panguitch's Full Review: Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of T...
Intellectual elitists possess something like the spirit of punk rock. An anxiety of identity is suggested by their earnest attempts to disintegrate themselves from the tastes of the general population. They wear Ulysses on their sleeve like a circled A and mime Johnny Rotten by singing “The Stephen Kings, They make you a moron.” The negative correlation between the general and the academic response to cultural expressions is no accident, and Tolkien’s writing is a strong example.
Escapist. Irrelevant. Juvenile trash. Dull. Tendentious. Over-written. These epithets have been used against The Lord of the Rings (LotR hereafter) for fifty years as the elite have sought to relegate it to the ghetto of popular literature. Dickens survived similar abuse, and it’s beginning to look like Tolkien might also.
Understanding The Lord of the Rings:
The Best of Tolkien Criticism
Edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs
Of course academia, whatever its faults, is not an entirely monolithic institution. There are scattered free-thinkers, isolated conservatives, and even the occasional crackpot with the suspicion that Tolkien’s work might merit serious consideration. In 1968 Zimbardo and Isaacs made their first collection of essays espousing this radical view: Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s "The Lord of the Rings." The problem of these fringe-litterateurs didn’t go away, and in 1977 Z&I returned with Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives.
Having established, as Isaacs puts it, first the possibility of Tolkien criticism, and second the need for it, the two have returned with a third compilation, Understanding the Lord of The Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, a celebration of the pleasures of Tolkien criticism.
Following Isaacs’ introduction are fourteen pieces spanning the fifty years since LotR’s publication and representing, according to Z&I, the best examples of essay-length approaches to LotR as literature. Excluded are biographical, linguistic, and other "idiosyncratic" or "digressive" approaches, and also any treatments of Tolkien’s work outside of LotR. As Issacs points out, it is interesting that the authors hail from four nations and include literary critics, medievalists, poets, folklorists, science-fiction authors, and a fellow Inkling.
Contents:
"Introduction: On the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing) Tolkien Criticism" by Neil D. Isaacs
"The Dethronement of Power" by C.S. Lewis
"The Lord of the Hobbits: J.R.R. Tolkien" by Edmund Fuller
"The Quest Hero" by W.H. Auden
"Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings" by Patricia Meyer Spacks
"Moral Vision in The Lord of the Rings" by Rose A. Zimbardo
"Men, Halflings, and Hero Worship" by Marion Zimmer Bradley
"Tolkien and the Fairy Story" by R.J. Reilly
"Folktale, Fairy Tale, and the Creation of a Story" by J.S. Ryan
"Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero" by Verlyn Flieger
"Middle-earth: An Imaginary World?" by Paul Kocher
"Tolkien: Archetype and Word" by Patrick Grant
"Myth, History, and Time in The Lord of the Rings" by Lionel Basney
"The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s Epic" by Jane Chance
"Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson’s Movie Trilogy" by Tom Shippey
Comments:
• One of the more common criticisms of the ill-informed is that Tolkien paints a simplistic, black and white world. Lewis points out that in Tolkien’s world good and evil may be easily defined, but the characters themselves freely move between the two, often in complex patterns. Blurring the lines between good and evil is an easy way to make your characters seem conflicted, when really they’re just confused. Tolkien’s moral world makes possible characters who are truly conflicted, who face good and evil with their eyes open yet still waver. This moral clarity also has to do with the restoration Lewis speaks of: "The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the 'veil of familiarity.'"
• Those who are impressed by the jargon of critical approaches like modernism and post-modernism will find what they’re looking for in several of these essays. Auden, for example, assesses LotR as a "literary mimesis of the subjective experience of being." His assertion that LotR is a mimetic work directly contradicts the common charge of didacticism. Auden suggests quest stories, with their clear telos and journey motifs, are ideally suited to an expression of our unique and uncertain passage through life.
• Spacks states that Tolkien created a new genre, affiliated most closely to folk epic and mythology. I would suggest that LotR may remain the sole representative of its genre, contemporary fantasy being something not entirely similar, having more in common with adventure stories or historical romances.
• After demonstrating at length the moral complexity of LotR, Spacks finally must toss the academy a bone, and holds to the party line by suggesting that Tolkien’s attention to detail and his diction make it difficult to take the text seriously. She even complains that "The language of the books is entirely an instrument of the story," as if there were some better purpose it should serve! Her failure to see the relevance of Tolkien’s language to the moral complexity of the story is disappointing, as is her assumption that no good can come from recalling the language of "primitive" literatures.
• Marion Zimmer Bradley’s essay is perhaps the best of the bunch and one of the greatest pieces of Tolkien criticism I’ve been blessed to read. She also provides one of my favorite lines in the collection when she attributes to Edmund Wilson, and through him many other anti-Tolkienites, "a truly cataclysmic ignorance of the pattern of heroic literature." Bradley explores love as LotR’s dominant theme, often in the form of hero worship. She addresses ignored characters like Merry and Pippin, and of course focuses on Frodo and Sam’s relationship. She very effectively rebuts charges that Tolkien’s characters are cardboard, showing eloquently the ways in which key characters develop and are transformed by the story.
• Reilly more or less rephrases Tolkien, drawing heavily from "On Fairy-Stories". Ryan rather more usefully applies insights gained from studying a variety of Tolkien’s own critical works, including, of course, Tree and Leaf, but also drawing heavily on "Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics" and some of Tolkien’s philological work. Indeed, several of these sources were unfamiliar to me and it was exciting to glimpse the insights they may offer on LotR. I do have one complaint in that Ryan suggests myths are allegorical to natural phenomena "and only gradually became localized and humanized." Based on the same passage from "On Fairy-Stories" I believe Tolkien argued explicitly against this traditional view.
• Flieger, like several others, examines Aragorn and Frodo as representing two strains of hero, the epic and the folk. She identifies medieval traditions in both. Aragorn carries a significant sword and personifies the healing king. Frodo personifies both the saving orphan and the wounded king, and has a watery beginning and ending. Frodo also has a significant sword, which parodies by its lesser significance Aragorn’s greater blade, highlighting the difference in hero types. Flieger stresses that these rich allusions to traditional motifs never devolve into simple correlations, and that Tolkien in fact implements them subtly, with a deft touch. Her explication of the scene where Bilbo bestows Sting on Frodo is a superb example of this point. This essay is very good, and an effective argument for viewing LotR as a modern work in the medieval tradition, as exemplified by the final point that Tolkien flips the paradigms by giving the folk ending to the epic hero and the epic ending to the folk hero—"the sacrifice is all the greater for being made by one so small."
• While I enjoy maps and poring over Tolkien’s always brings me joy, I do feel that Kocher makes too much of the Middle-earth’s geography. I agree that the appendices to LotR are not to be ignored, but much of his discussion seems to revolve around questions which, to use Kocher’s words, are "of no real importance to the story" and which "Tolkien himself chooses to ignore."
• Grant’s Jungian approach to LotR works well. Of course, Jungian theory has its detractors. "Lewis’s criticism that Jung offers a myth to explain a myth can be met only by the assertion: there is a myth that is true, and fundamental." Grant points out that this is the lynchpin of Tolkien’s defense of fairy stories. It is also the argument Tolkien used to help Lewis accept Christianity.
• Chance’s exhaustive essay treats each of LotR’s six books in detail. She sees in books one and two, and again in three and four parallel plot structures. Also in three and four, which explore the hero as monster, she sees contrasting depictions of mental and physical sin (Saruman vs. Gollum). Book five contrasts fealty to Germanic lords, both in a positive form (Theoden) and a negative (Denethor), with fealty to a Christian lord (Aragorn) who ushers in the renewals of book six. The essay is extremely insightful, and its eight pages of endnotes serve as a bibliography for much of Tolkien criticism. But Chance’s writing is dry and she does make two factual errors in labeling Sauron a Vala instead of Maia and in failing to give Elrond credit for the flood at the ford.
• Literature as film is an interesting field of criticism, but despite my respect for Tom Shippey I feared an essay on Jackson’s filminterpretation of LotR would be included more for its currency than its real worth. I should not have doubted him. Shippey is sensitive to the forms of the two media, and sees much to admire in Jackson’s decisions, though he also has much to say about Jackson’s additions and how they reflect current popular sensitivities. He also notes a simplifying process: "Jackson is also quicker than Tolkien to identify evil without qualification and as a purely outside force (a failing of which Tolkien has often, but wrongly, been accused)." Tolkien’s themes of Providence and chance have similarly been diluted. But "Jackson has certainly succeeded in conveying much of the more obvious parts of Tolkien’s narrative core . . . the difference between Prime and Subsidiary Action, the differing styles of heroism, the need for pity as well as courage, the vulnerability of the good, the true cost of evil."
Recommendation:
Isaacs seems to believe LotR needs saving from a fandom phenomenon which obscures the text, preventing critics from giving it a fair shake. To my mind, the notion that LotR must be saved from its fans is cousin to the thinking of elitists who, baffled by LotR but unaccustomed to being ill-equipped to address a text, resort to marginalizing the book. Fandom cannot add to or decrease a text’s inherent worth. Nor is it reasonable to discourage fans from taking ownership of the text in their own way. The problem, rather than lying with fandom or with Tolkien, lies with an academy inhibited against sharing ownership of its texts. Such academics would treat literature like an endangered animal, kept in a preserve and accessed only by certified experts who function as corrective lenses through which a myopic public can properly view it. But, to borrow an old adage, professors make better doors than windows.
In any case, in Understanding the Lord of the Rings Z&I have successfully compiled several doors through which LotR can be accessed as literature. Like any "greatest hits" album, this collection can’t help but be good, despite a few odd choices. Along editorial lines I was puzzled by the lack of representation of the 1980s and 90s, most of these pieces dating from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, with a couple coming after 2000. The apparent excision of passages, suggested by ellipses, was also disconcerting.
I could have done without several of the essays, but others are truly excellent. Bradley, Flieger, Chance and Shippey are worth the price of admission, and it’s nice to have Lewis’s, Fuller’s, and Auden’s classic pieces conveniently collected. The book does demonstrate the breadth of Tolkien criticism over the years, and contributes to the growing evidence that LotR must be taken seriously by the academy.
It is not the type of thing a casual fan would have interest for, and some of the essays are too academic for many readers. But I found it pleasureful, and those interested in giving the literary merits of The Lord of the Rings serious consideration might do well to start here.
Including essays by Edmund Wilson, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and others, this collection adds to the many delights of the Lord of...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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