CHAPTER 7
The Stimson arguments were repeated in a collection of essays, mainly by English and social science teachers in smaller British tertiary establishments, called J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land, published by Vision Press in 1983. (The title and cover lay-out would have made it rather easy for the purchaser to think he was buying a work by Tolkien, a mistake which would probably not have harmed its sales.)
Again, Tolkien was attacked for identifying the letters "K" and "Z" with evil, and for not writing a conventional modern novel. Some of the writers also seemed to share Stimson's political attitudes, and to allege that Tolkien's work was Cold War propaganda, despite the fact that most of it had been written before the Cold War began. Again, these writings contained a striking number of elementary factual errors.
The collection throws some light on interesting aspects of British post-secondary education. It is worth looking at in some detail because of what it shows about this and about some modern critical tactics. The editor of J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land, Robert Giddings, a Senior Lecturer in English and Media Studies at the Dorset Institute of Higher Education, and a contributor to the New Statesman, began by pointing out the potential wealth of academic publishing opportunities to be gained from writing about The Lord of The Rings, thus presumably boosting the list of publications to be presented with faculty reports and job applications. Tolkien criticism could become an industry:
It is strange, but true, that The Lord of The Rings has been strangely neglected by literary criticism in Britain ... it has not even been taken up in the school curriculum -- it has not been prescribed as a GCE text.
He identified a "British ideology of nostalgia":
[F]igures show that more people want to study archeology and local history in adult education courses than want to study English literature, politics, economics and sociology. Professor W.G Hoskin's two television series on the English landscape were followed by an average of 1,000,000 viewers in 1976 and 1978.
He referred patronisingly to Tolkien's world as a:
British traditional school -- Gandalf as headmaster, Aragorn as headboy, prefects, fags etc. ... all the ceremony and ritual that holds such a performance together ... bounders and cads.
Perhaps in an attempt to explain away its popularity, Giddings wrote that on publication The Lord of The Rings was "hyped [sic] by all the methods of advertising and public relations possible at the time", and that it was "written at the direct request of the publisher". As we have seen, this was at least to misrepresent what had actually happened, and not a happy foundation for a new academic body of Tolkien scholarship.
Giddings continued that Tolkien "exploits nationalist paranoia" and has a "Cold War ideology", apparently connected with British "invasion paranoia" in 1915. However, he rather gave the game away by dropping into creaking Marxist jargon and mythology to express his own theories. Tolkien, he said, was appalled by the industrialisation and despoiling of the countryside because:
It is usually the case in advanced capitalism that the life enjoyed by the privileged elite and the means of production needed to produce the wealth needed to support it are kept separate and discrete.
The above actually sounds as if it might apply to the life at many Institutes of Higher Education. Giddings quoted with approval the leftist historian E.P. Thompson, writing in the Nation, that President Ronald Reagan's perception of a Soviet "threat" was based on an infantile perception of political realities:
[D]erived, I suppose, from too much early reading of The Lord of The Rings. The evil kingdom of Mordor lies there ... while on our own side lies the nice republic of Eriador, inhabited by confused liberal hobbits who are rescued from time to time by the genial white wizardry of Gandalf figures such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, or, maybe, Richard Allen ... (50)
The thought of Kissinger and Brzezinsky as "Gandalf" figures requires a very casual, or idiosyncratic, reading of either The Lord of The Rings or of 1970s international politics. History does not seem to be Thompson's strong point: Ronald Reagan was born in 1911; when The Lord of The Rings was published he was in his forties, and a Democrat Party union activist. While it might be flattering to Tolkien to ascribe to him the influencing of young Ronald, it is impossible.
Roger King, a teacher of English and Sociology at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, said that in The Lord of The Rings "Myth has been reduced to a literary Rubik's Cube", and referred to "the reader's problems in interpreting Gimli, Ringwraith and Faramir". One gathers King thought the way to "approach" the work was not to read it for its own sake but as a task in deciphering. (Perhaps like those passages of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, eventually found to be type-setting errors, the significance of which, when properly "explained", provided many academics with employment and publication credentials).
In King's recapitulation of the story, with the statement that "Sauron is duly condemned to the chambers of fire" (note the suggestion implied by the word "duly" that the story is mechanical and predictable), he indicated he had not read what happened to the principal antagonist. The Ring is destroyed in fire. Sauron loses substance and joins Morgoth in nothingness.
He also described British artist Kit Williams's picture-puzzle book Masquerade (in which the reader was invited to find a real hidden golden hare by solving clues in the book) as "the reduction of myth to a game of intellectual deciphering even more explicitly than in Tolkien's works". The question: "So what?" springs to mind. This piece, incidentally, indicates he had not read Williams with much attention or understanding either. The puzzles in Masquerade were made up by Williams with little reference to "mythology" and he later wrote that he made the hare a messenger (one of its mythological roles) by no more than coincidence. The essential clues in Masquerade were to do with objects and letters which puppets were shown looking at in one illustration, numbers, and a memorial to Catherine of Aragon. Also hidden in it were names of, and references to, Williams's friends, a "red herring" of chemical element numbers, etc. Williams said later that in writing it he had wanted to provide readers with an exciting treasure-hunt. (51) Myth hardly seems to have come into the matter.
Nigel Walmsley, a teacher of English at Bath Technical College, said "Tolkien ... creates a world in which good and evil are reassuringly compartmentalised". Again, the use of the patronising word "reassuringly", with its connotations of comforting night-fears in the nursery, and "compartmentalised", with its suggestion of a rigid, artificial structure, seemed hostile to the notion of Good and Evil being really distinguishable.
Walmsley's further sociological musings reached the frontiers of the bizarre. He continued that The Lord of The Rings "rapidly became after 1967 a sub-cultural relic preserved in the aspic of the middle-class psyche, a literary anachronism paradoxically assured by its best-seller status of continuing popular success". He attributed this sudden obsolescence to a turn in youth culture away from the beads, bells, drugs and flower-power of 1960s hippies and towards pseudo-revolutionary chic triggered by things like the killing of Che Guevara. In fact, a survey of 900 teenagers published in The Observer in April, 1971, showed that The Hobbit was one of the most popular novels among them. In 1987 it celebrated its 50th year in print.
The assertion that The Lord of The Rings was part of the counter-culture and the drug-culture was a change from assertions that it was Cold War propaganda or a primer for President Reagan, but no less fatuous. The values expressed in The Lord of The Rings included a firm moral code, with conventional sexual morality not spelt out but taken for granted, military valour, respect for tradition, properly constituted authority, duty and obligation. On these matters it had nothing in common with the "counter-culture". (Furthermore hobbits and hippies perhaps differed fundamentally in that hobbits enjoyed baths.)
Walmsley continued: "the sudden ideological, philosophical and political shift which took place in 1968 ended Tolkien's period of influence on Western youth culture". One wonders what Walmsley would make of the lamentations of many later progressives that Western youth culture has been Reaganised, or the fact that among the most popular fantasy games in the 1980s were those of the "Dungeons and Dragons" variety (not to mention Star Wars and related works). Western youth in the 80s, it might be argued, had a great affinity for Tolkien's world. Walmsley's statement looks like impression and myth presented as political and sociological fact. In any event, there were big sales of Tolkien's books throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and beyond. Whatever direction "Western Youth Culture", as distinct from a visible minority, actually took in those years has not been established, nor, in all probability, can it be.
Diana Wynne Jones, a non-academic, contributed what was probably the most intelligent, perceptive and well-written and researched essay in the collection. It was factually accurate and contained some important pointers to an understanding of the story-teller's craft. This was the essay that most deserved to be called a valid piece of literary criticism, and almost the only one from which the reader could learn something other than the author's opinions. Wynne Jones pointed out what was probably a key to why The Lord of The Rings (and Star Wars) tended to attract so much progressive hostility and condemnation as Cold War propaganda: the story dealt with people pushed by a relentless enemy into a situation where: "the only defence can be some form of attack".
Kenneth McLeish called it patronisingly "The Rippingest Yarn of Them All" and sought influences upon Tolkien. One felt here not only an obtuseness, but a total lack of empathy with the creative process. This tracing of "influences" seems to derive from an urge to make literary criticism a pseudo-science, though the assertions made can never be proved or disproved and in any event seem unimportant. Again, the summaries made of the works referred to was not notably accurate, even when dealing with key points in the plots and key arguments.
McLeish asked if Tolkien "consciously imitated H.G. Wells", referring to Wells' The War of The Worlds, in which, he said, "Martians and Earthmen face each other for the final battle across just such bleak, scorched and above all menacing terrain". In fact, in The War of The Worlds there is no final battle. The Martians die of disease, not on a bleak and scorched terrain but in the middle of London. McLeish continued that "there was a fine film of The War of The Worlds in 1953, two years before the publication of The Return of The King". This possibly suggests plagiarism on Tolkien's part, but an elementary acquaintance with the publishing history of The Lord of The Rings shows that it was complete well before that time. Its ending was known to Tolkien many years before, and he had set it out in detail in a letter to his son in November 1944. (52) Furthermore, there is no such "final battle" in the film of The War of The Worlds any more than in the original book. In the film, set in the 1950s, the Martians, after being atom-bombed without avail, die of disease in Los Angeles, etc.
Seeking to show that Tolkien was also influenced by Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau, McLeish stated the creatures on Moreau's island were produced by "vivisection and genetic manipulation". However, genetic manipulation was undreamt of when The Island of Dr Moreau was published in 1896. The scientific community only discovered Mendel's work on the basic laws of genetics in 1900. One Moreau monster, the Puma-man, evidently meant to be the inspiration for Tolkien's villain Gollum, was described by McLeish as having "large pale eyes, bony groping hands and hissing speech". In fact it has no speech and its hands are not described.
However, there were much odder things about McLeish's work than this. In evident contrast to The Lord of The Rings, he said, The Island of Dr Moreau was "harmless ... a wholesome tonic to the growing mind". McLeish is of course entitled to his opinion, but I imagine people who think in terms of wholesome tonics for growing minds would find this an odd description of The Island of Dr Moreau. It is certainly a considerable feat of literary craftsmanship, but its atmosphere is an intensely-wrought combination of pain, bestiality, futility and decay. More than anything in, say, Swift, it is one of the most unrelievedly morbid pieces of writing in English. Wells himself later called it "an exercise in youthful blasphemy". One may wonder if the esteem with which The War of The Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau are held here has anything to do with the fact that Wells was also a political leftist and early Fabian.
McLeish contrasted the wholesomeness of Dr Moreau with what he described as more "sinister" influences. These included the works of Captain Marryat and "in [Tolkien's] children's childhood the messing-about-in-boats yarns of Arthur Ransome". One would think such a statement could not have been serious. In fact it is. To say that Dr Moreau was wholesome tonic for a growing mind and Captain Marryat and Arthur Ransome "sinister" might strike some people as a feebly amusing Wildean paradox or essay in flippancy, something someone might say in a literary version of A Woman of No Importance. However McLeish apparently meant it literally, without any sarcasm, paradox or humour at all. He said, of the writing of Marryat, Ransome etc.:
This literature is dangerous because it takes all ethical or moral problems for granted ... Without exception, it hymns the British imperial certainties of Tolkien's youth ... [The Lord of The Rings] is a lethal model for late Twentieth-Century living.
Perhaps the facts that Marryat was a royalist and a naval officer were damning enough, even before considering the fact that Marryat's work was infused with ideas of absolute standards of honour and duty.
In fact, neither Marryat's work (for example, the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians in Children of the New Forest) nor Ransome's takes "ethical or moral problems for granted". A good example of this is Ransome's We Didn't Mean to go to Sea. (53)
In We Didn't Mean to go to Sea four children are left to take care of an anchored sailing yacht when its owner, the only adult, rows ashore in the dinghy for petrol (the auxiliary engine has run out; it is a very neat bit of plotting indeed to deprive the children of adult, lifeboat and engine in a natural and initially non-threatening way). A fog comes up and they accidentally lose their anchor and drift out to sea. The obvious course, once they succeed in hoisting the sail, is to turn back at once. Susan, the second-oldest child and the symbol of responsibility in all these stories, begs her brother John, the eldest, to do so. John knows they are heading without lights or engine into steamer-lanes, in falling darkness, and that he can barely control the boat. He is already demoralised and blames himself for their plight. But he also realises that he cannot navigate back between the deadly banks and shoals outside the harbour. The hard way is the right one. He therefore makes himself disregard the pleas and distress of his sister, and his own fears, and press on out to sea.
The ethical problems in We Didn't Mean to go to Sea are complicated, but at bottom they are unambiguous. John is suddenly the de facto captain of a ship, in a desperately serious situation with all their lives at stake, and he must assume responsibility. The "sinister" thing about Ransome's works, most of which incorporated in their plots a conflicts of competing demands and loyalties, seems to be not that moral choice is simple or complicated, but that it exists. (Arthur Ransome himself could hardly be described as a simple British Imperialist. He had been a Bohemian litterateur, Russian correspondent for the liberal Manchester Guardian, had initially sympathised with the Russian revolution, and was even married to Trotsky's former secretary.)
As for the statement that Ransome's work "without exception hymns British imperial certainties", one of his Swallows and Amazons series, Missee Lee, has a highly-sympathetic central character who is a female Chinese pirate desperate to hide her base from British gun-boats. The other stories do not mention imperialism one way or another. One of the most important themes in his books is love of the countryside and wild-life conservation. Most of the villains are anti-conservationist. It is true that Ransome portrayed middle-class life, and the children's father, a British naval officer, favourably (as he did most adults of all classes, like the charcoal-burners, the old miner Slater Bob, the old sailor Peter Duck, Norfolk boat-builders, a university student, a tug-master, a doctor, a solicitor, farmers, prospectors, the skipper and crew of a barge, an old Norfolk eel-man, a Dutch harbour pilot and a Scots Laird), but it is drawing a very long bow indeed to so easily ascribe to him "British imperial certainties".
As for Tolkien's own "British imperial certainties", one may quote a letter he wrote to his son in 1945, when he had no reason to think he would ever be a celebrity or that his correspondence would ever be published:
I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East which does not fill me with regret and disgust. (54)
In Tolkien's world, Imperialism is a major political expression of evil: Morgoth and Sauron seek to build Empires. Numenor, which began well, was corrupted and overthrown after it succumbed to the temptations of Imperialism.
The essay by Mick Otty, a teacher of Literature and Drama at Bristol Polytechnic, with the sobering title "The Structuralist's Guide to Middle-Earth", was perhaps the climax of this indictment. Here Stimson's accusation that Tolkien was prejudiced in a dangerous fashion against the letters "K" and "Z" was resurrected. Otty elaborated on this by claiming that Tolkien also identified the vowel "U" with evil (what would Nancy Mitford have said?). The Lord of The Rings celebrated war, which it held was necessary and ennobling, and:
In 1983 this model seems to match the foreign policy of both Downing Street and the White House ... The "Empire of evil" that President Reagan sees in Russia is, like Mordor, an appropriate object for total destruction. The Lord of The Rings feeds Western ideologies of the Cold War, and, whatever ideologies might be promulgated by the other side, the fact that they are materialistic might limit their extension to a universal frame for the justified war.
[emphasis added]
No one could pretend the meaning of this is particularly clear. When it is grasped, however, it is shown to be extraordinary. What it means is that The Lord of The Rings is actually more totalitarian than Soviet Communism, seriously comparing an imaginary world created by a writer with a murderous political ideology with scores of millions of deaths to its credit in the real world in a way that shows an extreme lack of proportion. Otty continued:
The only justification for the divisions between good and evil in The Lord of The Rings, as in the Narnia books of Lewis, lies in a last-gasp attempt to revive the great chain of being.
He also blamed this for the "shamefully" patriotic reporting of the Falklands War, and said it was a motion of the mind towards which "we need to cultivate a severely critical rejection".
The most revealing passage in Otty's essay amounted to a plea to see things from the point of view of Mordor. Once again, given his categorisation of The Lord of The Rings as feeding Western cold war propaganda, this may be seen as a plea on behalf of Soviet Communism (of course, when most of The Lord of The Rings was written the enemy in the real world was the Nazi regime under Hitler in Germany). Otty ascribed paranoid and McCarthyist attitudes to Tolkien:
To ask questions about what Sauron and Co. are working for is mental treason, almost tantamount to working on their side. Such questions, if pressed, crack up the whole dynamic of the fiction and even of Arda itself. ... What about good and evil amongst the Orcs and the Wolves, the trolls and the maggots? What is wrong with the maggots? ... One has also to ask what motivates the inhabitants of Mordor to get up in the morning?
[emphasis in original]
This apologetic for Mordor ran together and confused literary, political and moral questions. Tolkien may, arguably, have failed in a literary sense to show what is wrong with Mordor, though most people who buy the book evidently do not think so. It is not the purpose of an heroic romance to suggest there is nothing to choose between the two sides, anyway. However the real basis of this critique again seems not literary but political.
It also ignored the fact that the question of what Sauron was working for had been put some time previously and the answer was now known. Before he had been known to be planning to set himself up as a rival to the The One (that is, God) and achieve absolute rule over Middle-Earth, well-intentioned Elves and men had to some extent cooperated with Sauron and given him every chance, from which he had benefitted. As with some progressives bewildered by anti-Communism, Otty seemed unable to grasp that it is quite possible to know exactly what an enemy is working for and still reject it, not because of any misunderstanding of its nature but because its nature is understood.
Otty's objection, furthermore, ignored the fact that Tolkien clearly differentiated between Sauron and his chief commanders like the Nazgul and the Black Numenorean, and Mordor's slaves and conscripts, as he did when considering Nazi Germany in the real world. We are told that the smaller breeds of Orcs were generally called "Snaga", meaning "slave".
Otty suggested sarcastically that if the West was so good, one would have thought that the inhabitants of Mordor would have welcomed liberation. In fact, The Lord of The Rings says that Aragorn frees the slaves of Mordor after Sauron's defeat. If despotisms stopped functioning simply because their inhabitants were enslaved, there would be no despotic states.
History shows that the inhabitants of real despotisms "get up in the morning", to paraphrase Otty, because they have no choice. Hitler's and Stalin's conscripts got up every morning for four years to fight on the Eastern Front, not an activity most people would voluntarily choose. The southern States of the US kept slavery until they were overthrown in a prolonged and desperate war with the North. The French and Russian Revolutions, the overthrow of the Peacock Throne in Iran and the collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989 occurred when the states in question were becoming not more, but less, despotic and terror was ceasing to be a sanction available to their rulers.
The states of Idi Amin, Pol Pot and Hitler, run largely by grotesque psychopaths, and in some instances even by intellectuals, where terror was never absent as the ultimate sanction, were only overthrown by military force from without. Stalin, who enslaved and murdered millions, died an undisputed dictator whose word was law, as did Mao Tse Tung, responsible for the murders and terrorisation of even more.
The Lord of The Rings gives a true picture of the durability of despotisms in the real world, and the irrelevance of whatever private motivations their humbler inhabitants might have. The overthrow of despotism depends not only on individual heroism but also on the ability to deploy force.
In The Lord of The Rings there is no mystery or distortion of reality in the fact that Mordor keeps functioning, and continues to build up its military strength at the cost of the enslavement and misery of its occupants. In fact, it is arguable that only coercive states can build up huge excesses of military strength. In states with free elections, tax-payers object and install less expensive governments. The Western democracies, though incomparably richer than Nazi Germany, were only able eventually to win World War II by temporarily adopting coercive measures to divert wealth to armies and arms production.
Putting the proposition: "to ask what Sauron and Co. are working for" showed the progressive and positivistic mind at its most obtuse. Sauron is, explicitly, working to become the god-ruler of Middle-Earth and to "cover all the land in a second darkness" -- that is, to demand Divinity for himself. He has already instituted torture, slavery and (in Numenor) human sacrifice. The truth or falsity of the religious values behind Tolkien's work may debated, but it cannot be said that, in The Lord of The Rings, these values are obscure. This is so intrinsic a theme that there is no excuse for missing it. (Note, too, the essentially dishonest tactic of referring to "Sauron and Co", which makes it sound rather as if Mordor is a cooperative enterprise.)
In any event, the fact that Sauron may be working for some other end as well as the aggrandisement of his own ego seems a worthless point in ethical terms.
The greatest mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot usually were working for something: a world free of Jews or Kulaks, for example. They were not gangsters or pirates but coercive Utopians with power, and Auschwitz, the Gulag and the killing fields of Liberated Cambodia were not run to make profits but to achieve lofty ideals. According to a recent study by Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, ideologically-motivated governments in pursuit of Utopian ends killed up to 120 million people in the first three-quarters of the Twentieth Century, more than three times as many as were killed in wars.
Apart from this, Otty's attack had various other inconsistencies. For example, he inferred Tolkien was a snob for having depicted gardeners having to clean up after Bilbo's birthday party -- in other words, for depicting a community where work had to be done, rather than a Utopia. However, he also attacked Tolkien for being unrealistic about the Shire's economy, claiming:
The Shire is unreal ... how the plenty of food in which they take such delight is grown, harvested, marketed, transported, etc. is never even hinted at.
As well as being inconsistent, this charge is simply false. The parts of The Lord of The Rings which are set in the Shire are full of references to farms, fields, tilling, haywards, harvests, milling etc. The prologue to The Lord of The Rings says of hobbits that:
Growing food ... occupied most of their time ... farms, workshops and small trades tended to remain unchanged. [The land] was rich and kindly, and though it had long been deserted when [the hobbits] entered it, it had before been well tilled, and there the king had once had many farms, cornlands, vineyards and woods.
Otty also attacked Tolkien for not giving precise measurements and distances:
The paradoxes of narration in The Lord of The Rings form loops which bend the tired mind of the enquiring reader back into the fantasy, so that attempts to historicise, localise, in a word realise, the fantastic in the sense of establishing its relationship to the real, tend to be frustrated.
It is again hard to know exactly what this means, but he says, as some possible guide, that when the hobbits and Aragorn are in the wild country beyond the Shire, Aragorn tells Frodo that the distance to Rivendell has not been measured in miles. Since he does not give a number of miles, to quote Otty, "the reader can set no co-ordinates on the wide wildness of the world". However, distances are frequently given elsewhere, and the books have large maps (fold-out in the hard-cover editions) so that any distance not specifically given can easily be worked out. In such details The Lord of The Rings is in fact more, not less, complete and comprehensive than most.
Also, Otty seemed to suggest that the alliteration of the sentence "The world looked wide and wild from Weathertop" was somehow contemptible or disreputable. It is hard to see why alliteration, the basis of much poetry and the creation of many literary effects of atmosphere, should be disreputable per se. This particular line has an onomatopoeia about it, suggesting the sound of a chilly wind and tossing leaves. Such a device, if used with suitable restraint and playing a part in the creation of atmosphere, might be considered a mark of literary skill, rather than something to attract derision (particularly from a writer whose own style does not seem felicitous). Why the reader's mind should be "tired" is not explained, since, as The Lord of The Rings is a book read only for pleasure (at least until those who want to make it a text for study have their way), any reader who finds it tiring can simply put it down.
Otty expressed fears that Aragorn as a Tory Cabinet Minister would "be right behind any increase in defence expenditure" at the expense of the education budget (perhaps even reducing the tax-payers' support of Otty's own department). He continued, as mentioned above, that war was celebrated in The Lord of The Rings, another comment that is false. Tolkien was a veteran of the Battle of the Somme and the casualty clearing station, and most unlikely to have illusions about war. In The Lord of The Rings Faramir, one of the noblest characters, says:
I do not slay man or beast needlessly, and not gladly even when in need ... I would see ... Minas Tirith in peace. ... War there must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only what they defend: the city of the men of Numenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.
Otty also thought Arwen Evenstar was an elf. It is an important part of the plot that she is not, and can choose mortality. He also thought there were songs quoted in The Lord of The Rings that are translations from the Black Speech. There are not, unless the translation of the two-line inscription on the Ring counts as a song. He claimed Tolkien's statement that the various other songs were merely translations was to excuse their poor quality, since he could write no better. However, many people think the songs in The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit are very pleasant, evocative and successful. It would be difficult to argue that they are inferior to many other songs written today. Some have been set to music by Donald Swann in a popular record, The Road Goes Ever On.
The final essay in J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land was a feminist plaint. The authoress, Brenda Partridge, was a teacher of English "full time" at the City of Bath Technical College.
Sexual organs seemed to be her particular interest. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, she suggested, had a homosexual relationship of some sort (both, being dead, are incapable of denying this). Tolkien, she said, gave up sleeping with his wife when his relationship with Lewis was closest (the source of this information not being disclosed) and Tolkien had a "deep involvement with male friends to the exclusion of women". Frodo and Sam had a homosexual relationship too.
The idea that anything other than sex may have been at work seemed ruled out. In Partridge's analysis swords were phalli and the giant spider Shelob's webs were a hymen. Galadrial's glass was a super-phallus (the detail that Galadrial was a woman possibly being overlooked here).
The Shelob incident (which was also subject to pseudo-analysis by Stimson, who saw Shelob as a male chauvinist's vision of Woman as "enormous, stenching [sic] bitch-castrator"), takes up only two per cent of the length of the story, despite the importance Partridge attached to it. For her, "Shelob's soft, squelching body is a metaphor for the female genitals swollen and moist with sexual arousal". She did not say "could be a metaphor", or "might arguably be seen as a metaphor". In the same dogmatic spirit she stated:
Tolkien interprets myth in such a way as to reveal his inner fear and abhorrence of female sexuality.
However, Shelob is the only female villain in the story. All other females are depicted favourably, including two, Galadrial and Goldberry, who seem to be living in sexual relationships. There are none of the menacing females -- sphinxes, witches, harpies, sirens etc. -- of classical myths, and if Tolkien is "interpreting myth" at all he is actually reducing this element of it. The only witch mentioned in The Lord of The Rings is male. Further, the empirical fact that Tolkien was happily married and the father of a family should perhaps not be altogether disregarded.
In fact, the absurdity of the suggestion of a homosexual relationship between Lewis and Tolkien is patent. Tolkien and Lewis were both devoted husbands whose love for their wives is obvious not only from their own writings but also from the many biographies and memoirs about them that exist. Both wrote many private letters that have been preserved and published which show them unequivocally as men who were not only opposed to homosexuality but, and perhaps more significantly, uninterested in it. Furthermore, both were Christians with a strong sense ol duty who, even if they had felt such inclinations, would probably have abstained from practices explicitly condemned as sinful.
There is little point in quoting more of this book, but the passages looked at above amply indicate that hostility to The Lord of The Rings tends to emanate from a certain distinct set of ideologies and ideas politically and socially connected with radical progressivism, and ethically and morally allied with positivism and relativism.
Another attack on much the same general lines was made by Rosemary Jackson, a lecturer in the School of English at the University of East Anglia, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. (55) This claimed that The Lord of The Rings reinforced: "a blind faith in 'eternal' moral values" that were really no more than "outworn liberal humanism". She added that, like the fantasies of C.S. Lewis, T.H. White and Stephen Donaldson, it was a "conservative vehicle for social and instinctual suppression". Its popularity indicated the "strength of a romance tradition supporting a ruling ideology", and it had "a recognisable death-wish".
I do not wish to give the impression that I think The Lord of The Rings is above literary criticism. There are probably a number of structural faults in it a literary critic could point to. However, one striking fact about the critiques quoted above is the absence of literary, and the presence of political, criteria.
ENDNOTES
50. Without being disrespectful to some of the heroic people involved, it might actually be possible, following the epoch-making "Eucatastrophe" of Eastern Europe in 1989, for those who see that event in mythopoetic terms to cast some of its players in Lord of The Rings or Star Wars roles: Ronald Reagan as Aragorn/Han Solo, Lech Walesa as Frodo/Luke Skywalker, Solzhenitzyn as Gandalf/Obi-Wan and Gorbachev as Gollum/Darth Vader, perhaps? I am not, of course, making this suggestion entirely seriously, and am quite sure Tolkien and Lucas had no idea of creating predictive political allegories, but it does perhaps hint at a certain congruity between myth and life, particularly insofar as these tales celebrate the need for heroism, faith and fortitude, and point to the fact that apparently lost causes can unexpectedly triumph.
51. By way of contrast, it is worth noting an article on the great success of, and interest aroused by, Williams's book which was published in the Australian conservative magazine Quadrant in April, 1984. "Beyond the Rorschach Test". The writer, Josh Shrubb, concluded: "[T]he lesson it offers us is that there is more willingness to wonder and more imagination in the world than most of us ever dream of".
52. Letters, page 104.
53. Incidentally, by the time Ransome's stories began to appear, in the late 20s and early 30s, the structure of Tolkien's mythology was well-established. He had begun working on it before the First World War, and one section, "The Fall of Gondolin", was completed in 1916, though not published.
54. Letters, page 115.
55. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Methuen, 1981).
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