Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. Patrick Curry

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СКАЧАТЬ hard to bear: a vulgarity – by which I do not mean a mere ‘down-to-earthiness’ – a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional ‘wisdom.’ … Imagine Sam without his education by Bilbo and his fascination with things Elvish!

      

      Even with this kind of conservative peer pressure, however, your behaviour had to be extreme to land you in any real trouble, for the Shire at this time had hardly any government: ‘Families for the most part managed their own affairs. … The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving,’ and ‘almost his only duty was to preside at banquets …’ Otherwise there were only hereditary heads of clans, plus a Postmaster and First Shirriff – the latter less for Inside Work than ‘to see that Outsiders of any kind, great or small, did not make themselves a nuisance.’

Englishness

      Now it doesn’t take any great perceptiveness to see in ‘these charming, absurd, helpless’ (and not-so-helpless) hobbits a self-portrait of the English, something which Tolkien admitted: ‘“The Shire” is based on rural England and not any other country in the world,’ and more specifically the West Midlands: Hobbiton ‘is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’ (i.e. 1897).

      Compare the portrait by George Orwell writing in 1940, and one still instantly recognizable, albeit sadly altered in some respects, of a conservative people neither artistically nor intellectually inclined, though with ‘a certain power of acting without thought;’ taciturn, preferring tacit understandings to formal explication; endowed with a love of flowers and animals, valuing privateness and the liberty of the individual, and respecting constitutionalism and legality; not puritanical and without definite religious belief, but strangely gentle (and this has changed most, especially during the 1980s), with a hatred of war and militarism that coexists with a strong unconscious patriotism. Orwell summed up English society as ‘a strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency.’

      True, these attributes are inextricably mingled with ones that the English have wanted to find in the mirror; nor are they eternal and immutable. Because this image partakes of a national pastoral fantasy, however, it does not follow that it has no reality. A social or literary criticism that is afraid to admit the relative truth of clichés and stereotypes is hamstrung from the start. Also, it is worth noting that Tolkien’s portrait is not altogether a flattering one; it includes greed, small-minded parochialism and philistinism, at least – even if Frodo, Sam and the other hobbits of his story were able to rise above these regrettable characteristics of the English bourgeoisie.

      However, although Tolkien drew on the tiny corner of the world that is the West Midlands of England, readers from virtually everywhere else in the world connect the hobbits with a rustic people of their own, relatively untouched by modernity – if not still actually existing, then from the alternative reality of folk– and fairy-tale. Doubtless this has been made possible by setting his books in a place that, while it feels like N.W. Europe, is made strange and wonderful by its imaginary time. Otherwise, I have no doubt, they would have suffered from the same limitations of time and place as Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and G. K. Chesterton’s poems, however wonderful these otherwise may be. Tolkien’s tale, in contrast, has probably achieved as close to universality as is given to art.

Country Folk

      The hobbits are recognizably modern in important respects, especially in their bourgeois and anti-heroic tenor. Thus, one famous hobbit, when asked by a large eagle, ‘What is finer than flying?,’ only allowed his native tact, and caution, to overrule suggesting ‘A warm bath and late breakfast on the lawn afterwards.’ As several commentators have noticed, it is crucial that Bilbo and Frodo be modern, in order to ‘accommodate modernity without surrendering to it,’ by mediating between ourselves and the ancient and foreign world they inhabit. But in other ways, the hobbits have much older roots. They remind us of ‘the archetypal pre-Industrial Revolution English yeomen with simple needs, simple goals, and a common-sense approach to life,’ and also of the English before their defeat in 1066, when the ‘Norman Yoke’ imposed centralized autocratic government, a foreign language and an alien cultural tradition.

      The bucolic hobbits also clearly fall within the long tradition in English letters of nostalgic pastoralism, celebrating a time ‘when there was less noise and more green.’ As Martin J. Weiner notes, ‘Idealization of the countryside has a long history in Britain.’ It extends from Tennyson’s mid-Victorian English Idylls and William Morris’s ‘fair green garden of Northern Europe,’ through the rural essays of Richard Jefferies and the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin’s Haunts of Ancient Peace (1902) – which could easily be the title of a song by Van Morrison today – to Kipling’s ‘Our England is a garden,’ and George Sturt listening to his gardener (note), ‘in whose quiet voice,’ he felt, ‘I am privileged to hear the natural fluent, unconscious talk, as it goes on over the face of the country, of the English race.’ In short, a deep cultural gulf had opened between England’s southern and rural ‘green and pleasant land’ and her northern and industrial ‘dark satanic mills’; or as Weiner puts it, with unintentional aptness, ‘The power of the machine was invading and blighting the Shire.’

      The irony is, of course, that since 1851 over half the population on this island has lived in towns, and by then England was already the world’s first urban nation. Thus, as Weiner writes, ‘The less practically important rural England became, the more easily could it come to stand simply for an alternative and complementary set of values, a psychic balance wheel.’ But few things are that simple, and when applied to Tolkien, such glib simplification has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. The related charges commonly laid at Tolkien’s door are several, and severe. They are also almost entirely mistaken, so I shall use them to arrive at the truth of the matter.

Nation and Class

      One of the first critics to attack Tolkien was Catherine Stimpson, in 1969. ‘An incorrigible nationalist,’ she wrote, Tolkien ‘celebrates the English bourgeois pastoral idyll. Its characters, tranquil and well fed, live best in placid, philistine, provincial rural cosiness.’

      Now it is true that the hobbits (excepting Bilbo and Frodo, and perhaps Sam … and Merry and Pippin) would indeed have preferred to live quiet rural lives, if they could have. Unfortunately for them, and Stimpson’s point, there is much more to Middle-earth than the Shire. By the same token, any degree of English nationalism that the hobbits represent is highly qualified. Tolkien himself pointed out that ‘hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view.’ It is СКАЧАТЬ