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Tom Shippey's latest Tolkien book released -- get some salt - Lord of the Rings news - J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

September 11, 2000 at 12:45:32

Many people regard Tom Shippey to be Tolkien's greatest critic and defender. Shippey actually knew Tolkien himself, and also taught at Oxford in the same position Tolkien once held. So Shippey's latest book is being widely hailed as a must-buy. Here are some observations about the faithfulness of Shippey to Tolkien's literature.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century was requested by Shippey's publisher when they realized that they could reap a financial windfall from the upcoming Peter Jackson movies based on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Shippey, who felt he had said all he could say in The Road To Middle-earth, pointedly ignores much of what Tolkien himself said about his own work, and virtually calls the author a liar when examining his sources.

Does Tolkien really need a defender like Shippey? His knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is unquestionably sound, and he is well able to grasp the roots and significance of many of Tolkien's own reconstructed Anglo-Saxon words and Tolkien's modern English constructions which follow Anglo-Saxon conventions. But Shippey misses the boat on several critical points, a fault he admits to in the "Acknowledgements and Abbreviations" section of Road to Middle-earth:

I have had several clear warnings as to the dangers of writing this book, not least from Professor Tolkien himself: who, on reading a very short and early draft of it more than twenty years ago, replied kindly, but with the hint that he would like to 'talk more' with me 'about "design"' as it appears or may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of actual composition.' Evidently he felt that I had found 'design' too readily, and become, as some critics do, too faithful to my own scheme. Some years before, his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford (now printed in Memoriam Essays) had made clear his low opinion of literary 'research'; while his letters bear witness to a particular suspicion of source-studies. This book continues to talk about design, and to indicate sources, and to that extent goes against the wishes of its subject, or rather its subject's creator. However, I may hope that, warned early, and educated at all times under a plan that Professor Tolkien had approved (and in most cases himself had followed), I have not become as 'bewildered' as many. My first acknowledgement must then be to Professor Tolkien himself, for a prompt and salutory tip.

Unfortunately, Professor Shippey did not fully comprehend the significance of what Tolkien had said to him, for in the preface to the second edition of The Road to Middle-earth Shippey concedes the following:

Yet I do turn back to the letter Professor Tolkien wrote to me on 13 April 1970, charmingly courteous and even flattering as it then was from one at the top of his profession to one at the bottom ('I don't like to fob people off with a formal thanks...one of the nearest to my heart, or the nearest, of the many I have received...I am honoured to have received your attention'). And yet, and yet...What I should have realised -- perhaps did half-realise, for I speak the dialect myself -- was that this letter was written in the specialised politeness-language of Old Western Man, in which doubt and correction are in direct proportion to the obliquity of expression. The Professor's letter had invisible italics in it, which I now supply. 'I am in agreement with nearly all that you say, and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper: especially about design as it appears or may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of of actual composition.' It has taken me twenty years (and the perusal of fifteen volumes unpublished in 1970) to see the point of the italics. Tolkien, however, closed his letter to me with the proverb: 'Need brooks no delay, yet late is better than never?' I can only repeat his saying, question-mark and all.

The problem, however, is that Shippey refused to let go of his preconceived notions. Notions preconceived on the basis of an extensive foundation of literary and philological study which parallels Tolkien's own. He is so convinced that everything in The Lord of the Rings is somehow derived from or intended to emulate Anglo-Saxon literature that even when he stumbles across obvious disagreement by Tolkien himself Shippey's only recourse is to say

As has already been remarked, though, the Riders according to Tolkien did not resemble the 'ancient English ... except in a general way due to their circumstances: a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain.' Tolkien was stretching the truth a long way in asserting that, to say the least!....

The previous "remark" referred to goes thus:

...Thus of the Riddermark and its relation to Old English he said eventually 'This linguistic procedure [i.e. translating Rohirric into Old English] does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or in art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances...' (III, 414). But this claim is totally untrue....

Such an profoundly absurd statement, belying a complete ignorance of the facts, has been accepted by numerous Shippey readers as holy writ. Yet the ignorance is not ignorance as in "that which one does not know" but rather as in "that which one elects to ignore". In his attempt to rationalize his interpretation of the Rohirrim, Shippey notes that "the Rohirriam cannot be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend."

Of course, he goes on to compare "Beowulf" with elements of The Lord of the Rings concerning the Rohirrim, never once mentioning the fact that the subject matter of "Beowulf" though preserved in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript in a form no doubt written by an Anglo-Saxon poet, concerns Danes, not Anglo-Saxons, and Geats. And Shippey even concedes that Tolkien draws upon Gothic and non-Germanic sources for depicting the Rohirrim in custom and culture (mentioning specifically the Huns and Tartars, and their horsetail plumes).

Such conveniences of oversight serve to underscore the fact that Shippey is at heart a propagandist, not determined to find the truth of the story or to present the true sources, but rather intent on overwhelmingly propounding the Anglo-Saxonist cause as the heart of Tolkien's inspiration. The bald-faced strangulation of Tolkien's work is tantamount to a wholesale slaughter of the innocents, a base betrayal of the ideals Tolkien esteemed in both literary study and the construction of his fiction.

In his haste to present the entire work as a boundless stream of Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm, Shippey barely pays lip-service to the Biblical and classical influences which Tolkien himself acknowledged, and even glosses over the immense significance of the clearly non-Anglo-Saxon traditions which took over the legends of the First Age, the cycle which originally began as an attempt by Tolkien to create an Anglo-Saxon (heathen) mythology from a distinctly English point of view.

In considering the value of his new book, Shippey's departures from Tolkien and outright brutalizations of the subject matter in past efforts should be kept in mind by the reader. The critic will bring intricate knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and Tolkien's work to the reader, but he will also weave a dazzling spell of bewilderment which easily entices one to accept the fantastic as fact and eschew the reality of Tolkien's own cautions against this very sort of behavior.

For an analysis of Tolkien's portrayals of Middle-earth and the Rohirrim which doesn't ignore the considerable wealth of facts, read Michael Martinez's Suite101 articles Middle-earth doesn't look like Medieval Europe and How did Tolkien actually portray the Rohirrim?.