Tree by Tolkien Read online

  The influence of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval poetry on Tolkien is quite clear. To begin with, there is his strong tendency to a backward-looking nostalgia, derived in part from Chesterton and Belloc, and their 'two acres and a cow' Distributism. (One should remember that one of Chesterton's best books is on Chaucer.) Next there is the pleasure in the sensual quality of life in the Middle Ages, as portrayed in its poems—great sides of beef cooking over open fires, magnificent feasts, colourful festivities, and so on. (Mervyn Peake is also fascinated by this world in his Titus Groan trilogy.) Finally, there is the element of savagery and wildness: the great battles, the burning of Njal, the bleak open moorlands and the lakes that hold monsters like Grendel (perhaps the creepiest monster in literature outside Frankenstein). It is very much an idealised, Chestertonian mediaevalism, rather like that of T. H. White. From The Lord of the Rings, one would gather that Tolkien's interest in the Middle Ages is literary and idealistic, not precise and detailed, like that of G. G. Coulton and Huizinga. And it could be argued that the battle scenes of The Lord of the Rings spoil the total effect, that they seem to be part of a completely different book. They certainly interrupt the swift flow of the story. When I first read The Lord of the Rings I skipped the whole of the fifth book in order to find out what happens after Frodo is captured by the Orcs, and when I later read it aloud to my children, they again insisted on skipping it. On this occasion, I returned to the fifth book after I had got Frodo and Sam on their road to Mount Doom, but the children seemed to lose interest until we got back to Frodo and Sam.

  Finally—in considering 'influences'—one should point out the relationship between Tolkien and T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land is an attack on the modern world, and Eliot turns to the past for his symbols of a superior order of reality—the Fisher King, the Rhine maidens, the Grail legend, 'inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold'.

  'What does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way? ...'

  In the essay on fairy tales, Tolkien has some strong words defending the fairy story against charges of 'escapism'. He mentioned that he recently heard 'a clerk of Oxenford' declare that he welcomed 'the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic because it brought his university into "contact with real life" ... .' This view obviously makes Tolkien see red. 'He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression "real life" in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. 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.' One sentence has a positively Chestertonian ring: 'Fairy stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea'. He argues that talk about 'escapism' is a misuse of language: why shouldn't a man in gaol try to escape? What he is arguing here—although he does not put it in so many words—is that there is escape from reality and escape to reality, and that what interests him is the escape to reality. It is Yeats's argument with the 'socially conscious' writers of the thirties all over again (expressed most typically, perhaps, in Lapis Lazuli). Tolkien argues at some length about street lamps and their ugliness, speaking of his 'disgust for so typical a product of the robot age', and on the next page uses one of his favourite images of life, a tree: 'How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree; poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist.' It is amusing to remember the use Chesterton made of the lamp versus tree image in The Man Who Was Thursday, when the anarchist declares that the lamp is a symbol of order, ugly and barren when compared with the tree, 'anarchy, splendid in green and gold.' Gabriel Syme, Chesterton's mouthpiece, replies: 'All the same, just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.'

  In the same volume as the essay on fairy stories (Tree and Leaf) Tolkien includes a short fable, 'Leaf by Niggle', written shortly after publication of The Hobbit (1937). This is an odd little work, almost Kafka-esque. It begins typically 'There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make'. But this is not another story of man's search for fairy land. Niggle is a painter who is engaged on a picture that sounds like an illustration for Lord of the Rings—mountains, forests, lakes, with an enormous tree in the foreground, a kind of Tree of Life. Niggle is often interrupted by a tiresome neighbour, Parish, a lame man with a sick wife. Parish's only interest is in digging his garden, and he finds Niggle's neglect of his own garden annoying. When he calls on Niggle, he does not even glance at the picture of the tree and fairy landscape. So far, the symbolism is clear enough: Niggle, the visionary artist, but nevertheless a modest little man, working away quietly, minding his own business, trying to capture his vision of fairy land, the 'world of meaning', and Parish, the man-in-the-street, interested only in 'practical' things and always obstructing the artist.

  Parish interrupts Niggle as he is trying to finish the picture, and asks him to go and get a doctor for his sick wife. Niggle goes, gets caught in a storm, and catches a cold that confines him to his bed for weeks, destroying his chance of finishing the picture before he sets out on his journey. While he is in bed, a strange Kafka-esque official calls on him and tells him that his neighbour's house is not satisfactory—the implication being that it is Niggle's duty to take care of his neighbour. Niggle's picture would be just the right size to mend a hole in Parish's roof. When Niggle protests 'It's my Picture', the Inspector replies 'I dare say it is. But houses come first. That is the law'. The bewildered artist is ordered to start on his journey, and he sets out quite unprepared. The journey is pure Kafka; he is pushed on to a train, gets out at a station where the porter yells 'Niggle', collapses, and is taken to a workhouse infirmary. This turns out to be a kind of prison where he is made to do boring manual tasks (it sounds like a Soviet labour camp) and spends hours locked in his room in the dark. Then some mysterious 'judges' talk about him so he can overhear them. 'His heart was in the right place.' 'Yes, but it did not function properly. And his head was not screwed on tight enough: he hardly ever thought at all ... He never got ready for his journey. He was moderately well off, and yet he arrived here almost destitute ... .' Niggle, it seems, is at fault; but the judges finally agree that he is a good sort and deserves a second chance. 'He took a great deal of pain with leaves.' So Niggle is let out, and sent on another train journey. This time he finds himself in a kind of Happy Land where his tree is an actuality, and behind it is the visionary country of his picture. His old neighbour Parish—who has also been confined in the workhouse for negligence—joins him, and they now work together to build a cottage with a garden. When this is finished—by this time Niggle has become the practical man and Parish something of a dreamer and slacker—Niggle finally goes off towards his goal in the mountains, leaving Parish to live in the cottage with his wife.

  Back in Niggle's old house, only a corner of his canvas remains, a single leaf, and this is put into the museum (hence the title of the story). The place that has been created by Niggle and Parish in cooperation becomes known as 'Niggle's Parish'.

  It is an odd little story, most disappointing to children. The 'journey' is quite plainly death—in fact, Tolkien makes something say so at the end of the story, where a councilor remarks that Niggle was worthless to society, and ought to have been sent on his journey much earlier, and consigned to the great Rubbish Heap. Like Yeats, Tolkien is continuing his argument with the socially conscious writers of the thirties. But what precisely is he saying? Niggle is an artist and something of a visionary, but all in
a rather bumbling, incompetent manner. This incompetence seems to be the root of his trouble. If he were more ruthless, he would tell Parish to go to hell, and finish his picture. But this, Tolkien implies, is the wrong solution. The Niggle-Parish conflict is not really necessary; they can collaborate fruitfully, and when they do, it becomes clear that Niggle is Parish's superior.

  The final judgement, then, is unexpectedly complex. In the conflict between the artist and society, Tolkien comes down on the artist's side—as is to be expected—but he also blames the artist, implying that if he were less vague and incompetent, he could become something more like a leader of society—without, however, compromising his own basic vision. He does not have to become a servant of the State and paint pictures of tractors ... . But what precisely he is supposed to do is left to the imagination.

  (I may point out, in parenthesis, that Tolkien's view agrees, unexpectedly, with Bernard Shaw's—as outlined, for example, in Major Barbara, where Shaw declares that the artist must come out of his ivory tower and try to become a dominant figure in the society. The question is of particular concern to me; it was at the core of my first book The Outsider (1956)—the problem of the relation between the artist and society. The romantics of the 19th century thought that the artist is at war with society, and must be destroyed by it eventually; this is the theme of all Hoffmann's stories. I suggested—in The Outsider and the subsequent five books of the 'cycle'—that the fault lies partly with the artist, for preferring pessimism and self-pity to serious thought, and that the 'outsider' must eventually learn to accept his position as a spiritual leader of society. The church once provided the link between 'outsiders' and society, standing for the world of values, of 'meanings' beyond the present. The artists of the 19th century found themselves without this visible symbol of nonmaterial values, and were, as Hoffmann says, frequently destroyed by society, or by their own destiny of standing outside it. I concluded that they must learn to stand alone, to be twice as strong, for half the problems of our civilisation are due to 'the treason of the intellectual', their tendency to opt out and collapse in self-pity.)

  This brings us back to the assertion in the essay on fairy stories, that it is not possible to preserve an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason 'without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual)'. That is fine; but what offensive action? As far as I can see, Tolkien nowhere suggests an answer to this problem. His own 'defensive action' was justifiable enough if we accept Connolly's view that the artist's business is to produce a masterpiece. For all its sentimentality and its flaws, The Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece. Whether it has any practical significance for the present discussion of the artist and society is a different matter.

  It seems to me that if we reject Edmund Wilson's view that Tolkien's work is an overgrown children's story of no significance, and accept that it is a part of the great European romantic tradition, attacking the same problems as the tales of Hoffmann, Goethe's Faust, De L'Isle Adam's Axel, Hesse's Steppenwolf, Eliot's Waste Land, then we must admit that Tolkien has weakened his own case by sticking too close to fairy tale traditions. I believe that The Lord of the Rings is a significant work of twentieth century literature, as significant as Remembrance of Things Past or The Waste Land. Its extraordinarily wide appeal—on American campuses, for example—is not due to purely 'escapist' elements. It strikes a chord, as The Waste Land did in the twenties, because its symbols constitute a kind of exploration of the real world. We still live under a threat of a great oppressive evil; in the west, we identify it with communism; in Russia and China, they identify it with capitalist imperialism; the hydrogen bomb serves as a symbol for both sides. But all imaginative people feel that there are solutions that no politician is far-sighted enough to grasp. Our hope for the future lies in the capacity of the human imagination to reach beyond the present, in our capacity to glimpse vistas of meaning that stretch out endlessly around us. Tolkien's work performs the important function of stimulating this wild, Chestertonian hope for the future. For all I know, Tolkien may think of himself as a pessimist, in the strictly historical sense; i.e. he may see no practical hope for our civilisation. Many intelligent men of his generation feel the same; T. S. Eliot did; the historian A. L. Rowse does; and Arnold Toynbee once told me that he was glad that he was near the end of his life instead of the beginning, because the next few decades were going to be hell for everybody. But in the fairy tale essay, Tolkien states that one of the most important functions of the fairy tale is to aid 'recovery'; that is to say, the work of fantastic imagination may be regarded as a kind of hospital, a place where exhausted people can regain strength and hope.

  But, I repeat, Tolkien has, to some extent, undermined his own case: primarily, by sticking to the tradition of 'the little man'. Presumably there is a psychological reason for this: Tolkien feels that the quiet, modest chap, who is capable of heroic exertion under stress, is a more satisfactory hero than Siegfried or Lancelot. There may be some truth in this: but in the way it is worked out in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, it furnishes ammunition for critics who accuse him of sentimentality. In fact, I suspect that Tolkien's choice of the 'little' hero may have been largely a matter of pure chance. Tolkien's work 'snowballed'; it grew by accident. One can see this process clearly in the various books from The Hobbit to Smith of Wootton Major (1967). The Hobbit, like Alice in Wonderland, began as a story for children—literally a story told to his own children. Stylistically, it has a casual, careless air. '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.' This style is very different from the slightly pretentious style of Smith of Wootton Major, which is a little too obviously biblical and poetical.

  The story is also distinctly tailored for children. The comforts of the hobbit-hole are listed, and Tolkien enjoys talking about tea and toast and cakes in front of a roaring fire; it is very much a Walt Disney kind of world. When the dwarfs (or dwarves, as Tolkien prefers to call them, for some philological reason) start arriving one by one, until the house is overflowing with them, you can imagine the children squealing with laughter, and saying 'How many more?'

  The basic Tolkien formula emerges very quickly. There is a certain realism in the descriptions of difficult journeys, reminiscent of The Thirty Nine Steps or Kidnapped. He likes describing travels through imaginary landscapes, and he produces the same blend of poetry and adventure and discomfort that one finds in Belloc. He has an excellent imagination for sudden adventures, like the scene with the trolls in the second chapter of The Hobbit, where the whole party nearly ends up being eaten by these hairy monsters. The grown up reader finds it exciting because the trolls are sufficiently like gangsters or Nazi thugs to produce the sense that we are talking about something real. Already, Tolkien is showing the ability to write on two levels—for children and adults—that makes The Lord of the Rings so successful. One might say that Tolkien had made the important discovery that there is really no need to assume that children and adults have different tastes; what will excite one will excite the other. Also worth noting is that the scene with the trolls is pulled back from the edge of being too 'scarey' for children with the comic climax out of 'The Brave Little Tailor'—the trolls being induced to fight among themselves by imagining that one of their number is playing tricks on the others.

  Towards the end, the book begins to lose impetus as a 'fairy story'; the events slow down; the wait on the Lonely Mountain is altogether more 'real' than the earlier scenes. In the conventional fairy story, Bilbo Baggins would kill the dragon by a clever strategem; in The Hobbit, the dragon is killed almost arbitrarily 'off stage' by Bard, one of the lake men. The quarrel that then follows—between the dwarves, who have now regained their treasure, and the lake men—is again a realistic touch, indicating that Tolkien is beginning to enjoy the adventure—and battle—for its own s
ake. Any good literary psychologist might have prophesied that The Hobbit would be followed by a more carefully realistic novel. And from the unflagging invention of The Hobbit, he might also have guessed that it would be longer.

  According to Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings was begun shortly after publication of The Hobbit (1938-9). He says (in the preface to Tree and Leaf), 'At about the time we had reached Bree (i.e. Chapter 9), and I had then no more notion than (the Hobbits) had of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was.' The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in 1954, so its genesis was lengthy. This is apparent in the book itself, which gradually changes tone as it goes along. The opening, with the great birthday party, might have been written by Edith Nesbit, or even Enid Blyton; it is still very much in the spirit of a tale told for children, with all the effects children enjoy—descriptions of food and drink, and the rivalries among various relatives. One gets the feeling that Bilbo's sudden disappearance—as he slips on the ring—was not really a calculated part of the story; it is still in the jolly, slapstick spirit of the opening of The Hobbit. One can also understand perfectly why it was that Tolkien had no ideas about the development of the plot. His heroes were Setting Off, walking into the unknown, like Belloc or the heroes of Jeffrey Farnol, or Hermann Hesse. The spirit here is very close to Farnol; all the talk about the Brandywine river and the pleasant home comforts of Hobbits are all rather sentimental and 'twee'. Tolkien seems to have invented a kind of secular paradise, a lazy man's heaven, where people have nothing to do but smoke their pipes in the twilight and gossip about the courting couples and next year's May Fair. This paradisial quality is underlined by the information that Hobbits live a great deal longer than human beings—Bilbo is celebrating his eleventy-first birthday. I suspect that it may well be this element, specifically, that jarred on Edmund Wilson, who had harshly criticised T. S. Eliot for escapism. For there can be no doubt that Tolkien himself is emotionally committed to this fairy tale picture of peaceful rural life; it is not intended solely for the children. The 19th century romantics loved painting this kind of a picture—it can be found in Eichendorf, Morike, Gotthelf, Tieck, Jean Paul, and probably derives from Rousseau. The 'realist' objection to it is no longer a matter of 'escapism'. Johnson created a 'happy valley' in Rasselas, but the prince finds it boring, and wonders about the nature of the strange urge that makes him want to turn his back on this drowsy peace and seek out conflict and excitement. The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.) And yet one might say, in defense of Tolkien, that this evolutionary urge is quite clearly symbolised in the urge that all his characters experience—to seek adventure, to 'go on a journey'. And at the end of The Return of the King, Frodo does not 'live happy ever after' in Hobbit land, but has a further journey to make to 'the grey havens'. Besides, naive or not, this Rousseau-ist nostalgia is a part of the charm of the book. The rural comforts of the pub at Bree or Tom Bombadil's house provide the right contrast to the Barrow Downs with their walking dead. It is much the same combination as in the James Bond novels—plenty of the good things of life, with a sharp smell of danger in the air to freshen the appetite.