Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (Volume VII, 2010)

408 Pages·2.256 MB·English

by  Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger

Editors’ Introduction
This is the seventh issue of Tolkien Studies, the first refereed journal
solely devoted to the scholarly study of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As
editors, our goal is to publish excellent scholarship on Tolkien as well as
to gather useful research information, reviews, notes, documents, and
bibliographical material.
In this issue we are especially pleased to publish Tolkien’s early fiction
“The Story of Kullervo” and the two existing drafts of his talk on the
Kalevala, transcribed and edited with notes and commentary by Verlyn
Flieger.
With this exception, all articles have been subject to anonymous, ex-
ternal review as well as receiving a positive judgment by the Editors. In
the cases of articles by individuals associated with the journal in any
way, each article had to receive at least two positive evaluations from
two different outside reviewers. Reviewer comments were anonymously
conveyed to the authors of the articles. The Editors agreed to be bound
by the recommendations of the outside referees.
The Editors also wish to call attention to the Cumulative Index to vol-
umes one through five of Tolkien Studies, compiled by Jason Rea, Michael
D.C. Drout, Tara L. McGoldrick, and Lauren Provost, with Maryellen
Groot and Julia Rende. The Cumulative Index is currently available
only through the online subscription database Project Muse.
Douglas A. Anderson
Michael D. C. Drout
Verlyn Flieger
v

Abbreviations
B&C Beowulf and the Critics. Ed. Michael D. C. Drout. Tempe,
AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,
2002. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 248.
Bombadil The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.
CH The Children of Húrin [title as on title page:] Narn i Chîn Húrin:
The Tale of the Children of Húrin. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: HarperCollins, 2007; Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2007.
FG Farmer Giles of Ham. Ed. Christina Scull and Wayne G.
Hammond. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
FR The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Unwin,
1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Second edition,
revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1987.
H The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Annotated Hobbit. Ed. Douglas
A. Anderson. Second edition, revised. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2002.
Jewels The War of the Jewels. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Lays The Lays of Beleriand. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Letters The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with
the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: George
Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Lost Road The Lost Road and Other Writings. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Lost Tales I The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1984.
viii
Lost Tales II The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1984.
MC The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher
Tolkien. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1984.
Morgoth Morgoth’s Ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
OFS Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Extended Edition. Ed. Verlyn Flieger
and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins,
2008.
Peoples The Peoples of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
RK The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin
1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Second edition,
revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
S The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1977. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Second edition. London:HarperCollins, 1999; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Sauron Sauron Defeated. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
SG The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. Ed Christopher Tolkien.
London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2009
Shadow The Return of the Shadow. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Shaping The Shaping of Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.
London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1986.
SWM Smith of Wootton Major: Extended Edition. Ed. Verlyn Flieger.
London: HarperCollins, 2005.
ix
TL Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books, 1964; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Expanded as Tree and Leaf,
including the Poem Mythpoeia [and] The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
Beorhthelm’s Son. London: HarperCollins, 2001.
TT The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954;
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Second edition, revised
impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Treason The Treason of Isengard. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
UT Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. Ed. Christopher
Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
War The War of the Ring. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
x
The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist
VLADIMIR BRLJAK
When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense,
and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself
ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old
and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making
keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are
both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved
once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless,
it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an
echo. (MC 33)
I
It has often been noted that J.R.R. Tolkien’s renowned lecture on Be-
owulf, defending the integrity of the Anglo-Saxon poet’s art against
those modern readers for whom this art was an embarrassment redeemed
only by the poem’s value as an historical and linguistic document, was on
another level also a defense of, and a blueprint for, his own literary work.
As T. A. Shippey has remarked, “Tolkien felt more than continuity with
the Beowulf-poet, he felt a virtual identity of motive and of technique”
(2003, 47; see also Shippey 2007). Various aspects of this special affin-
ity have since been looked into, including specific points of motive and
technique: for example the “unexplained” and “unattainable vistas” (Let-
ters 210, 333), a technique indebted to such “vistas” in Beowulf. Following
Tolkien’s cues, the importance of these has long been acknowledged. Like
the Beowulf poet, he had at his disposal a large amount of background
material which, skillfully inserted at strategic moments, could greatly in-
crease the tale’s mimetic potency. The vistas remained in background,
unexplained and unattainable, but depicted against such a background,
the foreground could jump off the page, immersing its reader in a fantas-
tic world realized with an unprecedented “reality” or “depth.”
Besides the “vistas,” however—as Christopher Tolkien noted long
ago (Lost Tales I 4-5), in connection to the same passage cited at the begin-
ning of this paper—Tolkien also set out to reproduce that singular effect
of which he speaks, the effect of the work reaching us as an echo of an
echo (of an echo . . .) from a remote antiquity, expending his art in in-
creasing the distance between the (mostly) Modern English text the read-
er would be holding in his or her hands and the fictional characters and
events of which it told. For this purpose, he integrated his major works of
1
Vladimir Brljak
fiction into an intricate metafictional structure, presenting them within
their fiction precisely as such echoes of echoes: translations of redactions
of ancient works, telling of things even more ancient. This metafictional
framework, it will be argued here, is both the cornerstone and crowning
achievement of Tolkien’s mature literary work. Indeed, “framework” is
a revealing metaphor: the problem is precisely that when they are dis-
cussed, these elements in Tolkien’s work often tend to be thought of as
merely a frame, extraneous and secondary to that which it frames, which
is where the true interest supposedly lies.
Tolkien critics have, of course, broached these issues before. Ver-
lyn Flieger has addressed them on several occasions, with increasing
complexity and sophistication: besides exploring the use of metafiction
throughout Tolkien’s opus, Flieger has drawn attention to Tolkien’s mod-
els in medieval literature and the modern reception of that literature,
to the use of metafictional devices by ninenteenth- and early twentieth-
century century novelists, or to the parallels between Tolkien’s work and
the work of his “postmodernist” contemporaries.1 Other scholars have
been covering some of the same terrain: Mary R. Bowman, for exam-
ple, has argued that “The Lord of the Rings goes beyond being an absorb-
ing and moving story to constitute a meditation on the nature of story”
(273); Gergely Nagy writes that “Tolkien’s focus on the written text as
the only appropriate medium in which the creation of a world can be
performed leads to important theoretical considerations about the dif-
ferent discourses of culture” (642). The present article would like to add
to these discussions by further specifying and elaborating a number of
points where such specification and elaboration seems necessary.
Two interrelated questions may be discerned: what is the form and
what is the function of the metafictional elements in Tolkien’s work? The
questions, as I say, are interrelated, indeed interdependent, yet it seems
best to begin with that of function, for it appears that the misunderstand-
ing of the function of Tolkien’s metafiction has been the main factor in
the misunderstanding of its form. By and large, those readers of Tolkien
who have taken account of the metafiction have seen its function as that
of intensifying the mimetic potency of the works. Shippey’s word for this
was “depth”:
one might say, it was a pity that Tolkien did not get on with
telling more stories, that he was . . . so preoccupied not with
what was told, but with how the telling came to be transmit-
ted. Was he ever to gain any advantage from these profes-
sional tangles? . . . There is a one-word answer to that ques-
tion, which is “depth,” the literary quality Tolkien valued
most of all. (2003, 308)
2
The Book of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist
Through the intricate manuscript history recounted in the Note on the
Shire Records found at the end of the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings,
or the bewildering mass of materials assembled in its Appendices, the
pseudo-editorial apparatus vouches for the tale’s “depth,” “reality,” “au-
thenticity,” “richness” etc. This is not just another fantastic adventure
tale: here are the sources, here the numerous copies and redactions,
here extracts from other related works, maps, chronologies, genealogies,
grammars, alphabets, calendars. Tolkien’s metafiction has “immediate
antecedents in some of the popular fantasy fiction of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, such as H. Rider Haggard’s She and King
Solomon’s Mines, books presented from the outset as found manuscripts
put into shape by an outside editor, their presumed actuality bolstered
by footnotes”; it is a hypertrophied, hyperrealist descendent of these
pseudo-editorial “attempt[s] at verisimilitude by artifact” (Flieger 2005,
75, 83).
Where Poe had a simple manuscript found in a bottle, Tolkien has
whole libraries of books-within-the-book, in a variety of meticulously
invented languages and alphabets; where Stevenson had an “authentic”
treasure map, Tolkien has several detailed, painstakingly crafted, real-
istically scaled maps of an entire continent; where Jules Verne had a
“facsimile” of a parchment containing a mysterious cryptogram found
in a runic manuscript of Snorri’s Heimskringla, and Haggard a similar
“facsimile” of a fourth-century pottery shard inscribed in correct fourth-
century Greek, Tolkien hand-crafted three “actual” tattered fragments
of his Book of Mazarbul, carefully burning, damaging and soiling the
paper in accordance with the text’s description of the remains of the
Book as “slashed and stabbed and party burned, and . . . so stained with
black and other dark marks like old blood that little of it could be read”
(FR, II, v, 335).
Like Shippey with his “depth,” Flieger has also viewed the metafic-
tional elements as part and parcel of a “quest for verisimilitude,” or, in a
different set of terms, as the necessary component of “a true mythology,
with all the layering and multiple narrators and overlapping texts and
variant versions that characterize mythologies in the real world” (2005,
74, 84). Radical statements of such a view can be found in her 2002 paper
“The Footsteps of Ælfwine,” where the metafictional strategies (“not sto-
ries but data,” “fossilization,” “excavating for artifacts”) are unfavorably
opposed to “immediately experiencing myth” (2002, 186). It is to be not-
ed that Flieger’s views on these matters have since changed substantially
in several respects: in particular, her paper “A Postmodern Medievalist?”
contains important observations on some of Tolkien’s metafictional de-
vices, perceptively analyzing the conversation between Frodo and Sam at
the Stairs of Cirith Ungol as “an image of postmodern indeterminacy,”
3