Tolkien: The Missives + Successors

Looking at his correspondence, listening to his critic(s)

Spending a rainy stint, in a fireside mood, perusing an expanded ed. of his letters, and his heir to his chair at Oxford, Tom Shippey, in his “Author of the Century” analysis of the don’s populist (not a dirty word for neither of us) appeal despite the literati and now the purported progressives, I share my paired reviews of these valuable studies.

I’ve written recently about Tolkien’s principled anarchism, and my “two degrees of separation,” since doubled my pleasure when I found out that Forrest Ackerman, a pal of my father-in-law who pitched plenty of projects related to what then was SF and now might be expanded given the “heroic fantasy” genre that Shippey credits Tolkien with having sparked if not spawned, given its serial proliferation throughout media, numbered among the supplicants appealing to T. for approval of the inevitable H’wd adaptation. Our savvy pipe-smoker knew by 1957 of its/his marketing potential, and while the stereotype’s that the professor eschewed any taint of Mammon, the Letters reveal that he manipulated the show-biz kids himself. First he didn’t flat turn down a proposal for an animated version; second when Ackerman and cronies came with caps in hand to his door, T. reckoned he’d better bargain for fidelity, bicker over integrity, and banter with the hapless scriptwriter charged with Middle-Earth on the big screen.

We all know in retrospect that Hobbit clunkered in a Bass-Rankin cartoon into the multiplexes sprouting in the Seventies (I saw it then and there as a h.s teen but have zero recollection) and of course, Peter Jackson at least for the LotR (I firmly refuse to entertain the prequel that is sequel let alone the Rings of Power franchise, however), managed to create a reverent and faithful version that I felt, and my mental pictures are strongly imprinted on my impressionable pre-adolescent imagination from print, remained both accurate and sensitive to depictions of very cherished scenes aplenty.

I hope in a future entry come summer to look at high-end illustrated editions of the Creator himself, as William Morrow in 2023 reissued the core canon. Yet, I’ve never managed to make it past the first few pages of the sonorous but strenuous cadences of the 1977 Silmarillion. But these are pricy on my widower’s mite budget, and thriftily, meanwhile, I must rely on the glimpses into their e-books, unfortunately, whose pdf’s naturally pale, scant recompense. These certain tomes earn pride of place only in palm.

Here’s my Goodreads Feb. 11th take, four stars, on the expanded and revised 2023 ed. of the Letters. Like its owner Amazon, maddeningly, GR clumps together different printings and forms of the classics (and a lot of crap) under a single entry. Suffice to say you’re aiming for Tolkien recto, sans pipe, rather than the verso with stem which comprises its cover. I prefer prof with smoke, since it suits his tweedy mien, after all.

First, the GR review of this parodying the snuffy or rumbling tone of our eminent don and themes of his persnickety letters is spot-on. Second, I way back entered this via its original 1981 ed. A 2023 update was a Kindle file, which is important as it supplements and revises an already standard reference for any Tolkien investigator. While the onscreen ability to navigate between endnotes and annotations (both of which needed more expansion; too many terms lack elucidation or definition, so key remarks oddly lack their proper explanation) is a benefit, lacunæ in moving between documented content makes ("see p. 25" or go to "letter 146") types of directions awkward for those of us consulting the new electronic versions. Putting this into the comments as future inquirers likely may lack a paper copy.

About the material itself, suffice to say CS Lewis scholar Roger Lancelyn Green's apercu applies too to his "frenemy"(?) JRRT. You can't cut open the ball to pluck out any secret for why it bounces. Key passages where T. waxes at full length (ok, honestly, I may weary alongside all but the most utterly fanatical of acolytes, of whom he cautions) on Elvish linguistics or hobbit birthdays get short shrift as mortality looms, as The Silmarillion languishes unpublished; our harried professor begs off for the 367th inquiry a pen-pal's callow demand for T's rehash why LotR isn't allegorical, or why a niggling indefinite article uttered once by addled hobbit for Númenorian nomenclature betrays no epistemological lapses. T. nimbly handles such faint parries from term-paper typists and unhinged fanboys-girls. You'll peruse with mingled involvement and detachment these abstruse excursions.

It's sobering to watch how slow and spirit-eroding the process of getting Lord of the Rings into an economical shape that pleased a skittish publisher, unsurprisingly as the genre and the market appeared sketchy, took. Having labored under difficult wartime privation and personal stress to produce the narrative, JRRT bickered with Allen & Unwin, later Ballantine in U.S., for this truncated subpar "trilogy" as a compromise. That series debuted ca. 1955 ~£50/$65 at present rate, a luxury expenditure for "average" British buyers amidst postwar rations, low wages, and paper shortages.

Not to mention the Ace paperback ripoff of that trio in the Sixties, or garish carnelian artwork for its then-ubiquitous "authorized" box set I bought in 1969 for $2.85 as my first purchase with my tiny allowance, a treasure I always cherish. The challenges of its runic script being accurately rendered, the inclusion of legible maps, the mistakes in calendars, dwarf/ves and elves/elfs as typesetters upset the insistent, perfectionist, and erudite creator (or is it subcreator) of this grand epic of dimly recalled, but so vivid, chronicles: fascinating, whether as a kid or today. This spoiled me for any other fantasy rival. Thus I concur with T. about Narnia's weaknesses, and of CSL's Space Trilogy. T. blames Charles Williams' pseudo-Arthurian muses luring off track "Jack," and his "odd" marriage, as his Inkling colleague opines, to Joy Davidman. I suspect T's sad jealousy, a mate's hurt lingering.

Anyhow, as another GR reviewer aptly asks, how to critique a work which was never meant for our perusal? Certainly the editors labored to present the in-depth survey of the great indigenous legendarium's bold recorder, he who didn't invent so much as convey the material out of which the languages emerged of Middle-Earth, as he situates his own life's labor as sharing the distant and half-forgotten, painstakingly glimpsed palimpsests, of lore built up into narratives both solid and fragmented, half-understood and partly grasped, long after the Third Age of fallen Man and sin.

The emphasis of his mythology from the North-West of what now's Europe, from its First and Second Ages: how do people deal with death, and loss of the land they loved and live among? What about those who cannot die, amidst a newer race of creatures who will? Beyond clashes and conflict, Tolkien explains how he envisions this mortal combat within us, and in an age where CGI, DEI, and craven cash-ins (not that the impecunious master himself was immune to the Hollywood big bucks temptation, as you will discover when the moguls came calling to adapt LotR, inevitably) dominate the estate's "adaptations," this humanistic, humbling message deserves recognition and respect.

The patient will ponder T's ethics, theology, storytelling, doubts, craft, and sex and love. Those pair of which in a few intimate letters to his son, the father observes in his paternal insights a decorum, dignity, and wisdom about human fragility, powerful temptation, instinctual drives, and Christian ideals which contrast with declines in rigor, scrutiny, and introspection. Amidst a concomitant rise of irresponsibility and self-pity default throughout our Americanized, debased, braying, selfie, sub-literate monoculture which he had the fortune not to view in devolution five decades after his death.

Unlike me, he comes off less as a curmudgeon. I sympathize, in maturity, often with bracing, sharp counsels. He burrows deep, a mentality opposing coercion, elevating decency of ordinary folks, yet acknowledging how they too may subvert dark powers that endure, surviving while rising to refuse our Enemies, not giving in when Ring, King, or thing seduces comrades to surrendering their souls.

Sure, some may scoff. But rather than a harbinger of countercultural excess (n.b. his reactions to a 1970 protest at Nottingham Univ.), Tolkien stands for local stances rooted in the pub, bucolic peace, quiet joys of friendship, jibes, a ready pipe, flowers, trees, books, nibs, children, and ecology. Not as a romantic, but as a Catholic. Imbued with a sacramental view of how material transforms. Of decay of all we desire, and how the eternal held out beyond the black horizon may endure. He never got over the reforms of Vatican II, yet he's always aware (one of his sons was ordained) of a foolish Church's inherent failures. Notably, he translated the Book of Jonah for the 1966 Jerusalem Bible.

Short of leisure, heavily taxed, fixing bicycle tubes, buying fish before rushing to lecture, seriously hurting his hand gardening, worn down by his wife's long decline and then his in cruel tandem, grading exams so as to educate his offspring, exhausted by debt, dealing with dense Old and Middle English texts to be proofread long after he promised, fretting as noisy Oxford increases rather than eases up demands, exercising compassion while his churlish countrymen bay for mob rule as if a "democracy" during and after WWII, defending principled non-explosive anarchism and individual moral rights vs a fascist, totalitarian, or socialist collective reduction to cogs in a Machine: this is a Tolkien whose thoughts merit not only preservation but consideration, application, contemplation.

Fewer ideals of which many young or no longer so (I first found The Hobbit at nine; not much later my first photocopy at the library was his Time Magazine 1973 fresh obituary) hold dearest of all now, but revisiting this compendium as I suffer loss, I reflect how well-timed boyhood exposure to Tolkien's influence has guided me over for a half-century-plus. (Cf. SF effects at the age of twelve.)

But full disclosure from this admirer, who nevertheless hesitates to meet his heroes at close range. I sense, as his son and his official biographer collaborated in the first gathering of correspondence, there echo delays or ping gaps from full disclosure as to failings of father or adjudicator. Or those who survive to supervise his archives may continue to withhold certain missives (I think of Richard Ellmann's uproar after sexy selections from James Joyce's stash) that might betray JRRT shadowed by not spotless illumination. But this is carping, speculative fiction indeed, and arguably or wholly unjustified; I mention slight misgiving as it's hovered over both my immersions into this collection.

While the updated volume at least in digital form despite its fresh content--not a small bit thuds across as superficial despite my high hopes for profound revelations and brilliance from hidden troves-- falls short of user perfection, it's a tribute to a fussy, flawed, funny, fustian, frazzled, and formidable character I learned I'm but two degrees of separation from, twice over, my sheer delight.

P.S. The founder of the Tolkien Society of America, one Dick Plotz to boot, attempting to compose a salutation in Elvish, then being corrected by the Man Himself, made hours immersed in this pay off.

Next, Shippey’s 2000 J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Four stars, Feb. 12th 2025.

While my 1982 first ed. of his (since two others appeared, as Tolkien's legendarium continued to be published, necessitating updates) 'Road to Middle Earth' remains a breakthrough interpretation that influenced my comprehension, I admit, infused with my own 'trained medievalist' background (my diss. adviser was among JRRT's final Ph.D. tutees at Oxford), that Shippey's philologist training and career (he's in the footsteps, literally, as he attended the same grammar school, and succeeded to the same chair that JRRT had occupied in not one but two universities) did court, as he admits, a specialized audience for that preceding book. In this 2000 version, he adapts his sharp scholarship for a wider readership. And he defends that bold subtitle, as fans/ populists win out over 20c literati.

Much to admire. Shippey, whom you'd hear reciting Anglo-Saxon in the Story of English PBS series, brings his ear and eye to bear. He asserts, and I'd agree amidst the greying remnants of those schooled before the erosion of traditional curricula in English lit, that bereft of these philological roots, those critiquing heroic fantasy--a genre all but invented by Tolkien--and producing a slew of series will never hereafter match the original (I second this judgement; LotR at the age of twelve ruined me for any imitators, even CS Lewis; see my review recently of T's Letters).

Sounds snobbish but consider a sample shard of evidence that Shippey's astute and learned enough to share. The Riders of the Mark='native' turf of T's maternal side, Mercia=West Midlands. Not West Saxons, for the names T. applies to troops and their horses are the former's dialect of Old English. Few in the T. industry, which has globalized since T. died, likely possess this acumen or parsing.

I respect how Shippey, not a Christian, accepts the framework of faith T. incorporated, to be fair in measuring its success, and also its shortcomings. Shippey's critique highlights temptations of top-down power transmitted to those who seek, like Saruman, to do good with its technological or ideal potency, more than tension between 'the Great Escape' from deathlessness Elves contemplate as in contrast with the mortality faced by humans and hobbits in Middle-Earth's Third Age. But this may be colored by my having trudged through the 2023 expansion of T.'s correspondence, where the balance on the latter which its creator (sub-creator too) tips may have weighed in louder, in steady, insistent explications, rather than in the original compilation out concurrently with the first 'Road.'

In both presentations, Shippey anticipates an impasse retarding or preventing progress in the fields he and Tolkien ploughed. For politicization and polarization within their academy has in hindsight sadly come to pass, by the pivotal point of the past millennium's passing. A quarter-century after 'Author' emerged, this shadows all of scholarship, as its proteges today control not only lecture-halls, but their online fora, offices elected or appointed, bureaucracies, PR, and mainstream media. It's a cliche to lament about falling standards, but medieval studies itself (I aver how I can speak from experience) has capitulated, since Shippey wrote this, to 'relevant' anti-DWM identitarianism.

Shippey emphasizes how few if any of T.'s successors inherit that discipline (I use this in double sense) to construct let alone conceive the maps, chronologies, world-building, art, theology (cf. Shippey's masterful excursion into how 'lead us not into temptation/ but deliver us from evil'= a Boethian concept of how evil is not 'real' ultimately vs. the Manichean insistence that negativity's perpetuated as a malignant force, and how both energies reify in the Ring itself), and the sense of how intricately but fragmented, fallen, and flimsy remain the threads tying a chronicle, mythology, and/or found treasure hoard of lore to whatever frayed scraps survive in the English tradition, which as Shippey notes lacks the teeming depths of Germanic or Welsh, Norse or Finnish troves.

It's one of many refreshing and briskly argued—despite the professor's understandable byways into burred thickets of exposition where he may ground his arguments firmly. This density invites those whose commitment to close readings does exceed my own enthusiasm; alas, I've never been able to submerge in every inked flurry of JRRT...My admiration for his legacy strives against my stamina. As with T.'s letters, I confess: my 'mature' attention span fritters away my 'suspension of disbelief.'

I wish Shippey's afterword had delved into hidden furrows deeper. But excavating their riches may be a task for those directed to this fertile terrain by his pioneering forays. For instance, the parallels and differences with Joyce's 'Ulysses,' the divide between derided masses (I hoist up 'baskets of deplorables' or any lit-crit parallel) who've snapped up LotR vs. the subscription which limited the first customers of that Dubliner's tome, sponsored by Parisian patrons and modernist elites) and those promoted in seminars now and drawing-rooms then. Plus failures by the burgeoning cadre of speculative fiction yarn spinners who can't rise to the level of their forebear. Shippey's prefatory framework placing T. within company of Golding, Orwell, Vonnegut, and 20c tellers of tales of similar imaginative power reverberates over his subtitle and his thesis, but he could have done with a return to this model, a follow-through wrap-up, given initiatives sparked which gaming, movies, spin-offs, and serializations, all the more in a generation since this emerged, do hyper-proliferate.