Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

in which the participants are fulfilling an agon, “a context conducted in accordance with artistic rules” (Encyclopedia 12).

      It is rather useful to compare the ways in which each approach the problem of creating a satisfactory and entire otherworld, to illuminate what it was that Tolkien achieved and how, and how each of the elements I have described are constructed. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not an inferior novel, but in terms of the creation of the fantastic it is far more visibly aware of the juxtapositions of its two worlds. Consistent with my argument throughout has been that the portal and the quest fantasy use essentially the same means of entry into the fantastic, and thus are required to take up the same narrative position: essentially one that posits the reader as someone to whom things are explained through explanations offered to the protagonist.

      The opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, perhaps because it is a children’s story, is much more self-consciously narrated than we have seen previously. The frame world is a story to be told, as much as the fantasy world is: “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy” (9). It is narrated as if it were further in the past than the adventure itself: “It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried led only into spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected that they would; but soon they came to a very long room full of pictures and there they found a suit of armour” (11).

      This use of the past tense to create the frame world is also employed by Tolkien, but here the purpose and direction of the technique is rather different. Tolkien deploys this distanced past to build the history of his world, to create depth for the fantasy. Lewis is using it to create depth for the frame world, to make that real. Consequently, the unfanciful tone of Tolkien’s prologue makes real, not the fantasy between the “there and back again,” but the frame world of the Shire, which in turn makes real the adventure. By framing the Shire and the outside world with a viable past, a real, potential, future of the Shire is projected that is interwoven with ours.

      Both Tolkien and Lewis feel the occasional need to rupture their fantasy lands. For Lewis, Narnia is unstable. It needs to be made more real by being rooted in our own world. By speaking directly with his readers, Lewis simultaneously breaks the fantasy and reminds us that it is real. So, for example, “This was bad grammar of course but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia—in our world they usually don’t talk at all” (100). Narnia is made the more real because the frame world from which Narnia is accessible is made the more real by this reminder.

      In contrast, Middle Earth is rendered stable by the relationship of the Shire to the rest of the world. This dynamic depends entirely on the structure of registers that Tolkien has developed for his epic. The Hobbit sections are written in the immersive style (which I shall discuss later). Much is taken for granted and the conversation is chatty, while neither interrogative nor excessively informative. What is particularly noticeable is that Gandalf is a questioner as well as questioned. He is not the source of all knowledge in this early part of the book (Fellowship 49, 50). However, while Frodo and Sam do not explain the Shire to us because they already know it, they do explain it to Gandalf, Aragorn, and to others they meet. Unusually, at these moments we look back through the portal to have the frame world described to ourselves as audience.

      The difference of registers influences the shaping of the past. There is a clear difference between history as it is delivered in Tolkien’s Prologue, and that delivered, often in rolling tones, by those with information to pass on, whether it be Gandalf narrating the history of the Ring, or the poetic prophecies interrupting the otherwise demotic narratives of the Faun Tumnus and the Beaver. High formality is reserved for delivering history and status, for establishing shots of relationships and characters. It distances not just us, but the hobbits and the four children, and reminds us that this is not their world either. And because it is not their world, they are reliant on what they are told. Tolkien and Lewis use different ways of closing the discourse down. Lewis simply puts doubt into the mouth of Edmund, whom we already know to be unreliable. We can trust the robin, because it is Edmund who casts doubt on its trustworthiness (61). Tolkien uses another, less coercive method, ensuring that all the kind people that the hobbits meet once they are dispersed from the fellowship accord with the dominant interpretation—what we might call a conspiracy of companionship. In both cases, this closure is for our benefit. As readers we are positioned to be dependent upon what we are told, but both Tolkien and Lewis recognize that if the internal narrative is to convince, it must be sealed from within, not without.

      Many of the “histories” we receive are oral retellings, which might alert the reader to unreliability. In the hands of Tolkien and Lewis, however, they do the opposite. The first example is when Gandalf visits Frodo to tell him of what the Ring portends, “ ‘Ah!’ said Gandalf. “That is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the Black Years, which only the lore-masters now remember’ ” (Fellowship, “The Shadow of the Past” 60).²² We then segue rapidly into the formal, the gloomy atmosphere conjured up by the capitals in the sentences. And it is here that language is used to convince us: “The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring” (“The Shadow of the Past” 60). There is no space for doubt here, no question that there might not be an enemy. Others may doubt later in the book—particularly in the bar at Bree—but no one who has spoken to Gandalf will do so, just as the word of Aslan is by its very nature the Truth. Whereas Lewis achieves it by positing Aslan as a sacred figure, who cannot be challenged, Tolkien constructs a style that defies the doubter. The style shifts: it becomes impersonal, in part because Sauron’s name may not be spoken, but also to give the sense of a Built Past. From Strider:

      In those days the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron was but a servant, dwelt in Angband in the North, and the Elves of the West coming back to Middle-earth made war upon him to regain the Silmarils which he had stolen; and the fathers of Men aided the Elves. But the Enemy was victorious and Barahir was slain, and Beren escaping through great peril came over the Mountains of Terror into the hidden Kingdom of Thingol in the forest of Neldoreth. There he beheld Luthien singing and dancing in a glade. (Fellowship, “A Knife in the Dark” 206)

      The cadences are those of oral telling. The very seamlessness of it maintains the momentum that makes it sound formal but also sung. The narrative use of “and,” as in Old Testament language and the narratives of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, provides the story with extra authenticity. Language in Tolkien is directed to the telling, that they be seen to be told. Stories, not just language, are in and of themselves convincing. When Bombadil speaks,

      The hobbits did not understand his words, but as he spoke, they had a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow. Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world. (Fellowship, “Fog on the Barrow-downs” 157)

      The vision compels belief, and this visionary element is present whenever History is retold. As reportage it takes on elements of the club narrative: impervious and protected by the reputation of the teller, and reinforced by the isolation in which the story is told. In contrast, we can consider the role of demotic language in Lord of the Rings. Although much information is delivered in formal storytelling sessions, many of the really significant decisions, observations, and pieces of information are actually exchanged in the low vernacular of the hobbits.

      Sam, who operates as the voice of the narrator does in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is the one who reminds us that he is a real person moving through the fantasy. Thus while Aragorn or Gandalf worry about the historical significance of actions taken or not taken, Sam reminds us of the realities of a cross-country trek, even down to a forgotten rope. This one small paragraph, and others like it, is crucial to the success of the quest. That it is told in an unspectacular style, drawing no attention to itself save as a bit of comic business, is marvelous. Hayakawa talks of the “value of unoriginal remarks” as both mood setters, and ways in which to control an atmosphere (80–81). Tolkien has embraced