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.
