(An article by AN Wilson on Daily Telegraph on 24th
November 2001)
What is the secret of The Lord of the Rings'
appeal? Re-reading the books in the run up to the film, AN Wilson found a
surprising answer
SOME time ago, in one of his witty columns in
The Telegraph, Andrew Marr repeated a story of CS Lewis, in his college rooms
at Oxford, listening to JRR Tolkien reading aloud from The Lord of the Rings,
and interrupting with: "Oh no! Not another fucking elf!"
This story is not true, though it is a garbled
version of a truth. Lewis, Tolkien and a number of like-minded dons, from the
late Thirties to the mid-Fifties, would meet regularly to discuss literature.
Sometimes, they would read aloud to one another from work in progress.
The high point of these meetings of the
Inklings, as the friends called themselves, were the readings from The Lord of
the Rings. JRR Tolkien was not an eloquent man. He mumbled and muttered. His
lectures on old Germanic philology, when they were not cancelled because of his
repeated colds, bronchitis and laryngitis, were only semi-audible to the small,
intelligent band who followed this, the primary area of his professional
concern.
When Lewis and friends could bear old Tolkien's
mumblings no longer, they enlisted Christopher Tolkien, the professor's
youngest son, to read from the great book. Christopher is a man of
extraordinary eloquence. His lectures at Oxford on Norse mythology were always
packed out. I wish I had heard him read from The Lord of the Rings. I have
heard him read from the Edda, from the Sagas, and from the Anglo-Saxon poems
which were the chief inspiratons for his father's work.
The "fucking elf" story came from
Christopher himself and I put it in my biography of Lewis. It was not CS Lewis
who made this unmannerly interruption, but Hugo Dyson, a noisy veteran of the
First World War, who taught English at Merton college.
Lewis had far too much generosity of spirit and
far too much admiration for Tolkien's narrative skills to have been capable of
uttering such a sentiment. He was always greedy for more Lord of the Rings, and
it was largely through Lewis's encouragement that the great tale ever came to
be finished.
Lewis was the first Tolkien addict, and there
have been many since, ranging from the stoned hippies of the Sixties who wore
T-shirts with "Gandalf lives!" on their chests, to the members of the
Tolkien societies, who meet at "moots" and dress as characters in the
story, to millions of enthralled readers, held by the sheer power of the
narrative.
It is the archetypical story of homely,
virtue-loving creatures contending against great odds. Moreover, though a
devout Catholic, Tolkien deliberately excluded religion from The Lord of the
Rings - there is just a strange moment when the hobbits are about to settle
down to a meal with the elves, and the older, more dignified elves turn
silently in prayer towards the east. The hobbits, being earthly creatures, do
not understand what is going on. For the rest of the tale, it is good versus
evil, and good magic versus bad magic which contend.
Of course, a lot has been made of the fact that
the story was written, much of it, when the small island of Britons stood alone
against the Dark Lord of Berchtesgaden in his mountain fastness. But Tolkien
was always anxious to deny any suggestion that the story was an allegory; and
nor is it. If it is inspired by the Dunkirk spirit, it is not a story secretly
about that spirit.
Iris Murdoch, interestingly, was a tremendous
fan, and loved talking to the old professor about the more abstruse points of
elvish lore. When her husband John Bayley exclaimed that The Lord of the Rings
was "fantastically badly written" she would look astounded, and say
that she did not know what he meant.
Actually, Murdoch and Tolkien had this in
common, though they could hardly be more different in other respects: like
Murdoch, Tolkien did not worry about "style" at all, simply charging
on, where The Lord of the Rings was in question, with his sub-William Morris
prose.
There are occasions - I shall speak of these in
a minute - where Tolkien's use of the old language and lore of the North, and
of Wales, is shimmeringly brilliant. All storytellers take over older material,
as this medieval professor would have been the first to tell us. But it is his
use of "other men's flowers" (as Montaigne called them) that
sometimes grates.
JRR Tolkien was not a great opera-goer, but he
pored over the text of Wagner's Ring cycle as a young man. It goes without
saying that his own great myth about the Ring of Power, The Lord of the Rings,
was first suggested by the music-dramas of the German composer. The Ring in
Tolkien is lost, like Wagner's Ring, in water. Like Alberich, Gollum is a base
figure of pure cupidity. The possession by a low creature of this instrument of
power creates reverberations among the higher creatures - in Wagner among the
giants and the gods, in Tolkien among the elves and in the heart of Sauron, the
Dark Lord himself, who sends out his emissaries, the Dark Riders, to reclaim
the Ring when, by accident or providence, it falls into the hands of the homely
little hobbits of the Shire.
Compared with Wagner, The Lord of the Rings is
weak stuff. It is Wagner for kiddies, Wagner without angst, Wagner without a
brooding sense of spiritual catastrophe.
The Hobbit had been a story written to amuse
children, and very little of Tolkien's imagined mythology had intruded into it,
beyond the Ring of Power having fallen into the hands first of Gollum and then
of Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit himself. Even The Lord of the Rings did no more
than lift a corner of the tapestry into the buried world of lost tales and
languages which had been their creator's preoccupation for most of a long life.
Only after the old professor died, and his son
Christopher withdrew to the South of France to edit the manuscripts, was the
full extent - one might even use the word enormity - of the Tolkien universe
revealed.
The first book to be published was The
Silmarillion, which Private Eye satirised as The Sell-A-Million. Those
accustomed to think that the name JRR Tolkien on the spine of a book would
guarantee an unputdownable narrative were amazed to discover that The
Silmarillion was something completely different.
Here, I think, one finds something much deeper
and more interesting than the rattling yarn of The Lord of the Rings. In his
imaginative reworking of Welsh and Germanic languages, in his evocation of how
myth grows out of language, and how language is sustained by myth, he is saying
something truly interesting. Its originality has not really been plumbed, I
fancy.
For this reason, I found The Silmarillion, with
its creation-myths and its elvish grammar, more impressive than The Lord of the
Rings. And I realised, as I turned the pages of The Silmarillion, why, during a
recent re-reading, I had given up on The Lord of the Rings: that is, I saw that
JRRT was not really a writer at all.
Take the example of the Ents, the talking
trees. It seemed obvious to me on this reading that the Ents in The Lord of the
Rings have partly been suggested by the talking apple trees in the film of The
Wizard of Oz, and more by the suicides who have turned into trees in Dante's
Inferno. Beside both originals, Tolkien's imitation seemed feeble. The Ents
seem wonderful when you first read the story as a child. In the forthcoming
film adaptation (opening on December 19) they will be wonderful again - you
won't be thinking about their literary analogues.
Yet, two things remain hauntingly good about
The Lord of the Rings, even for the reader who fears he will never enjoy it as
he once did. One is the sheer power of the narrative. The second is the elvish
mythology and the language. I found myself turning back to a volume called The
Lost Road and Other Writings: Language and Legend Before the Lord of the Rings,
edited by Christopher Tolkien and which contains 60 pages of "the
etymologies of the old tongues" - Danian, Eldarin, Noldorin, Old Noldorin,
Primitive Quendian and Telerin.
You might ask what is the point of reading the
etymologies of a fake language when you might be learning Old Norse, Old
English or Greek. The same sensible habit of mind might ask why one should read
ersatz mythology by Tolkien rather than reading Homer.
In Tolkien's own case, the psychological
reasons for, not merely creating, but, as far as one can tell, almost
completely inhabiting his mythological world are fascinating, if impenetrable.
They perhaps explain why, for so many years of the 20th century, Tolkien made
fans among dopeheads and fantasists.
He deserves better than this, however. If not
exactly a writer, he was a serious craftsman. It is possible that the film will
win him new generations of rapt admirers, caught up in his hypnotising skill as a
storyteller.
Etiquetas: Cosas que hay que saber, libros y escritores
