Middle-earth Journeys

Merry, I'm thrilled you liked the book so much! I knew some of the people on these forums would be familiar with it. A N Wilson of the Evening Standard is quoted on the back cover as saying it's the best book about Tolkien written so far. As Garth used to write for the Standard I wondered if Wilson was a little biased, but the more I read, the more I see the truth of his review!

I don't necessarily think that Tolkien suffered from clinical depression: but I was intrigued by Garth's reference. As for hope: here's a quote from the flyleaf of the book:

"Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day".

Iolanthe, I will lend the book to you when I've finished it if you like!

Great quote, m!

Riv Res and I heard Garth talk at the Marquette conference a couple of years ago. He's a young guy (meaning, of course, younger than I am!, which means maybe in his mid-thirties), unassuming but quietly funny. At the final banquet, he and a few other Tolkien fans got up and sang 'Happy Birthday' to somebody's girlfriend--in Elvish! So he's a serious scholar and a fan, too. Quite impressive.

I really admire the way Garth moves effortlessly from Tolkien the man to Tolkien the writer and back again, with some interpretation along the way; and adds in the story of the four TCBS members against the historical background of WW1. I've just read the first chapter of part 2, the battle of the Somme and the death of Rob Gilson, and don't mind admitting I shed a few tears. Which was embarrassing, as I was on the train to work at the time . . . and I have the feeling that when I've finished Garth I'm going to have to read the Sil again.

You've sold it to me. I shall definitely have to borrow this, it sounds ike essential reading to me.

theonering.net has this link to a news article about Tolkien and the Battle of the Somme, which was fought ninety years ago:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5133000.stm

Worth reading, although the article really is just a rehash of Garth's book, almost plagiarism, really. But at the bottom of the article, a reader has submitted a story that is amazing! It seems that Tolkien patterned the Black Riders after an encounter he had with German cavalrymen. You've got to read this!

Wow, that's quite find . If the reader (or Christopher Tolkien) has never written of that story before (does anyone recall it in anything?) it's a completely new discovery. That would have been a terrifying experience and puts the flight to the Ford in a whole new light.

Amazing what gems get buried!!!

That was well spotted, Merry! I did notice the article on the BBC website (plagiarism was the word that occured to me, actually) but at that point there were only a couple of readers' comments. The black riders anecdote is fascinating!

I've never seen the story written up anywhere, Iolanthe, so it is quite a find, at least to me. All of these connections with JRRT's war experience really give LOTR a kind of new gravitas that makes me appreciate it on a whole new level. It's heart-rending to think of our author in such circumstances, and it's so interesting that he never wrote about them directly, but chose to deal with it all mythologically. I wonder if that was more therapeutic.

I think it does - mythologizing it somehow elevates the experience into something bearable by putting it in the same context as the heroes in the sagas and their trials and tribulations. Without that perspective it's just a meaningless war filled with meaningless deaths and how do you deal with losing your two closest friends in a situation like that?

But in mythology it's more about character and endurance and friendship than the cause itself and the rights and wrongs of it. Looking at Tolkien's war experience that way it’s not what they did and why, but how they did it.

I thought I might shake up a new conversation in here with a bold claim!

Many people have claimed that Tolkien is unique: there is just nothing like his work, and all the copies of it since he wrote fall short. I'm assuming most of us here will agree. So I have often asked myself what it is about Tolkien's life that produced such an outcome. I suppose we could attribute it to a kind of private genius. Maybe so.

And maybe I'm just too much influenced by social psychology, the kind of theories that emphasize nurture over nature. Garth's book, which we discussed above, suggests that the events of Tolkien's life, particularly WWI, influenced his writing to a profound degree, and that makes sense to me. But there were probably thousands of British men who had Tolkien's education and were in WWI who produced nothing like what he produced. So what made him different?

Here's my hypothesis:

There are three factors that made Tolkien uniquely able to write his legendarium.

1. His mother. We know that Tolkien's father died young and that his mother provided all the parenting he had. His mother emphasized the learning of languages and encouraged JRRT in the arts. Her early death (I can't remember how old JRRT was--in his teens, I think) left Tolkien with a profound sense of loss, a remembered beauty, and a need for fellowship.

2. His Catholicism. Tolkien's faith made him a minority and, at least in his mind, a persecuted minority, in England, and he clung to it. It provided him with a worldview that helped him make sense of a difficult life. His understanding of suffering and death as ultimately meaningful, of eucatastrophe, of the way the divine enters, and does not enter, into the natural world, and thus, the sacramentality of things, all of this lifts his work to a new height.

3. His children. Had Tolkien been a bachelor or childless, would he have had an interest in Faery? Would there have been a Hobbit? Without hobbits and the grounded perspective they provide, the legendarium would have turned into just another 'gods and heroes' story (Xena comes to mind!) and Tolkien would have been a minor fantasy writer.

So! What say you? Fire away!

Well to say the others after Tolkien fell short is quite presumptuous. I think no other author has tried to create the entire cronicles of Myth for an existing society before. To me that is the beauty of his work.


As for factors you make some nice connections Merry. I think all of the above aplies with less emphesis on his religious practice.

Not to skirt around your question Merry but I wonder what was his drive to create such a huge body of work. I'm not asking why he chose to create myth stories (wasn't it said it was because of the lack of myths from a British perspective) but what drove him to almost obsessional behavior?

I think some have tried to create a mythic world, Philipa. I'm not a fantasy reader, for the most part, so others can help make the argument here. But the Dune series pops into mind first.

Dune is certainly a whole mythic world, but it's the depth of knowledge that Tolkien has of the almost lost history of the Northern world, passed down by words and fragments of literature, that grounds Tolkien's work. It underpins his fantasy and gives it a depth and reality that no other fantasy writer can hope to achieve. Most seem to move further from reality whereas Tolkien seems to be presenting a deeper view of reality seen as though through coloured glass. I'm trying to find a better metaphor, but I can't.

I really do think that Tolkien's achievement is unique - although many very fine writers have followed him - because his position, his experience and his interests came together in a very unique way.

Merry wrote:3. His children. Had Tolkien been a bachelor or childless, would he have had an interest in Faery? Would there have been a Hobbit? Without hobbits and the grounded perspective they provide, the legendarium would have turned into just another 'gods and heroes' story (Xena comes to mind!) and Tolkien would have been a minor fantasy writer.

I think he would still have been interested in Faery. His interest in it started so early on and his views on it were entirely adult. Whether we would have had a Hobbit, I don't know. Maybe not - he might not have had the motivation to start inventing children's tales and we might just have been left with the very difficult mish-mash of writing that forms the Silmarillion. He would still never have finished it and there would have been no interest or motivation to shape it and publish it after his death.

Interesting questions, Merry!

Well yes, Dune is another world so to speak but it is not based in the Mythological world. It derives from just an epoch of another world not so much as where that world came from. It doesn't start out with who is God but tries to recreate a new God...if memory serves me correctly.

Yep - you're right, it does and I was a bit loose with the word mythic, it's not really like Tolkien's creation. I've read and enjoyed all the Dune series, but detailed as it is I don't think it comes close to the depth that Tolkien created for Middle-earth and it's too far removed from our reality to really identify with.

Answering my own question about whether there would have still been a 'Hobbit' if Tolkien hadn't had children, I've just been reading about the creation of The Hobbit and how much Bilbo Baggins is like Tolkien himself - The Shire being Worcestershire where Tolkien felt his real roots lay, the enjoyment of a pipe and plain food, fancy waistcoats, not given much to travel but capable of making a remarkable journey just the same. I get the feeling that even without his children Hobbits would have somehow appeared, just as the word emerged from his subconcious - and then he had to find out what a 'Hobbit' was (I love that...).