CHAPTER 6
Attacks on The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars by hostile critics have run along strikingly similar lines, and shown a similar political agenda and set of value judgements.
This is not surprising given certain aspects of the progressive world-view. Writing in The New Age in 1913 on that magazine's general policy, the influential socialist literary critic Alfred Orage stated: "The literature which we despise is associated with the economics which we hate". (46)
In most societies the idea of inculcating values through stories is regarded as natural, as indicated in the previous chapter. It has been believed that stories of virtue, courage and justice can play a central part in the formation of characters, and that myths that are believed tend to become true. Members of the progressive intelligentsia have, virtually by definition, regarded it as natural, right and taken for granted, that their work should have a political, social or ideological message. There has also been a considerable pressure to deny legitimacy to equivalent non-collectivist or conservative messages in literature, art and entertainment. In Britain, for example, radical-progressive groups such as Librarians for Social Change and sections of the Inner London Education Authority have moved to ban ideologically unacceptable children's books, such as Peter Rabbit, which deals allegedly with "middle class rabbits", and Robinson Crusoe because it is fundamentally pro-capitalist. Librarians For Social Change set out to remove from public library shelves all books which could be taken as favouring "repressive ideologies" listed as "Fascism, Racism, Sexism, Capitalism and Ageism". (This particular set of sinful thoughts prompted Bernard Levin in The Times to offer a small prize to any Librarian For Social Change who could find another oppressive ideology ending in "...ism" which had been omitted from the banned list.)
The Lord of The Rings appeared before these campaigns had become well-developed in England, but the inferred values of Tolkien's tale early marked him as an enemy of progressivism.
In the progressivist attacks on both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars technical or artistic flaws were seldom analysed, but rather the entire concepts were denigrated. The close relationships between political value-judgements and ostensibly artistic or aesthetic pronouncements in both cases were significant. These critiques, despite their authors sometimes having academic or literary credentials, were often of poor intellectual quality, containing many factual errors and often apparently motivated largely by emotion or ideology.
In general, in these literary and journalistic critiques, a favourable feeling towards these works seemed linked to a mental attitude favouring non-left politics, and an unfavourable attitude with left politics (that is, progressivism, collectivism and moral relativism).
When the first book of The Lord of The Rings was published there was a considerable spread of criticism. Many of the initial newspaper and magazine reviews were probably a matter of chance, in that reviewing this new and unknown book was given to whatever reviewers were at hand. Only when there was at least a general notion abroad of what The Lord of The Rings was about were ideological battle-lines drawn up.
The reviewer of the conservative Daily Telegraph criticised it as "shapeless" but added that it "possessed an undoubted fascination", while Country Life, which although not overtly political is of a generally conservative persuasion, described it enthusiastically as a "work of art ... a profound parable of man's everlasting struggle against evil". The first review in the left-wing New Statesman, by Naomi Mitchison, on 18 September 1954, also praised it enthusiastically, as being: "... extraordinary, terrifying and beautiful", and likening it to the work of Malory. The non-left Time and Tide and Encounter also published enthusiastic reviews by, respectively, C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden.
Something, possibly its favourable reception in these quarters, caused the New Statesman to look again at its political and cultural implications. Maurice Richardson reviewed the second book, "The Two Towers", there on 18 December 1954, in much more hostile terms:
First, let me get Professor Tolkien out of my delusional system. "The Two Towers" is the second volume of his mammoth fairy tale, or, some would call it, heroic romance, The Lord of The Rings ... it is all I can do to restrain myself from shouting: Conspiracy! and slouching through the streets with a sandwichman's board inscribed in jagged paranoid scrawl in violet ink: "Adults of all ages! Unite against the infantilist invasion!" ... Mr Auden has gone into raptures over it. This, too, is not unexpected, because he has always been captivated by the pubescent worlds of the saga and the classroom ... they all speak with the same flat, castrated voice ... the fantasy remains in my opinion thin and pale. And the writing is not at all fresh.
The New Statesman had become even more hostile by 13 May 1977, when it carried an article by the poet James Fenton:
Nothing dates so rapidly as a fake ... and future ages will look at our cult of Tolkien and scratch their heads. We shall become a subject for a thesis -- the flight from reality, the failure of nerve, the retreat from the present day ... There is nothing particularly objectionable about The Hobbit, a children's book ... But The Lord of The Rings offends against the morality of scale. Bogusness should not be so big.
Fenton had been the New Statesman's correspondent in Indo-China at the time of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, whose coming he had written of in complacent terms ("If Phnom Penh falls, so what?"). Later he expressed worry that the Khmer Rouge's behaviour might provide support for "the crassest form of anti-Communism". There is a certain irony that he should have criticised Tolkien's work as symptomatic of a flight from reality.
The American political equivalent of the New Statesman is the Nation and it was in the Nation that the first major American attack on The Lord of The Rings appeared in a review headed "Oh, those awful Orcs!" by Edmund Wilson, in the edition of 14 April 1956 (it is interesting that Wilson, earlier a classic Soviet fellow-traveller and author of To The Finland Station, moved away from the left after this time, as, apparently, Fenton may have done in the 1980s). The main point of the attack was that the work promulgated moral absolutes:
What we get is a simple confrontation -- in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama -- of the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil ... clumsily handled ... the poverty of imagination displayed [is] almost pathetic. The hero is a hobbit called Frodo who has become possessed of a ring [which] exerts on one a sinister influence that one has to brace oneself to resist. The problem is for Frodo to get rid of it before he can succumb to this influence ... One looks forward to a queer dilemma, in which Frodo, in the enemy's kingdom, will find himself half-seduced into taking over the enemy's point of view, so that the realm of shadows and horrors will come to seem to him, once he is in it, a plausible and pleasant place, and he will narrowly escape the danger of becoming a monster himself ... but these bugaboos are not magnetic ... give me James Branch Cabell's Poictesme. He at least ... does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins ...
Wilson seemed to be saying that a serious work should not deal with moral certainties.
An extended hostile critique of Tolkien, in fact a small book, by Catherine R. Stimson, then Associate Professor of English at Barnard College and later editor of a series of feminist books (at least one of which "approached the study of history from the dual vantage point of Marxism and Feminism"), was published by Columbia Press in 1969. This book, titled simply J.R.R. Tolkien, had space to develop reasoned arguments, either literary or politico-cultural, but the critique remained largely emotive, with a low level of factual accuracy. Stimson was surprised that "A large and unsuspected public, largely student, received it far less reluctantly than had the original publisher". In fact, after the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien had been urged over several years both by his publishers Allen & Unwin and by friends such as C.S. Lewis to complete The Lord of The Rings. When the former received the manuscript, they believed that it would not be profitable, but undertook a small print-run. Rayner Unwin told his father, the chairman of the company, with a combination of literary enthusiasm and commercial doubt, "The Lord of The Rings is a very great book in its own curious way and deserves to be published somehow". (47)
Much of Stimson's criticism is not only abusive but misleading, and can in some instances be called intellectually dishonest. For example:
John Tinkler's essay ... sketches an incestuous familiarity between the speech of the Rohirrim, a horsey Aryan people in The Lord of The Rings and Anglo-Saxon ... Tolkien's heroes use lots of "L" sounds, his villains lots of "Ks" and "Zs". The beginnings of a dangerous orthodoxy are apparent.
This needs some comment. Apart from the gratuitous use of the word "incestuous", the use of the word "Aryan" here has vaguely Nazi associations. Stimson uses it in the Nazi racist sense to refer to Northern European, blonde, Saxon-like people, and the impression was perhaps conveyed that Tolkien would have accepted such usage: an odd thing to suggest about a leading professional philologist. Tolkien had pointed out to publishers in Nazi Germany before the war that the word "Aryan" properly refers to a group of Indo-Iranian languages. The original speakers of Aryan could not have spoken Anglo-Saxon which had not then evolved. The relationship between Anglo-Saxon and words attributed to the Rohirrim (Ceorl, Eorlingas, Riddermark etc.) is open and obvious, and the services of an incest-finder unnecessary. Tolkien wrote plainly in Appendix F of The Lord of The Rings, "The language of Rohan I ... made to resemble ancient English".
The unscholarly distortion in Stimson is made even plainer when one sees what John Tinkler actually wrote, in Tolkien and the Critics. (48) Tinkler, far from tracing incest, enthusiastically appreciated Tolkien and concluded:
Tolkien has succeeded in depicting the men of Rohan as a separate people by using an archaic form of English. Moreover, he has provided for the reader who knows this old English language and literature an added richness of connotation and allusion.
The accusation, silly enough to begin with, that the "villains [use] lots of 'Ks' and 'Zs'", is simply not true. Apart from Gollum, who speaks in sibilant broken English, the speech of all the villains, including Sauron himself, are given in various modes of conventionally constructed English. Only about three lines of the "Black Speech" are quoted and "Ks" and "Zs" are not particularly obvious in them. The word for "Ring" in the Black Speech is "Nazg", and it appears from a letter Tolkien wrote in 1967, two years before this critique, that the "z" was put in to distinguish it from the Scottish Gaelic word "Nasg". In the samples of the Black Speech quoted, apart from the word "Nazg", the letter "z" occurs precisely once.
Stimson may have confused the villains with the dwarves. "Ks" and "Zs" are prominent in almost all the Dwarf words quoted (their name for themselves is "Khazad"). However, the dwarves are allies of the good side. Nor is it correct that the heroes use a lot of "L" sounds. The elves, who are not the heroes, use a lot of "L" sounds in the lines of Elvish quoted. The heroes are mostly quoted, like the villains, in various modes of conventional English, the only exception being Tom Bornbadil, whose speech is full of half-rhymes.
It seems odd that the sounds of imaginary languages in a fiction should be described as heralding a "dangerous orthodoxy". One wonders: dangerous to whom? And how? Does it perhaps inculcate wrong thoughts in readers by reinforcing conventional moral notions and value-judgements? Perhaps the point is that the sounds of Elvish (A Elbereth Gilthoniel/ silivren penna miriel/ o menel aglar elenath etc.) are intended to suggest conventional images of beauty like the song of a nightingale, while the Black Speech (Ugluk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob bubbosh skai) is intended to suggest harshness, cruelty and brutality. That is to say, it reinforces the notion that there is an essential separation of good and evil, taking in not merely the situation of the moment, but whole ways of perceiving the world, including the area of aesthetics.
There is a general hostility to the notion of traditional associations. Stimson described Tolkien's work as having "outworn sources ... a hollow, inscribed monument with many, many echoes ...". Apart from the use of the pejorative words "outworn" and "hollow", this does not really tell us why there is anything wrong with monuments or echoes, or even how the unnamed "sources" are outworn. Stimson continued that "Tolkien's stubborn, self-deluding conservatism also demands that we respect families and dynasties ...". Such an idea is, of course, at odds with practically all progressive Utopianism, which insists on the State as the sole focus of loyalty. Tolkien, Stimson added:
[C]onsistently permits himself the unappetising luxury of class snobbery. Bilbo Baggins, the hero of The Hobbit, has trouble with three trolls. He speaks standard English, but they speak filthy, rough, working-class Cockney. Recently, of course, musical groups have shown us the wit and poetry of working-class speech.
In fact, the language of the trolls is rough and rather comic, but to describe it as "filthy" is simply ludicrous. What the narrator in The Hobbit says of the trolls' speech when Bilbo, cold, wet and hungry for the first time in his sheltered, middle-aged life, comes upon them in a forest, is that it was "not drawing room fashion, at all, at all".
The troll's speech which Bilbo hears is then quoted. It is about the number of men they have eaten and how hungry they are for more man-flesh. To say it is "not drawing-room fashion" is actually a grim joke on Bilbo, who is suddenly confronted with the fact that there are worse dangers in the wide world than meeting people of uncouth speech. There is an obvious irony in the contrast between the narrator's tut-tutting disapproval of the trolls' speech and that speech's dire content. As part of Bilbo's toughening-up, it is an important moment in the story. It is not exactly "working-class" speech either. Apart from robbing and eating travellers, the Trolls do not do any work.
Furthermore, none of the other villains in The Hobbit and none except one or two of the most minor bad characters (Bill Ferny in Bree, Ted Sandyman the Hobbit Miller) in The Lord of The Rings itself use what Stimson might call "working-class" speech. The major villains in both (The Great Goblin, Smaug, Saruman, The Lord of the Nazgul, etc.), the greedy and crooked master of Laketown in The Hobbit and the increasingly insane Denethor in The Lord of The Rings are among the most educated speakers. On the other hand "working-class" speech is used by several of the good characters (Sam Gamgee and his father, Farmer Maggott, Rosie Cotton, the innkeeper, etc.). The hobbits are mostly small farmers and of "working-class" speech in general.
Furthermore, a most important theme in these tales is that ordinary, humble, decent people can achieve great things. Another constant theme is that great ones like Sauron, Saruman, Denethor and Boromir -- all of them originally on the "good" side -- can in various ways be corrupted by pride. This is not class snobbery but on the contrary is ultimately incompatible with it. On the basis of such evidence it is hard to describe Stimson's accusation of "consistent" class snobbery as anything but literary McCarthyism. A critic detecting equivalent coded left-wing or revolutionary messages in a fantasy or a children's story from similar evidence could expect accusations of both McCarthyism and paranoia.
Stimson complains of "banal natural imagery", and that:
[S]ymbols are terribly simplistic. A star always means hope, enchantment, wonder; an ash-heap always means despair, enslavement, waste. Readily explicable, they also seem to conceal intellectual fuzziness and opaque axioms.
Would she have seen it as more praiseworthy if an ash-heap were to signify hope, enchantment, wonder, and a star meant despair, enslavement, waste? What is perhaps being worked towards here is that a "creative" work should be a distortion of normality and of familiar associations and images. This statement by Stimson is hardly an accurate recapitulation of the book either. There is just one scene dominated by ash-heaps in the book, the desolation outside Mordor. The ashy "Bonfire Glade" in the Old Forest, where some threatening trees were burnt, is described in "The Fellowship of the Ring" as being "a dreary place: but it seemed a charming and cheerful garden after the close Forest".
There are probably fewer than a dozen brief references to stars, and in the cosmogony of Middle-Earth the Evening Star is not a symbol of hope but a manifestation of it, as it is literally the light of the last Silmaril.
Tolkien was criticised further by Stimson for unsophisticated writing about "wizards, weapons, thaumaturgies, leaping in and out of the action at will". However, The Lord of The Rings was intended to be a tale of heroic and wondrous adventure, not a "realistic" novel of manners in the tradition of Henry James or E.M. Forster.
Further, Tolkien was "irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine" with a childish, evasive and "nasty" attitude to sex. However, this was once again a matter of assertion rather than proof. There is no sex, as the term is understood in modern writing, in The Lord of The Rings, though there are love-affairs leading to marriages. Stimson denied Tolkien was homosexual, but in a later attack (see following chapter) another feminist academic discovered that he was, as were his characters.
According to Stimson, Tolkien wrenched syntax. For example, if we expect to read "He came to an island in the middle of a river", he would write "To an eyot he came". Why the first construction is superior is not explained. Some would consider the second, being more concise and less pedestrian, better suited than the diction of social realism for an heroic romance. Some might even consider it a pity (if by now not a surprise) that the phrase "to an eyot he came" does not in fact occur in The Lord of The Rings at all. The words actually used are: "That night they came to an eyot close to the Western bank".
Tolkien sometimes deliberately used slightly archaic constructions (for example, "Helms they chose") for obvious atmospheric effects. It is not shown what, if anything, is wrong with this. (49) Again, however, he was attacked for it, Stimson indicating that it arose from stylistic incompetence, the use of decorative language being apparently illegitimate.
Stimson then moved towards a specifically cultural/political indictment, claiming:
[T]he appeal of Tolkien to Americans is ... disquieting ... His popularisation of the past is a comic-strip for grown-ups ... for those who long for security, he purveys a solid moral and emotional structure.
Moreover, the contemporary American myth of the Cold War has clamped over the public consciousness a sense of cosmic conspiracy. We, the besieged, defend virtue against Them, the dark warriors of the East.
[emphasis added]
Stimson tried to explain the tale's disquieting popularity, particularly among the young. She said it offered, like The Lord of The Flies, "the seductive charm of moral didacticism cloaked in remote and exotic settings". This seems to be saying that these stories imply a conflict between Good and Evil, and are set outside the canons of social realism. This charge which might also be levelled against many other books, including much of the work of Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, Swift, Defoe, Johnson, Cervantes, Marlowe, Stevenson, Goethe and Shakespeare. Indeed there is not a lot of great literature which would seem to escape such an indictment.
Tolkien's thinking was "wishful", his prose "weak", and his thought "pernicious":
Tolkien so blandly, so complacently, so consistently, uses the symbol of light and white to signify the good and the symbol of dark and black to signify evil ... Our writers must, if they are honest, confront the appalling moral, political and human devastation wrought because Western culture so happily, so stupidly, dresses its Gandalfs in white robes and puts its Sarumens [sic] in dark towers.
Stimson ended, rather puzzlingly, by prescribing that "We need genuine myth and rich fantasy to minister to the profound needs Tolkien is thought to gratify". What this actually meant was taken no further. The purpose of the critique was to be destructive of the values behind The Lord of The Rings, not to set out whal some acceptable replacement myth or fantasy might be.
ENDNOTES
46. For an excellent analysis of the ideas of Orage and other turn-of-the-Century socialist literary critics, see Tom Gibbon, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880-1920 (University of Western Australia Press, 1973).
47. Letters, page 140.
48. In Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (eds), Tolkien and the Critics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).
49. See Tolkien's Letters, page 226, for a discussion of this. Tolkien wrote that to have characters from a romance set in the distant past use modern idiom would lead to a disunion of word and meaning: "people who think like that talk like that".
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