9780230101661

10.1057/9780230101661preview - The Power of Tolkien's Prose, Steve Walker

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The Power of Tolkien’s Prose

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The Power of Tolkien’s Prose

Middle-Earth’s Magical Style

Steve Walker

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THE POWER OF TOLKIEN’S PROSE

Copyright © Steve Walker, 2009.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2009 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–0–230–61992–0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker, Steve, 1941– The power of Tolkien’s prose : Middle-Earth’s magical style / Steve

Walker. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–61992–0 (alk. paper) 1. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973—Criticism and

interpretation. 2. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973—Literary style. 3. Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR6039.O32Z8917 2009823’.912—dc22 2009011164

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: December 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Things Deeper and Higher 1

1 Ordinary Everyday Magic 7

2 Blade and Leaf Listening 41

3 The Road Goes On for Ever 71

4 Always On and On 93

5 The Potency of the Words 115

6 Just a Bit of Nonsense 147

Conclusion: What You Will See, If You Leave

the Mirror Free to Work 167

Notes 175

Sources 191

Index 201

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Brigham Young University for the many years of research

and writing time invested in me and in this project. Thanks to my

students who thoughtfully argued aspects of the manuscript, espe-

cially Jonathan Langford, Andy Schultz, and the inimitable and

invaluable Jeff Swift. Thanks to my wife, Mary Walker, without whose

careful and encouraging reading I could not have entrusted this work

to public scrutiny. Thanks to Brigitte Shull and her assistant

Lee Norton, whose warm competence provided the most helpful

editing in my four decades of publishing.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Things Deeper and Higher

Seldom has a literary work stirred such a maelstrom of critical contro-

versy as swirled around The Lord of the Rings at its publication. Half

a century later, this strange reincarnation of a form long relegated to

ugliest stepsister status among the genres of the novel, warm and

fuzzy fantasy adrift in the great ice age of sophisticated realism, still

roils readers. The critical furor reached a pitch recently that provoked

Joseph Pearce from his British reserve to marvel at the animosity of

the quarrels over the quality of Tolkien’s fiction: “Rarely has a book

caused such controversy and rarely has the vitriol of the critics

highlighted to such an extent the cultural schism between the literary

illuminati and the views of the reading public.”1

Pearce does not overstate. The highbrow London Guardian

assigned The Rings to the lowest level of literary hell, calling it “by

any reckoning one of the worst books ever written.”2 Yet in the same

year of that unmitigated negation, a poll of no less than 25,000

English readers by the BBC and Waterstone booksellers declared

Tolkien’s epic the best book of the century—fully a fifth of respon-

dents thought it number one, eclipsing second-place 1984 by an

astonishing 24 percent. That fulsome praise in its turn so incensed

anti-Tolkien readers that the “Greatest Book of the Century” poll got

repeated—and confirmed, and confirmed, and again confirmed, and

yet again confirmed—by a Daily Telegraph poll, a Bookseller analysis

of the most-borrowed books at British libraries, a poll of 50,000

people for the Bookworm television program, and a Folio Society poll.

The Shakespeare group went so far as to rank Tolkien’s epic Britain’s

favorite book of any century.3

And that’s not the half of it. The precipitous divide separating

anti- and pro-Tolkien factions extends beyond the disagreements

between experts and common readers. In fact, Tolkien quarrels

may be most fractious and fracturing among people who should

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2 THE POWER OF TOLKIEN’S PROSE

know better—professional readers, academic critics. Nor are these

conflicts mere theoretical quibbles. Opinions about the quality of

Tolkien’s fiction are about as viscerally felt and passionately argued

as criticism gets.

Probably no fiction writer of the twentieth century has been so

extravagantly lauded by critics as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

Certainly to no other have serious readers assigned such auspicious

literary bedfellows. The Lord of the Rings has been compared with the

Prose Edda, Genesis, Ariosto, Malory, and Spenser.4 Some think

“its congeners are rather . . . Gilgamesh . . . the Aeneid . . . Chanson de

Roland . . . Beowulf.” Others see it “closer to the Odyssey, Divine

Comedy, Paradise Lost, or Faust.”5 Modernists have found Tolkien “as

good as War and Peace,” “Spenglerian,” “in the ranks with Eliot,”

located in superlative literary prominence “somewhere between

Dickens and Wordsworth”6—a position variously pinpointed as

artistic intimacy with Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Browning,

Tennyson, and Arnold.7 Tolkien’s fiction has been compared to

Chaucer and Shakespeare, Verdi and Wagner, Wilde and Pound,

Proust and Melville, Cervantes, Faulkner, Marlowe, Henry James,

Defoe,Whitman, Augustine, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and

James Joyce—it “may surpass Joyce’s more radical work.”8

Others compare it to James Bond, Buck Rogers, Peter Rabbit, and

“the excruciating cutenesses of Walt Disney.”9 Tolkien’s fiction excites

passionately divergent reactions. Critics disagree about the literary

stature of The Lord of the Rings: it is to some a preeminent expression

of “the great modes and methods of English literature,” to others

“just a good yarn on the level of Tom Swift and His Magic Runabout.”10

Critics disagree about the quality of its narrative: the book is found to

manifest “little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form” and

simultaneously to exhibit “all the virtues of the great storytellers.”11

Critics disagree about its very genre: it is variously viewed as “genuine

epic,” “British melodrama,” “romance,” “parable,” “prose poem,”

“whimsy,” “quest-in-reverse,” “patent and systematic allegory,”

“a comic strip for grownups,” “morality play,” “Nordic myth,” “fable,”

“super science fiction,” “overgrown fairy tale,” “revelation,” “a new

genre” with “no true literary counterpart”—its stance has been

described as everything from “heroic-elegiac” through “symbolist” to

“post-realistic.”12

Critics disagree violently about virtually every aspect of Tolkien’s

fiction, content not excepted. According to its readers, The Lord of the

Rings at one and the same time “rejects the minutia of everyday life”

and “joins the high art of the world in revealing the significance, even



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INTRODUCTION: THINGS DEEPER AND HIGHER 3

the glory, of the ordinary.”13 It is “astonishingly underivative” and

“a tissue of ill-digested borrowings.”14 To some it “externalizes . . . con-

flicts are rarely within,” and yet to others it is “carefully internalized.

The authentic acts . . . all take place in the mind.”15 “Too long, too clut-

tered, too much,” it has at the same time “not a word or an incident

too many.”16 It is “a book to be read for sound prose” whose “prose

and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.”17 It is

“a profoundly Christian work” and “by no means a Christian work,”18

in “accord with the contemporary visions of youth” and filled with

“all kinds of archaic awfulness,”19 a “Tory daydream” and “radical,”20

“an astonishing feat of the imagination” beset by “pathetic imagina-

tive impotence,”21 “over-complicated” and “terribly simplistic,”22 “a

classic” and “mishmash,”23 “unreadable” and “a work of genius.”24

“No one seems unmoved by the work,” reports one reader: “it

provokes either awe or anger.”25 Tolkien’s fiction has “aroused the

most surprising passions in his audience. There are intelligent people

who cannot read more than a few pages without disgust, and there

are equally intelligent people who are addicts.”26 W. H. Auden, who

knows something of literary argument, contends in a New York Times

Book Review that “I rarely remember a book about which I have had

such violent arguments.”27

Tom Shippey, probably our most astute and certainly our most

comprehensive and balanced reader of Tolkien, considers that contra-

dictory criticism a symptom of our failure to read Tolkien well. He

worries about the superficiality of the critical reaction from both pro

and con camps, worries about “the quantity of shallow and silly

commentary, both hostile and laudatory.”28 Tolkien has attracted

“such a poor secondary literature,” Shippey thinks, because “it is dif-

ficult to write well about Tolkien because of the distinctive nature of

his merits, not because he has no merits.” Enthusiastically as I share

Shippey’s diagnosis that we have failed to appreciate the implications

of the dramatically divided views of Tolkien readers, I cannot concur

with his curative prescription, finding as I do in Shippey’s thoughtful

analysis yet another Tolkien reading to disagree with. I think he, like

the rest of us, has overlooked the deeper concern—seen the symptoms,

missed the diagnosis.

What if the variety of reaction to Tolkien’s prose were indication of

the richness of his art? If varied response is any kind of key to

complexity, Tolkien’s art is kaleidoscopic. The reaction of readers is

more complicated even than the critical quarrels would suggest.

Tolkien’s creation can inspire contradiction not only among different

critics but within the same critic. William Ready discovers “a tendency



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to ramble and be finicky” in this “spare, taut, ironic tale.”29 Tom

Shippey himself—for whom, as for most of us moderns, irony is a

kind of talisman of authorial competence—views “Tolkien’s whole

developed narrative method [as] ironic, as also anti-ironic.”30 Burton

Raffel begins his discussion of style insisting “it would be foolish to

say Tolkien does not write well” and concludes declaring that Tolkien’s

writing is “not literature.”31 Douglass Parker finds in it both “Batman”

and “recreated Beowulf.”32

Critics see Tolkien as a writer whose “compelling power” somehow

transcends his “linguistic limitations,” an awkward artist undercutting

his natural force with language “impoverished or pretentious. Yet the

power of the fable remains.”33 He is solemnly declared a “brilliantly

adequate” stylist, “a born storyteller and a bad writer.”34 It is not sur-

prising, given these professional opinions, that mere common readers

should judge The Lord of the Rings “among the most glorious, scary,

fantastic, happy, poignant, etc., etc. books ever to have been written

and I hope nobody has been scared away by the flowery, sentimental,

contrived writing.”35

If critical contradiction provides a key to Tolkien’s art, it is clearly

a key itself difficult to decipher. The deep disagreement surrounding

the significance of Tolkien’s fiction may, as some have suggested,

result from a disappointing tendency among the approving half of the

literate populace toward “a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash,” from

a profusion of escapists who crave the panderings of “a never-never

world that satisfies the 20th-Century mind,” from “a general lack of

spiritual funds, which has thrown up Gurus stranger than Tolkien.”36

Catherine Stimpson considers the disagreement a product of the

irresponsible application of “taste, not criticism”37—other people’s

tastes being inevitably inferior to one’s own criticism.

The controversial quality of this much-lauded and much-lamented

writing may result from the sheer scope of Tolkien’s fiction, from the

vastness and intricacy of a creation incorporating so much weakness

with so much strength that it provides infinitely variable material

for a host of fragmentary viewpoints. But it is intriguing that most

readers admit the power of Tolkien’s fiction, sometimes in the same

breath with which they deny its artistic dynamics—his “flat, rather

Pre-Raphaelite style” may be “stultifying . . . yet shudders run down the

back on reading him, and the hair lifts on one’s head.”38 I suspect

the strabismic critical reaction reflects penetrating artistry beneath

the deceptively simple surface of his narrative.

Tolkien’s mode is vivid ambiguity. His profoundly paradoxical

technique attains artistic integrity from a collision of disparate tensions,



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INTRODUCTION: THINGS DEEPER AND HIGHER 5

generating literary power from emotive polarities. With a subtlety

camouflaged by narrative directness, an understated vigor of craftsman-

ship, Tolkien maintains compelling artistic balance on a tightrope of

ambiguity where fantasy verges on deepest reality, tall tale approaches

archetype, and magic merges with the mundane, where metaphor

assumes actuality and flexibility finds lasting form, where semantic

magic comes perilously and provocatively close to life.



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C H A P T E R 1

Ordinary Everyday Magic

J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation of an incredibly credible imaginative world

in the Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is a

considerable artistic achievement. But that fantastic realism reflects a

more fundamental literary accomplishment. Tolkien not only creates

realistic fantasy, he stimulates us to create our own: he encourages us

to participate in his subcreation. He schools readers, through the

insight of his narrative, in the art of imaginative perception, training

us to see everywhere implicit meaning, inner life. He invites us so

deeply into his fictive world that it becomes our world, multiplied by

his. Tolkien creates a secondary world vital enough to move beyond

metaphor of the world as we know it into an artistic mirror that can

make our individual worlds metaphors for “things deeper and higher.”

To those who have ventured there with Tolkien, Middle-earth,

through its introspective realism, is more than an intriguing artistic

location, more than a unique narrative experience: Middle-earth

verges on a new dimension of perception.

Tolkien’s fiction focuses its penetrating vision by intricate applica-

tion of a simple rhetorical process: reader participation. Readers are

invited to familiarize themselves into this fantastic sphere, then to

reach through its naturalness to the preternatural. This invitational

prose is so carefully etched it can disclose not only the actuality of

the transcendent, but also that deeper miracle: the numinousness of

the commonplace. To reveal to the reader the faërie implicit in the

universe, Middle-earth transfigures normality and elucidates the inef-

fable in a reciprocal re-creation that imbues common occurrence with

mythic significance, realizing “ordinary everyday sort of magic.”1

Tom Shippey, so much the best recent reader of Tolkien he has

become the critical standard-bearer, stresses how popular Tolkien

has proved over the last half of the twentieth century, popularity

thoroughly certified by turn-of-the-century British polls. His



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diagnosis of the cause of that effect is significant: he sees Tolkien’s

fiction as “more than realistic, and more than romantic.”2 Perceptive

as Shippey is about the paradox, he appears to miss the point of it. In

a literary era driven by cultural concerns, a critical dispensation dom-

inated by the social criticism of cultural studies and Marxism and

feminism and new historicism, it is not surprising that Shippey should

see the source of that literary appeal as cultural rather than stylistic.

“The power” of Tolkien’s writing lies for him, as for most Tolkien

critics, “not in mots justes but in the evocation of ideas at once old

and new.”3

Readers more wary of the transience of literary fashions, especially

recent fashions, might question any dilemma that pits stylistic against

cultural concerns. Could it be that Tolkien’s style contributes more to

his literary appeal than we, with our focus on social considerations,

are disposed to notice? Could it be that The Lord of the Rings has

established itself as an instant literary classic not so much because it

evokes new historicist “ideas at once old and new” as because it is

unusually well written? Could we have undervalued Tolkien’s master-

piece because his narrative is effective in a way transparent to our au

courant literary dispositions: stylistically effective? Tolkien’s style is

worth a closer look, particularly because, in the half-century since

publication of The Lord of the Rings, few have looked at its prose style

at all, and no one has looked at it as closely as it deserves.

What becomes evident when we zero in on Tolkien style is how

strikingly invitational this prose is, how it stakes so much of its success

on reader response. Its open-endedness, the carefully orchestrated

ambiguity that is its essential fictional technique, is dramatized by the

most emphatic fact about this fiction: diverse reader reaction to

Tolkien’s creation. Middle-earth provokes fantastically fervent

response, “fulsome and flatulent adulation” frothing into “Frodo

Lives” sweatshirts, Tolkien Societies, mushrooming Middle-earth

newsletters and, in a deeper dimension, the sort of disciple’s awe for

this manifest fantasy one expects from dedicated readers of the

Gospels or Henry James.4

Serious critics dramatize even more emphatically the contradiction

of fantasy taken seriously, declaring this “incredible sphere,”

this “never-never world,” “notwithstanding the frame of fantasy—

profoundly realistic”: “It is the real world.”5 Middle-earth is for its

readers a superlative paradox, a world “at once human and supernat-

ural,” “strange and . . . familiar,” “magical . . . and also simply histori-

cal,” a world in which “ ‘unreality’ becomes the best road to realism”:

“The more real it seems, the more fictional he is.”6



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ORDINARY EVERYDAY MAGIC 9

The paradoxical nature of Tolkien’s artistic creation may be seen

in microcosm in the focused ambiguity of its locale. “Everyone who

reads these works feels the presence of a possible culture”;7 indeed,

individual readers are so sold on the precise nature of that culture

they fail to notice the general disagreement about just what it is.

One critic assures us, “Middle-earth is surprisingly fixed . . . the

Shire, the rich English Midlands near Birmingham,” whereas

another insists with equal certainty that the tale “does not take place

in England.”8 Other readers find in Tolkien’s creation “exactly

the same geographical relationship” as “the area of the epics in

middle western Europe, perhaps in France,” “considerable rugged

Scandinavian terrain,” a “real” similarity to “the Colorado moun-

tains where I live.”9

Nor have we begun to exhaust the possibilities of where Middle-

earth resides: Peter Jackson’s Academy-Award-winning films relocated

wholesale the locale of Middle-earth to New Zealand for a generation

of viewers. The most impressive thing about the verisimilitude of

Tolkien’s world may be not that “the terrain and families of Middle-

earth are as clear to us as those of London or Boston or Yoknapatawpha

County,”10 striking as that artistic feat is in fantasy. Tolkien’s ultimate

accomplishment is that Middle-earth stimulates among its readers not

just vivid responses, but individual responses. Tolkien’s creation

engages his readers in subcreation.

The key to that individuated involvement, that participatory

process, is the provision of a milieu that draws its magic sustenance

from roots deep in the familiar. Middle-earth’s “local terrain, climate,

and dominant flora and fauna are much as we know them today. We

feel at ease with them at once.”11 And it’s not just that we’re in familiar

general territory; the precision of Middle-earth’s detail, as Brian

Rosebury’s careful assessment attests, is even more compelling: “No

writer was ever more constantly aware than Tolkien of all the details

of mountain, grassland, wood, and swamp, of variations in

temperature, wind or calm, rain or cloud, the quality of sunlight and

starlight, the hues of each particular sunset.”12 So precise is that

authorial competence that one reader thinks “no attentive reader can

deny Tolkien’s skill and breadth of imagination in creating a Secondary

World where Secondary Belief is possible.”13

Many, however, do. On the one hand, doubters accuse that “all

too often, Tolkien asserts rather than demonstrates.” On the equally

skeptical other hand, there are those who think “Tolkien tends rather

to over-complicate—not in purpose, but in detail,” causing the reader

to lose himself in “a mass of detail which is itself vibrant with



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imaginative energy.”14 That striking critical dissonance, that

contradictory reaction to both an apparent absence of detail and at

the same time the presence of particularized detail so profuse it

swamps the creation, provides paradoxical proof of the careful craft-

ing of Tolkien’s ambiguity.

There is more to his verisimilitude than the superficial fact that

“seldom since Defoe has there been such a multitude of concatenating

details.”15 The technique by which Tolkien has created, peopled,

languaged, cultured, and made consistent within itself his vital and

credible imaginative world is essentially one of suggestion. This

narrator “makes sure we know that he knows more than he chooses

to tell.”16 His “art of fantasy flourishes on reticence”—“the data are

not there, and Tolkien has no intention whatever of supplying them.”17

His footnotes, his interjected explanations, even his “interminable

appendices that litter the flow of the tale,”18 involved as they are, tend

always toward expansion of the possibilities of his world rather than

toward reduction, raising more questions than they resolve. His

detail, however extensive and rigorously observed, is the tip of an

iceberg of implications.

The simile detailing Théoden on horseback “like a god of old,

even as Orome the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world

was young,”19 seems almost epic in its amplitude. Theoden’s magnif-

icence is magnified in the godlikeness of a cultural hero so renowned

his name needs no gloss, glorious in a battle so significant it needs no

explanation. Yet for all that obviousness, the appeal of the allusion is

to unseen complexity, to the convolutions of an underlying Middle-

earth mythology. For all its vividness, the allusion tells us nothing of

Orome except his generic greatness, so little of Middle-earth religion

we’re not certain it rises above superstition, nothing of the battle of

the Valar save its ancientness—not the enemy fought, not the signifi-

cance of the conflict, not even whether the battle was won.

That open invitation to imagination fosters realism on two fron-

tiers of the fiction. In the Middle-earth world itself, these missing

legendary details cannot be plausibly spelled out for natives who

naturally absorb such lore from the cultural atmosphere. And from

the reader’s perspective, visitors to Middle-earth must sketch the

specifics in from context, as newcomers to actual cultures do. With

but a handful of such casual references in 600,000 words, there is

established among Middle-earth peoples a sense of widespread mythic

communion so deep as to elude explicit discussion.20 Tolkien’s detail

works like that everywhere, typically reflecting rather than resolving

density. His world picture owes its credibility not so much to



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elaborateness of development as to the vivid suggestiveness, the

imaginative energy, the do-it-yourself appeal, of the carefully selected

brushstrokes that do appear.

The richness of that suggestion, although generated in ambiguity,

is not allowed to dissipate unfocused. Middle-earth’s every aspect—

its idiosyncratic topography and weather; its alien peoples and

institutions; its innovative number systems, calendars, alphabets, and

languages; and its fantastic fauna and flora—is grounded in the

familiar. Weather results invariably from unobtrusive but discernible

meteorological cause.21 Tolkien never goes out of his narrative way to

tell the time of his tale, yet seasonal sequences of diurnal light patterns

and even lunar cycles can be traced from incidental hints in the story.22

Third Age languages are so practically down-to-earth that modern

mortals write letters in them.23 There is throughout Tolkien’s fic-

tional universe “always a feeling of Present-earth.”24

The personal applicability of the fiction accounts for much of its

appeal, as wryly attested by my students’ “Top Ten Justifications for

Not Being Married from The Lord of the Rings”:

10. It’s the Arwen worry: a girl who married me might die.

9. If Frodo’s 60, still unmarried, yet saving the world, do I really

need to get married?

8. Tom Bombadil’s cohabited happily for epochs without marriage.

7. The only time I gave a girl a ring she started talking about being

a dark queen “beautiful as the morning and the night and all

shall love her and despair” and I got nervous.

6. I’m 4’2”, kind of fat, and my feet are hairy.

5. Is anyone in this book married?

4. The only guy who has any lady luck at all swears it’s the yellow

boots, and I’m not that desperate yet.

3. I have the “Black Breath.”

2. Whenever I thought about marriage a shadow fell on my heart

though I did not know yet what I feared.

1. Think it’s hard getting an elf to let his daughter marry a mortal?

Try talking somebody into letting his daughter marry an English

major.25

Middle-earth, its “fantasy based on hard fact,”26 proves reliable

with an earthiness that constantly stimulates readers to cross-reference

to their own versions of reality. A creature as extraordinary as that

stunningly innovative tree-being Fangorn is perceived at first sight by

sharp-eyed Merry and Pippin as commonplace, an “old stump of a



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tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure

of some gnarled old man, standing.”27

A typical touch of that deft earthing of Middle-earth underlies the

climactic Mt. Doom episode. Although the narrative makes no more

of it than latent steamings of assonance, the mountain is clearly a

dormant volcano: “a huge mass of ash and slag and burned stone, out

of which a sheersided cone was raised into the clouds” (919). As

we approach with Frodo and Sam and the ring, submerged and

incidental geological intimations of volcanic activation growl out of

the mountain in onomatopoeic rumblings of prose—“a deep remote

rumble as of thunder imprisoned under the earth” (918). There is a

“brief red flame that flickered under the clouds and died away” (918),

then we see the mountain “smoking” (924). We feel the pressure

cooker buildup of a preparatory “roar and a great confusion of noise”

in which “fires leaped up and licked the roof” and “the throbbing

grew to a great tumult, and the Mountain shook” (925).

Then Mt. Doom erupts:

Then all passed. Towers fell and mountains slid; walls crumbled and

melted, crashing down; vast spires of smoke and spouting steams went

billowing up, up, until they toppled like an overwhelming wave and its

wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land. Then at last

over the miles between there came a rumble, rising to a deafening

crash and roar; the earth shook, the plain heaved and cracked, and

Orodruin reeled. Fire belched from its riven summit. The skies burst

into thunder seared with lightning. Down like lashing whips fell a tor-

rent of black rain. (925–26)

Vivid as that description is, we get no explicit indication the scene

is volcanic until that “Orodruin reeled” sentence, and even then the

mountain seems more personified than geologic. A few pages later, “a

huge fiery vomit” rolls in “slow thunderous cascade down the eastern

mountain-side,” and later still, in precise geological sequence, falls “a

rain of hot ash” (929). Despite that journalistic reportage, we come

away from the chapter having witnessed not the eruption of a volcano

as detailed on the National Geographic channel, but rather the cha-

otic End of the Third Age triggered by Gollum’s fall into the Cracks

of Doom with the One Ring. The volcano is incidental, so submerged

in the narrative most readers are not consciously aware it is there.28

Developed unobtrusively throughout an entire chapter, that tangible

volcanic eruption grounds an ostensibly supernatural incident in

down-to-earth imagery. Middle-earth resonates with reality in part

because its felt points of reference are earthy.



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That credibility confirms in the internal consistency of Tolkien’s

creation. However dubious critics may be about its suggestive power

or its foundation in the familiar, they find Middle-earth a “totally

coherent world-scape,” “a structure that is so self-consistent and varied

it will withstand any amount of probing.”29 “The internal coherence of

its history, geography, philology” tends to reinforce “the impression of

a world which has the interior consistency of the real world.”30

The aura of internal consistency is in part the product of Tolkien’s

penetrating vision of his world, in part a dividend of its detailed

development, and in part the result of such deliberate technical

buttresses to coherence as his stylistic system of internal allusion, of

cross-referencing to his world as if it were reality. Hobbits consistently

think in Middle-earth terms; they compare aspects of their world as

familiarly as we. They talk of riding “elf-fashion” (582), of being

“more cruel than any Orc” (870); they make such distinctively

Middle-earthy remarks as “You’re three inches taller than you ought

to be, or I’m a dwarf” (934).

Such internal confirmation has convinced some readers that the

Middle-earth realism is entirely autonomous, that Tolkien’s creation

has “no literal ties to actuality” but is independently “true to its own

inner laws. It is simply ‘there.’ ”31 But as can be seen in Treebeard’s

entish comparisons, this rhetorical process, like Tolkien’s art gener-

ally, proves Middle-earth through a syllogism whose premises are

earthy: “Ents are more like Elves: less interested in themselves than

Men are, and better at getting inside other things. And yet again Ents

are more like Men, more changeable than Elves are, and quicker at

taking the colour of the outside, you might say. Or better than both:

for they are steadier and keep their minds on things longer” (457).

That terrestrializing helps explain the apparent sleight of hand by

which the fantastic beings of Middle-earth come to seem as real as

next-door neighbors. The most far-out creatures appear as logical

extensions of the familiar, likely links in a contiguous chain of being

whose unearthliest extremity draws distant sustenance from roots in

our world. “The reader walks through any Middle-earth landscape

with a security of recognition that woos him on to believe in

everything that happens.”32 Hobbits have much that is human about

them, elves much that is hobbitish; in a world where barrow-wights

have become by association believable, it is a small step to balrogs.

Thus the cornucopial innovativeness of this fantastic world proves

paradoxically self-authenticating: such new plants as simbelmyne

flowers and mallorn trees, such new insects as neekerbreekers, such

new bird species as the crebain, such drastically reshaped monsters as



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The Power of Tolkien's Prose

Middle Earth's Magical Style

Steve Walker

ISBN: 9780230101661

DOI: 10.1057/9780230101661preview

Palgrave Macmillan

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