J.R.R.Tolkien (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

183 Pages·2008·0.96 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (editor)

l
BLOOM'S N E W E D I T I O N
MODERN
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
CRITICAL
V I E W S
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
J.R .R . TOLKI EN
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: J.R.R. Tolkien, New Edition
Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
J.R.R. Tolkien / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-146-8 (acid-free paper) 1. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel),
1892–1973—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PR6039.O32Z66155 2008
823’.912—dc22
2008005711
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Tolkien, Epic Traditions, and Golden Age Myths 3
Charles A. Huttar
The Hobbit 17
David Stevens and Carol D. Stevens
Bilbo’s Adventures in Wilderland 27
William H. Green
J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero 43
George Clark
The King under the Mountain:
Tolkien’s Children’s Story 59
Jane Chance
The Quests of Sam and Gollum for the Happy Life 79
Jorge J.E. Gracia
Tolkien in the History of Ideas 89
Brian Rosebury
An Unfinished Symphony 121
Verlyn Flieger
vi Contents
Skin-Changing in More than
One Sense: The Complexity of Beorn 129
Marjorie Burns
The Evidence of Things Not Seen:
Critical Mythology and The Lord of the Rings 141
John C. Hunter
Chronology 161
Contributors 163
Bibliography 165
Acknowledgments 169
Index 171
Editor’s Note
My Introduction happily reaffirms my affection for The Hobbit, which I
continue to prefer to the rather overwrought The Lord of the Rings.
Charles A. Huttar learnedly traces the relation of The Lord of the Ring
to epic tradition, while David and Carol Stevens find in The Hobbit Tolkien’s
major theme: the renunciation of power.
Bilbo Baggins is seen as a quester after maturity by William H. Green,
after which George Clark studies Tolkien’s nostalgia for the heroic age of
Beowulf.
The contrast between the delightful Bilbo Baggins and The Hobbit’s
pompous narrator is shrewdly analyzed by Jane Chance, while Jorge
J. E. Gracia juxtaposes Sam and Gollum as types of the quest for happiness,
with only Sam achieving the goal in The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s place in the history of ideas is ambitiously considered by
Brian Rosebury, who risks a kind of inflation by invoking the formidable
philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Verlyn Flieger examines the uncompleted works in the Tolkien
canon, after which Marjorie Burns examines the dual nature of Beorn in The
Hobbit.
In this volume’s final essay, John C. Hunter astutely states the problem
of how Tolkien’s work can be defended against charges of escapism.
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
J.R.R. Tolkien was a distinguished scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature,
particularly of the epic poem Beowulf. His greater fame resulted from his
fantasy-romance The Lord of the Rings, which I have reread with care and
with considerable aesthetic reservations. Since I also have just reread The
Hobbit, prelude to the larger work, with pleasure, and am more persuaded
by it than by The Lord of the Rings, I will devote this Introduction only to The
Hobbit (1937). My views on The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), such as they
are, constitute my Introduction to the volume on The Lord of the Rings in
the Chelsea House series Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations,
published simultaneously with J.R.R. Tolkien in Bloom’s Modern
Critical Views.
The Hobbit continues to be a story written for extremely intelligent
children of all ages, and Bilbo Baggins seems to me easier to accept and
like than is his heroic nephew, Frodo Baggins, the protagonist of the long
and complicated The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo Baggins, though an admirable
hobbit, is fortunately more a well-meaning burglar than he is a hero. I think
we are fond of him because he is a hobbit to whom things happen. But Frodo
Baggins makes things happen and is certainly heroic, and I, at least, don’t
always understand how I am to judge his heroism, even when I am instructed
by Roger Sale, certainly the best of all Tolkien critics. But that is an argument
for the Introduction to the companion volume of this book.
Bilbo Baggins’s preferences for comfort and a sleepy existence persuade
because of their universality. Warring against goblins may be an exemplary
1
2 Harold Bloom
occupation for others, but not for one’s self, and it always seems better when
goblins are kept away from the world of what Freud called reality-testing
or the necessity for (eventually) dying. The Hobbit remains a rather funny
book, so long as it gives primacy to Bilbo’s good sense that adventures are
“wretched, tiresome, uncomfortable.” Dragons, I feel, ought to have no place
in Bilbo’s life; he is too amiable to be bothered by them. That is probably
Tolkien’s best joke in The Hobbit; we keep being rueful at all the perils Bilbo
is dragged into, though without them there would be no tale to tell. If trolls
and goblins are going about, we want Bilbo to be safe in his wonderfully
comfortable hobbit-hole, and I am rather grateful to Tolkien that sometimes
I want to be there with Bilbo, even though I know only a few trolls and no
goblins whatsoever.
I suspect that The Lord of the Rings is fated to become only an intricate
period piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as children’s literature. Really
good-natured fantasy is hard to come by, and one convincing personality
at its center is all it requires. No other figure in The Hobbit can be called a
personality, but Bilbo Baggins is so vivid and persistent that he makes up
for all the others. The first thing we hear Bilbo say is “Good morning!” to
the self-important wizard Gandalf, who is rude enough to overinterpret the
remark. Bilbo’s last exclamation is also to Gandalf, who has become more
respectful and even fond of Mr. Baggins by the end of the book but still
feels compelled to remind him that “you are only quite a little fellow in a
wide world after all!” Charming as always, Bilbo comforts us with a laughing
“Thank goodness!”
CHARLES A. HUTTAR
Tolkien, Epic Traditions, and Golden Age Myths
E
pic typically lays before a contemporary audience a vision of lost glory,
of an age when heroes walked the earth whose stature we may emulate but
not equal. It may also hold out some hope for a reparation of loss, but not
necessarily: we have epics whose mood is elegiac, such as Beowulf and the
Iliad, as well as ones of more prophetic strain, such as the Aeneid and Paradise
Lost. In some we find a more balanced mood: for Spenser, mutability reigns,
but is not to be mistaken for decline; for Tennyson, Camelot passes, but the
process of divine fulfilment continues.
Though written in prose, The Lord of the Rings is unquestionably heir to
Western epic traditions, both classical and medieval-vernacular. The author
explicitly thought of his work in terms of ‘epic’ (Tolkien, Letters 230–1,
31, 58). He loved Homer (Letters 172), and a recent study of the work’s
affinities with Virgil (Morse) has sought to bring greater balance into a line
of scholarship which had previously emphasised such Northern influences as
Beowulf and the Eddas. (I use the term ‘influences’, not ‘sources’: Tolkien’s
manner of working was not so much to imitate a model as to ladle his portion
out of the great bubbling soup pot of mythopoeic motifs to which storytellers
are always helping themselves [Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’ 53–6].) Critics
interested in how The Lord of the Rings connects with the epic tradition have
generally concentrated on Tolkien’s concept of heroism, which they find
From Twentieth-Century Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in Twentieth-Century
Mythopoeic Literature, pp. 92–107. Text ©1992 by Macmillan Press; editorial matter and
selection ©1992 by Kath Filmer.
3
4 Charles A. Huttar
firmly rooted in epic, albeit revisionist in a way that reflects both Christian
and contemporary sensibilities.1 My own earlier study of one recurrent
motif in Tolkien, the underground adventures of the hero, indicates the
central (though not sole) place of the epic tradition in Tolkien’s handling
of this theme. We turn now to consider another, not unrelated motif, one
widespread in the world’s cultures2 and, again, mediated significantly though
not solely through Greco-Roman and other epic traditions. It is the idea
that the world as we know it represents a woeful decline from a glorious
remote past: a Golden Age, Atlantis, Elysium, Eden, Heorot, Camelot, the
unspoiled wilderness and prairies. The differences among these myths are as
important as their resemblances, for one cook may flavour what is taken out
of the common soup pot with quite a different philosophy of history from
that of another. And, as with his concept of heroism, the flavouring Tolkien
gives to his myth of decline helps us define his place in the tradition of epic
and, more particularly, of Christian epic.
What seems the most obvious echo of the Hesiodic and Ovidian myth
of Four Ages proves on examination to be superficial. In Tolkien’s history
of Middle-earth there are four ages also, each ending catastrophically, and
the dominant races are successively lower in the hierarchy of created beings:
Valar, Elves and, finally, Men (LR 3:363, 365; Letters 146–60, 411). But
for all that, Tolkien’s four ages are not in essence distinct: they represent
a continuous sweep of time, perhaps hundreds of centuries, dense with
chronicle and demarcated into ‘Ages’ mainly by the restarting of the ‘tale
of years’. ‘Year 1’ always marks, to be sure, what is sensed as the end of an
era and a new beginning—for example, Theoden foresees ‘the great battle
of our time, in which many things shall pass away’ (LR 3.74)—and yet the
chronology keeps count, in the last analysis, of more of the same, that is, the
continuing struggle between good and evil. That struggle began—as in the
Judeo-Christian myth—outside the entire scheme of earthly ‘ages’, with the
rebellion of Melkor against the One at a time when the whole creation still
existed only as music in the mind of the gods (Tolkien, Silmarillion 15–22).
But once the historical clock started running, it has continued in a single
sequence—by our time, Tolkien suggests, for perhaps a half-dozen ‘ages’
(Letters 283n). Hesiod’s scheme (Works and Days 106–201, summarised
in Levin 14–15; Smith 69), in contrast, is radically ahistorical. There is no
continuity between the human race of one age and that of the next; each race
is a fresh creation. Each represents a state of life that lasts for an unspecified
length of time and is begun and (in all cases but one) ended by a divine act—
that is, from outside. The sole exception is the race of bronze, whose acting-
out of their warlike nature must result finally in mutual destruction without
any help from the gods; still, in merely behaving according to their nature,
they too represent the principle of stasis which governs each of Hesiod’s ages.