I am by far not the first to note this: It is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the accomplishment that JRR Tolkien achieved in a lifetime of effort.
Almost everyone comes to the world of Middle Earth via The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy, easily some of the finest examples of pure story-telling in the English language. Taken together, The Red Book of the Westmarch will undoubtedly take its place among the true and lasting classics of literature, revered for many, many years into the future.
But the Red Book was, after all, only the most visible culmination of a work of breath-taking scope. I re-opened the Silmarillion last night, and was once again reminded of just how wide and deep was the task Tolkien took on. Though likely somewhat organic and even accidental in its genesis, the construction of this mythology, this history, was a thing so complete and far-ranging, that it almost defies categorization.
Whole cultural mythologies that form the fabric upon which our shared Jungian subconscious floats, these required centuries of tale-telling and evolution by 100’s and even 1000’s of bards and scops. Tolkien, by nature and by education, lived and breathed those examples. As a philologist of the first rank, he also understood how the structure of a language colored and constrained the stories that are told in that language.
And then he, in one lifetime, as an individual, built an entire mythology, disguised, as he liked to say, as a history. True, there are still gaps, and some inevitable inconsistency (though it feels remarkably consistent to my eyes). And the language of his recounting of that vast tale changes as he tells it. The components of The Silmarillion read and sound like the myths we all learned as children: the style is elevated, the characters and beings are impossibly larger than life, sometimes hard to relate to, standing as they do for themes that are archetypal and not necessarily breathing and bleeding.
But then, with that framework largely a fait accompli (though he continued to expand and refine it his whole life), he chose to “try his hand” at writing a really long tale, one that would hold a reader’s attention in a way that the myths, as fascinating and necessary as they were, might never do.
And thus we have The Lord Of the Rings. A story painted against a massive backdrop of history and myth, a backdrop often hinted at, although never detailed. But it is primarily a story of people whom we know. And especially if the people we know happen to live in the English countryside, though really, they are from Everywhere. They are brave when they need to be, but they are also afraid. They make jokes, they get angry, they have plans. The landscape through which they journey is full of fantastic beings and events, but it is also one we can see, see plainly in our mind’s eye. It is full of detailed images that remain indelibly etched in us.
It begins in that least fantastic place imaginable, the Shire, then walks into the Old Forest and meets Bombadil, then encounters the Barrows. Then it’s into Bree and a sort of normalcy, but it’s hobbits and Men now, and some bumble, and some sneer, and one is mysterious. And so it continues, on to larger and larger vistas and a view of an increasingly wider world, a world in which so much more is at stake than hobbits from the Shire ever imagined possible. The style in which Tolkien tells this epic focuses our attention on these individuals, their foibles and their simple nobility. All the while revealing the larger history against which everything plays out.
“Fantasy” writing has been with us for a long time. But LOTR is not fantasy, though it is found in that section of the bookstore. Tolkien single-handedly created the genre which so many have attempted to imitate. And though there have been many very good, and even excellent, works produced that try to match his achievement, we know, or at least sense, that they all lack some essential element. And of course, when you think about it, it is Tolkien’s decades of deep consideration and creation of the material that comprises the Silmarillion that separates LOTR from all that came after. The construction of whole languages, with their rules and grammar*, of whole continents, with their landmarks and geography, and of a history and Creation myth, that formed a panorama against which the events in LOTR played out, these all made the world of Middle Earth ring “true” in a way that could never be so without the concomitant years of immersion and dedication.
Everyone who reads the works of JRR Tolkien benefits from his lifetime of work, even if they are not consciously aware of it.
* Just for example, consider how Elvish names are so consistent, and then compare that to (as a REALLY bad example) how sci-fi writers used to come up with the personal names of the aliens they introduced us to. Names which often were simply nonsensical syllables and letters, meant to convey “weirdness”. Fantasy writing is replete with such examples.
(c) 2021 Chuck Puckett