Laura Miller (31 page)

The same could be said of Tolkien’s hobbits. They aren’t technically human, but they’re more like us, really, than the majestic human heroes of Middle-earth. Tolkien used the hobbits as a way of, as he once expressed it, “putting earth under the feet of ‘romance,’” injecting “colloquialism and vulgarity” into a story otherwise dominated by “the highest style of prose.” “High” was the word Tolkien used to describe the sort of thing he most enjoyed writing and reading, the lofty myths and epics of
The Silmarillion.
Characters like Aragorn and the elves belong to this part of his legendarium, and so does the grand dialogue that readers like Edmund Wilson find so silly.

The result, Tolkien’s trilogy, is a hybrid, a winning formula combining the low mimetic characters that readers had grown comfortably accustomed to in novels with the grandeur and archetypal mystery many of them missed from the old romances. Morris hadn’t thought of this when he attempted to revive the romance, but in children’s fiction the combination was less remarkable; Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit had already inserted modern, middle-class English children into magical lands and situations. Tolkien himself had created an irresistibly bourgeois protagonist in his children’s book,
The Hobbit,
and sent him off on a Wagnerian quest involving dwarves, dragons, and a magic ring.

The main point Tolkien tried to get across in “On Fairy Stories” was that he saw no reason to restrict such fictions to an audience of children. “Fairy stories,” he wrote, “have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery,’ as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.” He recast the hand-me-downs as newly desirable antiques.

But this mixture of literary modes does not sit easily with everyone. For some it will always seem fatally juvenile, and for others merely dissonant. When a friend wrote to Tolkien complaining of the way certain characters in
The Lord of the Rings
spoke, he responded as a philologist, by explaining that King Theoden of the Rohirrim (for example)
must
say things like “I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better,” instead of the less archaic “I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed home”; Theoden speaks differently from people like us because he
thinks
differently. The events and actions that occur in
The Lord of the Rings
could happen only in a world where people talk, and therefore think, in the way Theoden does. The kind of man who would say something like “Not at all, my dear Gandalf” would never behave with the Rohirric king’s doomed nobility when confronting certain death in battle: “‘Heroic’ scenes do not occur in a modern setting to which a modern idiom belongs,” Tolkien insisted.

This means that the hobbits, who speak like Edwardian countryfolk, not only talk differently from the elves, but also think differently — they live, in effect, in another world. They resemble the denizens of the twentieth century enough to provide the modern individual with a sympathetic bridge to Middle-earth. They
are
us, much like the contemporary reader in Tolkien’s eyes: anti-Romantic, inflexible, incurious, unimaginative — a reader, like Eustace Scrubb, of the wrong kind of books, but secretly attracted to the old magic. As Tolkien imagined the distant past of Europe, time went by and the invented history of Middle-earth segued into the real history of our own world; hobbits and men became more and more alike and eventually merged. The last of the elvish blood is by now almost gone from the human race and the hobbitish mind-set has become universal. The age of romance ended. The age of the novel began.

This transition is a source of the great sorrow underlying
The Lord of the Rings;
the world it describes is on the cusp of a transformation; its heroic past is slipping away and another era, one of “colloquialism and vulgarity” is taking its place. “Associations with sunset and the fall of the leaf linger in romance,” Frye writes, and this decline “evokes a mood best described as elegiac . . . often accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one.” This so exactly describes the tone of
The Lord of the Rings
that I half suspect Frye of having Tolkien in mind when he wrote those words. But, in truth, it is the mood of all heroic epics. As a form, the romance is retrospective. The epic poet is forever lamenting that the titans of the past — Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf — have left this earth. We shall not see their like again.

Frye writes further of the “extraordinarily persistent nostalgia” of the classic romance, “its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space.” Deliberate archaism comes with the territory, which is why Spenser (however objectionably in Tolkien’s eyes) adopted an old-fashioned diction for
The Faerie Queene.
Though very fond of his hobbits, Tolkien did much prefer writing lays and sagas, like the ones collected in
The Silmarillion,
stories written in “the highest style of prose.” His publishers, however, didn’t regard this material as salable, and they were probably right. Nearly everyone who reads
The Silmarillion
comes to it only after being smitten with
The Lord of the Rings,
and many are disappointed. What they find are old-fashioned epics very much like the prose romances of William Morris. If it were not for the popularity of Tolkien’s trilogy,
The Silmarillion,
if published at all, would now likely be as obscure as
The Well at the World’s End.

Tolkien’s publishers, however, wanted him to repeat the success he’d had earlier with
The Hobbit,
a story that, when very first conceived, had not been set in Middle-earth. It was hobbits that sold, hobbits like Bilbo Baggins that readers loved and identified with;
The Lord of the Rings
was for a long time referred to by Tolkien and Lewis as “the new
Hobbit,
” as if it were merely the sequel to the earlier children’s book. Tolkien had to be pushed into presenting his private mythology as the backdrop to further hobbit adventures. The hybridization that has made the romance so resilient, that has allowed it to return in new forms and to triumph again and again with new audiences, did not come naturally to him. He was no great reader of novels.

But Lewis was. As much as the defensive Tolkien fan dislikes comparing Middle-earth to Narnia —
The Lord of the Rings
is not a children’s book, the author himself would have to insist, over and over again — it was children’s fiction, with its giddy disregard of genre boundaries and other forms of decorum, that first showed writers how to cross the line. The Chronicles cross the line so often that they effectively rub it out. And that, for Tolkien, was a problem.

Chapter Twenty-two

A Too-Impressionable Man

T
olkien began with
The Hobbit,
and then backed his way into the solemnity of
The Lord of the Rings.
Narnia, of course, was different.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and its sequels were begun and remained books for children, their background a gossamer and sometimes contradictory improvisation. These were mere “fairy tales,” as Lewis freely called them, although there was nothing “mere” about fairy tales as far as he was concerned. Still, classic fairy tales are set in a world that’s everywhere and nowhere, and in fairy tales it is always
now.
As Lewis continued to write more Chronicles, Narnia inevitably acquired a history, a geography, even a national identity of sorts, if never so extensive a one as Middle-earth’s.

The Chronicles are not elegiac — what could be more pointless than trying to arouse nostalgia in children? — but from the very beginning Narnia had at least a sketch of a past. The good old days that Mr. Tumnus reminisces about with Lucy are a woodland idyll that the Pevensies help to restore and then get to live in. Their reign as kings and queens becomes Narnia’s golden age, and by the time they find themselves grown up and back at the lamppost, they no longer speak as they once did. Even the narrator adopts the shift in diction: “‘Sir,’ said Queen Lucy. ‘By likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old.’ And they stood looking upon it.”

This is how aristocrats in chivalric romances talk, and the hunt that brings the siblings to the Lantern Waste (for a white stag who gives wishes to whoever catches him) is just the sort of pastime Chrétien de Troyes’s characters would pursue on a summer afternoon. The Pevensies have graduated from fairy tale to romance. The transition is natural because the genres enjoy a familial relationship. When Lewis writes of one of his favorite books,
The Faerie Queene,
“what lies beneath the surface in Spenser’s poem is the world of popular imagination: almost, a popular mythology,” he refers to a common technique of the great romances: the combination of folk traditions with the sophisticated literary amusements of aristocrats. Why does the lady Una, when she first appears with the Redcrosse Knight in
The Faerie Queene,
lead a “milkwhite lambe” on a string (hardly a practical companion for a long trip by horseback)? Because in Spenser’s time, English village pageants celebrating Saint George always included a local woman who played the part of the lady rescued by the saint, and she would customarily lead a white lamb.

From its early days, the romance, like the novel, was promiscuous and adaptive, read for entertainment more than the elevation of the soul. It blended religious symbolism with love poetry, instructions on manners for elegant courtiers with folklore borrowed from old wives and nursemaids. The great Italian romances of the Renaissance — Ludovico Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
and Matteo Maria Boiardo’s
Orlando Innamorato
— were, Lewis observed, written by educated men who approached traditional fairy tales with “a smile half of amusement and half of affection, like men returning to something that had charmed their childhood,” only to find that “their pleasure is not only the pleasure of mockery. Even while you laugh at it, the old incantation works.”

Tolkien did not agree, at least not when it came to the mockery. He took fairy tales very seriously. Mutual friends of the two men have offered various explanations for why Tolkien disliked the Narnia books so much, and this is one likely reason. Tolkien himself rarely elaborated on the subject. In a letter he wrote the year after Lewis died, he simply laments that “all that part of CSL’s work” had remained “outside the range of my sympathy.”

Roger Lancelyn Green recalls running into an indignant Tolkien in Oxford not long after both men had read the manuscript of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“It really won’t do!” Tolkien fumed. “I mean to say:
Nymphs and Their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun!
Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?” The note of parody in the titles of Mr. Tumnus’s books seems to have particularly irked Tolkien, to have struck him, even, as improper. There is no book called
The Love-Life of a Faun
mentioned in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(that’s a joke no child could be expected to get), but Tolkien’s mistake is revealing. His memory nudges Lewis’s gentle teasing closer to raciness than his friend would ever have come himself. To Tolkien,
Nymphs and Their Ways
was just as bad as a mildly smutty joke, really, tantamount to desecration.

“I have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome),” Tolkien once wrote to a reader. There’s not much comedy in
The Lord of the Rings,
but what there is comes mostly from the hobbits, sticking to their comfort-loving, yokel ways in the midst of all the “high” adventures and noble speeches. Theirs is a rustic humor but not an earthy one, and in that
The Lord of the Rings
does feel very much a children’s book.

By contrast, the wit of the Chronicles is positively worldly. There are the excerpts from Eustace’s shipboard diary that appear in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
shrewdly drawn little cameos of deluded self-justification (“Heaven knows I’m the last person to try to get an unfair advantage but I never dreamed that this water-rationing would be meant to apply to a sick man”). Reading those passages was my first experience with that refined literary device, the unreliable narrator, and with irony. Irony was a specialty of Lewis’s. The most successful of his books during his own lifetime,
The Screwtape Letters,
is entirely ironic. Purporting to be the advice sent to a trainee devil by his supervisor, it is instruction by inversion, in which the reader comes to understand the lineaments of Christian virtue by flipping everything the demonic narrator says on its head.

Irony — especially the ironic social comedy Lewis relished (he was a great admirer of Jane Austen) — is a cultured humor. You can find amusement in the differences between what we would like to happen and what usually
does
happen only if you are already in possession of a variety of stories, official and otherwise. Austen’s
Northanger Abbey,
a particular favorite of Lewis’s, is about a young woman who has read too many gothic novels too credulously but who inhabits the world of a novel of manners; only an author familiar with both types of narratives could have written it. Irony, satire — Tolkien didn’t care much for this kind of thing; he had invented an alternative world in part to escape a society that struck him as repellently cosmopolitan and complex. The broad humor of the hobbits was a plain dish that suited him just fine. Still, hobbit humor is curiously lacking in what most people would regard as an indispensable ingredient of broad, rustic jokes around the world: sex.

Tolkien, it must be said, was a terrible prude. There is more eroticism — however peculiar and sublimated — in the Chronicles than in
The Lord of the Rings,
even though Lewis was purposely trying to avoid sex in deference to the youth of his readers. The White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are evil, but they are also unmistakably alluring; Susanna Clarke, in response to complaints about the “misogyny” in those depictions, says, “I see it as [the witches] being
too
attractive, as if he were saying, ‘If someone were to tempt me to do bad things, it would be a woman like
this.
’” The old romances often took the power and danger of sexual desire as one of their major themes; that’s one reason why the modern romance genre inherited the label.
The Lord of the Rings
may be intended for adults, but the rare occurrences of romantic love in the book are bloodless and melancholy affairs. If Lewis often gives the impression that he’s having a hard time keeping eroticism
out
of the Chronicles (it swirls below the surface), Tolkien never seems quite able to get it
in.