Was Tolkien Really All That?

Confession: Back in 1996, I had the hugest crush on Kerri Strug

Reading:

• "Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?", by William Gay
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold"

Revising:

• "The Revenant"

Future Projects:

• Dairhenien's Library - Development
  
• Floorcraft - First rewrite of 1-5, first draft of 6-8
• Ferian Fetlock - "Ferian Fetlock Takes a Wife."
  
• "Motley" - Expansion
• "Fireworks and Earthworks" - 5% into first draft
  
• Untitled School Mistress Story

Unpublished Stories/Status (in chronological order of completion of first draft)

• "Pictures of the Old Port" - 5th Draft, Unsubmitted
• "What Price Stamps" - 3rd Draft, Submitted to The American Drivel Review, July 30th, 2008
  
• "The Frost Fugling" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Black Pudding" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Cora and the Sea" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Motley" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Leaves and Sunsets" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "A Happy Ending" - 1st Draft, Unsubmitted
• "The Revenant" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Illuminated" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "A Cup of Coffee" / "Morning Tea" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to Tea: A Magazine, July 29th, 2008
• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Hattie Donnelly's Favorite Doll" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to 24 Hour Short Story Contest, July 27th, 2008

So far, so good in my quest to update daily. Sure, I finished reading a short story and nothing more, but it's a start, right?

That was an odd story, by the way--"My Brother Eli." It's a long, rambling narrative about a disaffected Jewish intellectual, who writes long, rambling narratives about disaffected Jewish intellectuals. If the writer himself is a disaffected Jewish intellectual, well, then you can consider my mind well and truly blown.

Seriously, it was an okay story, but nothing special for me. The ending was a depressing mire which managed to affect me not at all, which I think is a testament to how little I connected with the characters.

But tonight, I'm writing about Tolkien. I heard a question raised the other day on an episode of Chicken Fried Radio: was Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien in general, really all that great? Or is it just the same as the usual, run-of-the-mill fantasy offering you see nowadays?

Well, even if it were all the same, the fact that it was first makes it special. Very few authors can claim to have defined a genre. Wilkie Collins did it with the detective novel in The Moonstone, and P.G. Wodehouse did it with the romantic comedy, a genre that he pioneered in musical theater, and which only later made its modern transition to the silver screen.

Yes, virtually all of modern fantasy can trace its roots back to Tolkien. And no, he was not thoroughly original--he stole from mythology with both hands. But in order to really judge him, first you must ask what he set out to do.

His original purpose was to write a mythology for England. He was a student of mythology, and was very familiar with Latin, Greek, Germanic, and Scandinavian myths. He knew the Irish ones, he knew the Welsh ones. He spoke their languages and could get inside their heads. But he was disappointed, because England did not have the same mythological tradition as the surrounding nations. St. George and the Dragon, sure, and Beowulf, but what else?

So he set about to make such a mythology. To do so, he drew on the surrounding traditions, blending Finnish stories with Welsh ones with Germanic ones. His purpose was, no more and no less, to create an entire fictional body of mythology which, and here's the tricky part, could be said to have informed the extant English texts, and to have modeled the English character. In other words, he wasn't concerned so much about making a good story, but rather was concerned about getting the story "right."

The project drew him in deeper and deeper. Being a professor of linguistics, Tolkien recognized how much language informed culture, and so he created a language of his own. Two, actually; a high speech that he initially called the "Elf Latin," and a more common speech for everyday use.

Of course, the elves were effectively immortal, so their language wouldn't really change. How did the difference come about? To explain that, he needed history, and so he began to write it.

The general themes were constant throughout, although the specifics are maddeningly fluid. Names shift and change, although the underlying characters they describe emerge almost from the beginning. From the creation of the world to the sailing of the last Elven ship from Middle-Earth, Tolkien's "Mythology for England" becomes a saga spanning generations.

You remember that Hobbit book he wrote? Yeah, that was just a bedtime story he made up for his kids, and wrote down for the hell of it. He sent it to his publisher as a triviality, and it became quite popular. The fact that it was set, at least nominally, in the world of his mythology was just laziness, really. He was constantly inventing and reinventing that world, so the place names and background would naturally come to mind in an ad-libbed story. (The history of The Hobbit is actually more complicated than that, but you get the idea.)

The Hobbit was so popular that the publisher demanded a sequel, but the original lighthearted return to that world mutated even as it was being written. The ties to the world of his mythology were too strong to break, and soon, they took over completely. And what was left was the perfect juxtaposition of the simple and direct Hobbit, with whom any Englishman could relate, with the deeper world of mythology.

The reader, through the hobbits eyes, could experience that world as a tantalizing place, always just out of reach. It was something to be aspired to, something to be marvelled at, something to be a part of yet always separate from. The reader got to experience the last taste of something that would never come again, got to witness the world becoming normal, but feel the last cool breath of magic.

And it was a magic the reader could take with him, because nothing in the real world contradicted it. The mythology could have been true, it could have, and the world in which we live is just the mundane remnant of a grander time. There is regret tied up in that feeling, oh yes, but the lingering thought that what was magical once might one day be magical again.

This all happened by accident, by the way.

That's not to denigrate Tolkien at all, but his mind was set firmly in the elder days, and could only be drawn out with difficulty. In his later days, he could not be separated from it, and had he lived 10,000 years, his story would only have become more detailed, and never more complete.

The Lord of the Rings is a fortuitous confluence of narrative skill, education, and a lifelong obsession. It could very easily have sucked donkey balls. But it didn't, and a genre of fiction is the result. If four decades of Tolkien's followers have dampened our appreciation of the original, we need only consider the legacy it inspired to truly judge its power.

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
• Pending: 3