Tolkien, Modernism, and Me

By Crispin Sartwell

Short of scripture, people are as devoted to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien as they have been to any text at any time. I myself grew up on the stuff, and preserve a battered hardback in which is inscribed, in my father's bold and careless hand, "These books in token of happy hours spent, together and apart, in Middle Earth. Xmas '73."

But as critics and theorists generate lists of the great fictions of the twentieth century, Tolkien is nowhere to be found amidst the Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, Hemingway, Beckett. This is often put down to Tolkien's genre: to the elves, wizards and goblins that emerge from fairy tales to populate The Lord of the Rings.

But that explanation, I submit, is superficial. The Homeric epics are fantasies. Beowulf is a fantasy. The Norse sagas are fantasies. The Arabian Nights is a fantasy. The Faerie Queen is a fantasy. Paradise Lost is a fantasy.

And like those works, the Lord of the Rings, while it seduces by its promise of escape from this world, also elucidates this one: it is an intensely moralistic work that occurs on the background of immense landscapes of slaughter. Its theme is the moral importance of a humble life in contact with the land, threatened by a supernatural technology of destruction. The Lord of the Rings is the epic of the preservation of the Shire, though none of the primary events of the story occur there. It is the epic of the significance of the humble.

I think both the promise of escape and the clarity of the view onto the real, both the sweep and the humility, caught and held me when I was a kid, and after my parents read me the trilogy a couple of times through, I went on to a total immersion, and read it perhaps fifteen times to myself.

Its style distinguishes it from the contemporary works that were taken seriously by critics. Whereas Joyce or Faulkner were marked by stylistic play and steeped in self-consciousness (that is, they were "modern"), Tolkien was thoroughly earnest. His prose, though it does not immediately impress you with its brilliance, is classical, dignified, stately, epic.

In a period of continuous aesthetic upheaval, in which the primary demand on artists of every kind was innovation, Tolkien sought the language of eternality, writing canonical English without a hint of irony.

That in itself would have been enough to completely exclude him from modernism, that is, from the "serious literature" of his period. But it also largely accounts for the devotion of his readers. In a literary age devoted to formal experimentation and displays of personal genius, Tolkien effaced himself before the world he invented and handed that world over to us with a dignified and reticent sincerity. Modernism could never quite bring itself to articulate a moral vision without making us aware of its contingency, without playing with it and undercutting it, without making us aware of how it was being written and by whom. Tolkien's fantasy is classical literature in a rococo age, and it satisfies a desire for clarity and - oddly enough, for a fantasy - truth, for a period losing its grip on both.

The Tolkien revival is perhaps one signal among many that epic is becoming possible again. I think especially of the popularity of non-fiction mini-epics such as John Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm. But I also think of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, which could hardly be more straightforward in its devotion to and representation of Tolkien's text.

Of course, the books emerge into the films transformed by our time: immense washes of computer animation that make possible for the first time a convincing cinematic presentation of epic fantasy. But the films nevertheless have the earnestness, scope, and moral cleanliness of the books, something we are no less in need of, and perhaps more ready to take seriously, than was Tolkien's initial audience.

Tolkien's trilogy was the underground epic literature of the twentieth century. Jackson's is perhaps the mainstream epic literature of the twenty-first. I wish I could go see The Return of the King with my father. But on the day of its release I will take my son.

Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives" has just been published. c.sartwell@verizon.net