J.R.R. Tolkien
(1892-1973)
“It is nearly impossible to overstate Tolkien’s importance in the history of fantasy.” (Mathews33).
Life:
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892, and returned
to England with his mother and brother three years later, partly out of
concern for his health. The next year (1896), his father died in
Africa, impoverishing his family. In 1900, Mabel Tolkien along with
her sons converted to Catholicism, estranging the children from her family
and further constraining financial resources. In 1904, she too died,
leaving Tolkien and his brother to be cared for by a priest, Father Francis
Morgan (Green ix). As Green puts it, “J.R.R. Tolkien’s early life
was a succession of bereavements that created in him a deep nostalgia for
the past.” (3)
Tolkien became fascinated with medieval language and mythology while still
a teen; he claimed to be born with a talent for language, and even in childhood
invented languages; he later said “he would have preferred to have written
all of his books in Elvish” (Manlove 153). He did well enough in
school to earn a scholarship to Oxford. He graduated shortly after
WWI broke out, and received a commission in the British Army, enabling
him to witness “the horrors of mechanized combat…[which] reinforced his
feeling that terrible powers were loose in the world” (Green 4).
Before his departure for France in 1916, however, Tolkien married his long-time
love, Edith Bratt.
Believing that the 20th century had lost its moral bearings and the recuperative
power of myth, Tolkien set out in 1917, while recovering from war injuries,
to create a new mythology through his imagined world (Green 4). He
produced a body of history and myth for a heroic world that could serve
as a moral model for the real world; these works were not published until
after his death, however, and might never have been published without the
subsequent works.
Tolkien worked briefly for the OED, then as a college teacher at the University
of Leeds. In 1925, he obtained an appointment as professor of Anglo-Saxon
at Pembroke College, Oxford; he remained in Oxford the rest of his life,
although he moved to a different college some years later. He became
a highly respected authority on medieval literature, in particular the
English epic poem Beowulf. Despite his academic accomplishments,
Tolkien tended to procrastinate and according to Manlove his fantasy was
a “therapeutic hobby” to relieve his academic work (153).
At Oxford, Tolkien became part of a literary circle called the Inklings,
which included C.S. Lewis (with whom he was
close friends) and Charles Williams. They shared their work in progress,
but – while the often harsh criticism at these literary meetings may have
affected the other writers’ work - Lewis commented on Tolkien, “No one
ever influenced Tolkien – you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch”
(De Camp 232). The group seldom gave Tolkien harsh criticism, since
he either ignored it or took it so much to heart that he gave up the particular
writing project (De Camp 235).
The Hobbit began with a sentence scribbled in a blank exam book
in 1928: the first sentence of what was to become his only children’s novel.
He also began to tell the story of the hobbit to his children as a bedtime
story. In 1932, C.S. Lewis saw a manuscript of the novel; it was
published in 1937 and won an award from the New York Herald Tribune as
the best children’s book of the year. It remained continuously in
print from its first publication until after the publication of LOTR
spurred further interest.
From 1954-55, published The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which subsequently
overshadowed The Hobbit. As Sullivan says, “the sequel became
the main work,” and the trilogy drew readers’ and critic’s attention away
from the earlier work; consequently,The Hobbit has rarely been discussed
as an individual children’s book (253-54).
Tolkien died with several unpublished manuscripts in various stages of
completion. The second of his four children, Christopher, himself
a university professor in his father’s field, has taken on the task of
bringing these works to the public.
The Hobbit:
Sullivan identifies three characteristics of children’s books that The
Hobbit exhibits (and that LOTR does not):
A Jungian reading: The Hobbit
uses an archetypal narrative – the story of “the inexperienced hero [who]
goes out into the world and discovers himself through adventures and hardships”
(Green 8). However, it alters the usual form of the story (seen,
e.g., in Julius Lester’s John Henry) by making the hero middle-aged.
Although adult protagonists don’t usually work in children’s fiction, “Tolkien
makes it work by inventing a diminutive hero who has avoided worldly experience”
(Green 9). Tolkien also draws from an existing tradition of adventure
stories, such as those written by H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan.
Green interprets The Hobbit in Jungian terms as the search for “individuation”
– the “state of wholeness” that we more familiarly term maturity.
In Jung’s theories, the shadow and the anima are particularly important
in the quest for maturity (32). The shadow “represent[s] traits rejected
by the ego,” including aspects of the personality that might be dangerous
(32). The anima is the female side of the male ego, and in The
Hobbit, there are no female characters to fulfilll this role; however,
there are feminine archetypal symbols, most obviously the ring and the
mountain (33).
Bilbo, though an adult, is associated with the child through his “quiet
strength, his point of view close to the ground, and his vulnerability
among ‘big people’” (37). He has not achieved individuation yet,
but is “a middle-aged child whose identity is submerged in generic hobbitness
and shaped by his dead father’s heritage” (38); his identity crisis is
associated with the loss of “the Tookish half of his character” (39).
The Hobbit generally reflects the theory of fairy tales that Tolkien
adumbrated shortly after the book was published (Fantasy, Escape, Recovery,
Consolation). The Hobbit has several eucatastrophes; as Green argues,
the story is structured by “a series of seemingly hopeless cliff-hangers
followed by sudden joyous turns” (27). There are altogether five
of these repeated patterns, in each of which Bilbo leaves home or a “home-like
refuge, is opposed by monstrous foes, is saved by a eucatastrophe. . .
and then arrives at another homelike refuge” (44). Each encounter
with the enemy takes place in darkness, after crossing or at least touching
water; further, the perilous events are also usually associated with a
lack of good food (44).
A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401
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