In 1961, C.S. Lewis attempted to nominate his friend and fellow Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in literature. Recently released files from the Nobel archive in Stockholm indicate that the jury briefly considered Tolkien, before dismissing the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with a terse verdict: his books had "not in any way measured up to story-telling of the highest quality." That same year, the judges also considered and rejected Graham Greene, Isak Dinesen, Robert Frost and E.M. Forster — none of whom would ever win the prize. The award went instead to Yugoslav writer (and civil servant under dictator Tito) Ivo Andrić.
I am no wide-eyed fan. Unlike most Tolkien admirers, I did not read his books during my youth, and thus encountered them with eyes that had already worked their way through the major novels of Dostoevsky, Proust, Tolstoy, Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, Dickens, James and the other mainstays of highbrow literature. As such, I chafed against the rococo elements in Tolkien's stories: the stilted diction, the interminable journeys through painstakingly described landscapes, and especially those insufferable songs.
Clap! Snap! the black crack! Grip, grab! Pinch, nab! And down, down to Goblin-town You go, my lad!
Clash, crash! Crush, smash! Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs! Pound, pound, far underground! Ho, ho! my lad!
Etc. etc.
I have my gripes, in other words. And yet I must object to the Nobel jury's glib dismissal. One might as well put down Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories or Lewis Carroll's Alice books for their shallowness and contrivance. Such attitudes miss the larger point: to create modern myth on such a large scale and with such pervasive impact on the collective consciousness places an author on the highest rank of storytellers, no matter what judges and jury might say to the contrary.
Tolkien's works have not only survived the changing tastes of several generations, but they loom larger now than ever. Peter Jackson's film trilogy of The Lord of Rings (2001-2003) brought in a staggering $3 billion in worldwide box office receipts, and 35 years after Tolkien's death his estate generated $50 million in annual earnings, placing the Oxford don right behind Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley on the list of income- producing dead celebrities. But Tolkien's impact can hardly be measured in merely monetary terms. Has any twentieth century author enchanted more people or inspired more imitators? I doubt it.
Tolkien began work on The Hobbit in the early 1930s, but the earliest roots of the work go back even further — to the years of World War I, when he began constructing imaginary languages and a related mythology. This odd approach to writing fiction is both revealing of Tolkien's mindset and helps explain his work's lasting appeal. A certain ineffable richness in the fabric of his novels contributed greatly to their success — and this texture no doubt came from our author's unusual determination to spend a couple decades tinkering with his imaginary universe before bringing it the attention of the public.
From this perspective, even the ingredients I least enjoy about Tolkien — such as those godawful elven songs — are essential parts of the recipe. In addressing a book such as The Hobbit , one almost needs to adopt an anthropologist's perspective. After all, we are not just reading a story but immersing ourselves in a different culture. As such, it's best to remember that the folk songs that construct and celebrate the key meanings for a society aren't always the tunes with the catchiest melodies or the wittiest lyrics. The folk tales that establish a group's literary culture aren't picked on the basis of clever plot twists. Cultural resonance requires more than wit or erudition, but rather a symbolic depth and an archetypal reality. On those measures, Tolkien is unsurpassed.
These deeper levels of signification allow Tolkien to build his plot around mundane objects — a stone, a cup, a ring. For another storyteller, these would be little more than what screenplay writers call a MacGuffin , an item sought by characters in a way that drives forward the plot, but without much thought put into its essence or attributes. It might be a Maltese falcon or a sleigh named Rosebud or the briefcase in Pulp Fiction . But Tolkien is less worried about plot than with the iconic (in the original meaning of the word) and archetypal nature of his imaginary world.
Of course, the idea of a mythic quest for a ring would have been familiar to Tolkien's earliest readers — it serves as a titular element in Richard Wagner's magnum opus Der Ring des Nibelungen , completed only a decade-and-a-half before Tolkien's birth. Tolkien himself dismissed the connection — "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases," was his rejoinder. Yet the connections between the two are striking, with Tolkien less an emulator of Wagner and more his mirror image. Witness the anti-heroic qualities of the quest for Tolkien's ring, especially in The Hobbit — where the hapless antagonists Bilbo Baggins and Gollum could hardly provide a starker contrast with the Wagnerian will to power of the famous opera cycle.
The best adjective Tolkien can offer in praise of the hobbit Baggins at the start of his novel is "respectable." When the wizard Gandalf shows up, "looking for someone to share in an adventure," Bilbo responds: "We are plain quiet folks and I have no use for adventures." Gandalf eventually enlists Baggins help in a quest to capture the treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. Along the way, the company encounters trolls, goblins, giant spiders, wood-elves — familiar enough from children's stories, but presented here in a manner more reminiscent of an oral epic or Icelandic saga.
My favorite interlude in The Hobbit involves a less spectacular conflict, the aforementioned contest over the ring between Baggins and Gollum. Here Tolkien's anti-heroic tendencies are most pronounced. Indeed, the two combatants do not battle with swords or daggers, clubs or spears, but simply with riddles.
This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.
Bilbo Baggins is unable to answer this riddle, but when he begs for more time-muttering "Time! Time!" — he finds that he has provided the solution by the sheerest luck.
No, one would not find that in Wagner — or even in Narnia or at Hogwarts. And while Tolkien's legions of imitators may have matched him dragon for dragon, troll for troll, few can impart such fluency with language and rustic charm into their adventure stories. Reading his works, one is constantly reminded that this author was imbibing Beowulf and the Kalevala while others were immersed in pulp fiction potboilers. Perhaps his genius lay in the simple realization that we still crave myth even as we live in an age that insists on rejecting it. So we shouldn't be surprised if his work seems so different from other "genre" fiction — if only because mythmakers always aim for something far too large to be reduced to genre.