The book of the century

In this regard, then, "The Lord of the Rings" belongs to the literature of the Industrial Revolution, a lament for the destruction of England's "green and pleasant land" that belongs somewhere on the same shelf with Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and William Blake. But Tolkien saw something wilder and stranger in the Sarehole of his childhood, and in himself: a fading but still tangible connection to the distant, mythic past. If his Shire hobbits are the West Midlands rural bourgeoisie of 1895 or so, they have been catapulted backward into a world where they themselves are the anachronisms, a realm of elves, dwarves (Tolkien insisted on this nonstandard but ancient plural, although he would have preferred "dwarrows"), wizards, dragons, goblins and black sorcerers.

Shippey's argument, which is both marvelous and convincing, is that Tolkien saw his realm of Middle-earth not as a fiction or invention but as the recovery of something genuine that had become buried beneath fragments of fairy tale and nursery rhyme. In short, it was a work of philology, which itself is a broader, braver and more full-blooded enterprise than we are likely to realize.

In Tolkien's view (and Shippey's), philology can never be reduced to dry questions of linguistics alone, but must encompass literary and cultural awareness as well. So the discovery that all Germanic languages, including English, share a word for "dwarf" -- in modern German it is "Zwerg," and in Old Norse "dvergr" -- raises the question of what original concept or creature the word reflects.

"However fanciful Tolkien's creation of Middle-earth was," Shippey writes, "he did not think that he was entirely making it up. He was 'reconstructing,' he was harmonizing contradictions in his source-texts, sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits), but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination: and for this he had a very great deal of admittedly scattered evidence."

In his moments of greatest pride and ambition -- which were not frequent -- Tolkien wanted to weave existing folk beliefs into a body of legend that would be specifically English (the Arthurian legends being Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon in origin). In populating the unexplored wilderness around the Shire with sinister Barrow-wights and Black Riders, great treelike Ents (the word exists in Old English, although its meaning is not clear), ancient woodland spirits like Tom Bombadil and of course the beautiful, vanishing race of Elves with their silvery singing, Tolkien was, in Shippey's phrase, trying to take the English countryside, perhaps the tamest in the world, and make it haunted.

In all this Tolkien was clearly inspired by 19th century Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot, who "reconstructed" the "Kalevala," Finland's national epic, from fragments of traditional songs and poems. (Tom Bombadil, who was one of Tolkien's earliest creations and whose role in the "Lord of the Rings" universe is never explained, may be derived from the singing wizards of the "Kalevala.") As Shippey wryly notes, latter-day philologists have grown suspicious of Lönnrot and no longer believe that his work reliably reflects any ancient original. Yet the Finnish public does not seem to care; the publication date of the "Kalevala" remains a national holiday, and a new generation of schoolchildren reads it every year.

If the reconstructive mythmaking of "The Lord of the Rings" is itself a kind of philology, the book is also deeply grounded in Tolkien's linguistic expertise. Sometimes he became so absorbed in the creation of languages and lineages, in fact, that he put the story itself aside for months or years at a time, believing he could not continue until some quandary or inconsistency in his invented realm had been resolved.

Next Page: The splinter of light inside us all

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