PART I
Tolkien did not like literary critics. As Tom Shippey points out, critics were “oaks” and philologists were “birches”. Oaks were students of English Literature, the “Enemy”, “the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons”, (Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth [TRtMe] 8.311) and birches, the students of Philology. Shippey tells us:
“Tolkien […] accepted that ‘lang.’ was just as foolish a rallying-cry as ‘lit.’. In his manifesto of 1930, ‘The Oxford English School’ he even suggested that both terms should be scrapped in favour of ‘A’ and ‘B’ – thus attempting, with something very close to lèse majesté, to introduce the curriculum of a ‘redbrick’ university, Leeds, to the ivory towers of Oxford, with sad if entirely predictable lack of success” (8).
CLYDE KILBY
Many Tolkien scholars have questioned Tolkien’s veracity when it came to answering questions about his own works. Tolkien almost uniformly disliked and even dismissed outright critiques of his works. Kilby states: “Like Lewis, he held a low opinion of the twentieth century, literary critics and all” (Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion [TatS] 30). Kilby remarks on this point: “This attitude may have been why Tolkien managed so remarkably to keep the events of his actual life hidden from the public” (16).
Kilby provides probably our most clear insight into Tolkien:
“I felt Tolkien was like an iceberg, something to be reckoned with above water in both its brilliance and mass and yet with much more below the surface. In his presence one was aware of a single totality but equally aware at various levels of a kind of consistent inconsistency that was both native-perhaps his genius-and developed, almost deliberate, even enjoyed. The word, if there were one, might be “contrasistency.” If my account of him is sketchy and in itself inconsistent, it has the virtue of reflecting my real impression of the man” (Preface).
So Tolkien was consistently inconsistent with his audience and enjoyed it. Regarding the influence of George MacDonald Kilby had this to say:
“One antipathy struck me oddly. Though elsewhere he has spoken of George Macdonald with real appreciation, at the time I visited Tolkien he was making frequent wholesale attacks on him […] A friend of mine who is well versed in Macdonald and also fond of Tolkien suggests that the dislike of MacDonald may have arisen partly to throw people off the scent of his deep indebtedness. Whatever the real explanation, I think that the indebtedness is clear” (31).
Kilby also described his equally strange antipathy to his universally popular character Sam Gamgee. This impenetrability was equally experienced by Tolkien’s own friends:
“Perhaps I can best give an idea of our sessions together by a seriatim record of one of them. But, first I should say that what went on was hardly a conversation. One of my friends had been told by C.S. Lewis that one might ask Tolkien questions but one would not necessarily get the answers expected. One might find him talking on an entirely different topic, to which he had seen a relationship lost to the questioner. I son [sic] found this to be true” (20).
Kilby notes other “contrasistencies”.
“In a telephone conversation with Tolkien, Mr. Henry Resnick asked what was east of Rhûn and south of Harad, to which Tolkien replied, “Rhûn is the Elvish word for east. Asia, China, Japan, and all the things which people in the West regard as far away. And south of Harad is Africa, the hot countries.” Then Mr, Resnick asked, “That makes Middle-earth Europe, doesn’t it?” To which Tolkien replied, “Yes, of course—Northwestern Europe…where my imagination comes from.”17 Not long afterwards, when I mentioned this interview to Tolkien, he denied ever having said these things. Yet later, when in my own efforts to get the geography of The Silmarillion straight I asked Tolkien where Numenor was, he promptly responded, “In the middle of the Atlantic.” Is this another instance of the Professor’s “contrasistency,” or is there a logical explanation? He is reported to have said specifically that Mordor “would be roughly in the Balkans.”18
All this thrusts upon us not simply geography but European history, and the allegorical framework which Tolkien so vociferously denied” (51-52).
Another relates to his statements about the appearance of religion in his works, and allegory:
“It is true that the word “God” never appears in any of Tolkien’s stories, not even in Leaf by Niggle where some Christian implications are overwhelming, including a conversation between God and Christ. We recall Tolkien’s insistence that his story had no allegorical meaning, religious or otherwise, but contrariwise, at a later time, he spoke of invocations to Elbereth Gilthoniel and added, “These and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked.”21 It seems to be another case of Tolkien’s “contrasistency”” (55).
TOM SHIPPEY
Tolkien’s views on and use of allegory has been a long running point of confusion and contention. Tom Shippey tells us:
“Against taking Smith allegorically, we have Tolkien’s own endorsement, Letters, p. 388, of a review by Roger Lancelyn Green which stated firmly that the meaning of Smith should be left alone: ‘To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce’. This can be backed up by Tolkien’s own stated dislike of allegory, discussed on pp. 55-57 above, and indeed by an even firmer statement of his own specifically about Smith, ‘This short tale is not “allegory”’. That would seem to settle the matter (for in cases like this I would scorn to fall back on the well-known critical get-out, ‘you cannot trust what an author says about his own work’) – if Tolkien had not gone on immediately to add ‘though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretation at certain points’. Tolkien furthermore gave a lead for any such allegorical interpretation by saying, ‘The Great Hall is evidently in a way an “allegory” of the village church; the Master Cook with his house adjacent, and his office that is not hereditary … is plainly the Parson and the priesthood’. Tolkien’s own surviving commentary on his own story, from which these statements, cited by Dr Flieger, are taken is indeed, again according to Dr Flieger, ‘a running argument with himself on the question of whether the story is or is not an allegory’.3 If Tolkien himself could not decide, then, the question can fairly be taken as open” (TRtMe 8.309).
He continues on the subject of the name of Nokes.
“There is furthermore one element which seems to me a clear case of Tolkienian private symbolism, and that is the name of Smith’s main antagonist throughout the work, the rude and incompetent Master Cook, Nokes. As I have said repeatedly, Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, […] There is no doubt that Tolkien knew all this, for there is a character called ‘old Noakes’ in the Shire, and Tolkien commented on his name, giving very much the explanation above, in his ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, written probably in the late 1950s. Tolkien there wrote off the meaning of ‘Noakes’ as ‘unimportant’, as indeed it is for The Lord of the Rings, but it would be entirely characteristic of him to remember an unimportant philological point and turn it into an important one later.”
[…]
“As must surely be obvious from chapters 1 and 2 of this work, oaks were furthermore the enemy: the enemy of philology, the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons. I do not think that Tolkien could ever have forgotten this. Furthermore it makes sense within Smith, and is not inconsistent with Tolkien’s own equation of the Master Cook with the Parson and the priesthood” (309-311).
DENYS GUEROULT
Let’s look at some more deceptive games that Tolkien engaged in. In his interview with Denys Gueroult in 1964 filmed for the BBC Tolkien makes a remarkable claim.
“Gueroult: …throughout the The Lord of the Rings for example… well the the mallorn trees in Lothlórien and the white tree of the citadel of Minas Tirith.
[…]
Gueroult: These are trees that are more than trees because they are symbols of great importance um is there something in your own life in your own background…
Tolkien: They’re not symbols to me at all, I don’t work in symbols at all, other people can find that they are symbolic they may be symbols in my mind but they’re not symbols to me in my conscious mind at all. I’m entirely stoically minded.
[…]
Gueroult: “you use um the white tree of Minas Tirith as a symbol of lordship of kingship do you not?”
Tolkien: Oh well yes yes an emblem certainly yes…
Gueroult: But not symbolic of anything more than…
Tolkien: Well what are the leopards of England symbolic of?
Gueroult: I state I take your point” (JRR Tolkien – 1965 AUDIO interview 4:43-5:31).
I’m not sure Gueroult does take his point because Tolkien’s views on his use of symbols is not clear in the least. Tolkien, as an artist has told the BBC that he does not work in symbols at all. In 1961, three years before he said:
“With regard to Aragorn’s boast,1 I think he was reckoning his ancestry through the paternal line for this purpose; but in any case I imagine that Númenóreans, before their knowledge dwindled, knew more about heredity than other people. To this of course they refer by the common symbol of blood. They recognized the fact that in spite of intermarriages, some characteristics would appear in pure form in later generations. Aragorn’s own longevity was a case in point. Gandalf I think refers to the curious fact that even in the much less well preserved house of the stewards Denethor had come out as almost purely Númenórean” (Letters 437, #230).
Tolkien specifically referred to the kingship of the men of Númenor as symbolized by something: “common symbol of blood”. This is a very similar point Gueroult just made regarding the “white tree of Minas Tirith as a symbol of lordship of kingship”. In 1954 Tolkien unequivocally states he uses symbols:
“I might perhaps have made more clear the later remarks in Vol. II (and Vol. III) which refer to or are made by Gandalf, but I have purposely kept all allusions to the highest matters down to mere hints, perceptible only by the most attentive, or kept them under unexplained symbolic forms” (Letters 297, #156).
And again in his draft letter probably written in 1951:
“* Elrond symbolises throughout the ancient wisdom, and his House represents Lore – the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful. It is not a scene of action but of reflection. Thus it is a place visited on the way to all deeds, or ‘adventures'” (Letters 213, #131).
This all recalls Dr Flieger’s remark, as referred to by Shippey, that Tolkien was having a running argument with himself on allegory, in this case on symbolism.
HENRY RESNICK
We can reveal another round of the game played by Tolkien in his interview with Henry Resnick in March, 1966, published in 1967. Resnick asks Tolkien about his awareness of Tolkien scholarship, academic theses, research papers and the like. Tolkien echoes Kilby’s impressions that it was a game: “I’d call it a game” to which “I hold the key” (Resnick 38). At the end of the conversation in a parting exchange Resnick points out that the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on Dec. 25th and Frodo must sacrifice himself that others may keep the Shire and asks: “How do you feel about the idea that people might identify Frodo with Christ?” (43). Tolkien remarks that:
“there’ve been saviors before; it is a very common thing.” but that Dec. 25th was: “As a matter of fact, December 25th occurred strictly by accident, and I let it in to show that this was not a Christian myth anyhow. It was a purely unimportant date, and I thought, Well, there it is, just an accident” (43).
Apart from Kilby’s problem with what Tolkien said to Resnick, Tolkien’s statement here also seems to be extremely questionable. Tom Shippey made the point that Tolkien’s narrative of LotR was structured around the dates of the birth and death of Christ:
“25th March remains a date deeply embedded in the Christian calendar. In old tradition, again, it is the date of the Annunciation and the conception of Christ – naturally, nine months exactly before Christmas, 25th December. It is also the date of the Fall of Adam and Eve, the felix culpa whose disastrous effects the Annunciation and the Crucifixion were to annul or repair. One might note that in the Calendar of dates which Tolkien so carefully wrote out in Appendix B, December 25th is the day on which the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell. The main action of The Lord of the Rings takes place, then, in the mythic space between Christmas, Christ’s birth, and the crucifixion, Christ’s death. Is this telling us something about Frodo? Are we meant to see him as a ‘type’ of Christ?” (Shippey, Author of the Century [AotC] IV.208-209).
This is very much supported by Tolkien’s words in 1953.
“I think I know exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 257, #142).
And these words are supported by his reference to Galadriel as Mary in 1971, which have been explored in Rateliffe’s essay on Haggard’s She (Rateliffe 148-150) and pointed out by others, “I was particularly interested in your remarks about Galadriel ….. I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary” (Letters 572, #320).
So again, we have the contradictions that he explicitly states he uses symbolism, and LotR was consciously a Catholic work.
