The book of the century

I suppose not every reader of Shippey's book will be as interested as I was in Tolkien's borrowings from "Beowulf" (who, in Tolkien's reading, is a sort of were-bear, akin to the character Beorn in "The Hobbit"). Or where in Old Norse poetry he found the name Gandalf and decided it might belong to a wizard. Or the suggestive connections between the words "hobbit" and "rabbit" (here Shippey is making Tolkien's ghost very angry), which is itself a relatively recent coinage of unknown origin. Or what use Tolkien makes of the mysterious Middle English word wodwos, which appears in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and has never been adequately translated. (OK, I'll tell you: He thought it meant "wild men of the woods," and it's the source of the Woses, who appear briefly in Book Five of "Lord of the Rings" to aid the Rohirrim on their ride to Gondor.)

But then, I share Shippey and Tolkien's belief that people respond to the rightness (or wrongness) of words and names without knowing why they do or what they're reacting to. I belong to the tribe of philologists by blood, if not by training, and I can only smile when I read in Carpenter's biography that Tolkien once wrote an essay on "The Lengthening of Vowels in Old and Middle English Times." Among the writings of my own father, Brendan O Hehir of the University of California, is a paper entitled, "Is 'O' a Graph for 'W' in Older Welsh?" (If you want to know the answer you'll just have to look it up.)

Tolkien's immense erudition is not, of course, the source of his success; without his storytelling gift, or his introduction of the hobbits as modern, modest, sturdily English heroes against his grand mythic landscape, "The Lord of the Rings" would be little more than a curiosity. But it is no accident, nor is it tiresome pedantry, that he invented the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin (loosely modeled on Finnish and Welsh, respectively) first, and then built around them the world they required.

Because Tolkien's details have the weight and density of reality, linguistic and otherwise, his great sweep of story feels real as well; you might say that his imaginary castles are built with a certain amount of genuine stone. Besides, if anything is clear about the contemporary world it is that elves, wizards, goblins and dragons are still among us (sometimes bearing new names, sometimes not). Other writers' fantasy worlds are made up. Tolkien's is inherited.

Tolkien himself often spoke of his work in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," as well as the great legendary backdrop of "The Silmarillion," as something found or discovered whose existence was independent of him. It's wise to tread lightly in this sort of interpretation, but Tolkien was a devout Catholic who believed profoundly in revelation, and it seems clear that on this deeper and broader level he believed his legendarium to be something given, something revealed, which contained a kind of truth beyond measure.

Carpenter's account of the semi-legendary 1931 conversation between Tolkien and Lewis, in which the former begins to sway his then-agnostic friend toward Christianity, is worth considering here for many reasons. It begins with Lewis insisting that myths are lies, "even though lies breathed through silver." No, answered Tolkien, they are not:

We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic "progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

As Carpenter observes, this is the central doctrine of Tolkien's philosophy, and it has countless echoes in his work. For one thing, this is pretty much the cosmological back story found in "The Silmarillion" (which he had already begun, even at this early stage): The Two Trees that illuminated the creation of the world are killed, but their light is captured in three jewels, or Silmarils, which are set in the Iron Crown of Morgoth, the Great Enemy (for whom Sauron is merely a toady). The Silmarils are lost in turn and their light splintered, so that only memories and fragments of it remain in Middle-earth at the time of "The Lord of the Rings."

Tuesday: Part 2 of Andrew O'Hehir's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien.

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