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

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 also possible, as Jonathan Bate suggests, to draw a distinction between love of the local land, on the one hand, and patriotic love of the fatherland on the other. In The Lord of the Rings, the lovingly detailed specificities of the natural world – which include but far outrun those of the Shire – far exceed any kind of abstract nationalism.

      Stimpson also accuses Tolkien of ‘class snobbery’ – that is, the lord of the manor’s disdain for commoners, and, by extension, the working class. Well, in The Hobbit, perhaps; but only zealous detectors of orcism and trollism would ignore its other virtues, such as any quality as a story. And its hero, if no peasant, is plainly no lord. But with The Lord of the Rings – if this charge means anything worse than a sort of chivalrous paternalism, appropriate to someone growing up at the turn of this century, which now looks dated – then it fails.

      There is certainly class awareness. But the idioms of Tolkien’s various hobbits only correspond to their social classes in the same way as do those of contemporary humans. The accent and idiom of Sam (arguably the real hero of the book) and most other hobbits are those of a rural peasantry, while those of Frodo, Bilbo and their close friends range through the middle classes. Or take Orcs; their distinguishing characteristics are a love of machines and loud noises (especially explosions), waste, vandalism and destruction for its own sake; also, they alone torture and kill for fun. Their language, accordingly, is ‘at all times full of hate and anger,’ and composed of ‘brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse.’ In the Third Age, ‘Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy,’ writes Tolkien, ‘than I have shown it.’ As he adds, too truly, ‘Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt …’

      But Orc speech is not all the same; there are at least three kinds, and none is necessarily ‘working-class.’ And it can be found today among members of any social class; nor is money a bar. In fact, virtually all of Tolkien’s major villains – Smaug, Saruman, the Lord of the Nazgûl, and presumably Sauron too – speak in unmistakably posh tones. After all, the orc-minded are mere servants of Mordor; its contemporary masters (or rather, master-servants) much more resemble the Nazgûl, although today they probably wear expensive suits and ride private jets rather than quasi-pterodactyls. And although many fewer than Orcs (who knows? perhaps there are exactly nine), they are infinitely more powerful, and to be feared.

      There is also the obvious and fundamental fact of The Lord of the Rings as a tale of ‘the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.’