SOURCE: Lobdell, Jared. “Defining The Lord of the Rings: An Adventure Story in the Edwardian Mode.” In England and Always: Tolkien's World of the Rings, pp. 3-25. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981.

[In the following essay, Lobdell discusses elements of Lord of the Rings that coincide with the Edwardian adventure story.]

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. …
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said
the Rat.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

It is not at all certain that the game of Quellenforschung (“source-hunting”) is worth playing with The Lord of the Rings, or indeed with most literary creations. Exceptions can be made, of course, for the asking of questions such as “What did Chaucer really do to Il Filostrato?” or for the game-playing demanded by The Waste Land, but there may well be truth to the suspicion that the game in general is not worth the candle. Yet the search for sources can be part of a search for influences, and the search for influences can be both valid and helpful—as when we look for Vergil's influence on Milton or the influence of the ballads on Coleridge. But we must be looking at both form and subject matter.

Now of course Vergil is an influence on Milton, but is not his source. The influence of the ballads on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is obvious, but it would be a brave man who considered them Coleridge's sources. Nevertheless, if there were a number of secondary epics that might have influenced Milton, we should, I think, be justified in looking to see which of them served as a source, in order to see which was most likely to have served as an influence. Similarly, if we were interested in finding out which ballads influenced Coleridge, we might well look through the ballad corpus for parallels—sources and analogues—for the Rime.

This is essentially the kind of endeavor I am engaged in here, for The Lord of the Rings. I want to know what kind of work Tolkien set out to write. To which of the great pre-existing forms of literary creation, so different in the expectations they excite and fulfill (the reader may recognize Professor Lewis's words here), so diverse in their powers, is The Lord of the Rings designed to contribute? Since we do not have available to us any writings in which Professor Tolkien set down the answer to that question, and since (despite the intentional fallacy) it is indeed “the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship, from a corkscrew to a cathedral, to know what it is,” I think my endeavor is justified. There may of course be better ways than mine to find out what The Lord of the Rings is designed to be, but this way seems to be both promising and untrod.

There are two sets of clues to which we should pay particular heed in a search for those whose writing influenced the form of The Lord of the Rings, and both sets have been largely overlooked. The first set is composed primarily of Tolkien's own comments and secondarily of those few passages in his work where he obviously echoes another author. The second set is composed of the subjective reactions and literary tastes of those readers of The Lord of the Rings who have at least a passing familiarity with the English literature of the period in which Tolkien grew up. The first set of clues provides material for answering the question, “Who, according to what Tolkien wrote, may be considered to have influenced him?” The second provides material for answering the question, “who wrote the kind of book that affects us in the ways The Lord of the Rings affects us and, the dates being right, may therefore have written the kind of book Tolkien would be likely to have read?” (The implicit assumption here is that authors write the kind of book they like to read.)

If we are to make use of both sets of clues, it is of course necessary for us to have some idea of the way Tolkien's mind worked. I suspect there has not been much of value written on this subject, but we can at least make a stab at gaining information sufficient to proceed with our inquiry. We can begin by quoting Tolkien's reaction to the tale of the juniper tree.

“The beauty and horror” of the tale, he says, “with its exquisite and tragic beginning, the abominable cannibal stew, the gruesome bones, the gay and vengeful bird-spirit coming out of a mist that rose from the tree, has remained with me since childhood; and yet always the chief flavour of that tale lingering in the memory was not beauty or horror, but distance and a great abyss of time, not measurable even by twe tusend Johr.” And, as I hope to demonstrate, we can see in some of Tolkien's other reading the impress of that dark backward and abysm of time. At the same time, we can see in his childhood reading of dictionaries a fascination with languages. Indeed, his mind was chiefly attuned to languages and the past—which is not, I should emphasize, the same thing as being interested in words and history.

I shall have occasion to refer to this again, but it may be a good thing to mention here Tolkien's reference to the remark of Sjera Tomas Saemundsson: “Languages are the chief distinguishing marks of peoples. No people in fact comes into being until it speaks a language of its own; let the languages perish and the peoples perish too, or become different peoples.” The languages are more than the words. And, in the same way, the past is more than its history. History is only the facts, or a presentation of the facts, accidentally left to us from the past. We cannot get into the real forest of the past; that is part of what the word “past” means.

It must also be made clear that to give the direction of Tolkien's mind is not yet to explain how his mind worked, only to give what mathematicians might call the parameters of its working. The important thing for us to remember here is that while grammar studies the rules of language, and history studies the rules of the past (one might argue that history is the grammar of the past), Tolkien's reactions to these things were not those of a grammarian. He described The Lord of the Rings as containing “in the way of presentation that I find most natural, much of what I personally have received from the study of things Celtic.” And he once remarked that “his typical response upon reading a medieval work was to desire not so much to make a philological or critical study of it as to write a modern work in the same tradition.”

In Tolkien's professional life the intersection of language and the past came in the realm of philology. In the inward life of his imagination, it came in his creation of a new version of middle-earth. There have, of course, been other versions of middle-earth, from the Midgard of the Norsemen to Langland's fair field full of folk: as Tolkien has reminded us, middle-earth is not his creation, though he created the “Middle Earth” of The Lord of the Rings. That act of creation was necessary before a story could be written about his Middle Earth, but it is the story, and not the creation, that is our subject here.

We know that The Lord of the Rings was not the first or even the second story whose events took place within the bounds of Tolkien's Middle Earth. It is not even certain it was the third story. We know also that Tolkien wrote other stories as his children were growing up, and it may be that these would repay our attention by giving us additional clues for our endeavor (one of these stories, “Mr. Bliss,” has been spoken of as “Thurber without the bitterness”). But since we do not have these additional clues, we may reasonably turn to the clues we have, to see where they will lead us.

First, we may look at the writers whose influence Tolkien himself acknowledged, or to whose works he referred, or whose works he conspicuously echoed. The list is not long, and the first name on it, Sir Henry Rider Haggard, is almost certainly the most important. Indeed, in a telephone conversation with the American journalist Henry Resnick, Tolkien said this of Haggard's She: “I suppose as a boy She interested me as much as anything—like the Greek shard of Amyntas, which was the kind of machine by which everything got moving.” And, if that were not enough, we have evident parallels between the death of Ayesha (the She of the title) and the death of Saruman. Perhaps it would be well to set them out here.

Haggard's description of the death of Ayesha may be the less familiar of the two:

Smaller she grew, and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a monkey. Now the skin had puckered into a million wrinkles, and on her shapeless face was the mark of unutterable age. I never saw anything like it; nobody ever saw anything to equal the infinite age which was graven on that fearful countenance, no bigger now than that of a two-months' child, though the skull retained its same size. … I took up Ayesha's kirtle and the gauzy scarf … and, averting my head so that I might not look upon it, I covered up that dreadful relic.

(Dover ed., pp. 222-223)

Beside this may be set Tolkien's description of the death of Saruman:

Frodo looked down on the body with pity and horror, for as he looked it seemed that long years of death were suddenly revealed in it, and it shrank, and the shrivelled face became rags of skin upon a hideous skull. Lifting up the skirt of the dirty cloak that sprawled beside it, he covered it over, and turned away.

(III, 370)

The parallel is not exact, but it is certainly highly suggestive. Nor do I think I would be stretching a point to bring in, as additional evidence, the predominant importance of caves in both Haggard and Tolkien. In King Solomon's Mines, the Don is found dead in a cave on the way, the dead kings are enthroned in the cave, and the travelers are very nearly entombed there as well. In She the secret fire of immortality, which destroys Ayesha, is likewise in a cave—and, of course, both fire and cave have their parallels in Orodruin. And Moria, Shelob's lair—all those dark places where “the flowers of symbelmynë come never to the world's end”—testify eloquently to what is at least a noteworthy similarity between the two. (Freudians may find a different explanation; I prefer mine.)

Perhaps it would also be worth recalling here that Haggard was drawn to Africa, where he had been secretary to the Governor of Natal, because of its mystery, its age-old past, and even (though not so strongly) the majesty of its languages. Given this evidence, I think we will not be far wrong if we assign to Haggard a chief place among Tolkien's literary forebears.

Next among them—and here we may be on more tenuous grounds—we find G. K. Chesterton, between whose works and Tolkien's “On Fairy Stories” we can trace a set of connections, including some Tolkienian passages with a remarkably Chestertonian ring. Let me give you some examples of what I mean. Andrew Lang once remarked that the taste of children “remains like the taste of their naked ancestors thousands of years ago.” Tolkien began his response by saying, “But do we really know much about these ‘naked ancestors’ except that they were certainly not naked?” When Max Muller claimed that mythology was a “disease of language,” Tolkien made this reply:

Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology.

Either response could have been written by Chesterton, and the first, in fact, echoes a passage in The Everlasting Man.

Finally, I would challenge readers who do not recognize it to tell me whether Tolkien or Chesterton wrote the passage which is my third example:

We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm.

In fact, the quotations are from “On Fairy Stories” (from the The Tolkien Reader, Ballantine, pp. 62, 48, 49). Nevertheless, we do not know whether Tolkien read the early Chesterton of The Man Who Was Thursday or The Napoleon of Notting Hill. On the available evidence we can only say that it seems highly likely, and on that basis look briefly at what Chesterton was trying to do, and what it was that he succeeded in doing.

Haggard in ordinary life was a sufficiently prosaic Englishman (an expert on English agriculture) and sought in his books to portray the romance of what everyone could see was romantic. Chesterton, on the other hand, was anything but ordinary (witness the fictional portrait in John Dickson Carr's Gideon Fell), and I think it not coincidental that he sought to portray the romance of what everyone could see was prosaic: “We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station?” It is true that Chestertonian paradox can grow wearying, but the root of his love for paradox lies in the not at all paradoxical belief that the wide world is really a remarkably interesting place after all.

How, then, might this have influenced Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings? Most directly, I believe, in the very character of the Hobbits. As Chesterton's Father Brown is short and round and the essence of the Norfolk flats, so Bilbo Baggins is short and round and the essence of an English shire. Perhaps the Battle of Bywater is not unlike the battles in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Of course, at these points Chestertonian paradox was touching something deep in the paradoxical character of England, and Tolkien could certainly have touched it entirely without Chesterton's intermediation. But I do not think he did.

Third among the authors Tolkien read—and here I claim an unfair advantage in the game of Quellenforschung—was Algernon Blackwood. The evidence I have seen lies in an entry in the original (but not the edited and published) version of the “Notes on the Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings,” in which Tolkien traces his use of “the crack of doom” to an unidentified story by Blackwood. Now for our purposes it is unimportant whether the source of Tolkien's Crack of Doom (in Orodruin) was indeed something Blackwood wrote; what is important is that Tolkien could not have thought it was if he had not read (and been influenced by) Blackwood. I suspect there may be confirmatory evidence for the reading (and the influence) in the character of Old Man Willow, though he is not so terrible as the willows in Blackwood's story of that name.

Blackwood's narrator writes of the “acres of willows, crowding … pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. … Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened … woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of … a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not invited to remain.” And a little later “the note of this willow-camp became unmistakably plain to me: we were interlopers, trespassers; we were not wanted. The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me.” And finally (in a passage with Entish—or perhaps Huornish—connotations), “They first became visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes—immense, bronze-coloured, moving. … I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. … I saw their limbs and huge bodies … rising up in a living column …” (Strange Stories, Heinemann ed., pp. 635-6, 644, 647).

The style is different, of course, and yet I catch in Blackwood something I catch in Tolkien but in few others—perhaps at night in the wildwood in The Wind in the Willows also (yet those willows are friendlier). I mean a sense of man (or Hobbit) as interloper in the woods, of the trees as sentient entities, and of something neither tree nor human—nor yet, as with Saki, clearly Pan. And in the same volume (“The Glamour of the Snow” in Strange Stories) I find passages (on pages 125 and 127) that could be glosses on the experience with Caradhras.

Here the hero of the story (not the same as in “The Willows”) “tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the first time that the power of the snow—that other power which does not exhilarate but deadens effort—was upon him. The suffocating weakness that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire for life—this was awfully upon him.” And then, as he escapes, “For ever close upon his heels came the following forms and voices with the whirling snow-dust. He heard that little silvery voice of death and laughter at his back. Shrill and wild, with the whistling of the wind past his ears, he caught its pursuing tones; but in anger now. …”

I am not suggesting here that Blackwood is Tolkien's source for the character of Old Man Willow or for the snowstorm at Caradhras; he could be, I suppose, but it is not in this that his importance lies. What I am suggesting is that the cast of Blackwood's mind, as revealed in these passages, is surprisingly like the cast of Tolkien's mind. It does not much matter whether the snow at Caradhras comes from Tolkien's alpine experiences or from Blackwood's. It matters considerably that they saw the snow in much the same way.

Indeed, it matters enough that we should ask what Blackwood was doing in his stories. The answer is that he was creating the modern story of the supernatural—not the pure ghost story of M. R. James or the story of the un-dead that found its best-known expression in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the story in which (if I may be forgiven a paradox of my own) nature itself is in a way supernatural. To be sure, Blackwood wrote ghost stories and stories of the un-dead, and he wrote stories that did not concern the supernatural at all, but what he added to English literature was a sense of mystery and unreliability underlying ordinary things. Blackwood's vision was of the treachery of natural things in an animate world: call it their mystery if you will, but the mystery has a sinister touch.

It is hard for us to re-create any world-view, especially the view of a world in which we have not lived, but there is little doubt that the generations of England who were brought up on Haggard, on Chesterton, on Blackwood—and on Stevenson, Conan Doyle, G. A. Henty, even Saki—were brought up as romantics, in the common sense of that word. While it is not easy to define romanticism in that common sense, we may at least note that ghost stories and stories of the undead make their first appearance in modern English literature with the Romantics, unless of course one wishes to count Hamlet as a ghost story. In any case, that these generations, and their romanticism, died in the trenches of the Great War is a truism. Like other truisms it is both true and overlooked, as it seems to be overlooked that Tolkien fought in that war and began his first epic of Middle Earth while convalescing.

It should be emphasized that the Edwardians of whom I am speaking were all of them storytellers. Their poetry—one thinks of Masefield or Kipling—was narrative poetry, even if it was not a narrative of princes and prelates. To a greater extent than in most of Victoria's reign, their natural form of narrative was the short story (it is worth recalling that only by an exercise of almost undiluted romanticism did Conan Doyle, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, succeed in writing a satisfactory novel about Sherlock Holmes). But their short stories in many cases, and their novels in some, were installments in a continuing story. I have elsewhere called these Edwardians “world-creators,” and I am not sure how important it is that their worlds were created monthly in The Strand rather than in the three-deckers of Trollope's age. After all, Dickens published his novels in parts, but they are still novels, and (witness the Baker Street Irregulars) the world of Sherlock Holmes is still one world for all that it was created story by story over the years. The important point is that what were being told were stories—not tone-poems, not Dunsanian lyrics, not Mervyn Peake's word-pictures (though they may be first-rate of their kind), but stories.

All this should give an idea, albeit a sketchy one, of what kind of information exists to make up our first set of clues. It must be admitted that the information is not abundant. We have Tolkien's own word for it that he was neither as voracious nor as retentive a reader as his friend Lewis, and of course Lewis wrote that “no one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” (Someone more adept than I at the intricacies of Carrolliana may know why a bandersnatch would be particularly difficult to influence.) Even so, no writer, when young, is immune to influences, and it is certainly reasonable for us to use such clues as we have to try to determine who Tolkien's influences were.

Our second set of clues is, alas, equally sparse. One reason is that critics in general (despite Lewis's lead in his Experiment in Criticism) have not addressed themselves to most works of literature with the question in mind, “How is this book being read?” Another reason, at least as important, is that criticism of Tolkien has generally begun de novo with Tolkien, just as most criticism of science fiction seems to begin de novo with the field of science fiction, as though no other fiction had ever been written. But to this approach to Tolkien de novo there are at least two exceptions that may be of use in our inquiry, both of them provided by English critics. The particular writers they pick as Tolkien's compeers are not, as it happens, the ones I would pick, but this may only mean that their taste in Edwardian literature differs from mine. Even if they are not entirely on the right track, I am convinced at least that the track they are on begins from the right place.

Mr. Colin Wilson suggests a relationship between Tolkien and Jeffrey Farnol. Now to say that Jeffrey Farnol is widely overlooked in histories of English literature is to overstate the notice taken of him, but as Mr. Wilson points out, his picaresque novels were enthusiastically circulated among the members of Tolkien's generation. I do not myself believe that Tolkien read the novels of Jeffrey Farnol, but I emphatically do believe that Mr. Wilson reads Farnol's novels and Tolkien's three-decker for much the same reasons.

Similarly, Mr. Brian Aldiss compares Tolkien to the late P. G. Wodehouse. Now this is curious. Mr. Aldiss is a scholar of science fiction and fantasy, and his discussion of Tolkien occurs in his history of science fiction. Yet for a comparison he goes to an author who did not write science fiction (though he may have written fantasy), and who would not generally be considered to place high on the list of “authors comparable to Tolkien.” Upon consideration, I can see more reasons than were initially apparent for the comparison—Wodehouse was, after all, a world-creator, and of a very English world at that—but linking the two still has a certain oddness to it. Oddness aside, it provides us with the evidence that Mr. Aldiss reads Tolkien at least for some of the reasons he reads Wodehouse.

My own contribution here may be at least as odd. I might reasonably make a general case for the parallel between Tolkienian “scholarship” and the “scholarship” devoted to the arcana of Sherlock Holmes—thus suggesting that some readers turn to Tolkien for the same reason that others turn to 221B Baker Street. I have already discussed the parallels between Tolkien and Rider Haggard, and could easily claim I read one for largely the same reasons I read the other. But I find by self-analysis that—in some moods at least—I read Tolkien as I read Saki (H. H. Munro).

That is a fact. What to do with it is a problem. Presumably I should be able to find an undercurrent of Tolkien's vision in Saki or an undercurrent of Saki's vision in Tolkien, or else find that I am particularly attracted to the Edwardian world-view exemplified by both. For the first, I cannot imagine that Tolkien enjoyed Saki: their humor, if not poles apart, is at least extremely dissimilar, and Tolkien lacks Saki's cruelty. Certainly any connection between Frodo Baggins and Clovis Sangrail is not obvious, nor—to put it mildly—is Comus Bassington the avatar of Gandalf the Grey. Admittedly, both Saki and Tolkien were Tories, and my own mind has that cast, but I would prefer for the moment to leave that line of thought aside as a possible red herring (or perhaps, in the circumstances, a blue herring?). I suspect that my turning to Saki, Mr. Aldiss's turning to Wodehouse, and Mr. Wilson's turning to Jeffrey Farnol have in common principally the fact that each of us is turning to the first (or close to the first) Edwardian author with whom we came in contact. I should note here that Mr. William Ready has observed the Edwardian nature of The Lord of the Rings, but he shuns what I welcome. Still, this is useful confirmatory evidence.

Those who have followed me thus far may think it odd, if not remarkable, that I have managed to discuss the sources and analogues of The Lord of the Rings without turning to the Elder Edda or Beowulf or any of the other commonplaces of the discussions generally heard on the literary genesis of Tolkien's work. But those are properly the subject of another inquiry: they are part of the influence of Tolkien's professional life on his imaginative life (though not the most important part). This, by contrast, is a look at the influence of other imaginative writers on Tolkien's imaginative life, so far as that influence affects the form of his work. By the nature of things (at least according to the “bandersnatch” theory), the terminus ad quem of this inquiry more or less antedates the terminus a quo of the other.

I have noted Tolkien's statement that his first response on reading a medieval work was to want to write a modern work in the same tradition. If that was true throughout his life, and not only of medieval works, then it is certainly proper to look at the kind of stories he read to see what kind of stories he was trying to write. I could wish I had in front of me the earliest manuscript of The Silmarillion as a check on my speculation, but failing that I have The Lord of the Rings, as well as a set of clues on the authors Tolkien read, and a set of clues made up of readers' reactions to Tolkien.

From these clues I would argue, with some confidence, that in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien set out to write an adventure story of the Rider Haggard sort, with overtones of G. K. Chesterton and undertones of Algernon Blackwood (to take only the authors mentioned here), an adventure story in what may be called the Edwardian mode. I would like to argue—anticlimax or not—that this “adventure story in the Edwardian mode” was precisely a “pre-existing form of literary creation” with its own set of expectations to excite and fulfill, and its own diverse powers. And I would like to spend some time examining the form.

The Edwardian adventure story might be of the “I have before me as I write” sort (to borrow Peter Fleming's phrase), in which a particular object associated with the adventure leads the author into his book. It might be a fictional travelogue, or at least a travel story, beginning with some such phrase as “It's eighteen months or so ago since I first met Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and it was in this way.” But however the story began, in general it would, like Conan Doyle's The Lost World, be framed in familiarity.

This is, in many ways, the mode of the fairy tale, though we do not always recognize it because the woodchoppers and petty kings with which the tales begin are, as Professor Lewis pointed out, as remote to us as the dragons and witches to which the tales proceed. But this is not quite the mode of the fairy tale, for the fairy tale begins “once upon a time,” while the Edwardian adventure story begins in rooms in Oxford in the late 1880's, or rooms in Baker Street in the same decade, or with a Fleet Street journalist's assignment to interview an eccentric professor, or with an English poet in Saffron Park in the London of the Edwardian age. In economist's jargon, these beginnings are “time-specific.”

In this adventure story odd and inexplicable things happen, not in Oxford or Baker Street or Saffron Park, but in the land of the Amahagger, or on Dartmoor, or on a lost plateau in South America, or in a kaleidoscopic adventure across a Europe of enchanted scenery and stock characters—the Europe, one might say, of a dream. In no case is characterization the chief concern of the story. Holly and Job in She, Malone and Lord John and Summerlee in The Lost World, Holmes and Watson themselves, the Council of Days in The Man Who Was Thursday—all are types: the “true but ugly,” the “faithful servant,” and so on. That they sometimes, as with Holmes, rise to the dignity of archetypes takes them further yet from the novel of character.

In a sense, even if it is a paradoxical sense, in many of these stories it is the character of nature, and not the characters of any of the actors, that is, as the French would put it, “realized.” That is why Blackwood's “The Willows” follows naturally in the Edwardian mode: there is no real effort at characterization (the author's companion is a stolid Scandinavian), except at the characterization of the willows themselves. And the character that nature bears in these stories is not altogether a good one. (I suspect, by way of personal aside, that this is one of the attributes of Saki's work that appeals to me: there is a fey quality to “The Hounds of Fate” and “The Stag” and a thoroughgoing supernaturalism to “Gabriel-Ernest,” standing in remarkable contrast to the world of Reginald or Clovis Sangrail. For comparison one might look to Badger's house on the one hand, and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn on the other.)

It should particularly be noted that the adventurers in the Edwardian adventure story are, in general, not solitary. They may indeed be “we few, we happy few,” but (if only so that one may tell the story of the others), they are at least two in number—Holmes and Watson, for example. They are likely to be more than two: indeed, the characteristic Edwardian adventure story is that of Sir Henry Curtis, Captain Good, Allan Quatermain, and Ignosi, or of G. E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Edward Malone, and Professor Summerlee—the band of (very different) brothers. And the narrative is in the first person, even if it involves that first person's bringing in parts of the story of which he had no firsthand knowledge. That is, there is a convention that the story should be told by those whose story it is. In general, the narrator is the most ordinary member of the band of adventurers (Allan Quatermain, Edward Malone, John Watson), and the tone of the narration tends to be self-depreciating.

This tone, and the first-person narration, mark the Edwardian mode as something quite apart from the mode of the fairy tale or (pace Edmund Wilson) from the school story—though the school story does perhaps represent a separate but related development from the Victorians. I suppose this Edwardian mode of the adventure story had its origin in the travel journals and first-person newspaper accounts that were conspicuous features of the English and American literary landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. The names of Richard Burton and H. M. Stanley come immediately to mind, followed by the war correspondent W. H. Russell and the American John Lloyd Stephens, whose Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan is one of the finest examples of this Victorian literature of exploration. It should, however, be pointed out that the self-depreciating tone comes in later, and may have its origins in the tradition of the pukka sahib—stiff upper lip, British understatement, and all that—that is in part the legacy of the Duke of Wellington. In any event, the Edwardian adventure story would appear to be a case of art imitating life.

One could, I suppose, distinguish between this travel literature and the derivative literature of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, on the grounds that one is more interested in the traveling and the other in what lies at the end—the object of the quest—thus making King Solomon's Mines or She into a quest story. But I am not sure this would be profitable. The Edwardian adventure story was indeed a story of Englishmen abroad in the wide and mysterious world, but what they were looking for was not so much the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece as—whatever excuse may have been provided by Maple White or the Shard of Amyntas—the wide world itself. (It is worth noting that the best of Blackwood's stories take place on the Danube or in Canada or in the Alps.) And I find this parallels The Lord of the Rings: it does not seem to me that Frodo sets out on a quest much more than Bilbo set out on one in The Hobbit. Certainly Frodo and Bilbo, though they are Hobbits, are Englishmen, and to them the “back again” in the subtitle of The Hobbit is as important as the “there.”

As I have said, the actors in these Edwardian stories were stock Englishmen, most of them. Mostly they returned to England and their workaday lives, if they survived at all. It is not my purpose here to point out in detail how The Lord of the Rings conforms to the Edwardian mode, only to suggest its conformity, but perhaps another example of that mode would not be amiss. The example that comes most quickly to mind (though it is late, having appeared in 1923) is John Buchan's Huntingtower, in which the character of the Scottish businessman is so Tolkienian that one would almost assume that Tolkien took time off from The Year's Work in English Studies to read Buchan. Buchan, admittedly, was Scottish, while the Shire is “forever England”—but that is not an insuperable difference.

The quite ordinary Englishmen (or, occasionally, Scots or Irishmen) who set off on their travels in these Edwardian adventure stories do more than merely see strange sights and have strange adventures: they sense a mysterious character indwelling in the world itself, or at least in that part of the world in which the adventures take place. The story may be of their triumph over nature (as with The Lost World), or it may be of their escape from it (“The Willows”). It may be, in its later and lesser form, a story of romance and a mysterious Russian princess (as with Huntingtower). Or the mystery may be—and frequently is—that of the past mysteriously alive in the present. This is the case with King Solomon's Mines, She, The Lost World, much of Chesterton, and the very idea of the ghost story, whether by Blackwood or M. R. James or whomever. In fact, from the number of examples I can call to mind, this might be taken as a hallmark of the Edwardian mode. To be sure, others have felt the lure of the past: it is a part of the nature of romanticism, and it was a Victorian, not an Edwardian, who wrote (if he wrote nothing else worthwhile) the great line “A rose red city half as old as time.” But the past alive in the present is a recurring motif in the Edwardian adventure story nonetheless.

The framework of the story, even in Haggard's time, is “there and back again.” The “back again” is skimped, and it would appear, in part, a convention necessitated by the first-person narrative: the narrator has to return home in order to tell his story (though Haggard did find a way around this in She). By Blackwood's time—as a result, I suppose, of the short-story form—the framework largely disappears, and we are left with the real kernel of the story, which in Blackwood is the mystery (or the “supernaturalism”) of nature. (Chesterton dropped the first-person narrative, while retaining the viewpoint of the first-person narrator, who likewise must return home to tell the story.)

It may be objected that I have taken three disparate authors and parceled them together very oddly, and that an “Edwardian mode” that overlooks Baron Corvo on the one hand or Henry James on the other is scarcely worth discussing seriously. Now I could look at either of these and find something of the sense of the past I have been discussing here, just as I could find it in Bram Stoker. But what have I, and what has Tolkien, to do with feigned autobiography in the manner of Hadrian VII or novels of character in the manner of The Ambassadors? The ancestry of the adventure story in its Edwardian mode is to be found in Scott and the Dickens of A Tale of Two Cities, as well as in Burton, Stanley, John Lloyd Stephens—the list is almost endless. It has its late Victorian affinities in G. A. Henty—and as in Henty's novels, where boys who make their way without benefit of birth are frequently found to have had that benefit all along (but to have been stolen or orphaned as very young children), the Edwardian adventure story is frankly aristocratic in its conventions, as was the Edwardian world from which it came.

That The Lord of the Rings is an exemplar of this Edwardian mode is at the root of the adverse reactions by such readers as William Ready or Edmund Wilson. In a way—and here Mr. Aldiss is quite correct—its basic presuppositions are those of P. G. Wodehouse, though Tolkien's knowledge of political reality was far superior to Wodehouse's (on which see Dr. Plank's essay on “The Scouring of the Shire”). I am not here concerned with the literary value of Edwardian adventure stories (except to note that Lewis's test in his Experiment in Criticism should convince us that they have a value). But Tolkien's adverse critics have in fact been concerned with that value, to the extent of denying that it exists. I am not here concerned with such questions as whether the aristocratic—or the Tory—view of things is the right one. But Tolkien's adverse critics have in fact been concerned with that question, and have come up with an unequivocal answer, unequivocally expressed. What the adverse critics have not been concerned with is what I am concerned with here: using my scattered evidence on sources to find out what kind of work Tolkien is likely to have been writing.

Certainly this adventure story in the Edwardian mode is a prime candidate to be considered the pre-existing form to which The Lord of the Rings was designed to contribute. At the very least, a formal comparison of The Lord of the Rings with various exemplars of the mode should prove to be enlightening. While not making the formal comparison here, I might suggest the lines along which it could be made. Take Conan Doyle's The Lost World as an exemplar. In this story the four travelers come together more or less by accident—or by the machinations of Professor Challenger (who is not with them for the entire journey). The Lord of the Rings has, of course, nine travelers, who come together more or less by accident—or partly by Gandalf's intent (and Gandalf does not make the entire journey with them). The four travel to unknown lands, seeking a way up (and then a way down) a mysterious plateau—involving, on the way down, travel through a cave. The Nine Walkers likewise travel to unknown lands, with Frodo and Sam seeking a way up (through Shelob's cave). The four are types: sportsman, Irish rugger, desiccated (but tough) professor, eccentric omnicompetent. The Nine likewise are types: master and man, enthusiastic but fallible assistants, warrior, king-in-exile, elf, dwarf, and the eccentric omnicompetent, Gandalf.

Further parallels are easy enough to discover. Nature—in the form of prehistoric animals and even (perhaps) the ape-men—attacks the four. Nature—in the form of Old Man Willow or the snow at Caradhras—attacks the Nine. The four come safely through to the triumph; eight of the Nine Walkers do likewise. The story of the four is told by the most “ordinary” of the group, Edward Dunn Malone (but, ordinary or not, “there are heroisms all around us”). Similarly, the story of the Nine is told by Frodo, whom David Miller has called “the common lens for heroic experience”—ordinary on the surface if not beneath it. The very attraction of the lost world is the past alive in the present on the mysterious plateau. And certainly the continually sounding theme of The Lord of the Rings is the past alive in the present: the Ring, Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, the sword reforged, the Barrow Wights—to list examples is to list nearly everything in the book.

I have elsewhere suggested that after the Great War there was a division in the Edwardian inheritance between the storytellers and the world-recreators—between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Angela Thirkell, the pulp writers and the country-house novelists. One might almost say the division was between those who were chiefly interested in the “there” and those who were chiefly interested in the “back again.” I still think that this is true, and that, as I also suggested, Tolkien brought the long-sundered branches of the Edwardian line back together again—for which reason he, more than P. G. Wodehouse, deserved the title of “the last Edwardian.” But I am not sure how much emphasis this merits here. Though the Shire's Tory quality is unmistakable, its idylls include no country houses, and my present concern is not with the Edwardian inheritance so much as the Edwardian mode of The Lord of the Rings—with the fact that, whatever the mode in which others were writing, Tolkien was writing an Edwardian adventure story.

It may be introduced as an objection that the Edwardian mode tended at least toward shorter novels, and in its final form toward the short story. Moreover, the speed of its writing, as well as the pace of its action, was almost journalistic. Haggard wrote King Solomon's Mines in six weeks, and Conan Doyle cranked out Sherlock Holmes at high speed for monthly publication. Chesterton wrote prodigiously, hastily—one might say, gargantuanly. But Tolkien wrote a three-decker novel and he took forty years to write it, if one counts from his beginning The Silmarillion, or twenty-five years, if one counts from the time he began the story of Bilbo Baggins. I think we will find, however, that the variation in the basic form represented by The Lord of the Rings was determined by Tolkien's professional life, and its period of gestation determined the same way. That is to say, what differentiates Tolkien from other writers of Edwardian adventure stories generally would be properly treated in a discussion of the influence of his professional life on his imaginative creation, with the root of the difference lying in the love of language that led him to philology as his life's work.

But that, as Aristotle taught us the formula (long before Kipling), is another story. To be exact, it is the story of the philologist's world, and not the Edwardian mode, of The Lord of the Rings. To write it requires some knowledge of what a philologist does and how his mind works. To write what I have written here so far has required only a knowledge of what it was Tolkien read in the first ten years of this century, or may have read—a far easier requirement, and made easier yet for me by the fact that I was brought up on the same books. To me this game of Quellenforschung has been a game of auld acquaintance, and doubly enjoyable on that account.

But it has been, I hope, instructive to the reader besides being entertaining to me. And its value, I think, is clear: we will be armed against a tendency to attack (or defend) Tolkien on the wrong grounds if we can determine what the proper grounds are—that is, what The Lord of the Rings is intended to be. To go back for a moment to Professor Lewis's example, it is necessary to know what the corkscrew or the cathedral is designed to do before we can say it is well- or ill-designed: once we know what the purposes are, the prohibitionist may attack the corkscrew or the Communist attack the cathedral. And here it is important that we realize one thing: the attack of the prohibitionist or the Communist is not an attack on how well the corkscrew or the cathedral works. The better the corkscrew works, the less the prohibitionist will like it. The more men pray in the cathedral, the more the Communist will seek to shut it down. The greater the success of The Lord of the Rings as an adventure story in the Edwardian mode, the more those who dislike adventure stories in the Edwardian mode will seek to denigrate and depreciate it.

In part, the critical dislike of this mode is merely an example of the critical dislike of adventure stories of all kinds, a point which Professor Lewis illustrated in his essay “On Stories” and which I need not illustrate here. But the dislike runs deeper for this mode than for others, and I suspect that there are those who enjoy Don Quixote or The Three Musketeers who do not enjoy the Edwardian adventure story any more than they enjoy the Chanson de Roland, with its good Christians and bad infidels (“Paiens ont tort et chrestiens ont droit”). The different modes of the adventure story appeal, I believe, to somewhat different—perhaps very different—audiences, and it would be a mistake not to distinguish among these modes.

The particular characteristics of the Edwardian mode that seem to cause the most trouble for the critics are those that apparently form the substratum of almost all popular Edwardian literature: the aristocratic view, the black-and-white morality, the lack of interest in character development (certainly more extreme in this mode than in others), the movement of “there and back again,” the emphasis on “we few, we happy few” (related to, but not altogether the same as, the aristocratic view), the fascination of the past alive in the present, the undercurrent of mystery (or even malignity) in nature. If one looks at the chief forms of the adventure story a few years into the last quarter of the twentieth century, he will find not these but the morally ambiguous: the hard-drinking and hard-wenching private eye, the solipsistic James Bond, the not-so-good sheriff and not-so-bad outlaw. If all these are part of the current mode of the adventure story, we could reasonably expect to find the Edwardian mode disliked.

Now the evidence of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Aldiss (and in conversation I have found others who support his linking of Tolkien and Wodehouse), as well as my own aberration in the direction of the world of Clovis Sangrail, should make it clear that there are some readers who enjoy the Edwardian character of The Lord of the Rings, for all that Mr. Wilson seems a little uncomfortable in his position and Mr. Aldiss speaks of “the counterfeit gold of an Edwardian sunset.” But we must be careful not to claim greatness for Tolkien merely because we are enamored of the Edwardian mode, just as those who dislike it should be careful not to deny him greatness because they are not so enamored.

And yet, I can hear my readers saying to themselves, “This is all very well, but how can he speak of the Edwardian mode of the adventure story in the same terms in which Lewis spoke of something so far beyond it as the secondary epic? Surely it is a little odd to speak of Tolkien in terms that have been reserved for Vergil or Milton. Surely he has lost his sense of proportion.” But a brief explanation should allay such misgivings.

It may indeed be the case that an epic is a greater thing than an adventure story; that does not mean that a given epic is greater than a given adventure story. I could also point out that Milton's “Epic following Nature” is very like an adventure story—perhaps, indeed, it would be well to note this as a corrective to the view that an adventure story is an inferior thing. Moreover, if a critical system is well drawn up, it should be applicable not only to Vergil and Milton but to the writers of three-deckers (let us say Tolkien and Trollope) as well. And there remains the corrective supplied in Professor Lewis's Experiment: if the work is capable of “good” reading (and especially of re-reading), then we had best be wary of dismissing it out of hand, or indeed at all. After all, popular literature (vide Shakespeare in his age) is not necessarily bad, and there is a genuine critical approach embodied in the assertion, “I don't know much about art but I know what I like.”

Admittedly, we are too close in time to The Lord of the Rings to judge its place in literary history. Yet we are not close enough in time, it appears, to judge accurately what it is supposed to be. Tolkien disliked the idea that anyone might write a critical study of his work while he was alive, both because he was a private man not welcoming fame and because he thought it wrong that someone should spin theories about what he had written without checking those theories with him. One appreciates his point, but one must also recognize that it has made criticism of his work more difficult: just as one would have enjoyed a talk with Lewis's ancient Athenian, if not his dinosaur in the laboratory, one would like to have spoken with the last Edwardian.

I suspect more may be recovered than I have recovered here. Haggard and Chesterton and Blackwood were not the only authors the young Tolkien read, and Mr. Wilson and Mr. Aldiss are certainly not the only critics to have examined Tolkien's work in ways that are useful for this kind of endeavor. But I would strongly urge those who seek more information to follow this path. Certainly enough evidence exists to show that The Lord of the Rings is an adventure story in the Edwardian mode. And whether we believe it to be as sublime as the cathedral, or as mundane as the corkscrew, or somewhere in between in merry middle-earth, it should be worth something to us to have some idea what it is.