The World of the Hobbits
By C. B. COX
NAUSEATING Billy Bunter escapades in the world of Merlin and Sir Lancelot or a twentieth-century heroic romance rivalling Spen- ser and Ariosto—readers of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings hold extreme views as to the fitting description for this saga of elves, dwarfs, ores and hobbits. It's usually agreed that The Hobbit, in which Bilbo helps to overcome the dragon, Smaug, and recover the dwarfs' treasure, makes an exciting children's story, but when Tolkien embarked on his adult, epic-length narrative of how Frodo, Bilbo's heir, journeyed to Mount Doom to destroy the evil Sauron, he 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, finding in the story, as C. S. Lewis says, an 'almost endless diversity of scenes and characters—comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic.' For the faithful, this revised edition,* with a new index of the names of persons and places, will be a valued possession.
The opponents usually can't stand the hobbits —Frodo, his servant, Sam Gamgee, and their companions, Merry and Pippin. Hobbits are small, good-natured creatures; they laugh a great deal, and love smoking, eating and drinking. After Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday, the gar- deners remove the guests in wheel-barrows. In their home, the Shire, they eat six meals a day, and during the most terrifying adventures they are always thinking of their stomachs. For many readers the hobbit-world seems to confirm their worst suspicions about Oxford senior common room life, the comfy, jolly, secure atmosphere from which this romance emerged. The hobbits are like boy scouts, with Frodo as superboy. After they have resisted an attack from the Black Riders, Sam sees the traitor, Bill: 'With a sud- den flick, quick as lightning, an apple left his hand and hit Bill square on the nose.' Hobbits do marry, and at the end Sam is left in Dickensian domestic bliss, but sex plays almost no part in The Lord of the Rings; this is the main reason for its inferiority to Spenser's Faerie Queene. There is nothing to rival Spenser's brilliant evocation of lust, as Sir Guyon undergoes the temptation of Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss. In Tolkien, when Faramir kisses the White Lady of Rohan, it's as if he were embracing the snow queen herself.
Tolkien began to write his romance in the 1930s, but the main part was written during the war. In 1944, as Frodo tackled the journey to Mordor, Tolkien was sending the chapters as a serial to his son, Christopher, then in South Africa in the RAF. Many readers have tried to link the story with the war, and to draw obvious parallels between Sauron and Hitler. In the fore- word, Tolkien rejects these interpretations, and tells us : 'I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.' The key to his purpose in The * THE LORD OF THE RINGS. By J. R. R. Tolkien. Revised Edition. (Allen and Unwin, three volumes, 25s. each.) Lord of the Rings, and to its very considerable virtues, is to be found in his essay on fairy stories, written in the same period (1938-39), when The Lord of the Rings was beginning to unroll itself.
For Tolkien, fairy stories are an important form of adult art. He treats with scorn the Oxford don who welcomed the proximity of car factories and the roar of traffic because it brought the- university into 'contact with real life.' In fact, modern robot-factories are a pro- duct of human fantasy, more horrifying and 'unreal' than much in fairy stories: 'The notion that motor-cars are more "alive" than, say, cen- taurs or dragons is curious; that they are more "real" than, say, horses is pathetically absurd.' In the twentieth century the poetic imagination is usually said to be ordering and valuing our actual experience; for Tolkien equally important is the power of the mind to conceive other worlds—to imagine a green sun, for example. Our delight in such fairy stories leads us away from romantic concern with the self and personal fulfilment to a simple, humble pleasure in other forms of life.
The greatest fairy stories touch upon our religious sense itself, the longing for the hidden paradise. And the association of fantasy with real experience can reawaken our responses to the marvels of this world: 'It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.' So in Rivendell, the elf-king- dom, Frodo wakes after his illness in a strange room: 'He lay a little while longer looking at patches of sunlight on the wall, and listening to the sound of a waterfall.' This re-creation of the wonder of simple, human pleasures is one of the great virtues of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's similes fOr the experiences of the hobbits are usually not eccentric or unexpected, but taken from everyday life. When the hobbits first dine with elves, 'there was bread, surpassing the savour of a fair white loaf to one who is starv- ing; . . he drained a cup that was filled with a fragrant draught, cool as a clear fountain. . .
- Tolkien argues that fairy stories satisfy one of our most primitive desires—to break down separateness and lack of communication between human beings and other earthly things—trees, rivers, birds. In The Lord of the Rings he creates his own figures of myth, like living embodiments of Nature. Among his greatest creations is Tree- beard, the Ent, a slow-moving, gentle giant of a living tree. Equally striking is Tom Bombadil, a Falstaffian figure, as rich and vital as earth itself; he whistles 'like a tree-full of birds,' and sings clear and loud wherever he goes: 'In his hands he carried on a large leaf as-on a tray a small pile of white water-lilies.' The Lord of the Rings includes an astonishing array of such creations—as if Tolkien had added new creatures, evil and good, to the world we know: Gollum, Barrow-wights, the Balrog, Shelob the giant-spider, the Ring-Wraiths. In reading him our pleasure is as if we discovered a new Australia, full of strange, unknown plants and animals. This power to relate fantasy and reality, and to maintain an overall consistency, is one of his major triumphs. For this purpose, the maps and the appendices on language and customs are essential features.
Much of the action is taken up with great journeys over wild, inhospitable country, often vividly depicted, and I think it's possible to tire of these. But in general, Tolkien has the virtues of the great story-tellers—quick-moving action, a lucid, all-purpose style, and a wealth of inci- dent and characters. The main protagonists emerge distinctively—the gentle-tongued, evil Saruman, who `has a mind of metal and wheels,' Gandalf, the white magician, behind whose care- worn face 'there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing.' The actions—minds at war over great distances as the eye of Sauron reaches out to control his enemies, the ring whose abnormal powers inevit- ably corrupt the possessor—may have no specific allegorical meaning, but create powerfully the war between good and evil.
Tolkien's supreme achievement is the paradise of Lothldrien, where the travellers recuperate after Gandalf's apparent death in conflict with the Balrog. In his essay on fairy stories, Tolkien talks of moments of beauty which come, like a sudden and miraculous grace, giving us 'a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.' So in Loden, presided over by the Lady Galadriel, ancient things still live in the waking world. The elves inhabit huge trees, their many-tiered branches standing up like towers in the twilight, full of countless lights, gleaming green and gold and silver. As the wind blows through the branches, Frodo hears 'sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth.' At such moments, Tolkien offers something very rare in contemporary prose—a touch of vision.
Perhaps modern literary critics are too utilitarian in their demands, too desirous of valuations that apply to life. What are Tolkien's values, asked one commentator, and decided that he stood for bravery. But in fact the enemy forces seem almost as courageous as the hobbits. If we're to talk of The Lord of the Rings in this way, then I think its great value is friendship, a word little used in recent discussions of the moral value of literature. When Gandalf returns, apparently from the dead, his friends are over- come with joy. The discovery that he lives brings that catch in the breath which Tolkien describes. Although they are in danger, they devote a proper amount of time to this 'meeting of parted friends.' The dignity of human relationships is fostered by the many ceremonies, the love of genealogies, which link together past and present, the gifts at parting, the gracious manners, the songs (sometimes a little hackneyed) which celebrate each stage of the action.
It's been said that Sam's affection for Frodo approaches the homosexual, but this seems to me a trivial matter. At the end, as Frodo and Gan- dalf begin their journey towards death, among the friends exists a love to which sex is irrele- vant. And the final catch in the breath comes as their journey over the sea brings them to an ultimate destiny : 'And 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.' In passages such as this Tolkien helps us poor benighted travellers in an industrial age to bear the notes of the horn of -Elfland: he comes to us some ancient king bearing a magic-gift of great. price— The Lord of the Rings.
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