The same could be said of Tolkien’s hobbits. They aren’t technically human, but they’re more like us, really, than the majestic human heroes of Middle-earth. Tolkien used the hobbits as a way of, as he once expressed it, “putting earth under the feet of ‘romance,’” injecting “colloquialism and vulgarity” into a story otherwise dominated by “the highest style of prose.” “High” was the word Tolkien used to describe the sort of thing he most enjoyed writing and reading, the lofty myths and epics of The Silmarillion. Characters like Aragorn and the elves belong to this part of his legendarium, and so does the grand dialogue that readers like Edmund Wilson find so silly.
The result, Tolkien’s trilogy, is a hybrid, a winning formula combining the low mimetic characters that readers had grown comfortably accustomed to in novels with the grandeur and archetypal mystery many of them missed from the old romances. Morris hadn’t thought of this when he attempted to revive the romance, but in children’s fiction the combination was less remarkable; Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit had already inserted modern, middle-class English children into magical lands and situations. Tolkien himself had created an irresistibly bourgeois protagonist in his children’s book, The Hobbit, and sent him off on a Wagnerian quest involving dwarves, dragons, and a magic ring.
The main point Tolkien tried to get across in “On Fairy Stories” was that he saw no reason to restrict such fictions to an audience of children. “Fairy stories,” he wrote, “have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery,’ as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.” He recast the hand-me-downs as newly desirable antiques.
But this mixture of literary modes does not sit easily with everyone. For some it will always seem fatally juvenile, and for others merely dissonant. When a friend wrote to Tolkien complaining of the way certain characters in The Lord of the Rings spoke, he responded as a philologist, by explaining that King Theoden of the Rohirrim (for example) must say things like “I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better,” instead of the less archaic “I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed home”; Theoden speaks differently from people like us because he thinks differently. The events and actions that occur in The Lord of the Rings could happen only in a world where people talk, and therefore think, in the way Theoden does. The kind of man who would say something like “Not at all, my dear Gandalf” would never behave with the Rohirric king’s doomed nobility when confronting certain death in battle: “‘Heroic’ scenes do not occur in a modern setting to which a modern idiom belongs,” Tolkien insisted.
This means that the hobbits, who speak like Edwardian countryfolk, not only talk differently from the elves, but also think differently — they live, in effect, in another world. They resemble the denizens of the twentieth century enough to provide the modern individual with a sympathetic bridge to Middle-earth. They are us, much like the contemporary reader in Tolkien’s eyes: anti-Romantic, inflexible, incurious, unimaginative — a reader, like Eustace Scrubb, of the wrong kind of books, but secretly attracted to the old magic. As Tolkien imagined the distant past of Europe, time went by and the invented history of Middle-earth segued into the real history of our own world; hobbits and men became more and more alike and eventually merged. The last of the elvish blood is by now almost gone from the human race and the hobbitish mind-set has become universal. The age of romance ended. The age of the novel began.
This transition is a source of the great sorrow underlying The Lord of the Rings; the world it describes is on the cusp of a transformation; its heroic past is slipping away and another era, one of “colloquialism and vulgarity” is taking its place. “Associations with sunset and the fall of the leaf linger in romance,” Frye writes, and this decline “evokes a mood best described as elegiac … often accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one.” This so exactly describes the tone of The Lord of the Rings that I half suspect Frye of having Tolkien in mind when he wrote those words. But, in truth, it is the mood of all heroic epics. As a form, the romance is retrospective. The epic poet is forever lamenting that the titans of the past — Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf — have left this earth. We shall not see their like again.
Frye writes further of the “extraordinarily persistent nostalgia” of the classic romance, “its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space.” Deliberate archaism comes with the territory, which is why Spenser (however objectionably in Tolkien’s eyes) adopted an old-fashioned diction for The Faerie Queene. Though very fond of his hobbits, Tolkien did much prefer writing lays and sagas, like the ones collected in The Silmarillion, stories written in “the highest style of prose.” His publishers, however, didn’t regard this material as salable, and they were probably right. Nearly everyone who reads The Silmarillion comes to it only after being smitten with The Lord of the Rings, and many are disappointed. What they find are old-fashioned epics very much like the prose romances of William Morris. If it were not for the popularity of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Silmarillion, if published at all, would now likely be as obscure as The Well at the World’s End.
Tolkien’s publishers, however, wanted him to repeat the success he’d had earlier with The Hobbit, a story that, when very first conceived, had not been set in Middle-earth. It was hobbits that sold, hobbits like Bilbo Baggins that readers loved and identified with; The Lord of the Rings was for a long time referred to by Tolkien and Lewis as “the new Hobbit,” as if it were merely the sequel to the earlier children’s book. Tolkien had to be pushed into presenting his private mythology as the backdrop to further hobbit adventures. The hybridization that has made the romance so resilient, that has allowed it to return in new forms and to triumph again and again with new audiences, did not come naturally to him. He was no great reader of novels.
But Lewis was. As much as the defensive Tolkien fan dislikes comparing Middle-earth to Narnia — The Lord of the Rings is not a children’s book, the author himself would have to insist, over and over again — it was children’s fiction, with its giddy disregard of genre boundaries and other forms of decorum, that first showed writers how to cross the line. The Chronicles cross the line so often that they effectively rub it out. And that, for Tolkien, was a problem.
Chapter Twenty-two
A Too-Impressionable Man
Tolkien began with The Hobbit, and then backed his way into the solemnity of The Lord of the Rings. Narnia, of course, was different. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its sequels were begun and remained books for children, their background a gossamer and sometimes contradictory improvisation. These were mere “fairy tales,” as Lewis freely called them, although there was nothing “mere” about fairy tales as far as he was concerned. Still, classic fairy tales are set in a world that’s everywhere and nowhere, and in fairy tales it is always now. As Lewis continued to write more Chronicles, Narnia inevitably acquired a history, a geography, even a national identity of sorts, if never so extensive a one as Middle-earth’s.