SOURCE: Lobdell, Jared. “Tolkien's Genius: Mind, Tongue, Tale—and Trees.” In England and Always: Tolkien's World of the Rings, pp. 73-91. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981.

[In the following essay, Lobdell discusses the widespread appeal of The Lord of the Rings.]

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel,
History is now and England.

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

God gives all men all earth to love
But since man's heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.

Rudyard Kipling, “Sussex”

“The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our
world coeval.”

(“On Fairy-Stories,” p. 48)

We have thus far considered the tale, and especially its Edwardian antecedents and Edwardian mode; the study of tongues and its influence on The Lord of the Rings; and the theology of Tolkien's approach to the Incarnate Mind. Can we, in these three, find Tolkien's particular genius and the reasons for the success of The Lord of the Rings? As the title of this chapter suggests, I believe there is one further reason, one further part of his genius, but that by and large these suffice. They may not be exactly coeval in Tolkien's development (though not far from it), but they are in the development of his creation. And whether we read the passage as describing how Tolkien himself went about his work, or (as I would prefer) we read it as discussing the universal process to which, volens-nolens, his own creation hewed, it still provides a key.

First, the Edwardian mode—the nature of the tale. The great exemplars of that mode—She, King Solomon's Mines, The Lost World—retain their popularity year in and year out, perhaps because of the adventures, but still more, I think, because of the mode. There is something very powerful in the image of the band of brothers abroad in the wide world, something very appealing in Tory England, something much attuned to our age in the idea of the past alive in the present, and something of great power in the commonplace narrator.

I once described the prevalence of Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings as an accidental goodness and took, as a result, a quantity of not-at-all-accidental ribbing from members of the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society. It was of course accidental in at least one sense (as Carpenter has pointed out, pp. 199ff.) that the Hobbits, almost alone of Tolkien's creations for his children, strayed into his creation for himself. It was certainly a goodness, not only because Hobbits are the most ordinary of ordinary narrators, but chiefly for that reason. By a just instinct, Tolkien found his perfect plain men in the halflings.

Allan Quatermain, at least in Haggard's first books, is a plain, bluff man; a colonial, but very English in his character—English of those great days of Victoria's empire. John H. Watson, M.D., albeit (on some accounts) partly a colonial, is by consensus likewise a plain, bluff man and English of the English. Edward Dunn Malone is Irish of the Irish, but plain enough in that oddly assorted foursome in The Lost World. Even in the real-world antecedents of the Edwardian adventure story, as I noted in the first chapter, we find plain Englishry (of the “pukka sahib” sort)—albeit sometimes, as with Stanley, raised to the theatricality of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” It is evident that this is part of the appeal of the genre, or Stanley—that most complex of plain men—would not have arranged this case of life imitating art. But why is the ordinariness of the narrator important to the success of the narration? Is it because we are ordinary? I think not.

For the plain fact is that no one thinks of himself or herself as ordinary. In one sense, of course, “you have never talked to a mere mortal,” but that is not what I mean. I think we put ourselves not on Watson's level—though surely in real life we should be overjoyed to achieve his dignity, self-lessness, bravery, and love—but between him and Holmes. We see ourselves not as E. D. Malone but between him and Challenger or Lord John Roxton. Yet at the same time we are reassured by the narrator's ordinariness. If this can happen to Dr. Watson, why then, it could happen to us. If Holly can sit before Ayesha in Kôr, we might also. The narrator's plainness serves the function not of making us identify with him, but of reassuring us that this strange adventure really happened. That—paradoxically, perhaps—is what the Hobbits do, and that is why this is an important part of the Edwardian mode. I do not know if earlier traveler's tales had this characteristic (was Sir John Mandeville a plain man?), but certainly it is highly important in the tales we are looking at here.

Of the past alive in the present, the more said, perhaps, the better. This is really (in the forests) the heart of Tolkien's world in The Lord of the Rings, and it is the heart of the Edwardian mode. It is, of course, a creation of the consciousness that the past differs from the present, and that the difference is not purely one of progress. The Middle Ages recognized that change is not necessarily progress, but they did not—as their art shows—realize that the past differed from the present. Neither, for that matter, did the Renaissance. It is only with the coming of the Romantic view—the appreciation of the Gothic, Strawberry Hill, Beckford's Folly, Ann Radcliffe—and especially with Sir Walter Scott, that the difference is appreciated. With Scott it takes root in popular consciousness. Once there, it flowers rapidly. And it is still flowering.

The flowering can be seen in the whole set of beliefs in the occult that has given us The Amityville Horror and The Omen (fulfillment of prophecy being a special case). It can be seen in such staples of present-day fantasy as the Cthulhu Mythos. It can be seen in the search for our roots as well as in the anthropological approach to literature. All these appeal to the desire to have, or read about, the past alive or coming alive now. The phenomenon has something to do, I suppose, with the coming of the machines, with a perception that the Industrial Revolution was a kind of fall from grace. It is not, however, the same thing as that form of conservatism that sees us standing upon the shoulders of giants (from the past) or views the political process as a compact between past and present. The difference between the two is precisely that with the pygmies and giants, or with the compact, there is no discontinuity from age to age; with the “past alive in the present” there is.

This brings us, by a fairly direct path, to the idea of Tory Democracy. In the first chapter I suggested that Tolkien's Tory views, and those of the Edwardian Age, were drawing us afield from our concerns. By that I meant particularly that politics is neither the subject of stories in the Edwardian mode (barring some of Saki's) nor even very important to them. But then, Tory Democracy is not essentially a political doctrine, as those who have tried to practice it have found out. Winston Churchill may have been a Tory Democrat—that is, by way of definition, he believed in an alliance between aristocracy and squirearchy on the one hand and the people on the other. But he became Prime Minister only in that darkest hour when England did come together in fact. He is the exception that tests and defines (that is, “proves”) the rule. Only in 1940, not even in 1945, could Tory Democracy “work” politically. Otherwise, we must accept the doctrine that, in essence, Toryism in any form is that political doctrine which avowedly prefers foxhunting to politics. As a form of Romanticism, based on a love of the land and a kind of longing for hierarchy, the relationship of master (say, Frodo) and man (say, Sam Gamgee), it is related to Chesterton's Distributism and thus to the same impulse that leads Americans back to the land on communes in Vermont. Nor is the communal aspect accidental.

For finally—and we might equally well use the nexus between Churchill and the Battle of Britain as our bridge—we come to the idea of the band of brothers, the final qualifying characteristic of the Edwardian mode. “Never have so many owed so much to so few” could serve as an epigraph for The Lord of the Rings. It could not serve for King Solomon's Mines or The Lost World, because those are essentially private adventures—a fact which should give The Lord of the Rings a substantial advantage over them in the public mind. But all these works have the appeal of the happy few—which is not (and this must be made clear) the same thing as the appeal of the Inner Ring.

We are not talking about the fellow professionals, the theme of so many of Kipling's stories from Soldiers Three on. We are not talking about unofficial hierarchies (as in War and Peace, to take Lewis's example) or about the strength of an appeal that can make men together do very bad things before they are individually very bad men. (This Lewis dealt with, in particular, in That Hideous Strength.) We are talking about the one sense in which The Lord of the Rings is certainly a quest—but I would rather say a “task”—narrative: the sense of great purpose that overshadows and ennobles the characters. Let me give a brief example of what I mean—not from Tolkien's works.

Consider the following chapter titles: “There Are Heroisms All Around Us”; “It's Just The Very Biggest Thing In The World”; “The Most Wonderful Things Have Happened”; “Those Were The Real Conquests”; “Our Eyes Have Seen Great Wonders.” Without further knowledge, to what would we assume these belong? Certainly not to most of our present-day novels, nor to any novel of character. Perhaps to something like a pageant, perhaps even to an imitator of Tolkien, or perhaps (but here we may be led by their appearance in this context) to an adventure story in the Edwardian mode. They are, in fact, the titles to chapters 1, 4, 10, 14, and 15 of The Lost World, and there is about them that sense of purpose I mentioned above. It is especially important that it is “Our” rather than “Mine” eyes that have seen great wonders—a notable contrast for our present age of anomie and alienation.

For that, in the end, may be what explains the power of this image of the band of brothers. As we are increasingly set apart from our fellow men, we fall either into individualism in Tocqueville's old bad sense (into Bishop Bossuet's “every man his own church”), or into the heresy of confusing the Inner Ring, fashioned perhaps from a shared skill but existing largely for its own sake, with the band of brothers that exists for some great purpose. (“For he who fights with me today / Shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile / This day shall gentle his condition”—a pleasant irony, quoting Shakespeare to illuminate Tolkien.) In the United States today, policemen call themselves brothers, as do black men, but, for the most part, a sense of brotherhood is sadly lacking. This may be one reason for the widespread appeal of professional sports: fans otherwise sundered and separate are given the sense of belonging. (The theme song of the Pittsburgh Pirates is “We Are Family,” as the country came to know during the 1979 baseball season.)

Now it is to this need for belonging that the very idea of a company of heroes speaks. For all that Frodo and Sam are master and man, there are Nine Walkers, not two, and that fact, I would argue, is highly—perhaps transcendently—important for the book's appeal. Like the appeal of the past in the present, the appeal of the company comes from our rootlessness and alienation. I do not think it is because we identify with one member of the company and are comforted to find the others around us. Rather it is the very idea of the company that gives us comfort—and, indeed, “comfort” (“strength-with”) is a highly appropriate word.

It is therefore particularly important that we never follow the adventures of a single figure for any significant length of time in The Lord of the Rings: even when we follow only one of the Walkers, he is with new companions. When Gandalf goes alone into the depths with the Balrog, we do not follow him. When Merry and Pippin are dressed as knights of Gondor and the Mark, that is the sign they have found new companions in their endeavor—not that they have left the old. This is a polyphonic narrative of companies, not of individuals: when Sam leaves Frodo it is a wrong choice in more ways than one.

This much Tolkien shares with his Edwardian peers. It is, as we have said, in the concern with language—in the philologist's world—that he parts company with them. It is here also that he parts company with much of the modern world. Our writers “indicate” rather than “say”; policemen in the Watergate case “responded” rather than “went” (or even “proceeded”) to the floor where the break-in occurred; official Washington mushes through page upon page of regulations or announcements in bureaucratese, whose lack of style is matched only by its lack of clarity. I know of one economist whose English seemed particularly dense and who, when questioned, confided that he did not think in English but in computer symbols.

Do we miss this clarity, this style? We do. Even as we speak the gibberish, we reject it, or are at least conscious of its insufficiency. We revenge ourselves upon it by finding beauty in the monosyllabic four-letter-word juvenility of street speech. To be sure, that speech is capable of both strength and accuracy, even poetry, but it rarely achieves it, achieving instead the dreary repetitions of the Orc-minded. In short, language currently seems to approximate the exact contrary to the “speaking in tongues” of charismatic or pentecostal Christianity. Rather than seeming to be meaningless, but really having meaning, bureaucratese and gutter-speech alike appear to have meaning but do not. No wonder we feel the lack.

Now whatever can be said of Tolkien's achievement, there is no question whatever that he uses words accurately and with unusual forethought, even on occasion with that pedantic accuracy which is in effect a play on words (the “Tale of Years”). We may sometimes sense a “Biblical” pastiche, but the same impulse that has led men to impute Biblical authority only to the “sacred English original”—to quote the story told by Miss Sayers—also leads us to welcome the familiar elevated diction and (possibly) rhythms. Whereas, a generation ago, the Bible and Shakespeare were only two constellations in a star-spangled sky of familiar great literature, these days the lights are going out all over the Western world, and even the Bible is more common in hotel rooms than in living rooms. But the memory lingers. A faint breath reaches even the late generations.

The naming and the language, then, are also part of Tolkien's appeal, though that is by way of being an accident. He may have set out to write an Edwardian adventure story (or a secondary epic following nature) when Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel to The Hobbit. He did not set out to appeal to our sense of the lost beauty and nobility of language; that appeal happened because of what he was. And he was as surprised by it as any. This is what we would expect of genius in the old sense; or, to put it another way, it is part of a sense of humor in the Muse. Be that as it may, one need only compare Tolkien's names with those of, say, E. R. Eddison (Lord Gro, Koshtra Pivrarcha) to see a naturalness in one, an appeal to an unremembered past perhaps, and in the other no more than a set of suggestive syllables. Yet Eddison was praised for his naming.

And the Incarnate Mind—the Mind of the Maker? We have drawn from The Lord of the Rings a familiar theology. We have seen a universe poised at a timeless moment different from ours, but in the same process of temptation. We have glimpsed the Holy Spirit abroad in Tolkien's world, and the gifts of the Spirit. This is indeed part of our universe, and we can say that the Poet who uttered it through J. R. R. Tolkien is the Same through whose Word our world was made. Quite so. But in what way does this aid Tolkien's appeal?

There can be several ways of answering this question. We could say—Tolkien would himself say—that we recognize the Original Maker in the act of sub-creation. In the essay quoted at the outset of this chapter he has, in fact, said something very much like that. This we may call the theological answer. Or we could say that the timeless drama of temptation, the sense of great powers moving, the mixed familiarity and strangeness of what happens within us happening within the nations and peoples of Middle Earth, are what speaks to us—especially if we are reassured somehow by the presence of unfallen beings in the drama. This I might call a philosophical answer, and I suspect Tolkien would agree with it also. Or we might say that theological consistency imposes a particular character on any work of literature. That argument has been advanced by Miss Sayers in the essay quoted before; it may be called the literary answer, and it deserves elaboration here.

She made that point in the introduction to her series of radio plays on the life of Christ: “Except a man believe faithfully he cannot—at least his artistic soul cannot—be saved.” Theological consistency, she was claiming (in defense of her own artistic endeavor), imposes a unity equal to, if not the same as, Aristotelian unity. Certainly the polyphonic narrative of The Lord of the Rings has unity neither of time, place, nor action: it is, after all, polyphonic. Nor—in comparison with The Silmarillion, for example—has it unity of language. Yet we perceive it as one work (at least most of us do), despite the publisher's expedient of making it a three-decker, despite the mutilation in the animated film, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune-hunting. Miss Sayers would have answered, as I say, that this unity we feel is theological. But what does that mean and how does it work? After all, most of us are close to being theological morons, either because we do not believe at all or because, having found God, we see no need for mapping His being. Theological consistency is not, on the face of it, something we value.

But we value The Lord of the Rings, and not least because we feel its unity. It is not merely that Men, Elves, Wizards, Dwarves, Hobbits, Ents, Orcs, and Trolls all act in character, though that in itself is part of this theological unity. After all, acting in character is part of many works of literary art. It is not merely that there is a sense of proportion, of part to part and of the parts to the whole. That also is true, and something of what Miss Sayers was talking about, but it is nothing like a full explanation. It is rather, I would argue, that this theological unity is itself mythopoetic. That is, the proper literary embodiment of theology is myth, or the creation of myth—mythopoeisis. Allegorical presentations, if they do not achieve myth, descend to mere personification, bearing to literature the same relation that mnemonic verses bear to poetry. That much has been noted. But it should be emphasized that myth is the natural result of theological concern, and especially that the more complete and consistent the theology, the more perfect the myth. Let me make it clear that by mythopoeisis I do not mean, generally, fantasy in Tolkien's sense, but precisely the making of myth.

Perhaps the connection between mythmaking and theology has been most widely acknowledged in criticism of Melville's Moby Dick. Not only is the myth of the great sea creature a powerful one, particularly in the United States—witness the recent success of the movie Jaws—but critics have almost universally asked questions exhibiting the theological implications of Ahab's search. Is the whale evil? Why is it white? Is Ahab a personification of some particular characteristic—vengeance, perhaps (but “‘Vengeance is Mine,’ saith the Lord”)? Good questions, these, and nonetheless for having been asked so often.

What has not been so often asked, and what I would like to discuss here, with The Lord of the Rings as my major example, is why myth and theology go together. In part, of course, the answer has to do with a certain sweep—a certain breadth—implicit in both. But it has much more to do with the almost axiomatic fact that both myth and theology deal with gods. We may, to be sure, call them archetypes: we may Platonize them or Euhemerize them. The fact remains that the creatures of the myth simply are, without explanation, without character development. Asking why they are, and particularly asking why they are the way they are, brings us immediately into theology, rather than into literary criticism.

Suppose we ask why Gimli was not tempted by the Ring, whereas Galadriel (for example) was. The answer, I suggest, lies in the very fact that Dwarves generically might be expected to be tempted by the Ring as a ring, as a golden object, and this lower-level temptation would be theologically irrelevant—as though Adam had been tempted to eat the apple because he was hungry. Or suppose we ask why Galadriel was tempted? Tolkien has given us the answer to that question in The Silmarillion, and Christopher Tolkien has added to it in Unfinished Tales: the answer itself is not important, but the fact that the answer is theological is important—indeed, crucial.

As a Christian, I would of course argue that the truth of Christian theology leads to mythmaking more satisfactory than that based on any other theology—in other words, that the Mind of the Maker is incarnate here. But to do so would in our present discussion be a prime example of question-begging. And in any case, mythmaking of any kind seems to appeal to our present age. Those who in the past few years observed books of “Jaws” jokes, stuffed sharks, and “Jaws” t-shirts and games can testify to that. Nor is it only our age: Fenimore Cooper's tales owed much of their popularity, I think, to their mythic quality.

Yet the theology implicit in Jaws is Pelagian if not Paleyite, though in a particular modern form of Pelagianism. (The shark is killed not by the Ahab figure or even by the academic expert on sharks, but by the apparently weak-kneed policeman who hates water.) The theology of Leatherstocking is Christian, though doubtless infected by those various heresies against which the first Timothy Dwight inveighed in his (and Cooper's) days at Yale: Natty Bumppo speaks not to the self-perfectibility of man but to his fall from natural grace. The fall from grace is, of course, the theological underpinning to the myth of the noble savage.

I would argue that it is the theology that captures the audience: we need to be told that our relation is to the scheme of things, to God or gods or the powers that be. But theology is not what the audience thinks is capturing it. What the audience perceives as its captor is the central mythic figure—the shark, Natty Bumppo, the Hobbit—and its element, its proper surroundings. For the shark, like Moby Dick (and here perhaps Jungian psychology could be used to illustrate our point), comes out of the depths of the sea, stirring (it may be) our racial memory. And Leatherstocking strides through the depths of the forest; the key word here may likewise be depths. Tolkien himself has recounted his own reading of those tales: “Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows … and strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and, above all, forests in such stories” (“On Fairy-Stories,” 63). And what of Tolkien's own creation? The Hobbits would doubtless say, if they said anything on the subject, that they were in their element at home in the Shire, and in one sense they would be right. But I know few readers to whom the chief appeal of The Lord of the Rings lies in the opening chapters, or even in the Scouring of the Shire. The chief element in which the book functions—Hobbits and all—is the forested earth.

Elementary, you say—though perhaps not so many have seen it as should have—partly because the Hobbits have in a way strayed from another book, another set of stories, into the world of the Ents, the forests at the heart of The Lord of the Rings. In The Silmarillion, if I may be permitted the digression, Tolkien feigns that trees are the leaders, so to speak, of the vegetable kingdom, a point which could be deduced from The Lord of the Rings but which is not explicit there. We have already noted that trees can turn to evil, that they are sentient and capable of being tempted (on which, also, The Silmarillion provides further detail). They are, in short, characters in the story—but they and their forests are much more.

There were olden days when a squirrel could go from tree to tree across Middle Earth; Mirkwood and the Old Forest are relics of those days. The Galadrim are tree-dwellers. The White Tree is the sign of the King's return. Even the Party Field in the Shire centers on a tree—first the Party Tree, then the mallorn. Mellyrn also play a part in the elegy for Arwen and Aragorn (“There at last, when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come …”). We need only look at The Lord of the Rings for the briefest of times to catch a vision of ancient forests, of trees like men walking, of leaves and sunlight, and of deep shadows.

But why is this world of forests so appealing? To that there are at least three possible answers. First, it may be that forests are part of the Jungian memory. Second, it may be (as has certainly been suggested) that Tolkien's love of countryside and distrust of progress is in tune with our Aquarian age of ecology. Third, it may be that the first answer is unnecessarily profound, and the second unnecessarily restrictive and specific; perhaps we should say only that men love trees, and the “citification” of the Western world has made them more precious than ever. In other words, Tolkien's appeal to us may be Fenimore Cooper's appeal to Tolkien.

It may be the trees we love, or the tale, or the tongues, or the Incarnate Mind, or it may be all of these (as I think it is). But why is it Tolkien? Why did John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, of all people, create The Lord of the Rings? To some degree, we have answered that question, by looking at the years and reading of his youth, at his life's work, and at his life's belief. But other Christian philologists grew to manhood in Tolkien's generation. They may have read his creation with enjoyment, but they did not create it. They did not characteristically respond to a work of medieval literature by writing another in the same mode. They did not create Hobbits for their children. They may have written light verse or war poetry or books for children. If they were exactly of his generation they would surely have written war poetry, or poetry after the mode of Rupert Brooke. But that poetry did not become part of a Silmarillion or a song of Middle Earth. What was the particular genius of this member of the King Edward's School Rugger XI, of the Tea Club, Barrovian Society, of the Lancashire Fusiliers (Lieutenant), of the OED and Leeds and the University of Oxford (D. Litt.), and the Order of the British Empire (Commander)?

One could answer, I suppose, that the genius attaches itself to the man as a kind of tutelary spirit. One could as well answer that the Muse strikes as she wills, not as we will. It is true. It has the form of an answer. But was it merely the Muse's jest to select Tolkien, a Hobbit himself, to create The Lord of the Rings? It was no jest. For the final thing we must note about The Lord of the Rings is that its success depends on the interplay of Hobbits and ancient world. Like Hobbits, we cannot live very long on the heights. We need rusticity amid our elevated diction, plain gardens amid our forests, inns amid our pleasures and palaces. And the answering of that need is what, in the end, defines Tolkien's genius. With all the other things he was—Edwardian, Tory, philologist, Roman Catholic—he was, finally, and forever is the image of Frodo Baggins. It was noted before that Hobbits strayed from stories he told his children into this greater story: it was noted that Hobbits are an accidental goodness. Just so, but the accident—the straying—was contrived by the Muse. Not in jest. In earnest.

Now the Hobbits, though self-portraits, are self-portraits at the age of forty (or more). The Elves, and most of the rest of The Lord of the Rings, have origins in Tolkien's youth. (The Ents, given that Treebeard's “Hoom, Hoom” is modeled on C. S. Lewis, are later.) The shift from the high style, the elevated diction, to quiet rusticity, is partly a shift in viewpoint from youth to middle age, though Hobbits, like Tolkien himself, seem in many ways perennially youthful. This perennial youthfulness notwithstanding, and the frequent comparisons to children as well, the Hobbits are recognizably the creation of an older man. Had I wished to trespass further on Tolkien's private life, I could have discussed his four children, and his relationship with them; I have not, but the Hobbits are, in effect, part of Tolkien as father—more than as Edwardian, or philologist, or Catholic.

But, it will be objected, the comparisons to children are valid: the Hobbits are childlike (or childish). Yes, but they are not a child's or even a young man's creation. And in this fact lies, I believe, a part of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings. If the forests and Elves, the knights and ladies, and the “paiens ont tort” call to morality are in tune with a youthful romanticism (of a medieval sort), the Hobbits are a kind of reassurance that this youthful romanticism, this version of middle-earth, will continue to have meaning into our own middle age. Rather than the slow decline of youthful hopes, the wearing away of high ideals, the growing success of the world (along, perhaps, with the flesh and the devil), the cynicism and worldly wisdom of a creature accustomed to this fallen existence, there is implicit in The Lord of the Rings a promise. We are promised that within as well as beyond our workaday being there is high adventure, great peril, and the possibility of success in something other than worldly goods. We are assured that the Elven world we longed for is there—somewhere—however much we, like Tolkien, are Hobbits.

We seem to have come a long way from the Edwardian adventure story with which we started back in Chapter I. That pre-existing mode, apparently a slight and merely popular thing, is carrying a whole world for ballast and the Holy Ghost for mast—what have Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle to do with this? Even if we call it not an Edwardian adventure story but a particular kind of secondary epic following nature, its immediate literary forebear is still Haggard, and it is still in the Edwardian mode as we have defined it. At the beginning of this chapter I considered the peculiar appeal of this mode, and particularly that part of it I defined as “the past alive in the present.” Could it be that this “adventure story in the Edwardian mode”—perhaps as a result of this characteristic—is in fact a far greater thing than we have believed it to be? I mentioned that its characters are types who sometimes (as with Holmes) rise to the dignity of archetypes. Could this be an indication that the Edwardian mode, whether we call it adventure story or epic, is mythopoetic?

Haggard was praised by C. S. Lewis as a mythmaker. Sherlock Holmes will live always in our minds at 221B Baker Street, with Mrs. Hudson below and Victoria on her throne. Is this perhaps part of the secret? Is The Lord of the Rings the apotheosis of something that was close to divinity before Tolkien began writing? Even Jeeves is a myth. Even Bertie Wooster. Have we mistaken the quality of the genre? Are we in a way rendering to Tolkien what is not peculiarly his?

For every action, the physicists tell us, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For the Industrial Revolution and the myth of progress that spawned or was spawned by it, there is a counterrevolution and a myth of anti-progress. For the story of man's perfectibility, the magic that makes dross into gold and men into gods, there is the story of man's fall, the black magic that has made dross out of gold and men into devils. But suppose, just suppose, a world in which Eden, though it must be striven for to be maintained, has never been lost. Suppose we have a myth of anti-progress recognizing that change may be ill, but not that it is inevitable. Suppose the contending forces are not the machines on the one hand and King Ludd on the other: suppose they are the machines and the countryside, Eden not at the confluence of the four rivers, nor whose gate is guarded by the angel with a flaming sword, but Eden in an English shire. Suppose it is not the new Jerusalem but, miraculously, something older than the old that is built in England's green and pleasant land.

Am I trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am. After all, weaving a spell is precisely what Tolkien has done, and it is not accidental that spell is the word both for “incantation” and for “story.” Tolkien, by his imagined past, is liberating us from our present, and still more from a future we perceive and fear. We are not, of course, the Englishmen for whom he set out to provide a mythology. We are not the Inklings. Yet we hear what he is saying, for all that we may be overhearing it, and we respond with a quickening of spirit. Frodo lives, and we with him. England lives, and with it, us. But is England's green and pleasant land so powerful a myth within itself that it refreshes us?

The question that concludes this last paragraph, and the one about rendering to Tolkien what is not his alone, may be the same question in the end. The Edwardian mode is peculiarly English, indeed the Edwardian Age was peculiarly English, even when transferred (in the person of P. G. Wodehouse) to the environs of New York City. Why does this vision of England appeal? There will always be an England, but is that any reason it should be firmly engrafted in American hearts—not to mention the hearts of those Dutchmen, Swedes, Japanese, Romanians, and all who have read The Lord of the Rings in translation? The intersection of the timeless moment is England (for all that it is a country of the mind) and always (for all that it never happened). But why is this important?

“God gave all men a land to love”—thus Kipling in praise of Sussex by the sea. But Kipling was born and raised in India, and came to England from his exile. So also Tolkien came—but much younger—from his birthplace in South Africa. The contrast between the arid land around Bloemfontein and the green of England was one of his first memories. He was—to repeat a point I made earlier—in England, loving England, but not of it. Since most of his enthusiastic readers are not of it either, that may be involved in his appeal to us. The question is whether another land could serve the purpose. Could the intersection of the timeless moment be France or Germany? Or must it be England?

Lewis, who was that most English of the non-English, an Ulsterman, would say yes, there is a particular spirit of England, different from the particular spirit of France or Germany. Even if that is true, why would this spirit of England be important to those who neither have seen the land nor descend from those who have lived in it? Tolkien's ancestry was English, as was Kipling's. Ours may not be.

But languages are the chief distinguishing marks of peoples. That is not merely something Sjera Tomas Saemundsson said, or Tolkien repeated. It is not merely a key to Tolkien's critical doctrines or day-to-day belief. It is true, and The Lord of the Rings is evidence of its truth. I cannot speak for those who read it in translation, and I suspect that translators into non-Germanic languages, at least, will have substantial trouble with their task. But we who read it in English are, as English-speakers, the inheritors of Tolkien's English mythology, heirs through that grace of his kingdom. By the fact of our language, whatever our ancestry, we are native to that northwest corner of Europe that is the scene of The Lord of the Rings. The timeless has intersected our English-speaking lives at an English moment: because Saemundsson's words are true, that moment belongs to us. Si momentum requiris, circumspice.

And that, but for some tying up of loose ends, concludes what I have to say. The principal loose end has to do with the matter of temptation: is it somehow illegitimate for us to be invited to observe and even participate in the long process of temptation in an unfallen world? Does this not cheat us by making us think things are easier than they really are? Granted that The Lord of the Rings is theologically accurate, is it not psychologically “escapist” in this way at least? Fair questions, these—but it is the purpose of Eucatastrophic stories to give hope, and the same theology that girds the world of The Lord of the Rings promises us that baptism overcomes original sin. In any case, Tolkien is not calling on us to take action, and his book is not a tract.

For we must be careful not to impute to a work of literary sub-creation the attributes of a Bible. Even if we find ourselves thinking in Tolkienian terms, using his characters and events to interpret our own lives, it is we who are doing this, not Tolkien, nor is he asking us to do it. During his life he accepted, even enjoyed, the efforts of his readers to apply to his sub-creation the same kind of scholarship he applied. He also strongly opposed those kinds of “scholarship” that looked at psychological journeys or involved any form of the personal heresy. He was a maker, not a psychologist, not even a priest.

This brings up a second loose end. I have from time to time, in what has gone before, explicitly rejected the use of The Silmarillion as a key to The Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien the maker made not only the one work, great though that is: he left many works, though this greatest among them. Why not look at them all? Why restrict oneself to this one work, when other parts might provide illumination (especially for Chapter III)?

To this there are two answers. First, I am specifically looking at The Lord of the Rings, partly because the continued success of most of the rest of Tolkien's oeuvre is derivative, partly because twenty-five years is long enough to wait for someone to spend a hundred pages or so seeing what it is that has become so popular. Second, so far as The Silmarillion in particular is concerned, there has not been a full reconciliation between that and The Lord of the Rings: not only are the tone and area of concern different (quite properly so), but on such things as the origin of the Orcs, one book must be wrong (presumably The Lord of the Rings) and one right. Either the Enemy bred the Orcs in mockery of the Elves (The Lord of the Rings) or he captured and perverted Elves (The Silmarillion), and even if we accept the capture theory, explaining away the statement in the earlier book, we are left with the fact that the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings do not sound like Elves in any way, shape, or form. Mockery perhaps, but perverted from Elves, I think not.

In any event, we are considering not Tolkien's appeal, or his achievement, in general, but in this one specific work, different in kind from all his others. I would like to give here some idea of the effect that work has had on me, serving as specimen where I may fail as a literary critic. Let me do so by telling you a story.

In 1967-8 there was a used-book store on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, not far from the library. While I was browsing, I noticed a dog-eared card, posted on the bulletin board, advertising the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society, and giving the name of its president, Mr. Richard West. I called him (he had, characteristically, forgotten the very existence of the card on the bulletin board) and shortly thereafter went to a meeting of the society. In that society there was a community of spirit as well as of interest. From The Lord of the Rings grew friendship.

The word “grew” is important, of course, but more important was, and is, the friendship. C. S. Lewis, better than most, has described the growth and particular characteristics of friendship, using Tolkien as one of his examples. The critical characteristic is the shared interest, the critical moment its discovery. And if my own experience is representative, part of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings is not only that those who read and revel in it become friends from the moment of meeting, but that they feel themselves Tolkien's friends. This, doubtless, was hard on him: it cannot be easy to have millions of friends one has never met, especially when they call on one without warning or call one long distance in the middle of the night. Tolkien eventually went into seclusion to avoid the importunities of his admirers—which is itself testimony to the degree to which The Lord of the Rings caught them in its web.

The world has changed since those days. Tolkien no longer lives in Oxford, or indeed in the circles of this world. Conferences on Middle Earth no longer meet on midwestern campuses. The long-awaited Silmarillion, though Professor Tolkien himself failed to finish it, is awaited no more. There is no longer a Tolkien Society of America, it having been taken into the Mythopoeic Society in California. The Lord of the Rings is no longer a discovery, or even a cult book. It has, more or less, been brought to the movie screen: that which we so greatly feared has come upon us.

But somewhere (and I do not apologize for borrowing these words) there is a corner of our mind where it is always 1966, with the Tolkiens at 76 Sandfield Road, and always the Great Years in the Third Age of Middle Earth. The timeless moment forever intersects our lives—both lives, in both times. “When Anodos looked through the door of the timeless, he brought back no message.” But when John Ronald Reuel Tolkien looked through that door, he brought us back The Lord of the Rings.

In endless English comfort, by country-folk caressed,
I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest.

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Three-Decker”