‘Some sent elves, and some sent serpents,
some sent sea-monsters, that live by the water.
No one knew any of them, but Hildebrand alone.’24
What must it have been like in Old English – a poem not about monsters erupting on humanity, as in Beowulf, but about men going into the heart of the monsterworld, for adventures in the ‘Ettenmoors’ themselves! But fate had snatched that prospect (almost) into utter oblivion. The wilderness of dragons, the shrewedness of apes
Probably the most disheartening conclusion to be drawn from this brief review of intellectual history is that the history of English studies in British and American universities has been forever marred by incomprehension and missed opportunities. Professor D. J. Palmer has shown how the birth of the Oxford English School in particular was accompanied by desperate struggles between language and literature, philologists and critics, ending not in mutual illumination but in a compromise demarcation of interests.25 Quite possibly the philologists were most to blame in this. Peter Ganz, Professor of German at Oxford, has pointed out that Jacob Grimm’s chief intellectual defect was a refusal to generalise.26 Indeed as he neared the end of his Teutonic Mythology (four volumes in the translation of J. S. Stallybrass, and 1887 pages) Grimm wrote a ‘Preface’ referring to himself as a gleaner, whose observations he left to ‘him who, standing on my shoulders, shall hereafter get into full swing the harvesting of this great field’.27 But actually there was no field left to harvest; while few would relish the thought of spending a lifetime putting someone else’s observations in order, without the fun of first collecting them! So the impetus of philology ran out in a series of Primers and Readers and Grammars, endless academic brickmaking without any sign of an architect. No wonder the early critics got annoyed. On the other hand they showed little magnanimity, or even curiosity, once they got control.
The overt result for the young Tolkien must have been that, when he returned from World War I to Oxford University in 1919, he found himself once again in a battle being fought by two sides from deep entrenchments, and one whose stalemates were as unlikely to be broken as the greater ones of Ypres or the Somme by frontal offensives. Still, both sides kept trying them. Tolkien did his best to make peace. His 1930 ‘manifesto’ led at least to the elimination of some academic ‘No Man’s Land’, during the syllabus campaign of 1951 he even emerged from his trench to fraternise with the enemy (till C. S. Lewis stopped him, see Inklings, pp. 229–30). But a covert result may have been that he gave up hope, at least from time to time, of penetrating other people’s vested interests and making them understand the appeal of the subjects he would have liked to teach. His jokes on the subject get wryer, his gestures of rapprochement – ‘the boundary line between linguistic and literary history is as imaginary as the equator – a certain heat is observable, perhaps, as either is approached’ (YWES 6, p. 59) or ‘the “pure philologist who cannot do literature” … is as rare as the unicorn’ (‘OES’, p. 782) – these become more perfunctory and finally disappear. What was possibly a natural bent towards reserve became more pronounced; it is hard to escape the feeling that in some of the interviews given after celebrity had arrived Tolkien was still liable to give easy or unnoticedly ambiguous answers to save the trouble of explaining something which he knew had proved incomprehensible many times before. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had made his point, whether it had been intellectually apprehended or not; and the hostile or even malignant reaction it evoked from so many on the ‘lit.’ side was only what he might have expected.
Indeed, to go back to the animus The Lord of the Rings created: it is striking that next to the books’ sheer success the thing that irritated reviewers most was their author’s obstinate insistence on talking about language as if it might be a subject of interest. ‘The invention of languages is the foundation’, Tolkien had said. ‘The “stories” were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse’ (Letters, p. 219). ‘Invention’ of course comes from Latin invenire, ‘to find’; its older sense, as Tolkien knew perfectly well, was ‘discovery’. If one were to say of nineteenth-century philology that ‘the discovery of languages was its foundation’, one would be stating literal truth; as often, probably, Tolkien was playing with words, juxtaposing the languages he had made up out of his own head with those that others had found or ‘reconstructed’ all over the world, so aligning himself yet again with his professional inheritance. Meanwhile the second sentence, though no doubt personally true again, might almost have been said of Ermanaric or Theodoric or the nineteenth-century vision of a ‘historical’ King Arthur. An element of generalisation underlay the particular application to Tolkien’s own case.
This remained completely unperceived by his critics. ‘He has explained that he began it to amuse himself, as a philological game’, translated Edmund Wilson. ‘An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity – that is, then, what The Lord of the Rings really is.’ Philology, you note, is peculiar but not serious. Lin Carter (who prepared for his commentary on Tolkien by looking up ‘philology’ in ‘the dictionary’, to little profit – maybe it was the wrong dictionary) professed the same opinion even more blankly, if kindly, by claiming that Tolkien was really interested in ‘the eternal verities of human nature’, and that the appendices of The Lord of the Rings needed to be seen that way and not just as ‘the outgrowth of a don’s scholarly hobbies’. The idea could be right, but the notion of ‘scholarly hobbies’ is singularly naive. Neil D. Isaacs, also writing in Tolkien’s defence, took the blunder on by asserting that ‘Tolkien’s own off-hand remarks about the importance of philology to the creative conception of the trilogy need not be taken too seriously’, and R. J. Reilly put the tin lid on the whole discussion by saying, in attempted refutation of Edmund Wilson, that The Lord of the Rings can’t have been a philological game because it’s too serious, and therefore, seemingly, cannot possibly be philology. ‘No one ever exposed the nerves and fibres of his being in order to make up a language; it is not only insane but unnecessary.’28 Like the reviewers quoted at the start of this chapter, Mr Reilly here makes a factual statement about humanity which is factually wrong. The aberration he talks about may not be common, but is not unprecedented. August Schleicher exposed the nerves and fibres of his being to make up Primitive Indo-European, and had them shredded for his trouble. Willy Krogmann, of the University of Hamburg, not only came to the conclusion that the Old High German Hildebrandslied (the oldest German heroic poem) must originally have been composed in Lombardic, a West Germanic language surviving outside ‘*-reality’ only in a handful of names, but also reconstructed the language and rewrote the poem, publishing his new edition as late as 1959. No one, as far as I know, went so far as to reconstruct the Burgundian Nibelung-story, the first Ostrogothic Ermanaric-lay, or the Danish Ur-Beowulf, but such thoughts were in many minds. The only extant Gothic poem is by Tolkien, ‘Bagme Bloma’, in Songs for the Philologists, reprinted and translated in Appendix B below; nor was this his only attempt at poetic reconstruction, see Letters p. 379. The drives towards creativity do not all emanate from the little area already mapped by ‘literary’ criticism. Awareness of this fact should have aroused a certain humility, or anyway caution, in Tolkienian commentators.