The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Power of Tolkien’s Prose

10.1057/9780230101661 - The Power of Tolkien's Prose, Steve Walker



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Middle-Earth’s Magical Style

Steve Walker



The Power of Tolkien’s Prose

THE POWER OF TOLKIEN’S PROSE

Copyright © Steve Walker, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61992–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker, Steve, 1941– The power of Tolkien’s prose : Middle-Earth’s magical style / Steve Walker. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–61992–0 (alk. paper) 1. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973— Literary style. 3. Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism. I. Title. PR6039.O32Z8917 2009 823’.912—dc22 Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


2009011164


All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Things Deeper and Higher

1

1 Ordinary Everyday Magic

7

2

Blade and Leaf Listening

41

3

The Road Goes On for Ever

71

4 Always On and On

93

5 The Potency of the Words

115

6 Just a Bit of Nonsense

147

Conclusion: What You Will See, If You Leave the Mirror Free to Work

167

Notes

175

Sources

191

Index

201



C on ten ts




Thanks to Brigham Young University for the many years of research and writing time invested in me and in this project. Thanks to my students who thoughtfully argued aspects of the manuscript, especially Jonathan Langford, Andy Schultz, and the inimitable and invaluable Jeff Swift. Thanks to my wife, Mary Walker, without whose careful and encouraging reading I could not have entrusted this work to public scrutiny. Thanks to Brigitte Shull and her assistant Lee Norton, whose warm competence provided the most helpful editing in my four decades of publishing.



Ack now l ed gmen t s




Things Deeper and Higher

Seldom has a literary work stirred such a maelstrom of critical controversy as swirled around The Lord of the Rings at its publication. Half a century later, this strange reincarnation of a form long relegated to ugliest stepsister status among the genres of the novel, warm and fuzzy fantasy adrift in the great ice age of sophisticated realism, still roils readers. The critical furor reached a pitch recently that provoked Joseph Pearce from his British reserve to marvel at the animosity of the quarrels over the quality of Tolkien’s fiction: “Rarely has a book caused such controversy and rarely has the vitriol of the critics highlighted to such an extent the cultural schism between the literary illuminati and the views of the reading public.”1 Pearce does not overstate. The highbrow London Guardian assigned The Rings to the lowest level of literary hell, calling it “by any reckoning one of the worst books ever written.”2 Yet in the same year of that unmitigated negation, a poll of no less than 25,000 English readers by the BBC and Waterstone booksellers declared Tolkien’s epic the best book of the century—fully a fifth of respondents thought it number one, eclipsing second-place 1984 by an astonishing 24 percent. That fulsome praise in its turn so incensed anti-Tolkien readers that the “Greatest Book of the Century” poll got repeated—and confirmed, and confirmed, and again confirmed, and yet again confirmed—by a Daily Telegraph poll, a Bookseller analysis of the most-borrowed books at British libraries, a poll of 50,000 people for the Bookworm television program, and a Folio Society poll. The Shakespeare group went so far as to rank Tolkien’s epic Britain’s favorite book of any century.3 And that’s not the half of it. The precipitous divide separating anti- and pro-Tolkien factions extends beyond the disagreements between experts and common readers. In fact, Tolkien quarrels may be most fractious and fracturing among people who should



I N T ROD U C T ION


know better—professional readers, academic critics. Nor are these conflicts mere theoretical quibbles. Opinions about the quality of Tolkien’s fiction are about as viscerally felt and passionately argued as criticism gets. Probably no fiction writer of the twentieth century has been so extravagantly lauded by critics as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Certainly to no other have serious readers assigned such auspicious literary bedfellows. The Lord of the Rings has been compared with the Prose Edda, Genesis, Ariosto, Malory, and Spenser.4 Some think “its congeners are rather . . . Gilgamesh . . . the Aeneid . . . Chanson de Roland . . . Beowulf.” Others see it “closer to the Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, or Faust.”5 Modernists have found Tolkien “as good as War and Peace,” “Spenglerian,” “in the ranks with Eliot,” located in superlative literary prominence “somewhere between Dickens and Wordsworth”6 —a position variously pinpointed as artistic intimacy with Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, and Arnold.7 Tolkien’s fiction has been compared to Chaucer and Shakespeare, Verdi and Wagner, Wilde and Pound, Proust and Melville, Cervantes, Faulkner, Marlowe, Henry James, Defoe,Whitman, Augustine, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce—it “may surpass Joyce’s more radical work.”8 Others compare it to James Bond, Buck Rogers, Peter Rabbit, and “the excruciating cutenesses of Walt Disney.” 9 Tolkien’s fiction excites passionately divergent reactions. Critics disagree about the literary stature of The Lord of the Rings: it is to some a preeminent expression of “the great modes and methods of English literature,” to others “just a good yarn on the level of Tom Swift and His Magic Runabout.”10 Critics disagree about the quality of its narrative: the book is found to manifest “little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form” and simultaneously to exhibit “all the virtues of the great storytellers.”11 Critics disagree about its very genre: it is variously viewed as “genuine epic,” “British melodrama,” “romance,” “parable,” “prose poem,” “whimsy,” “quest-in-reverse,” “patent and systematic allegory,” “a comic strip for grownups,” “morality play,” “Nordic myth,” “fable,” “super science fiction,” “overgrown fairy tale,” “revelation,” “a new genre” with “no true literary counterpart”—its stance has been described as everything from “heroic-elegiac” through “symbolist” to “post-realistic.”12 Critics disagree violently about virtually every aspect of Tolkien’s fiction, content not excepted. According to its readers, The Lord of the Rings at one and the same time “rejects the minutia of everyday life” and “joins the high art of the world in revealing the significance, even



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the glory, of the ordinary.”13 It is “astonishingly underivative” and “a tissue of ill-digested borrowings.”14 To some it “externalizes . . . conflicts are rarely within,” and yet to others it is “carefully internalized. The authentic acts . . . all take place in the mind.”15 “Too long, too cluttered, too much,” it has at the same time “not a word or an incident too many.”16 It is “a book to be read for sound prose” whose “prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.”17 It is “a profoundly Christian work” and “by no means a Christian work,”18 in “accord with the contemporary visions of youth” and filled with “all kinds of archaic awfulness,”19 a “Tory daydream” and “radical,”20 “an astonishing feat of the imagination” beset by “pathetic imaginative impotence,”21 “over-complicated” and “terribly simplistic,”22 “a classic” and “mishmash,”23 “unreadable” and “a work of genius.”24 “No one seems unmoved by the work,” reports one reader: “it provokes either awe or anger.”25 Tolkien’s fiction has “aroused the most surprising passions in his audience. There are intelligent people who cannot read more than a few pages without disgust, and there are equally intelligent people who are addicts.”26 W. H. Auden, who knows something of literary argument, contends in a New York Times Book Review that “I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments.”27 Tom Shippey, probably our most astute and certainly our most comprehensive and balanced reader of Tolkien, considers that contradictory criticism a symptom of our failure to read Tolkien well. He worries about the superficiality of the critical reaction from both pro and con camps, worries about “the quantity of shallow and silly commentary, both hostile and laudatory.”28 Tolkien has attracted “such a poor secondary literature,” Shippey thinks, because “it is difficult to write well about Tolkien because of the distinctive nature of his merits, not because he has no merits.” Enthusiastically as I share Shippey’s diagnosis that we have failed to appreciate the implications of the dramatically divided views of Tolkien readers, I cannot concur with his curative prescription, finding as I do in Shippey’s thoughtful analysis yet another Tolkien reading to disagree with. I think he, like the rest of us, has overlooked the deeper concern—seen the symptoms, missed the diagnosis. What if the variety of reaction to Tolkien’s prose were indication of the richness of his art? If varied response is any kind of key to complexity, Tolkien’s art is kaleidoscopic. The reaction of readers is more complicated even than the critical quarrels would suggest. Tolkien’s creation can inspire contradiction not only among different critics but within the same critic. William Ready discovers “a tendency



INTRODUCTION: THINGS DEEPER AND HIGHER


to ramble and be finicky” in this “spare, taut, ironic tale.”29 Tom Shippey himself—for whom, as for most of us moderns, irony is a kind of talisman of authorial competence—views “Tolkien’s whole developed narrative method [as] ironic, as also anti-ironic.”30 Burton Raffel begins his discussion of style insisting “it would be foolish to say Tolkien does not write well” and concludes declaring that Tolkien’s writing is “not literature.”31 Douglass Parker finds in it both “Batman” and “recreated Beowulf.”32 Critics see Tolkien as a writer whose “compelling power” somehow transcends his “linguistic limitations,” an awkward artist undercutting his natural force with language “impoverished or pretentious. Yet the power of the fable remains.”33 He is solemnly declared a “brilliantly adequate” stylist, “a born storyteller and a bad writer.”34 It is not surprising, given these professional opinions, that mere common readers should judge The Lord of the Rings “among the most glorious, scary, fantastic, happy, poignant, etc., etc. books ever to have been written and I hope nobody has been scared away by the flowery, sentimental, contrived writing.”35 If critical contradiction provides a key to Tolkien’s art, it is clearly a key itself difficult to decipher. The deep disagreement surrounding the significance of Tolkien’s fiction may, as some have suggested, result from a disappointing tendency among the approving half of the literate populace toward “a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash,” from a profusion of escapists who crave the panderings of “a never-never world that satisfies the 20th-Century mind,” from “a general lack of spiritual funds, which has thrown up Gurus stranger than Tolkien.”36 Catherine Stimpson considers the disagreement a product of the irresponsible application of “taste, not criticism”37—other people’s tastes being inevitably inferior to one’s own criticism. The controversial quality of this much-lauded and much-lamented writing may result from the sheer scope of Tolkien’s fiction, from the vastness and intricacy of a creation incorporating so much weakness with so much strength that it provides infinitely variable material for a host of fragmentary viewpoints. But it is intriguing that most readers admit the power of Tolkien’s fiction, sometimes in the same breath with which they deny its artistic dynamics—his “flat, rather Pre-Raphaelite style” may be “stultifying . . . yet shudders run down the back on reading him, and the hair lifts on one’s head.”38 I suspect the strabismic critical reaction reflects penetrating artistry beneath the deceptively simple surface of his narrative. Tolkien’s mode is vivid ambiguity. His profoundly paradoxical technique attains artistic integrity from a collision of disparate tensions,



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generating literary power from emotive polarities. With a subtlety camouflaged by narrative directness, an understated vigor of craftsmanship, Tolkien maintains compelling artistic balance on a tightrope of ambiguity where fantasy verges on deepest reality, tall tale approaches archetype, and magic merges with the mundane, where metaphor assumes actuality and flexibility finds lasting form, where semantic magic comes perilously and provocatively close to life.



INTRODUCTION: THINGS DEEPER AND HIGHER




1

Ordinary Everyday Magic

J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation of an incredibly credible imaginative world in the Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is a considerable artistic achievement. But that fantastic realism reflects a more fundamental literary accomplishment. Tolkien not only creates realistic fantasy, he stimulates us to create our own: he encourages us to participate in his subcreation. He schools readers, through the insight of his narrative, in the art of imaginative perception, training us to see everywhere implicit meaning, inner life. He invites us so deeply into his fictive world that it becomes our world, multiplied by his. Tolkien creates a secondary world vital enough to move beyond metaphor of the world as we know it into an artistic mirror that can make our individual worlds metaphors for “things deeper and higher.” To those who have ventured there with Tolkien, Middle-earth, through its introspective realism, is more than an intriguing artistic location, more than a unique narrative experience: Middle-earth verges on a new dimension of perception. Tolkien’s fiction focuses its penetrating vision by intricate application of a simple rhetorical process: reader participation. Readers are invited to familiarize themselves into this fantastic sphere, then to reach through its naturalness to the preternatural. This invitational prose is so carefully etched it can disclose not only the actuality of the transcendent, but also that deeper miracle: the numinousness of the commonplace. To reveal to the reader the faërie implicit in the universe, Middle-earth transfigures normality and elucidates the ineffable in a reciprocal re-creation that imbues common occurrence with mythic significance, realizing “ordinary everyday sort of magic.”1 Tom Shippey, so much the best recent reader of Tolkien he has become the critical standard-bearer, stresses how popular Tolkien has proved over the last half of the twentieth century, popularity thoroughly certified by turn-of-the-century British polls. His



CH A P T ER


diagnosis of the cause of that effect is significant: he sees Tolkien’s fiction as “more than realistic, and more than romantic.”2 Perceptive as Shippey is about the paradox, he appears to miss the point of it. In a literary era driven by cultural concerns, a critical dispensation dominated by the social criticism of cultural studies and Marxism and feminism and new historicism, it is not surprising that Shippey should see the source of that literary appeal as cultural rather than stylistic. “The power” of Tolkien’s writing lies for him, as for most Tolkien critics, “not in mots justes but in the evocation of ideas at once old and new.”3 Readers more wary of the transience of literary fashions, especially recent fashions, might question any dilemma that pits stylistic against cultural concerns. Could it be that Tolkien’s style contributes more to his literary appeal than we, with our focus on social considerations, are disposed to notice? Could it be that The Lord of the Rings has established itself as an instant literary classic not so much because it evokes new historicist “ideas at once old and new” as because it is unusually well written? Could we have undervalued Tolkien’s masterpiece because his narrative is effective in a way transparent to our au courant literary dispositions: stylistically effective? Tolkien’s style is worth a closer look, particularly because, in the half-century since publication of The Lord of the Rings, few have looked at its prose style at all, and no one has looked at it as closely as it deserves. What becomes evident when we zero in on Tolkien style is how strikingly invitational this prose is, how it stakes so much of its success on reader response. Its open-endedness, the carefully orchestrated ambiguity that is its essential fictional technique, is dramatized by the most emphatic fact about this fiction: diverse reader reaction to Tolkien’s creation. Middle-earth provokes fantastically fervent response, “fulsome and flatulent adulation” frothing into “Frodo Lives” sweatshirts, Tolkien Societies, mushrooming Middle-earth newsletters and, in a deeper dimension, the sort of disciple’s awe for this manifest fantasy one expects from dedicated readers of the Gospels or Henry James.4 Serious critics dramatize even more emphatically the contradiction of fantasy taken seriously, declaring this “incredible sphere,” this “never-never world,” “notwithstanding the frame of fantasy— profoundly realistic”: “It is the real world.”5 Middle-earth is for its readers a superlative paradox, a world “at once human and supernatural,” “strange and . . . familiar,” “magical . . . and also simply historical,” a world in which “ ‘unreality’ becomes the best road to realism”: “The more real it seems, the more fictional he is.”6



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The paradoxical nature of Tolkien’s artistic creation may be seen in microcosm in the focused ambiguity of its locale. “Everyone who reads these works feels the presence of a possible culture”;7 indeed, individual readers are so sold on the precise nature of that culture they fail to notice the general disagreement about just what it is. One critic assures us, “Middle-earth is surprisingly fixed . . . the Shire, the rich English Midlands near Birmingham,” whereas another insists with equal certainty that the tale “does not take place in England.”8 Other readers find in Tolkien’s creation “exactly the same geographical relationship” as “the area of the epics in middle western Europe, perhaps in France,” “considerable rugged Scandinavian terrain,” a “real” similarity to “the Colorado mountains where I live.” 9 Nor have we begun to exhaust the possibilities of where Middleearth resides: Peter Jackson’s Academy-Award-winning films relocated wholesale the locale of Middle-earth to New Zealand for a generation of viewers. The most impressive thing about the verisimilitude of Tolkien’s world may be not that “the terrain and families of Middleearth are as clear to us as those of London or Boston or Yoknapatawpha County,”10 striking as that artistic feat is in fantasy. Tolkien’s ultimate accomplishment is that Middle-earth stimulates among its readers not just vivid responses, but individual responses. Tolkien’s creation engages his readers in subcreation. The key to that individuated involvement, that participatory process, is the provision of a milieu that draws its magic sustenance from roots deep in the familiar. Middle-earth’s “local terrain, climate, and dominant flora and fauna are much as we know them today. We feel at ease with them at once.”11 And it’s not just that we’re in familiar general territory; the precision of Middle-earth’s detail, as Brian Rosebury’s careful assessment attests, is even more compelling: “No writer was ever more constantly aware than Tolkien of all the details of mountain, grassland, wood, and swamp, of variations in temperature, wind or calm, rain or cloud, the quality of sunlight and starlight, the hues of each particular sunset.”12 So precise is that authorial competence that one reader thinks “no attentive reader can deny Tolkien’s skill and breadth of imagination in creating a Secondary World where Secondary Belief is possible.”13 Many, however, do. On the one hand, doubters accuse that “all too often, Tolkien asserts rather than demonstrates.” On the equally skeptical other hand, there are those who think “Tolkien tends rather to over-complicate—not in purpose, but in detail,” causing the reader to lose himself in “a mass of detail which is itself vibrant with



ORDINARY EVERYDAY MAGIC


imaginative energy.”14 That striking critical dissonance, that contradictory reaction to both an apparent absence of detail and at the same time the presence of particularized detail so profuse it swamps the creation, provides paradoxical proof of the careful crafting of Tolkien’s ambiguity. There is more to his verisimilitude than the superficial fact that “seldom since Defoe has there been such a multitude of concatenating details.”15 The technique by which Tolkien has created, peopled, languaged, cultured, and made consistent within itself his vital and credible imaginative world is essentially one of suggestion. This narrator “makes sure we know that he knows more than he chooses to tell.”16 His “art of fantasy flourishes on reticence”—“the data are not there, and Tolkien has no intention whatever of supplying them.”17 His footnotes, his interjected explanations, even his “interminable appendices that litter the flow of the tale,”18 involved as they are, tend always toward expansion of the possibilities of his world rather than toward reduction, raising more questions than they resolve. His detail, however extensive and rigorously observed, is the tip of an iceberg of implications. The simile detailing Théoden on horseback “like a god of old, even as Orome the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young,”19 seems almost epic in its amplitude. Theoden’s magnificence is magnified in the godlikeness of a cultural hero so renowned his name needs no gloss, glorious in a battle so significant it needs no explanation. Yet for all that obviousness, the appeal of the allusion is to unseen complexity, to the convolutions of an underlying Middleearth mythology. For all its vividness, the allusion tells us nothing of Orome except his generic greatness, so little of Middle-earth religion we’re not certain it rises above superstition, nothing of the battle of the Valar save its ancientness—not the enemy fought, not the significance of the conflict, not even whether the battle was won. That open invitation to imagination fosters realism on two frontiers of the fiction. In the Middle-earth world itself, these missing legendary details cannot be plausibly spelled out for natives who naturally absorb such lore from the cultural atmosphere. And from the reader’s perspective, visitors to Middle-earth must sketch the specifics in from context, as newcomers to actual cultures do. With but a handful of such casual references in 600,000 words, there is established among Middle-earth peoples a sense of widespread mythic communion so deep as to elude explicit discussion.20 Tolkien’s detail works like that everywhere, typically reflecting rather than resolving density. His world picture owes its credibility not so much to



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elaborateness of development as to the vivid suggestiveness, the imaginative energy, the do-it-yourself appeal, of the carefully selected brushstrokes that do appear. The richness of that suggestion, although generated in ambiguity, is not allowed to dissipate unfocused. Middle-earth’s every aspect— its idiosyncratic topography and weather; its alien peoples and institutions; its innovative number systems, calendars, alphabets, and languages; and its fantastic fauna and flora—is grounded in the familiar. Weather results invariably from unobtrusive but discernible meteorological cause.21 Tolkien never goes out of his narrative way to tell the time of his tale, yet seasonal sequences of diurnal light patterns and even lunar cycles can be traced from incidental hints in the story.22 Third Age languages are so practically down-to-earth that modern mortals write letters in them.23 There is throughout Tolkien’s fictional universe “always a feeling of Present-earth.”24 The personal applicability of the fiction accounts for much of its appeal, as wryly attested by my students’ “Top Ten Justifications for Not Being Married from The Lord of the Rings”: 10. It’s the Arwen worry: a girl who married me might die. 9. If Frodo’s 60, still unmarried, yet saving the world, do I really need to get married? 8. Tom Bombadil’s cohabited happily for epochs without marriage. 7. The only time I gave a girl a ring she started talking about being a dark queen “beautiful as the morning and the night and all shall love her and despair” and I got nervous. 6. I’m 4’2”, kind of fat, and my feet are hairy. 5. Is anyone in this book married? 4. The only guy who has any lady luck at all swears it’s the yellow boots, and I’m not that desperate yet. 3. I have the “Black Breath.” 2. Whenever I thought about marriage a shadow fell on my heart though I did not know yet what I feared. 1. Think it’s hard getting an elf to let his daughter marry a mortal? Try talking somebody into letting his daughter marry an English major.25 Middle-earth, its “fantasy based on hard fact,”26 proves reliable with an earthiness that constantly stimulates readers to cross-reference to their own versions of reality. A creature as extraordinary as that stunningly innovative tree-being Fangorn is perceived at first sight by sharp-eyed Merry and Pippin as commonplace, an “old stump of a





tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing.”27 A typical touch of that deft earthing of Middle-earth underlies the climactic Mt. Doom episode. Although the narrative makes no more of it than latent steamings of assonance, the mountain is clearly a dormant volcano: “a huge mass of ash and slag and burned stone, out of which a sheersided cone was raised into the clouds” (919). As we approach with Frodo and Sam and the ring, submerged and incidental geological intimations of volcanic activation growl out of the mountain in onomatopoeic rumblings of prose—“a deep remote rumble as of thunder imprisoned under the earth” (918). There is a “brief red flame that flickered under the clouds and died away” (918), then we see the mountain “smoking” (924). We feel the pressure cooker buildup of a preparatory “roar and a great confusion of noise” in which “fires leaped up and licked the roof” and “the throbbing grew to a great tumult, and the Mountain shook” (925). Then Mt. Doom erupts: Then all passed. Towers fell and mountains slid; walls crumbled and melted, crashing down; vast spires of smoke and spouting steams went billowing up, up, until they toppled like an overwhelming wave and its wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land. Then at last over the miles between there came a rumble, rising to a deafening crash and roar; the earth shook, the plain heaved and cracked, and Orodruin reeled. Fire belched from its riven summit. The skies burst into thunder seared with lightning. Down like lashing whips fell a torrent of black rain. (925–26)

Vivid as that description is, we get no explicit indication the scene is volcanic until that “Orodruin reeled” sentence, and even then the mountain seems more personified than geologic. A few pages later, “a huge fiery vomit” rolls in “slow thunderous cascade down the eastern mountain-side,” and later still, in precise geological sequence, falls “a rain of hot ash” (929). Despite that journalistic reportage, we come away from the chapter having witnessed not the eruption of a volcano as detailed on the National Geographic channel, but rather the chaotic End of the Third Age triggered by Gollum’s fall into the Cracks of Doom with the One Ring. The volcano is incidental, so submerged in the narrative most readers are not consciously aware it is there.28 Developed unobtrusively throughout an entire chapter, that tangible volcanic eruption grounds an ostensibly supernatural incident in down-to-earth imagery. Middle-earth resonates with reality in part because its felt points of reference are earthy.



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That credibility confirms in the internal consistency of Tolkien’s creation. However dubious critics may be about its suggestive power or its foundation in the familiar, they find Middle-earth a “totally coherent world-scape,” “a structure that is so self-consistent and varied it will withstand any amount of probing.”29 “The internal coherence of its history, geography, philology” tends to reinforce “the impression of a world which has the interior consistency of the real world.”30 The aura of internal consistency is in part the product of Tolkien’s penetrating vision of his world, in part a dividend of its detailed development, and in part the result of such deliberate technical buttresses to coherence as his stylistic system of internal allusion, of cross-referencing to his world as if it were reality. Hobbits consistently think in Middle-earth terms; they compare aspects of their world as familiarly as we. They talk of riding “elf-fashion” (582), of being “more cruel than any Orc” (870); they make such distinctively Middle-earthy remarks as “You’re three inches taller than you ought to be, or I’m a dwarf” (934). Such internal confirmation has convinced some readers that the Middle-earth realism is entirely autonomous, that Tolkien’s creation has “no literal ties to actuality” but is independently “true to its own inner laws. It is simply ‘there.’ ”31 But as can be seen in Treebeard’s entish comparisons, this rhetorical process, like Tolkien’s art generally, proves Middle-earth through a syllogism whose premises are earthy: “Ents are more like Elves: less interested in themselves than Men are, and better at getting inside other things. And yet again Ents are more like Men, more changeable than Elves are, and quicker at taking the colour of the outside, you might say. Or better than both: for they are steadier and keep their minds on things longer” (457). That terrestrializing helps explain the apparent sleight of hand by which the fantastic beings of Middle-earth come to seem as real as next-door neighbors. The most far-out creatures appear as logical extensions of the familiar, likely links in a contiguous chain of being whose unearthliest extremity draws distant sustenance from roots in our world. “The reader walks through any Middle-earth landscape with a security of recognition that woos him on to believe in everything that happens.”32 Hobbits have much that is human about them, elves much that is hobbitish; in a world where barrow-wights have become by association believable, it is a small step to balrogs. Thus the cornucopial innovativeness of this fantastic world proves paradoxically self-authenticating: such new plants as simbelmyne flowers and mallorn trees, such new insects as neekerbreekers, such new bird species as the crebain, such drastically reshaped monsters as





orcs and barrow-wights and balrogs, even totally new categories of creation in the treeish ents and that ingenious invention the hobbit confirm their mutual authenticity by reciprocal reference both to each other and to the familiar flora and fauna of earth.33 Variation tending to integrity in Tolkien’s “astonishing prodigality of invention”34 can be seen even among Middle-earth men. The principal societies of this world, as Brian Rosebury observes, are “extremely various.”35 Despite their subordinate role in the Third Age, we meet no less than a dozen varieties of men, ranging from black Haradrim out of the southern regions to Snowmen from the Far North, from Anglo-Saxon Riders of Rohan to werebear Beornings, from aboriginal Woses to semisupernal Halfelven. Through that striking variety, men of Middle-earth form a graduated scale of plausibility that ultimately relates commonplace corpulent Breemen to ghoulish ringwraiths. Notwithstanding the integrity of its total cosmological mosaic, Tolkien’s fiction has been found seriously wanting in terms of piecemeal credibility. At intimate levels, critics see “bland and eyeless disregard of facts of life”36 in The Lord of the Rings’ rejection of everyday minutiae: “Not once in well over one thousand pages does a character brush his teeth, argue with his wife, or have a bowel movement.”37 Yet other readers are convinced that, in the very act of slighting such fundamental aspects of ordinary experience, The Lord of the Rings “joins the high art of the world in revealing the significance, even the glory, of the ordinary. No book published in recent times creates a more poignant feeling for the essential quality of experience.” That felt experience can be so real that “after reading the Rings, one sees and feels more deeply.”38 Tolkien’s success in chewing the huge chunk of narrative he bites off, in creating the essential quality of experience at a narrative pace that permits few of those experiences to be detailed, is in part the product of sheer sensuousness; the details that survive the refining of his fiction are compellingly tangible. He demonstrates a “sense of the power of places and things” that suggests that his “mythic knowhow” results directly “from touch and hearing, from taste and smell, and from sight.”39 But the hallmark of Middle-earth credibility is something deeper than that: not external accuracy so much as incidental glimpses of psychological rightness. The stylistic texture of the art provides internal substantiations whose integral appropriateness makes them seem spontaneous. Tolkien’s fiction, for all its deficiency of defecation, is rich in reflex realism, in the presence of common mortal concerns amidst the most



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rapid action and the most grandiose events, the sort of everyday reaction typified by Merry under imminent threat of his life pondering the harrowing fates of friends “all gone to some doom”: “In the midst of these gloomy thoughts he suddenly remembered that he was very hungry” (779). On yet a deeper level, the narrative endorses itself by the consistency of its contextual responsiveness. Characters react with dramatic, even mimetic appropriateness to situation, as when Frodo, hypnotized by hot-breathed Withywindle trees and overcome with a “compelling desire for cool water,” instead of drinking, treeishly bathes his feet (114). The psychological authentication of Tolkien’s fiction approaches Freudian levels of subtlety. That psychiatric insight can get almost clinical, as with the representation of Denethor’s aberrant behavior in terms of paranoia, the motivation of Théoden’s passivity as bipolar depression, and the causally rich implications of the parallels between Beorn’s werebear transformations and symptoms of epileptic seizure.40 This sensitivity to the mortal psyche tends to be most telling in its more modest manifestations: Sam, upon becoming familiarly acquainted, alters the “it” he has been calling Gollum to “he” (600). At their best, such fundamental assurances of actuality seem the intuitive reaction of an author feeling his way through experiences as unpremeditatedly as his characters. But Tolkien clearly has these validating earthy insights under tight artistic control. Bilbo’s riddle match with Gollum in The Hobbit, in all its folklorish obviousness, typifies that careful orchestration of submerged motivations. The riddle contest, a well-worn literary technique for dramatizing conflict since before Samson’s riddling challenge to Philistine wedding guests, is well chosen, permitting as it does the interplay of whimsy with life-and-death significance.41 For all the unassuming lightness of its tone, the verbal battle between Gollum and Bilbo grows with strict naturalness out of the immediate psychological environment, organically nurtured from fundamental reality. The first riddle there “at the very roots of the mountain” is, in perfect correspondence with the setting, about a mountain. Bilbo’s yearning to escape into the open air soon surfaces in a conundrum on “sun on the daisies.” The benighted brain of Gollum reacts to Bilbo’s sun with a “darkness” riddle, a riddle in this lightless environment easily solved, the answer being “all around them.” Visceral concern about Gollum’s sharp fangs focuses Bilbo’s riddles “uncomfortably” on teeth, on egg sucking, on fish dinner—“the idea of eating was rather on his mind.”





Associational sequence (darkness followed by sunlight, fish leading to fish dinner) moves through a natural crescendo of increasing difficulty and climactic order (the last line of the last riddle levels the “high mountains down” which were raised “up, up” in the first riddle; the final riddle incorporates all earlier riddles into “this thing all things devours”) to the climax of Gollum’s growing impatience in the riddle on time that Bilbo is able to answer only because his increasing panic causes him to cry out for more “ ‘Time! Time!’ ” Thus, with thoroughly credible adroitness, an apparent O. Henry twist of narrative saves the right-motived hero by the “pure luck” of intersecting valences of motivation (H66–73). Tolkien in this deft narrative manner gives careful attention to the whys underlying narrative hows, attention the more telling in terms of its contribution to credibility because it is so unobtrusive. That unobtrusiveness may be the wedge that drives the schisms among Tolkien evaluators. It may well be that this low-profile approach to motivation makes The Lord of the Rings a literary experience in which some readers “simply cannot become engrossed.”42 Such a discerning critic as Edmund Wilson can discover in it “no serious temptations . . . no insidious allurements . . . no serious problems. It is a simple confrontation—in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama—of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good.”43 Yet other readers are convinced in directly opposite directions that both “characters and their actions avoid” so much as a hint of “copybook banality.”44 The question of motivation is crucial, involving much more than a means to realism. Character motivation may be the central concern of the narrative—the plot of The Lord of the Rings is all about motivations, its thematic essence a demonstration of ways in which generous actions tend to be productive, whereas selfish actions prove self-thwarting. That implicit complexity of Middle-earth motivation is the very quality that involves some readers so thoroughly they find it “difficult to withdraw” from this fiction.45 Such a critic as Edmund Fuller sees in The Lord of the Rings a graphic “demonstration of the fact that creaturely life does not always offer us clear choices of good or evil”: “motives, even on the right side, are mixed”; “each individual is both good and evil.”46 It is likely this quiet concentration on underlying causes of action that moved Naomi Mitchison to suggest “if you are deeply interested in motive . . . this is the book for you.”47 Even those apparently blatant caricatures of evil, orcs, “recognize the idea of goodness, appreciate humor, value loyalty, trust, group cohesion and the ideal of a higher than themselves, and condemn failings from these ideals.”48



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There is ample scope for motive in this fictional cosmos. Middleearth hosts in addition to men “seven species capable of speech and therefore of moral choice . . . like us.”49 They are perhaps most like us in their vulnerability. The creatures of Middle-earth, however fantastic, are inescapably mortal. The most supernatural monsters—the Goblin King, Shelob, the Balrog—meet their mortal matches. Nor are the most righteously valiant warriors invincible: “the mightiest man may be slain by one arrow.”50 The wisest—Gandalf, Saruman, Sauron—make serious errors of judgment.51 The strongest—Boromir, the Lord of the Nazgul, Sauron himself—are defeated.52 The most trustworthy—Strider, Gimli, Galadriel, Gandalf, Frodo, even the loyal Sam—are sometimes suspect.53 The most depraved are “not altogether wicked” (676). The most venerable, like the dragons who live “practically forever, unless they are killed,” must die (H22). But to overassert the essential humanness of Middle-earth characters is to oversimplify the assertion made by Tolkien’s fiction. We rarely mistake hobbits or dwarves or ents for people, however much we may empathize or even identify with them. Tolkien’s nonpeople peoples provide readers with an objective perspective of ourselves made meaningful by intense personal involvement. The real power of these creations, as always in this fictive world, lies in their ambiguity, in their being not merely like us, but very much themselves. Some readers find those selves hardly worth being, “perfectly stereotyped . . . characters who are no characters” with an “utter lack of more than surface characterization”: “the most hackneyed of stereotypes.”54 Yet to others, Tolkien’s characters seem “not folk-tale ‘types’ . . . but beings . . . often as complex psychologically as any in world literature”: “no individual, and no species, seems to exist only for the sake of the plot. All exist in their own right,” “each one perfectly realized.”55 In that liminal space of critical contradiction between “perfectly stereotyped” and “perfectly realized” can be glimpsed the ramifying capacity of Tolkien’s prose style. There is a kind of DNA potential in this rhetorical approach that, for all the repetitiveness of its internal patterning, promises almost infinitely individualized manifestations. Even those who see the characterization in simplistic terms— “character delineation is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls”—intimate in that simplicity latent complexity: “Treebeard would have served any other author (If any other could have conceived him) for a whole book.”56





Tolkien “manages very cleverly to give his types an uncommon depth and solidity.”57 He manages it by discovering the individual within the type. Fictional creations based in “pure stock character”58 evolve in Middle-earth into individuals whose credible presence multiplies the implications of established stereotypes by the complexities of felt personality. Tolkien’s faërie characterization, as charmingly as every other aspect of his shamanistic style, expands the possibilities of the commonplace. That kind of concentrated complexity can be viewed anywhere in the vast collection of Tolkien’s thumbnail characterizations, even in such brief and less-read whimsies as Farmer Giles of Ham. Among the slightly drawn characters of this mock-heroic trifle, all of which are stereotypes, none is more blatantly stock than Farmer Giles’s horse, a tired hack who plods into the narrative looking like any other old grey mare. But her appearances, brief though they are, shade in a more complex picture within the frame of that stereotype. We soon see that she has a mind of her own; provided no provender, “the mare was indignant, and she forswore her allegiance to the house of King Augustus Bonifacius.” She is nobody’s fool; approaching the dragon: “as luck (or the grey mare herself) would have it, when at last they drew under the very shadow of the dark mountains, Farmer Giles’s mare went lame.” Yet confronted by the dragon: “The old grey mare did not budge. Maybe she was afraid of breaking her legs on the steep stony path. Maybe she felt too tired to run away. She knew in her bones that dragons on the wing are worse behind you than before you, and you need more speed than a race-horse for flight to be useful. . . . Anyway she stuck her legs out wide, and she snorted. . . . There seemed nothing else to do.” She is a realist whose horse sense gives her command of practical situations. It also makes her something of a skeptic: “The mare sniffed. She could not imagine Farmer Giles going down alone into a dragon’s den for any money on earth.” She is, in short—and her part is short: this is the sum of her appearances—a stereotype alive with unspoken possibilities: “The grey mare passed to her days’ end in peace and gave no hint of her reflections.”59 The old grey mare is an instructive example because Tolkien’s love of the idiosyncratic molds her into suggestive dimensions even though she is the most minor of minor characters in a minor tale, in a role whose narrative necessity requires nothing more than a ridable back. The progress of this slight story features more thorough fleshing out of other stereotypes, a Nagging Wife, a Mean Miller, a Self-serving Parson, a Vain King, a Stupid Giant, a Cowardly Dragon, the Faithful



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Dog Garm who liked “to bully or to brag or to wheedle” (FG35), plus that Honest English Yeoman and stereotype Farmer Giles of Ham himself, whose transformation into Dominus de Domito Serpente, Aegidius Draconarius, King of the Little Kingdom, the story is all about. Tolkien’s talent for suggesting the complexity within apparent simplicity can best be seen in his best creations, the hobbits. For all the richness of hobbit possibilities, Daniel Hughes is right that “the hobbit is neither mysterious nor magical.”60 Hobbits are mundanity incarnate, the epitome of “ordinary everyday” British middle-class philistinism: they are constantly engaged in “very respectable” and “well-ordered business” (5). They “never had any adventure or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins”—one of the more ruminative strains—“would say on any question without the bother of asking him” (H1–2). Their literary tastes run to “books filled with things they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions” (7). They are as vigorously unimaginative in lifestyle as in philosophy, “good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them)” (2). Telltale signs of the essential rednecked rusticity of these “commonsense commonplaces”61 appear in hobbit physique—they are “inclined to be fat in the stomach”—and in their architecture—“a hobbit-hole . . . means comfort.”62 As hero material, the hobbit is “the most unlikely person imaginable” (54), outstanding only for being “so dull” (79). Hobbits are, in short, “very like us,”63 us common folk. Yet within that exaggerated ordinariness there is “something . . . that does not quite meet the eye.”64 King Théoden, meeting hobbits for the first time outside legend, registers that surprising potential with typical Tolkien understatement: “It is said that they do little . . . but it seems that more could be said” (544). Hobbits are as “ramifying” as their tunnels (6). “Those Peter Rabbit creations,” far as they are from “observed personalities in the novelist’s sense,” develop into a “delicate triumph” of characterization that forms the nucleus of the vast universe of Tolkien’s fiction.65 The power of that hobbit attraction generates from balanced refusal to yield wholly either to the centripetal pull of their Little Peopleness on the one hand or the centrifugal force of their embryonic Manhood on the other. At once “man’s own daring admission of himself as he really is” and a creature closer to the ground who





“can see things that the poetic vision of man . . . fails to see,”66 the hobbit invites objective identification. These “relatives of ours” (2) are at the same time “strange folk” (424): hobbits are almost but “not quite like ordinary people” (H64). The tensions from the strange familiarity of that objectified ego make such individuated hobbits as Bilbo, Frodo, and especially Sam rich in personal implication for readers willing to look behind the ironic façade of their philistinism. Journeying with a hobbit is an adventure into self-understanding that “can be taken as far as the reader is able to take it.”67 Take, for the sake of a succinct example of hobbit possibilities, Gollum. Gollum is a hobbit in grievous decline, “a small slimy creature” (H66) with “no flesh worth a peck” (630), a hissing, sniveling “miserable slinker” (590) who hardly knows where his next blind fish or stale goblin meat is coming from. “As dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face” (H66), even his “heart is black” (H121). He slinks to such depths that he no longer merits the masculine pronoun, marauding snakily as “a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles” (57). Unprepossessing as he appears, this “faded” hobbit harbors surprising possibilities. “Slier than a fox, and as slippery as a fish” (375), he has “a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered” (248); his long fingers are “as quick as thinking” (H66). Even more striking are the moral shades that closer view distinguishes within the blackness of his heart. We see this emotionally wizened creature “pitifully anxious to please,” “chuckling to himself,” even “croaking in a sort of song” (604–06). He takes on cramped Faustian dimensions as the narrative gradually reveals that he was “the most inquisitive and curious minded” (51) of his clan, but curious in a degenerative direction: “his head and his eyes were downward” (62). We discover “a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it” (53). Indeed, “there is a change in him” (609), and for a while we see “the new Gollum” (604) so dominant that Sam wonders for awhile about him what we readers always wonder—whether “he’s the hero or the villain” (697). Gollum in his ambivalent character represents a great deal. He is both a “comic grotesque” and “a preternatural moral lesson.” He is the depths to which a free soul, or at least a free hobbit, can fall, “a Cain to Deagol’s Abel,” “in fact and theme, the darker self of both Bilbo and his nephew Frodo.”68 At the same time, Gollum is very much an individual, a “delightfully disgusting creation”69 in his own



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right; his idiosyncrasies define his being. Those idiosyncrasies, as well as the density of that contradiction which is the hobbit, are realized with graphic appropriateness in the divided state of his mind: Gollum is schizophrenic. His conversations with himself when he first appears hint of schizoid tendencies, and it soon becomes apparent that his identity has been confused by possession of the Ring of Power—he calls himself as well as the ring Precious (619); he daydreams of being gloriously swollen into “Lord Sméagol. Gollum the Great. The Gollum” (619). His conflict with the domination of the ring is manifest by increasing verbal dualism. “Then suddenly his voice and language changed, and he sobbed in his throat, and spoke but not to them. ‘Leave me alone . . . I, we, I don’t want to come back’ ” (602). As that “I-we” dichotomy deepens, “a pale light and a green light” alternate in his eyes, and Sam detects “Sméagol and Gollum halves (or what in his own mind he called Slinker and Stinker)” (624). One of the most intriguing moral considerations in the trilogy is Tolkien’s complication of Gollum’s ultimate utter degeneration by that “wild light of madness glaring in his eyes” (923). Eventually his better half is completely dominated; it is a thoroughly schizophrenic Gollum who says, “Poor Sméagol, he went away long ago. They took his Precious, and he’s lost now” (602). We sense the richness of personality of this most degenerated of hobbits in how much is lost when his soul is gone: “Which way has Gollum gone?” panted Sam. “Sméagol!” said Frodo, trying to call. “Sméagol!” But his voice cracked, and the name fell dead almost as it left his lips. There was no answer, not an echo, not even a tremor of the air. (703)

For all their individuating and densifying internal tensions, hobbits are far from complex as Middle-earth characters go. In fact they are characterized by their simplicity. Wizards are infinitely more intricate in conception, ents more unique. Elves exhibit a relative depth of character that, in Tolkien’s elf-centered Silmarillion, attains a profundity at some points overshadowing The Lord of the Rings as that work eclipses The Hobbit. Even Tolkien’s dwarves, which critics have tended to see as “in the main, traditional,”70 seem more to me as Tolkien considers them—“a race apart”: “They are a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stone, of gems, of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by





their own life. But they are not evil by nature, and few ever served the Enemy of free will, whatever the tales of Men may have alleged” (1106). The dwarf character as it appears in Middle-earth is an accumulation of contradictions. Driven by the crassness of constant “lust for gold” (1051), dwarves are yet sensitive: “No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them” (535). Dwarves are thoroughly inconsiderate yet scrupulously polite. They are truckling and truculent, self-seeking and loyal, gregarious and taciturn, dreamy and practical, petty and magnificent.71 Despite unprepossessing size they are “untameable,” “of a kind to resist most steadfastly any domination.”72 “Cruel,” even “pitiless,” they are somehow strangely admirable.73 Perhaps it is because Bilbo, Beorn, Elrond, all the elves and a lot of other condescending folk are “not overfond of dwarves” that they become dourly appealing to the reader: “There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much” (H195). Out of the earthy credibility of those easygoing expectations, Tolkien molds beings who manage even in their group manifestation considerably more presence than the average run of fictional hero. Tolkien’s capacity for achieving implicit characterization with a minimum of explicit characterizing is essentially a matter of stylistic suggestion. He evokes terrifying abysses of character through such brief glimpses of attitude as these self-revelatory orc asides about a fellow monster: “She just gives ‘em a jab in the neck and they go as limp as boned fish, and then she has her way with them. D’you remember old Ufthak? We lost him for days. Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed! She’d forgotten him, maybe, but we didn’t touch him” (723). Undeterred by the cheesy horror movie trappings of giant spiders, that final orcish clause condenses chapters of external description in its insight into truly horrific psychological potential. Tolkien’s characterizing, submerged and unpretentious as it is, manages by means of its intense condensation to be amazingly universalizing. The fantastic creatures of Middle-earth are real because Tolkien turns every aspect of his taut tale to that purpose. The very names of



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Middle-earth fantasies ring true by means of built-in linguistic credibility factors: “Many people . . . feel that names fit; and that places have a character of their own. On this not entirely irrational opinion much of Middle-earth is based.”74 Tolkien’s application of the term ents (Latin graft) to his tree people evokes etymological echoes of an epoch when men were closer to trees. Neekerbreekers sound their name. The Latin stem in orc reflects the diabolical nature and subterranean habitat of creatures vile enough to be denominated an equally guttural cognate of ogre—the scope of those orc connotations becomes apparent in Entish, which calls the creatures “evileyedblackhanded-bowlegged-f linthearted-clawf ingered-foulbelliedbloodthirsty, morimaitesincahonda” (957). We meet all these creatures, however weird, on familiar ground. As usual with Tolkien’s deftly “characteristic combination of the familiar with the unfamiliar,”75 much of the magic of Middle-earth rhetoric grows out of Tolkien’s adroit juggling of the remarkable and the mundane in ways that echo Coleridge and Wordsworth’s intermingling of the supernatural and the commonplace in Lyrical Ballads. The more unusual monsters approach us in the lessthreatening territory of legend before we face them in actuality; rumor comes before to prepare the way for belief. En route to encounter that climactically villainish dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, we pass a preparatory procession of intermediate monsters—trolls, goblins, wargs, and giant spiders—plus a long list of confirmatory allusions to Smaug’s existence beginning with the dwarves’ legendary dragon lay as early as the initial chapter. Even the unprepossessing dragon Chrysophylax in the relatively simplistic Farmer Giles of Ham comes thoroughly heralded, announced by a sequence of eight increasingly reliable and auspicious messages ranging from the barking of Garm to the royal proclamation to news from the neighboring town that the dragon had devoured not only “sheep and cows and one or two persons of tender age,” but “the parson too.”76 We meet the most unthreatening Middle-earth monsters through similarly successive intimations: there are five extensive discussions of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings before we see so much of him as “some soft plashing and a sniffing noise,” and despite persistent references, he does not in his repulsive person enter the narrative until well past its midway point.77 Middle-earth creations not only come anticipated, they reveal themselves realistically. The advent of ringwraiths is predicted at the outset of The Lord of the Rings, and creatures we discover much later to be those superghouls appear in the introductory Shire episode.78





But they appear initially as “Black Riders,” spies more human than diabolical. The transition from Black Rider to Nazgul, from sneaky snooper to satanic right-hand man of Sauron, demands much of the length of the narrative and step-by-step development of reader awareness of the imminence of fantastic evil through journeying with Frodo’s band into growing terror, shadowed every step of the way by the increasingly awesome presence of a Black Rider, while we and the hobbits see in the distance “a black figure,” hear a “long-drawn wail,” detect his “sniffing,” feel his “deadly chill,” and suffer a hallucinatory vision of him before finally confronting him face to face, “blackmantled, huge, and threatening,” a black-hole absence become a terrifying presence: “between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only the gleam of deadly eyes.”79 That “naught was there to see,” its syntactic inversion urging the punning possibility of reciprocity between frustration of reader vision and Nazgul eyelessness, provides a capsule comment on Tolkien’s characterizing technique. The credibility generated by this gradual incarnation of bodiless presence is all the more compelling for its being more a matter of increasing reader insight than of Nazgul character development; even the ringwraith escalation of steeds from black horses to pterodactylian creatures dramatizes our increasingly infernal vision of them as much as their enhanced powers. That stylistic progression is psychologically apt: “Though the Ringwraiths do have physical capacities, their real weapon is psychological; they disarm their victims by striking them with fear and despair.”80 Tolkien’s developmental realism enables the Nazgul to become real in terms of our perception of them. Much of the credible force of Tolkien’s characters grows out of the apparent casualness and definite ambiguity of their development. It is precisely because “as personalities they do not impose themselves,”81 because the artistry of Tolkien’s creation aims at involving the reader in subcreation, that the fantastic characters of Middle-earth are capable of growing into “the most convincing men and women of Faërie this critic has ever encountered.”82 Uncanny as its believability may be in its own right, Middle-earth refuses to be satisfied with autonomous existence. Time and again the cables of Tolkien’s narrative secure grappling hooks of legend in the world as we know it—as we knew it, that is, before Tolkien. He is not concerned with making illusion seem real; he is at great pains to establish that his world is imaginative and not merely imaginary, a manifestation of the existence of a larger world transcending our narrow vision of things.



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Fantasy for Tolkien is “the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds.”83 His artistic perspective eclipses the making with the glimpsing—made worlds are here veritably glimpsed worlds; art at its best incarnates unseen reality. Hence arises his insistence that the term supernatural is misapplied to faërie: “For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he” (Tree 12). Tolkien naturalizes. Under the cumulative spell of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, we come to accept his world less as a clever figmentation and more and more as a vision of a larger reality in which the world we thought we knew represents only an aspect of the total truth. One of his narrative routes to that larger reality lies through transfiguration of the normal. Tolkien discovers something extra in the ordinary; indeed, the most common critical epithet applied to his fiction by both positive and negative camps is extraordinary.84 That something-added quality appears everywhere in Middle-earth. Tolkien’s characters, for instance, “do the same job as the maps and the names: they suggest very strongly a world which is more than imagined, whose supernatural qualities are close to entirely natural ones.”85 The ordinary in Middle-earth is largely incorporated in “the ordinary hobbit” (43); men here seem considerably more legendary. The hobbit’s conventional, commonsense point of view, a point of view scrupulously maintained despite persistent peregrinations of personae, is an apt lens for “showing other ways in which the world can be seen.”86 Hobbit down-to-earthiness inspires confidence: we allow ourselves to be undeceived by hobbits because they seem too sensible to be themselves deceived, too unimaginative to misconceive actuality, too dull to be deceitful. Moreover, Tolkien generates considerable empathy for his focal hobbits by appealing to the hobbit in each of us; we tend to accept their insights because we accept them as “relatives of ours” (2). And because their enthusiastically middleclass materialistic mundanity allows them to be laughed at as well as learned from, we tend, in order to avoid laughing at ourselves, to leap to their credulous conclusions before they themselves leap. The very shortsightedness of hobbits impels us to vaster vision. Proceeding from that carefully limited hobbit perspective, Tolkien demonstrates that the normal view of the world is myopic. Though dragons may be seen on most any street corner in Middleearth, reasonable people stolidly refuse to believe in them. Dale folk, about to be attacked by Smaug, “openly doubted the existence of any dragon”: even among professed believers, the “legend did not





much affect their daily business.”87 The good burghers of Bag End cannot see out of the cul-de-sac of their provinciality, let alone as far as dragons: “In this neighborhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dishcovers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary)” (H20). Dragons in Farmer Giles of Ham go so far in that cynical direction as to view things from the other end of that telescope of skepticism: “ ‘So knights are mythical!’ said the younger and less experienced dragons. ‘We always thought so.’ ” Even the “older and wiser worms” think knights “ ‘may be getting rare . . . far and few and no longer to be feared’ ” (FG25). Middle-earth disarms doubt with its own dubiety. Tolkien outscoffs the skeptics. When Bilbo warns himself “don’t be a fool . . . thinking of dragons and all that outlandish nonsense at your age!” (H26), it is the very force of our skepticism that converts us to his foolishness. Frodo’s frequent “what-am-I-doing-here-in-all-this-idiocy?” similarly forestalls reader objection.88 Before we have so much as had a chance to doubt dragons, let alone ents or orcs or Nazgul, we recognize among feet-on-the-ground farmer hobbits at the Green Dragon Inn in “the comfortable heart of the Shire” the limitations of Ted’s normal doubt: “Queer things you do hear these days, to be sure,” said Sam. “Ah,” said Ted, “you do, if you listen. But I can hear fireside-tales and children’s stories at home, if I want to.” “No doubt you can,” retorted Sam, “and I daresay there’s more truth in some of them than you reckon. Who invented the stories anyway? Take dragons now.” “No thank ‘ee,” said Ted, “I won’t. I heard tell of them when I was a youngster, but there’s no call to believe in them now. There’s only one Dragon in Bywater, and that’s Green.” (43)

After a thousand pages of wonders far surpassing dragons, that hardy hobbit skepticism reasserts its shortsightedness in a footnote to the final index of the last volume of The Lord of the Rings: “It thus became a jesting idiom in the Shire to speak of ‘on Friday the first’ when referring to a day that did not exist, or to a day on which very unlikely events such as the flying of pigs or (in the Shire) the walking of trees might occur” (1082). To readers personally acquainted with a forest full of walking trees in Fangorn, the manifest myopia of such hardheaded doubt comes as a considerable stimulus to belief.



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In this context of growing conviction, Tolkien unveils magic, uncommonly believable magic: “the ordinary everyday sort” (H2). Middle-earth is rich in down-to-earth magic of the imagination. We discover there the sleight of hand of deftness, skill, art: “Hobbits possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical. But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind” (1). We witness natural incantations: “Bilbo whistled. Three dwarves came out of different rooms.”89 We find magic emerging from the most mundane of sources—work, for example, in Frodo’s warning to Sam that enchanted seeds are not in themselves enough: “Use all the wits and knowledge you have of your own . . . and then use the gift to help your work and better it. And use it sparingly” (1000). We even see commercial magic, in the blacksmith who “knew how to turn an honest penny into twopence” (Smith 22) or the “enchantment of surpassing excellence” on Barliman Butterbur’s beer (257). We learn from Middle-earth experience how much magic is of the imagination, how much it is a manifestation of attitude. Middleearth elves, instantaneously extinguishing the light by a process beyond our understanding, “as if by magic” (H40), reveal to us that many such processes proceed perfectly well in the primary world beyond our understanding and any real comprehension of electricians. It is not only in Tolkien’s world that “things are impossible” (H248). The technical incredibility of our everyday world is persistently illuminated by such flashes of Middle-earth insight as “dwarves have never taken to matches even yet” (H103). Middleearth manifests to the reader that operative faith is after all a fundamental fact of life, that the mundane is essentially marvelous. Shippey suggests “the difference between Earth and Middle-earth, one might say, is that in the latter faith can, just sometimes, be perceived as fact.” 90 I would say too that Middle-earth dramatizes to us how faith is always, on our own earth, at least potentially a matter of fact. Middle-earth magic is so natural it shows us the magic of our own lives. Thus Tolkien encourages us to “recover the habit of imagination.”91 Like Wordsworth and the modern magical realists, he approaches the commonplace from a fresh perspective, envisioning wonder to which our eyes have become calloused by familiarity. He sees the surprise of the usual.92 He manages to manifest that surprise by exploiting to the full his fantastic advantage over realistic literature that dare not approach so closely the strangeness of truth. By the very act of





overemphasizing commonness, calling our attention to such things as “ordinary bears” (H120) and “actual darkness” (H260), he points out their inherent extraordinariness. His fiction realizes the marvelous by refusing to take the mundane for granted. Absorbing that inverse realism, the sympathetic reader admits deeper dimensions of reality. The hallmark of Tolkien’s version of magical realism is its open-endedness, its stimulation of the observer to “participate actively” in the work of art: “the allusions could mean something different to each spectator.” 93 Tolkien’s creation is an open invitation to subcreation. This deft author provokes reader involvement with alluring depths of apparently transparent narrative. In incident after unassuming incident, there is more to the action than meets the eye. Frodo, for example, disquieted by Black Rider alarms in the distant Shire, “went to sleep again; but his dreams were again troubled with the noise of wind and of galloping hoofs. The wind seemed to be curling round the house and shaking it; and far off he heard a horn blowing wildly. He opened his eyes, and heard a cock crowing lustily in the inn-yard” (189). Like Tolkien’s fiction, itself “notes of the horn of Elfland”94 resonating down the mind of the reader, that far-off horn winds from the apparent world of the Shire into profounder actuality, sounding out in Frodo’s imagination paradoxical confirmation of his most pessimistic fears through the rooster’s dawning optimism, psychological projection surpassing the reliability of objective fact. Unheard echoes reverberate into the psychically actual identification of wind and threatening hooves, of cock crowing and horn blowing, echoing through that insistent sound imagery from its source in the primary world through the imaginative amplification of the Frodian psyche back to its tangible source with such celerity that the sounds of seen and unseen worlds fuse in a single stereophonic impression. In Middle-earth, as in our individual worlds, the invisible invests the visible, the psychological informs the metaphysical. The psychological depths probed by Tolkien with this simple stylistic technique of relating the amazing to the commonplace can be profound. Tolkien has been much maligned for tarring all his negative characters with the same broad brush, hilariously so by Edmund Wilson in “Ooo Those Awful Orcs.” Yet recent readers like Tom Shippey are as impressed as I am with the subtleties of dark psychology in Tolkien creation: “Evil works, we realise, by sapping the will with over-complication. Like ‘the Shadow,’ this is in fiction an external force with physical effects of which sensitive characters like Legolas can be aware.” 95 Because “even in reality things are not



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always as they seem” (39), this strange fiction can paradoxically seem in some ways true. The direction of Tolkien’s narrative movement leads the reader into intimacy with that inherent faërie in the world. The Hobbit is a journey into unfamiliar territory whose gradualness acclimates us to the extraordinary: “The broad scope of Middle-earth unfolds slowly and believably as we cross the bridge from a known world to a fabulous one.” 96 The process is partly chronological, as when narrative time reveals “an old man with a staff” to be “Gandalf . . . the wandering wizard” (H3–5). The progression is at the same time geographical, a narrative and psychological movement from the recognizable to the outlandish, as can be seen in capsule form in Bilbo’s departure from the Shire: “At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse” (H29). The characteristic movement of Tolkien narrative is toward discovery of “a world of wonder.” 97 For us as for Bilbo, acceptance of the outlandish increases in direct proportion with distance from the Shire: “It is easier to believe in the dragon . . . in these wild parts” (H186). The Lord of the Rings narrative even further extends our imaginative range by making “wild parts” psychologically contiguous with the familiar world. Starting again from the sensible Shire, where dwarves are considered “outlandish folk” (24), innocuous Bree looked upon as “a dark bad place . . . where folks are so queer” (22), and giant tree-men absolutely scoffed at as “things that ain’t there” (43), we journey with the hobbits into the increasing preternaturalness of the Old Forest: “Are those stories about it true?” asked Pippin. “I don’t know what stories you mean,” Merry answered. “If you mean the old bogey-stories Fatty’s nurses used to tell him, about goblins and wolves and things of that sort, I should say no. At any rate I don’t believe in them. But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire.” (108)

The deeper in we venture, the more strangely familiar the Old Forest seems to become.98 Sensitized by Merry’s account of previous





experience with vigorous vegetation, the reader attunes to apparent plant language, detecting more than metaphoric significance in the “whispering” of leaves. The trees’ vividly detailed responsiveness to wind and weather intensifies to the point of animation, and we begin to suspect that the branches of Old Forest trees “sway and grope without any wind.” Indications of possible willfulness become imaginable: “Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer” (108). As we advance into the forest, the trees seem more and more actively hostile: they first will “not yield,” then begin “to close in,” finally “force” (112). In some, like the “huge willow-tree, old and hoary,” animistic form can be detected: “Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands” (114). This personifying process is so gradual and so deeply rooted in the familiar that even the shock of the outlandish situation fails to trigger incredulity when a tree hypnotizes the hobbits with its mesmerizingly glimmering leaves, trapping Merry and Pippin in thoroughly plausible fissures. We are so caught up here in what’s happening we don’t wonder whether it can happen. The whole movement of the narration presses the reader to feel with anxious hobbits the awesome believability of this almost animate forest, where “strange furtive noises ran among the bushes and reeds on either side of them; and if they looked up to the pale sky, they caught sight of queer gnarled and knobbly faces that gloomed dark against the twilight, and leered down at them” (119). The potential vitality of the trees so convincingly manifests itself that the very absence of activity—“no whispering or movement among the branches,” “no echo or answer” (109)—comes to indicate latent animation. Much of the magic of Middle-earth lies in this uncanny ability to conduct us credibly into the incredible. Tolkien’s narrative believably bridges the real and the surreal. The bridge traffics both ways. As we enter the incomprehensible, the ineffable enters us. Having seen trees so unassumingly assume human characteristics, it hardly strikes the reader as strange to internalize tree feelings by imbibing entwine with the hobbits: “The effect of the draught began at the toes, and rose steadily through every limb, bringing refreshment and vigour as it coursed upwards, right to the tips of the hair. Indeed the hobbits felt that the hair on their heads was actually standing up, waving and curling and growing” (460). Even for those of us who are for the first time here feeling our hair grow, the far side of Middle-earth, that world in which everyday



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reality assumes a mythical quality, is “a world in which myths turn out to be true.” 99 Tolkien humanizes the supernal as he idealizes the human; he relates the transcendent directly to the reader. The matterof-fact hobbit perspective persistently grounds the fantastic in the finite by the simple expedient of juxtaposing its earthiness against things ethereal. Gaffer Gamgee, for example, brings the supernal solidly down to earth with his characteristic exclamation, “ ‘Elves and dragons!’ I says to him. ‘Cabbages and potatoes’ ” (24). Middle-earth everywhere manifests the mundane in the magical. Wizards, esoteric experts in Middle-earth magic, are focused by the clarity of Tolkien’s narrative into definitely commonplace dimensions. The mysterious “much lore” (251) of Gandalf, for all its wizardish effectiveness, reveals itself in practice to be a most unmystical combination of clever chemistry, some explosives experience with “particularly excellent fireworks,” diligent detective efforts, a little electrical know-how, and a lot of busybody public relations “wandering about and minding the affairs of Men and Elves.”100 Gandalf himself is explicit about the natural basis of his wizardry when praised as “mighty in wizardry”: “That may be. But if so, I have not shown it yet. I have but given good counsel in peril, and made use of the speed of Shadowfax” (530). The very means of Middle-earth sorcery approximate the mundane. Gandalf’s wand flashes “like lightning,” but more like a flashlight. Saruman’s crystal-ball “palantir” has the same reception problems as my television set. The Silent Watchers might be an electric eye system in a superstitious setting, and Sauron’s most destructive magic seems materially like modern artillery or a World War II air raid.101 Tolkien’s fiction invariably grounds the apparently supernatural in ready natural explanation. During the titanic battle of sorcery between Gandalf and the Balrog, “those that looked up from afar thought that the mountain was crowned with storm” (491). As Frodo’s faërie ship sails into the Grey Havens in the Uttermost West, Sam sees “only a shadow on the waters” (1007). The narrator goes to great trouble to naturalize the uncanny disappearance of hobbits: “Even a keen-eyed beast of the wild could scarcely have seen the hobbits, hooded, in their grey cloaks, nor heard them, walking as warily as the little people can. Without the crack of a twig or the rustle of a leaf they passed and vanished” (686; cf. H32, 963). Often Tolkien’s presentation is so manifestly biased toward natural explanation that it provokes the reader in compensation toward the magical, as with the mysterious roads of Mirkwood which “vanished or fell into disuse,” or the “earthquake or two (which some were inclined to attribute to the dragon)” (H175).





Tolkien focuses his fantastic world into earthy perspective by providing it a history. “No matter how much Tolkien loves and enjoys fantasy, history absorbs him.”102 He asserts Middle-earth historicity by attaching its history to ours, making hobbit annals markedly Anglo-Saxonish, chronicling the appearance of the “Reunited Kingdom,” alluding to Norse historical events, suggesting modern history as an afterword to The Lord of the Rings.103 The narratives of Middle-earth also assume an internal past by frequent backward glances and an insistent sense of phylogeny, which ultimately brings legend into proximity with life. Middle-earth legends keep coming true; old wives’ tales prove reliable.104 The very semantics of Middle-earth enliven legend: story appears as an exact synonym for history. Tale means a plausible explanation of fact, an accurate tally, an account of a life. Distant news is “a tale from far off” (830). The Middle-earth annals are titled The Tale of Years. To its dictional foundations, Tolkien’s creation is “a work of art but it is also history.”105 The effect of all this normalizing of the supernal is not to trivialize faërie but to affirm its everydayness. Proceeding from premises that real things have magic in them and magic a real foundation, Middle-earth proves reality magical. The invisible, far from being reduced, widens its implications in down-to-earth realization, as when “on a time” is footnoted “March 15, 2941” (1052). Like the barrow-wight’s spell on his treasure mound, which gets “broken and scattered” by division of the treasure, magic confirms in tangible paradigm (142). The potential density of such sympathetic vibrations between the earthy and the supernal are particularly evident in the focusing of unnatural terrors by approximation with familiar fears. When Frodo hesitates in his flight from the awesome Black Riders because he is nervous about crossing cantankerous Farmer Maggot’s mushroom patch, the urgency of the near fear actualizes the supernatural as that instills overtones of vaster terror (89). That densifying reciprocation of the imminent and the transcendent can be more explicitly seen in the earthy concerns of Sam, who “had imagined himself meeting giants taller than trees, and other creatures even more terrifying, some time or other in the course of his journey; but at the moment he was finding his first sight of Men and their tall houses quite enough, indeed too much for the dark end of a tiring day” (149). Thus the focused ambiguity of Middle-earth asserts not that reality is illusory, but that much that we have taken for illusion is real. To stress that insight, Tolkien pointedly realizes illusions. Frodo, seeing what seem to be black specks in the distance, does a double take and



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notices three others “creeping eastward to meet them.” Although “neither Frodo nor Merry could make out their shapes for certain,” the illusory specks turn out to be painfully real ringwraith steeds (184).106 With his attention to the deceptiveness of appearances, Tolkien gives credence to his apparent world so convincingly that we can overhear in the forest of Fangorn “not an echo but an answer” (468). A troll, which earlier adventures have intimated might be but rocky figment of hobbit imagination, comes with a tangible vengeance “crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him” (874; cf 203). Middle-earth’s double-barreled imagery has a disturbing habit of turning on the reader, of blasting appearances and exploding assumptions into profounder awareness. When Faramir says of a narratively visible boat, “Then I saw, or it seemed that I saw, a boat floating on the water, glimmering grey” (651), his reality cum vision upsets preconceptions into deeper dimensions of suggestion. The blurred grey edges might be a figment of Faramir’s wish-fulfilling fantasy, or his brother’s funeral boat might actually be mystically transformed into ethereal translucence. Whether by psychological projection or supernatural miracle, reality in Middle-earth might have become vision, vision reality: the perceptive eye might here have discovered illusion and actuality to be complementary, integrating art with life. On the ever-present other hand of Middle-earth plausibility, Faramir’s eyesight might be blurry. Middle-earth metaphor similarly unsettles its readers into insight. By coining secondary world metaphor from primary world reality, Tolkien presents a pregnant paradox in which acceptance of the reality of the imagery means acceptance of Middle-earth as an image of realism. Watching a giant, for example, squash Farmer Giles’s favorite cow “as flat as the farmer could have squashed a black-beetle” (FG13), our minds, oscillating about the probabilities of that “could have” between the possibility of fantastic giants and the certitude of beetle-squashing farmers to arrive at the farmer premise proving the giant thesis, enriches both aspects of the metaphor: we learn from the image as much of the farmer’s pretentiousness as of the giant’s clumsiness. Tolkien’s actuated metaphor proves the improbable by the undeniable, densifying both. This double-edged naturalizing is whetted by every element of the fiction, especially style. The very diction is a microcosm of Middleearth’s characteristic ambiguous simplicity. Tolkien once told an interviewer who found him unclear, “I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.”107 He writes the same way. He’s meticulous about the smudging.





Very much the modern literary artisan, he is Hemingwayesque in the care of the preparation of his prose: “Every part has been written many times. Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. “ Style clearly matters to Tolkien; he informs us that “the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all the features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered.”108 Tolkien is a careful stylist, down to the most minute detail. In my 40 years of editing, the only book I’ve read that is more carefully proofread than the Lord of the Rings is the King James Version of the Bible. The concentration of this prose, coupled with deliberately ambiguous diction, opens out the potential implications of apparently simple narrative almost to incomprehensibility. Tolkien introduces a cabalistic air among his forthright verbs through a disproportion of such actively ambiguous terms as imagined, believed, suspected, wondered, half fancied, as if, apparently—the frankly equivocal seemed ranks high among the most frequent verbs in The Lord of the Rings.109 He conjures his straightforward substantives with odd, queer, curious, strange, unnatural—modifiers tending to objectify the supernatural even as they imply mystery in the natural.110 Playing up such terms as chance, luck, and fortune, he smiles at the plotted coincidences from which he structures his narrative world at the same time he complicates their significance. It is in the liminal space between the commonplace and the astonishing that Tolkien opens the door in his fiction to the preternatural as unassumingly as Jews inviting Elijah to the Passover. Tolkien’s invitational style, with its sensitivity to subtle nuance, illuminates dimensions of numinous belief too deep for more melodramatic expositions: “Too strong a flurry of angelic wings, too ready recourse to miracles or to Omnipotence, would instantly diminish the stature of the characters,” Shippey reminds us. Tolkien’s understated theology is at once more supernal and more natural: “ ‘May the Valar turn him aside!’ shout the Gondorians as the ‘oliphaunt’ charges. But the Valar don’t. Or perhaps they do, for the beast does swerve aside, though this could be only chance.”111 This prose, almost under its breath, opens up breathtaking possibilities: “Think of what might have been. . . . There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now hope to return from the victory here only to ruin and ash. But that has been averted—because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chancemeeting, as we say in Middle-earth” (1053). The actualizing potential of those theoretical implications makes the apparently nonexistent Middle-earth theology one of the best



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places to observe the subtlety of Tolkien’s profundities. The Lord of the Rings is profoundly religious, about as religious as fiction can get. Tolkien himself more than once disavowed that elusive religious quality. But in a letter to Father Murray he admitted the novel is “of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”112 The ambivalence of its author about the book’s religiousness may be because it both is and is not a religious work—not overtly religious, not religious in appearances, but rather religious in its bones: “The religious element is absorbed into the story.”113 Thus it comes as no surprise that critical opinions on the religiosity of Tolkien, as with everything else in his fiction, differ markedly. Catholic scholar Bradley Birzer asserts “the myth behind Tolkien was of course Catholic Christianity, the True Myth.”114 Birzer thinks “the Ring represented sin, the lembas the Blessed Sacrament, Galadriel the Blessed Virgin Mary,”115 Gandalf’s Secret Fire “The Holy Spirit,” the Blessed Realms heaven, and every other thing in the book equally thoroughly blessed, bless Birzer’s Catholic heart. Baylor Baptist Ralph Wood, on the Protestant other hand, asserts that Middle-earth is a “providentially ordered universe.”116 Wood’s Lord of the Rings, though directly in contrast to Birzer’s, is just as thoroughly theological, replete with Pauline faith, hope, and charity: “faith as friendship, hope as the desire for [postmortal] fulfillment, love as forgiveness.”117 For Wood, Tolkien is Billy Graham with a better gift for narrative. For Birzer, Tolkien is the pope—he explicates the novel, in fact, with benefit of several papal encyclicals. Tolkien himself insists “as for ‘message’: I have none really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth.”118 So it may seem to less doctrinaire readers that Tolkien’s fictive religion lies deeper than sectarian theology, beyond catechisms and even doctrines to moral essences. The Lord of the Rings might be better read as parable than as sermon, as symbol rather than allegory, as morality rather than theology—better read at the level of lived religion than as religious theory. At that more interior level, there may be not so much a moral of the story as literary motives, motives, even, as in parables or symphonies. There may be, for instance, inherent suggestion of subcreation, implication we can participate with God in creating, in making of our world better worlds with more trees and fewer cars, in making of ourselves better people. There may lie deep in Tolkien’s subtle religiosity intimations of the reality of evil, a suggestion that there may be not only truly bad stuff





out there, but truly bad stuff in here, in us—evil that is not horrormovie scary entertainment, but scary actuality, evil that, in its horribly real selfishness and greed, turns out to be self-defeating. There may be the more deeply underlying implication that love is the core of morality, and that love translates in practical terms to friendship, to getting by with a little help from our friends so unpretentiously and naturally every reader can echo Merry’s “You cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone. We are your friends, Frodo” (103). Growing out of that bottom-line love may be responsibility, the direct contradiction of modern victim mentality, a sturdy disposition to take upon ourselves personally the worst of tasks under the most difficult of situations: “I will take the Ring,” The Lord of the Rings disposes us to say with Frodo, “though I do not know the way” (264). That kind of practical love may trigger in us, too, mercy, the kind of “mercy not to strike without need” (58) that allows Gollum to live and that leads ultimately to the destruction of the ring, the kind of “sometimes things must be given up” sacrifice that seems to make Sam the greatest among men and hobbits because he is the ultimate servant. That love may foster a kind of courage that owes ironically little to the grandiose Northern heroic sort and everything to the quiet hobbit hang-in-there sort, the kind of personal and social regeneration that can be seen in “The Scouring of the Shire” or, closer to home, in Sam’s humbly summative “Well. I’m back” (1008). “To really get the job done,” suggests a close observer of those underlying morals of the Tolkien story, “you need a little guy.”119 Those persistent strains of simple human goodness and essential moral concern accumulate to an undergirding and overarching religiousness in Tolkien’s fiction that celebrates all life as quest, weighting every action with momentous implications: “To get out of bed, to answer the phone, to respond to a knock at the door, to open a letter—such everyday deeds are freighted, willy-nilly, with eternal consequence.”120 “Tolkien succeeds in synthesizing the physical with the metaphysical in a way which marks him as a mystic.”121 That integration of the numinous with the here and now may explain how Tolkien’s theology, for all its practical earthiness and profound understatement, manages to carry cosmic implications in every Lord of the Rings sentence. To step out our front door might be to step into the abyss. To reach for our morning coffee could stretch our souls in the direction of eternal implications. The kind of subtle preternaturalizing that permeates Tolkien’s religiousness is so persistent everywhere in his diction it carries over into syntactic levels of style. The insistent clarity of Tolkien’s prose



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seems not to dissipate but to intensify explicit ambivalence by making it more visible, as in the focused oscillation of this description of the fate of hobbit horses: “They had to work harder in Bree, but Bob treated them well; so on the whole they were lucky—they missed a dark and dangerous journey. But they never came to Rivendell” (175). That kind of clear ambiguity reflects itself at more profound levels of Tolkien’s fiction, most intriguingly in a sort of grammar of faith. The paradoxical probability of metaphysical incident occasionally expresses itself in an objectifying absence of subjunctive mood, the assertive was in place of tentative were: “Tom Bombadil came trotting round the corner of the house, waving his arms as if he was warding off the rain—and indeed when he sprang over the threshold he seemed quite dry, except for his boots.”122 Tense, too, can upset grammatical expectations into new dimensions of probability, as in this shift from narrative past to eternal present: “He cried, and knew not what he had spoken; for it seemed that another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit. But other potencies there are in Middle-earth”(704). Tolkien constantly equivocates; the texture of his prose is everywhere enriched by the profound whimsy of contextual pun. A typical instance is his fertilization of The Lord of the Rings theme of literal invisibility by frequent figurative vanishings and disappearances: Gandalf “quickly vanished into the twilight” (40), “Sam disappeared” (68), the Black Rider “seemed to vanish across the lane” (77), Merry “passed out into the sunshine and disappeared into the long grasses” (113), Goldberry “turned and vanished behind the hill” (133), Tom Bombadil “disappeared in front of them” (118), ents “strode into the wood and vanished” (536), Gondor warriors “vanished quickly into the shadows of the rocks” (653), “the pony bolted into the mist and vanished” (136), “the clouds vanished southward” (292), “flaming brands scattered and vanished” (520), “the falling stream vanished into a deep growth of cresses” (413), a ringwraith steed “fell out of the air, vanishing down into the gloom” (378), “a small ship passed away, twinkling with lights. It vanished” (355). With such natural disappearances, Tolkien establishes a plausible phenomenology of actual vanishing as he intimates overtones of the occult in simple nonvisibility. When the figurative vanisher is capable of physically vanishing, the compounding implications reach a density that makes the imminent transcendent. Hobbits with the ring of invisibility “vanished and passed down the hill, less than





a rustle of the wind” (392). But without the ring they are equally amazing: “Without the crack of a twig or the rustle of a leaf they passed and vanished” (686), “as invisible as if they all had magic rings” (69). The force of such contextual pun gyrates Middle-earth into dynamic tension between the possible and the probable. Observing the agility with which Tolkien manages “not to limit the word to a certain range of its possible meanings,”123 one can almost feel with William Ready that “Tolkien has broken through the crust of the alphabet . . . into the spelling of the supernatural. Yet his spelling on first reading is simple and easy: there is his great skill.”124 Although the ambiguity inherent in its diction, metaphor, and imagery only occasionally surfaces in comment from characters explicitly ambivalent about “whether it was magic or not” (H117), “spooks or no spooks” (166), “by art or devilry, none could see” (804), Middle-earth is a thoroughly ambiguous creation. “It is not a fairy-tale world so much as the world of . . . legend, where enchantment is at once human and supernatural.”125 Middle-earth is a perpetual paradox, an artistic sphere that, in its refusal to resolve itself to either other-worldliness or this-worldliness, invites both internalization and objectivity. Middle-earth allows readers to have the fantastic cake of Tolkien’s fiction and eat actuality too. Thus its balanced ambiguity makes Middle-earth a double-value world that encourages in its inhabitants—both character and reader—a binocular vision capable of penetrating deeper dimensions of reality. Thus “secondary realms apprehend another world, granting a glimpse beyond the walls of the world; paradoxically secondary realms thus reveal the primary world more fully.”126 Sam, that lover of tales, is especially apt to densify the implications of his existence by objective glances at its narrative possibilities: “What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?” he said. “I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: ‘Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom’? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it. And I wonder how it will go on after our part.”127 As we wonder with Sam “if we shall ever be put into songs or tales,” it is borne in upon us as upon him that “we’re in one, of course.” “Adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of



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it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually. . . . I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” (696). This literary world where “we are but the passing tale” (536) becomes an almost tangible vantage point from which to see if our own story is true. Middle-earth establishes itself at once in and out of fantasy in an artistic location where we can view our half-hobbit selves in a set of opposing mirrors reflecting images of images toward infinite possibilities. Tolkien’s fiction finds faërie to be as feasible as fact. Its earthily metaphysical view of the world is so convincing that some readers think its creator is himself convinced of its actuality. Tolkien, they feel, “did, and still does, believe in elves”; “they are part of what for him is the natural world.”128 But it is a deeper belief than magic that impels J. R. R. Tolkien to speak of possible things like his Silmarillion cosmos as if they were tangibly existent (1010), a more fundamental faith than the Christianity believers find in his fiction that moves him to write as incantatorily as “the Elf-minstrels, who can make the things of which they sing appear before the eyes of those that listen” (1033). Tolkien’s tales are a deeply felt affirmation of the probability of possibilities, the infinite implications of the finite—life for him overflows with understated significance: “We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can’t live long on the heights.” “No,” said Merry. “I can’t. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose; you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.” (852)

Tolkien’s fiction envisions “things deeper and higher,” inviting an unusually rich range of perception. “By juxtaposing the enchanted with the familiar, the magical with the mundane,” Gregory Bassham is convinced, Tolkien’s magical prose allows us “to see the world with fresh eyes.” “Having encountered ents and towering mallorns, we forever see elms and beeches differently. The blue ocean and silver moon suddenly appear wondrous and strange.”129 Within a world that is itself revelation of unperceived reality, Tolkien’s narrative exposes level upon level of implicit significance. Stimulating readers to find the transcendent in the immediate, to





pierce the opaque layers of familiarity with which calloused eyes blur reality, his paranatural world alters our individual worlds. Middle-earth’s semantic magic generates a critical mass of realizing life and multiplying meaning that works as a dynamic experience focusing the perception of the reader into dimensions alive beyond the covers of the books. Most works of fiction encourage us to see things we have not seen. Some few provide insight into how others see. Rare are those, like the faërie tales of J. R. R. Tolkien, that alter our way of seeing.



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Middle-earth’s pervasive atmosphere of realism breathes life into his fiction. This subcreated world stretches its unstressed believability beyond animation to sentience and beyond sentience to awareness. Middle-earth, like the creature in the old Frankenstein movies, is “alive!”—and much less melodramatic about it than mad scientists. We feel the vitality of Tolkien’s fiction more emphatically for his restrained style’s refusal to shout it aloud, stylistic presentation so subtle we seldom so much as consider how vital this fictive world is. Even after we have felt the realizing effects, even when we have noticed how “Middle-earth beckons us to look with renewed wonder at our own world,”1 we remain by and large oblivious to the rhetorical means by which Tolkien manages that prose magic. Tolkien’s subcreations sprout such complexity they feel real. “Treebeard is like a tree, but like a lake, too, and a well, and a man.”2 The essay “On Fairy-Stories” states frankly the Tolkienian conviction that the life of the imaginative world is at least as viable as the life commonly read into the mechanical sterility of the modern primary world: “The notion that motor-cars are more ‘alive’ than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more ‘real’ than, say, horses is pathetically absurd” (Tree 55). In Middle-earth, the kind of world where plants are not merely sentient but perceptive, a tree can be “considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.” The very possibility of that kind of stylistic perspective underlines how emphatically “the aliveness of the world is not just belief for Tolkien.”3 That may be why Middle-earth comes to feel to readers so eminently “there”—for some, even, here. This fictive world matters not just as a vehicle for its narrative but for its own sake: this wizardish author seems to have “created Middle-earth before he had a plot to put in it.”4 Natural life looms unnaturally large here; nature figures not



CH A P T ER


merely as “the principal setting for the plot, but also as a vital force.”5 That may be why the natural world matters so much in Tolkien’s fiction, why throughout the world of The Lord of the Rings there is such an “obsessive interest in plants and scenery.”6 Wildlife, like all the life in Tolkien’s fiction, is more than set decoration, more than plot staging, more even than verisimilitude. The simplest plants of the Shire contribute fundamentally to the stylistic ecology of Tolkien’s fictive world. At the deepest levels, what makes Middle-earth so lively a creation is Tolkien’s realizing imaginative focus. Middle-earth is alive in every dimension. It lives in its “intensely active” narrative, a narrative “constantly and organically growing” in “imaginative life,” vibrant with “every kind of colour and movement.”7 It lives as a believable imaginary sphere, “a clear, keen world of legend come to life,” a “complete and satisfying” artistic universe “of appearances wonderfully visualized, of a country given form and contour,” “so vivid, so various, and so self-consistent” that it is “difficult for even the adult reader when he closes its covers to withdraw himself from it.”8 It lives both as a re-creation of our world in accord with “our sense of historical and social reality” and as the “essence of utter reality,” an insight into new possibilities in “what we think of as the real world.” 9 It lives as a telling dramatization of “authentic experience,” a “symbolic concentration on the most basic human concerns,” a psychic exploration providing readers “the key into their own inner consciousness.”10 It is alive to its very “roots in ritual and myth,” a part of “living oral tradition,” a “myth of the life of the spirit that informs all our lives.”11 Middle-earth is “amazingly alive.”12 For all that liveliness, Middle-earth is in the eyes of many readers moribund, lacking sustaining artistic pulse. That perception of vitiated vitality goes beyond paradox to direct contradiction: some of the same critics who certify “the lilt and zest of fresh inspiration” in Tolkien’s artistic world pronounce his art “as a whole . . . inorganic.”13 More typically, disdain of the creative dynamics undercuts appreciation of the creation’s vitality; there is widespread feeling that the liveliness does not run deep. Critics have gone so far as to snub Tolkien’s artistic approach as “terribly simplistic.” “Internal consistency”14 is generally granted, but the consensus seems to be that Tolkien is a stylistic “wizard,” “casting a spell,” who produces his vibrant literary “magic” by conjuring a zombie world from inert artistry.15 Richard Hughes typifies the general tendency; his praise of the energy of the fiction faints away into regret that the artistic roots of this “so brilliantly evocative” world “lack somewhat . . . inner vitality.”16



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I propose that the breath of life of this fiction inheres deeper than the animation of narrative however exciting or the verisimilitude of an imaginary world however vivid. It goes deeper even than the reflection of human experience that an increasing number of critics find in it. Tolkien’s vision of the universe’s inherent vitality manifests itself in the stylistic texture of his artistic world. It is not just that the milieu is credibly consistent and concrete; Middle-earth is alive in the pulse of its prose, in the marrow of its artistry. Tolkien’s style incarnates his fiction, makes it feel not merely realistic but real. This prose works the kind of authorial “ ‘magic’ that produces,” in Tolkien’s own terms, “real effects in the physical world.”17 The comment gives as much insight into Tolkien’s writing style as into his view of magic. Magic for him in all realms is a matter of “the natural powers.” It would be as false and ineffective from that perspective to manipulate rhetoric as it would be to exercise magic manipulatively—“a motive easily corruptible into evil, a lust for domination.”18 Prose style, as surely as anything else with magical potential, must, if is to be effectual, be invitational. Tolkien’s fictive world comes alive to the extent we invest ourselves in it, to the degree we participate in the subcreation. That is why, even at the most accessible levels of narrative, there is more to Tolkien’s vitality than meets the eye. It is not just that “the plenitude of the Great Chain of Being really comes alive”19 in the fiction—the foundations of Middle-earth enlivening lie deeper than its vivid populace. Tolkien discovers anatomy in the very topography. In the course of those epic journeys through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, hints of physiological elements within the landscape persistently impress themselves upon the reader. Mountains, for example, may manifest vegetative characteristics, sprouting “roots” (H66) and “limbs” (133), even blooming into complete orchards: “glades of flowering stone” (535). Affinities of apparently inanimate objects with living forms are not limited to plant analogues. Among those evolving mountains may also be caught glimpses of more animate anatomy: “feet” and “knees” and “naked sides” and “shoulders” and “heads” and “thick hair.” Even the details are there—“mouth,” “lip,” and “tooth.” Nor is the anatomy superficial, merely skin deep. We see clear to the “heart” of mountains, deep enough to realize that the landscape is solidly anatomical: “this country has tough bones.”20 Spread strategically throughout the four volumes, such subliminal anatomical suggestion generates potent cumulative impact. And the lifelike anatomy implicit in Middle-earth reveals itself convincingly,



BLADE AND LEAF LISTENING


enacting the natural world in its gradual awakening of reader perception. Tolkien masterfully understates these intimations. Anatomy, when visible, appears unobtrusively in single-word physiological hints growing from natural description. Indeed we become consciously aware of its presence, if we do, only through the broader intimations of occasional outcroppings: “Their way wound along the floor of the hollow, and round the green feet of a steep hill into another deeper and broader valley, and then over the shoulder of further hills, and down their long limbs, and up their smooth sides again” (133). That kind of semi-personification is rare, and even these more explicit anatomical suggestions remain deeply embedded in the tangible earth of Tolkien’s landscape. Tolkien’s topographical anatomy is the more natural for its responsiveness to the systole and diastole of narrative; the relative prominence of anatomy in the landscape directly reflects the relevance of setting to the immediate situation. Thus, when the ruggedness of the landscape becomes a prominent threat to the progress of Frodo and Sam toward Mordor, setting previously peripheral asserts itself, dominating the narrative through a vividly hostile animistic profile: “Before them darkling against a pallid sky, the great mountains reared their threatening heads . . . they swung out long arms northward; and between these arms there was a deep defile. This was Cirith Gorgor, the Haunted Pass, the entrance to the land of the Enemy. High cliffs lowered upon either side, and thrust forward from its mouth were two sheer hills, black-boned and bare” (622). The organic development of this anatomical realizing is unaffectedly persuasive. Recent readers have admired both Tolkien’s “recognition of consciousness in natural entities” and his “emphasis on kinship with nature.”21 The simple technique of implying lifelike form in topography, in skeletal outline an affront to credibility, becomes in the fleshed presence of Tolkien’s prose profound insight into the world we thought we knew. Thoroughly, vividly, and self-consistently created, Middle-earth comes alive as the artistic equivalent of experience; its multitudinous detail restructures our primary worlds. Tolkien’s imaginary sphere does not avert our eyes from our own world so much as it transforms that world into Tolkienian terms: “Our sun and moon are still there, although the sun is referred to as ‘she’ and the moon as ‘he,’ the reverse of our nomenclature.”22 The artifice of anatomical topography, embedded as it is in “a structure that is so self-consistent and varied it will withstand any amount of probing,”23 provides not imaginary but imaginative perspective, builds not illusion but a bridge to a more clearly envisioned version of reality than the world we almost look at



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daily. The literary liveliness of Tolkien’s fiction reaches so far into the literal feel of Middle-earth life it takes us deeper into our own. As he intimates suggestions of more lively forms of being into the inorganic aspects of Middle-earth landscape, Tolkien discloses in its vegetation the sentience of animate life. Growing percipience among plants is noticed by Bilbo and his companions in The Hobbit; under the ominous branches of Mirkwood Forest, they become aware of a “sort of watching and waiting feeling” (H127), a feeling intensifying until “it seemed to them that all the trees leaned over them and listened” (H129). Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings express similar qualms about the Old Forest: “Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire.” Merry is convinced that the trees show more than tactile capacity: “they watch you” (108). This inanimate awareness, germinating in the forests, quietly pervades the entire landscape. Amon Llaw and Amon Hen are not the only “hills of Hearing and Sight” (384) in Tolkien’s sentient setting. This is a landscape full of objects “immovable, and yet . . . aware” (882). The awareness is catching. As we journey with Frodo and Sam through Middle-earth, we feel as they feel “the watchfulness of the land increase”: we too become increasingly sensitive to “tree and stone, blade and leaf . . . listening” (866). Traversing a countryside teeming with incipient life and fraternizing with creatures extraordinarily aware alerts us; the entire environment ultimately assumes such plausibly encompassing sentience that readers can feel with Gollum that “day itself might overhear” (607). Everything in Middle-earth is made aware, and that proliferating percipience intensifies the awareness of the reader. Having nurtured this broad ground of lifelike form and believable sentience in the topography, Tolkien further enlivens his setting by gradually animating the landscape. Probably because it is the most tenable, the commonest aspect of that animation is verbal. Middle-earth acoustics are richly orchestrated. Everywhere we hear with the hobbits “the noise of water and the wail of wind and the crack of stone” (H51). Auditory density is accented until it comes to mean much more than mere noise. This is a vociferous world, a world of such vigorous communing among its beings that even the inanimate is involved, and every object in Middle-earth proves at least potentially capable of communication. In its wind are “shrill cries, and wild howls of laughter” (281), in its treetops, “moaning and sighing” (198); its “valleys have ears” (H47) and its sky “speaks” (126)—and this amidst the burgeoning life of Middle-earth is as





close to objective documentation of observed fact as to dramatic contrivance. The very silence becomes articulate: “I hear nothing,” says that careful listener Gimli the dwarf, “but the night-speech of plant and stone” (328). These communicative inanimate objects introduce a total activation of the topography. Middle-earth becomes completely kinetic. Paths, with their natural affinity for movement, prove particularly ambient; “they seem to shift and change from time to time in a queer fashion” (108). The track up Weathertop hill, with almost cognizant liveliness, “ran cunningly, taking a line that seemed chosen so as to keep as much hidden as possible. . . . It dived into dells, and hugged steep banks” (180). The road traversing the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, winding “like a snake . . . to and fro,” gyrates into that delicate Tolkien balance where metaphor hovers on the brink of animism: “At one point it crawled sideways right to the edge of the dark chasm . . . on and up the stairway bent and crawled, until at last with a final flight, short and straight, it climbed out again on to another level. The path had veered away from the main pass in the great ravine, and it now followed its own perilous course” (694). Such dynamic metaphor amid the environmental vividness of Middle-earth generates intense kinetic energy. Scanning the vista of Tolkien’s epic, the reader views a landscape that hosts seething activity and is itself incessantly active, a region where not only are paths running with unusual metaphoric vigor, but mountains are “marching” (H42), downs “stalking” (119), boulders “galloping” (H51), forests “striding” (475), clouds “hurrying” (272), and mists “crawling” (94), where everything from “writhing” roots (109) to winds with “searching fingers” (274) displays vivid activity. Under the influence of an environment so thoroughly animated, shadows literally flee, cave mouths threaten to bite (H159), and leaves whisper not just metaphorically but in earnest: “Frodo and Sam sat under the whispering trees amid the fragrance of fair Ithilien; and they talked” (934). That extensive enlivening multiplies voices so universally the very silence communicates: “Merry . . . sat for a moment half dreaming, listening to the noise of water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound” (774). These subtle stirrings of nature come to life in quiet rhythms of prose. Recurrent suggestions of anatomical topography, sentient landscape, and animated setting gradually enliven the entire Middleearth environment. Mountains assume lifelike aspect, plants seem to listen and speak, aspects of physical setting move—apparently



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purposefully. Ultimately, all this personification, percipience, and animation accumulates to a suggestion of pantheistic presence, of purposeful personality underlying the universe. It is not just that mountains manifest physiognomy; their “stony faces” express attitudes: they “frown” and “threaten” (H176). It is not just that trees are sentient; they seem to assume self-consciousness, “blushing red at their fingertips” (496). Paths, not content with wandering kinetically as well as geographically, prove “misleading” with active intent, revealing themselves as “cheats and deceptions . . . leading nowhere or to bad ends” (H51). The life of Middle-earth extends beyond the broad bounds of nature. Even manufactured objects—the sword Orcrist, for example, which gleams “bright as blue flame for delight in the killing” (H60)— prove actively aware. In that way Middle-earth exhibits implicit meaning in being itself. Existence, with its potential for awareness and willed action, becomes in this world a definite affirmation of significance. Everything can feel. Anything may move. Will is everywhere. Middle-earth insists in its very setting that everything, however insensate or trivial it may seem to be, matters. That insistence permeates deeper levels than setting, reaches its roots right into style: “All this is conveyed in long rhythmic phrases (literally breath-taking to read).”24 Tolkien’s wizardry with words sets that sense of significance up by deftly manipulating the perspective of the hobbits, “with special reference to the beholders (the landscape of Ithilien is an eye-opener to Sam, who is a gardener of long experience but little range).”25 The impact of that artistry is as quiet as it is compelling: “It brings us, the readers, a sense of life abundant—exuberant and untamed, even—but gracious, and full of possibility, and of determination to thrive, even in the face of the evil to the east.”26 The unassuming artistry with which Tolkien nurtures this insight into the inherent vitality of his universe can perhaps best be observed in the way he works the plant populations of his narratives into a hierarchy of animation as plausible as it is gradual. The great majority of plants in Middle-earth are plants as we know them, tangible and familiar: “Groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam” (636).





All that flourishing foliage familiarizes Middle-earth, makes us feel at home. “Tolkien uses his flora as adornments to the mood of the story, as distinct from the mechanics of telling it,” writes Henry Gee, who thinks that stylistic manipulation so precise as to qualify as “scientific”: prime among the author’s “main reasons for discussing specific detail” is to invite each reader to personally “identify with the landscape as one immediately familiar to the reader, who will therefore feel ‘at home’ in it.”27 Yet for all that homey familiarity, Tolkien presents the most ordinary plants in a light so vivid their liveliness is not easily overlooked. Middle-earth flora branches out beyond its verisimilitude in an organic process from familiar to unrecognizable varieties, plants “beyond the garden-lore of Sam” (636) and of the reader. This movement from known to unknown asserts itself as a prevailing direction of Tolkien narrative. That lay of the Middle-earth land may be seen in the “tumbled heathland, grown with ling and broom and cornel, and other shrubs that they did not know” (635), or in “small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire” (636). Progression from familiar plants to more exotic varieties is the initial phase in a broad process revealing the innate animation of “living wood” (431). Gradually, Tolkien discloses degrees of plant liveliness ranging from familiar quiescent plants to passively “watching” plants (H127) to plants “murmuring and singing” in a manner verging on communication (361) to plants manifesting such forming will as the bramble bushes “reluctant to let them through” (H199). Eventually this increasing liveliness of plants blossoms into individuation; we notice “trees like our trees,” but “different from one another” (468). We begin to glimpse, through the enlivening lens of Tolkien’s prose, personality in plants: “One old stump of a tree with only two bent branches left” looks “almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing there, blinking in the morning-light” (451). The supremely animate form of vegetation, the ent tree, exhibits as culmination of this evolving awareness highly developed agglutinative language and an impressive aptitude for striding off to council, to war, and to romantic pilgrimage in search of lost entwives. Yet even ents seem deeply rooted in the natural, “as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years” (452). Tolkien’s animation of the landscape, through the carefully cultivated gradations of



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life in that chain of being linking the familiar with the unfamiliar, becomes as plausible and pervasive as organic growth itself. Middle-earth style most dramatically demonstrates its viability by itself generating life, life so expansive it penetrates the unlikeliest extremities of this artistic world. Life creeps into the most improbable corners of Mirkwood metaphor: the deadly forest is “waiting like a black and frowning wall” (H125), an emblem of inert inactivity animated in these intensely animate surroundings by the very passivity of “waiting,” the very reluctance of “frowning.” Throughout Middleearth, life propounds itself, multiplying incidental vitalities into a world so richly fertile its characters are capable of conceiving such organic insights as vegetative compounding of the growth of dwarvish beards: “Don’t dip your beard in the foam, father . . . it is long enough without watering it” (H47). The vigor of Tolkien’s literary enlivening stimulates his subcreations to subcreate. In the process of uncovering this luxuriant profusion of life, this word nurturer leaves no stylistic leaf unturned, resorting to such unlikely ploys as pathetic fallacy, treating aspects of nature as if they were human. Deliberate identification of viewer with referent forms a fundamental focus of this narrative sphere of “breathless” paths (H190), “thirsty” tales (129), and “castles with an evil look” (H29), an essential means of realizing the liveliness of the creation. Referential objects in this fictive world are more than passive reflectors of the emotions of observers; even through the much-maligned medium of pathetic fallacy, referents ostensibly inanimate or even inorganic may themselves become actively sentient, even emotional. To Tolkien, the referential world may be itself literally alive, its vitality revealed to us only as our perceptions come alive to it. Pathetic fallacy, our confusing tendency to project our personal awareness into the world, becomes in Middle-earth affirmation of the underlying reality of things. The forthright ambiguity of Tolkien’s pathetic fallacy is disarming. We should in circumstances less dynamically tentative find bathetic Bilbo’s projection of his own attitude upon the Lonely Mountain: “He did not like the look of it in the least” (H175). But in this Middle-earth context, in the immediate psychological vicinity of the mountain’s apparently autonomous activity—“all alone it rose and looked across the marshes to the forest” (H175)—the “look” of the Lonely Mountain is more than projected appearance; that look also implies the mountain’s independent act. Setting here is significant for itself as well as for what it appears to characters to be. A Middle-earth path may in fact as well as metaphor be as “breathless” as its climbers, a tale as “thirsty” as its teller.





That kind of intricate interaction of observer and referent further functions in Tolkien’s fiction to dramatize the symbiotic relatedness of aspects of the natural world. That interaction is so richly connective that pathetic fallacy in the pejorative Ruskin sense is almost impossible in Middle-earth. Tolkien comes close in his Middle-earth worldview to erasing the border between subjective and objective, to healing T. S. Eliot’s modernist “disassociation of sensibility.” There is so slight a gulf between orders of being, so intimate and reciprocal a relationship here between viewer and referent that empathy rarely suffers total eclipse in the shadow of projected egotism. Not everyone sees it that way: “Instead of having their own type of sentience, non human entities are represented as having thoughts and emotions that are essentially analogous to those of humans.”28 Analogous, maybe, but way beyond simple projection. After consorting with Tolkien’s ents, most of us do not actually start talking to trees, but we definitely think about trees differently. Setting and character in such an invitational context become reciprocally enriching, so that we are enlightened about both character and landscape by seeing landscape as extension of character, with horizons “far-seen,” rivers flowing away “out of knowledge,” downs vanishing “out of eyesight into a guess” (133). We gain insight into setting as well as into personality through the incorporation of personality into setting when hobbits are absorbed into the landscape “as silent as tree-shadows” (H187). The thoroughness of that reciprocation of setting and character is dramatized by the correlation between hobbits and the most inconspicuous aspect of the landscape, its silence. At one extreme of this relationship there is obvious projection of character into setting in, for example, the silence that “seemed menacing to Bilbo” (H81). At the other end of the spectrum, silence seems to reverse the initiative, manifesting not only autonomy but dominance, as when “the silence began to draw in upon them” (H125). But typically, character and environment strike a balance of reciprocity in a richly ambiguous relationship wherein projecting psyche and sentient landscape maintain mutual influence: the silence of Mirkwood Forest “seemed to dislike being broken” (H51). The dexterity with which the narrative maintains that equilibrium of psychological reality and imaginative possibility performs a gyroscopic function for Middle-earth’s artistic integrity. The implications of that dynamic style can be far-reaching. Here amid the Mirkwood flora, for example, Tolkien manages to acknowledge “that individuals are shaped by their environment” at the same time he



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emphasizes human “stewardship over, and even domestication of, the natural environment,”29 celebrating a symbiotic relationship between responsible hobbits and flourishing land that honors the best land-use elements of everything from biblical stewardship tradition to modern ecological concern. Tolkien engenders naturally telling effects with this symbiotic interaction of character and landscape, as in the mutual responsiveness of setting and character in this typically unassuming passage: “A dark figure climbed quickly in over the gate and melted into the shadows of the village street. The hobbits rode on up a gentle slope, passing a few detached houses, and drew up outside the inn. The houses looked large and strange to them. Sam stared up at the inn with its three storeys and many windows, and felt his heart sink” (148–49). In most literary environments, we would not take a second glance at a “dark figure” melting “into the shadows.” But in this corner of Middle-earth, where one may not only hide in shadow but turn out to be one, we sense immediately eerie overtones of complicity with— even the possible awesome presence of—those literal shadows, the ringwraiths. In delicate counterpoint to this merging of character into the setting, setting simultaneously reveals its impact on character in the vividly responsive person of Sam; the inn’s massiveness graphically shrinks Sam’s enthusiasm, his heart sinking in inverse ratio to the distance he stares up at the overwhelming building. Such a casual example suggests the potential density of this reciprocal interaction, demonstrating as it does Tolkien’s dynamism, his gift for evoking convincing overtones of the portentous in the psychological vicinity of the credibly commonplace. Tolkien’s pathetic fallacy thus reveals itself to be “poetic truth, for in aroused aesthetic contemplation the feelings reanimate what the scientific intelligence has killed.”30 It is not the fallacy of the strong-feeling weak thinker, but of the seer, “the language,” in Ruskin’s Modern Painters terms, “of the highest inspiration.”31 In the very texture of his artistic world, at the marrow of his narrative technique, Tolkien’s fiction insists by the acutely ironic means of pathetic fallacy that the way we perceive the world is crucial: we see, his fictional perspective asserts, as we are, and we are as we see. Looking into the Middle-earth world, we discover ourselves. Tolkien’s enlivening of the literary environment generates sufficient critical mass to radiate energetic artistry from even unlikelier narrative inertness than pathetic fallacy. Perhaps his most unprepossessing source of technical vitality is the morality of his geography.32 There is in Middle-earth a tendency—on the surface of it, a disturbingly





general tendency—for positive and negative valences to become associated with definite location. One reader complains that “morally Middle-earth is surprisingly fixed.”33 And it is true that south is the region of decadence, north barbaric. East is danger—“evil lurks in the East where its chief stronghold is.”34 West is safety, and, by precise logical extension, far west is ultimate safety—“the other-world from which the Wizards have been sent, incarnate, to the aid of Middleearth.”35 Supporting bias is grounded in the topography. Mountains and caves, heights and depths threaten evil, whereas areas of gently undulating Shire-like terrain tend to be sheltered locales. One can hardly help suspecting a bedrock of Western European chauvinism beneath such judgmental place associations. Shire topography is so smugly Cotswoldsy as to indict a specifically English insularity—the hobbits have always lived in provincial satisfaction “in the North-West of the Old World, East of the sea” (2). Tolkien’s deft stylistic control of that irony is clear, however, in his personal aversion to that quality of hobbits “which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity—by which I do not mean a mere ‘down-to-earthiness’—a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness . . . a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience.”36 So the manifest chauvinism may well be the point. As usual with Tolkien’s literary thrusts, it cuts more than one way. On the one hand, geographical bias, revealing itself as it does through the provincial hobbit perspective, looks askance at myopic assumptions about locales. Simultaneously, the insistent morality of this geography, buttressed by pathetic fallacy and rich with irony, intimates that there is interaction of character and landscape, that attitudes, lifestyles, and ultimately values are affected by surroundings. In Middle-earth, as in ours, environment influences as it is influenced in a cycle of reciprocal creation: character molds itself through interaction with its environment so insistently that “one’s closeness to and respect for nature is a measure of one’s goodness.”37 Some think “Tolkien’s work is thus eco-centric (nature centered) as opposed to anthropocentric (human-centered).”38 This persistent stylistic closeness to the soil evokes echoes of the most venerable moral ecology, that of the Hebrews, whose plagues inevitably arrived on “the east wind” from the evil locations “eastward.”39 In more current terms, Tolkien’s moral geography may ally him with modern environmentalists. The ecological dimension of his writing has been much appreciated recently as “rising popular interest in the United States and Europe in ecology and the environment as political and



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scientific movements” has engendered “critical interest in Tolkien’s focus on nature.”40 Ecologists like his treatment of the natural world “as a larger force than a mere tool for human allegorizing and semiotics,” and like even more how Tolkien’s rhetorical approach “tends to engage with nature in an integrative way rather than to marginalize it as Other.”41 However simplistic its surface, Tolkien mines rich complexities from this moral geography. Although their quest presses in general into evil, even the uncomplicated Bilbo and his companions cannot make decisions on the basis of mere directional appearances. They must go north toward the repellant dangers of Mirkwood Forest because it proves the “safer” of their choices (H124). Later they turn south “into the sunlight” made paradoxical by the presence of the dragon (H170). Along the way they face similar incidental dilemmas, having to choose at one point whether to ascend the bank of a river at once reassuringly west and sinisterly left (H186). From a broader perspective, too, there are intriguing ambivalences. East, for all its evil, is the clear locale of adventure, whereas the homey west is static, uninteresting, and edges into the stories only as the place of preface and afterword. Despite the centrifugal force of dense ambiguities, Middle-earth geography maintains a pivotal moral dimension. The hobbits, both in Bilbo’s and in Frodo’s expeditions, journey ever east into evil, east into “the darkness” (688), “east to meet the coming of war and the onset of the shadow” (774). All things evil—ringwraiths, “invasion” (1024), “deadly plague”—come “with dark wings out of the East” (1023). The opposite direction accommodates an opposite tenor of existence. Always the hobbits look west toward home: “Away in the West where things were blue and faint, Bilbo knew there lay his own country of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole” (H51). The terrain assumes judgmental implications with equal cartographic certitude, its bottom-line position that, in Middle-earth, one does well to keep his feet on level ground. Whenever a hobbit ascends or descends significantly, he is in trouble. When we see Bilbo “going up and up” into the mountains, we become aware almost immediately that he is on a “hard path and a dangerous” (H51), and it is on those foolhardy heights that he encounters first trolls (H32) and later goblins (H51). Going “down, down, down into the dark” (H196), the hobbit hero stumbles into the dungeons of wood-elves and, more deeply troublesome, the evil lair of Smaug. This morality persistently probing the terrain discovers underlying significance: topography, in Middle-earth as in earth, affects





psychology. When Frodo and his hobbit companions “climbed slowly down” into the gentle valley of Rivendell, “the spirits of the party rose” (199). As the directional paradox stresses, pleasant sensations upon entering a valley, however much they may confirm the attitude pattern of Tolkien’s moral landscape, accurately report the expansive psychological realities of tired travelers easing downhill toward evening shelter. Such carefully charted responsiveness to environmental conditions underscores the complexity of the morality in Tolkien’s geography. His moral landscape, far from artificial and even farther from stereotypical, plots psychological effects into the emotional impact of topography on his characters. That organic origin may more definitively be seen when landscape and character come to a parting of the ways between the affect of the immediate situation and the general Middle-earth topographical pattern. Up tends to be a dangerous direction, but “as the road climbed upwards” through the tunnels of Moria, “Frodo’s spirits rose a little” (306). There are good immediate reasons, despite the general danger of high places, that Frodo should feel better: his expedition has for the moment evaded the orcs; draughts of cold air promise imminent escape from the ominous caves; Gandalf has chosen the right way. Even so, Frodo’s spirits rise only “a little.” Danger is but temporarily averted by going against the moral grain of Middle-earth topography, and Frodo, aware in his bones that the natural threat of extreme situations will ultimately out, “still felt oppressed” (306). Augmented by newly respirant life in such stillborn attitudes as moralized topography and such extinct techniques as pathetic fallacy, the revivifying gust of Tolkien’s style freshens his prose. About that prose, as about most things in Tolkien’s fiction, there is profound critical disagreement. Many think the language “inorganic,” “lacking in inner vitality of its own.”42 An enthusiastic few find it “alive, thrusting, moving, plunging, piercing,” with “even at its quietest . . . the tension of near-movement.”43 The vitality some see and others fail to see in Tolkien’s language may well result from his stylistic manner, a manner “perilously close to stereotyped prose.”44 A hallmark of that enlivening style is Tolkien’s sleight-of-hand trick of resuscitating dead metaphor. He exhumes dead metaphors and revives them: metaphor long expired, its primary meaning buried under layers of petrified usage, revivifies in the pervasively animating atmosphere of Tolkien’s artistic landscape. “As a simple matter of arranging words, Tolkien can make the world ‘live’ by taking all the dead metaphors he knows and using them as though they were not dead.”45 In a context where mountains manifest animistic features,



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even worn-out terms like “foothills” take on new significance, and when a “great spur of the Mountain” gets “flung out” (H186), readers tend to visualize the attached heel. That tendency toward realization of metaphor is so vigorous it fuses metaphor with the objective world, making referential actuality of trope, as when some particularly lifelike hills are seen to be “stony-faced” (622). Having thus sensitized his reader to metaphoric implications of setting, Tolkien can unlock the vitality of an entire passage with a one-word key, even when the word may be the least lively of dead metaphors. Something so quiescent as the spent and fallen leaves of Mirkwood can be revived with the innocuously inactive term lay; dead leaves lay, in this context, ready to get up (H129). He is capable of priming that dead-metaphor pump with as little hint as sound, sometimes a single sound. When he describes orcs “resting in the pleasant darkness” (44), we feel the threat of evil subliminally even if we don’t notice the warning implications of that concluding hissing ss. Few readers mentally extrapolate from three hissed sibilants, even concentrated in five words, to the metaphorical rattlesnake lurking in the shadows of that unassuming sentence. The fact that so many of us feel that snake while so few of us notice it is sincere tribute to the subtlety of Tolkien’s style. The vividly subliminal quality of that kind of subcreation is the more impressive to me because I so seldom hear the hissing of such s’s, yet come away so often from a Tolkien sentence with the creepy-crawly feeling of having passed too close to a snake. The technique of treating dead metaphors as if they were alive contributes crucially to the vitality of Tolkien’s creation. Resuscitating metaphor provides an organic microcosm of the larger movement of the fiction, sympathetically vibrant with reiterative narrative structure and the resurrectional symbolic movement of the epic as a whole. This unprepossessing pulse at the heart of Tolkien’s prose informs the vast narrative and psychological expanses of Middle-earth with life. The same perceptual momentum that resuscitates metaphor and vivifies sympathetic fallacy focuses the generality some critics find in the tales of Middle-earth. Burton Raffel, the apostle of anti-abstraction, points out that “it would be foolish to say that Tolkien does not write well,” then does precisely that.46 The central concern for Raffel, as for many a Tolkien reader, is overgeneralization. For a critic like Raffel who wants “particular objects in particular relationships,” Tolkien comes up seriously wanting: “For Tolkien a hill is the generality of hill-ness, a chair is ‘low and comfortable’—that is, the generality of comfortableness.”47





I am convinced, in direct contradiction to those who read as Raffel does, that Tolkien’s narrative positively abhors abstraction. The prose is sensuous, the landscape tangible. “The tangibility of the world is heightened by the naturalistic prose, creating . . . almost palpable landscapes.” The most cornucopially evident aspect of those settings is their “overabundance,” which has the inevitable and intriguing “consequence that although certain roads are chosen by the characters, there is the naturalistic sense that there exist horizons unexplored.” The implications of that concrete naturalness reach far into narrative flexibility and thematic range. As a direct moral result, for example, “the Middle-earth landscape is not deterministic.”48 That kind of open-ended concreteness involves much more than mere specificity; Tolkien’s shamanistic technique is more a matter of the orchestration of the specification. Even when abstraction occurs, it gravitates toward the tangible. Close association with concrete analogues, for example, can stimulate a generalization into sympathetic sensuousness. We realize tangibly what “more wickedness than this afoot” means because we have seen that abstract wickedness keep recent company with a spectrum of incarnate monsters focusing in scope from “the whole goblin army with their wolf-allies” through “Goblin patrols . . . hunting with Wargs” to an individuated “Warg and a Goblin wandering in the woods,” “biting and snapping” and “devouring people waked suddenly from their sleep” (H121, H95). Keeping company with such visibly vicious evildoers, the most abstract evil becomes snarlingly substantial. Tolkien demonstrates uncanny capacity for realizing abstraction. He brings it down to earth, giving it a concrete locale—danger that “brooded in every rock” (H191); providing it with sensory presence— “rumour like the shadow-sound of many feet” (770); presenting physical evidence of it—terror that “drank blood” (57). He involves it with concrete emblem in the sort of actualized metonymy that the disguised Dernhelm demonstrates when, removing her headgear, she “undoes the helm of her secrecy” (823). He splits generalization into observable component parts, visualizing riders in the abstraction of time, for example, moving “through sunset, and slow dusk, and gathering night” (495). He makes the invisible visible by capturing it in characterizing action, embodying unseen danger in “footsteps” that “went away down the hill” (H179). Or he finds out the finiteness of abstraction by affirming its mortality, manifesting its capacity for decay: the abstract notion of fame becomes palpably evanescent in “the memory of the old Kings . . . faded into the grass” (146).



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In the fervor of his quest to give body to generality, Tolkien at times resorts to more conventional personification. The prose lapses, in fact, into apparently simplistic abstracting frequently enough that some critics think personification his habitual mode: “Ultimately, Tolkien attributes human consciousness to nonhuman entities to various degrees.”49 But looked at closer, even these concessions to abstraction tend to live more as characters in their own right than as mere tokens of generalization. Personification as conventional as “Spring and Summer” making “revel together in the fields of Gondor” (942) is reserved for the traditional dignity of such occasions as state weddings, even then exhibiting in its formal stiffness a certain sprightliness. Far more typical of Tolkien’s nuanced prose is the more vital personification exemplified by that “huge shadow,” the Lord of the Nazgul: “The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. ‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it?’ ” (811). We probably would not have, had we not been told. Even without a body, the Lord of the Nazgul, however much “Death” in the abstract, is very much an individuated being. There is here, as throughout Tolkien’s personifying, more personality than personification. The consummate energy of the prose here again enlivens the most enervated literary forms. The climax of Middle-earth enlivening crescendoes from its imagery. The Lord of the Rings is a tale of endings, of death, “an obsessive obituary of the Third Age.”50 Its pages relentlessly document the passing away not only of individuals but of entire cultures. “The peculiar achievement of the author is to create a world which is at once completely (or to a superlative degree) sentient and yet dying, to have presented vividly, objectively, and emotionally the eternal conflict between life and death.”51 Tolkien himself as he reread his trilogy affirmed “the dominance of the theme of Death.”52 Yet in the face of all those narrative dyings, The Lord of the Rings manages by means of vital imagery a paradoxical paean to ultimately triumphant life. Tolkien’s tales are lively to their metaphoric chromosomes; his narrative generates dynamic symbolic offspring. The rhythmic movement of imagistic birth against narrative death, of spring against winter, of dawn against dark creates in the annals of Middle-earth an intricately coordinated symbolic regeneration manifesting itself in constant renewals and escapes and awakenings.





That incipient imagistic resurrection animates Tolkien narrative. Not only the light-footed Hobbit, but even The Lord of the Rings in all its vastness and dense complexity reflects its resurrectional imagery in narrative vigor: plot, despite continual dead endings, surges forward with an inevitability suggestive of the drive of life itself, urgent toward regeneration. The journeys of Tolkien’s hole-loving heroes take the reader through an extended sequence of entombments, from goblin tunnels under the Misty Mountains by way of wood-elf dungeons and Smaug’s den through the morbid caverns of Moria and Shelob’s lair to the brink of the Cracks of Doom in the dark tunnel of Sammath Naur. Counterbalancing that heavy weight of implicit death are enough symbolic births in Tolkien’s narrative for a population explosion. Because “all hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground” (6), hobbits who adventure must come into the world by way of tunnels, tunnels whose participation in the process of coming out into the air marks them as maternal. Bilbo strains to escape the goblin cave in a palpable parody of birth: “He tried to squeeze through the crack. He squeezed and squeezed, and he stuck! It was awful. His buttons had got wedged on the edge of the door and the door-post. He could see outside into the open air. . . . He gave a terrific squirm. . . . He was through!” (H83). The key characters to a hobbit suffer natal trauma in delivery from stony wombs: Frodo and Sam “laboring in the stony shadows under Cirith Ungol” (695, 719), Gollum “expelled” by his grandmother from the family tunnel (H163). These intimations of birth are augmented by Alice in Wonderland concern with birthdays, a preeminent hobbit passion. The entire epic hinges upon the ring that Gollum calls his “birthday present” (H74). Bilbo’s “eleventy-first birthday” ushers in The Lord of the Rings, and much is made of the day’s being also Frodo’s thirty-third birthday, the time when a hobbit “comes of age and into his inheritance” (29). It is upon another birthday that Frodo begins the Quest of the Ring; his fiftieth birthday “seemed somehow the proper day on which to set out” (64). Anniversaries of birth recur in the narrative again and again—Frodo keeps up “the custom of giving Bilbo’s Birthday Party year after year” (41)—the repetition enacting the reiterative force of birthdays, their ambivalent significance as both reminders of birth and anticipations of the blown-out candles of death. The birthdays accumulate to potent regenerative force. In a transcendent fusion of birth, death, and resurrection at the end of the epic, we see Frodo and Bilbo, on another of their birthdays, “go off



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together” to the paradisiacal Grey Havens (1003). Birthdays in the aggregate come to mean infinitely more than the finite slices of life they celebrate. Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthdays fall emphatically together, and together on the equinoctial date of September 22. It is even more astrologically propitious that the flower of the new hobbit generation, Elanor Gamgee, is born to Sam and Rose on March 25, “a date that Sam noted” (1003)—no doubt because it commemorates, in addition to the day “when Sauron fell” and “the New Year will always now begin” (931), the week of the vernal equinox. Thus the narrative resonates with deeper rhythms of life. Tolkien’s epic is thoroughly organic. Its imagery grows from theme; Middleearth is imagistically alive because the narrative is “a struggle for life,” “a struggle to ‘be natural’ and to be alive and preserve life.”53 Moreover, the basic form of that narrative is founded directly upon patterns of life. Natural cycles articulate Tolkien’s structure. The lives of individual characters correlate so intimately with cycles of nature that recurrence of natural phenomena becomes the controlling pattern of the narrative. Earthy rhythms put Middleearth’s narrative pulse in intimate communion with “the power of the earth itself” (259). Seasonal associations accrue to the elemental motifs of death and life in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo leaves his home at the autumnal equinox, and, having in the meantime established himself as a kind of archetypal wounded king, completes the quest precisely at the time of the vernal equinox. Seasonal rhythm is equally vital in The Hobbit. The resurrectional “return of Mr. Bilbo Baggins” (H276) coincides exactly with the summer solstice, and much is made of such symbolic dates as May 1, Midsummer’s Day, and the beginning of winter, “Durin’s Day”—the “first day of the dwarves’ new year” (H271, H50). The seasonal cycle is stressed by an incremental repetition in which a second passing year expands into Bilbo’s total lifetime. The Hobbit plot traces a life cycle, initiating Bilbo’s adventure in spring, confronting threats to life in autumn. This is a surprisingly autumnal tale. The great bulk of the narrative—more than two hundred of the book’s nearly three hundred pages—takes place in “the waning of the year,” in fall “crawling towards winter.”54 It may be this thorough evocation of wintriness that provokes the poignance of Bilbo’s looking forward “after winter to a spring of joy” (H268). The full symbolic force of that spring can be felt in The Lord of the Rings, where nascent growth recurrently resists the desolation spreading from Mordor. In Ithilien, for example, the hobbits find spring





“already busy about them,” the reiterating life of this blooming wasteland springing into lush alliteration in the prose: “Fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a disheveled dryad loveliness” (636). The font of life finds here indirect expression in yet another spring, “almost wholly covered with mosses and rosebrambles; iris-swords stood in ranks about it, and water-lily leaves floated on its dark gently-rippling surface; but it was deep and fresh, and spilled ever softly out” (636–37). Against Middle-earth’s incessantly encroaching winters, spring spills “ever softly out.” (637) Spring spills into such remote corners of the narrative as color scheme. The style, in its 1950s fashion, goes so far as to make certain its colors match. A green-and-gold motif so persistently highlights the seasonal ushering in of new life to Middle-earth that those colors even at their subliminal level become capable of brightening certain places into perpetual spring. The vernal haven of Tom Bombadil is furnished with “green hanging mats and yellow curtains” (123); outside “everything is green and pale gold,” and the surrounding land rises “in wooded ridges, green, yellow, russet under the sun” (134). Similar hues spring always in the elven kingdom of Lothlórien, where throughout the year the grass on “green hillsides” is “studded with small golden flowers’ (341). In the perennial spring of Ithilien sway “wide beechen boughs, and through their young leaves sunlight glimmers, green and gold” (930). These symbolic impulses of spring tend to be deep-rooted, cryptic to the point of mysticism, like the orphic voice of Nimrodel the water sprite echoing through the epic in search of her lost lover “in the spring when the wind is in the new leaves” (332). But occasionally intimations of spring surge enthusiastically near the surface of the narrative. Spring fairly bounds out of the ground in the irrepressible person of Tom Bombadil, nature gone humanistically incarnate, neighborly embodiment of the recurrent life of the earth. In the freshening of each new year, Tom courts Goldberry, the river-daughter, herself “as young and as ancient as Spring” (119), renewing life with her in the “spring-time,” in “the merry spring” (124). Seasonal cycles merge in Tolkien’s narratives into more intimate rhythms of life. The Hobbit vibrates to the systole and diastole of day and night, beginning in morning, ending in evening, throbbing throughout with stressed diurnal pulse. The narrative reflects that rhythm; all Hobbit dangers are foreshadowed by the coming of the dark. The tale’s first sunset precipitates dwarves’ songs predicting the



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coming dragon peril; the subsequent sunset is a prelude to trolls. Darkness introduces the goblin threat: “they will be out after us in hundreds when night comes on” (H89). When he flees “into the darkness” under the Misty Mountains, Bilbo meets Gollum (H65). Wood-elves capture the dwarves in “blackness of night” (H158). The adventurers first encounter Smaug in “deep darkness” (H194). In reprise to that rhythmic threat of night throbs the hope of dawn; Middle-earth further manifests its artistic equipoise in a tense chiaroscuro of daylight and dark. Day lightens many narrative dangers: Gandalf curses monsters with “dawn take you all!” (H38). Trolls “must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again” (H39). Goblins “don’t like the sun: it makes their legs wobble and their heads giddy” (H83). That positive power of daylight is so strong as to modify, with psychological appropriateness, the morality of Middleearth topography. On the way back to the Shire, Bilbo and Gandalf come to “the very pass where the goblins had captured them before,” now safely because “this time they came to that high point at morning” (H270). The Lord of the Rings, shadowed by even more darkness, orchestrates a crescendo of dawns into one vast awakening. Contributory arousals are stressed both by frequency and strategic placement. Almost 40 percent of the chapters begin with wakings from sleep or unconsciousness. Half the trilogy’s major introductions are awakenings: Book II begins, “Frodo woke and found himself lying in bed” (213); Pippin’s arousal in midride initiates Book Five and the entire Return of the King volume (732); Sam comes to dramatically at the beginning of the final book (877). In the Two Towers, “hobbits must awaken Treebeard and the other Ents,” and “Gandalf must awaken Théoden from the false sleep of old age.”55 This imagistic foundation of narrative awakenings underlies the persuasiveness with which callow and provincial hobbits wake up to universal responsibility. The novel in thematic and symbolic unison is an intense anticipation of the dawn. Middle-earth awakenings amass almost resurrectional force, as when hobbits, having lain “in the dead night” (125) in the wintering (124) home of Tom Bombadil, unable to tell “whether the morning and evening of one day or of many days had passed” (129) in dreaming of escape and water and organic growth, wake up “all four at once in the morning light” (126). Sam’s arousal at the beginning of the final book of the trilogy after two hundred pages of unconsciousness is, in its rousing imagery of spring and ambient organic incense and




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When Sam awoke, he found that he was lying on some soft bed, but over him gently swayed wide beechen boughs, and through their young leaves sunlight glimmered, green and gold. All the air was full of a sweet mingled scent. He remembered that smell: the fragrance of Ithilien. “Bless me!” he mused. “How long have I been asleep?” For the scent had borne him back to the day when he had lit his little fire under the sunny bank; and for the moment all else between was out of waking memory. He stretched and drew a deep breath. “Why, what a dream I’ve had!” he muttered. “I’m glad to wake!” (930)

The deep rhythms of these natural cycles, morning following night, spring after winter, interact intimately with Middle-earth’s enlivened landscape. Wise Aragorn affirms the implicit affinity of the best narrative with the natural world when he points out that “the green earth” itself “is a mighty matter of legend” (424). And all that organic growth of narrative is sustained by the tendency of Tolkien’s imagery to run to water: to rain and to river and to sea. Refreshing water is a central current in Middle-earth imaging. Renewing water rites are a common feature. For a race “regarding even rivers and small boats with deep misgivings” (7), hobbits spend an uncommon amount of time in water, exhibiting something of an obsession with being “washed and refreshed” (123). And hobbits often plunge more deeply into life-giving water, as in Frodo’s thorough baptism when Old Man Willow almost succeeds in drowning him in Withywindle stream (114–15). Middle-earth water, moreover, demonstrates unusual rejuvenative power, as when Pippin and Merry are renewed by draughts of Treebeard’s entwine that, with an appearance “like water,” brings extraordinary “refreshment and vigour” (460). At Tom Bombadil’s, too, “the drink in their drinkingbowls seemed to be clear cold water, yet it went to their hearts like wine and set free their voices” (123). The lively intimations of Middle-earth water imagery surface in Tom Bombadil’s companion, Goldberry. Appropriately enough for a character whose role consists of refreshing the hobbits on their journey, Goldberry is both the metaphoric representative and literal embodiment of water. With “her clear voice . . . like the song of a glad water flowing” (119), she sings to the hobbits “rain-song as sweet as showers on dry hills” (127), songs of “sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,” of “reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water” (120),



edenic Ithilien and intaken breath and relit fires, particularly evocative of resurrection:

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“songs that began merrily in the hills and fell softly down into silence; and in the silences they saw in their minds pools and waters wider than any they had known” (130). This “fair River-daughter” even runs like water, the sound of her footsteps like “a stream falling gently away downhill over cool stones in the quiet of the night” (123), her gown rustling “softly like the wind in the flowering borders of the river” (121), “a light like the glint of water on dewy grass” flashing from under her feet as she dances (132). The effluent imagistically enlivening Tolkien’s narrative flows ultimately from a fountain deeper than Goldberry, welling up from the source of life itself, from that teeming mother the sea. Sea imagery recurs with tidal force through The Lord of the Rings, a fount of hope even in the wasteland that is Mordor: “a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it” (617). Sea imagery directly nurtures the landscape, swelling the grassland of Rohan, for example, so “like a green sea” that it has tides (413), and its waves of “swelling grass-lands rose and fell like a wide grey sea” (537). The sea surges metaphorically so far as to morph into character, and unusually vital character: ents attack “as the bursting of a flood that had long been held back by a dike” (474), wrecking Isengard as if “the Great Sea had risen in wrath and fallen on the hills with storm” (542). Everywhere the sea swells imagistically through the narrative action, most vividly in the massive tidal waves of the wars of Middleearth, ebbing and flowing in the battles before Helm’s Deep, casting up the “Flotsam and Jetsam” (546) of Isengard, storming and breaching the dike of Osgiliath. Small wonder that characters are haunted by subliminal whisperings of the sea. Frodo, like Merry and the entire race of elves, is obsessed with “the sound of the Sea far-off, a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams” (106; cf. 354). Water power is not the only natural force invigorating the imagery of Middle-earth; complementary surges of resurrectional energy emanate from other organic sources. The sun sheds stimulating warmth in the imagery, streaming in to “heat now heart and limb” (140). Aspirating winds agitate the pages of Tolkien’s tales; “the air that blows in that country” (Tree 16) is “keen air” (503), “a wind of spring” (931), “a wind from the sea” (820). Echoes redouble life upon itself (931). Even moonlight in its apparently sterile “cold and white” not only enlightens but enlivens the Middle-earth landscape (577). These natural images are doubly potent for their ambiguity. Their lively profiles are complicated by perverse implications; they associate





as easily with death as with life.56 That makes it possible for immediate context to activate in these ambiguous images either positive or negative valences. Water, “spreading, spreading irresistibly” (H138–39), threatens inundation as often as it promises replenishment, images war as potently as peace. Winds destroy as much as they refresh. Sunlight withers as well as warms. Like life itself, these ambivalent images merge living and dying, attaining tense density by nourishing a complex range of both negative and positive implications. That imagistic approach is almost Joycean in its cultivation of epiphany through ambivalent symbol.57 Its multivalence makes opposition the crux of existence in this morally informed rhetorical universe. “Light diminished, darkness illumined, throw one another into relief, for light and dark, like all polar contrarieties, exist not only at each other’s expense but also by virtue of each other.”58 Tolkien’s natural imagery enlivens the most insensate aspects of his creative world. Pippin’s discovery of implicit life in the palantír provides a kind of parable of that narrative resurrection. Under the hobbit’s first casual glance, the seer ball seems totally lifeless: “a smooth globe of crystal, now dark and dead.” Then that more animate spying globe, the moon, analogically looks “in over the edge of the dell.” As Pippin sees the ball in the new light of vivifying “moonlight gleaming on its surface,” there comes in response to his increased attentiveness “a faint glow and stir in the heart of it.” Once moved upon by the natural imagery of the moon, once really seen, the palantír, like the whole of Middle-earth, holds the eye of the viewer “so that now he could not look away” (578). It reveals powerful implicit life, a will of its own; we feel how strongly “it draws one to itself” (584). In what we thought emptiness, the narrative enables us to discern with Pippin implicit truth, to visualize “images of things far off and days remote,” even to extend our awareness so far beyond our usual myopia as to “perceive the unimaginable” (584). Tolkien’s reader-reviving subcreation resurrects more than the palantír. The vivifying force of natural imagery and pantheistic prose impels the narrative through escapes and recuperations and arousals into pervasive symbolic resurrection. The expansive structure of The Lord of the Rings itself reflects that resurrectional movement: the narrative splits into simultaneous plot progressions so that an interweaving multinarrative reveals to the reader a pulsating process of disappearance and reappearance. That regenerative plot pattern is bolstered by a recurrent motif of more explicit vanishing and reappearance, notably the innumerable goings and comings of the ring-bearers. Again and again—after vanishing through the power of



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the ring, after hiding and being lost, after total narrative eclipse— Gollum comes back. Bilbo comes back. Everyone who bears the ring—Frodo, Sam, even Tom Bombadil—dramatically reappears. By force of déjà vu emphasis and the death associations surrounding the source of the ring’s power, those infinite returns to visible existence vibrate with resurrectional implications. A more explicit prototype of that resurrection, a coming back to dynamic life from morbid inactivity, is provided by King Théoden when he “arose and rode through the Shadow to the fire, and died in splendor, even as the Sun, returning beyond hope, gleamed upon Mindolluin in the morning” (954)—the conceptual reversal within syntactic parallelism adroitly resurrects him in the syntax itself. “A faint light” growing, Gandalf knocks with the prophetic command of an Elijah at the door of the king’s entombing hall: “Come out. . . . Too long have you sat in shadows. . . . Breathe the free air again!” “Open!” he cried. “The Lord of the Mark comes forth!” The doors rolled back and a keen air came whistling in. A wind was blowing on the hill. (503)

Théoden, convinced by that revivifying wind that “the time for fear is past,” draws himself “up, slowly, as a man that is stiff from long bending,” and, looking “into the opening sky,” makes an almost explicit declaration of rebirth: “Dark have been my dreams of late . . . but I feel as one new-awakened” (504). Analogues of resurrection incarnate in the narrative’s fuguelike reiteration of recuperations. Exhausted hobbits under the care of Tom Bombadil, for example, “after being long ill and bedridden, wake one day to find that they are unexpectedly well and the day is again full of promise” (141). The simultaneous recovery of Éowyn and Éomer hints of resurrection: Éowyn “opened her eyes and said: ‘Éomer! What joy is this? For they said that you were slain’ ” (850). Frodo’s tenacious recuperative powers make him particularly resurrectable; he enjoys no fewer than five distinct revivals, ranging from subtle to explicit. After his near-death experience at the significant site of Balin’s Tomb, when Frodo declares himself sufficiently recovered from orc attack to walk, “Aragorn nearly dropped him in his amazement,” exclaiming “I thought you were dead!”59 Escapes, too, transfigure into resurrection. “A series of unexpected rescues, of lesser ‘happy endings’ ” figures forth the ultimate triumph.60 Pippin raises resurrectional implications as well as “a good





deal of laughter” with his account of how the mayor, “buried in chalk” by the Town Hole’s collapse, “came out like a floured dumpling” (153). The subconscious significance of Pippin’s own escape from entombment in Old Man Willow is stressed by repetition in dream (117–18, 125). Perhaps most dramatically, locked in the grave of a barrow-wight, “deathly pale,” “clad in white,” “chilled to the marrow” by the wight’s chant of “never more to wake on stony bed, / never, till the Sun falls and the Moon is dead” (138), Frodo is resurrectionally rescued by Tom Bombadil: “There was a loud rumbling sound, and of stones rolling and falling, and suddenly light streamed in, real light, the plain light of day.” With the stone rolled back from the tomb and that triple infusion of thrice-welcome light, the face of Tom, regenerative force of nature, takes shape, “framed against the light of the sun rising red behind him” (139). Moments later in this transcendent passage the natural force that is Tom Bombadil, “large as life,” even more explicitly revives Pippin, Merry, and Sam: Raising his right hand he said in a clear and commanding voice: “Wake now my merry lads! Wake and hear me calling! . . . ” To Frodo’s great joy the hobbits stirred, stretched their arms, rubbed their eyes, and then suddenly sprang up. They looked about in amazement, first at Frodo, and then at Tom standing large as life on the barrow-top above them; and then at themselves in their thin white rags. (140)

Small wonder these diminutive Lazaruses address their “large as life” resurrector with an awe—“What in the name of wonder?” (140)— which for hobbits amounts almost to reverence. A tributary theme of reincarnation flows in various forms through the narrative, augmenting that central current with another form of resurrection. There is reincarnation in genetic repetition: the great horse Shadowfax is declared “one of the mighty steeds of old . . . returned” (511). There is the reincarnation of titular continuity in echoic reappearances of “The King under the Mountain” in such anticipated variants as Thrór, Thráin, Thorin, and Dáin, and such unexpected forms as the dragon Smaug.61 There are intimations of more literal reincarnations: “Durin the Deathless,” eldest of the Seven Fathers of the dwarves, never failed of an heir so “like to his Forefather” that he was always named Durin: “He was indeed held by the Dwarves to be the Deathless that returned” (1046). And there are in Tolkien’s revitalizing prose more mystical suggestions of



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reincarnation, as in this paean to resurgent life: “The battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed” (820). The recurrence of such resurrectional analogues is incremental. These well-timed prototypes of resurrection move the narrative toward a definite climax. The regenerative inertia they provide makes more palatable for cynical modern readers even such a stretch of faith as the apparently literal resurrection of Gandalf, so that Edmund Fuller can see Gandalf’s return as the key to the “mystical” significance of the trilogy: “The wizard undergoes a harrowing prefiguring of the death, descent into Hell, and rising again from the dead” to become “the angel in the incorruptible body of resurrection.”62 Although that theological explication may overstretch the narrative intention, internal witnesses seem as impressed as Fuller with the transcendent implications of Gandalf’s return. Aragorn rejoices, “Gandalf . . . beyond all hope you return to us in our need” (484). Pippin, in an echoic environment of vibrant sunshine and greening grass and banners animated by a sprightly breeze, adds his witness: “I will not yet despair. Gandalf fell and has returned and is with us.”63 Much more important in the Tolkien context than any philosophical implication is the feel of it, the sensuous evocation of resurrection. Gandalf’s account of his death cum resurrection involves us directly with the experience, engaging reader sensibilities in tangible imagery through such tactile techniques as the onomatopoeia groaning in its final clause: “I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth. Faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone” (491). We can almost feel, with rich indirection through the response of Aragorn to Gandalf’s unlooked-for return, the physical sensation of resurrection itself: “A strange cold thrill . . . like the sudden bite of a keen air, or the slap of a cold rain that wakes an uneasy sleeper” (483). Ostensibly less literal, Sam’s metaphorical resurrection, in the richness of its images of water and wind and sunshine and spring and echoing laughter, incarnates even more vividly a sense of reviving joy: Between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I





was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” “A Great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed. “How do I feel?” he cried. “Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel—he waved his arms in the air—“I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves.” (930–31)

Middle-earth life flourishes in the very midst of death. The dead invariably revitalize through such natural means as those “bright eyes in the grass,” the evermind flowers, which “blossom in all the season[s] of the year, and grow where dead men rest” (496). Or effectual resurrection can be managed through such mundane means as Frodo’s custom of honoring Bilbo’s departure by an annual birthday party. Although “some people were rather shocked” by this refusal to admit the finality of mortality, Frodo himself “did not think Bilbo was dead” (H151), and Frodo’s conviction ushers him ritually back. The liveliness of the dead transcends the most emphatic symbolic revivals. Éomer hopes his fallen comrades may continue to stand guard in death: “When their spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mound stand and guard the Fords of Isen” (538). Nor is this mere oratory—the legends of Middle-earth are alive with such eminently effective dead guards as the sons of Folcwine, whose haunted burial mounds “the enemies of Gondor feared to pass” (1030). Tolkien’s incessant symbolic resurrections usher the reader within practical reach of eternal life. Both the transcendent possibility and the inexorable mortality of life are realized in Middle-earthly intimations of the eternal. Constantly on the horizon of Tolkien’s fiction glows the prospect of possible paradise, of potential elven Avalon, of longed-for uncertain “regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness” (933). This stressing of the certain uncertainty of life— and of afterlife—distills intense poignance from the narrative: Treebeard said . . . “It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.”



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It would be difficult to rhetorically balance ambivalence more delicately than in that triad of uncertainty: Treebeard reluctantly pessimistic, Galadriel hesitantly hopeful, and Celeborn with his deciding vote abstaining. It is with such taut stylistic restraint that Tolkien compresses from his narrative the intensity of its optimistically elegiac tone. In the direction of that sad uncertain spring, in the eternally evanescent willow meads of that elusive Land in the Uttermost West, Frodo’s quest, with “the echo of all our strivings toward the unseen goal,”64 moves at the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings toward the ultimate beginning that is at the heart of the most magnificent ending: “The ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise” (1007). Thus through this undertow of resurrectional movement flows the primal flux of the quest, of adventure and return, of There and Back Again. The cyclical pattern of human existence itself, sleep to waking, life to death, provides “the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of plot” in Tolkien’s fiction (Tree 23). Returning to the Shire in the closing trek of The Hobbit, Bilbo recalls in echoic detail “at each point on the road . . . the happenings and the words of a year ago” (H274). Frodo, expressly determined in The Lord of the Rings to avoid a “there-and-back journey,” yet finds himself “flying from deadly peril into deadly peril” (102). That inevitable there-and-back pattern is underscored by the climactic journey back to the Shire, when the adventurers drop away in symmetrical order of their joining, leaving, as Merry observes, “just the four of us that started out together” (974), come to “the very last stroke . . . at the very door of Bag End” (997). The resurrectional significance of the return is clear: the hobbits have come back for the explicitly reviving purpose of “raising the Shire.” The pattern of return stresses itself further in the reinstatement of Sam Gamgee. When Sam informs him, “I’ve come back,” Farmer



And Celeborn said: “I do not know, Eldest.” But Galadriel said: “Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring.” (959)


Cotton responds, “ ‘You’ve been in foreign parts, seemingly. We feared you were dead.’ ‘That I ain’t!’ said Sam. ‘Nor Mr. Frodo.’ ” Moments later Sam makes another significant comeback, this time with Rose Cotton, with whom he is to restore a vigorous hobbit line in the Shire: “ ‘Hullo, Sam’ said Rosie. ‘Where’ve you been? They said you were dead; but I’ve been expecting you since the Spring’ ” (985). Thus the earthy, feet-on-the-ground, hands-in-the-soil Sam Gamgee enacts in conclusion this transcendent accumulation of spring and dawn and wind and water and awakening and renewing and escape and return and reincarnation and resurrection, affirming the quiet triumph of life in the face of relentless annihilation, bringing the story full circle and the reader caught up in this archetypal movement fully to himself, fusing the intricate strands of enlivening landscape, pantheistic prose, and resurrectional narrative in the forceful simplicity of his return: “He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said” (1008).



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Critics have found in Tolkien’s fiction so much not to like that the disapproval invades what some of us thought sanctuaries of his stylistic strength. The most surprising of those repudiations of style is critical dismissal of Tolkien’s narrative. Ursula LeGuin sums up how widely those perceived deficiencies can stretch: “There’s Aragorn, who’s a stuffed shirt; and Sam, who keeps saying ‘sir’ to Frodo until one begins to have mad visions of forming a Hobbit Socialist party; and there isn’t any sex. And there is the Problem of Evil, which some people think Tolkien muffs completely.”1 But the most serious contender for fictive deficiency is awkward narrative, “the peculiar rhythm of the book, its continual alternations of distress and relief, threat and reassurance, tension and relaxation: this rocking-horse gait (which is precisely what makes the huge book readable to a child of nine or ten) may well not suit a jet-age adult.”2 I share LeGuin’s view that some of the arguments denouncing the narrative are “superficially very good”: “Tolkien’s plodding stressrelief pattern” can seem “simplistic, primitive.”3 Yet I remain convinced Tolkien’s narrative may be his major stylistic accomplishment. LeGuin pinpoints the stylistic rhythm “that shapes and directs his narrative” as “very strong and very simple, as simple as a rhythm can be: two beats. Stress, release. Inbreath, outbreath. A heartbeat. A walking gait.” That peripatetic narrative rhythm seems to me so naturally pervasive in Tolkien’s fiction that we don’t so much read as “we walk from the Shire to the Mountain of Doom with Frodo and Sam.”4 Tolkien enacts his enlivening and realizing imaginative vision through narrative unusually dynamic for such domestically grounded story—Middle-earth teems with activity. But there’s more to The Lord of the Rings than the average action movie; Tolkien works his lively medium artfully. Narrative provides for this mobile author both a formal paradigm and a deft process for revealing hidden potential,



CH A P T ER


for enacting theoretical possibilities, for realizing wonder. Narrative as adapted by Tolkien to his characteristic linguistic concerns is the consummate art form for activating imagination. The actualizing capacity of Tolkien’s narrative, intimated in The Hobbit, is broadcast by the very attitude of The Lord of the Rings. Its narrative reads more like discovery of reality than spinning out of story. “Tolkien believes in his world, and convinces us that there is far more of it than has found its way into his books”; “he is not stretching his invention: he is writing from abundance.”5 The Middle-earth of the trilogy seems almost autonomous; it shows indications of having evolved from the conviction that in a fundamental way it really is there somewhere. Certainly its author appears—and appears in his travel-weary description of the discovery of the tale to think himself—not so much creator as explorer: I plodded on, mostly by night, till I stood by Balin’s tomb in Moria. There I halted for a long while. It was almost a year later when I went on and so came to Lothlórien and the Great River late in 1941. In the next year I wrote the first drafts of the matter that now stands as Book III, and the beginnings of Chapters 1 and 3 of Book V; and there as the beacons flared in Anórien and Théoden came to Harrowdale I stopped. Foresight had failed and there was no time for thought. It was during 1944 that, leaving the loose ends and perplexities of a war which it was my task to conduct, or at least to report, I forced myself to tackle the journey of Frodo to Mordor. (xv)

The lengths to which Tolkien is willing to take this assumption of the reporter role can be seen in his explicit rejection of more fictive approaches to fiction: “I much prefer history, true or feigned,” he says, “with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers” (xvii). Middle-earth accounts themselves make abundantly clear that Tolkien considers himself not so much making his tale up as telling it as he sees it, allowing the creation a self-sufficiency that leaves the reader free to see into it as deeply as personal experience will permit. That reader-response reaction of the most enthusiastic readers of The Lord of the Rings is precisely what its author invites: “Tolkien did not write his fictions to be decoded, but rather to be experienced.”6 The pervasive sense of discovered actuality that characterizes the annals of Middle-earth derives in part from narratorial insistence on the story as a ripple in the long stream of history. Tolkien’s tales manage so convincing an impression of natural ongoingness that they



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draw attack both from detractors who dislike their lack of closure and from enthusiasts who hate that they end too soon. That insistent sense of felt history extending beyond finite limitations of narrative surfaces early in the trilogy in Gandalf’s brief account of the ring’s origin: “That is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the Black Years, which only the lore-masters now remember. If I were to tell you all that tale, we should still be sitting here when Spring has passed into Winter” (50). Tolkien’s narrative is equally farsighted in the other historical direction. The Lord of the Rings, a coda to the Third Age, is at the same time a prelude for our age, ushering in as it does the era of “the domination of men” (950, 1057). This fiction is complex in its time frame, open-ended almost to infinity in both directions, a forward-looking extension backward from a chronological position impinging on ongoing historical experience. That continuity with accepted history is subliminally stressed by an underlying theme of onwardness—“on again, always on and on” (612)—that dramatizes itself in the tales by its own insistent recurrence.7 Bilbo initiates the undercurrent of determined ongoing with his decision to press on through the goblin caves: “ ‘Go back?’ he thought. ‘No good at all. Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only one thing to do! On we go!’ So up he got, and trotted along” (H64). The central journey of Frodo and Sam toward Mordor and indeed the entire movement of The Lord of the Rings is a protracted process of characters “bending their weariness and failing wills only to the one task of going on” (917), an epic of unswerving onwardness that refuses to end even with its narrative climax: “Quick, Master!” he gasped. “Go on! Go on! No time to lose. I’ll deal with him. Go on!” Frodo looked at him as if at one now far away. “Yes, I must go on,” he said. “Farewell, Sam! This is the end at last. . . . Farewell!” He turned and went on. (923)

“Even at the end of all things, at the edge of ruin, when the task is impossibly accomplished,” Sam “begs Frodo to move a little farther away from the edge.”8 Tolkien with the compelling momentum of that tenacious pressing on manages to integrate into the natural continuity of his narrative inherent tribute to human perseverance; as in history, the tenacity of the characters determines the extent of their tale. Frodo’s determination to press on sets the tone and pattern of the entire narrative: “I will take the Ring,” he vows, “though I do not know the way” (264).



THE ROAD GOES ON FOR EVER


His tentative and timorous actions accumulate through persistence to something close to stoic courage; he makes muddling through an act of heroism. “It’s no worse than I expected,” he says at one critical setback in this pilgrimage to Mordor, “I never hoped to get across. I can’t see any hope of it now. But I’ve still got to do the best I can. . . . So we must still go on” (903; cf. 913). That gritty tenacity ingrains itself into the texture of the book to such an extent that it too, beyond its covers and even its aspirations, goes on and on. The Tolkien brand of persistence is as habit forming for readers as for hobbits; after sticking with Frodo through the harrowing trials of Mordor, we start to feel like Sam: “After coming all that way I don’t want to give up yet. It’s not like me, somehow” (929). It is that emphatic onwardness that makes the questing road the imagistic backbone of the narrative. Throughout Tolkien’s fiction, Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea; Over snow by winter sown, And through the merry flowers of June, Over grass and over stone, And under mountains in the moon. (H275)

Most Tolkien tales are close variations on the essential plot summarized in the initial sentence of “Leaf by Niggle”: “There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make.” 9 The journey is the essence of Tolkien narrative; the Middle-earth “road goes on for ever” (72). Frodo in his final leave-taking at the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings anticipates yet more road: Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate; And though I oft have passed them by, A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun. (1005)

The questing road leads into intriguing literary territory, opening up frontiers of Tolkien attitude bordering on an aesthetic of the unsettling. The Hobbit narrator explicitly proposes the concept of discomfort as the origin of art: “Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told



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about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway” (H47). Hence the intriguing tensions in hobbit heroes regarding the ambivalent attractions of security and excitement, the conflicting lures of the hobbit hole that “means comfort” (H1) and “uncomfortable adventure” (H161). Hence “the most dreadful of all Bilbo’s experiences, and the one at the time which he hated most” is “the one he was most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards” (H259). For Tolkien, narrative like life means restive pursuit of rest, pleasure realized as response to pain, a longing for security so intense it risks adventure. The discomforting vitality of Tolkien’s narrative does more than propel characters through the tale; it is so agitating it can drive readers, even readers who are catatonically complacent, out of our ruts of imperceptivity. The most urgent aspect of that nervous dynamism is its ambivalence. Ursula LeGuin with her astute novelist’s eye notices both the narrative momentum and the stylistic inertia of the story’s “nightmarishly slow transit”: “the description is full of verbs suggesting movement, though most refer to static features of the landscape.”10 Those dissonant attitudes resonate with the inmost inclinations of Tolkien’s pulsating style: “The paradox of movement in stillness reinforces that of an audible silence: we sense the nervously attentive eyes and ears of the travelers” so viscerally the resulting anxiety suffuses the Middle-earth stylistic landscape “with a tension which will be intensified in the following pages with moments of relief.”11 Tolkien’s ambivalent style generates astonishing complexities from the simple principle of binary alternation. Simply by distinguishing “ ‘familiar’ and ‘heroic,’ ” the author’s “stylistic contrast, both in speech and in narrative,” contributes richly to “the texture of the tale.”12 That fertile cross-pollination of alternating language can be seen in large in “the form of an asymmetrical stylistic arch, beginning with the everyday language of the Shire” that builds to “the climax of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which uses biblical-sounding parataxis and ends with a long section of alliterative verse.”13 The Bible rhythm, like so much of Tolkien’s subtle styling, is buried so deep in his prose it is almost imperceptible: “Less prominent, but more pervasive, is Tolkien’s use of a biblical style of narrative, especially when recounting a series of momentous events in rapid succession, as if from a remote distance.”14 The momentum of that narrative accelerates through Tolkien’s rhetoric toward inevitability. Bilbo “used often to say there was only





one Road; that it was like a great river; its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary,” a road as irresistible as it is unavoidable: “ ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to’ ” (72). Middle-earth narrative enacts inevitable surprise with a kind of flexible fatalism, an indeterminate determinism in which “the years will bring what they will” (1034). Like the painter Niggle, convinced that “things might have been different, but they could not have been better” (Tree 89), Middle-earth manages a conviction of free choice hand in hand with an inescapable sense of rightness about the way things are. Tolkien enhances that open-ended inevitability by emphasis on coincidence. The Hobbit makes much of luck; Bilbo is inordinately fortunate. The lucky fourteenth member of the dwarves’ party, he is saved from Gollum in the riddle contest by “pure luck,” emerges unscathed from the concluding holocaust by sheer accident, and just happens along the way to find an invaluable troll key, the Arkenstone, and the ring. As Gandalf’s sharp wizardly eye sees it, he has “good luck far exceeding the usual allowance.”15 But Bilbo’s luck, like Tolkienian narrative coincidence generally, is “luck of an unusual kind” (H164). Good fortune in Middle-earth is a matter of something more, of “some wits, as well as luck” (H154), “good management and good luck” (H105). Fatalism interacts intriguingly with free will in Tolkien’s creative world. Gandalf chides Bilbo, “surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck?” (H278). Middle-earth, in the narrative necessity of its coincidence, is a world much like that of Beowulf, a world where we make our own luck, maybe, where “fate may sometimes save a man, if his courage is strong.” Thus Middle-earth fortune, persistent to the point of obtrusiveness, is by no means unnatural. Tolkien’s narratives are convincingly inevitable in part because they so consistently proceed upon premises of observable cause and effect. Even such peripheral details as weather phenomena follow natural cycles. At the funeral of Théoden, “a great rain came out of the Sea, and it seemed that all things wept” (827). Those weeping skies, on the face of them suspiciously convenient if not sentimentally fortuitous, blow in as part of a consistently developed low pressure system whose frontal winds appeared incidentally several pages earlier when “morning came, morning and a wind from



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the sea” blowing away the smog of Mordor. Still more naturally causal and with even more minute accuracy of wind direction, that prevailing weather pattern later carries the salvific sound of Rohirrim singing “even to the City” (820). These weather rhythms, like most of the ripples of fortuitousness in Tolkien’s fiction, arise as organically and inevitably as morning sea breeze. It is possible for coincidence to contribute to the integrity of the narrative at the same time it enhances psychological plausibility because the progress of that narrative is essentially associational. Almost any passage in Tolkien’s fiction demonstrates that associative movement: “If you look for a companion, be careful in choosing! And be careful of what you say, even to your closest friends! The enemy has many spies and many ways of hearing.” Suddenly he stopped as if listening. Frodo became aware that all was very quiet, inside and outside. Gandalf crept to one side of the window. Then with a dart he sprang to the sill, and thrust a long arm out and downwards. There was a squawk, and up came Sam Gamgee’s curly head hauled by one ear. (61–62)

Talk of untrustworthy friends conjures up a suspect friend; mention of spying anticipates eavesdropping; the very word hearing stimulates listening on the part of the speaker and more intent listening on the part of the listener and the capture of another listener by his listening ear. Because Tolkien’s narrative moves characteristically in that associative manner, from verbal anticipation to action and from action to consequent action, it can ensure integral relatedness in a story that seems almost to write itself. The associative process tends to expansiveness and hence toward a diffusion continually threatening to push Tolkien’s narrative right off the page, but through that very dynamism establishes organic inevitability as the most integrative aspect of the narrative. The associative current of Tolkien’s fiction is the more forceful because it is alternating rather than direct, generated as often by contrasts as by similarities. This fertile fluctuation is particularly evident in broader movements of the story. Peaceful interludes strategically quiet the prevailing tumult of Middle-earth war. Periodic respites—at Rivendell, at Lórien, at Beorn’s lodge and the house of Tom Bombadil—ease reader fatigue from the rapid narrative pace. Frequent comic (or at least comedic) relief provides rejuvenation for more intense tragic action, as when Frodo, in response to Sam’s silly poem, “laughed in the midst of all his cares” (633).





At the structural heart of Tolkien’s narrative pulses a fundamental alternation of mood in which intermittent interjection of hope maintains the unjaded quality of the tale’s essential terror. “That Frodo’s eastward journey is delayed is no blunder in narrative construction, for it is just the kind of happiness encapsulated in this episode, the happiness of grateful contemplation of beauty, and of unforced, unhurried activity, practical and creative, which the work opposes to the nihilistic spirit of Mordor.”16 Moreover, it is precisely “the imagining of such happiness (which like any object of desire is most compelling when transient or imperiled)” that is most “central to the purposes of The Lord of the Rings.”17 Affectively, the trilogy is a perpetual struggle of recurrent optimism against a background of despair, a generative tension that pervades the slightest shifts of mood: “It seemed to them that the Forest had relented, and was going to let them pass unhindered after all. But after a while the air began to get hot and stuffy. The trees grew close again on either side” (110). That kind of natural emotional oscillation between negative and positive moods pulsates in virtually every page, stirring deep-seated rhythmic expectations more compelling than more obvious associations. The subtlest evocation of those emotional rhythms is Tolkien’s delicate stylistic variation, his “frequent play between different linguistic styles.”18 Garbowski’s simple example reflects the unassuming nature of the process: When Aragorn ceremoniously lays his hands on Merry in the Houses of Healing and dramatically resurrects the unconscious hobbit, Merry’s leveling reaction to all that formal folderol is a simple hobbit-style “I am hungry”—“the function of the comic utterance at this juncture is to gently prick the high tone of the preceding narrative.”19 The cumulative impact of such understated stylistic play can be profound. Bottom line, such reassertions of simple hobbitish concerns in the face of high-toned demands of international politics and war reassure us: “There is still hope. The future is not fixed. There are still places on Earth that are beautiful, and loved, and cared for; there are still wonders, people who can wonder, and indeed who work wonders.”20 Hobbit hominess confirms as it undercuts Gondor grandeur; life is much the richer, Middle-earth asserts, for being both domestic and magnificent. The narrative inevitability that characterizes Tolkien’s fiction launches itself essentially through intensive prefiguring techniques, anticipation making coincidence artistically viable. There is a parable of the process in Frodo’s wondering at Gandalf’s fortuitous



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return: “What brought you back in the nick of time?” The wizard replies: “Looking behind.” Just so the narrative. At the most obvious level, the prefiguring is simply a matter of careful narrative preparation; The Lord of the Rings profits from having been, as Tolkien puts it, “rewritten backwards” (xvi). Sam’s fortunate possession of the rope that enables him to descend the Emyn Muil is a case in point. To make certain the rope will be more than “a piece of luck” (594), Sam thinks fully three hundred pages earlier, “No rope! And only last night you said to yourself: ‘Sam, what about a bit of rope? You’ll want it, if you haven’t got it’ ” (273). That preparation is quietly reinforced by Sam’s casual muttering much later in the caverns of Moria, “Rope. . . . I knew I’d want it, if I hadn’t got it!” (303), and by the incidental warning of elves in Lórien: “Never travel far without a rope” (362). On a deeper level than that sort of direct foreshadowing, the narrative underwrites its inevitability through parallel events. Tolkien’s fiction tends to anticipate incidents by prefiguring their essential elements in earlier actions. The introductory meeting in the initial chapter of The Hobbit, for instance, paradigms the total narrative movement: the “Unexpected Party,” as its title intimates, ushers in that amalgam of narrative surprise and undergirding structural consonance that is to typify the story throughout. That kind of parallel between the chapters and the book extends into intimate detail. The intermittent manner of the dwarves’ arrival anticipates the ploy by which the party later gains access to Beorn’s home in Chapter 7 (H7, H110). Bilbo’s urge to hide behind the beer barrel foreshadows the wine barrel escape of Chapter 9 (H15, H163). Gandalf’s “if you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something” provides a précis of the “On the Doorstep” chapter (H25, H186). The dwarves enlarge the prefiguration potential of those narrative echoes by singing a ballad that simultaneously recalls history and outlines the coming adventure. That historic lay, in its celebration of past events, foreshadows such future incidents as the party’s capture by goblins in “dungeons deep and caverns old,” escape from wargs through the “flaming spread” of Gandalf’s fire, unleashing of “the dragon’s ire” on Dale, and the “dying fall” of Thorin in the final battle (H14). Although in general oblique, as befits prophetic pronouncement, this cyclical repetition of history can be incisive in its detail. Bilbo’s “What about a little light?” echoes from his hobbit hole in the initial chapter into the dragon cave two hundred pages later, amplified by the heightened intensity of the narrative: “ ‘Light!’ he cried. ‘Can anybody make a light?’ ” (H15, H216).





This prefiguring process involves much more than the natural fulfillment of dwarvish appetite for adventure. Tolkien constructs his narrative inevitability with intricate care. In one instance, typical in its apparent casualness and thorough articulation, he builds toward Bilbo’s encounter with Smaug by means of a complex of underlying similarities in earlier meetings with monsters, notably Gollum and the trolls.21 All three of the meetings revolve around riddles. Knowing “no dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk,” Bilbo introduces himself to Smaug as “the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. . . . I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider” (H205). That riddling sequence is anticipated by a formal riddle match between Bilbo and Gollum of no fewer than nine riddles. Earlier still, trolls demand, in what sound a lot like riddles, that Bilbo explain “what he means by lots and none at all,” and “what’s a burrahobbit?” (H34). Those insistent riddles are not only invariably present but invariable in pattern, directed in all three cases at discovery of Bilbo’s identity. More detailed parallels knit the three incidents. A moment of bucking up courage introduces each monster meeting, a ritual whose repetition incrementally manifests Bilbo’s growing hardihood. Approaching the trolls, “he stood and hesitated in the shadows,” trying to determine “the least difficult” course of action (H34). On the trail toward Gollum, he has become more valiant, though only by necessity; he presses pluckily on because there is “only one thing to do!” (H64). On the climactic brink of meeting Smaug, however, despite the “vast danger that lay in wait,” he moves on with no coercion whatsoever: “it was the bravest thing he ever did” (H197). That simple incremental technique can intensify the narrative, as when Bilbo’s uneasiness deepens graphically with the growing darkness from “I feel it in my bones that this place will be attacked” (H211) to “I fear that dragon in my marrow” (H213). What is more, the déjà vu functions in the fiction incrementally even when increments are not apparent; in the writings of Middle-earth, simple repetition seems paradoxically to establish distinction, so that Tolkien’s iterations increase observer insight in the same way each unique season of spring deepens appreciation of what spring can be: “Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world’s beginning to world’s end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men” (Tree 51).



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Bilbo’s triad of monster meetings most precisely anticipates each of its increments in the pattern of their occurrence. In addition to the introductory courage ritual, correspondences of sequence include the central riddles, plus parallel concluding altercations in which the life of Bilbo is invariably threatened. The incidents are even similarly prefaced. Each of the meetings takes place after a passage in utter darkness has been broken by some ominous light—the trolls’ campfire, the green sheen of Gollum’s eyes, “the glow of Smaug” (H197). Such narrative parallels reflect widely in the tale. Recurring hobbit hunger for home, one of the common strands unifying the central monster-meeting incidents, appears elsewhere throughout The Hobbit as a harbinger of disaster. Just before encountering the trolls, Bilbo thinks, “ ‘Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!’ It was not the last time that he wished that” (H30). Indeed it was not. Bilbo’s wish for his comfortable home in the Shire runs like a refrain through the tale, announcing virtually every crisis. He wishes it again just before entering the Misty Mountains, just before the “complete miserableness” (H63) of meeting Gollum, just before capture by giant Mirkwood spiders, just before braving Smaug’s lair, and just before the climax of the climactic battle.22 The force of that unifying, intensifying, and densifying narrative recurrence carries as far as The Lord of the Rings. Just before an attack by orcs and trolls in the caverns of Moria, Frodo’s “thoughts had been carried away from the Dark Mines, to Rivendell, to Bilbo, and to Bag End in the days while Bilbo was still there. He wished with all his heart that he was back there, and in those days” (310). The most compelling of these parallel anticipations are, as always with Tolkien, the most subtle. Tolkien narrative establishes the eventuality of its events not simply in broad design but through their inmost texture, postulating by their very manner of occurrence a cyclical history in which present phenomena foreshadow what is to come, as naturally as they do in life. Tolkien’s prefiguring techniques range from the ingenuous to the ingenious. He enlists images as precursors of the thing imaged: Púkel statues, “carved in the likeness of men, huge and clumsy-limbed, squatting crosslegged with their stumpy arms folded on fat bellies,” prefigure the Wose who appears forty pages later, “a strange squat shape of a man, gnarled as an old stone . . . short-legged and fat-armed, thick and stumpy” (777, 813–14). He makes tokens anticipate actuality in such striking instances as Strider’s discovery of the elf-stone prior to meeting the elf Glorfindel (196, 205). More subtly and more significantly, he capitalizes on the





intensifying potential of rhythmic recurrence. The timeliness of comforting elvish voices at moments of crisis through the Middle-earth narratives, for example, invokes an increasing power of benediction from each incrementally reassuring repetition of the elvish tongue.23 Tolkien’s technique of establishing narrative inevitability is as thorough as it is flexible. The advent of Smaug, announced directly and anticipated indirectly through those parallel encounters with lesser monsters, is in addition more obliquely prefigured. Incidental interspersals of dragon cliché, worm image, and reptilian rhetoric subliminally foreshadow the actual dragon. Bilbo, musing on the vague possibility of adventure, notices a distant fire and thinks suddenly of “plundering dragons” (H15). “A dragon marked in red” appears on the dwarves’ map (H19). Gandalf remarks in passing that the hobbit is “as fierce as a dragon in a pinch” (H16), and Bilbo, assenting to the adventure, says, “I will try, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms” (H18). Gollum, in addition to anticipating Smaug in the events surrounding Bilbo’s meeting with him, prefigures the dragon to the point of imagistic snakiness: The “small slimy creature,” “gathered for a spring,” “hissed softly but menacingly” at Bilbo (H66); “his eyes gleamed cold in his head, as he swayed it from side to side” (H80). Implicit intimations of dragonness point again and again throughout The Hobbit toward Smaug. Such images by their recurrence assume the dual advantages of opening out their implications as they interlock the narrative. The inevitability of Tolkien’s fiction in part derives from the unobtrusive pervasiveness of such densifying images—like the chess game in The Return of the King, its controlling and enriching presence emphatically asserted by an economic handful of well-placed allusions. Early in the book Gandalf puts the war game in motion: “The board is set, and the pieces are moving” (743). Two hundred pages later, we realize that the Dark Power, too, “its first moves” having been “checked upon its western line,” has all along been “moving its armies like pieces on the board” with the ponderous deliberateness of a grandmaster (902). Chess references shade into an increasing illusiveness that invests even vague allusions such as “we must press our Enemy, and no longer wait upon him for the move” with the full force of the explicit image.24 That extension of imagistic edges is so effectively expansive that by the time Farmer Cotton inquires toward the end of the book, “Well, what’s the next move?” (985), his oblique allusion to the chess game can call up sufficient structural resonances to make the minor Shire



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disturbance to which he refers seem a densified microcosm of the Mordor War. The best thing about that symbolism is how deep in the weft of the prose it lies, how unobtrusively germane Tolkien manages to make it. It is so undistracting we never have to attend to it, hardly need notice it—we are aware of the imagery at an almost subliminal level. As Isaac Asimov smilingly affirms, “One can read The Lord of the Rings without getting lost in the symbolism.”25 That puts us in the favored readerly responsive position of reacting emotionally even when we don’t have to analyze this quietly pervasive imagery. The naturalness of Middle-earth, the internal quality of its stylistic implications, makes this fictional world “so real that when we immerse ourselves in it, we can never be sure, from one reading to the next, where it will take us or what we will see along the way.”26 That is why so many readers find it fraught with such possibility: It is “a wild tale, untamable. It is the mark of the depth of this great river that sweeps us along when we step into it that there can be variant readings which are nonetheless consonant with the text. It is as ragged as a river.”27 By means of its careful narrative structure, Tolkien’s fiction comes at us paradoxically pregnant with possibility, as rich in surprise almost as life. It is typical of Tolkien’s structural dexterity that the most unifying image of the trilogy, “the One Ring that binds them” (v), is at the same time the most expansive. That splendidly singular ring becomes a danger signal, an emblem of power, an image of increasingly comprehensive unity, a reinforcement of the circular movement of narrative, even, in one of the most remote of its many imagistic resonances, a source of vision: “Sometimes,” says Frodo, “I have felt it was like an eye looking at me.”28 That visionary aspect, far out though it is, is dramatically presented. It is possession of the ring that exposes Frodo to the evil Eye of Sauron (355), and when Tom Bombadil looks into it, the hobbits have “a vision,” typically ambivalent, “both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through the circle of gold” (130). That association of the ring with eyes causes eyes to assume in this context implicit potential as rings, so that Middle-earth eyes come to radiate more than usual significance when they get so much as hints of gleams or glows or flashes in them, let alone when we see outright fire in someone’s eye. That sort of imagistic echoing creates a chorus of symbolic reverberations in a rich recurrence of Middle-earth rings, rings ranging from a wide variety of finger ornaments to ring reflections as far afield





as key rings and stone circles and smoke rings and rings around the moon and ringing sounds, rings of rippling concentric circles reaching as far as the rings within rings of a King Lear-like “wheel of fire.”29 Those ringing overtones ultimately invest almost everything circular with imagistic significance; this kind of symbolic crosspollination can stimulate paradigmatic anticipations in the unlikeliest places—maybe even stretching the implications as far as magnificent hobbit ring-bearing destiny intimated in such mundane domesticities as hobbits’ love of round doors and windows, architectural inclinations that make them ring lovers before they become Ring lovers. Tolkien’s narratives thus attain what feels like inevitability from cumulative imagery, from anticipative structure, from convincing coincidence, thematic recurrence, and presaging rhythms, and perhaps most compellingly from an aura of historicity and a cyclical parallelism of events that casts over the entire creation “The Shadow of the Past” (41). That impelling presence, of the past, both as image and as narrative reality, haunts Middle-earth as persistently as “a shadow on the borders of old stories” (50). Tolkien’s prose reveals constant tie-ins to that spectral faërie history through allusions to legendary events and even verbatim quotations of ostensible historic statements.30 These insistent knittings with Middle-earth historicity ultimately weave the entire narrative pattern so thoroughly into the surrounding warp of faërie that we find in the fiction not so much an overview of a contained world as glimpses of a vaster world at once more elusive and more imminent. The most productive source of that expansiveness is the propensity of Middle-earth characters for recounting events beyond the narrative chronology, a process that extends the boundaries of the tale as it induces through the texture of the fiction a mind-set urging the reader to look outward from the story. The resulting interconnection of legendary past and possible future with vital present is so convincing that Tolkien’s style seems at times capable of looking backward to see forward: “ ‘What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?’ he said. ‘I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part’ ” (929). The very grammar partakes of that chronological agility. Tense shifts so fluently from the implied past of dialect present to the present impression of narrative past it can with explicit ambivalence certify that any given fact of faërie “was (or is)” (146). Middle-earth



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characters involve us in looking so intently with them “towards Numenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be” (661) that the vast historical sweep of their world comes to us “present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time” (364). Chronological density is further complicated by a diachronic strain of ubi sunt, its elegiac note eliciting perspectives of the future from visions of the past, eliciting those prospects all the more intensely through its recollection of the timelessness of Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Ubi sunt passages recur throughout Tolkien’s tales, usually with incidental casualness—“Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footstep rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window”31— occasionally echoing formal Anglo-Saxon dignity: Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning? (497; cf. OE Wanderer, ll.92, ff.)

“So men still sing in the evening,” and whoever can hear that timeless strain of elegy stands with Frodo, “hearing afar off great seas upon beaches that had long been washed away, and sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth” (342). That encompassing sense of time, so inclusive it attains almost to its polar opposite of eternity, is underscored in Tolkien’s style by his updating of archaic language. Instead of the “modern colloquial form”32 of the hobbits, Tolkien frequently interjects into his saga Anglo-Saxon ancientness: “An epic tale needs an epic voice, a poetic voice, a voice raised above the babble and trivia of the everyday world.”33 That archaism is much parodied and much critiqued, but it may be one of the glories of Tolkien’s style, mainly because of his restraint in its use: “There should be a hint of the ancient world in this voice, an understanding that the storyteller is dealing with a





heroic age, with people who were, if not better than, more than us. (But only a hint. A little archaism can go a long way).”34 Whatever else may be said against it, Tolkien’s style is anything but what is usually said against it: monotonous. It is “by no means uniform”: “episodes of grandeur or solemnity or violence bring out expressive nuances of syntax and diction.”35 Tolkien’s chronological ambiguity fosters an aesthetic distance than can paradoxically intensify the tactile presence of his fiction. The narratives evoke an atmosphere as old as now, creating a literary environment that engages the reader in intimate participation—“He wants you to immerse yourself in the tale”36 —even as it affords disinterested observation. The experience of Tolkien’s fiction is one of involved objectivity, rather like Niggle’s perspective of the realized art of his painting come to life in “Leaf by Niggle”: “The Forest, of course, was a distant Forest, yet he could approach it, even enter it, without its losing that particular charm” (Tree 86). In its very form, in the ambiguous implications of its proper noun capitalization, the Forest here, like the whole of Middle-earth, manages to be both abstract ideal and precise place. In complementary counterthrust to that open-endedness, Tolkien’s fiction orchestrates a crescendo of conclusion, an almost apocalyptic vision of finality. Anticipations of the end set in early in The Lord of the Rings; Merry promises before the beginning of the journey: “You can trust us to stick with you through thick and thin—to the bitter end” (103). That kind of glance toward the conclusion recurs throughout the narrative in constant terminal comments—“the end will not be long”; “often said I’d come to a bad end”; “the time draws swiftly to some great conclusion”; “our journey is almost at an end”; “just a few more little steps and that’s all.”37 Through such anticipations of closure, Tolkien conditions the reader to look to his conclusions as farsightedly as Bilbo recording the passage of Middleearth history, pondering for the greater part of the trilogy upon “an ending for his book” (266). Along the way to that imminent conclusion, numerous incidental closures anticipate the ultimate end. In situation after climactic situation, Middle-earth characters find themselves “at the uttermost end of need” (795). Hobbits in their arduous narrative journeys again and again “come to a dead end” (907; cf. 887). These foreshadowings of finality include such carefully structured anticipations as a kind of conditioning of readers to claustrophobia. A sequence of incidental traps extends from the hobbits’ departure through their return—hobbits are trapped inside Old Man Willow,



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entombed in the barrows, ambushed at The Ford, ensnared by Shelob, cornered in the caverns of Moria, and dramatically locked in the labyrinths of Mordor, where “the great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground.”38 Those anticipatory traps make cumulatively claustrophobic Frodo and Sam’s final capture when they are “trapped in the end” in that vast snare which is Mordor.39 What is more, the anticipations of entrapment are themselves anticipated. As Merry and Pippin approach imprisonment inside Old Man Willow, the fog of the Old Forest seems to “close forbiddingly behind them” (107). Prior to ringwraith ambush of the Fellowship at The Ford, “the hills now began to shut them in” (197). The hobbits are “shut in a hall of mist” before their entombment in the barrow; “they felt as if a trap was closing about them” (135). Moments before he himself is cornered, Gimli reads the final words of earlier dwarves trapped in the same cavern: “We cannot get out. We cannot get out” (314). Even the anticipations of anticipations are anticipated. Frodo and his friends can feel circumstances beginning to close in on them from the inception of the narrative; as the hobbits set out from the Shire, “Merry got down and unlocked the gate, and when they had all passed through he pushed it to again. It shut with a clang, and the lock clicked. The sound was ominous” (108). On a deeper level, the tales suggest apocalypse through a crescendo of narrative urgency. Among the characters there is the kind of increasing anxiety for conclusive action felt by Frodo: “If I must go there, I wish I could come there quickly and make an end!” (589). Normally sensible Sam is so bothered about making an ending that his logic leaves him: “There’s no time to lose,” he urges, “or it’ll be the end anyway” (715). There is in the sinews of the narrative a constant sense of straining to get on with things, a syntactic urgency that forces not just from harried characters but from the overseeing narrator frequent impatient gasps of “at last!”40 That syntactic haste reveals itself most markedly in scarcity of punctuation. If commas are breathing points, Tolkien’s is breathless prose. The missing comma brakes convey throughout the narrative an impression of headlong rapidity through such impatient statements as “all the dwarves sprang up knocking over the table” (H16) and “poor Mr. Baggins all in a fluster” (H27). A simple omitted comma can even contribute to chronological density, creating an impression of simultaneity in sequential action: “With a cry and a splash he fell face downward into deep swift water. Gurgling he went under” (396).





Reinforcings of that syntactic urgency may be seen in Tolkien’s omission of commas from series for purposes of reflecting continuity—“an endless winding stair” (353), integrating descriptions—“a hilly rocky land” (375), or, most usually, actualizing the movement of such rapid Middle-earthly things as “deep swift water” (396). The velocity of the prose is accelerated by remarkably mobile metaphor. In the process of enlivening the Middle-earth landscape, Tolkien images in hyperactive terms. “Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland” is typical of the dynamic quality of his description (258). He attains much of his vividness through vigorous motion: “Untie your legs? I’ll untie every string in your bodies. Do you think I can’t search you to the bones? Search you? I’ll cut you both to quivering shreds” (446). The activity compounds, Tolkien metaphoring motion where there is none: “There was some scent or savour in it which they could not describe: it was faint, but it reminded them of the smell of a distant wood borne from afar by a cool breeze at night” (460). And where there is motion already, his metaphor accelerates it: “The boats whirled by, frail and fleeting as little leaves” (383); “there was a rush of hoarse laughter, like the fall of sliding stones into a pit” (315); “a punch from an Ent-fist crumples up iron like thin tin” (553); “out of it streamed a great host as swiftly as swirling waters when a sluice is lifted” (873); “their glances were like blades from eye to eye, flickering as they fenced” (796). Perhaps The Lord of the Rings’ most impelling anticipation of the end is its undertow of death. Considerable narrative force accumulates from Tolkien’s densely packed death anticipations. The burial of the hobbits in a barrow, for instance, brief as it is, amasses potent intimations of death. The barrows, emblems of the shattered kings interred in them, “were crowned with green mounts, and on some were standing stones, pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums.” The atmosphere is as “silent, heavy and chill” as that of a cemetery, and the hobbits’ ponies are “standing crowded together with their heads down” in sympathetic mourning. It gets deathly cold, “so cold that they halted and got out cloaks and hoods.” Thus enshrouded, “Frodo was chilled to the marrow, and “found himself stiffening” toward imagistic rigor mortis. In that funereal setting, where Frodo feels the isolation of the grave—“he was alone: the others had not followed him”—death itself with considerable dramatic presence descends in the form of a barrow-wight, “a tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars”: “It leaned over him. He thought there were two eyes, very cold though lit with a pale light



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that seemed to come from some remote distance. Then a grip stronger and colder than iron seized him. The icy touch froze his bones, and he remembered no more” (134–38). Innumerable intermediate dyings of that symbolic sort contribute to the inevitability of this vast overarching death of an age, among them the almost ritualistic passings of Boromir, Gandalf, Théoden, Denethor, Gollum, and Saruman.41 Death stalks through Middleearth as the “sleepless dead” (765) of the Shadow Host, the haunting faces in the Dead Marshes, those dark undead, the ringwraiths. Death himself, in the person of the captain of the Black Riders, dies, with a cry that “went up into the shuddering air, and faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up, and was never heard again in that age of this world” (824). Death in Middle-earth ultimately multiplies the passing of individuals into the ending of an epoch. The elves are poignantly aware that their entire culture is doomed with the Third Age to die: “Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten” (356). All these anticipatory endings add up to a hyperbole of finality, overstatement unusual in Tolkien, and the more unusual because here expressed not only narratively but explicitly. Tolkien himself notes the emphasis, observing that when he reads his own fiction “I become aware of the dominance of the theme of Death.”42 Frodo speaks toward the end of the quest and of the novel of “the end of ends” (921), and the hobbits still later finish things off five times in as few lines: “And that’s the end of that,” said Sam. “A nasty end, and I wish I needn’t have seen it; but it’s a good riddance.” “And the very last end of the War, I hope,” said Merry. “I hope so,” said Frodo and sighed. “The very last stroke.” (997)

There is an even more emphatic ending after the end. Part I of Appendix A in its final two sentences not only thrice concludes itself, but for good measure finishes off Evenstar and summer and fruitfulness generally: “There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea. Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in the book of the days of old” (1038).





The irony of all this finality, this ending beyond ending, conclusively suggests that nothing, whether epochs or individuals or narratives worth beginning, ever really in the most important sense ends. With all the apocalyptic fervor of its finality, The Lord of the Rings asserts in its very ending that expansive ambivalence, that tenacious ongoing that characterizes Middle-earth. The “death” of Shelob is typical: “Shelob was gone; and whether she lay long in her lair, nursing her malice and her misery, and in slow years of darkness healed herself from within, rebuilding her clustered eyes, until with hunger like death she spun once more her dreadful snares in the glens of the Mountains of Shadow, this tale does not tell” (713). Much else that this tale does not tell radiates outward from it with a narrative energy that outlasts its end. Tolkien controls the expansiveness with apparent ease. The tight unity that gives the impression of simplistic design results from careful interweaving of incessantly repeated thematic actions,43 vast underlying concentric cycles of “There and Back Again,”44 the containing frame of the Red Book of Westmarch,45 and such special techniques as the focusing of narratively disparate events into chronological contiguity through natural phenomena that navigate the narrative as effectively as stars guide the mariner.46 The ultimate foundation of the narrative inevitability lies in the organic complementariness of its broad movements, as can be seen in the frequent cross-references among various narrative threads, and occasionally in more explicit signposts tracking the most involved narrative complications with deft clarity: “So the desperate journey went on, as the Ring went south and the banners of the kings rode north” (914). Thus this paradoxical narrative produces the inevitable surprise of a conclusion directly anticipated by the unconstrained events of an unpredictable narrative. Pippin confirms the shock from a hobbitish perspective: “Well I am staggered! Of all the ends to our journey that is the very last I should have thought of” (983). But however much hobbits and human readers may be surprised, Tolkien clearly knew the end from the beginning. He refers to that concluding “Scouring of the Shire” chapter of which Pippin is speaking as “an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story” (xvii). There is as much in “the event modified” as in the “foreseen from the outset.” The key to the narrative’s capacity for actualization lies in that flexible structure. Tolkien’s two-edgedness, the focused ambiguity that realizes and enlivens Middle-earth, carries over into the essential process of his narrative.



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Tolkien cultivates an engaging model for that controlled expansiveness, envisioning the natural growth of narrative as a forming tree: “As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches; but its main theme was settled from the outset” (xvi). The narrative itself nurtures the image of art as tree through a root system of such subterranean suggestions as the superlative creativity of those “tree-people,” the elves (332). Occasionally this underlying metaphor surfaces: Treebeard, himself a mobile embodiment of the image, invokes tree simile directly when he says “songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way” (475). In “Leaf by Niggle,” Tolkien’s parable of aesthetics about an artist who devotes his life to painting a single tree, there is explicit vision of tree as dynamic art: “Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch” (Tree 85). The vitality of that artistic vision stems from its expansiveness. The tree flourishes with prolific birds, birds “mating, hatching, growing wings, and flying away singing into the Forest, even while he looked at them. For now he saw that the Forest was there too, opening out on either side, and marching away into the distance. The Mountains were glimmering far away” (Tree 86). There is nothing arbitrary about Tolkien’s cultivation of narrative as a means of “the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation” (Tree 63). He shares with Coleridge a total commitment to the free growth of such organic creations as trees and tales. “Leaf by Niggle,” prototype of the longer narratives, seems itself a natural outgrowth of Tolkien’s love affair with “a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourner, except myself and a pair of owls” (Tree 5).







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Always On and On

The “either you love him or you don’t” response is so pronounced among Tolkien readers that I annually poll my students on just what it is about The Lord of the Rings they find so appealing or so repellant. The distaste is straightforward—too much of a good thing: “Too many names and places to try to keep straight.” “Too much stuff— lists, tales, poems, histories, biographies, genealogies.” “He gets pedantic—too many footnotes and appendices.” “He belabors the point too much, way past where we get it.” “He takes too long to tell too many little details—I don’t usually have a free summer.” When on the other hand I ask Tolkien lovers what they like best about the book, they seem motivated by the prose in precisely the opposite direction: “It’s not long enough. It could never be.” For some readers of Tolkien, there are way too many details; for others, never enough. The details would appear to be key. A fierce realist myself, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any kind of fantasy, let alone fantasy as frankly archaic as Tolkien’s. I find myself 40 years later so entranced by his writing—the appendices of The Lord of the Rings were the first I ever read, and so much the best I’ve never read an appendix through since—I’m not sure I can see the critical territory clearly anymore. But one thing is obvious: readers react very differently to Tolkien’s prose. Maybe that’s in part because, despite all the detail he puts in, Tolkien leaves more out. That can seem pretty formulaic. Looked at from the usual modernist perspective it is a formula, like an algebraic equation where we have to solve for x. If we find that fill-in-the-blanks approach abstract, vague, repetitively mechanistic, or just plain too much work, we are likely to be put off by what we perceive as its irrelevant generalizing, by the pointless lists many of my students find in Tolkien’s fiction. If, on the other hand, we find that participatory approach organic, engaging, and an invitation to endless case-study



CH A P T ER


applications of x as the epiphany of personal experience, we are likely to think this stylistic approach quintessentially realistic, about as close to life as fiction can get. The crucial question for my more reluctant students comes down to whether Tolkien fails his authorial duty by providing too little James Joyce detail to engage us in his work. The issue for my enthusiastic students is whether he involves us in his work by providing just enough details, and precise enough details, to invite us to participate in his subcreative process. The x factor in that reaction to Tolkien is the imagination of the reader: Tolkien writes as if Middleearth depends upon our imaginations as much as upon his. That pressure on the individual reader makes this fiction, if less responsive to the more fashionable cultural critical isms, preeminently reader responsive. That invitational quality fits well with Tolkien’s personal and literary concern that things should grow naturally. As the natural-born treehugger and owl befriender he declared himself at the conclusion of our last chapter, he is dedicated to artistic noninterference—to an aesthetic, in his terms, of subcreation. The prime condition of successful literary subcreation is authorial respect for narrative tendencies tantamount to the respect that Michelangelo exhibited for the grain of marble—the artist is the discoverer of existent patterns. His discovery, however, is only the gestation of the art. The creation is not fully delivered until the writer has disclosed in his discovered form a universal suggestivity that invites every reader to bring forth from the art his own version of the reality that is there. That’s why Tolkien’s rhetorical technique is a process of encouraging the natural growth of the tree of art rather than a pruning of it; he aims at more than the presentation of a finished pattern. He seeks ultimately to involve his readers as himself in “the desire to unravel the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales” (Tree 23), in the organic process of realizing personally applicable variations of archetypal pattern. That intimate involvement of the reader makes it appropriate that the most engaging expression of patterned expansiveness in Tolkien’s fiction is its narrative unfolding of character. Middle-earth journeys are much more than avenues to adventure; the narrative movement realizes the maturational progress of the characters. Without exception from Farmer Giles of Ham through The Lord of the Rings, the tales concern themselves centrally with development of latent character potential. That intense focus on growth of character grows into Tolkien’s essential genre pattern: bildungsroman.



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Bildungsroman—growing-up story, coming-of-age narrative, maturation tale—taps into a rich lode of novelistic quality. It is not surprising that so many of our favorite novels—Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, the Harry Potter tales—shape themselves in bildungsroman form. If that spotlight on human potential, that focus on the infant in us, feels pregnant with possibilities, it is. Jung thinks the potential close to limitless: “The ‘child’ is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificantly dubious beginning, and the triumphal end. The ‘eternal child’ in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate growth or worthlessness of a personality.”1 Tolkien’s bildungsroman pattern, teeming with that rich potential, is so intricate that it is most accessibly observed in the relatively uncomplicated narrative of The Hobbit. As can be seen in an overview of its larger narrative movement, the structure of this fertile little tale focuses its total intensity on revelation of Bilbo’s implicit possibilities. The Shire from which the naïve hero departs is a virtual Eden, a land of blissful innocence and six meals a day. Bilbo’s ventures into the world in the episodes of the story increasingly wean him from Shire simplicity; 2 he returns from his maturational adventure to the inevitable adult discovery that you can’t go home again: “He had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honor of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighborhood to be ‘queer’ ” (H277). The static nature of the Shire, stressed by “there and back again” circularity of narrative, highlights by contrast the change in Bilbo. And change he does. Bilbo is to the dwarves at the book’s beginning just another body to round out the lucky 14, and a decidedly unprepossessing one at that, “a queer little creature” (H247) forever turning up “at the end of the row” (H53, H17, H252). As hero material, the hobbit seems “the most unlikely person imaginable” (54). But Bilbo’s reputation improves so dramatically through the progress of the narrative that by the book’s conclusion a wise elven king has declared him “worthy” (H250), and even the skeptical dwarves have developed “a great respect for him” (H153). Thorin says, “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure” (H264)—high praise from one who earlier called him a “descendent



ALWAYS ON AND ON


of rats” (H253). Gandalf sums up the developed Bilbo at the tale’s end: “You are not the hobbit that you were” (H276). But The Hobbit is much more than the record of Bilbo’s improving reputation. These external evaluations serve essentially to confirm and dramatize the more vital transformation: Bilbo’s personal realization of his inherent potential. It is not just a matter of there being “more in him than you guess”; the really important thing is that there is in the prototypical hobbit, as with most of us, “a deal more than he has any idea of himself” (H18). Revelation of that “deal more” is orchestrated through several congruous movements within the narrative. In one strain, Tolkien pursues a sort of hobbit identity crisis, organically expressing the alternating expansions and contractions of Bilbo Baggins’s ambivalent character by means of the contrasts in his genetic heritage: “He looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father,” but “must have got something a bit queer in his make-up from the Took side” (H3). Rumor has it among hobbits that there is “something not entirely hobbit-like” about the Tooks, and Bilbo goes adventuring because “something Tookish woke up inside him” (H15). We are told early in this extended confrontation of Baggins timidity and Took intrepidness that “the Took side had won” (H17), but it is a momentary victory in a minor skirmish of a conflict whose tensions can be felt through the entire book; almost immediately the “Tookishness” can be seen to be “wearing off” (H25). Although Bilbo’s mature Took assertiveness gradually gains the upper hand, resistance from the timid “least Tookish part of him” is very much in evidence throughout the tale (H196; cf. H261). The Hobbit bildungsroman is more symbolically intimated in suggestions of initiation ritual. Bilbo begins the adventure stripped down like a Sioux novitiate for the test of his manhood, Dwalin the dwarf announcing the conditions: “You will have to manage without pocket-handkerchiefs, and a good many other things, before you get to the journey’s end” (H28). Similarly central to the tradition of initiation is Bilbo’s fasting; after that introductory feast in “An Unexpected Party,” there is painfully little eating, particularly for hobbit tastes (H139). A long sequence of isolating events moves the novice toward mature independence. He must at the outset, in direct contradiction to the strong group instincts of hobbits, leave family, friends, and neighbors. Then one by one his allies in the adventure desert him. His mentor Gandalf disappears. The dwarves leave him to face Smaug alone.



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Even his best dwarf-friend Balin, who volunteers to help him brave the dragon’s tunnel, deserts after “a bit of the way” (H195). He faces virtually every crisis in the narrative in initiatory isolation, “alone and unaided.”3 Bilbo’s growing self-reliance is dramatically underlined by the dwarves’ increasing reliance on him; gradually he becomes “the real leader in their adventure” (H203). He emerges triumphant from the initiation ordeal: “Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach” (H144). The bildungsroman intimated in initiation ritual and implied in identity crisis becomes graphically apparent through role exploration. At the most rudimentary level, Bilbo tries on roles by changing costume. His adventuring clothes, borrowed from Dwalin, are “too large for him” (H29); they need growing into. The growth process involves more, however, than simplistic role playing; it is not so much a matter of mimicking models as a surfacing of internal potential, a fact dramatized by the exploration of identity involved in trying on the ring of power. Bilbo muses as he slips it on his finger, “What have I, I wonder?” (H77). The rhetoric’s implicit answer to that rhetorical question is of course “I”—what Bilbo has is himself, and the ring is merely a means to reveal his inmost capacities; even the dwarves recognize that the crucial thing to Bilbo’s success is his possession of “some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring” (H154). The climax of this expansive trying on of roles comes when Bilbo is arrayed in elf armor and finds it fitting even though it doesn’t fit: “Bilbo Baggins!” the elvenking announces, “you are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many that have looked more comely in it” (H250). Bildungsromantic role graduation is reflected in hobbit nomenclature; Bilbo changes so drastically that his name changes. Early in The Hobbit, Bilbo gets very little nominative respect. He is initially nameless, generic, simply “a hobbit” (H1). When he is dubbed “Bilbo Baggins,” the name seems almost a joke. References to him are marked for their indistinctiveness, their undistinguished quality; goblins introduce the adventuring party to their king as “dwarves, and this” (H58; cf. H136). But through the course of the narrative, the hobbit achieves definite nominative maturity. Plain “Bilbo” becomes “Mr. Baggins” (H153), who is promoted to “Mr. Invisible Baggins” (H162), awarded the official title of “expert burglar and investigator” (H217), and eventually recognized in better circles as “Bilbo the Magnificent” (H269).



ALWAYS ON AND ON


Bilbo tries on roles more experientially by mirroring stylistic traits of his companions. In the company of Thorin, he becomes similarly extravagant in his rhetoric (H15–17). Near Gandalf, he is suddenly fierce (H17). As he converses with Gollum, he degenerates to a Gollumish state, even to the point of picking up the gulping habit: “Bilbo sat and cleared his throat once or twice, but no answer came” (H71). It is a rather nice touch that Tolkien makes Bilbo’s personal recognition of that otherness in him precipitate newfound largeness of heart. His initial reaction to Gollum, to “stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it,” is overborne by mature insight into a fellow hobbit’s misery: “A pity mixed with horror welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled” (H80). Trembling empathetically with Gollum stretches Bilbo into a more inclusive personality. During the course of The Hobbit, Bilbo tries on a great many roles. He is at times childish, at times manly. He is mistaken for a “nasty little rabbit” (H34), a fish (H247), a rat (H253), even suspected of being a “burrahobbit” (H34). Occupationally he transmogrifies from cook and general servant to burglar expert (under formal contract) to scout to professional vanisher to giant spider killer to prison breaker to dragon fighter to leader to peace negotiator to warrior to poet, with several lesser experiments in identity in between.4 Much the most persistent of these trial roles is the hobbit’s attempt to be “expert burglar and investigator” (H217). Bilbo’s uncertain burgling ability reflects a deeper crisis of identity behind that superficial ambivalence. Thorin thinks he “looks more like a grocer than a burglar” (H17), but Gandalf insists, “if I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes” (H18). Gollum enthusiastically confirms the hobbit’s burgling status; upon discovering the loss of his ring, he cries out, “Thief, thief, thief! Baggins!” (H81). Gollum’s accusation for some time seems accurate. With a little burgling experience under his belt, Bilbo “no longer thought twice about picking up a supper uninvited if he got the chance” (H173). He robs Smaug deftly (H198), and upon pocketing Thorin’s beloved Arkenstone exults, “Now I am a burglar indeed!” (H217). Yet for all his burglarious attainments, Bilbo to the end maintains severe ambivalence about the role: “I may be a burglar—or so they say: personally I never really felt like one—but I am an honest one, I hope, more or less” (H249). There is much less ambivalence about the other half of that role. Whatever Bilbo’s uncertainties as a burglar, he is beyond question an



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Three very large persons sitting round a very large fire of beech-logs. They were toasting mutton on long spits of wood, and licking the gravy off their fingers. There was a fine toothsome smell. Also there was a barrel of good drink at hand, and they were drinking out of jugs. But they were trolls. Obviously trolls. Even Bilbo, in spite of his sheltered life, could see that: from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to mention their language, which was not drawingroom fashion at all, at all. (H32)

Even drooling hobbit preoccupation with food and prim shock at the bad manners of trolls cannot deter Bilbo from his hardheaded private investigator purpose of sizing up the criminals. The passage approaches parody of the style of Mickey Spillane, its economy reflecting the practiced eye and report-form habits of the trained observer, especially in the factual assertiveness, the detached thoroughness, the clipped efficiency of those incomplete sentences. The content of the passage—typical private-eye lowlife associations, attentiveness to detail that would do Sherlock Holmes proud, description fitting for a police bulletin—further emphasizes Bilbo’s investigator identity. That investigative function, his main and enduring role, echoes the exploratory nature of bildungsroman. All this investigating, this trying out of roles and trying on of identities, this narrative realizing of latent character potential, builds Bilbo’s bildungsroman. The Hobbit is at heart a psychic search for self. Bilbo Baggins, constantly positing riddles the answer to which is his own identity, is “terrified of losing himself” (H161). Bilbo’s adventure, in the essence of its narrative, at the core of its imagistic yearnings, is a seeking for his own soul that at times approaches the subtler questing of The Lord of the Rings: “All night he dreamed of his own house and wandered in his sleep into all his different rooms looking for something that he could not find nor remember what it looked like” (H103). Nor does expansion of hobbit character end with the end of The Hobbit. It is as true of Bilbo’s successors as of the original hobbit that “all of them will have the chance to learn of what stuff they are made.”5 Frodo, Elisha-like, receives the mantle of Bilbo’s bildungsroman along with his ring and sword and dwarf-mail. The naïve nephew feels at first unworthy to don the uniform of the accomplished uncle: “I don’t think I should look right in it” (270). But as the narrative progresses, Bilbo’s gear fits him better and better.



investigator. The Hobbit’s assimilation of that investigative function is complete; even Bilbo’s language is affected. He cases the trolls:


Frodo’s stature increases considerably. The hostile Saruman admits upon Frodo’s return to the Shire, “You have grown, Halfling . . . you have grown very much” (996). Pippin declares him even before the hobbits have reached Rivendell “twice the hobbit that he had been” (180). With his sight “grown keener” (357), Frodo himself can acknowledge the deep change in his character: “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same” (967). Sam’s character apprenticeship, served under Frodo, the apprentice of the apprentice Bilbo, is even more impressive. He reaches awesome heights of development for the callowest of hobbits, though his improvement is as gradual as it is natural. Part of the reason for the believability of that growth lies in his developmental attitude; Sam’s simple motto, “live and learn” (338), stands him in good bildungsromantic stead. The journey to Mordor is for him a protracted process of “learning a lot”: “First he was a conspirator, now he’s a jester,” Frodo observes. “He’ll end up by becoming a wizard—or a warrior” (203). Events prove him something of both and much else besides. Late in the book, Frodo himself, who has become by this point the ultimate hope of the moral universe, pleads with the earthy gardener, “Lead me!” (907). And he does. Sam’s apprenticeship through loss of his master and assumption of the burden of the ring has matured the homespun hobbit from subsidiary sidekick to the central hero of Tolkien’s world.6 The more acute the adversity, the deeper the reserves of courage it taps in this single-minded hobbit; Sam grows into a habit of rising to meet challenges that just won’t quit: “After coming all that way I don’t want to give up yet. It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.” “Maybe not, Sam,” said Frodo; “but it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.” “Well, Master, we could at least go further from this dangerous place here, from this Crack of Doom if that’s its name. Now couldn’t we? Come, Mr. Frodo, let’s go down the path at any rate.” (929)

Given that indomitable instinct for pressing on down the path, it is inevitable that Sam will not only endure, but prevail—as “the Mayor, of course,” and, still more impressively, as “the most famous gardener in history” (1006). Sam, Frodo, Bilbo—hardly a hobbit in Middle-earth who does not dramatically develop. “There is a seed of courage hidden



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(often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow” (137). Even subsidiary hobbits make it big. The juvenile Merry and Pippin come back from their adventures “three inches taller” (934). “Meriadoc, called the Magnificent, becomes Master of Buckland.” “Peregrin becomes the Took and Thain” (1071). Shire observers, not noted for their acuity, note the difference in all the hobbits: “You’ve come back changed from your travels, and you look now like folk as can deal with troubles out of hand” (973). The final confirmation of the maturation of hobbit bildungsroman is given by Gandalf, wisest of wizards: “You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high” (974). That growing up reflects so appropriately the inmost movement of Tolkien’s narrative in part because hobbits are metaphorically children. Cute, naïve, and always hungry, they delight in riddles, games, and fireworks; they avoid learning; they hum “childish tunes” (887); they manifest inordinate concern with birthdays and apparent disinterest in sex. They talk like children, with childish simplicity and directness, their very metaphor childlike: in their deepest terror they shake “like a jelly melting” (H16). Their perspective of the world is the child’s perspective; they see the most terrific dangers in terms of blindman’s bluff or hide-and-seek or a football game; Bilbo finds killing giant spiders much like “quoits, dart-throwing, shooting at the wand, bowls, ninepins and other quiet games of the aiming and throwing sort.”7 Hobbits even look like children—beardless, between two and four feet tall, youthfully “bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking” (1–2)—a typical hobbit can be mistaken for “a lad of nine summers or so” (746). Halflings, the most common Middle-earth term for hobbits, clearly labels the unfinished quality of their character. “Hungry as hunters, the Hobbit children, the laughing folk, the little people” (572) exhibit an insatiable childlike appetite for anything which smacks of bildungsroman. Hobbit bildungsroman is so pervasive it works as a kind of stylistic yeast for other dramatic Middle-earth developments of character. Strider comes a long way from “Longshanks” (176) to “Aragorn son of Arathorn, chieftain of the Dúnedain of Arnor, Captain of the Host of the West, bearer of the Star of the North, Wielder of the Sword Reforged” (945–46). Gandalf the “Grey Fool” (806) manifests something very close to transubstantiation in his progression from “Stormcrow” (501) through “Mithrandir” (350) and ultimately to “Gandalf the White,” head of the White Council (569). The list of



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dynamic developers is a catalog of the book’s central characters— Éowyn discovering her real self through her disguise as Dernhelm (823, 956); Éomer becoming king (827); Faramir, unfavored of his father, developing into “Steward of Gondor, and Prince of Ithilien” (955). The collective Hobbit bildungsroman refracts the complex ramifications of maturation through the myriad narrative facets of The Lord of the Rings. It is typical of Tolkien’s realistic rhetoric that character change in Middle-earth is not all improvement. The organic nature of the general character growth confirms in counterpointed degeneration. Initially sound characters atrophy in evil: Boromir the warrior succumbs to the temptation to make right by might. The self-interest of counselor Wormtongue eats away his integrity. Denethor, Steward of Gondor, is gradually led by his ambition into disastrous corruption. The most drastic decay of character, more extended even than Gollum’s protracted degeneration, is the fall of Saruman, who provides a Faustian demonstration of how perilous it is “to study too deeply the arts of the enemy, for good or for ill” (258). Saruman’s corruption is not a case of bad to worse, but of good to abominable; once head of the White Council, the imposing wizard withers to a “grey mist” that promptly dissolves “into nothing” (997). That extreme dissolution is as carefully causal as the rest of Middle-earth character change. Saruman’s initial compromise with the evil of Mordor is the catalyst for the loss of his wizard’s staff of power, precipitating the degeneration into petty villainy that leads to his violent end, his throat cut by the only person he still dared bully. That reversibility is the most compelling indication of the expansive nature of Middle-earth character: its very pattern of changing may change. Even Gollum, steeped in untold centuries of degeneration, can repent, become “the new Gollum” (604), then, having tentatively repented, revert to corruption again. By means of firm general tendencies and striking individual variations, Middle-earth bildungsroman becomes a confirmation of flexibility within fatalism, narrative proof that free acts form character inevitably. Tolkien’s characterization is developmental. It is a serious oversimplification to consider Tolkien’s simple characters two-dimensional. In Middle-earth, character is not so much a state of being as a perpetual process of becoming, the present self less a finished product than a blueprint of future possibilities. The characterization process is so expansive it comes to include its converse: “What we ought to become is usually dependent on what we are.”8 Through the



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there-and-back-again movement of bildungsroman’s organic unfolding of implicit possibilities, character is continually in process of becoming what it is. That universal Middle-earth bildungsroman actualizes in the central quest theme of Tolkien’s tales. Bilbo and Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham quest after the ideal self as certainly as for any such objectifications of that ideal as dragon hoards or even the inner realms of faërie. Frodo and Sam, tirelessly tracking the Cracks of Doom, seek their own souls, and seek them the more surely for the self-sacrifice of their questing. They seek their souls all the more surely for the ambivalence of this anti-quest, a quest not for gain but for loss: “For what shall it profit a man [or hobbit], if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). The thrust of that central search for self reaches into the utmost extremities of the tale, into its narrative restlessness, into such diffuse but impelling longings as Frodo’s yearning for the unseen sea, into dreams in which a Middle-earth inhabitant is “looking urgently for something, but what it was he did not know” (353). That soul stretching ferrets out subtle expressions of self. Middleearth characters can be found with surprising frequency looking into mirrors and discovering disturbing personal possibilities. Frodo envisioning his future in the Mirror of Galadriel (354–55), Pippin peering into the palantír (577–80), Sam “too deep in thought to answer” (325) his reflection in Lake Mirror-mere—all survey at deepest reaches their own souls. The faërie eyes of Galadriel form another mirror for ascertaining identity; each hobbit finds in them his personal version of what Sam sees: “She seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance” (348). And when they are not looking for their possible selves in mirrors, Middle-earth characters spend an inordinate amount of time talking to themselves as if addressing a better self within, as when Frodo, “speaking to some one who was not there,” talks himself into pitying Gollum (601). That incessant search for self turns up some very concrete alter egos. Sam seems on occasion almost as schizoid as Gollum, “divided in his mind,” so thoroughly “torn in two” (1001) that when he talks to himself he receives “an answer in his own voice” (918). The searching self in this realm of corporate identities mirrors in surrounding similar selves, richly refracting individual uniqueness through the peculiarities of proximate personalities. The Lord of the Rings abounds in revelatory relationships among neighboring egos. Frodo is very like Bilbo. His nephew in the Norse tradition of inheritance, Frodo accedes to Bilbo’s accoutrements, his home, his



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love of walking and fascination for adventure, his birthday, and his role in the Middle-earth universe—he becomes a sort of Bilbo II: “A great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart—to follow Bilbo, and even perhaps to find him again. It was so strong that it overcame his fear: he could almost have run out there and then down the road without his hat, as Bilbo had done on a similar morning long ago” (61). Sam becomes as much like Frodo as Frodo is like Bilbo, accompanying him step by step on the pilgrimage to Mordor and sharing his struggle totally, even to the taking on of the burden of the ring. In the orc-caves of Mordor, master and servant take dramatic care to dress alike, Sam saying, “if we go together, we’d best match” (891). Gollum is like Sam, surprisingly like Sam for his polar opposite. Sam Gamgee is a near anagram of Sméagol, and Sam acts like it; Gollum brings out the corresponding worst in him. When Gollum is around, Sam longs as viciously as Gollum “to get his hands on its neck” (908); he “pricks up his ears” (660) and stands “despondently with hunched shoulders” and “puckered eyes” (589) like Gollum. Sam wonders aloud with such likelihood he leaves out the subjunctive “if I was like Gollum” (609), and Frodo is appalled at the similarity: “Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth” (891). Gollum is like Sam is like Frodo is like Bilbo—the implications of the equation are clear. Hobbit relationships are infinitely reciprocal. Even Bilbo and Gollum, far apart as they may seem to be, have much in common: “Bilbo’s story suggests the kinship. There was a great deal in the background of their minds and memories that was very similar. They understood one another remarkably well” (53). Under the influence of the ring, Bilbo, like Sam, comes to look like Gollum, “a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands” (226). The most disparate ends of the chain of alter egos interlock. As Sam puts it, centering Frodo in these parallels, “Three precious little Gollums in a row we shall be, if this goes on much longer” (614). As a result of that intimate reciprocity of similar individuals, “like, and yet unlike” (564), hobbit interrelationships that seem to some readers group stereotype become almost infinitely revelatory of the implicit possibilities of individual characters. In addition to exploiting the similarities of disparate elements, Middle-earth characterization, with its usual inclusive ambivalence, capitalizes on dissonances among similar elements. One of Tolkien’s most efficient techniques for exposing depths of character in short space is his presentation of a series of individual reactions to the same



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stimulus. A simple instance is the variety of characterizing responses he evokes with the odor of a single Middle-earth herb. The plant’s scent reminds shabby-genteel Ioreth “of the roses of Imloth Melui when I was a lass, and no king could ask for better.” The same scent provokes the underlying romanticism of Faramir the warrior, who perceives it as an almost mystical “memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in Spring is itself but a fleeting memory.” It exposes the academic sterility of the herb master: “kingsfoil, as the rustics name it,” he says, “or athelas in the noble tongue, or to those who know somewhat of the Valinorean . . . it has no virtue that we know of, save perhaps to sweeten a fouled air.” For the virgin Éowyn “it bore no scent, but was an air wholly fresh and clean and young, as if it had not before been breathed by any living thing and came new-made from snowy mountains high beneath a dome of stars.” Merry, earthy hobbit from the Shire, finds it more “like the scent of orchards, and of heather in the sunshine full of bees” (847–51). The most significant and intricate instance of individuation through typifying response in The Lord of the Rings is the impact of the ring on character. The One Ring is for everyone who comes in contact with it “a test” (357), a chance “to show his quality” (665). In this vast parable of the corruptive potential of power, the ring permits each bearer “power according to his stature” (52), and thus automatically tempts him according to his unique weakness. “Those under the influence of the ring adopt as much of Sauron’s own thirst for domination that their minds can conceive.”9 The ring is to Gollum an unlimited supply of fish (619), to Sam the gardener the possibility of commanding the growth of flowers and trees (881), to Boromir “victory for Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein)” (656), to the Lady Galadriel a chance to “put things right” while incidentally waxing beautiful “as the Morning and the Night” (356–57), to Gandalf the temptation of “pity for weakness, and the desire of strength to do good” (60). “On a psychological level,” where Tolkien’s symbolism invariably resides, “the One Ring exposes the presence in most of the characters of a humbling frailty.”10 The temptation to wield the power of the ring molds in some manner virtually every character who confronts it. There is a wide range of response to that temptation, from that of apparently unaffected Tom Bombadil—“the Ring has no power over him. He is his own master” (259)—to the total capitulation of the ringwraiths, men to whom “the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil” (677).



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Most succumb to the ring’s seductiveness, perishing in their choice to pursue its power. For Boromir, “Isuldur’s Bane” is “too sore a trial”; “the lure of the Ring” works in him “dreadful change” leading to ignominious death (656–57). Gollum’s consuming lust for it shrivels him, mind and body, “enslaved to that Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again” (923), drives him mad and eventually destroys him utterly, wailing for his “Precious” even as he falls into the Cracks of Doom where it has lured him. The One Ring’s influence is so universal and so individually provocative that actual possession is not necessary; “the very desire of it corrupts the heart” (261). Saruman is corrupted by correspondence course, and Denethor’s unfulfilled ambition to attain the ring drives him to suicide (261; 835). Yet there are those in Middle-earth wise and strong enough to sidestep the temptation of the ring’s power. Elrond “will not take the Ring to wield it” (261), nor will Galadriel, who decides rather to “diminish, and go into the West” (357) than to corrupt herself, even for the sake of victory. The morally strongest give the ring widest berth. Faramir “will not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her” (656). Gandalf refuses it “even as a freely given gift” (796); though one of the few beings to handle the ring without disastrous effects, the wizard scrupulously avoids its contact: “I dare not take it,” he says, “not even to keep it safe, unused” (60). Upon those who hold it longest, the halfling ring-bearers, the ring’s power results in intriguingly variable long-range effects. Gollum in his self-seeking is utterly destroyed by it. The ring gets “far too much hold” on Bilbo; he has to have help from Gandalf to give it up (33–34). Even Frodo, for all the heroic unselfishness of his long bearing of the ring’s burden, cannot willingly part with it, and screams at the Cracks of Doom, “The Ring is mine” (924). The ring has become an ulcer of possessiveness to Frodo, festering the mistrust in him until he suspects even Sam (890, 916). Yet much as the ring may seem to dominate him—“the Ring is so heavy, Sam. And I begin to see it in my mind all the time” (898)—Frodo comes to almost equal terms with it: “great as the pressure was, he felt no inclination now to yield to it” (691). Sam absolutely triumphs over the ring, giving it up of his own free will as only Gandalf and Bombadil were able to do before him, they after much briefer possession. And this though the ring has severely tempted him, “gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land” (880). Some readers



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feel Sam is able to resist because he lacks imagination—“his humility made him laugh at his own ambitions”—Sam being of a “humbler social class, he never once conceived himself as being truly worthy to bear it.”11 Seems to me rather that the ring’s negative pressure stimulates in sturdy Sam positive internal power: “His head was bowed to the ground with the weight of the Ring, as if a great stone had been strung on him. But slowly, as if the weight became less, or new strength grew in him, he raised his head, and then with a great effort got to his feet and found that he could walk and bear his burden” (716). Sam’s final conquest of the ring, stressing as it does the magnificent possibilities to be found in unsuspected places, provides an important paradigm. The focus here and virtually everywhere in Middle-earth is internal. The external struggle, the physical hefting of the weight, is a reflection of interior wrestling with more fundamental psychological burdens. Sam succeeds with the ring because he succeeds with himself. Sam may make more of it than most characters, but the process is a universal one in Middle-earth. “Imagination is the whole point of Middle-earth.”12 That is why all the important battles are fought internally.13 The archetypal confrontation between Bilbo and the dragon makes the implicit process explicit: before the actual meeting, “Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone” (H197). Heroism in Middle-earth—for that matter everything in Middle-earth—is ultimately of the imagination. And as usual in Tolkien’s finely balanced rhetoric, that emphasis on inner conviction does not mean outward action does not matter. There are “still deeds of renown to be attempted. And they must be attempted if imagination is to be of any value.”14 That inner imaginative focus is the crux of Tolkien’s fictive power. On the one hand, the narrative is distinctive for its dynamism. The tales are so energetically active that in them character is action, personality so changeably etched by the flux of what it does that the natures of things tend to get explained by the processes through which they come to be, in the manner of the river “flowing fast and noisily, as mountain-streams do of a summer evening, when sun has been all day on the snow far up above” (H47). Even description— even description that seems on the surface as static as this ulterior melting—usually implies progress. Character is thus an accumulation of action. Treebeard says that to tell his name “would take a long



ALWAYS ON AND ON


while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time: my name is like a story” (454). Yet action is far from the whole story. Narrative is the tip of the Middle-earth iceberg. As its introduction points out, The Lord of the Rings is “largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history” (1)—a little history, we see, reveals a lot of character. The tale continually tells more than is told. Middle-earth, and every one of its names not as extended as Treebeard’s, is mostly a matter of implicit intimations. The process of employing more than meets the eye is so pervasive and so successful that Tolkien himself can parody it in those passages where he affirms in gleeful detail the likelihood of narrative eventualities that “this tale does not tell” (713). There is more to Middle-earth than meets the eye, and that more is the storehouse of its fictive power. The most frequent criticism of The Lord of the Rings decries its apparent superficiality. That should not be surprising even to Tolkien fans. This is indeed a simple book, single-minded in its artistic and thematic focus. Many find its worldview simplistic: “In Tolkien’s world of pure forms, the good are only beautiful and the bad are always ugly; no one is ever embarrassed; causes are worth dying for—everything is true, right, clear, serious.”15 But Middle-earth, and the prose that informs it, is simplistic only on the surface: “The moral world is not black and white.”16 And Tolkien invites sufficient glimpses beneath that surface to intimate the profound depths of its simplicity. It is easy to diagnose Tolkien’s fiction, on the basis of its blackwhite polarities, as a chronic case of false dilemma. There are definite good guys and unmistakable bad guys. Trees, for example, are obviously good. Yet there is much more to trees than the general goodness that immediately meets the eye. Within that positive stereotype there is individuation: Ents are different from one another “as trees from trees”; “Merry and Pippin were struck chiefly by the variety that they saw: the many shapes, and colours, the differences in girth, and height, and length of leg and arm; and in the number of toes and fingers (anything from three to nine)” (469). There is, too, the possibility of change: “Some of us are still true Ents, and lively enough in our fashion,” says Treebeard, “but many are growing sleepy, going tree-ish, as you might say. Most of the trees are just trees, of course; but many are half awake. Some are quite wide awake, and a few are, well, ah, well getting Entish. That is going on all the time” (457). Any assessment of Tolkien’s tree prejudice—and it is an admitted prejudice17—must deal with the fact that Old Man



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Willow is an unmitigated villain, Fangorn Forest as threatening to hobbits as to orcs, that among the best of Middle-earth trees “you find that some have bad hearts. Nothing to do with their wood: I do not mean that. Why, I knew some good old willows down the Entwash, gone long ago, alas! They were quite hollow, indeed they were falling all to pieces, but as quiet and sweet-spoken as a young leaf. And then there are some trees in the valleys under the mountains, sound as a bell, and bad right through” (457). There is more to Middle-earth trees—more to Middle-earth everywhere, and far more dimension to Middle-earth morality—than immediately meets the eye. Love, or the apparent lack of it in Middle-earth, is another case in point. At first glance, Tolkien’s fictional world seems as sexless as Beowulf’s. Julie Phillips has fun with how carefully Tolkien steers “well clear of that love garbage”—“whether through embarrassment or Englishness or adherence to his Anglo-Saxon models, Tolkien left all the sex out.”18 Many are quite sure there is no love lost in The Lord of the Rings, and some think they know the reason why: “the corrosive power of the Ring, which takes the focus away from the romantic quest and subsumes to itself the power of the erotic”19 —this confirmed by the fact that “those who have borne the ring for any length of time do not marry at all.”20 Except Sam. I see clear outwellings of erotic love in Sam and a lot of other unlikely places that tap deep implicit undercurrents of Middleearth sexuality. The first full-figure female to appear in the trilogy is “Fair Lady Goldberry,” and Frodo is clearly smitten by her: “keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart.” “Overcome with surprise to hear himself saying such things,” he bursts into a paean upon Goldberry’s charms: “O slender as a willow-wand! O clearer than clear water! / O reed by the living pool! Fair riverdaughter! / O spring-time and summer-time, and spring again after! / O wind on the waterfall, and the leaves’ laughter!” (121–22). Frodo’s attraction to Goldberry may be, appropriately enough in this bildungs romantic milieu, mere puppy love, but the intensity of his feeling is attested by acute distress at their parting, and it arouses sufficiently sexy overtones to carry the hobbits away into imagistic amorousness, “leaping, as lusty as Tom” upon the “crumpled skirts of the down” (132). Nor is Goldberry Frodo’s only love interest; this Don Juan of hobbits falls in love also in the space of the first volume with both Arwen and the Lady Galadriel (232, 364). “Tolkien’s treatment of sexuality is more varied than some critics have thought.”21 Though they are always presented with brevity,



ALWAYS ON AND ON


there are much fuller love affairs in The Lord of the Rings than Frodo’s passing fancies, notably the idyllic mating of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, the wide wanderings of ents after their entwives, the immortal romance of Beren and Tinuviel, and the long and loyal and unaffected love of Sam and Rose.22 The author himself considers that “simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life [to] quests.”23 Sam’s love life, which many readers don’t much notice, underwrites the novel as domestic goal of its epic quest. There is in addition the courtly love of Frodo, Gimli, and Sam for Galadriel, a love so compelling it makes the voracious Frodo eat and drink “little, heeding only the beauty of the Lady” (364), inspires gold-greedy Gimli to request “a single strand of your hair, which surpasses the gold of the earth as the stars surpass the gems of the mine” (367), and provokes poetic appreciation in prosaic Sam: “Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime” (664). There is, in addition, the complex Lord of the Rings triangle of the love of Faramir for Éowyn, the “mistaken”24 love of Éowyn for Aragorn, and the ultimately triumphant love of Aragorn for Arwen 25: The next day at the hour of sunset Aragorn walked alone in the woods, and his heart was high within him; and he sang, for he was full of hope and the world was fair. And suddenly even as he sang he saw a maiden walking on a greensward among the white stems of the birches; and he halted amazed, thinking that he had strayed into a dream, or else that he had received the gift of the Elf-minstrels, who can make the things of which they sing appear before the eyes of those that listen. For Aragorn had been singing a part of the Lay of Lúthien which tells of the meeting of Lúthien and Beren in the forest of Neldoreth. And behold! there Lúthien walked before his eyes in Rivendell, clad in a mantle of silver and blue, fair as the twilight in Elven-home; her dark hair strayed in a sudden wind, and her brows were bound with gems like stars. (1033)

This is clearly a matter, in the best tradition of romance, of love at first sight and happily ever after. Aragorn and Arwen live in love together for a world record “six-score years in great glory and bliss,”



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with a love so deep that when Aragorn dies, Arwen dies also (1037–38). It is significant that this, the most extended account of Middle-earth love, occurs in an index, demonstrating again the unadvertised nature of Tolkien sexuality. The suggestion of Middle-earth sexuality extends all the way from that rarified romanticism to what some see as sexual deviation. Not satisfied with implying orc group-ravishing of Elrond’s wife (1019), Tolkien conducts one of the few female rapes in literature when Shelob, “an enormous, stanching bitch-castrator,”26 “her legs quivering,” “has her way” with Sam in a spidery mate-destroying sequence (712) that rounds out his romantic role as the guy in The Lord of the Rings who gets loved every which way. Nor is the eroticism limited for Tolkien readers to heterosexuality. Frodo and Sam’s “relationship fits neatly into the discourse of friendship expressed by homosexual men until the mid-twentieth century.”27 Sam and Frodo are not only inseparable, but increasingly intimate physically, from Sam’s first awkward holding of Frodo’s hand—“he stroked it gently and then blushed and turned away” (21)—through kisses of foreheads (715) to lying about together “comforting” one another with “arms and body” (919). No wonder some are convinced “their relationship should be read as a love story in its own right.”28 Ludicrous as it would seem to me to think a hobbit capable of overt homosexuality, Tolkien leaves no question as to the latent potential for affection underlying hobbit togetherness.29 So Middle-earth’s notorious deficiency of explicit eroticism may not be, as some readers suggest, the result of its author’s erotic deficiency. The tale’s implicit sexuality and the broadly indulgent smiles of narrative at the narrator’s donnish pose imply sublimation of the sexual into the more sedate sensual indulgences of clubbish conversation, smoking, and eating—Tolkien self-satire which is all the more incisive for being so submerged its satirical edge won’t slice many readers. Similarly, there may be artistic insight rather than oversight in such extravagant omission of certain types of everyday minutiae that “not once in well over one thousand pages does a character brush his teeth, argue with his wife, or have a bowel movement.”30 Tolkien’s gently humorous creation of solid realism despite a paucity of explicit toothpaste, toilet paper, and titillation is a triumphant affirmation of an aesthetic vision founded upon infinite faith in the human imagination and its powers of subcreation. In sexuality, in moral complexity, in its every aspect there is more to Middle-earth than meets the eye, and most of the more is a matter



ALWAYS ON AND ON


of the imagination of the reader. The really impelling part of Tolkien’s fiction is the implicit part. Its depths are the depths of reader imagination. Tolkien opens the door to Middle-earth. His fiction serves an introductory function: it is vivid; it is evocative; and it is deliberately insufficient to realize Middle-earth without active imaginative involvement of the reader. The most important part of the developmental pattern of The Lord of the Rings is reader development. Tolkien works to actualize the implicit potential of the reader, training us in techniques of character maturation and narrative realization and imagistic incarnation that make us increasingly capable of subcreation. Thus Tolkien, in narratively portraying the process of bildungsroman, promotes reader bildungsroman. He conditions us by incessant hints of implicit possibilities to penetrate the commonplace, to transcend the usual, to forge as relentlessly forward into the unimagined as hobbits trekking toward the Cracks of Doom. Thus Tolkien’s fiction doubly fosters its fundamental assumption: Humanity is a questing. Human nature is a persistent search for its better self. The tenacious onwardness integrated into the Middle-earth narratives can be as self-revealing and as habit-forming for readers as for Sam the hobbit. Responsive readers return from Middle-earth more “unquenchable” (574) than we were. This is no Pollyanna vision of smiles unlimited. Even as the peoples of Middle-earth turn the world over to “the Dominion of Men” (950), they point to our limitations, our tendency to “come to naught in the end but might-have-beens”: “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise” (855). As antidote against too-easy identification with the remarkable accomplishments of his hobbits cum heroes, Tolkien finishes off The Hobbit with a pointed reminder to Bilbo and to us: “You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you, but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all” (H279). That down-to-earth assessment of transcendent potential is at its clearest in Tolkien’s ubiquitous Christ imagery. New Testament allusions intimate through their frequency in this prose the possibility that every person in Middle-earth may in some manner reflect Jesus— there are so many Christ figures in this fiction it verges on secular sanctification. Gandalf successfully grapples with a supernatural antagonist and passes through “baptism of fire and deep water” to become “sacred” (490, 484, 492). “Like Jesus, he has the love that will lay down his life for his friends.”31 Aragorn is a miraculous healer,



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“the King come again” with “the grace” to yield up his life at will (853, 1037). Galadriel comforts the hobbits with words of Jesus: “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (348). Bilbo, “the chosen and selected,” exhibits Christly compassion, setting prisoners free and resurrecting dwarves—“Well, are you alive or are you dead?”— despite the pointed unfaithfulness of companions who desert him in his hour of need and betray him for love of money.32 Frodo is so Christlike that disciples reverence him—“‘Master!’ cried Sam, and fell upon his knees” (926)—and blasphemers “curse his name” (56; cf. 1002). He assumes messianic accoutrements from swaddling clothes (889) to a forehead full of thorns (900). He continually points out to his followers “the narrow way ahead” (690). He shares a last supper, “their last meal before they went down into the Nameless Land, maybe the last meal they would ever eat together” (695), prior to his ascension of Mount Doom. He forgives Saruman when the wizard stabs him (996). And if Frodo the hobbit, hardly the likeliest messiah material in Middle-earth, can make it, every person is potentially a savior. Even the least of us might prove willing to pay the price, losing his life to find it: “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (1006). Through such painfully earned realizations of profound potential, the little things of Middle-earth—from diminutive hobbit heroes down to the most trivial incidents—come to mean much. The intricate edifice of Tolkien’s fiction is founded on the William Blake artistic premise of a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. Perhaps its ultimate manifestation of unfolding implicit potential is the germination of The Lord of the Rings from its introductory sources in The Hobbit. The novel and its baby brother prequel are genetically related. The structural integrity of the two works involves more than their sharing of a distinctive milieu, more than Tolkien-surrogate Bilbo’s unification of the two novels into his single history, There and Back Again. And What Happened After (1004), more even than the clear repetition of narrative pattern which that title implies. The tales manifest déjà vu parallels down to such immediately corresponding detail as the Fellowship of the Ring’s “following the very track that Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves had used many years before” (203). The Lord of the Rings “grew in the telling” (xv); its organic growth affirms in the deepening of tone and maturation of perspective and heightening of intensity between the two tales.



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That process begins in The Hobbit, in “glimpses that had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface” (xv), when Middle-earth was more an island than the universe it was to become, Gollum just a “funny creature” (H67), Gandalf a firecracking comic escapee from somewhere near Oz, goblins not yet focused into orcs, the Necromancer a mere hint of Sauron, the ring a latent depository of unguessed power. Bilbo gropes in the dark after it: “He guessed as well as he could, and crawled along for a good way, till suddenly his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it” (H63). Neither, I am tempted to speculate, did Tolkien himself recognize at that point the vastness of the narrative and psychological implications that were to emanate from that single incident. Nor is the event exceptional in Tolkien’s writing. I was unnerved in early stages of this study to discover so many obvious stylistic examples in The Hobbit, in the primary school of Tolkien’s prose lessons rather than in his more mature fiction. Then I realized the implication of that obviousness: Tolkien’s prose style, as all else in his fiction, develops. The style gets subtler as it goes along, so that simple beginning will sometimes demonstrate the developing quality of the prose more clearly than complex conclusion. That determined development is as pregnant with potential significance for readers as T. S. Eliot’s discovery of beginnings in endings, endings in beginnings: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”33 The prose of The Hobbit enriches retrospectively, after The Lord of the Rings has played out its potential. That may explain why the total potential of Tolkien’s narrative vibrates in its every incident. The simple initial sentence of that unassuming introductory volume—“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (H1)—contains by implication the entire four-volume saga with the prolific ramifications of its every line.



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The Potency of the Words

The fundamental focus of Tolkien’s faith in implicit possibilities is his language. Tolkien is first and foremost a philologist, and his fiction is founded in his philology. He loves language, cherishes words with an ardor that looks beyond surface appearance to inmost potential. Thus his most open-ended invitation to the reader and his deepest penetration of latent significance takes place in the world of words. “Words were important to Tolkien, not just instrumentally, through their power and effect on life, but metaphysically, through their source and basis and foundation.”1 Beyond loving words, Tolkien believes in them, “the essence of Tolkien’s belief” that “the word authenticates the thing.”2 As his narratives lure readers to explore Middle-earth, his prose similarly searches semantic territory, disclosing implicit meaning at the levels of allusion and irony and pun and emblem and nuance of diction and syntax. In the same way he invites us into the possibilities of narrative, or suggests through his Middle-earth characterizations the rich potential in character, Tolkien manifests in the manner of his fiction how much more there is to words than meets the eye. Tolkien everywhere extends the semantic capacity of his prose, turning words every which way but loose. Consider, for example, his unusual use of allusion. Though evocation of literary echoes is an obvious method of densifying literature, Tolkien’s allusion, sparing to the point of paucity, is by no means obvious. Even in such a prominent area as Middle-earth biblical references, the allusion is elusive. Despite direct recalls of Bible language—horses “smelling battle afar” (501), watchmen crying “what of the dawn?” (527), people who “stank in one another’s nostrils” (614)—the allusion is more a matter of stylistic echo than manifest repetition of specific situation. And even this much directness is rare; Middle-earth allusions tend toward an obliqueness requiring active involvement of the reader not simply



CH A P T ER


at the level of recognition, but in their very formation: when Théoden enjoins Merry to “eat and drink,” it is the reader who must come up with that unspeakable”eat, drink, and be Merry” (760). By such invitational techniques, Tolkien encourages through relatively few references a sensitivity to allusion that grows into an expansive attitude disposed to discover outreaching implications in virtually every statement in the tales. That sensitized attitude is fostered by selection of allusions whose density manages the most from rare reference. Although invariably called up for purposes of immediate narrative clarification, the allusions open out fictive possibilities with a vigor that would be startling if it were more explicit. Tolkien taps the complex resonances of the Shakespeare canon with a few such well-considered and strategically located references as Gandalf’s Learish lament upon “the little life of men” (537), the “lean hungry face” of yon Gollum (699), the symbolic echo of the moving of a Middle-earth Birnam Wood (475). He opens the door upon vast philosophical vistas with Bilbo’s Kierkegaardian leap of faith, here a simple “leap in the dark” (H80). He calls up classical cues through Homeric descents into hellish places of “gaping pits and poisonous mounts” (617–18), of “little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the Dark Lord” (1007), complete with a Charon slightly disguised as “Cirdan the Shipwright” (893). Much has been made of Tolkien’s disdain of stylistic sophistication: “If there is one image which biographical criticism has projected powerfully, it is that of Tolkien the Philistine, hater of literary mainstreams.” So ingrained is that view that “mentioning Tolkien in the same breath with Shakespeare will seem to many rash, even perverse.”3 Yet Tolkien’s strategic allusions, as with his rhetorical stance generally, tunes Middle-earth in not just to Renaissance drama but to the entire range of English literature. Against references to Shakespeare and Homer and the Bible, he juxtaposes echoes of “Humpty Dumpty” (FG72) and “Hey Diddle Diddle” (155), highlighting the variety of the literature at the same time he suggests by association that profundity lies in the least trivia for those who know how to look for it. The historical sweep of those spare allusions is surprisingly encompassing. Tolkien evokes the twentieth-century wasteland in the desolation near Mordor where “nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about” (617).



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Then he conjures up the total chronological scope of British literary consciousness by engaging at the opposite end of that historic spectrum the flavor of medieval England, “looking at long tables filled with folk” as alliteratively as Piers Plowman (H181), and alluding through Malory-like language to the earlier England of Arthur: “Then she stared at him as one that is stricken, and her face blanched, and for long she spoke no more, while all sat silent. ‘But, Aragorn,’ she said at last, ‘is it then your errand to seek death?’ ” (766). The dominant subject matter of Tolkien’s allusion itself makes subtle allusion. The subtlety can be seen in the widely held—and thoroughly mistaken—view that “his source was most clearly the Bible.”4 References to Genesis as surely as to Milton and to Homer underscore a narrative format that intimates not scripture so much as epic. There are Homeric flashbacks (234), genealogies (H1–3), roll calls of warriors (753–54), detailings of vast battles (827–28), and descriptions of arms like that of Merry’s war horn, “small but cunningly wrought all of fair silver with a baldric of green; and wrights had engraven upon it swift horsemen riding in a line that wound about it from the tip to the mouth; and there were set runes of great virtue . . . it was made by the Dwarves, and came from the hoard of Scatha the Worm” (956). Beowulf conventions especially enrich the epic fabric of the fiction: Monsters guard treasure troves. The nephew-uncle fidelity so important to Anglo-Saxon society is in evidence: “Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother” (H267). The leader is a gold giver (Beowulf himself is called prince of the rings), noble according to his capacity to “deal his treasure well” (H267). Gifts, the status-signifying rewards of heroism, are carefully detailed, as Frodo’s “great stone of a clear green, set in a silver brooch that was wrought in the likeness of an eagle with outspread wings” (365–66). Weapons—the swords Orcrist, Glamdring, Sting, Narsil, Anduril, and Guthwine; the spear Aiglos; even the battering ram Grond—bear names.5 There are ponderous Miltonic debates (239). There are even epic similes: “As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes” (928). That intermittent archaism has provoked considerable critical scorn. “One reviewer complained that The Silmarillion sounded like ‘a Swedish railway conductor with a head cold announcing stations.’ ”6



THE POTENCY OF THE WORDS


But these epic tendencies seem more than mitigated, in fact artfully complicated, by a mock epic attitude whose undertow distances the tales of Middle-earth from the severe formality of traditional epic, diminishing awesome actual dragons to believable dimensions by serving them up in the same narrative stew with Mock Dragon’s Tail soup (FG22). That complicating process is apparent in Tolkien’s toying with Gandalf’s simile, “as fierce as a dragon in a pinch.” “If,” suggests the narrator of The Hobbit, “you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit.” Then, in deadly deadpan, he offers as a corrective to the exaggerations of epic convention an account of “Old Took’s great-granduncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their King Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment” (H17). This sort of facetiousness is so far-out farcical it almost mocks mock epic—tonally about as far as it is possible to get from the severe decorum of formal epic. There is a lot of such lighthearted lore in Tolkien’s epic of Middleearth, and it contributes more than burlesque. The narrator points out, tongue in cheek, that a certain prototypical dragon was wont to “carry away people, especially maidens, to eat” (H23).7 Even as it smiles at the pretensions of conventional dragon legend, that joke upon the humanistic tendency of dragon tastes makes the perfectly plausible point that dragons are after all likely to select for their dinners the tenderest persons. Undercut epic thus serves a realizing function in Tolkien’s fiction; its pragmatic reductiveness brings larger-than-life epic values down to essentially lifelike dimensions. That sort of epic ambivalence complicates Middle-earth. Bilbo, as a “legendary burglar,” evokes echoes of Jason and Hercules and Odysseus even as the mock epic tone of the tale undercuts those echoes into humor-tinged hobbit-sized realism. For all its expansiveness, allusion in Tolkien’s fiction is ultimately introspective. Instead of tending to diffusion, its ramifications are reabsorbed; the tale alludes in the last analysis to itself. That invitation to reader involvement sublets the subcreation, making the reading a do-it-yourself project. The most common epic convention in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is the flashback, the tale within the tale.8 Yet the very thrust of that allusion to external epic is internal, toward the kind of insight into dimensions of interiority that



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Smith of Wootton Major enjoyed when “he came through a narrow cleft and looked down, though he did not know it, into the Vale of Evermorn where the green surpasses the green of the meads of Outer Faërie as they surpass ours in our springtime” (Smith 30–31). Allusion in Tolkien’s fiction fosters an aura of expectancy that encourages the reader to find in its statements ripples of expansive implicit meaning. The most important means by which Tolkien extends the potential of his language are the hardest to get at. Irony permeates the tales of Middle-earth. Indeed the works themselves are essentially ironic, not so much fantasy as a fantastic assertion of reality. But the irony is so profoundly ingrained its nuances elude elucidation. In fact the irony is so deeply ensconced that many discerning readers are convinced it isn’t there at all: “He did not write in a largely ironic tone. Thus Tolkien’s work represents much of what the modernists (and after them, the postmodernists) simply detest.” 9 It may be that detesting, as well as the critical respect that contradicts it, represent different reactions to the same stylistic phenomenon: when the ironic tensions that infuse Tolkien’s fiction do surface, they surface in understatement, as when the carnage in Ithilien “was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much” (646), or when the narrator states with blatant litotes that there is between those murderously bitter enemies Eotheod and the dwarves “no great love” (1039). More typically, the understatement is itself understated, Tolkien provoking semantic power from unimposing words with uncanny efficiency. Torment is to us at its most emphatic no more than trivial annoyance; we are tormented by such things as mosquito bites. But in Middle-earth when Celebrian “suffers torment” (1019), torment becomes without benefit of glossary probable orc-rape, and the mighty Thráin gets “tormented” to death (1051). The intensity of torment is typical of the power with which Middleearth’s ironic attitude magnetizes its words. Tolkien’s ability to manipulate context for maximum dictional force is evident in the leverage that he manages from innocuous inadvertently in his description of a post-party cleanup: “Gardeners came by arrangement and removed in wheelbarrows those that had inadvertently remained behind” (36). As one hobbit describes this verbal empowering process, “It is the way of my people to use light words,” to say “less than they mean. We fear to say too much” (852). Amid that studied implicitness of meaning, such a simple statement as “Sam had more on his mind than gardening” (44) can point through the denotative depths of his loyalty to Frodo to hidden hopes of visiting elves in their ethereal





gardens and beyond that to a remarkable capacity in simple Sam for imaginative transcendence of the commonplace. To see that kind of verbal expansiveness is to share in it, the most unimaginative reader more disposed as a result to dream bigger dreams. Anticlimax is a frequent approach to emphatic understatement in this stylistic environment, one that has the distinct Tolkienian advantage of bringing the unlikely into probable perspective by means of laughter. The dwarves crammed into troll sacks are “nearly suffocated and very annoyed” (H39). A giant in Farmer Giles of Ham displays anticlimactic enormity, his walking-stick “like a tree, and his tread . . . heavy” (FG11). In The Lord of the Rings, Pippin promises to follow Frodo everywhere, “into every bog and ditch” (86), and Gaffer Gamgee, after the magnificently ruthless marauding of the Black Riders, complains that “they’ve been and dug up Bagshot Row and ruined my taters” (990). The very structure of the trilogy partakes of that realizing quality of Middle-earth anticlimax, the epic wars of its lengthy chronicles brought down to the level of a local quarrel in the concluding “Scouring of the Shire” chapter. But Tolkien’s most persistent method of understating irony into his prose works not reductively like anticlimax, but cumulatively, climactically. One of the more intriguing dimensions of The Lord of the Rings is its innate prophecy. In a mode somewhere between usual fictional foreshadowing and Old Testament revelation, Tolkien establishes a sense of prophetic disclosure in the narrative through oracular proclamations whose significance is revealed by the unraveling of the tale. Gandalf, in recounting an ancient poem, provides such a prophecy: All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring: Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. (167)

The meaning of that cryptic passage is clarified by the progress of the tale, its complete significance not revealed until the final pages of the final book of the trilogy when the disguised wanderer Aragorn, himself reshaped and renamed as dramatically as his sword, is finally proclaimed king.



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The aura of augury induced by that kind of prophetic foreshadowing is compounded by the inherent narrative inevitability of Tolkien’s tales. Carefully causal motivation, stimulated by frequent explicit portents and predictions (H15, 107), produces practical prophecy everywhere. Premonitions, such as Bilbo’s fear that “trouble would come” of his theft of the Arkenstone, are uncannily accurate (H218). The most dubious superstition can get confirmed by experience, as when Bombur is warned “don’t start grumbling or something will happen to you,” then grumbles and falls right on cue into the river (H159). Curses are carried out and blessings prove actually beneficial: beer that Gandalf has given “a good word” becomes “uncommonly good” (972), and we recall in Frodo’s decline that Saruman had told him, “Do not expect me to wish you health and long life. You will have neither” (996). Wishes routinely come true; in this atmosphere of ubiquitous augury, the merest desire may assume prophetic impact. Bilbo wonders, “Why don’t they lend a hand?” and his dwarf guests have the table set “before he could say knife” (H11). That rhetorical realization reflects Tolkien’s inmost linguistic attitude, where language intermingles with reality, where “words are not mere labels for concepts”—“things are in words for Tolkien.”10 Hobbits dream as fondly as they imbibe mushrooms, and those frequent Lord of the Rings dreams provide another fertile field for the irony of implicit prophecy. The tales of Middle-earth are suffused, too, with near dreams—waking nightmare and daydream and mystic vision (505, 586, 686) and oracular flashings forth of Jungian group consciousness (276, 347, 886). These frequent Middle-earth dreamings naturalize the narrative, showing actuality as dreamlike at the same time the dreams anticipate actual events—“the evocation of the quality of dreams is throughout naturalistic and not allegorical.”11 Nightmare imperceptibly fades into reality, from “uneasy dream . . . to a doze, and from a doze to wide waking” (H199): “he woke up with a horrible start, and found that part of his dream was true” (H55); “the washing-up was so dismally real that Bilbo was forced to believe the party of the night before had not been part of his bad dreams” (H26). That reciprocity of dream and reality is apparent in how insistently equivocal Middle-earth wakings tend to be: “When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut” (H63); “either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind” (132). In Middle-earth we dream always “in the realm of the real and the realistic”12—dreams are a definite part of reality: as they venture outside the Shire, hobbits “enter a world in which waking experience





becomes the stuff of dreams.”13 “The dreams (and they may be veridical) are part of the story in his world—not the gate to his world or even the gate to the story.”14 That verity of Middle-earth dream may explain how the most pragmatic persons in this psychological territory can be the deepest dreamers, “preeminently Frodo, secondarily Sam.”15 The tide of consciousness ebbs as forcefully out into dream as it flows toward waking. Bilbo, explaining to Frodo how to distinguish Middle-earth dream from waking, admits “it is difficult to keep awake here” (231). Middle-earthers walk about “as if in dream” (80), “in a waking dream” (81), “half in a dream” (114), “on the edge of a dream” (310), “hovering between sleep and waking” (618). Small wonder “they began to feel that all this country was unreal, and that they were stumbling through an ominous dream that led to no awakening” (119). At the conclusion of the trilogy, the reciprocal reality of that tidal dreaminess is precisely evinced when Sam says of the adventure through which the hobbits have passed, “It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded,” and Frodo replies, “To me it feels more like falling asleep again” (974). From the ebb and flow of its reveries, the reality of Middle-earth acquires such an aura of dreaminess its dreams become realized: “Dreamlike it was, and yet no dream, for there was no waking” (651). That dreamily prophetic perspective of Middle-earth, wherein vision reflects life into infinite possibility, enables us to see almost into the subconscious with Frodo, “as if he were dreaming, or looking inward into his heart and memory” (631). The liminal viewpoint provides the reader an elf-like capacity for “blending living night and deep dream” (432), for “resting his mind in the strange paths of elvish dreams, even as he walks open-eyed in the light of this world” (419). Our thoughts, Tolkien implies through all this dreamy rhetoric, shape our reality. We dream ourselves into being. Frodo’s saving of his soul in the barrow owes as much to Tolkien dream-who-you-are philosophy as to Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” It is not until Frodo starts “thinking and getting a hold on himself” that he is able to see the light at the end of the tunnel—“as he does so, light begins to shine.”16 That alternating current of dream and reality generates the vitality of Tolkien’s worldview. A spark of that fictive power can be glimpsed in the way the discontinuity between dream and actuality that Frodo sees in Galadriel’s mirror “underlines the important elements of contingency and mystery within the historical unfolding of Middle-earth.”17 Those ironic implications of Tolkien’s prophetic fiction reach deeper than dreams, wider than wishes. Everything in Middle-earth



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is an omen. Virtually every statement is prophetic. Jokes carry serious undertones: a hungry Frodo, unaware he is about to undergo physiological fading toward ghostliness, hopes “the thinning process will not go on indefinitely, or I shall become a wraith” (180). Wistful effusions become reliable: “I don’t suppose we shall see them again.’ ‘Yet we may, Mr. Frodo, we may,’ said Sam” (397). Idle boasts like “we will never be overcome” (886) come true. Such extravagantly empty threats as the warning to orcs before Helm’s Deep that “not one of you will be spared” (527) are fulfilled. Offhand comments, the simplest statements of fact, become oracular, as when Bard mentions to Thorin, “we are not yet foes” (H242). White lies prove prophetic: Aragorn’s promise that “Minas Tirith shall not fall” (404), made merely to comfort Boromir in his dying, comes true. The most unpredictable matters become predictive: “Is there a storm coming? If so, it’s going to be the worst there ever was,” says Sam, and his off-the-wall weather forecast precisely predicts the weather as well as the terrible storm of coming war (684). There are Tolkien readers who find that pervasive prophesying fatalistic: “the basic difference between the moral structures of Tolkien’s world and our own,” for some, is that “in Middle-earth, the result of an action is the product of its intent.”18 Other readers find Tolkien’s world much less predictable and hence much more morally interesting. Some of us think this fiction so convincingly realistic that its causation—and hence its morality—is almost as complex, almost as troubling and intriguing, as moral choice in our own lives. The catalyst of that perceived complexity is, bottom line, style. Tolkien’s delicate irony and scarce allusion manage to multiply meaning so complexly in Middle-earth because they are manifest through the medium of a diction that itself compounds meaning. “To produce an effect in the material realm,” Tolkien “models in language a cause resembling that effect.”19 He makes sounds mean as much as words mean to Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass: “When I make a word do a lot of extra work like that,” huffs Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”20 Middle-earth words, too, work overtime. That word work manifests itself in many dimensions. Tolkien reveals the unseen significances of terms through the unfolding of narrative, as when the “Barrels out of Bond” chapter turns out to be about means of escape as well as quality of liquor (H158, ff.). He employs deftly such unwieldy devices as tautology to demonstrate that simple things contain hidden profundities: the “crafty” boats of the elves are clever as well as seaworthy (362); rope “as light as light” proves no heavier than a sunbeam (595). He makes sounds declare





their latent meaning; in Middle-earth, “spells of ruin” are both ruinous and runic (810). He puns with a persistence that suggests words always mean more than they seem. Pun is no mere word game with Tolkien. Double-directed diction, even when it displays itself in superficial play on words, grows out of the basic disposition of the prose. The organic nature of Tolkien’s wordplay is intimated in the thoroughly punful texture of such passages as this almost Elizabethan repartee: A tall figure loomed up and stumbled over him, cursing the tree-roots. He recognized the voice of the Marshal, Elfhelm. “I am not a tree-root, Sir,” he said, “nor a bag, but a bruised hobbit. The least you can do in amends is to tell me what is afoot.” “Anything that can keep so in this devil’s mirk. . . . Pack yourself up, Master Bag!” (813; cf. 596)

The depth of root of double meaning in Tolkien’s tales is attested by the tenacity with which puns are sustained. Throughout a protracted account of the entire Third Age, there is recurrent play on Aragorn’s nickname, “Estel, that is ‘Hope’ ”: “hope dwelt ever in the depths of his heart.” His mother laments, “I gave Hope to the Dunedain, I have kept no hope for myself.” His lover waits for him “in hope.” Through him “hope beyond hope was fulfilled,” and with his death the Third Age “ended thus in victory and hope” (1032–36). Pun for Tolkien is much more than whimsy patched on the narrative; it is woven into the essential texture of the prose. The impact of that punful meaning implodes deeply into the prose. Magic in this rhetorical universe “is not only inspired by the structure of language but is also effected through actual language use”21 in a world where “the right words could unleash significant powers.”22 Those essentially stylistic powers, as artful as they are subtle, are prized in Middle-earth: “Several representatives of evil forces in The Lord of the Rings harness the power inherent in language for their purposes.”23 The repercussions of this stylistic legerdemain go beyond empowerment of magic—Tolkien believes even more fundamentally in the power of words: “According to the Ents, the words of a language ought to reflect the nature of the entities they denote.” In direct contrast to Saussurian insistence on arbitrary connections, “the Ents assume that the relationship between signifier and signified should be motivated.”24 That makes for potent verbal magic. Virtually every prospect of that prose opens out the potential significance of words.



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Middle-earth shows us how words can mean more than we thought they might: an ambitious orc, ordered that his prisoner be stripped, says, “Stripped, eh? What, teeth, nails, hair and all?” (723). Tolkien makes words serve entirely new semantic functions, as when fade comes to mean, in addition to its usual denotation, the specific psychophysiological withering induced by wearing the ring (213, 274). He dramatizes meaning by verbal mimesis: “ ‘How much are you prepared to carry on your backs?’ ‘As much as we must,’ said Pippin with a sinking heart” (174). He emphasizes again and again how much words may mean, specifically explicating such multiple meanings as these four denotations of a word we thought as straightforward as by: “The fireworks were by Gandalf: they were not only brought by him but designed and made by him; and the special effects, set pieces, and flights of rockets were let off by him” (27). At the very outset of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s rich vision of the implicit possibilities within words becomes apparent in his playful insights into the multiple meanings of good morning: “Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. “What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not: or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” “All of them at once,” said Bilbo. “And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain. . . . Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water.” By this he meant that the conversation was at an end. “What a lot of things you do use Good Morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.” (H4–5)

Proliferation of verbal significance is such a prominent aspect of Tolkien’s prose and so intimately integrated with Middle-earth situation that double meaning becomes a narrative reflex. Punning metaphor spontaneously generates from almost any kind of circumstance. Bilbo’s creeping up on Smaug with such silence that “smoke on a gentle wind could hardly have surpassed it” (H203) gathers mimetic resonances from the slightly smoke-blown atmosphere around a slumbering dragon emitting “scarcely a snore more than a whiff of unseen steam” (H204). Elves appropriately chide the hobbit





that his “snores would waken a stone dragon” (H274) because a calcified dragon reposes in the narrative vicinity. Rumor “running like fire” (H232) about the dragon’s treasure trove reflects in addition to the inflamed imaginations of listeners the fiery sheen of the gold and the flaming destruction it sparks. These doubling implications more than reflect reality; they inform it, as this punned metaphor, by making fingernails metallic, enhances their personified vividness: “The Orc’s clawlike hand gripped Pippin’s arms like iron; the nails bit into him” (437). Metaphor that attentive to circumstance creates mimetic diction. Smaug speaks out of the depths of his reptilian nature when he says, “this is some nasty scheme . . . or I’m a lizard” (H205). Dwarves about to become troll hors d’oeuvres find themselves, stickily enough, in “a nice pickle” (H37). Ents understandably know “by heart” the song of their lost entwives (465). Frodo speaks in “a cracked whisper” near the Cracks of Doom (920). A “sharp corner” features swords waiting on its other side (H62). Sam encourages his stumbling friend with relevantly “clumsy words” (617). That dictional mimeticism lends itself to lively semantic horseplay among Middle-earth inhabitants: “The Pony is a good inn by all accounts,” says Merry. “My people ride out there now and again” (145). The hobbits, after three quarters of an hour’s eating, find their inn room too “stuffy” (151). Goldberry tells Frodo the ring-bearer, “I see you are an elf-friend; the light in your eyes and the ring in your voice tells it”(122). Farmer Giles decides to load his blunderbuss with “a good charge of powder, just in case extreme measures should be required,” and the giant whose nose is blasted by that extreme charge responds, “Blast!” (FG15–16). Words disseminate narrative events of Middle-earth into multiple levels of meaning. Contextually distilled into Bilbo’s threat to “do the stinging” is, in addition to the general intent to harass, a specific plan to harry the giant spiders waspishly, plus the precise implementation of that attack through his sword Sting (H152). The “stewing depths of the dragon-haunted caverns” are overheated, worrisome, and fraught with the sweaty possibility of having the hero actually stewed for a fire-breathing dragon’s dinner (H222). Hobbits “too crushed for the moment” are squashed under a heavy orc as well as emotionally flattened (447). When Pippin seems “curiously restless,” the oddness of his disquiet involves inquisitiveness (576). Woses who “haunt Druadan Forest” spook as they inhabit (813). A “ruffianly” evening promises rogues as well as unpleasant weather (968). “Night-eyed” orcs have nocturnal vision, dark points of view, dim prospects (880).



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These language-energizing contextual puns, even as they inflate semantic possibilities, tend paradoxically to confirm the down-to-earth actualities of Middle-earth. Pun in Tolkien’s fiction reinforces reality. The advent of ponies is greeted dictionally by the appearance of “furlongs” and “girths” and “plodding gloom” (143; H186–87). “Pointed remarks” accompany swords (FG31). The Great Willow has “rooted” wisdom, “rotten” heart, “green” strength (128); Treebeard “stalks” about giving his “leave” (456–62). And there is a more fundamental sense than this realizing of metaphor in which Tolkien’s pun confirms actuality; at times the inherent verbal significance is truer than the apparent narrative meaning. When dragons “turn to fly,” they are not merely fleeing; they truly are about to take to the air (FG44). Faramir and Boromir, “akin,” are not just similar, but blood relatives (657). When Galadriel “divines thought,” she is not simply perceiving; she is magically divining (355). Pun tends in Tolkien’s prose to actualize reality. Middle-earth death, however punful, is really death. It is no hyperbole when Frodo exhorts Sam, “If you really care about me, you will keep that dead secret” (62)—the pun is a matter of literal life and death. When Gandalf warns, “Do not stray far in search of dead wood. Let the fire die rather” (432), those verbal death references indicate the imminence of all-too-real murder lurking outside the fire. Dying is emphatically actual in Middle-earth—there are “folk killed, killed dead!” (970). Dead, even as semantic intensification, is an invariable indicator of the possibility of actual death lurking under surface appearances; there are fatal implications in every “dead silence” (277) and “dead end” (907) and “dead of night” (772). Every deadly conjures up the surrounding shadows of real death: the dwarves are “deadly tired” because they are fleeing orcs, and if they stop to rest will be dead indeed (H61). Even such whimsy as Gandalf’s “I have been saved by this hobbit from a grave blunder” is deadly serious (581). Thus comes to pass in Middle-earth a world of words as true as narrative actuality. Tolkien’s terms are so energized by their realizing potential that the possibilities they bespeak become tangible, the fantasy palpable. In this sphere of verbal reality, the meanings really mean. Balin the dwarf is obviously not talking through his hat when he says, “ ‘I take off my hood to you.’ Which he did” (H86). When the Witch-king “passes into the shadows,” he literally does everything that statement might intimate: he is sneaking away under cover of darkness; he is associating himself with the blackness of evil; he is becoming a wraith, a literal shadow (1026). Middle-earth authenticates in its actualizing diction the truth-proposing function of its fiction.





Through the equivocal terms of Middle-earth, verbal reality is intricately related to the referential world. Tolkien in this alchemical manner manages to revivify the real meanings of words. When Saruman “speaks seemingly gentle and reasonable words, the hobbits and men are half persuaded,” but “Gimli the dwarf spots the falseness of tone as sharply as if he had been to school with a New Critic: ‘The words of this wizard stand on their head.’ ”25 That revitalization of language may be more miraculous for our post-1984 times than the most dramatic of Middle-earth narrative resurrections: “In days like ours when help can still mean ruin and saving mean slaying, when evil and horrible acts can be given wrong names—‘redevelopment’ for people losing their homes, ‘defoliation’ for forests and fields blasted with poison—a book which sharpens a sense of words, their power and proper meaning, is to be praised.”26 The natures of things are so closely integrated with the words that represent them that naming becomes in Middle-earth an act of creation. Tolkien heals the faërie-fact schism by closing the gap between words and their referents. David Jeffrey in his article devoted totally to the meaning of the name Aragorn entitled the section about how naming functions in Tolkien’s fiction “Name as Incarnational History.”27 Tolkien appreciated our noticing how much his names matter: “I am honoured by the interest that many readers have taken in the nomenclature,” he said. “It shows that this construction, the product of very considerable thought and labour, has achieved (as I hoped) a verisimilitude, which assists probably in the ‘literary belief’ in the story as historical.”28 Naming and creating correspond throughout the fiction. Treebeard declares that those creative people the elves “made all the old words: they began it” (454). The elves themselves describe prehistory—and precreation—as the time when “no words were laid on stream or stone” (308). The generalized premise that naming and creating are complementary manifestations of the same fundamental process is explicitly propounded in such instances as the re-creation of Strider’s weapon: “The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths . . . and Aragorn gave it a new name” (269). The affinity of names with the referential realities they represent is attested by corresponding changes in things and their titles. There is much more to that biblical changing of names to reflect change of character than Gandalf the Grey ascended to the White rank or even Smeagol degenerated to the glottal gulpings of Gollum. The name of the elven lands, Laurenlindorenan, shrinks to Lothlórien as the elvish



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culture diminishes. The change of name is as inevitable as the change in topography; the land is “fading not growing. Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, that was it, once upon a time. Now it is the Dreamflower” (456). Greenwood the Great becomes Mirkwood when it “darkens” (3), then, as its aspect alters for the better, the forest’s new growth gets reaffirmed as “the Wood of Greenleaves” (1069). Nominative change embodying actual change is more clearly if trivially apparent in Fatty Bolger’s shrinkage through the rigors of a prison term to “Fredegar Bolger, Fatty no longer” (998). Middle-earth names participate in referential reality. Bilbo asks about Strider the Ranger, “What do you call him that for?”: both the question and its obvious answer suggest that names are anything but arbitrary (226). Frodo, who also notices that the Ranger has “a lot of names,” wonders as pragmatically as his predecessor about the inherent significance of names. “ ‘Why do you call him Dunadan?’ ‘The Dunadan,’ said Bilbo. ‘He is often called that here. But I thought you knew enough Elvish at least to know dun-adan: Man of the West, Númenorean’ ” (226). The Middle-earthy assumption is that words more directly represent their referents than in our sphere: “If this is shelter,” laments matter-of-fact Sam, “then one wall and no roof make a house” (282). “Real names,” Treebeard affirms, “tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language” (454). Tolkien’s language is more than arbitrary, more than merely made up, more than a theoretical case study. His invitation to us to participate in its processes makes it rather a “network of consciousness that holds together an entire pattern of life.”29 Middle-earth is alive with “real names.”30 Tolkien denominates his creations with the delight of a new Adam, and invariably, with a kind of Dickensian gusto, the name reflects the nature—“the most powerful words are proper names.”31 The men of the agricultural community of Bree “seemed all to have rather botanical (and to the Shire-folk rather odd) names, like Rushlight, Goatleaf, Heathertoes, Appledore, Thistlewool and Ferny” (152). Hobbits, from the hobbit architectural point of view at least, have “natural names, such as Banks, Brockhouse, Longholes, Sandheaver, and Tunnelly” (152; cf. 1108–09). “Strange persons and creatures prowling about the borders” of the Shire are, appropriately enough, termed bounders (10). A Middle-earth yeoman is named ceorl, Old English for “yeoman” (515). The son of Lobelia and Otho, Lotho, reflects his genealogy in his portmanteau name (67). A raven onomatopoeically introduces himself as “Roac son of Carc” (H236). In “Midgewater! There are more midges than water!” (178). The outpost Orthanc is





guarded by surrounding orcs anagrammatically as it is militarily (254). Khazad-dum spells doom for Gandalf as emphatically as its warning drums: “Doom, boom, doom” (313). The city center of Michel Delving is the punfully appropriate Town Hole (152). All this intermixing of words and the referential world brews a powerful concoction of semantic magic. “Anyone who can use language can work magic in Middle-earth.”32 Names both reflect and effect things in Middle-earth. Frodo is worried about the impact of words on reality when he warns Gollum “don’t take names to yourself” (700), and Strider commands one who has murmured Mordor, “Do not speak that name so loudly!” (182). “A rebuke follows a lighthearted hobbit reference to Frodo as the Lord of the Rings.”33 Fear of the effect of words on the world is no groundless superstition in this runic universe; words have direct and powerful impact on their referents, as Tom Bombadil is potently aware: “I know the tune for him. Old grey Willow-man! I’ll freeze his marrow cold, if he don’t behave himself. I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing up a wind and blow leaf and branch away” (117). In Middle-earth, names are things, and names can make things happen. In his “On Fairy-Stories” disquisition on subcreation, Tolkien explicates the essential power source of his semantic magic: “How powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. . . . When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power” (Tree 25). There is in Middle-earth so much in a name that etymology hunting becomes habit forming, and such apparently uncomplicated terms as hobbit prove infinitely provocative. “Hobbit,” Tolkien baldly states, “is an invention” (1111), provoking us with his deliberate nondefinition into wondering after the etymological vibrations of the invention. Is it “a worn-down form of a word preserved more fully in Rohan: holbytla ‘hole-builder’ ” (1104)? Is it a cross between a hobo (English hobb) and a rabbit? Is it a reference to the creature’s happy hobnobbing I’d-just-as-soon-skip-it habits? And what of the nomenclature of specific hobbits? Is Frodo a bildungsromantic junior version of frod, the Old English root denoting wisdom? A reference to the Old Icelandic chroniclers who took an appellation derived from frodr? A ring-bearing reincarnation of the Old Norse legend in which Odin’s descendant Frodi ruled over a kingdom of such peace that a golden ring lay untouched on a heath because there were no robbers?34



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And just when the reader is becoming embarrassed by the audacity of his own etymological conjecture, Tolkien urges him to greater imaginative heights. Lest we rest content with prosaically supposing that Thorin Oakenshield’s surname is a vague reflection of his defensive prowess, we are presented the decidedly more whimsical actual origin: “It is said that Thorin’s shield was cloven and he cast it away and he hewed off with his axe a branch of an oak and held it in his left hand to ward off the strokes of his foes, or to wield as a club. In this way he got his name” (1048). Soon as the reader gets Saruman’s nickname, Sharkey, comfortably affiliated with the likes of predatory loan sharks, the narrator straightens him out with the straight-faced proposition that the term is “probably Orkish in origin: sharkû, ‘old man’ ” (995). The moment we have found in simple reflection of place the etymology of the despicable “Sackville-Bagginses,” Tolkien demonstrates in the abbreviation of their name, “the S.-Bs,” other intimations. Perhaps the ultimate testament to nominative power in Middle-earth is that names can convey significance by their absence. Naming is so closely tied to creation that namelessness becomes a condition of nonexistence; an extinct people is a people whose “name was lost” (777). Namelessness can connote even more emphatic negation, the kind of unspeakable evil that is expressed in Sam’s failure to find adequate terms for the monster he has glimpsed: it is not a Balrog, but “something colder. I think it was—” (378). The worst things are beyond the creative force of nomination: the wickedest trees are “strange and nameless” (112). “There were murmured hints of creatures more terrible than all these, but they had no name” (43). Sauron, the embodiment of ultimate evil, is referred to as “the Nameless One” (804; cf. 656, 239). Words further interact with the Middle-earth world by means of onomatopoeia, as in “lalaith, ‘laughter.’ ”35 Sound in Tolkien’s prose is acutely responsive to sense. Gollum’s licking-his-chops talk is thick with salivary juices: “Is it nice, my preciousss? Is it scrumptiously crunchable?” (H71). Elves breaking into song vibrate the prose into rhythmic alliteration and even rhyme: “the elves being very merry began to sing a song round the river-door” (H169). When goblins begin “to sing, or croak, keeping time with the flap of their flat feet on the stone,” the loud sounds make the prose as well as “the walls echo to the clap, snap! and the crush, smash! and to the ugly laughter of their ho, ho! my lad!” (H56). The prose onomatopoeically issues psychological sounds ranging from “fierce whistling steam” (H200) and “winter thunder” that “on a wild wind rolled roaring up and rumbled in the Mountain” (H256), all the way to a sibilantly “endless rustle of leaves like poplars in the breeze” (328).





The prose presents sound so palpable it can almost be felt. The reader receives a personal chill from Thorin’s assiduously alliterative “clothes clinging to him cold and clammy” (H173), enjoys the rich visual impression of those magnificent r’s and l’s in “countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light” (H197), moves so intimately with the texture of the prose that he can empathetically slip with the dwarves as they “slither on stones rubbed smooth and slimed by the passing of the dragon” (H222). Tolkien’s prose is so sensitive it mirrors mood. The discouragement of Merry distills into wearily distancing w’s: “The world looked wild and wide from Weathertop” (183). Frodo’s languor reflects in the easy liquids of “he lay a little while longer looking at patches of sunlight on the wall, and listening to the sound of a waterfall” (213). The ebb and flow of ent temper manifests in an alternation of rising r’s and falling l’s, of raised and lowered vowels: “The voices of the Ents at the Moot still rose and fell, sometimes loud and strong, sometimes low and sad, sometimes quickening, sometimes slow and solemn as a dirge” (473). In its most emphatic moments, Tolkien’s onomatopoeic prose enacts itself. It paints pictures of its content in the extending alliteration of “eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning” (133), the pointed plosives of “piercing the press with the thrust of bitter spears” (928), the insistent assonance of “Grond crawled on” (810). It dramatizes meaning, the hard i’s of “iron” and “like” graphically crumpling up into the soft vowels of “thin tin” in “a punch from an Ent-fist crumples up iron like thin tin” (553). “Hand in hand upon a little hill” (930), with those assonant a’s and i’s interwoven with alliterative h’s, l’s, and n’s, performs a stylistic paradigm of unity more compelling than the narrative explication of Frodo and Sam’s togetherness. Words in dialogue are particularly apt to enact their significance: “ ‘Wait for me, Sam’ he stammered,” pronounced in the drowsy hurry suggested so as to postpone the effort of that plosive t to later in the statement, transliterates in my students’ mouths to “Way’ for me, Stam”—stammer incarnate (114). The powerful reciprocity between Tolkien’s words and the world that they create generates onomatopoeic metaphor, urging implicit imagery from the very sounds of the prose: “Quick as water flows, or quicker” (H46) manages momentum in its underlying metaphor that picks up the pace of the surface simile by telescoping “quick” and the last syllable of “water” into the rapidity of that final “quicker.”



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The penetrating onomatopoeia of Tolkien’s prose creates a context of sensory ambivalence, an environment in which sensate possibilities expand as senses assume powers of other senses. There are in Middleearth, for example, “many ways of hearing” (H72). Such sounds as “the imagined echo of a footfall” (310) are perceived in an almost extrasensory manner. Other Middle-earth sounds are so earthy as to attain texture; goblin talk is “stony” (H56). Sound becomes kinetic in dragon laughter, a literally “devastating sound which shook Bilbo to the floor” (H207). “A cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom” (824) is tactile to the point of pain. And sound can be visible: “Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the Downs” (128). Hearing is compounded with feeling, feeling complicated by seeing, and seeing alloyed with the sense of smell until the senses of characters and the readers identifying with them integrate into a total intensified sense receptor, a fictive transparent eyeball.36 That implicit synesthesia multiplies perceptive possibilities. Middle-earthers expand our sensitivity because they tend to be more aware of sensory stimuli than we. They see better: Malbeth is a professional “Seer” (1025), Faramir enjoys “long sight” (742), and the primitive Woses “have long ears and long eyes” (814). In this ultrasensitive sphere, “senses, too, there are other than sight or smell” (185). Elves understand each other by psychic means: “They did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro” (963). But more impressive than that paranormal perception is the ready sensitivity with which emotions are more naturally apprehended, as when Faramir perceives “sorrow and unrest” through means no more extraordinary than his “clear sight” (938). All this heightening of perceptivity is acutely appropriate in a narrative that is in large measure about perception. Tolkien’s tales typically revolve around a series of epiphanies. The Lord of the Rings, for example, is a documentation of Frodo’s achieved insights; time and again throughout the book we see him noticing something “as if for the first time, though he had long known it” (284–85). Perhaps the most striking of that sequence of epiphanies is the instantaneous insight that occurs when Frodo is first exposed to elven lands: Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world.





A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.37

The locale of that transcendent vision is significant. Elvish areas are places of profound perception; elves like Legolas see farther and hear better than other peoples. Thus there is implicit suggestion in Tolkien’s tales that exposure to faërie increases awareness. Characters visiting elven lands, like readers entering Tolkien’s faërie fiction, begin to perceive more intensely. Perceptual sensitivity is not simply a pleasant adjunct to a person’s aesthetic equipment; it is vital to existence. In Middle-earth, one’s universe is informed by one’s perceptions. Barliman Butterbur’s rednecked imperceptivity limits his world through his failure to profit from the experiences of the hobbits: “Most of the things which they had to tell were a mere wonder and bewilderment to their host, and far beyond his vision” (969). Just as shortsightedness narrows the world, distorted perceptions deform it. The dishonest see crookedly. When Wormtongue says, “You lie,” Gandalf notes, “That word comes too oft and easy from your lips” (509). An orc squealing “you miserable rat” through his rattish “yellow fangs” (435) paradigms how readily the vile, seeing as they are, project their own hateful image upon their perceived universe. The persistent interplay of perception with verbal and referential reality produces a Tolkien stylistic specialty best termed emblem—an echo of a psychological state or narrative event that accentuates the original as resonantly as an overtone on a guitar. As hobbits break out from the confining maze of Old Forest, escaping at last its occlusive darkness, they notice the sun in reinforcing parallel pattern “escaping from the breaking clouds” (89). That sort of emblematic reiteration of narrative situation occurs persistently in the trilogy, in hobbits smoking while Isengard smolders (543), in the raven hair of Faramir and the golden hair of Éowyn intermingled by the wind (941), in Bilbo before “a small bright fire” very like himself (963). Emblems in Tolkien’s tales, images that merge the precision of metaphor with the pond-ripple ramification of symbol, reflect the narrative with an intensity that radiates collateral luminousness into the surrounding text at the same time it probes the implications of



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Day was waning. In the last rays of the sun the Riders cast long pointed shadows that went on before them. Darkness had already crept beneath the murmuring fir-woods that clothed the steep mountain-sides. The king rode now slowly at the end of the day. Presently the path turned round a huge bare shoulder of rock and plunged into the gloom of soft-sighing trees. Down, down they went in a long winding file. When at last they came to the bottom of the gorge they found that evening had fallen in the deep places. The sun was gone. Twilight lay upon the waterfalls. (774)

As a result of that kind of outward-looking internal complication, Tolkien’s emblems incrementally relate fantasy to reality. The process can be seen in individual images such as the battle rams at Helm’s Deep—“trees, swung by strong arms, smiting the timbers with a rending boom”—that as they reflect realize the concurrent fantastic fight of tree-people rending Isengard (521). One of the more layered instances of emblem takes place among the simple folk of Wootton Major, whose overeating comes emblematically to incorporate overconsumption and then materialism generally and eventually the spiritual grossness that is failure to perceive the faërie in life. Tolkien’s emblems enact the characteristic ambivalent pattern of his style, interlocking aspects of his world expansively, complicating by relating. The emblematic disposition of the narrative activates the symbolic potential of everything in it. Numbers become emblems, taking on “important” (22), “curious” (22), and “ominous” (42) overtones: 7s (67), 12s (29–30), and especially 3s—there are significant triads everywhere.38 Weather becomes emblematic, as do aspects of landscape and animals. Colors also refract into emblems: green and yellow, the favorite hues of hobbits, associate with spring and with faërie; red is warning; blue indicates distance, pale malevolence; nature is colorful, the urban scene greyer. Nor are these emblems as reductive as they might seem, nor as stereotypical. They permeate the tales at such depth they occasionally approach profundity, as when such violent and horrific incidents as Shelob’s attack on Sam, in contrast to the usual technicolor presentation of Tolkien action, appear in Mordorizing black and infrared.



specific episodes. A twilight, for example, reiterates itself so insistently as to illuminate with its emblem of ending the emotional, political, even moral overtones of its larger context; the twilight through its increasing concreteness paradoxically reflects the twilight of the entire Third Age of Middle-earth:


Characters in this emblematic ambience assume typifying signs, outward indications of inward grace. Dwarves, for example, are known by the length of their beards. Trolls relate to stone, goblins are froggy, Woses treeish.39 Sometimes the signs are characteristic actions: the hallmark of orcs, whether imaged as ants or beetles or maggots, is their incessant swarming.40 Through a persistence of association that integrates varied and often indirect presentation, these character emblems achieve the identifying force of Homeric tags. Elves, for example, “the People of the Stars” (1111), are thoroughly star-crossed. They first appear in The Lord of the Rings “starlit” (77), extending their usual greeting: “a star shines on the hour of our meeting” (79). Dawn and twilight in elven lands are “the times of star-fading and star-opening” (1084), goodbye “may the stars shine upon the end of your road” (83); the very grass of elven lands is studded with flowers “shaped like stars” (341). The eyes of elves are “grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars” (221). The star association is so persistent that the appearance of elves comes reflexively to call up their signal: “ ‘Hmmm! It smells like elves!’ thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars” (H44). Tolkien’s emblem, as usual with his style, tends to ramification rather than reductiveness. Specific characters attract more specific tags. Wizards are individually color-coded—Gandalf the Grey (346), Radagast the Brown (250), Saruman the White (250). Gollum, imaged as a “little whining dog,”41 exhibits in addition to generally doggy behavior specifically whiny actions, “pawing at Frodo, fawning at his knees” (604), “sitting by himself a few paces away and whimpering a little” (608), “crawling on all fours, like an erring dog called to heel” (672). Precise as his canine qualities are, Gollum is much more emblematically than dog. Tolkien densifies the cur emblem, associating it through the hobbit’s chameleonic moods with a herd of supporting animal images; Gollum appears imagistically as snake (710), as maggot (53), as mouse (600), as “some large prowling thing of insectkind” (598). He can be seen as “a squirrel, or a kingfisher” (669), “wriggling like an eel, biting and scratching like a cat” (673), “slier than a fox, and as slippery as a fish” (375), “like a spider . . . or perhaps more like a starved frog” (721). That deliberately heterogeneous assortment is not the imagistic shotgun blast it seems. Each of the images, while focusing a different facet, emphasizes Gollum’s essential verminousness. And the dissonances among the images are themselves orchestrated to produce revealing reverberations. Both



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the hunted-hunter lifestyle and the self-destroying internal conflicts of Gollum’s schizophrenic selves are stressed in the contradictory representations of kingfisher and fish, fox and hare, cat and mouse. Thus a Tolkien emblem, for all its engaging breadth of applicability, is more than a Rorschach blot, more than open invitation to the reader to bring purely personal expectations to bear on nebulous image. Ultimately, emblem is the culmination of “Tolkien’s ability to produce aesthetic effects simultaneously on multiple levels.”42 The very expansiveness of the imagery focuses precise dimensions of the presented reality so interactively that “the connotations and linguistic objective correlatives tend to outweigh the actual description.”43 That inclusive precision permits Tolkien’s heterogeneous images to zero in precisely on actual experience: the “shudder” felt by us through Frodo is “a strange cold thrill; and yet it was not fear or terror that he felt: rather it was like the sudden bite of a keen air, or the slap of a cold rain that wakes an uneasy sleeper” (483). Shadowfax through a sequence of increasingly elusive images becomes increasingly visible: “a flash of silver in the sunset, a wind over the grass, a shadow that fled and passed from sight” (516; cf. 849–50). The reiterative imagery of emblem enriches by interlocking levels of reality; the elven-lady, her ring of power, and her chosen star reflect their mutual glory into images of images of images: “Earendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its rays glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come down to rest upon her hand” (355). The outreaching concentric circles of that image are further compounded by allusion: in the Old English Christ, Earendel is a very bright star that represents God.44 The barrage of images brought to bear on a given entity is the more penetrating for Tolkien’s activation of the full implicational possibilities of each image involved. Snakiness is a minor aspect of the animal emblem that builds up about Gollum. Yet the snake image homes in on him degrees of serpentine potential ranging from the sliminess of worms and leeches to the magniloquent evil of such reptilian monsters as dragons. That associational density is produced by wide application; the hissing Gollum is but one of a vast assortment of Middle-earth creatures whose characteristics keep company with serpents. The snake image provides a prism for a spectrum of specific Middle-earth evils expanding from the impotent hatred of that “snake without fangs” Saruman (958) through “black serpent”





Haradrim cruelty (821) and ringwraith hissings (74) to the preeminent evil of the balrog, “stronger than a strangling snake” (490). Moreover, the image moves beyond degrees of badness to convey snake attributes at times without moral overtones (777, 591), even intimating such positive valences as the shrewdness of that “young serpent” Éomer (566). This associational growth of an image through narrative movement tends to bring its total possibilities to bear upon any given application. The serpentine allusions in the following passage, for example, in precisely presenting Wormtongue’s cobra motions, expose also his wormish abasement, his rattlesnake venomousness, his blowsnake bluff, his leechlike symbiotic treachery, plus a malice of dragonish proportions: “Slowly Wormtongue rose. He looked at them with half-closed eyes. Last of all he scanned Théoden’s face and opened his mouth as if to speak. Then suddenly he drew himself up. His hands worked. His eyes glittered. Such malice was in them that men stepped back from him. He bared his teeth; and then with a hissing breath he spat before the king’s feet, and darting to one side, he fled down the stair” (509). In its larger context, Wormtongue slithers into this passage with a stealth that undersells his considerable snakiness as forcefully as a shouted whisper. Tolkien’s characteristic understatement is contextually amplified by intensely mobile interactions of the metaphors composing Middle-earth emblems; the reverberations create a magnetic field of imagery that attracts images into coherence as it secures a symbolic situation in which imagistic impact is directly proportional to subtlety. In this context, the most artificial of Tolkien’s tropes can approach reality, his most glaring similes simulate life. When we hear with fleeing hobbits “a rushing noise as if a wind were rising and pouring through the branches of the pines” (207), the competing implications presented by the simile—the rushing noise as pursuing ringwraiths, as blood pounding in our ears for fear, as the wind— complicate the narrative situation through their multilevel realism into densely packed approximation to life. There is easy and widespread semantic and imaginative intercourse between Tolkien’s tropes and his world—and ours. His characters are “old images brought to life” (813). His images become reality: “ ‘Were the breath of the West Wind to take a body visible, even so would it appear,’ said Éomer, as the great horse ran up” (513). His narrative realities merge into image: the Forest of Fangorn moves “as if the twilight under endless trees were flowing downward from the hills” (515).



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In the West the dying sun had set all the fume on fire, and now Mindolluin stood black against a burning smolder flecked with embers. “So ends a fair day in wrath!” he said, forgetful of the lad at his side. “So it will, if I have not returned before the sundown-bells,” said Bergil. (754)

Middle-earth imagery accumulates as inevitably toward reality as the series of Arkenstone similes moves into metaphor: “It was like a globe with a thousand facets; it shone like silver in the firelight, like water in the sun, like snow under the stars, the rain upon the Moon!” (H213). At its best Tolkien simile is reality. A long-drawn wail comes down the wind “like the cry of some evil and lonely creature,” precisely because it is the cry of some evil and lonely creature (88). When the hobbits stop short, “as if they had been struck stiff” (117), they had. Quickbeam bows “like a tree bending in the wind” (958) because that is exactly what he is. Prose that undertakes to be simultaneously realistic and emblematic as well as ironic, aurally sensitive, allusive, and narratively vital puts intense pressures on itself. Tolkien’s prose profits from that pressure, consistently rising to the narrative occasion. It is well formed for the purpose. It is clear prose. Simple sentences predominate. Syntax is straightforward, uncluttered by obtrusive inversion or cloying dependent construction: independent clauses outnumber dependent clauses five to one. It is active prose. Its quick-paced sentences average less than fifteen words in length, in passages of rapid action under ten. If verbs are the workhorses of language, Tolkien’s prose generates maximum horsepower: fully twenty percent of the words are verbs, and an additional five percent are verbals; only seven words in a hundred are nonverbal modifiers.45 Mobility and clarity make for suppleness. Tolkien’s prose is remarkably responsive to narrative need: when “suddenly the cliff fell away. The shores sank. The trees ended,” the prose ends and sinks and falls away with them (H174). “The Lonely Mountain!” is as isolated by syntactic scission as by geographic separation (H175). The river running “on and on and on for ever” runs on in the prose as well (H176). In addition to the extent to which onomatopoeia dramatizes the narrative, the prose enlists the further aural reinforcement of rhyme, as when white and bright graphically reflash the light of “light leapt from his hand, bright and white in the morning” (H252). Stress patterns signify: the terminal



And always the images, the most imaginatively far-fetched of them, are brought as solidly back to earth as this sunset apocalypse:


impact of accent on all three concluding syllables underscores the emphatic finality of “a stone hurtling from above smote heavily on his helm, and he fell with a crash and knew no more” (H262). Phrase length communicates: “tree-trunks of innumerable sizes and shapes: straight or bent, twisted, leaning, squat or slender, smooth or gnarled and branched” (109) mirror their variety in heterogeneity of phrase. Rhythms enact action: confusion giving way to velocity is portrayed by syntactic pattern in “they kept no order, thrusting, jostling, and cursing; yet their speed was very great” (439). Tolkien’s prose is eminently flexible. The prose responds to narrative mood with a rhythmic and structural acuteness that attains at times to poetry. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings include almost eighty verses deftly interspersed throughout the narrative, rhymed explication for rhythmic relief. Those occasional poems rank high among the least-liked of Tolkien’s stylistic moves— this despite his endearing us to his verse by his own self-effacing criticism of it. He puts his poetry with significant frequency in the mouth of colloquial Sam, and then has Sam, whose verbal standards are not all that high, bad-mouth it: “I’m not much good at poetry— not at making it: a bit of a comic rhyme, perhaps, now and again, you know, but not really poetry” (664). “It ain’t what I call proper poetry, if you understand me: just a bit of nonsense” (201). However readers feel about Tolkien’s obvious poetry, his best poems, his densest and most moving passages, are an integral part of the narrative itself. “Tolkien’s prose runs to the normal narrative ratio of one stress every two to four syllables. In passages of intense action and feeling the ratio gets pretty close to fifty percent, like poetry.”46 And the poetry can be emphatic, as with Tom Bombadil, who “speaks metrically. His name is a drumbeat and his meter is made up of free, galloping dactyls and trochees, with tremendous forward impetus.”47 That urgent metrical rhythm intensifies at times to formal poetry: “when his speech is printed as verse Tom is singing.”48 Treebeard’s lament for the lost entwives is submerged in prose. Yet in its rhythmic sensitivity, its conceptual integrity, and the lyric intensity of its elegiac sensuousness, it is obviously poetic, as structuring the passage as a poem shows: When the world was young, and the woods were wide and wild, The Ents and the Entwives—and there were Entmaidens then, They walked together and they housed together. But our hearts did not go on growing in the same way: The Ents gave their love to things in the world, And the Entwives gave their thought to other things.



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And they drank of the mountain-streams And ate only such fruit as fell in their paths. And they learned of the Elves and spoke with the Trees. But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees, And to the meads in the sunshine beyond the feet of forests, And they saw the sloe in the thicket, And the wild apple and the cherry blossoming in spring, And the green herbs in the waterlands in summer, And the seeding grasses in the autumn fields. (464–65)

The elegiac tensions felt in the poem resonate from an organic structure embodying its theme of fundamental conflicts. The passage is essentially parallelistic, like biblical psalms, grouping associative and antithetical concepts in paired phrases and clauses—the world and the woods, love and thought, the kind of syntactic-conceptual integration epitomized in “they walked together and they housed together.” This inset poem simultaneously organizes competing triadic groupings—the “wide and wild” woods is complicated by the “young” of the world in the first line; entmaidens disturb the balanced existence of ents and entwives. That basic tension is amplified in the larger structure: consistently throughout the poem pairing clauses accumulate into three-line relationships within the two-part sections of three stanzas in an organization as magnetically polarized as the lifestyles of ents and entwives. Those ambivalently attracted ents and entwives, united until the closing lines of the first stanza, are in the final stanzas separated structurally, imagistically, and stylistically. The horticultural imagery and repetitive seasonal concerns displayed in the strictly parallel pattern of the poem’s third section portray the placidity with which “the Entwives desired order.” The ents’ passion for change contrasts with that domesticated orderliness in the relative freedom of form of such ent passages as the expansive and interjectional opening line and the crescendo of uneven line lengths in the second-stanza paean to unpredictable wild woods. That complex pattern is supported by the syntactic cadences of the passage, the ent stanza having more and more erratic stressed syllables than the sedate entwifely sentence rhythms. Thus the mutual attractiveness of polarized attitudes, aching in isolation toward



For the Ents loved the great trees, And the wild woods, And the slopes of the high hills;


togetherness, yet moving in intimacy in the direction of separation, congealing from chaos into artistic integrity and moving centrifugally from form toward freedom, is aptly paradigmed in a syntactic and imagistic structure that unifies by means of its contradictions. There are throughout Tolkien’s tales several such undelineated poems, typically at points of structural and thematic climax. These poetic passages are the more compelling for being written in continuous prose form within the text, without poetic lineation or artificial capitalization. The prose appearance makes the poetry in context difficult to distinguish from surrounding prose. In its natural habitat, as in the following passage, the impression of poetry approaches the heart through the pulse rather than the optic nerve: The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. “Old fool!” he said. “Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!” And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade. Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last. (811)

Impressive as its poetic capability can be, the potency of Tolkien’s prose is more apparent in its linguistic capacity. The Lord of the Rings, “primarily linguistic in inspiration” (xv), not only “displays a wide range of personal and ethnic styles”49 but is most obviously a mélange of languages. Tolkien creates a half-dozen new tongues—mannish Westron, elvish Quenya and Sindarin, the Black Speech, “the strange tongue” of the dwarves, and Entish (1101–06), producing for them alphabets, phonetic systems, formational patterns, thoroughly developed etymologies, and sufficiently sizable vocabularies to make them practical communicative systems.50 And the flexibility of Tolkien’s prose is more evident in the depth than in the breadth of his language range. The major language systems propagate whole families of dialects. Westron is the “Common Speech” of Middle-earth; almost all creatures speak it at least as a second language. And all speak it differently. Entire dialects are



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definitively distinguished. Elvish Westron, with its Elizabethan syntax and diction, its intricate lyrics, melodic names, and liquid prose, is distinctive to the point of eccentricity—“beautiful, but it sounded eerie and strange” (H136). The dwarvish dialect is formal and formulaic, “a fair jaw-cracker” (278) starched with ceremonial phrase and tending to pompous oratory, compulsive redundancy, and, in poetry, the stilted dignity of trochees. Orcs and other slaves of Sauron speak “without love of words or things,” their conversation pockmarked by expletives, “dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong” (1108). The entish version of Westron is, like ent-speech itself, rhythmic to the point of persistent anapests, “a lovely language” (454) sounding very like bassoon music—“slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity” (1104). Man-talk, which tends in general toward prolixity (512), varies as wildly as men. The most-spoken mannish Westron in the trilogy, the dialect of the Rohirrim, partakes precisely of Anglo-Saxon syntactic patterns as well as much Old English diction; it is stirring, alliteratively stately, stern, “laden with the sadness of mortal men” (497). The Middle-earth linguistic landscape teems with minor dialects, each with its distinctive characteristics—Trollian and its Cockney coarseness, the coldly consonantal “scraping” of Barrow-wightish (138), brusque Beornian, the stately inversions of Eagle-speak, archaic Dragontalk, “quick and difficult” Thrushic (H234). The dialects range in expressive approach and capacity from the empty emphasis of Goblinese with its hollow spondees in poetry and shouted nothings in prose, “yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls, and curses; shrieking and shriking” (H59), to the profoundly quiet “speech of plant and stone” (328). Some of the more spectacular idioms are wielded by a single speaker. That word-twister, Saruman, is a chameleon of dialects, capable of shifting stylistic gears a half-dozen times in as many paragraphs (564–66). Goldberry the river-daughter is a verbal rivulet of delicious liquids (119–27). Perhaps the most intriguing dialect of all is chanted by Tom Bombadil, his irrepressible good humor breaking unfailingly forth in rollicking meter and outrageous rhyme (117–44). Language expansiveness as it expresses itself in multiple dialects is particularly apparent among the most frequent Middle-earth speakers, the hobbits. However much readers may be disposed to





homogenize their varying accents, hobbits do “not always use the same style” (1107). The flexibility of their language is apparent in its responsiveness to linguistic environment; they are “quick to note and adopt” geographic and social dialects (1107). As their vocational functions vary with the narrative, for example, hobbits spout journalistic jargon one moment (29) and barroom talk the next (43), ranging freely among styles as varied as bathhouse vulgarity (99) and courtly speech (929), poetry51 and rural coarseness (91), business language (H21) and detective cant (H32), ceremonial flatteries like “O Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities” (H204), and the argot of melodramatic villainy—“Foiled again. . . . Fiddlesticks!” (38). Within the same local Shire version of the hobbit dialect of the Westron language, hobbits manage such distinct idiolects as the lucid manner of a Frodo, the colloquial heartiness of Sam, and the involuted gurglings of Gollum. It’s not just that “Frodo speaks differently from Sam.”52 Hobbitish accommodates remarkable variety. Its flexibility reflects the searching quality of the hobbit temperament, the sort of straightforward ambivalence manifest in Frodo: “ ‘Have you decided what to do?’ ‘No!’ answered Frodo. . . . ‘Or perhaps, yes’ ” (60). Frodo’s speech approaches the chameleonic, “shows the most skill in varying . . . according to the company.”53 That hobbitish ambivalence of style results in quick reversals of speech, particularly in this kind of evanescent assumption of formality: “ ‘O Thorin Thráin’s son Oakenshield, may your beard grow even longer,’ he said crossly, ‘say so at once and have done!’ ”54 But more usually the style maintains surface consistency, its radical fluctuations submerged deep within still conversational waters; hearing hobbits talk “lightly in hobbitfashion . . . no listener would have guessed from their words that they had suffered cruelly” (448). Hobbit language is as supple, as pertly profound, as substantively light-footed as hobbits are. In Middle-earth, the style is the creature. Language in its every aspect reveals character. “Cold water on the neck’s like rain on a wilted lettuce” is the gardener in Sam growing metaphor (661). In “do not be hasty, that is my motto,” the redundancy of the second clause bespeaks entish origin as surely as the motto itself (452). The overexaggeration of “he is a liar, O truly tremendous One!” marks it as goblin talk (H59). Gollum’s habitual omission of the first person pronoun reflects the erosion of his ego (629). Faramir the steward’s discussions are hallmarked by accountant diction: “We may make the Enemy pay ten times our loss at the passage and yet rue the exchange. For he can afford to lose a host better than we to lose a company” (798).



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Middle-earth style is so invariably involved with personality it becomes reliable as aesthetic fingerprint; Isuldur judges certain runic writing to be “a tongue of the Black Land, since it is foul and uncouth” (246). That organic interaction of language and personality in the direction of objective reality creates dramatic effects: “ ‘Give me my sword!’ shouted the King, finding his voice, but forgetting his plural. ‘Give us your crown!’ said Giles” (FG71), reversing with his reversal of the royal plural the royal fortunes and the very identity of the royal person. The linguistic nuances of Tolkien’s tales are refracted through the lens of an unusually complex, insistently ambivalent persona. He is an involved observer. He constantly shifts his omnipotent point of view into the minds of individual characters. He takes his tale with profound seriousness, yet parodies it within itself.55 “This crossreferencing of styles . . . results in an interplay of perspectives as marked as that which, in modern fiction, we dignify as ‘narrative ambiguity.’ ”56 That shifty Tolkien persona is a self-effacing intrusive narrator, persistently explicating and at the same time promoting a low profile by receding as the story proceeds, allowing the tale to attain to a life that transcends its teller. He focuses his perspective by maintaining it invariably “as perceived by the Hobbits (whose point of view I was mainly concerned to preserve)” (1108)—others may provide the reader information, but only hobbits provide experience.57 Then he deliberately fragments that carefully unified vision by presenting it through several different hobbit perspectives. Then he unifies it by complicating it: “The danger that a narrative of such length may lose cohesion amid a profusion of highly localised points of view” is obviated by “a number of key passages in which an approach is made to a more nearly objective perspective.”58 The voice of Tolkien’s fiction is, for all its intrusiveness, an extremely elusive voice, a voice of complex timbre, moving behind many masks. As provocatively as Alfred Hitchcock making cameo appearances in his own movies, Tolkien at one point or another peeps in his own personality with disarming directness through Bilbo, Gandalf, Sméagol, Tom Bombadil, Elrond, Sam, Merry, and Treebeard—most of whom have as a result been nominated by one reader or another as the direct spokesman, the “real voice” of the author.59 The dexterous Tolkien persona manages at the same time to stand in the reader’s shoes, forcing us out of habitual positions by viewing from his bias with such insistency that we are provoked into another point of view. Thus the bogus-historian persona of Farmer Giles of Ham can correct





inaccurate conceptions of history by being so inaccurate himself as to insist “there was more time then, and folk were fewer, so that most men were distinguished” (FG9). The narrative voice of Tolkien, expressing itself through a prism of personae and a spectrum of linguistic styles, is extraordinarily ambiguous. “Aesthetic juxtaposition of the different languages . . . serves as an index of the cultural and even moral differences between their speakers.”60 In that antithetical way, “Tolkien was trying continually to extend the frontiers of style.”61 That style-stretching voice is a voice of almost Keatsian negative capability. Part of its empathetic power grows out of a refusal to become judgmental. Speaking in the voice of Treebeard, Tolkien describes himself as “not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side” (461). But the negative capability of Tolkien’s personae transcends tolerance. Tolkien identifies with his creations. He cannot long escort a character without starting to think like him; taking mental inventory with Sam, he slips into Sam’s thought pattern: “Sam eased the pack on his shoulder, and went over anxiously in his mind all the things that he had stowed in it, wondering if he had forgotten anything: his chief treasure, his cooking gear; and the little box of salt that he always carried and refilled when he could; a good supply of pipe-weed (but not near enough, I’ll warrant).”62 Tolkien identifies at this visceral level not only with his favored hobbits, but with all his creations, the worst as well as the best. In ent territory, the persona meditates in nature-flavored ent terms upon “a rock-wall before them: the side of the hill, or the abrupt end of some long root thrust out by the distant mountains” (451). With shadow-loving orcs, he discovers the evil satisfactions of “resting in the pleasant darkness” (444). Throughout the vast verbal complex of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, untiring attention to such detailed linguistic nuance bespeaks implicit faith in the power of language to engage reality. At its stylistic best, “The Lord of the Rings enacts the nature of language.”63 The insistently ambiguous words of this philologist of fiction accumulate meaning on multiple and reciprocally magnifying levels. Nor are words for Tolkien simply a means to the end of meaning. Language is for this wizard with words the method of subcreation. Language in his narrative prose amounts to much more than décor, more even than a vehicle for communicating the creative potential of things. Language for J. R. R. Tolkien is magical, a force in itself fraught with vital creative potential.



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Just a Bit of Nonsense

There is a broad vein of nonsense in Tolkien’s tales. Middle-earth creatures delight in whimsy. They banter. They pun incessantly. They recite rollicking rhymes composed of “just a bit of nonsense” (201). They joke. Their author jokes, too, so outrageously he is sometimes embarrassed about it—he informs us the title of that magnificent dragon Smaug derives from “the past tense of the primitive Germanic verb smugan, to squeeze through a hole,” playful paronomasia that he promptly puts in its proper stylistic place as “a low philological jest.”1 That relish for the ridiculous can get so out of hand as to propel casual Middle-earth conversation into Alice in Wonderland semantic antics like this tea party-ish interchange between Bilbo and Gandalf: “I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business.” “Where else should I be?” said the wizard. . . . For your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Bellodonna, I will give you what you asked for.” “I beg your pardon, I haven’t asked for anything!” “Yes, you have! Twice now. My pardon. I give it to you.” (H5–6)

That sort of verbal outlandishness in Tolkien’s tales is mere everyday absurdity. The nadir of Middle-earth nonsense lies closer to Victorian non-sense of the Edward Lear stamp, statements that literally and deliberately make no sense, nearer the kind of tomfoolery of Tom Bombadil in such jocosely enigmatic comments as “Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! / Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! / Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!” (116). Yet at its most enthusiastically absurd, there is discernible rationale to this silliness. Middle-earth nonsense, an open invitation to readers to discover sense, like every other aspect of Tolkien’s fiction involves readers in the process of making meaning. Like the elvish singing that is one of its major expressions, absurdity in Tolkien’s



CH A P T ER


tales is “pretty fair nonsense” (H44): however preposterous, it can be conceptually contributive. Nonsense in The Lord of the Rings reveals significance. Meaning in Middle-earth can be rendered even from ridiculousness. Tolkien directly advertises that potential value of nonsense for the reader. He points out its capacity for conceptual substance by declaring nonsensical such obvious good sense as Sam’s poem upon the elven lady: “Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in the springtime” (664). Sam’s calling that lyrically acute passage “a lot o’ nonsense, and all wide of my mark” increases considerably the reader’s respect for the off-the-wall astuteness of Middle-earth nonsense. Through this invitational process, the Gandalf of fantasy yet again sublets his subcreation to his readers, stimulating us not simply to make the most of meaning where it is scarce, but to discover it where it does not seem to be, to pursue it in the unlikeliest places. There is a kind of alchemy about Tolkien’s participatory prose. His fiction is a sort of sorcerer’s stone, the reader’s imagination the catalyst that propagates significance where none was. Middle-earth mental adventurers are encouraged to find golden insight in the lead of mundane circumstance, even to sift valuable significance out of thin air. Tolkien’s fiction is magical in its nurturance of meaning, and it is the hands-on quality of the sleight of hand, the readerly participation in the process, that works the magic. Something about being allowed to pull the rabbit out of the hat ourselves invests us in the creation. That distillation of meaning from the effervescence of nonsense is among Tolkien’s most compelling rhetorical moves, and more common than has been noticed. Riddles appear so frequently in Middle-earth in part because they paradigm the process of meaningful nonsense, pointing through their absurdities to underlying significance. Negative exclusions accumulating to positive meaning dramatize that intimate interaction of nonsense with sense in Gollum’s riddle on darkness: It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It lies behind stars and under hills And empty holes it fills It comes first and follows after Ends life, kills laughter. (H69–70)



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The rational potential of nonsense is emphasized by Tolkien’s technique of making the most childish riddles contribute the most considerable concepts. He discloses amidst the infantile immaturities of a riddle like “Grey as a mouse, / Big as a house, / Nose like a snake, / I make the earth shake” penetrating insight into pragmatic epistemology: “If ever you’d met me / You wouldn’t forget me. / If you never do, / You won’t think I’m true” (632). The rich suggestiveness of riddles makes them, like the rest of Middle-earth nonsense, “nonsense maybe, and maybe not” (632). The message within the messages of riddles, the riddling bottom line, is that anything may mean. If we look deeply enough in Middle-earth, meaning inheres everywhere—even in nonsensical interjections, even when the interjections are not actually interjected: “Out jumped the goblins, big goblins, great ugly-looking goblins, before you could say rocks and blocks.” The meaning-making impulse to utter in such serious straits such utter gibberish as “rocks and blocks,” inane as it at first glance seems, subliminally results with organic appropriateness from the immediate impression of goblins emerging from surrounding stone walls. Similarly, when “they were all grabbed and carried through the crack, before you could say tinder and flint,” the nonsensical “tinder and flint” we are unable to speak bespeaks the vulnerable softness of hobbits in flinty goblin hands, suggests a longed-for source of light to hobbit eyes plunged into “deep, deep, dark,” and anticipates the hair-triggered explosiveness of that “splintered second” of narrative with its immediately ensuing “terrific flash like lightning” and “smell like gunpowder” from Gandalf’s ballistic magic (H55). Insofar as Tolkien’s literary quests provide a rhetorical training course in how to realize meaning from narrative, that process expresses itself most dramatically in the discovery of significance in nonsense. This engaging prose provides training wheels for the imagination. Our readerly experience of Middle-earth shows us that anything can come to mean, because so many unlikely things do. Such an imprecation as “dawn take you all, and be stone to you,” the climax of a long sequence of conversational absurdities, seems utterly nonsensical until the trolls to whom it is addressed actually at dawn turn into stone (H38). Meaning may be mined from slighter stuff than the narrative texture in Tolkien’s tales. Meaning can inhere in a “bit of nonsense” (201) as trivial as Sam’s childish troll rhyme: Troll sat alone on his seat of stone, And munched and mumbled a bare old bone; For many a year he had gnawed it near,



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The verse attains meaning by means of its absurdities. That ostensibly innocuous first line contains an implicit pun on which the entire poem pivots; the eighth stanza reveals the troll to be part rock, his seat as stony as it can get. And it is the most absurd part of the poem, its Edward Learish internal chorus, that most emphatically attains to meaning. “Come by. / Done by! Gum by!,” ostentatiously redundant and seemingly thrown in for sheer aural exuberance, makes sufficient sense to expand meaning in several definite directions: “come by”— get near and capture; “done by”—cooked and finished; “gum by”— chewed and mouthed and mumbled upon, by gum (201–02). The absurd choruses of this nonsense poem chant their gibberish into loci of implication. Tolkien’s fiction urges our very inclinations toward discovery of sense in nonsense. In one scene a hobbit, surrounded by hungry eagles who have just delivered him from hungrier wolves and feeling understandably “like a piece of bacon,” dramatizes the grateful fearfulness of his ambivalent attitude in a double-barreled Freudian slip of the tongue: “Eagles aren’t forks! O no! Not a bit like storks—forks, I mean” (H101). By such slight, apparently incidental means, we are made familiar with the potential of nonsense for illuminating significant states of mind. We experience in this engaging fiction multiple ways beyond that kind of reflection of mood that our interpretations of nonsense might ramify meaning, some ingenious. There is, for instance, the reversal of reversal that, instead of cancelling out meaning, augments it: “You’re no Baggins—you—you’re a Brandybuck!” “Did you hear that, Merry? That was an insult, if you like,” said Frodo as he shut the door on her. “It was a compliment,” said Merry Brandybuck, “and so, of course, not true.” (38)

That kind of invitation to subcreate meaning pushes us to interpretation of nonsense by such inventively provocative ploys as intolerable equivocation: “Please don’t cook me, kind sirs! I am a good cook myself, and cook better than I cook, if you see what I mean. I’ll cook beautifully for you, a perfectly beautiful breakfast for you, if only you won’t have me for supper” (H35). Middle-earth nonsense provokes us by its absurdity into meaning as irresistibly as it provokes the



For meat was hard to come by. Done by! Gum by! In a cave in the hills be dwelt alone, And meat was hard to come by. (201)

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spiders called nonsensical names by Bilbo—“no spider has ever liked being called Attercop (edderkopp: Danish “spider”), and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody” (H148). Tolkien’s meaningful nonsense is the culmination of the movement of a fiction that impels us by means of its ambiguities into personal realization of its possibilities. The process by which sense appears “suddenly out of a long string of nonsense-words (or so they seemed)” (116) is essentially one of accretion, of disparate trivialities accumulating to something significant. Goblins shouting in rhythm as they harass prisoners, for example, chant a pattern of significance from confusion. The precise logical flow of “Clap! Snap! the black crack! / Grib, grab! Pinch, nab!” is unfathomable, if it exists. The chant is an aggregation of loose associations about the capture of Bilbo’s party through an expandable “black crack” in the cave wall; both goblins and their trapdoor are in the poem hectically clapping and snapping and pinching and nabbing. Yet “the general meaning of the song” is “only too plain” (H56); the chaotic parts of the passage accumulate to definite, even tactile suggestion of the painful pinchings attendant upon goblin capture. Tolkien’s entire narrative moves in the manner of this passage, amassing materials for meditation that make it possible for the significance of any aspect of any passage to be informed by the imagination of the reader interacting with the total texture of the tale. Tolkien’s nonsense tends so inexorably toward meaning that it tows in its expansive wake perfectly sensible things. The redundancy of such a statement as “Very peculiar. Always a bit more to discover, and no knowing what you’ll find round a corner” (219) is the last place one would look normally for implicit profundity. But in the atmosphere of the unexpected that pervades Middle-earth, we look. The sensibly nonsensical context highlights the inherent paradox of that climactic “round a corner” cliché until the reader himself begins imaginatively rounding square corners. In this “very peculiar” corner of a peculiarly veridical imaginative universe, innocuous redundancy becomes a paradoxical paradigm of the infinite possibility of fiction in which there is “always a bit more to discover, and no knowing what you’ll find round a corner.” Disclosure of the meaning in ostensible nonsense extends deeply into Tolkien’s writing, notably into the diction. One of this subcreator’s favorite techniques of increasing language collateral is to coin new words; his tales are rich in lexical creations. Despite the apparent arbitrariness of such fabrications, those neologisms are microcosmic revelations of the ways nonsense makes sense; they come to mean with surprising appropriateness.





At the simplest level of meaning implementation, neologisms reflect the newness of their referents. The novelty of Middle-earth fauna, for example, is dramatized by such innovative plant names as elanor, athelas, simbelmynë, nimloth, mallos, alfirin, and galenas. But there is an organicism in the creativity of these terms that transcends mere mimetics of newness; the words relate their referents to more solid realities. The formal term for galenas is nicotania, and narrative events reveal that unheard-of weed to be similar to the tobacco we know (8). Elanor, a star-shaped flower, bears in its elvish etymology nominative resemblance to our aster (1003). We have seen already how such newly applied terms as ent, such drastically reshaped words as orc, even such whole-cloth creations as hobbit signify their referents with an etymological and connotative precision that is anything but arbitrary. Like Tolkien’s total creation, the neologisms of Middleearth grow out of the familiar. Because they are both new and familiarly related to reality as we conceive it, Tolkien’s neologisms naturally expand our perception of the world’s possibilities. The term Middle-earth itself seems value-added, more to it, our old commonplace home plus a new nominal dimension (simple as middle) whose natural etymology makes us realize possibilities we hadn’t noticed were there in the most familiar features of our lives. By altering their names, Tolkien can make anything—even numbers, among our stablest symbols—denominate different ideas in his sphere: 111 is 111 in Middle-earth as well as our earth, but eleventy-first birthday is a much more common occasion there, and tweens (Middle-earth twenties) expressive of a less frenetic cultural vision than that intimated in our less mature teens.2 Nor are longevity and maturity the only areas in which our world is linguistically transcended; dynamism surpassing earth’s is evident in the essential idiom of Middle-earth: we say good morning here; we are good-morninged there (H5). We are also bewuthered and bebothered, feelings similar to but beyond what we have felt before (H9, H11). The innovative diction moves in the direction of inexpressible intensity; tireder feels more tired than more tired (H65); things in Tolkien’s fiction are miserabler and beautifuller than things elsewhere (H63, 1003). The inflections of Middle-earth bespeak a dimension beyond our declensions, not altering so much as expanding the expressive range of language, extending its possibilities always along lines that seem comprehensible because they tend in familiar directions. The expansive diction of the tales makes us feel the linguistic limitations imposed upon our vernacular, the way our options for expression and even awareness shrunk because “men changed the



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language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.” Tolkien’s familiar neologisms provide the imaginative possibility of restoring to the reader words adequate “to express his staggerment” (H198). The flip side of Tolkien’s neologistic coin is archaism. Only an occasional lo or alas or verily or ere, a few thees and thous, and a rare hither, thither, and whither are scattered throughout the tales. But the total antiquity amounts to more than the sum of its smattering of archaic words. The diction manages to seem in its essence nostalgic, maybe even archaic. There are words in Tolkien’s fiction that would stagger an Anglo-Saxon; láthspell, éored, dwimmerlaik, ell, weregild, eyot, and mearas are rescued from total obscurity in the eyes of most readers only by the most pellucid of contexts.3 The archaic impression of Tolkien’s diction arises more directly, however, from less archaic terms, or rather more familiar ones, from the sooths, redes, deems, wights, and moots.4 It is that kind of familiar archaism that exudes the atmosphere in which rare words like tilth or specialized words like coomb or words with ancient historic associations like vambrace seem by association archaic. The aura of antiquity can evoke archaic overtones from such manifestly modern terms as darkling, lade, and westering.5 That interrelating of archaic and current diction is thorough. I defy the most recent cover-to-cover reader of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell from memory which of nuncheon and daymeal is the obsolete word, which Tolkien’s neologism.6 The antiquating tendency in Tolkien’s diction is not limited to an indiscriminate intermingling of more and less archaic words; it is more a matter of definite linguistic tendencies. Familiar words assume archaic senses: mark is a section of land (496), dint reverts to its earlier verb function (59), baleful means distressed (705). Ancient terms are modernized, as in sister-son and twice twelve (511, 417). Words with which we are conversant are presented in archaic form: nigh is anigh (716), lawn is termed launds (681), meadow becomes meads (371). It is not only words like the twice-dead dolven, obsolete form of the archaic delved, that open up possibilities of the past among Middle-earth terms; such ancient forms of familiar verbs as woken and writhen and misgives introduce an archaic dimension into modern inflectional patterns.7 The past-urizing drift of Tolkien’s diction is complicated by the modernizing manner of its presentation in the narrative. Words archaic in our world are current in Middle-earth. Archaic terms are not glossed, not apologized for; they are simply included as linguistic





facts of life. Most archaisms occur in the language of men; when men speak, the diction becomes so archaic as to age syntax into Old English mannerisms—predominant coordination, frequent parallelism, alliteration, inversions like “a hard life and a long” (whose rarity stresses their emphatic rhetorical purpose), and cultivation of the eccentric Anglo-Saxon habit of phrase formula.8 But this emphatically archaic speech is not presented within the narrative as obsolete; it is in Tolkien’s prose a modern dialect. “He cherishes words that have fallen out of use, and he brings stale figures of speech to life.” 9 Archaic words are called out of retirement by the context of the tales, acquiring fresh conceptual impetus in counterpoint to the neologistic assumption of traditional meanings. In this philologically creative world, linguistic as well as historic past becomes immediately present. Middle-earth is a world of living words. Its linguistic vitality realizes semantic potential most dramatically through the way its words come alive. By involving readers in the actual procedure of word making, Tolkien’s prose renews old word-creating processes. Churning out fresh verbal generations by antique means makes modern terms (terms earlier originated from those processes) themselves smack of archaism. Unmade and undead unmodernize unsay and unmanned; belike by association antiques betide.10 Words lengthen, inversely revealing their historic shortening: forever in Middle-earth is for ever, as it was in the days before the white-hot pace of modernity welded its parts together (235); willy-nilly appears as I will or I nill (1037). The very presence of such uncompounding calls attention to the ways meaning comes to mean, highlighting the generative and historic implications of every compounded term in the tales. One of the most engaging ways Tolkien demonstrates the expansive possibilities of words is by showing words in the process of becoming what they are. Words in this masterful style are not static, as they appear in dictionaries; words are alive, as they function in life. A compelling impression of freshness permeates this prose and intimates regenerative movement in every direction—even with speech pattern as moribund as cliché. Cliché is commonplace in Tolkien’s fiction, the texture of his tales thoroughly interwoven with deliberately trite expressions. Yet the prose is possessed of a verve that survives those frequent hackneyed phrases so well as to seem somehow to rise out of them. We have the feeling in the annals of Middleearth that we are seeing clichés in the vigor of their youth, before habitual usage wore them weak. Tolkien infuses fresh insight into hackneyed expectations by reactivating cliché, by a contextual



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catalysis that causes worn idioms to call up original connotations with the kind of enthusiasm that led originally to their overwear. The latent power of cliché is mobilized in Tolkien’s prose primarily through a process of literalization in which Middle-earth asserts itself as a more immediate world than ours. “A leap in the dark” has become in our vernacular metaphoric and nebulous; Bilbo’s “leap in the dark” in The Hobbit is, on the other hand, precisely “seven feet forward and three in the air” (H80). We might with only slight concern and in the vaguest of circumstances “let people down”; Dori the dwarf is mortally anxious not to “let Bilbo down” because the hobbit dangles above a pack of ravening wolves (H93). “Putting your foot in it” in Middleearth, you find your foot in a tray full of beer mugs (157). “Quieter than a mouse” is not semantic intensification but fact (H149); a “stab in the dark” is an actual knife thrust (897); “nosing about” is done with the nostrils (H66). Middle-earth is a literalizing world, a world where there is “no longer any chance of their catching old Chrysophylax napping” because he is now awake (FG57), a world where “Smeagol’ll get into real true hot water, when this water boils” (640). Characters in this actualizing atmosphere mean what they say, literally, whether they want to or not. Tolkien encourages readers toward a cliché-unlocking disposition by showing us Middle-earthers in the process of dramatically activating clichés. “We’ll hear no more of that,” says one, and the narrative echoes, “Nor did he” (H198). “ ‘We look to you!’ they said,” and sure enough “they remained standing round and looking” (FG31). Like things in The Tempest, things in Middle-earth tend to be taken at full face value, sometimes higher. Pippin’s hearers make more meaning of his comment than he intended when he claims to have become “a man of Gondor”: “Oh come!” says a lad, “Then we are all men here” (51–52). That reading of real intent into cliché tends in one direction toward burlesque reduction: “There was no getting round Queen Agatha—at least it was a long walk” (FG75). But it can also make something of the most vapid of polite nothings: “ ‘I suppose you will all stay to supper?’ he said in his politest ‘please don’t stay’ tones. ‘Of course!’ said Thorin. ‘And after!’ ” (H11). That insistent literalism injects significance back into statements of such insignificance as kneejerk interjections: “Hear hear!” provokes “Hear what?” (H25); welcome broadens its active meaning in “welcome and well met” (221). Some clichés are actualized by direct interpretation. “Pitch-dark,” Middle-earth style, is “not what you call pitch-dark, but really pitch” (H130), a “black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the





mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought” (702). “Big toes” are “indeed big, and very broad” (459). “Keeping the wolf from the door” means more explicitly to Farmer Giles “keeping himself as fat and comfortable as his father before him” (FG10). A phrase as generalized as “all and sundry” can get explicated in this particularizing context—“the latter were those who went out again by a back way and came in again by the gate” to pick up an extra door prize at Bilbo’s party (26). The reactivating tendency of such elucidations of cliché comes alive in this thorough revivification of “vanishing into thin air”: “I saw him, Mr. Butterbur,” said a hobbit; “or leastways I didn’t see him, if you take my meaning. He just vanished into thin air, in a manner of speaking.” “There’s some mistake somewhere,” said Butterbur, shaking his head. “There was too much of that Mr. Underhill to go vanishing into thin air; or into thick air, as is more likely in this room.” (158)

In addition to encouraging identification with characters in the process of activating clichés, Tolkien’s fiction stimulates us as readers to refurbish threadbare phrases ourselves. Occasionally a cliché can be reactivated simply by calling our attention to it; the usual confines of “a tight place” are considerably expanded when Bilbo finds himself rather in “what is called a tight place” (H64). Emphasis on the antiquity of outworn idioms may paradoxically affirm their currency; we are reminded that some tritenesses retain practical value by Farmer Giles’s reuse of the old “haven’t you dropped something?” ruse to get the drop on the dragon: “an ancient trick, but it succeeded” (FG42). More usually and more penetratingly, we are provoked by the prose to visualize crisply what has been blurred by use, as when roads rather than people come to “bad ends” (H51), or “the first we heard of it” is freshly realized in “a noise like a hurricane” (H22), or the latent actuality within the platitudinous triteness of drowned grief is made tangible to us by drowning the grief of an actual griever “in cold water” (369). Tolkien conjures word possibilities so convincingly that the slightest shifts in the form of a cliché can expose implications encrusted within layers of habitual usage. Meaning in this milieu of renewal may be illuminated by the simplest of additions, whether they reductively specify, like the arrow that hurts no more “than a fly from the marshes” (H228), or intensify, as in “seize your chance with both hands” (550), or qualify, as with “the spur of a very awkward moment”



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(H148). Even such strictly repetitive additions as “night before the night before last” (H89) can trigger the initial impact latent in the cliché. Mere alteration of word order in a cliché invigorates it in such reversals as “later—or sooner” (97), “sound and safe” (H118). Capitalization revitalizes “off into the Blue” (H5). Outright negation can activate clichés: “in good time, or in bad time” (461); “one ill turn deserves another” (995); “no news is bad news” (FG55). The reactivation may be managed with no internal alteration of the cliché whatsoever. Tolkien sometimes enlivens enervated statements through ambiguity, locating them in contexts that imply additional interpretive possibilities: Bilbo, “stopped dead,” has stopped quickly because he is dead tired and caught dead to rights within bowshot of elves.11 In this freshening atmosphere, Tolkien “restores power to a jaded image by constructing around it a new historical and geographical context,” so that “the very simplicity which made it a cliché becomes again its virtue.”12 Most cliché rejuvenation is simply a matter of Middle-earthing earthly clichés, as when we wonder “what in the Shire is that?” (97) or “where in Middle-earth are we?” (771) or get trapped like “orcs in a hole” rather than rats in a trap (557). Tolkien constantly stresses the freshness of the Middle-earth perspective; “keeping an eye on things” in his creative sphere can require “less than an eye” at one time (546), “two eyes” at another (32). The orc point of view is evident in “where there’s a whip there’s a will” (910), and only in a land driven to distraction by dragons could it be celebrated that “a worm won’t return” (FG47). Activated cliché affirms how intimately Middle-earth is an imaginative complement of ours, how much there is to familiar things seen from a fresh perspective. That symbiotic imaginative relationship is dramatized in the delightful stylistic juxtaposition of the hackneyed “she is too far above you” with a Middle-earthy translation that goes beyond renewing the cliché to vastly expand it: “She is of lineage greater than yours, and she has lived in the world already so long that to her you are but as a yearling shoot beside a young birch of many summers. She is too far above you” (1034). In his clichés, as in most aspects of his prose, Tolkien makes a lot out of a little. “He thought of everything” is almost totally rejuvenated by his reduction to “he thought of most things” (H61). “It gave me quite a fright” becomes actively frightening as “it gave me quite a shudder” (74). The diminished “master of his own horse” is a more imaginable person than the usual “master of his own house” (FG72). “A long bite” is far more penetrating in a discussion about food than





“a long shot” (590). Middle-earth cliché encourages us out of our language ruts by playing upon the familiar from an altered perspective. “A month of Mondays” shows us from a drearier vantage point what is meant by “a month of Sundays” (72). “Bless our soul” reveals through the interpolated royal pronoun real blessing (FG68). Even a cliché incorporating Shakespearian literary development to the point of proverb like “all’s well that ends well” is better as “all’s well as ends better” (999). Ultimately the dead-letter form of cliché becomes in Tolkien’s prose a dynamic medium. It is everywhere incipient. Simple as the rhetorical principle seems, its impact is profound. We realize in Middle-earth the implicit promise of clichés because we watch them coming into being. “As the crow flies,” for example, appears in its early stages—“winging the heavy air in a straight flight a crow, maybe, would have flown but a furlong” (622)—and later in the competitive phase of its evolution—“some fifteen miles as the crow flies, and maybe twenty as the wolf runs” (290). Rolling stones are just beginning not to gather moss (974), people are only dreaming of sleeping like logs (126), “a feather in his cap” is still a physical rather than a metaphoric phenomenon: Shirriffs had “no uniforms (such things being quite unknown), only a feather in their caps” (10). That stylistic sleight of hand accumulates such vitality that in Tolkien’s prose we participate in the living process of language with the same sense of lived-in realism, the same feeling of participatory experience, that we walk the narrative paths of Middle-earth with hobbits. Proverbs long passed out of active usage appear as immediate distillation of experience, viewed from the creative end: “ ‘Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!’ he said to himself, and it became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. ‘You aren’t nearly through this adventure yet,’ he added, and that was pretty true as well” (H209). The prevailing pattern of that disclosure of the potential of cliché is important. Its ramifying tendency, the wide spectrum of its complexity, lures on the reader with promise of ever increasing subtlety. Its historical mobility catches the reader up in an impression of ongoingness that accelerates nearly to inevitability—Tolkien’s incipient realism can feel as tentatively tenacious, as vital almost as life. It is the artistic force of that deepening current of flexible significance, far more than any specific unlocked clichés, that sweeps the reader toward a cliché-activating attitude. Similarly compelling currents can be felt almost anywhere in the style of this fiction, perhaps most notably in the vivifying tendency of Tolkien’s prose.



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The most common—and most compelling—charge against the professor’s style is its lack of concreteness. Critics in this precise post-Pound epoch lament his lack of particularity, worry that generalizing tendencies weaken his realism, think superficial detail may make his fiction feel theoretical rather than actual. The Lord of the Rings is thought to “reject the minutia of everyday life.”13 “The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by no serious problems. What we get here is a simple confrontation—in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama—of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good.”14 Not only does the novel from this perspective fail as realistic fiction, it falls so far in that direction as to fail even on the level of the fantastic, subjecting us as it does to “the excruciating cutenesses of Walt Disney.”15 But there may be more to Tolkien’s prose than has met those critical eyes. It may be Tolkien is as committed to subcreation as he claims, his prose style as invitationally disposed as it appears to be from the perspective of this study. Readers have every right to dislike Tolkien’s invitational approach, to feel he has failed his authorial duty by inviting us to participate in the process, by palming off on us part of his creative work. Readers are of course under no obligation to like an author’s project. But it is an open question whether critics— including friendly, sometimes laudatory critics—have credited or so much as recognized how competently Tolkien’s style may be accomplishing precisely what it aims at. Certainly this crafty author is capable of considerable sensuousness. We see quite lucidly his bedewed cobwebs “like white nets” (964), his “ancient holly-trees whose grey-green trunks seemed to have been built out of the very stone of the hills” (275), his vivid ripples in a cave pool: “plink! a drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea” (534). We feel “the quick heave and surge as the horse left the river and struggled up the stony path” (208). We hear so vividly the footfalls in the caverns of Moria we can hear them when they are not there: “The dull stump of Gimli’s dwarf-boots; the heavy tread of Boromir; the light step of Legolas; the soft, scarce-heard patter of hobbit-feet; and in the rear the slow firm footfalls of Aragorn with his long stride. When they halted for a moment they heard nothing at all, unless it were occasionally a faint trickle and drip of unseen water. Yet Frodo began to hear, or to imagine that he heard, something else: like the faint fall of soft bare feet” (304). I readily concede that, even at his most sensuous, Tolkien is less concrete than he seems. Much of his writing upon close examination





proves surprisingly general, and it is this generalized quality that has led reasonable readers to adjudge Tolkien’s fiction as “not literature.”16 But that judgment overlooks the intriguing possibility that it might be the very generalizing tendency of this prose that generates specific impressions. Tolkien does not always write concretely, but he writes always in the direction of greater particularity, always from the general to the specific. Watch him, for example, making sensuousness emerge gradually from the generality of “a sound,” a “sort of bubbling like the noise of a large pot galloping on the fire, mixed with a rumble as of a gigantic tom-cat purring. This grew to the unmistakable gurgling noise of some vast animal snoring in its sleep” (H197). Similarly, after generalizing an inauspicious “sight,” the gravitational force of Tolkien’s particularizing style lets loose from that generic “sight” an avalanche of vividness: “What from a distance had seemed wide and featureless flats were in fact all broken and tumbled. Indeed the whole surface of the plains of Gorgoroth was pocked with great holes, as if, while it was still a waste of soft mud, it had been smitten with a shower of bolts and huge slingstones. The largest of these holes were rimmed with ridges of broken rock, and broad fissures ran out from them in all directions” (913). His subcreated world comes at us, or we come at it, with the same crescendo of immediacy approached in his series of increasingly tangible cavern steps— “narrow, spaced unevenly, and often treacherous: they were worn and smooth at the edges, and some were broken, and some cracked as foot was set upon them” (693). That tendency toward increasing concreteness manifests itself throughout the fiction. Even general nouns incline to specificity; hills and lakes and mountains have a way in Middle-earth of becoming with British nominative directness “The Hill,” “The Water,” “The Mountain” (H3, H42). That pervasive particularizing process is compounded by the further specification of things already specific. Something as definite as “a most unhappy dwarf” may be minutely amplified: “Wet straw was in his bedraggled beard; he was so sore and stiff, so bruised and buffeted he could hardly stand or stumble through the shallow water to lie groaning on the shore. He had a famished and a savage look like a dog that has been cabined and forgotten in a kennel for a week. It was Thorin, but you could only have told it by his golden chain, and by the colour of his now dirty and tattered skyblue hood with its tarnished silver tassel” (H178). The impulse of the prose toward specification reaches so far as to make nothingness concrete: “He could hear nothing, see nothing,



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and he could feel nothing except the stone of the floor” (H63). That almost gravitational directionality makes the specifying process most compelling when we do not notice it, and we tend to notice it least when we ourselves are most engaged in the subcreating. The scarcity of empty landscapes or meaningless movement or colorless characters in Tolkien’s fiction is less a tribute to the thoroughness of his detail than a testament to how effectively he encourages readers to fill in his frequently sketchy canvasses. “The art of fantasy flourishes on reticence,” Paul Kocher concurs with Tolkien, and he sees the novelist as not just deliberate but adamant about that reticence: “the data are not there, and Tolkien has no intention whatever of supplying them.”17 Tolkien is concretely general. His creative world is sensuously remote and abstractly intimate, a world where “everything is still, and far-away noises seem near and clear: fowls chattering in a yard, someone closing a door of a distant house,”18 a deliberate imaginative vacuum whose very details generalize it toward a reader-imposed impression of specificity. Middle-earth opens up to our perspective the imaginative vividness of faërie. Its particularities are “piercingly bright, and yet remote” (49), transcendent and at the same time immediately imminent, “like a thing seen from a great distance, yet there it was” (Smith 35). Tolkien can cause us to convince ourselves of vividness with no more detail than an occasional wren-sized red tongue: he makes the air of faërie “so lucid that eyes can see the red tongues of birds as they sing on the trees upon the far side of the valley, though that is very wide and the birds are no greater than wrens” (Smith 31). The difference between the generalization some see and the unusually vivid evocation others perceive is the imaginative involvement of the reader. “These half-mythical creatures of Middle-earth are meant to subsist partly in our world, partly in another in which the imagination can make of them what it will.”19 In a perceptual field where “the shadow is the truth” (Smith 52), the impression of vividness depends on provocation of reader reaction that is both personal and precise. Tolkien propels us so subtly on his bandwagon of specification that given “good plain food,” we move with the particularizing circumstances to imagine our own “hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese” (151). Given that degree of concreteness, we are stimulated by this specifying environment to taste particular flavors and textures according to personal preferences in hot soups and ripe cheeses, then to imaginatively experience precise nuances of those flavors. The particularizing tendency of the prose energizes generalization into an open-ended invitation to imaginative participation.





Tolkien’s concreteness is paradoxical in fact as well as formation. Appearances in this fantastic sphere prove as deceptive as they are vivid. We are reminded by the lay of Middle-earth that things are not necessarily what they seem; Tolkien narrative runs the reader into such disenchanting details as “bogs, some of them green pleasant places to look at, with flowers growing bright and tall; but a pony that walked there with a pack on its back would never have come out again” (H43). Things in Tolkien’s fiction can “seem fairer and feel fouler” (168); the brightest of situations may prove “treacherously bright” (84), the worst of wounds result from “sweet words” (933). Appearances in Middle-earth can be as chameleonic as the elven clothing we see there: “It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars” (361). What is spoken amid such liminal circumstances is not always what is communicated. Even such a transparent character as the simple hobbit Bilbo shows himself capable of speaking misleadingly. He says, “ ‘I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth’—by which he meant: ‘What am I going to get out of it?’ ” (H21). “ ‘Dazzlingly marvelous! Perfect! Flawless! Staggering!’ exclaimed Bilbo aloud, but what he thought inside was: ‘Old fool!’ ” (H208). Tolkien with such direct interpretations of illusory communications taps another aspect of that vast reservoir of implicit significance in his created world. There is more to Middle-earth than meets the eye because things there are not always what they seem. Those disguised possibilities are multiplied by paradox. Paradox proliferates in Middle-earth. It is a world of “white shadows” (126), of “ambush . . . itself trapped” (867), of elves “so old and young, and so gay and sad” (85), a world where one might receive as a perfectly serious answer, “yes perhaps” (11), or be trapped in total ambiguity between absolutely contradictory intellectual possibilities: “He heard himself crying out: Never, Never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell” (392). Paradox permeates the fundamental feeling tone of this place of “astonishment and terror, and lasting delight” (646). Sam sees paradox in the very fabric of the narrative movement: “ ‘What a fix!’ said Sam. ‘That’s the one place in all the lands we’ve ever heard of that we don’t want to see any closer; and that’s the one place we’re trying to get to! And that’s just where we can’t get, nohow’ ” (589). That kind of incidental paradox is the natural outgrowth of a



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narrative revolving about a ring capable of possessing its possessor, who “hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself” (54). The possibility of paradox is implicit in Tolkien’s fictive approach. Middle-earth mirrors earth, and thus reverses many of our usual ways of seeing things. We become in Tolkien’s fiction like “those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm” and live “at once in both worlds” (216). Middle-earth’s every insight reflects into our sphere; recognizing “it is a queer land” means automatically realizing “and so is this” (456). The perceptual breadth provided by that reversal is compounded by frequent internal reversals of point of view: “Above them was a dome of pale sky barred with fleeting smoke, but it seemed high and far away, as if seen through great deeps of air heavy with brooding thought. Not even an eagle poised against the sun would have marked the hobbits sitting there, under the weight of doom, silent, not moving, shrouded in their thin grey cloaks” (630). One moment we are hobbits looking up toward eagles; the next moment, with no transition whatsoever, we are eagles—imaginary eagles—looking down upon hobbits. That inverting perspective adds a deeper dimension to such incidental reversals as “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life” (58). It provides a highlighting backdrop for statements like “for a time they were safe” (H93) that assert the opposite of what they say. Its ultimate value may lie in helping us to that Robert Burns gift of seeing ourselves as others see us—as, for example, an elvish observer might: “It is not easy for us to tell the difference between two mortals,” said the Elf. “Nonsense, Lindir,” snorted Bilbo, “If you can’t distinguish between a Man and a Hobbit, your judgement is poorer than I imagined. They’re as different as peas and apples.” “Maybe. To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different,” laughed Lindir. “Or to shepherds. But mortals have not been our study.” (230–31)

That inverting perspective comes close to permitting us to view ourselves from outside ourselves, from the fresh and frank point of view of elves or hobbits or eagles or ents. Tolkien’s attempt to expand limited views expresses itself most extremely in negative affirmations; his most paradoxical means of extending the inclusiveness of our worlds is deliberate exclusion. There is a lot of emphatic nothing in the tales. Bilbo trudges through territory so desolate that not only the path disappears, but “the bushes, and the long grasses between the boulders, the patches of





rabbit-cropped turf, the thyme and the sage and marjoram, and the yellow rockroses all vanish”; only “the remains of a landslide” remain to stress the vacancy (H90). Frodo and Sam encounter near Mordor a desert even more full of nothing, a place of “no living blade or green; an unfriendly waste without even a broken tree or a bold stone to relieve the emptiness” (371; cf. 915). The closer the hobbits get to Mordor, the closer we are to the apotheosis of nothingness: its ringwraith guards are so emphatically empty they appear as “black holes in the deep shade behind them” (190). The very vapors from those Mordor fens drip desolation so disintegrating it dissolves the entire landscape, including the hardiest hobbits, so completely everything fades away before our eyes into nothingness: “They said no more; and it seemed to them as they stood upon the wall that the wind died, and the light failed, and the Sun was bleared, and all sounds in the City or in the lands about were hushed: neither wind, nor voice, nor bird-call, nor rustle of leaf, nor their own breath could be heard; the very beating of their hearts was stilled. Time halted” (941). The insistence of those negations intimates a significance to all this nothing. Recurrence gives “shape to their nothingness” (216); negation incrementally reiterates itself into indirect affirmation. We are made to realize that a dragon is coming, for example, by much protesting to the contrary: “They looked West and there was nothing, and East there was nothing, and in the South there was no sign of the dragon” (H225). Similarly, when “they saw nothing, and heard no sound but the sigh of withered leaves and grass. Not once did they feel the sense of present evil” (195), we anticipate the evil through direct denial of it. And lest we miss their tacit import, the meaning in such nothings is occasionally made explicit: “All was silent. No sign of any enemy had they seen, no cry or call had been heard, no shaft had sped from rock or thicket by the way, yet ever as they went forward they felt the watchfulness of the land increase” (866). Thus things unimagined can be evoked in Middle-earth even by what they are not. Our sense of that original hobbit hole is established not nearly so much by the blankly general assertion that it is comfortable as by denial of the specific discomforts of holes we might have known: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort” (H1). Tolkien economically encourages the creative autonomy of the reader by presenting the “unbeknown” (H66) through negation of the known. His prose literally makes something of nothing. 10.1057/9780230101661 - The Power of Tolkien's Prose, Steve Walker


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At the level of prose style, double negatives like “yet not no hope” present positives (54). Rhetorical negations are capable of assertion, provoking possibilities by explicit insistence that they cannot be. We know Gandalf to be Gandalf because Bilbo exclaims: “Not the wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered? Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons? Not the man that used to make such particularly excellent fireworks?” (H5). That something-out-of-nothing stylistic legerdemain is so powerful it can make a mental lapse serve to summarize the narrative: “He could not think what to do; nor could he think what had happened; or why he had been left behind; or why, if he had been left behind, the goblins had not caught him; or even why his head was so sore” (H63). Tolkien metaphor involves a sort of insubstantial metonymy, an Emperor’s-new-clothes kind of imagery, as when we recognize the faërie Queen precisely because “she wore no crown and had no throne” (Smith 36). Aspects of setting are made conspicuous by their absence, nonexistent trees grown vivid in the weeds that replace them: “No tree grew there, only rough grass and many tall plants: stalky and faded hemlocks and weed-parsley, fire-weed seeding into fluffy ashes, and rampant nettles and thistles” (109–10). The sustenance of significance in such barren ground causes us to anticipate meaning as intently as the character whose response to seeing “no sign of the enemy” is, “I wonder very much what that means” (196). Like Frodo with his memory of tangible things corroded by the ring’s destructive influence, left with “no taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star” (916), we come to an appreciation of things through their emphatic absence. Our imaginative possibilities are expanded by such impossible things as “wealth that could not be guessed” (H198), by such implausible places as the down-and-dirty desolation of Mordor—“I can’t imagine what spring would look like here, if it ever comes; still less a spring-cleaning” (450), by descriptions of events “beyond description,” like goblin clamor—“Several hundred wild cats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it” (H59–60). Thus it happens that some of the most significant things in this sphere of meaningful nothings are the things that aren’t there. Tolkien sets up with his thoroughly evoked and thoroughly paradoxical and thoroughly understated creation a context in which some of the most pointed statements are made by studiously avoiding explicit 10.1057/9780230101661 - The Power of Tolkien's Prose, Steve Walker




statement. The deliberate construction of fictive blank spaces, of creative vacuums, might be the consummate touch of Tolkien’s artistic encouragement of reader subcreation. Omission in his fiction becomes not passive but provocative, a sort of ultimate understatement. Tolkien’s fiction posits, bottom line, the probability of the impossible. Everything about Middle-earth—its nonsense, its contradiction, its downright negation—tends to imaginative expansiveness. Specific expressions of that propensity for stretching the borders of our expectations appear almost everywhere; an incidental paradigm of the process can be provided by the inordinate height of a passing horseman, “a tall man, taller than all the rest” (421). It is not enough in this imaginative sphere that he be the tallest; Tolkien makes him taller still, taller than tallest, by superadding to his super height a colossal “helm as a crest.” That is, as so frequently in Tolkien’s magical style, a simple paradigm of a profound process. Middle-earth urges our sensibilities toward things “far worse than the worst” and “finer than the finest.”20 Tolkien’s invitational prose is a dramatic presentation of things deeper and higher. For centuries, alert readers of English have suspected that the glory of the language, for all its lyrical musicality and grand magniloquence, might lie in litotes: the essential strength of our cultural style might come down to understatement. The recent resurgence of that critical disposition in “less is more” attitudes augurs well for future prospects of Tolkien’s invitational style. Middle-earth in saying little intimates much. This subtle prose, of the Teddy Roosevelt school of communication, speaks softly and carries a big rhetorical impact. Whether or not that prose is best that says least, Tolkien’s prose is clearly at its best saying less, and that may be a telling indicator of its essential quality. J. R. R. Tolkien’s understated creation involves us as readers so crucially in subcreation it may be most compelling conceptually when it is least imposing stylistically. Reading Tolkien through the lens of his invitational style is every bit as engaging and even more proactive than I’ve painted it—less like yielding to gravity, more like making love. What beguiles our sight in this artful medium can translate into personal internal experience. And that imaginative experience can generate feeling so heartfelt it can realize something close to the tactile actuality of bodily experience, a reading experience that in the Middle-earth subcreative process manages to maintain in its most realistic fictive embodiment a transcendent perspective on the reader’s personal life.



166

What You Will See, If You Leave the Mirror Free to Work

The best literature, Robert Frost thought, “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” The more popularly the delight of Tolkien’s fantasy is applauded, the less there seems to be seen in it of wisdom—the scarcer the deeper reading satisfaction of profound insight. But given the subcreative disposition of this fiction, given its emphatically invitational nature, that lack of insight may reside not so much in the text as in the reader. Fantasy, like all fiction, is a kind of escape; but it may be this fantasy affords not so much escape from reality as escape from the limitations of the littlenesses of our realities—if truth is stranger than fiction, it may be this strangest of fictions brings us closest to truth. Certainly, as we’ve seen, Middle-earth is capable of taking us places we could not go without it, surprising us with awareness that some of the happiest aspects of ourselves live in those unexplored places. Tolkien might have liked—might himself have written—an Old English rune that views the world with what may be more insight than the most up-to-date twenty-first-century sophistication: “Not only in the common earth / By water and wood and air, / But in the wide world of magic / You and I both fare.” The Lord of the Rings is unusually realistic fantasy, and that realism, in our all-but-hopeless world, holds out hope. Middle-earth shows us that our world might be different than it is, urges us toward a vision of things better than they are. There might be, this realizing fantasy intimates, a world with congenial hobbit folk and sentient trees. There might even be, if we imagine hard enough, a world without global warming and Middle East terrorism and starving African children. In our world where lint tends to collect in the navel and diapers always need to be changed and cancer kills people for no very good reason and crime too often pays and true love does not



C ON CL U S ION


conquer nearly enough, this participatory fantasy focuses us on larger, and very possibly truer, possibilities. Tolkien’s fantasy pushes our parameters, stretches our envelopes, lures us out of our mental ruts into wider imaginative territory. That is not your usual literary wisdom. Tolkien clarifies the underlying moral of his story with characteristic frankness: “As for ‘message’: I have none really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth.”1 Readers of Tolkien, on the other hand, fall all over themselves to find in his writing political, religious, and especially social visions of truth, visions so wide-ranging they have to reflect reader imaginations rather than Tolkien’s. Tolkien, for his part, insisted his purpose was not nearly so sociological as recent critics have suggested—he not only did not claim cultural study or psychological survey or new historicist inquiry or modernist let alone postmodernist intellectual pursuits, he disclaimed them. Tolkien explicitly declared his work not a cultural statement but a literary one: “I was primarily writing an exciting story.”2 It’s not that the tale is devoid of implication, not that there is too little moral to the story—we find rather an embarrassment of riches in that direction, interpretations of a magnitude reminiscent of the innumerable denominational readings of the Bible. Yet I concur with Tolkien that the story’s multiple moral implications remain, however tantalizingly, implicit. Diehard reluctance to moralize is especially evident in the most moralistic aspect of Middle-earth, the religious dimension, which seems to have mattered to its author in exact inverse proportion to his almost total absence of explicit reference. Tolkien underscores the carefully tacit quality of that concern with Middle-earth matters of faith: “I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology,” he says, however much he “actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought.”3 Consonant it is—resonant, even—though the Christian thought remains almost completely unspoken. Tolkien avoids lecturing with a restraint that would be admirable in a mime, let alone a professor. The literary approach here is much closer to Jesus’s parables than to Aesop’s fables. Tolkien almost never talks down to his readers, in fact never after the mild condescension of The Hobbit. The profusion of meaning in Middle-earth, the organic richness of the ramifications of this fertile fiction, is a direct result of the writer’s refusal to dumb his morals down. Tolkien never spells out the meaning—that, in subcreative Middle-earth, is the reader’s job.



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The characteristic rhetorical stance is more of a Rorshach inkblot than a T. S. Eliot objective correlative. The form and resulting function of Tolkien’s fiction is provocative rather than prescriptive, a literary strategy aimed not at Jungian collective unconscious but at individuated reader response. At every level—whether its generative words or its blossoming imagery or its maturational character or its expansive narrative or its chameleonic style—this is unusually invitational prose. This is do-it-yourself literature. For those who are Oliver Twistian in reading tastes, for readers who want always more literary gruel, Tolkien’s fiction really hits the spot. I have a literary shelf limited to books I reread annually, a small and sacrosanct set because the ultimate test of literature in my eyes is whether it gets better on rereading. There are innumerable ways a book can qualify, but they come down mostly to more than can be extracted at a single read, and the surplus tends to multiply—there’s more in them this month than last, more at age 66 than age 16. Tolkien rides high on my shelf of honor because The Lord of the Rings may be by that measure of rereadability about as good as literature gets. Or it may not. That depends, it would seem from stylistic analysis of Tolkien’s prose, on how much we are disposed to invest imaginatively. If we are willing to fill in his frequent blanks, to extend his metaphors, play out his puns, stretch our souls with his hobbits, walk his endlessly questing narrative on and on and ever on, we may find ourselves never getting enough—as I found myself after three voluminous volumes of trilogy, reading on into the appendices. But if we prefer buying our fiction off the realism rack that features the precisely detailed likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, we are likely to want to spend as little time as possible in the custom-made individually-fitted rhetorical marketplace of Middle-earth. Our critical thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the literary quality of The Lord of the Rings is personal. Our relative approval depends entirely on our reaction to its invitational stance, its insistent ambivalence and studied stylistic understatement, its virtually limitless openness to interpretation. For those of us who find there the imaginative engagement we are looking for, the more we explore this self-styled preternatural prose the more Middle-earth seems a deeper and higher dimension of reality, Tolkien’s fiction a more sensitive way of seeing. Tolkien’s tales illuminate for responsive readers the faërie implicit in the universe—the intrinsic vitality of the objective world, the submerged meanings of language, the inherent implications of narrative form, the profound potential of human imagination.



CONCLUSION: WHAT YOU WILL SEE


Tolkien’s rhetorical approach can train us to see everywhere the underlying significance, the implicit possibility. Tolkien’s narratives invite us to school ourselves in the art of imaginative insight. This shaman of language sets up the stylistic lenses through which he extends our vision of the world simply. Bottom line, he expands readers’ imaginative awareness through a closer look at the commonplace, his fiction drawing its fantastic sustenance from roots deep in the familiar. “Actually,” he tells us, “fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting” (Tree 53). Tolkien is constantly showing us that there is more to things than our preconceptions can conceive by way of urging us on to imaginatively discover the more beyond that. Again and again in the most mundane situations in his fiction we find expansive suggestivity. The most innocuous line in the Middle-earth distance may be more than a dark line, more than the line of trees it appears on closer examination to be, more than the tree-lined dike wall we eventually recognize, more than all the physical facts and historic overtones and emotional associations it amasses. Like so much else in Tolkien’s fiction, a simple line can be understated into virtually unlimited imaginative possibility: “The dark line they had seen was not a line of trees, but a line of bushes growing on the edge of a deep dike with a steep wall on the further side. Tom said that it had once been the boundary of a kingdom, but a very long time ago. He seemed to remember something sad about it, and would not say much” (143). Tolkien activates in his fiction a complex range of specific techniques for making our imaginative reach exceed our grasp. His epiphenomenal style naturalizes, taking literary realism where no fiction has dared go before, stretching aesthetics as far as metaphysics. To show there is more in the world than we have imagined, he turns the world inside out; he creates a secondary world so vital it moves beyond metaphor of the world as we know it into an artistic mirror that makes our individual worlds metaphor things deeper and higher. Tolkien transfigures the normal and normalizes the transcendent in a re-creation illuminating the mythic significance of common occurrence, “ordinary everyday sort of magic.” Through this deft dance of ambivalence, he promotes recovery of the habit of imagination, leading us into the fantastic with a believable gradualness that encourages acceptance of his world not simply as a clever figmentation but as a vision of a vaster reality in which the world we thought we knew represents only an aspect of larger truth.



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He extends imaginative horizons by enlivening the Middle-earth landscape through a crescendo of organic imagery. Paths wander, trees talk, mountains threaten, storms attack, topography assumes morality, and readers come similarly alive imaginatively, invited into perceptual alertness by moving imaginatively amid all that incipient sentience. Fraternizing with creatures extraordinarily aware sensitizes us further; such unlikely fictions as ents and orcs and hobbits incarnate through Tolkien’s magical style with a psychological acuteness that reflects insights into our worldview as it focuses theirs. The viable interaction among characters and images and what in most fiction would be setting generates in this panthropomorphic prose a critical mass of realizing life and multiplying meaning that explodes our conventional perceptual habits into wider awareness. Tolkien’s crusade to involve the reader in discovery of implicit meaning makes the most of narrative movement. His narratives investigate personal applications of archetypal implications of the quest motif, simultaneously tapping latent character potential through the developmental movement of bildungsroman. He invites us to invest in the blossoming development of a cornucopial range of Middle-earth characters with a shared closeness that stretches our souls with theirs. This character-driven plot progression grows organically out of natural associations and resonates with the deep natural rhythms of day and night, winter and spring, life and death, generating a compelling sense of ambivalent inevitability, of freely chosen journey drawn ineluctably toward its end, of event prefigured and prophecy fulfilled, of unfolding story as revelation of things as they irrevocably are, a supple narrative integrity that significantly relates the slightest episodes and most molecular insights to the metaphysical values of life, the imminent made transcendent as the transcendent becomes imminent. Through that dynamically reliable narrative pattern, Tolkien induces a suggestivity that urges every reader to find in the art his personal version of the imaged reality, to forge as relentlessly forward into the unimagined as hobbits tracking the Cracks of Doom. Language is Tolkien’s bottom-line means of imaginative expansion. His prose is taut with semantic ambiguities tending to widen potential meaning—the contradictory consonances of paradox, the incremental implications of emblem, the topsy-turvy profundity of irony. Centrifugal forces such as literary allusion and incarnated legend balance tensely the concentrating centripetal powers of internal tales and dream parables. Such sleight-of-hand stylistic techniques as realizing puns and generalizations shown in process of moving toward





specificity invite the reader into—all but shanghai the reader into— apprenticeship in the imagination of alternative possibilities. All this elaboration of imaginative vision, richly refracted by the perspective of a complex persona’s faith in reader imagination, focuses us on the meanings behind surface meaning. In this luminous atmosphere, imaginative invitation appears even in apparent meaninglessness: neologisms, clichés, even nonsense reveal vital significance, impelling us by their ambiguities to see more, and to find a personalized realization of implicit potential in everything we see. Everywhere in this percipient prose we find more than we expected. Fantasy proves more realistic than we have realized through the epiphanic interaction of transcendent values with imminent details. Unprepossessing words manifest more meaning than we had noticed. Symbols of a seemingly simple sort attain astonishing complexity. Characters again and again turn out to have more in them than meets the eye. Narrative of dead-ending pattern demonstrates itself capable of surprisingly innovative vitality. Understatement lures us into a disposition of expansiveness, a habit of seeing beyond the explicit into implicit potential. In every way, Tolkien’s rabbit-out-of-the-hat prose moves us from the seen toward the unseen, from the limited into the expansive. Thus Tolkien’s rhetorical approach deftly engages the reader in the creative process itself. Tolkien’s style is at every level from word choice to narrative pattern an open invitation to subcreation. Invitational undercurrents of narrative and character and semantic development everywhere in this proactive prose sweep the reader toward deeper implicit meanings, wider imaginative awareness. Tolkien’s unflagging faith in the potential of human imagination allows him to write with total trust in his readers: The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it implies one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. (Tree 67)

The fruits of that literary faith are borne in richness of reaction to Tolkien’s tales. Diverse readers discover in Middle-earth different worlds, expanded insights into their individual versions of reality. Thus Tolkien’s art is immeasurably capable of provoking reader imagination; it is an imaginative road that goes on for ever. A Lord 10.1057/9780230101661 - The Power of Tolkien's Prose, Steve Walker


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of the Rings hobbit expresses that practical metaphysics, that earthily expansive aesthetic vision, in typical Tolkien understatement: “There is much to read in that book” (744). The fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, like Galadriel’s magic mirror, provides an almost infinite invitation to personal imagination: “What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be” (352). Middle-earth is a place where the invisible has palpable impact, where the impossible can be experienced. That freewheeling movement between the fantastic and the real, the potential and the actual, makes The Lord of the Rings a literary locale verging on life, so imminently intimately close to life as at points to intersect. That may explain why Tolkien’s invitational prose manages such carryover power into the personal lives of readers who invest themselves in it. Experiencing the subcreatings of Middle-earth makes us more capable of this-worldly creation, compounds our capacity for seeing the infinite potential not only in fiction but in life. The sky’s not the limit in this expansive fiction—there is no limit. Anything might happen. Everything may mean. In the do-it-yourself ambience of Tolkien’s Middle-earth subcreation, anything can be.







Introduction: Things Deeper and Higher 1. Joseph Pearce, Tolkien: Man and Myth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998) 2. 2. The Guardian January 20, 1997. 3. Pearce 2. 4. Catharine R. Stimpson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, 41 (New York: Columbia University Press, l969) 7; Robert J. Reilly, “Tolkien and the Fairy Story,” Thought 38 (1963) 90; C.S. Lewis, “The Gods Return to Earth,” Time and Tide 35 (August 14, 1954) 1082; Naomi Mitchison, “One Ring to Bind Them,” The New Statesman 48 (September 18, 1954) 331; Richard Hughes, “The Lord of the Rings,” The Spectator (October 1, 1954) 408. 5. Mark R. Hillegas, ed., Shadows of Imagination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) xiii. 6. Edmund Fuller, “The Lord of the Hobbits: J.R.R. Tolkien,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 36—Fuller quotes Philip Toynbee quoting W.H. Auden; Robert Sklar, “Tolkien and Hesse: Top of the Pops,” Nation 204 (May 8, 1967) 599; W.R. Irwin, “There and Back Again: The Romances of Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien,” Sewanee Review 69 (October–December 1961) 577; Daniel Hughes, “Pieties and Giant Forms in The Lord of the Rings,” Shadows of Imagination, ed. Mark R. Hillegas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) 96. 7. D. Hughes 95; George Burke Johnston, “The Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien,” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 65; Gerald Monsman, “The Imaginative World of J.R.R. Tolkien,” South Atlantic Quarterly 69 (1970) 265; Reilly 130; Burton Raffel, “The Lord of the Rings as Literature,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 229; Michael Wood, “Tolkien’s Fictions,” New Society 338 (March 27, 1969) 493; Stimpson 13. 8. Johnston 63; Monsman 265; Marion Zimmer Bradley, “Men Halflings, and Hero Worship,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,



No tes

176

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

1968) 126; Fuller 18; Monsman 264; Neil D. Isaacs, “On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 4; William Ready, The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1968) 165; Charles Moorman, “The Shire, Mordor, and Minas Tirith: J.R.R. Tolkien,” The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966) 86; W.D. Emrys Evans, “The Lord of the Rings,” The School Librarian 16 (December 1968) 287; David M. Miller, “The Moral Universe of J.R.R. Tolkien,” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 60; Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 93; Clyde S. Kilby, “Meaning in The Lord of the Rings,” Shadows of Imagination, ed. Mark R. Hillegas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) 75; Roger Sale, “Tolkien and Frodo Baggins,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 247, 263 ; Reilly 130; Rose A. Zimbardo, “Moral Vision in The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 105; Irwin 575; Monsman 271. Spacks 97; M. Wood 493; Francis Huxley, “The Endless Worm,” New Statesman 50 (November 5, 1955) 587; Fuller 22. Cf. Stimpson 43, who finds it Captain Marvelous. D. Hughes 95; Charles Elliott, “Can America Kick the Hobbit? The Tolkien Caper,” Life 62 (February 24, 1967) 10. Edmund Wilson, “Ooo, Those Awful Orcs!” The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965) 329; C.B. Cox, “The World of the Hobbits,” The Spectator (December 30, 1966) 844. Raffel 240; Wilson 329; George H. Thomson, “The Lord of the Rings: The Novel as Traditional Romance,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8 (Winter 1967) 43; W.D. Norwood, “Tolkien’s Intention in The Lord of the Rings,” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 23; Harry T. Moore, preface, Shadows of Imagination, ed. Mark R. Hillegas, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) vi; Douglass Parker, “Hwaet We Holbytla,” Hudson Review 9 (Winter 1956–1957) 604; Irwin 568; Stimpson 43; Nat Hentoff, “Critics’ Choices for Christmas,” Commonweal 83 (December 3, 1965) 284; Moorman, “Shire, Mordor” 86; Spacks 82, 99; Parker 598, 609; Wilson 328; Ready, The Tolkien Relation 155; Monsman 271; Hillegas xvii. Miller 60; Kilby 73.



NOTES

177

14. Fuller 18; Raffel 229. 15. Parker 607; M. Wood 493. 16. R.A. Schroth, “The Lord of the Rings,” America 116 (February 18, 1967) 254; R. Hughes 408. 17. “Heroic Endeavor,” [London] Times Literary Supplement 27 (August 1954) 541; Wilson 328. 18. Gunnar Urang, “Tolkien’s Fantasy: The Phenomenology of Hope,” Shadows of the Imagination, ed. Mark R. Hillegas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) 107; Spacks 82. 19. Sklar 598; M. Wood 493. 20. M. Wood 493, 492. 21. Earl F. Walbridge, “The Two Towers,” Library Journal 80 (May 15, 1955) 1219; Wilson 331. 22. Spacks 97; Stimpson 18. 23. L.A.C. Strong, “The Pick of the Bunch,” The Spectator (December 3, 1957) 1024; M. Wood 493. 24. Moore vi; Michael Straight, “The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien,” New Republic 134 (January 16, 1956) 26. 25. Bruce A. Beatie, “Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 3. 26. Cox 844. 27. W.H. Auden, “At the End of the Quest, Victory,” New York Times Book Review (January 22, 1956) 5. 28. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth (London: Grafton, 1992) 2. 29. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 41, 78. 30. Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) 313. 31. Raffel 219, 246. 32. Parker 607, 608. 33. Spacks 98–99. 34. Raffel 220; M. Wood 493. 35. Judy Henry, letter to the editor, New York Times Book Review (November 28, 1965) 79. 36. Wilson 332; Judith Crist, “Why ‘Frodo Lives,’ ” Ladies’ Home Journal 84 (February 1967) 58; M. Wood 492. 37. Stimpson 3. 38. Huxley 588. 

Ordinary Everyday Magic

1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again, 3rd ed. (London: Unwin Books, 1966) 2. Hereafter cited in the text as “H,” thus: H2. To avoid confusion, it has sometimes been necessary to alter British punctuation conventions in quotations from Tolkien’s works to coincide with the general format of this work. British



NOTES

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2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

spelling and Tolkien’s overenthusiastic capitalization have been preserved. Shippey, Road 216. Shippey, Road 216. Good articles on the Tolkien craze include “Don’s Tales Start U.S. Campus Craze,” [London] Times February 12, 1966, 6; Nancy Griffin, “The Fellowship of Hobbitomanes,” San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle December 18, 1966, “This World” section 44, 51; “Tolkien Mythology Comes to Vietnam,” Publisher’s Weekly 192 (September 4, 1967) 24. Among the more stable newsletters and journals are The Green Dragon (Palo Alto) Mallorn (London), The Middle Earthworm (Bristol), Minas Tirith Evening Star (Monmouth, Illinois), Mythlore (Alhambra, California), Orcrist (Madison, Wisconsin), The Tolkien Journal (Center Harbor, New Hampshire). The Tolkien Journal 3:1 (1967) 12–13 gives a comprehensive list. Margery Fisher, Intent upon Reading (Leicester: Brockhampton Press, Ltd., 1961) 85; Crist 58; Fuller 30; Monsman 272. Fisher 85; Urang 97; M. Wood 493; Kilby 76; Beatie 8. E.L. Epstein, “The Novels of J.R.R. Tolkien and the Ethnology of Medieval Christendom,” Philological Quarterly 48 (1969) 517. Stimpson 27; Parker 605. Epstein 522–23; Alexis Levitin, “The Hero in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 171. Charles Moorman, “ ‘Now Entertain Conjecture of a Time’—The Fictive Worlds of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien,” Shadows of Imagination, ed. Mark R. Hillegas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) 61. Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (London: Macmillan, 1992) 15. Rosebury, Assessment 15. Mary Quella Kelly, “The Poetry of Fantasy: Verse in The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 171. Spacks 98, 87 is on both hands. Kilby 75. Paul Edmund Thomas, “Some of Tolkien’s Narrators,” Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-Earth, eds. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (London: Greenwood Press, 2000) 74. Paul Kocher, “Middle-Earth: Imaginary World?” Understanding The Lord of the Rings, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) 151. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 6. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) 820. This widely available compact edition, which comprises



NOTES

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

179

Volume I: The Fellowship of the Ring, Volume II: The Two Towers, and Volume III: The Return of the King, will hereafter be cited in the text by page number only. See, for another example, 303; I could discover in the entire work only four such references. Perhaps the most impressive weather effect is the incidental explication of the conditions that allow Sauron to lay down his smog camouflage for “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields,” then disperse that smoke as Aragorn arrives by boat “upon a wind from the Sea” (829)—the wind patterns, for all their supernatural implications, precisely indicate a passing low pressure area. Some, such as Naomi Mitchison, find “uncertainties on the scientific side” (331), but do not specify what they are. An intriguing instance can be seen in the recurring references to the psychological effects of light on warriors’ morale in such places as 528, 617, 820, and 842. Some take their plausibility even further. See Kathryn Blackmun, “The Development of Runic and Feanorian Alphabets for the Transliteration of English,” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 76–83, and C. Stevens, “Sound Systems of the Third Age of Middle-Earth,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54 (October 1968) 232–40. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 56; the subsequent reference is to 177. Andy Schultz, “Tolkien and Friends” English 495 Course, Brigham Young University, fall semester 2005. Ready 177. Shippey, Road 132, first observed this. Two of twenty-one in my informal survey. Beatie 8; Parker 599. Rosebury, Assessment 28. Beatie 8; Kilby 75. Kocher 147. Parker feels Middle-earth nurtures “probably the most original and varied creation ever seen in the genre, and certainly the most consistent” (602). There is an extended discussion in Thomas J. Gasque, “Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critters,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 159–63. Fuller 21. Rosebury, Assessment 39. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 3. Miller 60. Kilby 73. Evans 287; Kilby 77. See 1031, 500–11, and H116. Cf. Judges 14:12–20.



NOTES

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

NOTES

Moore vi. Wilson 329. Rosebury, Assessment 42. R. Hughes 408. Fuller 28; C.S. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power,” Time and Tide 36 (October 22, 1955) 1373; W.H. Auden, “Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings,” Critical Quarterly 10 (1968) 138. Mitchison 331. Tom Shippey, “Orcs, Wraiths, Wights,” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (London: Greenwood Press, 2000) 186. Auden, “Good and Evil” 8. Respectively, H60; 490–91; 711–12; 739. Gandalf: 57, 214, 251, 488–89, 569, 733, 793–94. Saruman: 982–99. Sauron: 924–25. See 738, 824, and 925. See 65–66; 276; 349; 425; 217; and 62. Wilson 329; Parker 602; Stimpson 18. Beatie 8; C.S. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 14; Fisher 85. Lewis, “The Dethronement” 1374. W.H. Auden, “A World Imaginary, but Real,” Encounter 3 (November 1954) 61. Raffel 237. J.R.R. Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1949) 56, 57, 59, 62, 75—hereafter cited “FG” in text. D. Hughes 89. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 77. Parker 607; H2—comfort is a vital term in The Hobbit; see 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 26, 31, 42, 44, 51, 103, 161, 166, 179, 208, 262, and 277 for typical examples. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 77—the humanness of hobbits is the thesis of Ready’s book. Cf. H18: “There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself.” Huxley 587; D. Hughes 84. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 161; William Ready, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit: Notes (Toronto: Coles Publishing Company Limited, 1971) 6. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 106. Stimpson 31, 32. Gasque 161. Gasque 160.



180

181

71. H7 vs. H25; Ready, The Tolkien Relation 99; H219; 221–22 vs. 1045–46; 276 vs. 1110; H195 vs. H260. 72. See 1051. 73. See 1048 and H111. 74. Shippey, Road 109. 75. Kocher 162. 76. See FG23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, and 40. 77. See 11–13; 47; 53–59; 243–50; 374–85.; the quotation is from 374. 78. Evans calls their introduction at that point “a daring stroke, whose impact is not to be appreciated in a first reading” (285). 79. See 87, 88, 73, 193, 191, and 822. 80. Shippey, “Orcs” 191. 81. Wilson 329. 82. D. Hughes 89. 83. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Books, 1964) 40—hereafter cited in the text as Tree. (Also includes “Leaf by Niggle”). 84. Fisher 85, Fuller 17, Urang 97, Walbridge 1219, M. Wood 493, for example. 85. Shippey, Road 109. 86. Sale 265. 87. H79, H177; cf. the citizens of Wootton Major, who are of such limited vision as to overlook a faërie star in the very center of Smith’s forehead: “Few people in the village noticed it though it was not invisible to attentive eyes”—J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967) 20; hereafter cited in the text as Smith. 88. See Parker 602. 89. H34; cf. an orc turning in Frodo’s imagination into Sam (889), the sun bringing green fire from the emerald in Aragorn’s hand (960). 90. Shippey, Road 175. 91. Wilson C. McWilliams, “Critics’ Choices for Christmas,” Commonweal 83 (December 3, 1965) 287. 92. His perception of the surprise of the usual is more than artifice: in the realistic context of a prefatory note, Tolkien says, “typing by the ten-fingered was beyond my means” (The Lord of the Rings xvi). 93. H.H. Arnason, A History of Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969) 314; cf. 368. 94. Cox 844. 95. Shippey, Road 166. 96. Gasque 154. 97. William Blissett, “Despots of the Rings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 58 (Summer 1959) 456. 98. See 108–19. 99. Kilby 71.



NOTES

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

NOTES

See 27; H5; 1059; H99; and 462. See H99; 578; 881–82; see 894 for an air raid. Stimpson 11. See 3–5; 9–13; 1009–13 and 663. See, for example, 777–78, 780, 868, 952, 365, 430–31, and 842. See, for example, 95, 100, 243, 346, 373; 479; 523; 873; 830; and 1057; Sklar 599. Cf. 190, 279, and 615–16. Ruth Harshaw, “When Carnival of Books Went to Europe,” American Library Association Bulletin 51 (February 1957) 120. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) Letter #131, 160. For typical examples from the first volume see 1, 11, 12, 22, 28, 33, 46, 49, 61, 66, 73, 74, 77, 78, 87, 89, 95, 108, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 134, 136, 154, 172, 190, 199, 207, 213, 231, 233, 243, 247, 257, 292, 306, 317–18, 336, 342, 347, 367, 368, 383, and 396— the relative density of such terms is directly proportional to the supernaturalness of the situation. There are many others—for example, funny, fabulous, remarkable, marvelous, and unearthly. Shippey, Road 151. Tolkien Letter #142, 172. Tolkien Letter #142, 172. Bradley Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (ISI Books, 2002) xi. Birzer xvi. Ralph Wood, The Gospel according to Tolkien (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press) 121. R.Wood 10. Tolkien Letter #208, 267. Leslie Ellen Jones, Myth and Middle-Earth (Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Springs Press, 2002) 132. R. Wood 46. Pearce 97. 27; cf. 110, 135, 287, 598, 620 for a cross-section of examples. Dorothy K. Barber, “The Meaning of The Lord of the Rings,”The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2 (Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967) 44. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 13. Fisher 85; cf. M. Wood 493, Cox 844. David Sander, “ ‘Joy beyond the Walls of the World’: The Secondary World-Making of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis,” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000) 143. See 929. The tale is actually told in 933.



182

183

128. Gasque 158; Sale 268. It is not as surprising a conclusion as it sounds; in the carefully rational criticism of Tree and Leaf 16, 24, 44, and 59, Tolkien sets forth and proceeds upon the hypothesis “if elves are true.” 129. Gregory Bassham, “Tolkien’s Six Keys to Happiness,” The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, eds. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson (Illinois: Open Court, 2007) 59. 


1. Christopher Garbowski, “Middle-Earth,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 427. 2. Roger Sale, “Tolkien and Frodo Baggins,” J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000) 47. 3. Sale, revised “Tolkien and Frodo Baggins,” 47. 4. Shippey, Road 132. 5. Jennifer McMahon and B. Steve Csaki, “Talking Trees and Walking Mountains: Buddhist and Taoist Themes in The Lord of the Rings,” The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, eds. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson (Illinois: Open Court, 2007) 180. 6. Shippey, Road 132. 7. Fisher 87; D. Hughes 83; Jared C. Lobdell, “From Middle-Earth to the Silent Planet,” Rally 2 (July–August 1967) 36; Mitchison 331. 8. Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales (London: Edmund Ward Publishers Ltd., 1965) 277; Fisher 85; R. Hughes 408. 9. Auden, “At the End” 5; Sklar 600. 10. Kilby 80; Spacks 95; Green 277. 11. Urang 101; Beatie 3 ; Green 277. 12. Hugh T. Keenan, “The Appeal of The Lord of the Rings: A Struggle for Life,” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 63, provides an acute discussion of “the reiterated sterility-fertility conflict” of the trilogy. 13. Stimpson 30, 36. 14. Michael N. Stanton, Hobbits, Elves, and Wizards (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 45. 15. Ready, The Tolkien Relation 3; Walbridge 1219; Cox 844. 16. R. Hughes 408. 17. Tolkien Letter #155, 200. 18. Tolkien Letter #131, 152. 19. Monsman 266. 20. See 133; 286; 279; H42; H174; 111; 622; 593; 275; 60; and 519. 21. McMahon and Csaki 180. 22. Stanton 13–14. 23. Parker 599.



NOTES

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

NOTES

Stanton 62. Stanton 62. Stanton 62. Henry Gee, The Science of Middle-Earth (New York: Cold Spring Press, 2004) 195. McMahon and Csaki 181. McMahon and Csaki 183. Max Riessar, Analyse Des Poetischen Denken (1954) 72. I am indebted for this apt phrase to Sheridan Baker, “Paton’s Beloved Country and the Morality of Geography,” College English 19 (November 1957) 55–61. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3, part 4 (London: G. Bell, 1927) 164. Stimpson 27. Stanton 13. Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) 74. Tolkien Letter #246, 329. Stanton 17. Patrick Curry, “Environmentalism and Eco-criticism,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 165. See, for example, Daniel 11:44, Ezekiel 27:26, Hosea 12:1. Alfred K. Siewers, “Environmentalist Readings of Tolkien,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 166. Siewers 166. Stimpson 36; R. Hughes 409. Fisher 84. Raffel 221. Sale 42. Raffel 219. Raffel 219. Garbowski, “Middle-Earth” 423. McMahon and Csaki 181. Stimpson 12. Keenan 64. Tolkien Letter #208, 267. Keenan 62; Sale 260. See H187 and H188; cf. 50, 51, 52, 100, 136, 159, 165, 185, 222, 232, and 256. Stanton 51. Keenan 74. See Monsman 271–78. Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983) 78. See 317; see also 138, 192, 889, and 1002–03.



184

185

60. Urang 105. 61. See H180; H214; H226; and H267. 62. Fuller 35. Fuller thinks Tolkien has been “explicit about the nature of Gandalf. In response to my question he said, unhesitatingly, ‘Gandalf is an angel.’ ” 63. 749; cf. 503 for Gandalf’s own witness. 64. Green 277. 


1. Ursula LeGuin, “The Staring Eye,” A Reader’s Companion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995) 117. 2. LeGuin, “The Staring Eye” 117. 3. Ursula LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern,” Meditations on Middle-Earth ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martins, 2001) 106. 4. LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern” 105. 5. Janet Adam Smith, “Does Frodo Live,” A Reader’s Companion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995) 70. 6. Orson Scott Card, “How Tolkien Means,” Meditations on MiddleEarth, ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martins, 2001) 154–55. 7. See, for example, 612, 618, and 920. 8. Eddy Mark Smith, Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2002) 123–24. 9. Tree 73; cf. Smith 36, 49, and FG39. 10. LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern” 107. 11. LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern” 107. 12. Allan Turner, “Prose Style,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 546. 13. Turner, “Prose Style” 546. 14. Gee 46. 15. See H18, 72, 264, 40, 217, and 194 respectively. 16. Rosebury, Cultural Phenomenon 55. 17. Rosebury, Cultural Phenomenon 55. 18. Allan Turner, “Rhetoric,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 568. 19. Christopher Garbowski, “Comedy,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 108. 20. Patrick Curry, Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (Great Britain: Floris Books, 1997) 164. 21. See H31–41; H64–83; and H194–213. 22. See H42, 63, 143, 192, and 262; cf. H47, 56, 61, 103, 161, 196, 203, 270, and 274. 23. See, for example, H46, H138–39, H142, H271, 77, 187, 231, 330, 368, 491, 712, and 1005.



NOTES

NOTES

24. See 763; cf. 748, 750, 797, and 864. 25. Isaac Asimov, “The Ring of Evil,” A Reader’s Companion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995) 30. 26. Card 172. 27. Card 172. 28. See 734; 1059; 873; and 34. 29. See 958; 315; 543; 683; and 128—cf. King Lear 4.7.46–48. See also Ezekiel 1:15–20. 30. Legendary allusions include 701, 703, 704, and 714. There are historic quotations in 600, 665, 704, and 818, 849, and 926. 31. Ubi sunt (Latin: “where are?”). See 736; cf. 779, 916, and 1069. 32. Turner, “Prose Style” 546. 33. Lisa Goldstein, “The Mythmaker,” Meditations on Middle-Earth, ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martins, 2001) 190. 34. Goldstein 190. 35. Rosebury, Assessment 15. 36. Card 156. 37. See 527; 623; 679; 775; and 693; cf. 358, 475, 540, 624, 684, and 740, 869, 910, and 914. 38. See 114–15; 137; 207–09; 307–16; 315; and 725. 39. See 701, 873, and 909. 40. See 177, 412, 591, 635, and 741, 802, and 887, for example. 41. The destructions and conclusions leading up to Théoden’s funeral are conveniently accumulated in 824–26. 42. Tolkien Letter #208, 267. 43. See the prolonged ax joke in 480, 492, 500, 512, 520, 522, 532, 552, 565, 571, and 953. 44. See 102, 954, 974, 997, and 1008. 45. See 1 and 1004. 46. Note the wind in 819, 828–30, and 839. 

Always On and On

1. Carl G. Jung, Four Archetypes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 12. 2. Tolkien goes so far as to present a hissingly snakey Gollum to play Satan to Bilbo’s bildungsroman Adam. 3. See H161; cf. H33, 144, 171, 197, and 262. Frodo’s isolation is even more thorough in 61, 98, 106, 107, 152, 270, 387, 392, 394; 626, 671, and 715; Merry: 865 and 877; Aragorn: 1034 and 1035. Cf. also “poor Sméagol all alone” (671), and the isolating of that most gregarious of hobbits: “No thought could yet bring any help to Samwise Hamfast’s son; he was utterly alone” (877). 4. See H10; H247; H21; H32; H77; H144; H171; H197; H203; H248; H261; and H277, respectively.



186

187

5. E. Smith 19. 6. Jonathan D. Langford, Pathways into Maturity: Coming-of-Age among Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1990, 188–190, details Sam’s spectacular growth.” 7. See H146; cf. H82, 886, and 852. 8. Auden, “The Quest Hero” 54. 9. Gee 204. 10. Christopher Vaccaro, “Rings,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 572. 11. Card 169. 12. E. Smith 100. 13. See M. Wood 493. 14. E. Smith 100. 15. Julie Phillips, “Hobbit Redux: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elf Consciousness,” A Reader’s Companion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995) 81. 16. J. Smith 70. 17. See the Introduction to Tree and Leaf. 18. Phillips 81. 19. Alison Milbank, “ ‘My Precious’: Tolkien’s Fetishized Ring,” The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, eds. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson (Illinois: Open Court, 2007) 35. 20. Milbank 35. 21. Anna Smol, “Sexuality in Tolkien’s Works,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 602. 22. See 119–31; 464–66; 189; and 985. 23. Tolkien Letter #131, 161. 24. Tolkien Letter #131, 161. 25. See 940–44; 511–12; 1032–38. 26. Stimpson 19. 27. M. Wood, 493. 28. Patrick Bruckner, “Tolkien on Love,” Tolkien and Modernity, ed. Thomas Honegger and Frank Weinreich (Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2006) 36. 29. See 929; cf. 699, 703, 905, 917, 921, and 930. 30. Miller 60. 31. E. Smith 47. 32. See H20–21; H80; H174; H178; H85; and H253. 33. T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1943) ll. 214, 239–42. 

The Potency of the Words

1. Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview behind The Lord of the Rings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005) 154.



NOTES

NOTES

2. Shippey, Road 43. 3. Shippey, Road 133. 4. Poul Anderson, “Awakening the Elves,” Meditations on MiddleEarth, ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martins, 2001) 31. 5. See H40, 212; H48; H59; H144; 237; 269; 521; 237; and 810; Beowulf 1.1507. 6. Kreeft 155. 7. Cf. H204 for more explicit dragon lore. 8. For a cross section of internal tales, see the flashbacks beginning on pages H17, H21, H116, 142, 236, 423, 707, 794, and 856. The allusion functions with the same indirect appropriateness as the more puzzling digressions in Beowulf. 9. Douglas Anderson, “Tolkien After All These Years,” Meditations on Middle-Earth, ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martins, 2001) 139. 10. Kreeft 156. 11. Rosebury, Assessment 60. 12. Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1997) 189. 13. Flieger, Time 199. 14. Jared Lobdell, “Dreams,” J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007) 132. 15. Lobdell, “Dreams” 132. 16. Ursula LeGuin “Rhythmic Pattern,” Meditations on Middle-Earth, ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martins, 2001) 112. 17. Rosebury, Assessment 63. 18. Randall Helms, Tolkien’s World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974) 80. 19. Mary E. Zimmer, “Creating and Re-Creating Worlds with Words,” Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004) 52. 20. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Macmillan, 1962) 248. 21. Zimmer 50. 22. Ruth S. Noel, The Languages of Middle-Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980) 57. 23. Marion Gymnich, “Reconsidering the Linguistics of Middle-Earth,” Reconsidering Tolkien, ed. Thomas Honegger (Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2005) 26. 24. Gymnich 23. 25. J. Smith 75. 26. J. Smith 75. 27. David L. Jeffrey, “Name in The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky) 106. 28. Tolkien Letter #297, 380. 29. Rosebury, Assessment 292.



188

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

189

Rosebury, Assessment 292. Kreeft 159. Zimmer 58. Jared Lobdell, The World of the Rings (Chicago: Open Court, 2004) 40. See Stimpson 35. Noel 60. See H80 and 279 for synesthesia of vision, 74 and 687 for olfactory. See 341; cf. 342, 785, and 947. See 410, 621, 640, 633, and 928, for example. See, for example, H54 and 813. See 622, 799, and 439. See 604; cf. 605, 608, 621, and 672. Michael D.C. Drout, “Tolkien’s Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects,” Tolkien Studies 1:1 (2004) 155. Lobdell, World 45. See Albert Stansburrough Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900) 89–90. The analysis is based on an average of random samples. For a convenient example, see the final page of Book I and the initial page of Book II in The Fellowship of the Ring. LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern” 104. LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern” 102. LeGuin, “Rhythmic Pattern” 103. Turner, “Rhetoric” 567. See Appendices E and F at the conclusion of The Return of the King. Hobbit poems in The Lord of the Rings alone may be found in 35, 76, 88, 99, 104, 110, 155, 181, 201, 227, 241, 266, 271, 350, 606, 632, 888, 965, and 1005. Rosebury, Assessment 72. Turner, “Rhetoric” 567. See H195; cf. H269 and especially the fluctuating tensions of H80. See, for example, H40. E. Kirk, “Language, Fiction and The Lord of the Rings,” Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. M. Spilka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) 300. H94 is a good example of the lengths to which Tolkien goes to maintain that hobbit perspective. Rosebury, Assessment 59–60. See 28; 48; 51; 128; 236; 664; 774; and 461. Lewis nominates Treebeard as “a portrait of the artist”; Ready’s books insist upon hobbits, particularly Frodo, for that position; Stimpson (16) thinks Gandalf “a totally reliable moral mouthpiece.” Gymnich 14. Shippey, Road 136. See 273; see also 215 for a clearer but more involved example. Kirk 294.



NOTES

190

NOTES

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Just a Bit of Nonsense

Tolkien Letter #25, 31. See 21; see 27 for elevenses. See 502; 424; 822; 595; 237; 373; and 497. See 501; 419; 236; 768; and 467. See the usages in 734, 516, and 827. See 745. The word invented by Tolkien for the occasion is daymeal. See 307; 861; 426; and 426. For typical Old English sections, see 237–41, 407–30, 760–65. Specific Old English formulas are included, notably the “that was a worthy man” (425), “that was a strange deed” (409) type. J. Smith 74. See 59; 823; 567; 868; 806; and 735. See H158; cf. 442, 244, 868, and 427. Rosebury, Assessment 78–79. Miller 60. Wilson 329. Fuller 22. Raffel 246. The passages just quoted demonstrate that generalized quality clearly. Kocher 151. See 107; cf. 804–05, 10. Kocher 151–52. See 58, 49; cf. 218, 709. Conclusion: What You Will See, If You Leave the Mirror Free to Work

1. Tolkien Letter #208, 267. 2. Tolkien Letter #208, 267. 3. Tolkien Letter #269, 355.





Tolkien’s Fiction and Poetry Listed Chronologically Songs for the Philologists. With E. V. Gordon and others. London: privately printed through the Department of English at University College, 1936. The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1937, 1951, 1966. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1938, 1958. New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965, rev. ed., 1966. “Leaf by Niggle.” Dublin Review 216 (January 1945): 46–61. “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun.” Welsh Review 4 (December 1945): 254–66. Farmer Giles of Ham. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1949. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1950. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” Essays and Studies of the English Association, New Series 6 (1953): 1–18. “Imram.” Time and Tide 36 (December 3, 1955): 1561. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1962. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1963. Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books, 1964. (Collects “On Fairy-Stories” and “Leaf by Niggle). The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. (Collects “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Farmer Giles of Ham, “Leaf by Niggle,” and “On FairyStories.”) The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. With music by Donald Swann. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1967. Smith of Wootton Major. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1967. Redbook, 130 (December 1967): 58–61, 101, 103–07. “For W. H. A.” Shenandoah 18 (Winter 1967): 96–97. Poems and Songs of Middle Earth. With William Elvin and Donald Swann. London: Caedmon Records, 1968. Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969.



S ources

SOURCES

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Critical Works Cited Three collections of essays have been of especial value in the preparation of this book: Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, eds., Tolkien and the Critics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Mark R. Hillegas, ed., Shadows of Imagination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2. Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967. Richard C. West’s Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1970. is a helpful guide to early Tolkien criticism. Anderson, Douglas. “Tolkien After All These Years.” Meditations on MiddleEarth, ed. Karen Haber. New York: St. Martins, 2001. 129–51. Anderson, Poul. “Awakening the Elves.” Meditations on Middle-Earth, ed. Karen Haber. New York: St. Martins, 2001. 21–32. Arnason, H. H. A History of Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Asimov, Isaac. “The Ring of Evil.” A Reader’s Companion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995. 23–30. Auden, W. H. “At the End of the Quest, Victory.” New York Times Book Review, January 22, 1956, 5. ———. “Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Journal 8 (1967): 5–8. Reprinted in Critical Quarterly 10 (1968): 138–42. ———. “The Quest Hero.” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A Zimbardo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. 40–61. ———. “A World Imaginary, but Real.” Encounter 3 (November 1954): 59–62.



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Baker, Sheridan. “Paton’s Beloved Coutnry and the Morality of Geography.” College English 19 (November 1957): 55–61. Barber, Dorothy Elizabeth Klein. “The Meaning of The Lord of the Rings.” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2. Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967. 38–50. Bassham, Gregory. “Tolkien’s Six Keys to Happiness.” The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, eds. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson. Illinois: Open Court, 2007. 49–60. Bassham, Gregory, and Eric Bronson, eds. The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy. Illinois: Open Court, 2007. Beatie, Bruce A. “Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” The Tolkien Papers, Mankato Studies in English 2. Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967. 1–17. Birzer, Bradley. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003. Blackmun, Kathryn. “The Development of runic and Feanorian Alphabets for the Transliteration of English.” The Tolkien Papers. Mankato Studies in English 2. Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967. 76–83. Blissett, William. “Despots of the Rings.” South Atlantic Quarterly 58 (Summer 1959): 448–56. Bradley, Marion Zimmer. “Men, Halflings and Hero Worship.” Fantasy Amateur Press Association booklet, 1961. Reprinted in Niekas (June 1966): 25–44. Abridged for Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. 109–27. Bruckner, Patrick. “Tolkien on Love,” Tolkien and Modernity, ed. Thomas Honegger and Frank Weinreich. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2006. 1–52. Card, Orson Scott. “How Tolkien Means.” Meditations on Middle-Earth, ed. Karen Haber. New York: St. Martins, 2001. 153–73. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and through the LookingGlass. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Clark, George, and Daniel Timmons, eds. J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Cook, Albert Stansburrough. The Christ of Cynewulf. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900. Cox, C. B. “The World of the Hobbits.” Spectator (December 30, 1966): 844. Crist, Judith. “Why ‘Frodo Lives.’ ” Ladies’ Home Journal 84 (February 1967): 58. Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. Great Britain: Floris Books, 1997. ———. “Environmentalism and Eco-criticism,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2007. 165. Drout, Michael D.C., ed. J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2007.



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Sander, David. “ ‘Joy beyond the Walls of the World’: The Secondary WorldMaking of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.” J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons. London: Greenwood Press, 2000. 133–45. Schroth, R. A. “The Lord of the Rings.” America 116 (February 18, 1967. 254. Schultz, Andy. “Tolkien and Friends” English 495 Course, Brigham Young University, fall semester 2005. Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ———. “Orcs, Wraiths, Wights.” J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons. London: Greenwood Press, 2000. 183–98. ———. The Road to Middle-Earth. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Siewers, Alfred K. “Environmentalist Readings of Tolkien.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2007. 166. Sklar, Robert. “Tolkien and Hesse: Top of the Pops.” Nation 204 (May 8, 1967. 598–601. Smith, Eddy Mark. Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings. Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2002. Smith, Janet Adam. “Does Frodo Live,” A Reader’s Companion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995. 65–75. Smol, Anna. “Sexuality in Tolkien’s Works.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2007. 601–02. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien and the Critics, eds. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. 81–99. Stanton, Michael N. Hobbits, Elves, and Wizards. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Stevens, C. “Sound Systems of the Third Age of Middle-Earth.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54 (October 1968): 232–40. Stimpson, Catherine R. J. R. R. Tolkien. Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, No. 41. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Straight, Michael. “Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien.” New Republic 134 (January 16, 1956): 24–26. Strong, L. A. C. “The Pick of the Bunch.” Spectator (December 3, 1937): 1024. Thomas, Paul Edmund. “Some of Tolkien’s Narrators.” Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-Earth, eds. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. 161–81. Thomson, George H. “The Lord of the Rings: The Novel as Traditional Romance.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8 (Winter 1967): 43–59. The Tolkien Papers. Mankato Studies in English. Mankato: Mankato State College, 1967. Turner, Allan. “Prose Style.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2007. 546.



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absurdity, 147–50 accretion, 151 action, 107–8, 136, 139–40 activating cliché, see cliché actualizing, 72, 88, 90, 155 Aeneid, 2 Aesop’s Fables, 168 Aiglos, 117 alchemy, 128, 148 see also magic Alice in Wonderland, 58, 147 alive, 41–45, 49, 54, 59, 68 allusion, 82, 84, 115–19, 123, 137, 171 ambiguity, creations/characters, 9–11, 17, 33, 53, 63–64 writing style, 4–5, 32, 34, 37–38, 49, 86, 90, 145–46 ambivalence, 90, 98, 133 anatomy, 43–45 Anderson, Douglas, 119, 188 Anderson, Poul, 117, 188 Anduril, 117 And What Happened After, 113 Anglo-Saxon, 14, 32, 85, 117, 143, 153 animation, 41, 43, 45–49, 54 anticipation, 58, 61, 77–78, 81, 84, 86–88 anticlimax, 120 antiquity, 153–54, 156 apocalypse, 86–87, 90, 139, 164 appearance, 18, 35, 49, 53, 127, 136, 162

Aragorn, characteristics of, 11, 71, 124, 159 healing, 78, 112–13 love, 110–11 progression of, 101, 120 see also Strider archaism, 93, 117 Ariosto, 2 Arkenstone, 76, 98, 121, 139 Arnason, H.H., 28, 181 Arnold, 2 Arthur, 117 artistry, 42, 47, 50 Arwen, 11, 109–11 Asimov, Isaac, 83, 186 association, 77–78, 136, 153 Auden, W.H., 3, 16–18, 42, 102, 175, 177, 180, 183, 187 Augustine, 2 augury, 121 autumn, 59 awakenings, 57, 61, 70 awareness, 41, 45, 48 Bag End, 26, 69, 81 Balin, 72, 97, 127 balrogs, 13–14, 17, 131, 138 Barber, Dorothy Elizabeth Klein, 38, 182 Barliman Butterbur, 27, 134 barrow-wights, 13–14, 34, 66, 88 Bassham, Gregory, 39, 183, 187 Batman, 4 Beatie, Bruce A., 3, 8, 13, 17, 42, 177–80, 183 believability, 24–26, 41, 100, 118



Inde x

INDEX

Beorn, 15, 22, 143 Beornings, 14 Beowulf, 2, 4, 76, 109, 117 Beren and Tinuviel, 110 Bible, 34, 75, 117, 141, 168 Bilbo, adventures of, 29, 45, 49–50, 53, 75, 95–100, 107 connection to readers, 20, 22, 86, 112, 145 relationship with Frodo, 59, 68, 100, 104 see also burglar, riddles, escape, luck, dreams, Ring of Power bildungsroman, 94–97, 99–103, 112, 130, 171 binary alteration, 75, 77–78 Birnam Wood, 116 birth, 57–59 birthdays, 58–59, 68, 79, 101, 152 Birzer, Bradley, 35, 182 black and white, 108 Black Breath, 11 Black Riders, 24, 28, 32, 37, 89, 120 see also ringwraiths Blake, William, 113 Blissett, William, 29, 181 Bombur, 121 Boromir, 17, 102, 127, 159 death of, 89, 123 Ring of Power, 105–6 Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 2, 175 breathless prose, 87–88 see also syntactic urgency Bree, 29, 34, 37, 129 Breemen, 14 Bronson, Eric, 183, 187 Browning, Robert, 2 Bruckner, Patrick, 111, 187 Buck Rogers, 2 Bullroarer, 118 burglar, 98–99, 118 burlesque reduction, 155 Burns, Robert, 163

Cain, 20 Card, Orson Scott, 72, 83, 86, 107, 185–87 Carroll, Lewis, 123, 188 Catcher in the Rye, 95 Catholic, 35 Celeborn, 69 centrifugal force, 53, 171 Cervantes, 2 Chanson de Roland, 2 character, degeneration, 98, 102, 104 development, 94, 100, 102–3, 171–72 foil, 95–96, 98–100, 103–6 growth, 96–97, 99–102 maturation, 94–96, 101–2, 112, 169 roles, 97–99 stature, 25, 34, 100, 105 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2 chauvinism, 52 chess, 82 childishness, 98, 101, 149 children, 95, 101 choice, 76 Christian, 3 Christianity, 39, 168 Christlike, 112–13, 137 chronological, 84–86, 90 Chrysophylax, 23, 155 Cirith Gondor, 44 Cirith Ungol, 46, 58 Clark, George, 180, 182, 198 cliché, 151, 154–55, 158, 172 activating, 156–57 classic, 1, 8 coincidence, 76–78, 84 Coleridge, 2, 23, 91 color scheme, 60, 135 comic, 2, 20, 77–78, 114 commonplace, 7, 18–19, 27–28, 34, 51, 112, 120, 170 see also mundane, ordinary



202

complexity, 3, 10, 16, 18–19, 34, 41, 58, 123, 172 moral, 54, 111 concentration, 16, 34 concreteness, 159–62 contradiction, 42 controversy, 1–4 Cook, Albert Stansburrough, 137, 189 courage, 36, 74, 76, 80, 100 Cox, C.B., 2, 3, 28, 38, 42, 176–77, 181–83 Cracks of Doom, 12, 58, 100, 103, 106, 112, 126, 171 crafting, 10 creative vacuum, 166, 169 credibility, 10, 14, 16, 18, 23, 30 see also believability, plausibility Crist, Judith, 4, 8, 177–78 critical isms, 94 critics disagree, 1–4, 9, 35, 54, 159 cumulative imagery, 84 Curry, Patrick, 52, 78, 184–85 darkness, cliché, 155 in the east, 53 evil, 55, 57, 60–62 metaphor, 64, 67, 80–81 see also shadow dawn, 57, 61–62, 136, 149 Dead Marshes, 89 dead metaphor, 54–55 Deagol, 20 death, 57–59, 64–69, 88–90, 127, 171 Defoe, Daniel, 2, 10 déjà vu, 65, 80, 113 Denethor, 15, 89, 102, 106 Dernhelm, 56 Descartes, 122 detail, 9–10, 14, 34, 48, 93–94, 99, 159, 161, 172 development, see character, organic, reader development

203

dialect, 142–44, 154 Dickens, Charles, 2, 129 Disney, Walt, 2, 159 Divine Comedy, 2 do-it-yourself literature, 118, 167–69, 173 Don Juan, 109 down-to-earthiness, 11–12, 25, 27, 32, 52, 112, 127 dragons, 25–26, 29, 82, 118, 126–27, 132–33, 137, 157–58, 164 see also Smaug dream, 121–22, 171 Drout, Michael D.C., 41, 137, 183–85, 187–89 Durin, 22, 66 Dwalin, 96–97 dwarves, 17, 21–23, 136, 142–43 dying, 57, 64, 89, 127 dynamic, 42, 46, 50–51, 57, 65, 71, 107, 152, 158 eagle, 150 Earendil, 137 echoes, 69, 79, 83, 85, 99, 115 ecology, 42–43, 51–53 Eden, 62, 95 Elanor Gamgee, 59 elegy, 140–41 Elijah, 34, 65 Eliot, T.S., 2, 50, 114, 169, 187 Elisha, 99 Elliott, Charles, 2, 176 Elrond, 11, 22, 106, 111, 145 elves, description of, 13, 91, 123, 133–34, 136–37 knowledge of, 27, 89, 128 language of, 131, 142 traits, 21–22, 63 emblem, 134–38, 171 emotional oscillation, 78 Emyn Muil, 79 engaging, 93–94



INDEX

INDEX

enlivening, Middle-earth, 43, 46, 62, 64, 70, 88, 90–91, 171 narrative, 49, 51, 54, 57, 63 entombment, 58, 66, 87 entrapment, 87 ents, creation of, 14, 17, 23, 39, 152, 171 description of, 11, 21, 30, 48, 108, 126 language of, 23, 124, 132, 142–44, 146 entwives, 48, 110, 126, 140–41 Éomer, 65, 68, 102, 138 Éowyn, 65, 102, 105, 110, 134 epic, 1–2, 59, 73, 85, 117–18, 120 epiphany, 64, 133, 172 epistemology, 149 Epstein, E.L., 8, 9, 178 escape, 54, 57–59, 64–66, 70, 79, 123, 134, 167 eternal, 57, 68–69, 85 etymology, 115, 130–31, 142, 152 Evans, W.D. Emrys, 2, 14, 23, 176, 179, 181 Evenstar, 89 evil, 159, 164 fight against, 16, 55–56, 71, 102, 105 of Mordor creations, 28, 127, 131, 137–38 reality of, 24, 35–36, 52–53 expansiveness, 77, 84, 90–91, 143 exploration, 72 extraordinary, 11, 25, 28–29 eyes, 24, 33, 40, 81–83, 138, 149 faërie, 18, 24–25, 32, 39, 134–35, 161 faith, 25, 27, 37, 39, 168, 172 false dilemma, 108 familiarity, characters, 22–23 in diction, 153 in fiction, 170

Middle-earth, 8–9, 13–14, 27–30, 40–41, 48, 152 narrative, 11 through cliché, 157 see also commonplace, style Fangorn Forest, 11–12, 26, 33, 78, 109, 138 see also Treebeard fantasy, 5, 7–8, 25, 119, 135, 167, 172 see also genre Faramir, 33, 102, 105–6, 110, 133–34 Farmer Giles, 18–19, 33, 126, 156 Farmer Giles of Ham, 18, 33, 94, 113, 120, 145 Farmer Maggot, 32 fatalism, 76, 102, 123, 158, 171 Father Murray, 35 Faulkner, William, 2 fauna, 9, 11, 14, 58, 152 Faust, 2, 102 finality, 86, 89–90 Fisher, Margery, 8, 17, 25, 38, 42, 54, 178, 180–84 flashback, 118 flexibility, 90, 140, 142, 144 Flieger, Verlyn, 64, 121, 122, 178, 184, 188 flora, 9, 11, 14, 48, 50 Folcwine, 68 formulaic, 93, 143 fortune, 34, 76 Frankenstein, 41 Freud, Sigmund, 15 Frodo, 11, 28, 65, 99–100, 122 connection with readers, 20, 36 journey to Mordor, 32–33, 38, 44–46, 54, 69, 73–74, 87, 103, 133 language of, 144 relationship with Sam, 71, 100, 111, 119–20 see also Bilbo, birthdays, Christlike, love, Ring of Power



204

INDEX

Gaffer Gamgee, 31, 120 Galadriel, 11, 17, 35, 109–10, 127 mirror of, 103, 122, 173 Gandalf, 17, 35, 65, 98, 145 magic of, 31, 37, 61, 101, 114 Garbowski, Christopher, 41, 56, 78, 183–85 Garm, 23 Gasque, Thomas J., 14, 20, 21, 29, 39, 179–81, 183 Gee, Henry, 48, 75, 105, 184–85, 187 generalization, 55–57, 93, 159–61, 171 Genesis, 2, 117 genre, 1 geographical bias, 52 giant, 120, 126 Gilgamesh, 2 Gimli, 17, 46, 87, 110, 128, 159 Glorifindel, 81 Goblin King, 17 goblins, 23, 56, 61, 114, 131, 136, 149, 151 language of, 133, 143–44 Goldberry, 37, 60, 62–63, 109–10, 126, 143 Goldstein, Lisa, 85, 86, 186 golf, 118 Gollum, 20–21, 23, 58, 102, 136–37 language of, 128, 131, 144 similarities with Frodo and Bilbo, 98, 103–4 Gondor, 37, 60, 68, 78, 155 Gospels, 8 Graham, Billy, 35 Great Expectations, 95 Green Dragon Inn, 26 Green, Roger Lancelyn, 42, 69, 183, 185 Grey Havens, 31, 59

Grond, 117 Guardian, 1 Guthwine, 117 Gymnich, Marion, 124, 146, 188–89 Haber, Karen, 185–86, 188 Halfelven, 14 Haradrim, 14 Harry Potter, 95 Harshaw, Ruth, 33, 182 Helm’s Deep, 63 Hemingway, Ernest, 34 Henry, Judy, 4, 177 Hentoff, Nat, 2, 176 Hercules, 118 Hey Diddle Diddle, 116 Hillegas, Mark R. 2, 175–78 history, of characters, 79, 84, 108 Farmer Giles of Ham, 146–47 Middle–earth, 13, 32, 72–73, 86, 154 Tree of Tales, 94 Hitchcock, Alfred, 145 The Hobbit, luck, 76 narrative of, 7, 25, 39, 95–96, 99 as preface to The Lord of the Rings, 21, 72 seasons, 59–60 style, 114, 125, 140, 146 hobbits, creation of, 19, 130, 152 domesticity of, 52–53, 58, 75, 81, 84, 111 familiarity of, 13–14, 17, 25 language of, 144–45 magic of, 27, 31, 37–38 perspective of, 13, 21, 31, 45, 47, 78, 129 see also birthdays, childlike, dreams, down-to-earthiness, Shire, water Homer, 116–17, 136



Frost, Robert, 167 Fuller, Edmund, 2, 3, 8, 14, 16, 25, 67, 159, 175–81, 185, 190

205

INDEX

homosexuality, 111 Honnegar, Thomas, 187–88 Houses of Healing, 78 Huckleberry Finn, 95 Hughes, Daniel, 2, 19, 24, 42, 175–76, 180–81, 183 Hughes, Richard, 2, 3, 16, 42, 54, 175, 177, 180, 183–84 Humpty Dumpty, 116, 123 Huxley, Francis, 2, 4, 19, 176–77, 180 identity crisis, 96–98 imagery, 132, 137, 165, 169, 171 of Middle-earth, 138–39 see also metaphor imagination, of characters, 28, 107 Middle-earth, 27, 42, 107, 166 of reader, 27, 11–12, 94, 148–49, 161, 168–73 of Tolkien, 3, 7, 9–10, 94 see also invitational implicit, 7, 16, 22, 62, 64, 95, 103, 108, 112–13 implicit possibility, 95, 103–4, 113, 168, 170–72 incremental technique, 80 individuation, 48, 104–5, 108 inevitability, 76–80, 82, 84, 89–90, 171 inflections, 152–53 initiation ritual, 96–97 see also language innovative, 4 inorganic, 42, 45, 49, 54 insight, 7, 15 see also perspective integrity, 14, 50, 77, 102, 140–42, 171 interjections, 149, 155 internal consistency, 13 internalized, 3, 30, 38 introspection, 7, 118 inverting perspective, 163 investigator, 98–99

invisibility, 28, 32, 37, 56, 173 invitational, imagination, 10, 161, 173 prose, 7–8, 34, 43, 159, 166, 169 reader, 115, 118, 129, 147–48, 169, 173 subcreation, 28, 93–94, 150, 172 irony, 4, 52, 90, 115, 119–21, 123, 171 Irwin, W.R., 2, 175–76 Isaacs, Neil D., 2, 175–76, 178–80, 183, 188 Isengard, 63, 134–35 Isuldur, 145 Ithilien, 59–60, 62, 119 Jackson, Peter, 9 James Bond, 2 James, Henry, 2, 8 Jason, 118 Jeffrey, David L., 128, 188 Johnston, George Burke, 2, 175 Jones, Leslie Ellen, 36, 182 Joyce, James, 2, 94, 169 Jung, Carl, 95, 121, 186 Kafka, Franz, 2 kaleidoscopic, 3 Keats, John, 2, 146 Keenan, Hugh T., 42, 57, 59, 64, 183–84 Kelly, Mary Quella, 9, 178 Kierkegaard, Søren, 116 Kilby, Clyde S., 2–3, 8, 10, 14, 31, 42, 176, 178–79, 181, 183 kinetic, 46–47, 133 King Lear, 84, 116, 147 Kirk, E., 145, 146, 189 Kocher, Paul, 3–4, 23, 161, 178–79, 181, 190 Kreeft, Peter, 115, 117, 121, 129, 187–89 language, 121, 123–24, 128–30, 142–46, 158, 166, 170–71 agricultural, 30, 48



206

archaic, 85 style, 54, 75 Lawrence, D.H., 2, 169 Lazarus, 66 Leaf by Niggle, 74, 86, 91 Legolas, 28, 134, 159 LeGuin, Ursula, 71, 75, 122, 140, 185, 188–89 Levitin, Alexis, 8, 178 Lewis, C.S., 2, 9, 16, 17, 175, 178, 180 lifelike, 43–46, 48, 55 light-minded lore, 118 liminal, 17, 34, 122, 162 linguistic styles, 78 literalization, 155–56 literary wisdom, 167–68 litotes, 166 little, 36 Lobdell, Jared C., 42, 122, 130, 137, 183, 188–89 loci of implication, 150 Lonely Mountain, 49, 139 Lord of the Nazgul, 17, 57 The Lord of the Rings, 1–2, 34, 57–58, 71–72, 78–79, 88–90, 113, 167 language in, 140, 142, 146 as literary classic, 7–8, 169, 173 opinions about, 4, 16, 93–94 reader development, 112 wildlife, 42–43, 59, 61, 63 Lórien, 77, 79 Lothlórien, 60, 72, 89, 128 love, 35–36, 39, 109–11 luck, 16, 34, 76, 79–80, 85, 97 Lyrical Ballads, 23 magic, faith, 39 of language, 23, 40–43, 124, 130, 146–49 ordinary, 5, 7, 27–28, 30–32, 39, 170 Malory, 2, 117

207

Marlowe, 2 maturation, see character, maturation McMahon, Jennifer, 42, 44, 50–51, 57, 183–84 McWilliams, Wilson C., 27, 181 meaning, 147–52, 154, 156, 164–65, 168, 171–73 meditation, 151 melodramatic, 41, 159 Melville, 2 Merry, 15, 30, 62–63, 66, 78, 101, 132, 145 message, 168 metaphor, 5, 7, 57, 134, 165, 169 dead, 54–55 of characters, 62–63, 91, 101, 144 of Middle-earth, 30, 33, 38, 46, 49, 139, 170 mobile, 88, 138 see also poetry, pun metonymy, 165 Michelangelo, 94 middle class, 19, 25 Middle-earth, 32, 35, 51–52, 107–9 creation of, 7–12, 29, 38–39, 42–48, 72 creatures of, 17–18, 21–25, 112–13, 147, 161 tales of, 119, 121–22 Milbank, Alison, 109, 187 Miller, David M., 2–3, 14, 111, 159, 176, 179, 187, 190 Milton, 117 mimetic diction, 125–26 Minas Tirith, 105–6, 123 Mirkwood, 31, 45, 49–50, 53, 55, 81, 129 mirror, 170 mirroring, 98, 103, 163 Misty Mountains, 58, 61, 81 Mitchison, Naomi, 2, 11, 16, 42, 175, 179–80, 183 Mithrandir, 101



INDEX

INDEX

mock epic, 118–19 Modern Painters, 51 Monsman, Gerald, 2, 8, 43, 64, 175–76, 178, 183–84 Moore, Harry T., 2–3, 16, 176–77 Moorman, Charles, 2, 9, 176, 178 moral, 20–21, 35–36, 53–54, 56, 123, 128, 168 moral directionality, 52–54, 56 morality of geography, 51–54, 61 Mordor, 44, 63, 78, 87, 102, 116, 164–65 Moria, 54, 58, 72, 79, 81, 87, 159 motivation, 15–16, 121 motives, 16–17, 35 Mt. Doom, 12, 71, 113 mundane, 19, 23, 27–28, 31, 39, 68, 148, 170 myopic, 25–26, 52 mythology, 10, 31 naïve hero, 99 see also unlikely hero names, 22–23, 25, 93, 97, 108, 117, 128–31, 152 naming as creation, 121, 127–31 narrative, of Middle-earth, 42–44, 48, 59–60, 108 Tolkien’s style, 2, 4–5, 8, 14–16, 29–32, 71–72, 76–79 narrator, 10, 118 Narsil, 117 natural, 7, 33, 72–73 Middle-earth, 25, 44, 48, 83, 171 Nazgul, 24, 26 see also Black Riders Necromancer, 114 neologisms, 151–54, 172 New Criticism, 128 New York Times Book Review, 3 Niggle, 76, 103 Noel, Ruth S., 124, 131, 188–89 nonsense, 147–51, 166, 172

Norse, 32, 103 Norwood, William D., 2, 176 nostalgic, 153 nothingness, 160–61, 163–65 numinous, 7, 34, 36 Odyssey, 2, 118 ogre, 23 Old Forest, 29–30, 45, 87, 134 old grey mare, 18 Old Man Willow, 62, 66, 86–87, 108–9, 130 Oliver Twist, 169 omen, 123 One Ring, see Ring of Power, rings “On Fairy-Stories,” 41 onomatopoeia, 129–33, 139 onwardness, 73–74, 86, 90, 100, 112, 158, 169 open-ended, 8, 28, 56, 76, 86 Orcrist, 47, 117 orcs, 14, 22, 55, 157 attack of, 65, 81 description of, 16, 23, 126, 146 imagery, 134, 136 language of, 130, 143 ordinary, 14, 19–20, 25, 27–28, 170 organic, creation, 91 development, 44, 48–49, 62, 102–3, 171 imagery, 59, 61, 171 language, 145, 152 Lord of the Rings, 113, 124 Middle-earth, 42, 63, 149, 168 origin, 54 Oromë, 10, 67 Osaki, B. Steve, 41–42, 44, 50–51, 57, 183–84 Osgiliath, 63 palantír, 31, 64, 103 palpable prose, 127, 132 parable, 2, 35, 64, 78, 91, 105, 168, 171



208

Paradise Lost, 2 paradox, in Middle-earth, 8–10, 13, 33, 38, 42, 54, 75, 151, 162 narrative, 90 Tolkien’s fiction, 3–4, 83, 86, 163, 171 parallelism, 79–82, 84, 113, 141, 154 Parker, Douglass, 2–4, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19, 26, 44, 176–81, 183 pathetic fallacy, 49–52, 54–55 Pearce, Joseph, 1, 36, 175, 182 Pelennor Fields, 75 perception, 7, 24, 133–34, 152, 171 perseverance, 73 see also tenacity persistence, 74 persona, 25, 145 personifying, 12, 18, 24–25, 30, 47–48, 50, 57 perspective, 10, 24, 145, 157–58, 166, 172 Peter Rabbit, 2, 19 Phillips, Julie, 108–9, 187 philology, 115, 146–47, 154 Piers Plowman, 117 Pippin, 11, 61–62, 64–67, 87, 90, 100–1, 103, 120 plausibility, 14, 32, 34, 42, 47, 49, 77, 118 poetry, 140–44 polls, 1, 7 popularity, 3, 7 possible, 9, 47 postmodernist, 119, 168 potential, 19, 30, 32, 34 Pound, 2 prefiguring, 78–81 Pre-Raphaelite, 4 private eye, 99 progression, 48, 64, 77, 107, 114, 120, 154, 171 prophecy, 120–23, 171 see also augury

209

prose, 3, 7–8, 17, 37–39, 41, 54, 56, 64, 66, 70, 139 imagery in, 64 magic of, 39, 41 semantic capacity, 115 Tolkien’s style of, 37–38, 54–57, 114, 124, 139 velocity of, 88 see also breathless prose, invitational Prose Edda, 2 Protestant, 35 Proust, 2 psychology, 14–15, 21, 28, 54, 77, 168 pun, 24, 37–38, 115, 124–27, 147, 150, 169, 171 quest, 109–10, 112, 171 Bilbo, 53, 99 end of, 69, 89 Frodo, 58–59 imagery, 74 rhetorical, 57, 149 theme, 103 see also Bilbo, Frodo Quickbeam, 139 Raffel, Burton, 2–4, 18, 54, 55–56, 160, 175–77, 180, 184, 190 reader development, 112 reader participation, 7, 24, 171–72 allusions/hints, 112, 115–16 intimate, 29, 86, 94 senses, 159–61 sleight of hand, 148, 158 subcreation, 28, 168 reader response, 8, 30, 33, 41, 72, 83, 94, 112, 161, 169 Ready, William, 2, 3–4, 10, 11, 14, 19–20, 22, 38, 42, 145, 176–83, 189 realism, 7, 10, 13, 24, 27–8, 41, 111, 138, 158–59



INDEX

INDEX

reality, believability, 42–44 cross-referencing, 11, 13, 27, 40, 94 deeper, 5, 28, 38, 169–70 dreams, 121–22 fundamental, 15 imagery, 33, 135, 137–39 magic, 30–33 personal, 167, 171–73 psychological, 50 unseen/subtle, 12, 25, 35, 39 verbal, 127–29, 134, 145–46, 152 realizing abstraction, 56–57 reciprocal creation, 52 recurrence, 73, 81–84, 86, 164 Red Book of Westmarch, 90 redundancy, 151 refrain, 81 Reilly, Robert J., 2, 175–76 reincarnation, 65–67, 70 religion, 10, 35–36, 168 resurrection, 55, 58–59, 61–70, 78, 113 return, 59, 65, 69–70, 79 reversibility, 102 rhetoric, 43, 75, 122, 148, 158, 166, 170, 172 allusion, 116 character change, 98, 102 imagery, 64 subcreation, 94 rhetorical negation, 157, 164–66 rhythms, 57, 59–62, 71, 77–78, 82, 84, 140, 171 riddles, 15–16, 76, 80–81, 99, 101, 147–49 Riessar, Max, 51, 184 Ring of Power, Bilbo, 97, 106, 114 destruction of, 12 evil of, 35, 109, 163, 165 Frodo, 100 Gollum, 21, 108 Sam, 65, 104–5, 107

ring resistance, 97–98, 105–7 rings, 83–84, 105 ringwraiths, 14, 23–24, 51, 53, 89, 105, 164 ritual, 80–81, 89, 97 Rivendell, 37, 77, 81, 84 roads, 29, 31, 46, 56, 74, 76, 156 Rohan, 63, 130 Riders of, 14 Roosevelt, Teddy, 166 rope, 79, 123 Rorshach inkblot, 169 Rosebury, Brian, 9, 13, 14, 16, 52, 78, 86, 121, 122, 129, 144–45, 157, 178–80, 184–86, 188–90 Rose Cotton, 59, 70, 110 Ruskin, John, 50–51 Sale, Roger, 2, 25, 39, 41, 54, 59, 176, 181, 183–84 Sam, characteristics of, 17, 20, 36, 38 family, 59, 69–70, 109–13 journey to Mordor, 44–45, 73–74, 79, 84, 87, 103, 164 language of, 126, 131–32, 140, 144, 148 relationship with Gollum, 15, 21 see also awakenings, Frodo, Ring of Power Sammath Naur, 58 Sander, David, 38, 182 Saruman, characteristics of, 17, 100, 137 death of, 89 fall of, 102, 106 language of, 143 Sauron, 17, 83, 105, 131, 143 Schroth, R.A., 3, 177 scientific, 48, 51 sea, 63, 67, 69, 85, 103 search for self, 97, 99, 102–3, 106, 112 Secondary Belief, 9 secondary literature, 3



210

secondary world, 7, 9, 25, 33, 38, 170 semantic capacity, 138, 146, 154 sense, 147–48, 150–51, 159–60 sentience, 41, 45–46, 49–50, 57 serpent, 136–38 sex, 71, 101, 109–111 Shadowfax, 31, 66, 137 shadows, 51, 53, 57, 65, 67, 84, 137, 161–62 see also darkness Shakespeare, William, 2, 116, 158 Shelley, Mary, 2 Shelob, 17, 22, 58, 87, 90, 111, 135 Sherlock Holmes, 99 Shippey, Tom, 3–4, 7–8, 12, 16, 23–25, 27–28, 34, 41–42, 115, 116, 146, 177–83, 187–89 Shire, critics disagree, 9 features of, 26, 29, 52, 95 journey from, 87, 95, 121 language of, 144 return to, 69–70, 100–101 see also hobbits, quest Siewers, Alfred K., 52–53, 184 significance, 149–51, 165, 170 The Silent Watchers, 31 The Silmarillion, 21, 39, 117 simplicity, 21, 33, 71, 90, 95, 108, 157 Sklar, Robert, 2, 10, 32, 42, 175, 177, 182–83 Smaug, 53, 58, 61, 80–82, 96, 126, 147 see also dragons, darkness Sméagol, 21, 104, 128, 145, 155 see also Gollum Smith, Eddy Mark, 73, 99, 107, 112, 185, 187 Smith, Janet Adam, 72, 108, 128, 154, 185, 187–88, 190 Smith of Wootton Major, 119 Smol, Anna, 109, 187 Snowmane, 67 Snowmen, 14

211

Socialist, 71 sorcerer’s stone, 148 soul stretching, 169, 171 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 2–3, 4, 9–10, 42, 176–78, 183 specificity, 160–61, 172 Spenglerian, 2 Spenser, 2 Spillane, Mickey, 99 spring, 57, 59–63, 67–70, 80, 105, 112, 135, 165, 171 Stanton, Michael N., 42, 44, 47, 52, 61, 183–84 stars, 136–37 stereotype, 17–18, 104 Stevens, C., 11, 179 Stimpson, Catherine R., 2, 4, 9, 17, 20, 32, 42, 52, 54, 57, 111, 130, 145, 175–78, 180, 182–84, 187, 189 Sting, 117, 126 Stormcrow, 101 Straight, Michael, 3, 177 Strider, 17, 81, 101, 128–30 see also Aragorn Strong, L.A.C., 3, 177 style, artistic, 5 levels of, 36–37 meaning, 33–34 Middle-earth, 49, 123, 144–45, 155–56 prose, 8, 17–18, 41–43, 54–55, 75, 86, 114, 158–59 subcreation, 35, 41, 49, 94, 111, 146 see also invitational, reader participation subtlety, 5, 15, 28, 35–36, 55, 81, 138, 158 suggestivity, 94, 111, 170–71 summer, 57, 59, 112 sun, 44, 53, 60–68, 164 superficiality, 3 supernatural, 8, 12, 23, 25, 31–34, 38, 112 see also numinous



INDEX

INDEX

surprise, 76, 90 Sword of Elendil, 128 symbol, 172 synesthesia, 133 syntactic urgency, 87–88 see also breathless prose syntax, 115, 139–40, 143, 154 tale, 32, 38–40, 57, 72–75, 81, 94–5, 107–8 The Tale of Years, 32 tangible, 44, 47, 56, 67 Ted, 26 The Tempest, 155 see also Shakespeare tenacity, 73–74, 90, 112, 124, 158 see also perseverance Tennyson, 2 Théoden, 10, 15, 65, 76, 89, 138 theology, 34–36 “there and back again,” 69, 90, 95, 103, 113 Third Age, 11–12, 14, 57, 73, 89, 124, 135 Thomas, Paul Edmund, 10, 178 Thomson, George H., 2, 176 Thorin Oakenshield, 22, 34, 98, 131–32, 160 Through the Looking-Glass, 123 time, 16, 56, 73, 85–89, 164 To Kill a Mockingbird, 95 Tolkien, J.R.R., 1–5, 7, 32–35, 39, 72, 115, 145–46 Tom Bombadil, 11, 65–66, 110, 145 house of, 60–61, 77 language of, 130, 140, 143, 147 ring resistance, 83, 105–6 Tom Swift and his Magic Runabout, 2 topography, 43–46, 52–54, 61, 129 torment, 119 Town Hole, 66, 130 Treebeard, 17, 41, 69, 91, 107–8, 140, 145–46 see also Fangorn Forest

trolls, 61, 80–81, 99, 117, 136, 149 language of, 143 Turner, Allan, 107, 109, 113, 142, 144, 185–86, 189 ubi sunt, 85 unassuming, 15, 28, 30 understatement, 119–20, 166, 169, 172–73 unlikely hero, 95, 100 unobtrusiveness, 16 unpredictability, 90 Urang, Gunnar, 3, 8, 25, 42, 65, 177–78, 181, 183, 185 Uttermost West, 31 Vaccaro, Christopher, 105, 187 Valar, battle of the, 10 vanish, 37, 64, 156 variation, 14 verbal magic, 124, 130 Verdi, 2 verisimilitude, 10 verse, 75, 140, 150 see also poetry, prose visionary, 71, 83, 85, 91 vitality, 41–42, 51, 54–55, 57, 63, 84, 154, 158, 170, 172 of Middle-earth, 7, 41–43, 49, 57, 169–70 of Tolkien’s prose, 54–55, 57, 75, 84, 154, 158 of wildlife, 30, 47, 63, 91 vulnerability, 17 Wagner, 2 waking, 61, 65, 69, 121 Walbridge, Ean F., 3, 24, 42, 177, 181, 183 War and Peace, 2 wargs, 23, 56, 79 water, 61–64, 67–70, 144 weather, 11, 30, 63, 76–77, 123, 135 Weinreich, Frank, 187 Westron, 142–44



212

Whitman, Walt, 2 Wilde, Oscar, 2 Wilson, Edmund, 2, 3, 4, 16, 17, 24, 28, 159, 176–77, 180–81, 190 winter, 59, 62, 68, 171 Witch-king, 127 Withywindle, 15 wizards, 21, 29, 31, 52, 67, 136 Wood, Michael, 2, 3, 4, 8, 25, 38, 107, 111, 175–78, 181–82, 187 Wood, Ralph, 35, 36, 182 Woolf, Virginia, 169 Wootton Major, 103, 135

213

words, 115, 119, 121–27, 129–31, 139, 146, 151–54, 169 in dialogue, 132 meanings of, 128, 172 Wordsworth, William, 2, 23, 27 Wormtongue, 102, 134, 138 Woses, 14, 81, 126, 133, 136 Zimbardo, Rose A., 2, 175–76, 178–80, 183, 188 Zimmer, Mary E., 123, 124, 130, 188–89



INDEX

The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style

Power of style. berlin stylewriting

The cognitive style of power point

Prose

The Prose of the World

The Status of Style

The elements of style

The Elements of Style

Varieties of mathematical prose

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking

The elements of style

The Significance of Style

The Magical Worlds of Narnia

Greek Prose Style (Briston Classical Press Advanced Language)

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Magical Battle of Britain

The Prose Marmion

Practice of Magical Evocation

Poemes prose

Uncollected Prose

Weapons of Magical Destruction

Magical Worlds of Fantasy

Uncollected Prose

Uncollected Prose

The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture

The Magical Christmas Cat

The Magical Christmas Cat

Style

The Elements of C++ Style

The Development of Chess Style

The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style

Power of style. berlin stylewriting

The cognitive style of power point

Prose

The Prose of the World

The Status of Style

The elements of style

The Elements of Style

Varieties of mathematical prose

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking

The elements of style

The Significance of Style

The Magical Worlds of Narnia

Greek Prose Style (Briston Classical Press Advanced Language)

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Magical Battle of Britain

The Prose Marmion

Practice of Magical Evocation

Poemes prose

Uncollected Prose

Weapons of Magical Destruction

Magical Worlds of Fantasy

Uncollected Prose

Uncollected Prose

The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture

The Magical Christmas Cat

The Magical Christmas Cat

Style

The Elements of C++ Style

The Development of Chess Style

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