Vincent D'Onofrio

First published in The Age June 16, 2005
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D'Onofrio's a Bobby Dazzler

VINCENT D'ONOFRIO inhabits his TV character detective Bobby Goren so completely it's hard to accept that the two don't share more than physical characteristics. He has the Goren stubble, the dark clothing and the half-smile that suggests he knows something you don't and knows you want to know it, too.

When you are introduced, he sizes you up. He doesn't look straight at you for long, but you know he just measured you. Not measured as for a suit or a coffin, or to work out whether he could take you down in a brawl — it's clear he could, he's a big man, and solid. But it seems he was trying to gauge the challenge you might present to his intellect. Or is that to confuse him with the impossibly intelligent Goren, the modern-day Sherlock Holmes of Law & Order Criminal Intent, assuming traits that come with the face?

D'Onofrio is a loose-jointed man, despite his size. When he walks down the corridor at Channel Ten, he's all knees and elbows, but controlled, not awkward. It seems that he's throwing his sharp bits wider than usual in an unconscious limbering-up exercise to prep for the interview. Or it might be a fluidity he enjoys when he doesn't need to be wound up for a role — when he's not clutching Goren's leather satchel, or wrapped tight in Goren's duffle coat.

We're shown to a large room and led to a nest of comfy chairs beside a boardroom-sized table. On a side table a jug of water sits beside two glasses and a fruit platter.

The spirit of Goren enters D'Onofrio's body and he puts on a brief performance. He leaps from his chair and fires questions about a ceiling-mounted TV projector. How does it work? Do you watch movies on that wall over there? Is it LCD? Do you really watch movies with it? He probes and demands and doesn't settle for "I don't know".

Next it's the fruit: Is it good? It looks good. I'll try this watermelon ... Nothing. No flavour at all. You try it. Nothing.

Then we are alone. Just the room with the table, television system, glasses of water and platter of beautiful but tasteless fruit. And this D'Onofrio — the D'Onofrio who talks for the next half-hour about exhaustion, about directors, the future of Criminal Intent and the demons we all have inside us — this is a more gentle, genuine, less guarded D'Onofrio. If the quirky, agitated, obsessively inquiring Bobby Goren had been in the room with us a few moments before, he isn't now.

Much was made of D'Onofrio's health after he was put into hospital a couple of times while filming last season, sparking speculation about the series' future. Having decided he couldn't keep up the pace of 22 episodes a season of a show in which he has 60 per cent of the dialogue and appears in most scenes, he and executive producer Dick Wolf decided on a radical plan. Criminal Intent would be reshaped to have alternating lead characters. Bobby Goren would appear every second episode, with detective Mike Logan (Chris Noth) returning from the original series every other week.

There were issues about your health ...

"I'll tell you what happened so you don't have to ask. I'll tell you. I was directing a film, acting in a film, producing a film, doing my (TV) show. Simultaneously. And one day I collapsed. I lost my vision and I went down. And then I lost it twice more and I had to go to the hospital. They hooked me up to all these machines — my heart and my head — and I had wires coming out of me for days straight, and they couldn't find anything wrong. So the neurologist said 'You're f--king tired. Sleep.'

"And they gave me something to sleep and I slept for a week. I came out and I talked to Dick (Wolf) on the phone, and I said 'Dick, I can't do 22 episodes a season. I just can't do it.' That's why Chris Noth" — he says it to rhyme with "both" — "has to come now. It's why he's shooting his episode right now while we're talking. Dick knew that was it for me unless he did something about it."

There will be competition and critical comparison between the two strands. Will that hurt the show?

"Yeah, there will be, but this is the only concern that I have: that Chris and Annabella (Sciorra, who will play Logan's partner, detective Carolyn Barak) do a good job ... Annabella's a great actress. Chris has known that character for a long time, he can come in and he can do that character.

"My prediction is that they're going to love Chris and Annabella and our ratings are going to go up because of them."

Why?

"Because the women love Chris, he's Mr Big (from Sex and the City) ... If he sticks to his character, and if (writer and executive producer) Rene (Balcer) writes it so that Annabella's the smart one and Chris is the street-wise one ... If the audience gives it a chance, we've got a chance."

But so much of Criminal Intent's appeal is the quirkiness of Goren. And you're subtracting that from every second episode.

"I'm hoping that the audience likes my character but likes the structure of Criminal Intent and will give it a shot with those other guys. I have to hope that it works out; I can't keep doing 22 episodes a season. The audience has to decide: do they want me every other week or do they not want me at all? Because I ain't gonna make it even though I wish I could.

Out of the blue, D'Onofrio offers a tantalising titbit. There is no obvious lull in the conversation, barely a moment's breath, but he chooses now to plant a seed.

"I'm going to come here and I'm going to do a show."

What sort of show?

"I'm not going to tell you. But I'm going to come here and I'm going to do something here with Channel Ten.

Do you have something in mind?

"I'm talking to Channel Ten already."

Why do you want to do something here?

"Because I love Australia. I would live in Sydney because that's where my friends are. That's where my daughter was born."

With some actors you're never certain you know who you're talking to. Is this publicity circuit D'Onofrio playing the PR game?

Would it be similar to what you do now? A TV series?

"Yep, a TV series. But I won't play a cop. Probably a miniseries. I don't know. It'll be mine and Channel Ten's."

There's no more to learn. For the moment.

Detective Bobby Goren is one of the quirkiest characters on television. Impossibly smart, a master of arcane subjects — from the odours of chemical compounds to cloisonne to oriental calligraphy and more. His agitated, stylised manner infuriates some viewers and electrifies others.

Where do Bobby Goren and Vincent D'Onofrio intersect?

"In the spontaneous stuff. That's the closest I come to the character. When we're on set, my choices from moment to moment are spontaneous choices. I go whichever direction I feel like going. I don't change any dialogue; it's improvisation without changing any of the words.

"I'm very close to the camera crew and the cinematographer and all the guys involved in lighting. I've been with these guys for four years and I've worked with all of them before in the 50 or so films I've done. They're very used to my energy; I keep my energy up high. We get into conversations that are bizarre and they know that when I come on set that things are gonna happen; that energy level's going to go from a work atmosphere to an elevated atmosphere so that the energy doesn't have to change when the camera starts rolling."

What sort of director do you work best with?

"A director who knows the story. I need to be informed because I know the story too, but I can make mistakes."

What about direction of your performance?

"The worst thing is a director who thinks they know anything about acting. If a director knows something about acting, you know immediately in your first conversation. If they don't, then you just have to let it go in one ear and out the other as much as you can."

From what you've about said working with Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket it sounds as though you craved more direction than you got.

"I wouldn't have dared ask him for more direction. I was shit scared of him. It was my first (big) film, he's Stanley Kubrick, it didn't even dawn on me that I should be wanting anything more from him. I was in this whole other head where I just wanted to do a good job then get the f--k out there and not get fired."

D'Onofrio has said that Kubrick gave him a valuable piece of advice about acting: real is one thing but interesting is another.

"Yeah, that's what he said. That's what he taught me."

It seems that you took that as a motto for your career.

"I think that's right. And that's important with the Goren character because when they gave me the first script I knew immediately that I was going to have to bring something to the guy to enable me as an actor to get away with him being so smart. I mean, he's ridiculously smart."

Ridiculously smart.

"Ridiculously smart. It's completely unbelievable that a guy like that could exist. So how do you get away with that? You make him weird.

"He's a weird f---in' guy. He's really arrogant, he's self-centred and he's as spontaneous as you can absolutely be."

Does he need more weakness? The episodes I've loved are the ones where ...

"Where he f---s up?"

Not just where he f---s up, but where someone finds that place inside him and ...

"... and f---s with him. Yeah, those are the ones I love, too.

"In this season coming up, the fifth season, we have a direction that we're going in that's different to what we've done before. I am no longer going to wink at the audience. I'm going to have fun. I'm going to lie, I'm going to tell the truth, and you're never going to know which is which ... I think you're going to see Goren in a way you've never seen him before.
"The people that hate him will hate him more and the people that love him will love him more."

Does an actor have to have personal demons to play a character with demons?

"That's kind of an odd question because we all have demons, whether we're actors or not. I don't think actors have any more demons than anyone else."

But actors learn how to tap into them, to use those dark places in their craft. And some actors seem to use acting as a form of therapy ...

"I wish that acting helped me out more than (it has). I have as many problems in my life as anybody else and I wish that acting could sort it out for me, but it doesn't. When you have problems in life you have to not act and to deal with it."

The publicist returns and reminds us that the photographer is waiting. Time for the last question.

Is there a particular role or type of character you yearn to play?

"I've never played a master thief. And I think I am one."

Perhaps we can look forward to seeing what you develop with Channel Ten, then ...
Pause. Then there's a flicker of ... Of what? Of surprise and then the hint of a smirk. "Um ... ya."

Clearly, he knows something and knows you want to know it too.

He jumps up to be photographed, now looking unexpectedly dramatic and stern. But between clicks he's cheeky, full of banter, bouncing around to the photographer's side to look at the shots. "Very nice."

After half-an-hour of calm, casual, intimate chat, the energy levels are high again. Bobby Goren is back in the building.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent returns on Sunday, July 3, on Channel Ten.

Shoddy fences make for good neighbours

This article first appeared in The Age on January 31, 2007.


OUR neighbours moved out last week and we don't know why.

We didn't know they were going. We had seen them a couple of days earlier but they said nothing about moving.

Then a huge removal truck came and took everything away. It parked out the front early one morning and had "Melbourne to the Gold Coast" in metre-high letters along the side. I thought someone else in the street was moving but got home that evening to find the neighbours and their kids gone and the house empty. Every curtain on every window was cast wide to expose its empty, lifeless insides.

Where did they go and why didn't they say anything?

No more splitting hairs over identity

This article oringinally appeared in The Age in January 2000


IT CAN be a jolt to the system to realise that you have turned into a Bukowinan. I speak from experience.

Once a golden, hairless-skinned youth, the bloke who now looks at me from the mirror is swarthy, with black whiskers, dark-circled eyes and bouffant that is truly unruly in its East European lushness. It's a shock, because I was once pure Anglo.

Maybe I'm biased, but bowls is more than just a sport

This article first appeared in The Age on October 8, 2007

WHEN I hit my 30s about a dozen years ago, leaving behind my best sporting years, I used to joke that it wasn't too late for me to represent my country — all I had to do was take up lawn bowls. Those blokes hardly break into a sweat, any old bugger can do it. Watch them at your local club on a Saturday arvo, see if I'm wrong. I started playing in February and reckon I've eaten those words 10,000 times since.

It's an addictive pastime, an excruciatingly exquisite blend of science, art and plain bloody luck that can frustrate you to the point of baldness. Some days everything falls into place, your touch is perfect and it's as though you have the bowl on a string.

Those are rare days. More often, you trudge away from a game after going down — it could have been a close match or you might have copped a shellacking, it's all the same, losing hurts — and you'll curse the wind, the green, the better luck of your opponent.

But even on those days, you'll take away the thrill you felt for the one shot that came off, that delicately weighted backhand that slowly curled under three close bowls and came to rest on the jack, gentle as a feather landing on cotton wool. For the whole of the next week, you'll dream of doing it again.

I'd be out on the green every day if I could, but more important things get in the way. Home, family, work - life. My wife already regrets pushing me out the door that Sunday morning eight months ago, telling me to stop talking about it and just have a go.

Mastery of the game doesn't come quickly, but beginner's luck has a way of making you think you're destined for great things. When that doesn't — I'm not in the Australian squad yet, dammit — you settle in to the pleasure of participation and enjoying the people you meet.

Bowls is still disparaged as a sport for old folks, though that's changing.The average age of the national side is lower than the Australian cricket team. But at the grassroots, it is true; few clubs in the country could survive without the grey army that runs them — and for no financial reward. The sport is built on their unceasing, tireless effort. I'd guess the average age of our club is well over 70. We've got members who can't bend, many with crook hips, some losing their sight. But geez, they put down some gorgeous shots.

Our club is modest - not nearly as grand as some of the others in the bayside suburbs nearby, let alone the showcase clubs you get in NSW and Queensland, but we have a synthetic green, so we can play through the colder months when grass greens close down. Many players from neighbouring clubs came to play on our all-season surface. Every Saturday through winter, we'd turn out to throw down a few bowls for a few hours.

I remember the weekend I realised bowls is more important than sport. It was a filthy day, wet and bitterly cold. We were playing triples against Sandringham and feeling stiffer than usual under five layers of clothing. As another icy blast whipped across the green, we whinged about the conditions, what a stupid bloody thing to be doing on a miserable bloody day, we're bloody idiots. Then someone said, "Thousands in hospital would kill to be here", and we instantly regretted complaining.

Representing my country doesn't seem so important any more. But if I change my mind, there's always chess.

The mathemagicians

This article first appeared in The Age on June 19, 2009
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SITTING in a Carlton cafe discussing mathematics, Marty Ross asks: "What's a number?"

It sounds like a rhetorical, philosophical musing so the appropriate response seems to be to make deep pondering sounds. "Hmmm, yes … "

"No," says Ross. "I'm asking you: What is a number?"

It's too early in the day for this — especially without a couple more coffees under the belt — but the conversation with mathematicians Marty Ross and Burkard Polster continues along these lines for the best part of 1½ hours.

They touch on some fascinating and occasionally brain-twisting questions. What's an irrational number? What are negative numbers? How can you have the square root of minus one? If pi runs to an infinite number of decimal places, does that mean it includes an infinite number of ones, twos, threes and so on, or do some peter out as others are repeated?

"These are really deep concepts," says Ross. "But that's kinda where the fun is from my point of view, from the point of view of ideas."

Those ideas don't have to be as hifalutin' as pi, irrational numbers or negative numbers, though. These self-styled maths masters are just as happy to investigate the best distance from which to attempt a conversion in rugby league, to examine statistics about how many sexual partners people have or to work out the best way to balance a wobbly table.

Ross and Polster are excited and inspired by mathematics in all its guises, and in the eight years since they met at Monash University they've become a two-man cottage industry. They tour schools and run an annual Mathemagical Mystery Tour to regional Victoria. Their Mathsnacks series of puzzlers is published in the Mathematical Association of Victoria's Vinculum magazine, they write maths columns for The Age's education section and each year they hold a public lecture series at Melbourne Museum (the next one is on Sunday).

Their lectures are a quirky blend of theory, history and attention-grabbing — if unexpected — subject matter. Past titles include "The Secret Life of Soap Bubbles", "Poker, Nuclear War and Other Fun Games" and "Cheating Like a Mathematician: A History". In "How to Become a Human Lightning Calculator", the first of the upcoming season of lectures, Polster will demonstrate feats of mental arithmetic and teach the audience tricks to amaze friends and family — he hopes (he's been practising for weeks). The following month Ross will present "Rocky V and Other Roman Contributions to Mathematics".

Ross says each lecture must be fun. "If people aren't enjoying themselves, then it's failed. It simply has to be as much fun as possible, then you slip in some mathematics."

The fun principle applies even more to their schools tours, for which Polster puts on a show that can include juggling, square soap bubbles, mathemagical tricks and deliberately setting children on fire. It is, he says, a formula that works. "We expect to get a standing ovation at the end," he grins. They usually do.

Fun aside, Polster and Ross are serious mathematicians. Ross' PhD was on soap bubbles, though, he insists, "I never blew a soap bubble for my PhD."

Polster describes his area of specialty as "perfect universes", a mix of high-dimensional geometry, algebra and "a couple of other things". It's such a narrow area of expertise, he says, the audience for ruminations on the subject comprises "basically me and five other guys in the world".

Ross, who calls calculators the "cane toads of the education system", also regrets the concentration in maths on formulas. "It's not the formulas that matter, it's being able to think precisely about precise quantities on the one hand, and abstract ideas on the other. That's the value and the pleasure of mathematics."

If you believe that pure mathematics — maths in its highest, most ethereal form — is a bit of a game, a luxurious pastime with little applicability to the real world, you wouldn't be Robinson Crusoe. You wouldn't get an argument from Polster, either. Not because he agrees, but because he'd dismiss the suggestion outright. "We don't really care about that," says Polster.

"Maths is justification in itself. It's beautiful and it's fun."

QED.

On Tolkien: The Word of The Ring

Published in The Age, December 22, 2001



In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. -- John 1:1

DID John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, master of myth and narrative, accomplished philologist and devout Catholic, think that he was God?

The question is suggested by Tolkien's creative powers. His creation, Middle-earth, is the most detailed fictional world devised by an author, with its own geography, history, peoples, cultures, beasts (evil, benign and curious), flora, mythology and languages. So extensive and thoroughly developed is it that we know more about Middle-earth than we do about many ancient cultures of our world. There are more complete records for the Elvish languages, literature and legends of Middle-earth, for example, than for the people of Easter Island.

As complete and complex as Tolkien's fictional creation is, Middle-earth had an unusual genesis, one that echoes strongly the Biblical text above. Subverting the usual order of creation in fiction, Tolkien contrived Middle-earth as a setting for the rich and varied languages he had invented as a young man on the path to becoming one of the 20th century's most accomplished experts in comparativephilology. "The invention of languages is the foundation," he wrote in a letter to the poet W.H. Auden in 1955 after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. "The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse."

For Tolkien, the word came first.

Set in a mythical past, the races of men -- women figure marginally -- elves and dwarves that inhabit Tolkien's world are engaged in a never-ending struggle with evil. The specific struggle of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's longest and most powerful narrative work, is between the possession and destruction of an inherently malign and seductive "magical" ring that can determine the balance of power in the world. The Hobbit is a prequel to this struggle, written as a children's story; The Silmarillion, the most dense of the three works, is the history of the three ages of Middle-earth, supernal in scope, providing an account of the doings of gods, demi-gods, mortals and those who oppose them.

As a boy growing up in the late 1890s in Sarehole, an idyllic hamlet near Birmingham, Tolkien inherited from his widowed mother an interest in Latin, French and German. After her death, when he was 12, this interest deepened and was extended to Spanish, Gothic, Welsh, Finnish and Old English, which he taught himself from textbooks with encouragement from teachers. He was as fascinated by the shapes and sounds of words as much as by their meaning, and even as a schoolboy began to delve into the question of why languages are what they are -- how they arise, what shapes them, how they change over time, their relationships with other languages.

His study introduced him to the ancient texts of Old English, Middle English and Norse literature: the 1000-year-old epic Beowulf; the chivalric Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Younger and Elder Eddas, the 13th-century source of modern knowledge of Germanic mythology. In this way the young Tolkien not only built his understanding of language, he also came to appreciate the power and importance of myth.

Immersed so completely in language, it was not surprising that Tolkien began to invent his own. As Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien's authorised biographer, has written: "If he had been interested in music he would very likely have wanted to compose melodies, so why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be as it were a private symphony?"

His early, simplistic efforts -- languages with names such as Nevbosh and Naffarin -- were little more than versions of Latin, French and Spanish in disguise. His discovery of Finnish when he was 19 inspired the creation of a language that would eventually become Quenya, the High-elven language of Middle-earth, complete with its own alphabet and elegant cursive writing style (Tolkien was also an accomplished calligrapher and artist). Quenya would be the first of many invented languages to find their way into his fictitious world.

By 1915, when Tolkien was 21, Quenya had evolved into something quite complex, with a large vocabulary. He wrote poems in it (and, later, diaries) and started to feel the need for a history behind it -- after all, why have a language without someone to speak it? "He was perfecting the language," Carpenter noted. "Now he had to decide to whom it belonged."

Tolkien decided that this was the language spoken by the elves seen by Earendel, the star-mariner, on his voyage across the firmament. Tolkien had created the character of Earendel in the poem Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star, inspired by a reference to the name in Crist, a religious poem by the eighth (or possibly ninth) century Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf. Spurred by this "discovery" of a home for his language, he began work on a collection of poems, the Lay of Earendel, in which would appear the realm of Valinor, where the Two Trees grew, one bearing silver moon-apples, the other golden sun-apples.

This collection of verse -- and these elements in particular -- would become the root stock for the mythology of Middle-earth in the form of The Silmarillion, a grander project than Tolkien had initially expected for his invented languages, which he had described modestly as his "nonsense fairy language", believing that they would interest no one.


INTEREST in Tolkien's languages is extensive. Websites dedicated to "Tolkienian linguistics" abound on the internet, including dictionaries, glossaries, courses in grammar, phonetics, pronunciation, alphabetic scripts and the study of poems written in Elvish languages.

Tom Shippey, who teaches courses in mediaeval English literature at Saint Louis University in Missouri, in the United States, and the author of The Road to Middle Earth and J.R.R.Tolkien: Author of the Century, says that Tolkien's linguistic invention had a great effect on his fiction. "It gives it depth, it's unexpected," he says. "Nobody else does that. It creates a feeling for people that there's a world there outside the story. They become fascinated by the world rather than by the story itself."

Shippey, who not only knew Tolkien but held the same chair of English language and mediaeval literature as Tolkien at Leeds University and taught the same syllabus as Tolkien at Oxford University, says the Tolkienian languages are complex, partly because he worked so hard at them, but also because he worked on them for close to 60 years: "Not only was the final product complex -- insofar as there was a 'final' product -- but they'd been through stages, stages in his own life when he changed his mind (about how they should function). The whole thing was about change: not only did he want to invent languages, he wanted to show how one developed out of another."

As happens with real languages over time, Tolkien's invented languages diverged into different forms. Consider the languages of two races of elves in Middle-earth: Quenya, the original Elvish language and the main tongue of Tolkien's Light-elves, and Sindarin, the language of the Wood-elves. Shippey argues that the relationship between these languages, with the changes in phonetics and semantics that led to the two distinct languages from an original root, suggests divergent histories for the speakers -- different experiences, separation and so on. Tolkien described the Quenya/Sindarin relationship as similar to that of Latin and Welsh; the stories of Middle-earth were his attempt to explain why his languages developed as they did.

Christopher Tolkien, literary executor of his father's incompleted works after his death, has shed light on this process of invention. Explaining that his father did not usually pluck syllables from thin air simply because he liked their sound, he wrote in The Lost Road and Other Writings that "in principle, he devised them from within the historical structure, proceeding from the bases or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds, deciding (or, as he would have said, finding out) when the word came into the language, following through the regular changes of form that it would thus have undergone, and observing the possibilities of formal or semantic influence from other words in the course of its history. Such a word would then exist for him, and he would know it."

The derivation of the word "hobbit" is instructive. The story goes that Tolkien wrote the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" on the back of an exam paper he was marking in the early 1930s, but had no idea what a hobbit was. "Names always generate a story in my mind," he recalled many years later. "Eventually, I thought I had better find out what hobbits were like."Tolkien's answer to the question of where hobbits came from appears in the last appendix of The Lord of the Rings, which purports to be a collection of historical and academic information on the languages of the peoples of Middle-earth. In the appendix, he explains that hobbit is a worn-down version of "holbytla". "Hol" means "hole", of course, and (Shippey notes) "bytlian" in Old English means "to dwell in". Hence, a hobbit is a hole-dweller.

This account glosses over greater etymological complexities but it does suggest how Tolkien used his professional understanding of languages and how they change to reconstruct a highly plausible explanation for the nature of a creature whose name hadpopped into his head.

Tolkien's work on the languages, poems, stories and chronology of Silmarillion would consume a lifetime and remain incomplete at the time of his death nearly 60 years later in 1973. It was eventually published in 1977, edited by his son, Christopher. In The Lord of the Rings, frequent allusions are made to the mythological content of The Silmarillion - "unexplained vistas", Tolkien called them -- giving the work a detailed back story and adding to its sense of historical depth.

Finding a home for his languages was one purpose Tolkien had for creating Middle-earth. Another, closely bound up with language, was his desire to create a "mythology for England".

Tolkien felt that the Norman invasion of England in 1066 had overwhelmed and all but obliterated the "native" culture of the English (Anglo-Saxons), supplanting it with the culture of the French, with only patches remaining alive in odd corners (he remained a Francophobe throughout his life). His familiarity with the Germanic myths of Iceland created in him a yearning for what England might have had. "I would that we had more of it left," he once wrote of the Kalevala, the collection of ancient ballads, lyrical songs, and incantations that were a part of Finnish oral tradition, "... something of the same sort that belongs to the English".

While recuperating from trench fever during World War I (he fought at the Somme), Tolkien began to build his English mythology under the title The Book of Lost Tales, eventually to become The Silmarillion and later supplemented by the 12-volume The History of Middle-earth (all posthumously published). His intention, he explained many years after starting the project, had been "to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story -- the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths -- which I could dedicate simply: to England, to my country".

Tolkien applied all of his skills as a comparative philologist to his role of cultural saviour. Following in the steps of the Grimm brothers, who had performed a kind of literary rescue of ancient German culture by preserving its fairy tales, he worked through early English literature to try to rediscover the elements that preserved part of an older belief system that might be considered indigenous to England. These he would then retrieve and adapt into modern fiction -- reclaiming what had been lost.


IN THIS way Tolkien mined not only English but also Norse literature for tales, characters and creatures for his mythological fiction. He took slim and contradicting profiles of elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons and other creatures and made them uniquely Tolkienian, ironing out inconsistencies and confusion in the literature, expanding on hints about their true nature, and imbuing them with distinctively English stylistic and mythological qualities.

Tolkien felt that he was not in control of this process. Rather than being the creative force behind his fiction, he sensed he was more a conduit for discovery by other forces working through him. "I have long ceased to invent," he wrote in a letter to a reader, referring to that feeling. He later explained that the tales that make up The Silmarillion "arose in my mind as 'given' things ... I always had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing"'.

Tolkien believed that the mythology of Middle-earth was real. It was not that he believed that orcs, wizards and hobbits had existed (although he had literary or historical models for them all), but he believed that what he was writing contained profound truths about human experience, derived from a canon of literature that had grown over many centuries. As Shippey writes in Author of the Century: "However fanciful Tolkien's creation was, he did not think that he was entirely making it up. He was 'reconstructing', he was harmonising contradictions in his source-texts. Sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits), but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination: and for this he had a great deal of admittedly scattered evidence."

Contrary to the common conception that, by definition, myths are not true, Tolkien understood that they captured something elemental. "The truth that myths are designed to express concerns not of only the world around us, but the world within us; not so much its surface appearance, but its inner form," wrote Stratford Caldecott in his essay Tolkien, Lewis, and Christian Myth. "For a myth is a way of describing the rules by which the world is made -- 'deep magic from before the dawn of time'."

Fellow author and friend C.S.Lewis once put to Tolkien that he, Lewis, felt the power of myth but complained that myths were lies and therefore worthless. Tolkien countered that myths were the ideal vehicle to transmit universal truths that would otherwise be impossible to express.

Furthermore, Tolkien believed that because myths were created by humans, who in turn were created by God, there must be fragments of "the true light" in them. This process he called "sub-creation": pagan myths were merely God revealing His nature through the minds of poets. Significantly, Tolkien maintained that Christianity was also a myth, but one that was devised by God with the events of the gospel verifiable. It would seem that Tolkien believed that he was producing a fundamentally Christian work, with God working through him and his hobbits.

Academics, journalists and elite lettered folk have mostly derided Tolkien's fictional works. Germaine Greer was clearly distressed by the news that Tolkien had been granted the title "Author of the Century" (confirmed twice afterwards) when a 1997 poll taken by Channel Four's Book Choice program and the Waterstone's chain of bookstores in Britain declared The Lord of the Rings to be the best book of the previous 100 years. Greer's reaction was to despair: "It has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century," she wrote. "The bad dream has materialised."

Other critics have attacked Tolkien's work as: "Faerie-land's answer to Conan the Barbarian"; "juvenile trash"; and "Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic".

But the past decade has seen some scholars investigate and explain the intellectual and academic value of Tolkien's fiction. Patrick Curry (Defending Middle-earth), Joseph Pearce (Tolkien: Man and Myth) and Tom Shippey have mounted spirited and strikingly different campaigns in defence of Tolkien, approaching his work from the angles of post-modernistic anti-globalisation, religious faith and comparative philology, respectively. Shippey's insights into the linguistic puzzles, references and acrobatics performed by Tolkien are fascinating.

Whether he created with the help of divine revelation or tapped into race memories of deeper truths about the human condition that the modern world no longer remembers, Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth have struck a chord with a large audience -- in spite of the critics' assessment. Sales of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, published in 1937 and 1954-55 respectively, have topped 100 million copies in 30 languages.

In the 1960s, the peace movement in the United States adopted Rings and its themes as a symbol for their anti-war rhetoric ("Frodo Lives" and "Gandalf for President" were popular slogan buttons). Hippies saw in Tolkien a validation of their alternative lifestyle choices (including, curiously, their drug-taking). And deep-green environmental movements to this day find a powerful source of inspiration in Tolkien's anti-modernism and rhapsodic depiction of nature, taking the blighted, evil land of Mordor to represent the destructiveness of the modern world and the effects of globalisation. ("Another piece of Mordor" accused the graffiti sprayed on building sites across the United Kingdom.)

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings already had underground cult status in the former USSR and other Soviet-bloc countries before the fall of Communism in 1989. Since then, their popularity has increased as they have become a rallying point for anti-globalism protest, suggesting that the "profound truths" of Tolkien's mythology for England can cross cultural, political and economic boundaries. What started as a story spun around created languages became a mythology that has the power to appeal to people at different points of history, in different cultures and of varying religious convictions.

Tolkien once warned that the desire to create -- to "sub-create", as he put it -- could cause a kind of sinful pride. In a 1951 letter to a potential publisher for Rings, he wrote that such a desire "may become possessive, clinging to the things made as 'its own', the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation". Tolkien was aware of the temptation to want to be God. Having that awareness, he was able to resist it.



The film, The Fellowship of the Ring, opens in Melbourne on Wednesday.

How I became a published poet in just 10 minutes

This article first appeared in The Age on May 12, 2009
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I RECEIVED the email from Poetry.com (The International Library of Poetry) inviting me to take a poetry IQ test late on a Friday.

It had been a lazy day in the office, I was bored, so I did the quiz: 11 multiple-choice questions and an assignment to write and submit an original, unpublished poem. I rattled off the answers, knocked out a poem and sent the lot into cyberspace before racing for the train.