Master of Middle-Earth The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien

CHAPTER I MIDDLE-EARTH: AN IMAGINARY WORLD? In 1938 when Tolkien was starting to write The Lord of the Rings he also delivered a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in which he offered his views on the types of world that it is the office of fantasy, including his own epic, to "sub-create," as he calls it. Unlike our primary world of daily fact, fantasy's "secondary worlds" of the imagination must possess, he said, not only "internal consistency" but also "strangeness and wonder" arising from their "freedom from the domination of observed fact."1 If this were all, the secondary world of faery would often be connected only very tenuously with the primary world. But Tolkien knew, none better, that no audience can long feel sympathy or interest for persons or things in which they cannot recognize a good deal of themselves and the world of their everyday experience. He therefore added that a secondary world must be "credible, commanding Secondary Belief." And he manifestly expected that secondary worlds would combine the ordinary with the extraordinary, the fictitious with the actual: "Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted." Tolkien followed his own prescription in composing The Lord of the Rings, or perhaps he formulated the prescription to justify what he was already intending to write. In either case the answer to the question posed by the title of this chapter is "Yes, but." Yes, Middle-earth is a place of many marvels. But they are all carefully fitted into a framework of climate and geography, familiar skies by night, familiar shrubs and trees, beasts and birds on earth by day, men and manlike creatures with societies not too different from our own. Consequently the reader walks through any Middle-earth landscape with a security of recognition that woos him on to believe in everything that happens. Familiar but not too familiar, strange but not too strange. This is the master rubric that Tolkien bears always in mind when inventing the world of his epic. In applying the formula in just the right proportions in the right situations consists much of his preeminence as a writer of fantasy. Fundamental to Tolkien's method in The Lord of the Rings is a standard literary pose, which he assumes in the Prologue and never thereafter relinquishes even in the Appendices: that he did not himself invent the subject matter of the epic but is only a modern scholar who is compiling, editing, and eventually translating copies of very ancient records of Middle-earth which have come into his hands, he does not say how. To make this claim sound plausible he constructs an elaborate family tree for these records, tracing some back to personal narratives by the four hobbit heroes of the War of the Ring, others to manuscripts found in libraries at Rivendell and Minas Tirith, still others to oral tradition.2 Then, in order to help give an air of credibility to his account of the War, Tolkien endorses it as true and calls it history, that is, an authentic narrative of events as they actually happened in the Third Age. This accolade of history and historical records he bestows frequently in both Prologue and Appendices. With the Shire Calendar in the year 1601 of the Third Age, states the Prologue, ". . . legend among the Hobbits first becomes history with a reckoning of years." A few pages farther on, Bilbo's 111th birthday is said to have occurred in Shire year 1041: "At this point this History begins." And inKocher, Paul H. is the author of 'Master of Middle-Earth The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien' with ISBN 9780345465603 and ISBN 0345465601.