1 of 3
Growing up in the Middle-earth of American evangelicalism, I received the full Tolkien treatment. My parents read The Hobbit to me before bedtime, and I read it again many times on my own. I ventured through The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a teenager, studied it in college, and read it again as an adult. I made a handful of abortive efforts to read the saga's dense prequel, The Silmarillion. A similar tale is told by multitudes of American Christians who grew up in the seventies and eighties, as it is by millions of British readers who are as hooked on Tolkien as they are on The Archers. But Tolkienism cuts an even wider swath. The trilogy has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, putting it well beyond the designation "cult classic," and the first installment of the movie version is introducing Middle-earth to an even wider circle.
Until recently it hadn't dawned on me that Tolkien's books are not considered literature in the academic sense. I shouldn't have been surprised, not only because they're "fantasy" and suspiciously popular fantasy at that, but because none of the Inkling authors are much studied academically. Although they are cornerstones of my personal canon, they merit all of a single mention in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (on page 77, in connection with Dante). A Google web search for "20th Century British Novel," the generic and historical classification in which we'd have to put Tolkien, yields college syllabi full of familiar names: Forster, Joyce, Beckett, Orwell, Woolf, Huxley. Recent additions include Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day) and the newly Nobel-christened V.S. Naipaul. Tolkien is never listed.
In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Saint Louis University professor Tom Shippey aims to change that, and he is well qualified to try. His credits include among other things an excellent work of Tolkien criticism, The Road to Middle-Earth (1983), and editorship of The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994) and Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1996). More important, perhaps, his professional trajectory has closely followed Tolkien's: "I attended the same school as Tolkien, King Edward's, Birmingham, and followed something like the same curriculum. In 1979 I succeeded to the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds which Tolkien had vacated in 1925." Shippey was also a fellow at Oxford from 1972 to 1979, where Tolkien had taught until his retirement in 1959; the two were acquainted from 1970 until Tolkien's death three years later. In short, Shippey knows Tolkien's world firsthand as few critics can.
Above all, Shippey shares with his subject a deep, abiding passion for philology: "the study of historical forms of a language or languages … [and] the texts in which these old forms of the language survive." In his own writing Tolkien declared the importance of a "growing neighborliness of linguistic and literary studies" and designed his curriculum at Oxford to reflect that belief. He taught such texts as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which Shippey also teaches) with a strong emphasis on the dynamic growth of the English language from its Anglo-Saxon roots.
It's a commonplace that Tolkien's philological expertise informed his creation of Middle-earth, but Shippey goes further, suggesting that in no small part it was this knowledge that made Tolkien's imaginative creations not merely believable but eerily resonant with the modern imagination. There is evidence for this, for example, in an appendix entry at the end of The Lord of the Rings in which Tolkien parses "hobbit" as hol ("hole") plus the Old English bytlian, which means "to dwell," arriving at the invented word holbytla or "hole-dweller." In the same vein Shippey convincingly parses names such as Frodo, Ringwraith, Saruman, Bree, and Withywindle, revealing their implications for the overall design of Tolkien's work. Whether or not Tolkien had all of these etymologies consciously in mind as he wrote (and it's clear that in many cases he did), he was so familiar with the ancestral tongues that he couldn't help but make Middle-earth a place of names and languages that really existed, or might have, in an unrecorded past. And all this works its magic on readers who have never conjugated an Anglo-Saxon verb. They feel in their bones the authenticity and coherence of Tolkien's language.
share this page
RSS Feed
