Neil D. Isaacs
On the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing)Tolkien Criticism
It is almost forty-three years since Rose Zimbardo pointed me
toward Middle-earth. I was a relatively late arrival, the phenomenal
success of The Lord of the Rings having already been well established
—to the dismay of some establishment defenders of the traditional
canon.
Throughout the sixties, three aspects of that phenomenon
seemed to dominate perceptions of the value of the book. One was
the persistent resistance by the arbiters of literary taste to afford critical
recognition to a work that had proven its abundant appeal to a
wide popular and, worse, youthful audience. Another was the fact that
the book"s commercial success was not the product of hype: the early
popularity of The Lord of the Rings was produced by a word-ofmouth
groundswell that preceded the reactive attention of the mass
media. It was a matter of reporting the phenomenon rather
Neil D. Isaacs
On the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing)Tolkien Criticism
It is almost forty-three years since Rose Zimbardo pointed me
toward Middle-earth. I was a relatively late arrival, the phenomenal
success of The Lord of the Rings having already been well established
—to the dismay of some establishment defenders of the traditional
canon.
Throughout the sixties, three aspects of that phenomenon
seemed to dominate perceptions of the value of the book. One was
the persistent resistance by the arbiters of literary taste to afford critical
recognition to a work that had proven its abundant appeal to a
wide popular and, worse, youthful audience. Another was the fact that
the book"s commercial success was not the product of hype: the early
popularity of The Lord of the Rings was produced by a word-ofmouth
groundswell that preceded the reactive attention of the mass
media. It was a matter of reporting the phenomenon rather than precipitating
it, though the reportage added fuel to the fire.
The third was that some of the features and attractions of the
book and its created world inevitably elicited an infectious outbreak
of "faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism," as I called it in "On
the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism." In that introduction to
our first collection of critical essays I was lamenting that these factors,
particularly "the feverish activity of the fanzines," were counterpro-
ductive to the development of a climate for serious critical attention
to Tolkien"s masterpiece.
More than a decade after the novel"s appearance, as an example
if not a proof of the shocked attention still being paid to a literary
phenomenon by an uncomprehending coterie of critics (including
EdmundWilson, Germaine Greer, and Philip Toynbee), the New York
Herald Tribune"s Book Week published on its front page (February
26, 1967), beginning in large type and accompanied by a cartoon,
what amounted to a confession of ignorance by a prominent critic,
Paul West. Part of my response in "On the Possibilities of Writing
Tolkien Criticism" neatly summarizes, I think, the nature of the problem:
On what bases does West attack The Lord of the Rings?
1. He is baffled by it, baffled into numbness. I cannot argue with
this; he demonstrates both bafflement and numbness throughout.
2. With a nostalgia for the last century"s discarded theories, he laments
that Tolkien created his world and its creatures alone,
without some folksy community origin. But if Tolkien is sole
owner and proprietor of Middle-earth, I would prefer to give
him all my admiration than to betray any envy for his creative
imagination.
3. The Lord of the Rings is a game, only a game, and has no bearing
on humanity. Now this is a serious objection, to which I would
offer a pair of categorical adversatives: first, without the sense of
play as an essential element in literature, we would have to do
without much of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Proust, Nabokov
—for in a sense all art is a game, the game of putting form to
matter; second, the game of The Lord of the Rings is miraculously
designed to be played and won by anyone who takes part,
but the reader who doesn"t see the significance of its urgent
bearing on humanity will always be a loser.
4. The society from which people must escape into Tolkien"s world
is very bad indeed. I offer no comment on this argument, but I
wonder if West hasn"t simply used Tolkien"s popularity as a way
to make this last general point; it has no direct (or logical) bearing
on the relative excellence of the book.
It may be unfair to hold West up as epitomizing the negative attitudes
toward Tolkien. After all, few attentive readers had actually
been driven to the simplistic notions that the book features "a virtue
that triumphs untested," an "evil that dies uninvestigated," and one
protagonist, Frodo, who is "the goodie hobbit." But even West acknowledged
that the cultism and clubbism were irrelevant to—indeed
barriers to—considerations of literature, that is, serious criticism.
In such a climate, Rose Zimbardo and I designed Tolkien and
the Critics as a small contribution toward a major project, saving
what we believed was a great novel from the "faddists and button
makers" whose enthusiasm contributed to clouding some critical
judgment.
An obligatory if presumptuous request to Professor Tolkien to
consider supplying a brief foreword for the collection brought a gentle
but firm response:
I am very grateful for your attention and interest. But I am
wholly occupied, or should be, with new work of my own, and I
am obliged to say "no" to all requests for articles in reviews,
opinions, forewords, or anything of the kind. I think it is essential
to a writer who is still writing to avoid the distraction of external
criticism, however sensitive or well-informed.
That the contributions to our book were to varying degrees
"sensitive and well-informed" may be attested to by the warm welcome
it received from reviewers. The fourteen essays, about equally
divided between original pieces and reprints of the best available material,
formed what one review (perhaps the least flattering of all)
called "largely an unstructured dialectic on the meaning and value of
the whole trilogy." What was most gratifying to us about its success
(as measured within the limited aspirations of academic, university
press publication) was its threefold accomplishment: its samples of
general appreciations by prestigious writers, its examples of illuminations
of specific aspects of the novel by critics with focused interests,
and its anticipations of an abundance of critical attention yet to
come. In a way, the collection was an announcement of assurance
that, in due course, The Lord of the Rings would have to be given its
rightful place among the major fictional works of our time.
Within the following decade an astonishing amount of critical
work on Tolkien appeared. The variety of critical approaches that
Middle-earth had spawned was as great as that of the imagined species
in Tolkien"s world, a kind of secondary "sub-creation." There
were doctoral dissertations and papers at professional meetings,
guides for innocent readers, collections of learned essays, memoirs,
bibliographies, explorations of source material, and contextualizings
fromone perspective or another. The enormous appeal of The Lord of
the Rings had spread to include not only its increasing mass audience
but also a cottage industry of scholarly study. Medievalists and philologists
had a field day mining the rich veins of their disciplines" ore
with tools both venerable and au courant. Allegorists of many persuasions,
especially of the Christian and historical orientations, had
their innings. And the psychological, the archetypal, and the structuralist
schools were staking their claims.
Into this thick growth Zimbardo and Isaacs ventured once more,
proposing a second collection. Dissuaded from calling it "Tolkien
and the Critics II" or some variation of "The Second Generation," we
settled for Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives. If we had been motivated
the first time around by the wish to justify Tolkien"s admission to the
canon, we now faced the more formidable task of separating well-intentioned
appreciations of The Lord of the Rings and the proliferating
attention to extraneous, external, tangential, devotional, and personal
matters from what we regarded as appropriate approaches to the
book that would foster substantial literary criticism.
In most ways, the second collection was as good as the first.
Equally divided, again, between reprinted and original material, it
may have lacked the clout of contributions by C. S. Lewis and W. H.
Auden. But it made up for that, in part, by including a chapter from
Paul Kocher"s Master of Middle-earth, at that point the best booklength
study of Tolkien"s work, and an original essay by Verlyn Flieger,
her first published work on her way to a distinguished career as a
scholar of Tolkien in particular and of fantasy and Faërie in general.
Our second collection received much less attention from reviewers,
but one astute critic, in an otherwise favorable notice, took me to task
for an "ill-tempered" introduction, "On the Need for Writing Tolkien
Criticism."
He was right; the book was marred by my approach, which
focused not on the strength of the collected contributions but on
carping critiques of material we had deemed unworthy of inclusion.
Looking back, I find this indefensible, but I believe I know the reason
for my critical distemper (though I would leave the differential diagnosis
of mood disorder or personality disorder to others). It was that
the publication of The Silmarillion, some four years before our second
collection, had altered both the public perception of, and the
critical climate for, Tolkien"s work.
The problem was a double-edged sword. On one hand, critics
with negative attitudes toward The Lord of the Rings used The Silmarillion
to bolster their positions, disregarding the wholly different
natures of the two works and illogically applying their distaste for the
latter to the former. On the other hand, devotees used The Silmarillion
to range far beyond The Lord of the Rings in their enthusiasm for
Tolkien"s created world, thereby deflecting attention from, and appreciation
for, a major work of fiction, in precisely the ways we had
feared. Of the provision of new scripts for video games to come I will
not speak here.
There may well have been as much sadness as anger in my mood
vis-à-vis Tolkien scholarship and readership at the time, as a couple
of short passages from my review of The Silmarillion featured in the
Washington Star on Sunday, September 11, 1977, will attest:
The Silmarillion is a sacred text. It is an editor"s attempt to set
forth in an orderly way a great body of traditions, lore, and mythology
that stands behind the great narrative of The Lord of the
Rings. It is cosmogonical, cosmological, and apocalyptic. It is also
a seemingly endless series of names (personal and place) and
events chronicled without the distinction of detail that would
temper the repetitiveness. Above all it is solemn, as befits a sacred
text.
Readers who love The Lord of the Rings for its narrative power,
its droll charm, its intricate playfulness, and the physical and
psychological details that give life to its fully realized world will
not be very happy with The Silmarillion. Its style will stun many,
particularly those who know Tolkien as the author of "Beowulf:
the Monsters and the Critics," still the most lucid and readable
essay in all Old English scholarship. This book is persistently
Biblical. The Book of Numbers comes most often to mind. And
so it is that, beyond all hope, Christopher son of J.R.R. has
brought the new Tolkien to light in the world of men.
That the ill temper faded over time I attribute not to any mellowing
but to an appreciation for later developments. With Christopher
Tolkien"s gathering, editing, and publishing of successive volumes
of the history, legends, lore, and mythology of Middle-earth,
there came a plethora of rewards for the devotees. But the voices of
carping critics faded in large part, I think, because the attention of serious
literary scholarship to The Lord of the Rings reinforced the
book"s importance and won its canonical recognition even as it attracted
new generations of a mass readership.
One great fear remained. Translated to the screen, I thought, the
book would be reduced and its meaning lost to serious readers.However,
as soon as we saw Peter Jackson"s The Fellowship of the Ring all
such fears dissipated. Indeed, the monumental triumph of Jackson"s
movies has given us a road back to Middle-earth, a road already well
traveled by yet another generation of appreciative readers.
From the moment Rose Zimbardo first suggested to me that it
was time for us to conclude our own trilogy of Tolkien essay collections,
I have thought of this edition as a "greatest hits album." Such an
enterprise has its own built-in pitfalls for the compilers, not to mention
the writer of the liner notes. Why the obvious "Pretty Woman"
for the Roy Orbison selection and not the more representative
"Ooby-Dooby"? Why the Licia Albanese reading of Puccini"s "Vissi
d"arte" and not a remastered Claudia Muzio? In any case we are obligated
to spell out our general criteria for choices—which are certain
to be challenged.
Our first decisions were nearly automatic. We intended to collect
the best critical work available that focused on The Lord of the
Rings. Moreover, we had no intention of presenting a "balanced"
view. There would be no representative of those voices—strident,
cynical, sardonic, dismissive, supercilious, condescending—that articulated
negative views of the book. All the naysayers had one thing
in common. Whether they objected to prose style, poetic insertions,
assumed allegorical simplicities, self-indulgent allusiveness, character
stereotyping, derivative clichés, sociopolitical bias, Christian apologetics,
or puerile taste, to make their case they all had to shift focus
away from the story.
The Lord of the Rings is an adventure story par excellence, and as
such it is one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction. If it has
elements of myth, archetype, epic structure, and adolescent fantasy,
not to mention deep moral, psychological, and geopolitical insights,
so much the better for its performance as narrative. This collection
assumes that argument about the value and power of The Lord of the
Rings has been settled, certainly to the satisfaction of its vast, grow-
ing, persistent audience, but also of a considerable body of critical
judgment. (For a summary of the case, with explicit refutation of the
losing arguments, we refer readers to Tom Shippey"s book J.R.R.
Tolkien: Author of the Century.)
Another early decision was to eschew biographical approaches,
of which there are many available. From personal memoirs to carefully
documented accounts, this material is often charming or illuminating,
particularly when it places Tolkien"s experience in such
broader contexts as the group of his fellows called Inklings, his experiences
in World War I, and his immersion in medieval languages and
literature.Without denying the validity of the many connections between
the author"s life and his work, we determined to focus on the
latter. That decision has cost us the option of reprinting an excerpt
from Humphrey Carpenter"s estimable biography, but that book is
still available in print.
We extended that principle of focus into a much broader criterion
of exclusion. Many worthy pieces of individual scholarship exploring
specific aspects of Tolkien"s work—linguistic discoveries, individual
sources and analogues, the poetics of the interpolated verse,
the evolution of invented flora and fauna, the rich realms of the naming
of things and creatures, and even a herd of hobbyhorses ridden
by idiosyncratic interpreters—can provide insight into particular
features of the novel. But the typical tendency in them is toward digression,
and our intention was to choose the work of critics who
kept their focus on the main chance, whose eyes were ever on the
prize: general appreciation of Tolkien"s narrative art. This decision
may have cost us some intriguing slants upon the work, but it also
shielded us from the onslaught of continuing allegorical interpretations
and assumptions.
We were ever mindful of the need to avoid superficiality and redundancy.
The final choices, however, should exemplify our standards
of importance, timeliness, and the likelihood of enduring
value. In other words, we have chosen essays that we believe already
are, or are likely to become, classics of Tolkien criticism. The final se-
lections speak for themselves. They all maintain focus on the central
issues of the artistry of The Lord of the Rings. (Rose Zimbardo"s
headnotes to the essays provide precise indications of that focus and
concise accounts of the context of each.)
We were faced, however, with a thorny problem in the presence
of serious book-length studies of Tolkien"s work. Those of Joseph
Pearce, Patrick Curry, Verlyn Flieger, and, preeminently, Tom Shippey
will come to mind. Of particular interest to us was Jane Chance"s
Tolkien"s Art, originally published in 1979, for it persuasively argued
two major points: that Tolkien"s creative and scholarly work was all of
a piece, a comprehensive, coherent, cohesive, interrelated corpus; and
that the central intention of his art was to construct, in the phrase of
her subtitle, "a mythology for England." The revised edition (2001)
supports her argument with extensive documentation derived from
work published in the decades since the first publication of her book,
including Tolkien"s letters. Chance"s chapter on The Lord of the Rings
can stand alone; we reprint it here, with minor adjustments, from the
revised edition. It was rare in our experience to find a separable chapter
that could be isolated and retain the integrity of its critical focus.
Let me demonstrate the essence of the problem. I studied Shippey"s
Road to Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
in an attempt to isolate passages that met our criteria. I found
three that were tantalizingly close: from Road, the first fifteen pages
of chapter 5, "Interlacements and the Ring," and from Author, the
subsections "the ironies of interlace" and "the myth of Frodo" plus
"Timeless poetry and true tradition." But the very presence of the
word "interlace" in the titles of two of these selections identifies the
problem, because a critical analyst attempting to do justice to Tolkien"s
work will inevitably produce works structured by critical interlace.
And such excerpting as I contemplated would do great injustice
to Shippey"s accomplishment. It is the nature of great works of literature
to attract critics of the first rank and criticism of the highest
quality, which becomes essential accoutrement to the works themselves.
Dostoevsky has found his Joseph Frank, James Joyce his Rich-
ard Ellman and Stuart Gilbert, Nabokov his Brian Boyd, and Tolkien
his Tom Shippey.
In the case of Flieger, while Splintered Light: Logos and Language
in Tolkien"s World and A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien"s Road to
Faërie are justly admired books of Tolkien scholarship, we bridged
the dilemma by reprinting her earliest published essay, "Frodo and
Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero,"which appeared in our New Critical
Perspectives. In the case of Shippey, we found a most promising
solution.We commissioned an original essay, the only one in the collection.
"Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson"s Movie Trilogy" explores
the process by which the screen version of the novel would
lead to new generations of readers.
Here, then, in one volume, in addition to the Kocher, Chance,
and Shippey pieces, is a great deal of material unavailable elsewhere
now: essays by C. S. Lewis, Edmund Fuller, W. H. Auden, Patricia
Meyer Spacks, Rose Zimbardo, Marion Zimmer Bradley, R. J. Reilly,
J. S. Ryan, Verlyn Flieger, Patrick Grant, and Lionel Basney. Besides
providing handily packaged availability, the book offers some happy
unintended results of our criteria of selection. It contains works of
criticism from Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. It contains
works of criticism, not only by general critics, medievalist scholars,
and another Inkling, but also by a world-class poet, an acclaimed
writer of science fiction/fantasy, a prominent folklorist, a devoted
environmentalist, and two esteemed scholars of eighteenth-century literature.
And among its fourteen contributors are six who are no
longer with us, so that part of their legacy lives on in their appreciation
of yet another sub-created world.
We have passed from the "possibilities" of Tolkien criticism
(now richly fulfilled but viably open to enrichment), through the
"need" for Tolkien criticism (now satisfied by a commonly accepted
recognition of The Lord of the Rings as a masterwork), to the "pleasures"
of what is gathered here (with the promise of more to come).
Enjoy.
Continues...
Excerpted from Understanding the Lord of the Rings by Neil D. Isaacs Copyright © 2004 by Neil D. Isaacs. Excerpted by permission.
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