Luke Slattery: Rings resound old truths
Mike in Cairns
January 03, 2004
JR.R. Tolkien, an extroverted Oxford don, garbed permanently in a
three-piece tweed suit, more at home in a past that never was than a future
he could never have foreseen, managed to create in Gollum a hero for our
times.
While the Tolkien character that really registered with the 1960s generation
was the sweet-hearted and stoical boy-saviour with the impossibly hairy feet
("Frodo Lives" was the message of hope stamped on badges and scrawled on
train station platforms), in Peter Jackson's film it's the sushi-loving
Gollum who steals the show.
Frodo's horrified expressions are all variations of my own in the final 10
seconds of the Rugby World Cup final, but Gollum is mesmerising: his eyes
dilate into pools of dubious purpose; his teeth gnash like those of an
overgrown piranha; he slathers and drools like a pup. Or a child.
An early review of Tolkien's completed trilogy scorned the simplistic moral
colouring of Middle-earth. Edwin Muir, writing in The Observer, noted that
the author's "good people are uniformly good, his evil figures immutably
evil; and he has no room in the world for a Satan both evil and tragic". The
film does Tolkien a favour; it answers this criticism.
While Jackson's cinematic canvas is largely Manichean, in Gollum the light
and dark, good and evil slug it out in some sort of psychic boxing ring.
Gollum's torments - enacted as an interminable moot court in which he plays
both prosecutor and defence - are externalised versions of our own internal
debates.
Gollum is the Tolkien mascot for the new millennium. Where just about every
other character descends from a noble lineage - even Gimly son of Groin -
Gollum is just plain Gollum. He's a no-logo character, alone in the world.
The final instalment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy opened worldwide in
December, giving cinematic presence to a load of old nonsense: literally.
There is only one relevant question about the life of Tolkien's 1069-page
tale and its afterlife as prolix screen epic: Che?
How did a retrospective myth combining Scandinavian, Icelandic and central
European legend, sweetened with English nationalism, then basted in
boffinish nostalgia, achieve such popularity? The Lord of the Rings
regularly rates as the best-loved book of the past century. How did such a
plainly antediluvian dream raise itself from niche to cult status in a world
where all taints of magic, both black and white, are dissolved by science
and commerce?
Tolkien, a soldier who survived World War I (only one of his friends did),
was hostile to the 20th century. In 1938, shortly after the publication of
his children's classic The Hobbit, he was happy to speculate that cars were
as "alive" as centaurs or dragons. His point, I suppose, was that if one
were to invest as much in the fairy realm as in the material one, all sorts
of things might come to life.
Believing his cherished little England lacked a coherent mythology - unlike,
for example, the corpus of Iceland sagas - Tolkien set out between the wars
to create one. His chief creations - Lothlorien, Rohan and Treebeard - are
fascinating and convincing because Tolkien, an academic philologist and
antiquarian, knew his stuff. But Hobbiton, the pure heart of the novel, is
unbearably twee. Whenever I think Bilbo, I think Noddy. As W.H. Auden
observed in an early review, hobbits in their thinking and sensibilities
"closely resemble those arcadian villagers who so frequently populate
British detective stories".
The Hobbit was explicitly a children's book. Its hero, Bilbo Baggins, went
on an adventure with dwarves and a wizard and came back with a ring and a
load of treasure after vanquishing a dragon. The much darker, scarier Lord
of the Rings appeared in 1954 (Vol I) and 1955 (Vols II and III).
In the late '50s and early '60s its sales slumbered like Smorg the dragon.
Tolkien's "myth for England" first took hold on the campuses of US
universities. By 1965 a paperback version of The Lord of the Rings had
become as faddish as flares.
The Tolkien cult caught on in the era of protest against the Vietnam War,
stirred into life by an agrarian-minded counter-culture, fuelled by LSD, and
sustained by the apocalyptic presentiments of the time. Hippies, yearning
for their own sleepy verdant Shire, were contesting the terms of the future
with the agents of industrialised militarism and The Ring, to them, was The
Bomb.
By the mid-'60s the critics were beginning to discuss the book not only as a
piece of imagined literature but as a social phenomenon. Writing in The New
York Review of Books in 1967, Matthew Hodgart said Tolkien divided his
universe into such childish extremes of good and evil that he may have
harboured authoritarian notions. "If this is true, it may explain the
astonishing success of the book among the young, who after a permissive
upbringing may secretly wish to be treated with authority - like
old-fashioned children."
Tolkien believed that anyone can imagine a "green sun" but it takes a lot
more work - and a "devilish craft" - to create a world where such a thing
seems credible. He called this a "secondary world" requiring "secondary
belief". The trilogy that gave birth to a cinematic sensation is a Catholic
and anti-modernist work. But the religious elements, as Tolkien confessed to
a friend, were not explicit. Rather they were "absorbed into the story and
the symbolism". The tale, in many ways, is a rival world to the modern - a
"secondary world" more congenial than our own. Roots go deep in Middle-earth
(unlike our own). One of the most heinous crimes committed there is the
uprooting of Fanghorn Forest.
At least one delightful irony embroiders Tolkien's tale: its modernism
inheres in its atavism. The impulses that drove the literary modernism of
Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce are precisely those that drew Tolkien
into the forest. Pound tried to restore the dead languages of antiquity
(Latin and Greek); Eliot's guides included Dante and the Psalmists; while
Joyce grafted Homer on to a day in the life of Dublin. The Lord of the Rings
turns out to be a great work of modernism - its antique dreaming is what
makes it modern.
FROM http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au
slat...@theaustralian.com.au
Rob Singers
of wisdom
> Luke Slattery: Rings resound old truths
Wow you've managed one Australian tripe post with out a binary. Did
someone buy you a clue for Xmas?
--
rob singers
pull finger to reply
Mike in Cairns
news:Xns9465EC9ADDA9Arsingers@IP-Hidden...
> Mike in Cairns startled all and sundry by ejaculating the following words
> of wisdom
>
> > Luke Slattery: Rings resound old truths
>
> Wow you've managed one Australian tripe post with out a binary. Did
> someone buy you a clue for Xmas?
Happy new year Rob.