly. The ‘purportedly true facts’ behind The Lord of the Rings are, to be sure, the product of an incredibly fertile imagination. Whereas for the Nibelungenlied the ‘saga’ consists in the historical destruction of the Burgundians by the Huns in the year 437, for the Chanson de Roland in Charlemagne's expedition to Spain in the year 778, for the Beowulf in obscure Dano-Swedish quarrels of the late fifth century, there is no such kernel of historical ‘truth’ in Tolkien's work.”²⁸ Ironically, none of Beatie's three examples is a saga, which is by definition a prose work.

Yet, Tolkien has a broader perspective on the nature of history. In the “Foreword” to the revised edition of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien confesses his preference for history: “But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers” (I, 7).

And, in fact, he has gone to some lengths to feign a historical basis for his work. In the “Note on the Shire Records,” Tolkien discusses the relationship between the trilogy and its sources: “This account of the end of the Third Age is drawn mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch.” He explains that the origin of the Red Book was Bilbo's diary, which Frodo brought home from Rivendell and supplemented with his own account of the war. The Red Book, like the Morkinskinna and the Fagrskinna, is named for its binding, a red leather case. Tolkien continues the “Note” with a discussion of the copies of, redactions of, additions to, and repositories of the Red Book, and then he launches into a discussion of supplementary sources such as Meriadoc's Herblore of the Shire, Reckoning of Years and Old Words and Names in the Shire. These books, and others from the library at Great Smials, were used in compiling the appendices for the story of the war of the Ring (I, 23-25). Icelandic scholars would undoubtedly be grateful to have such a clear statement of the use of the Landnámabók, other chronicles, and older sagas in the composition of one of the surviving family sagas.

Clearly, as the “Note on the Shire Records” and Appendices “A” to “F” show, Tolkien has created a historical framework as real as that of many of the sagas. And, this pretension to history is perhaps one of the conventions that places The Lord of the Rings most convincingly in the saga form.

Throughout this paper, I have argued that the genres of fairy-story, epic, romance, and novel should be assigned to The Lord of the Rings only as they are illuminating and only when the full connotation of the generic term, as well as its skeletal definition, aids in that illumination. Thus, in my definition of the saga, I insist on the affinity of the saga to the North Atlantic peoples—the Scandinavians and their heirs in Iceland, Greenland, and England.

The proof of this affinity lies in my doctoral dissertation where I have shown how Tolkien did, indeed, “modernize the myths and make them credible.”²⁹ The traditions of the North pervade Tolkien's work. The chain of being of Middle-earth includes many creatures from Miagara, the home of men in Norse cosmography. But some of the characters are changed and disguised with their names and most obvious characteristics omitted. Some possible reasons for alterations might be a desire to subordinate the sources to the story, the necessities of the plot, and the lack of adequate personages in recorded Norse mythology.

The creatures of Middle-earth, such as elves, dwarves, and trolls, all have analogs in Norse materials. And the Northern superstition about the evil eye culminates in The Eye of Sauron. Certain landscapes, magic rings, named swords, and splendid armor have Norse parallels, and both cultures engaged in riddle games, used runes, and respected dreams and portents. The ethical system of both realms is concerned with pagan virtues, such as comitatus, kinship and revenge.

Moreover, these Old Norse parallels increase in the portion of the trilogy that features the men of Gondor and the Northern Kingdom. Here, Tolkien recreates some of the famous personages of the sagas. For instance, Aragorn is in many ways like an archetypal Norse king. His reforged sword, his white tree, and his use of a leaf in healing could come from the Volsunga saga while his ride through the paths of the dead and his winged helmet may come from Norse mythology.

Considering The Lord of the Rings as saga also prepares the reader for the Ragnanøk (Doom of the Gods) world view and for the loss of the heroic way of life in the ending. Of the several genres that have been assigned to the trilogy, none of them is as suitable as the saga, for none explains the structure, the style, and the orientation as thoroughly.

Notes

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader (New York, 1966), p. 2.

2. “Adventures in English,” Essays in Criticism, VI (1956), p. 454.

3. “The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien,” New Republic, CXXXIV (January 15, 1956), p. 24.

4. In Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame, 1968), p. 39.

5. Roberts, pp. 455-57.

6. Saturday Evening Post (July 2, 1966), p. 90.

7. Andrew Lang, ed., The Brown Fairy Book (New York, 1904), pp. 1-47.

8. Jakob Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales, tr. Mrs. H. B. Paull (New York, n.d.), pp. 45-60.

9. George W. Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse (New York, 1912), pp. 232-251.

10. In Mankato State College Series, II (February, 1967), The Tolkien Papers, p. 3.

11. (Berkeley, 1946), p. 22.

12. Carpenter, pp. 38-39.

13. (New York, 1961), p. 29.

14. South Atlantic Quarterly, LVIII (Summer, 1959), 448-56.

15. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII (Winter, 1967), 44-45.

16. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1969), p. 306.

17. (New York, 1934), pp. 1-17.

18. Schlauch, pp. 95-118.

19. (New York, 1927), p. 13.

20. Volsunga saga, The Saga of the Volsungs, The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok Together with the Lay of Kraka, tr. Margaret Schlauch (New York, 1930), p. xviii.

21. (New York, 1931), p. 40.

22. Njáls saga, Njál's Saga tr. Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Lee M. Hollander (New York, 1955), p. 5. Icelandic Pet Name: Njála.

23. Although the wording is mine, this definition is utterly indebted not only to the sagas and introductions I have read but also to Halvdan Koht's The Old Norse Sagas, Margaret Schlauch's The Romance in Iceland, W. A. Craigle's The Icelandic Sagas (Cambridge, 1913) [Reprinted New York 1968], Theodore M. Andersson's The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey (New Haven, 1964), and G. Turville-Petre's Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford, 1953). Stefan Einarsson's chapter “The Sagas” in A History of Icelandic Literature (New York, 1957) was particularly helpful.

24. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965 c. 1965). Citations in my text are to this edition.

25. The Saga of the Jomsvikings, tr. Lee M. Hollander (Austin, 1955), pp. 22-23.

26. Njáls saga, p. 64.

27. Einarsson, p. 122.

28. Beatie, p. 11.

29. Resnik, p. 94.