The Lord of the Rings
IN 1937 Professor Tolkien published one of the best books for children of our generation. It was a long magical romance of a quite unusual kind and quality, called The Hobbit. I have five children, widely differing in mind and character: all in turn were enthralled by it, and I myself never tired of re4ding it to them long after they were capable of reading it to themselves. Quite apart from its exceptional narrative skill, the invented world it described was so vivid, so various and so self-consistent, that it was difficult even for the adult reader when he closed its covers to withdraw himself from it, to remind himself' that such creatures in such a world never existed, never could exist—were not even for the most part authentic folk-lore, unless Professor Tolkien was in himself a one-man 'folk.'
What was so difficult for the reader has seemingly proved down- right impossible for the writer. Like the fairyland of tradition, his invented world has claimed him completely, and for the past fourteen years or more he has inhabited this country of the mind, writing a vast work about it, romantic epic rather than children's romance, of which. The Fellowship of the Ring is only the first of three volumes, the other two being already in the press.
The work is 'vast' in conception as well as bulk, but not 'vast' in the sense that it is tedious or that there is a word or an incident too many. The author's invention and narrative power have proved adequate for the larger canvas, one finishes the 423rd page of this first volume with unallayed appetite for page one of Volume 2. Now this, in all the circumstances, is a very remarkable achievement. Some of the early reviewers of this first volume have tended to take its sponsors (including your humble servant) to task, for the ' bom- bardment of praise directed at it from the blurb.' That perhaps is a natural reaction: as Mr. Edwin Muir points out in the Observer, 'only a masterpiece could survive' such a bombardment: but it would be a pity indeed if what were intended as bouquets served instead, as leaden sinkers, for whether or not it is a masterpiece (and none of us used that vexed word), the book is certainly no mere freak. As Mr. Muir recognises: To read it is to be thrown into astonishment.
Ile goes on to say: It deals with a stupendous theme. It leads us through a succession of strange and astonishing episodes, some of them magnificent, in a region where everything is invented, forest, moor, river, wilderness, town, and the races which inhabit them. This world is both un- accountable—one asks one's self every now and then where on earth Mr. Tolkien could have got it—yet perfectly coherent at the same time .... It exists at no known part of the earth, and in no period of time the reader can guess at; but we accept it as a region of the imagination.
This is the very quality I was trying to convey when I said that this was 'something which has scarcely been attempted on this scale since Spenser's Faerle Queene,' and stressed its width of imagination. Indeed on reading the book now for the second time I do not feel that I have said anything I ought to withdraw. I can still think of no other book with which this one can properly be compared. Al the same time I feel in substantial agreement with a good deal at lust of what Mr. Muir has to say in a more critical vein. It would ue absurd to suggest that the book's achievement is faultless; or rather, to suggest that it has all the virtues equally, proportionate to What it sets out to do. In particular, the conflict on which the theme depends derives from a highly simplified personification of Good and Evil such as one finds in the romances of C. S. Lewis: in this context Mr. Muir speaks of the 'lack of depth' of the author's imagination, where I stressed its width. Again, I agree with Mr. Muir that the verbal style is 'unequal to the theme.' Now without question the author has an adequate command of language: with- out it, he could never have been so vividly evocative: but in liter- ature one expects more than that the writer should have command over language, one expects that language should almost equally have command over him: that means that his words should be living rreatares—his language a -horse he rides rather than a car he drives: and Professor Tolkien's words, particularly when .he is writing verse which never for a moment, alas, becomes poetry—lack somewhat this inner vitality of their own. Nevertheless it is surely a truism that the life or death of a work of literature does not, in the long run, depend on the faults it has, or even on the lack of virtues it has not Sot, but on one thing only—the virtues that it has: this book has certain virtues of a high order, and I think we should be well advised to remember that what we have before us now is the first volume only of a larger work only arbitrarily divided at the point where it leaves off, and be willing to suspend judgement of this 'curious and inex- plicable object' (to quote Mr. Muir for the last time) until we have seen the whole. In •the meantime, I can assure the reader, the pleasure to be derived from this first volume is a pleasure not to be missed.
RICHARD HUGHES
Previous page
