C.S Lewis's Review of 'The Hobbit'
Matthew Woodford
'Of This and other Worlds'. It was a review written in 1937 for the Times
Literary Supplement:-
'The publishers claim that 'The Hobbit' ,though very unlike 'Alice', resembles
it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that
both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save
that each admits us to a world of its own - a world that seems to have been
going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader,
becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with 'Alice','Flatland','Phantastes'
,'The Wind in the Willows'.
To define the world of 'The Hobbit' is ,of course, impossible because it is
new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it
once you have gone. The author's admirable illustrations and maps of Mirkwood
and Goblingate and Esgaroth give one an inkling - and so do the names of the
dwarf and dragon that catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages. But there
are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe foer children's stories will give
you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor
Tolkien - who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale
. Still less will the common recipe prepare us for the curious shift from the
matter-of-fact beginnings of his story ("hobbits are small people, smaller
than dwarfs [sic] - and they have no beards - but very much larger than
Lilliputians") to the saga-like tone of the later chapters ("It is in my mind
to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid had you found the
hoard ungarded [sic]"). You must read for yourself to find out how inevitable
the change is and how it keeps pace with the hero's journey. Though all is
marvellous, nothing is arbitrary: all the inhabitants of Wilderland seem to
have the same unquestionable right to their existence as those of our own
world, though the fortunate child who meets them - and his unlearned elders
not much more - of the deep sources in our blood and tradition from which they
spring.
For it must be understood that this is a children's book only in the sense
that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. 'Alice' is
read gravely by children and with laughter by grown-ups; 'The Hobbit' , on
the other hand, will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years
later , at a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft
scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so
ripe , so friendly,and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but
'The Hobbit' may well prove a classic. '
Matt.
--
Matthew Woodford.....mjw@uk.ac.cov.ccrowan.....Gollum Fan Club!
Matthew Woodford
published in 'Time and Tide' in 1954 when tFotr came out, the second in the
same journal in 1955 when the rest of tLotr followed. I hope everyone shares
my enjoyment of these reviews - and I hope there are no lawyers reading!
The Fellowship of the Ring:-
' This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as
unpredictable in our age as 'Songs of Innocence' were in theirs. To say that
in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent , and unashamed, has suddenly
returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate
.To us ,who live in that odd period, the return - and the sheer relief of it -
is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance itself - a
history which stretches back to the 'Odyssey' and beyond - it makes not a
return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.
Nothing quite like it was ever done before. "One takes it," says Naomi
Mitchison, "as seriously as Malory." But then the ineluctable sense of reality
which we feel in the 'Morte d'Arthur' comes largely from the great weight of
other men's work built up century by century, which has gone into it. The
utterly new achievement of Professor Tolkien is that he carries a comparable
sense of reality unaided. Probably no book yet written in the world is quite
such a radical instance of what its author has elsewhere called 'sub-creation'
. The direct debt (there are of course subtler kinds of debt) which every
author must owe to the actual universe is here deliberately reduced to the
minimum. Not content to create his own story, he creates , with an almost
insolent prodigality, the whole world in which it is to move, with its own
theology, myths, geography, history, paleography, languages, and orders of
beings - a world "full of strange creatures beyond count" [Prologue: tFotr].
The names alone are a feast, whether redolent of quiet countryside (Michel
Delving, South Farthing), tall and kingly (Boromir, Faramir, Elendil) ,
loathsome like Smeagol , who is also Gollum, or frowning in the evil strength
of Barad-dur or Gorgoroth; yet best of all (Lothlorien, Gilthoniel, Galadriel)
when they embody that piercing, high elvish beauty of which no other prose
writer has captured so much.
Such a book has of course its predestined readers, even now more numerous
and more critical than is always realised. To them a reviewer need say little
, exxcept that here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold
iron; here is a book that will break your heart. They will know that it is
good news, good beyond hope. To complete their happiness one need only add
that it promises to be gloriously long: this volume is only the first of
three. But it is too great a book to rule only its natural subjects. Something
must be said to 'those without' , to the unconverted. At the very least,
possible misunderstandings may be got out of the way.
First, we must clearly understand that though 'The Fellowship' in one way
continues its author's fairy tale, 'The Hobbit', it is in no sense an
overgrown 'juvenile'. The truth is the other way round. 'The Hobbit' was
merely a fragment torn from the author's huge myth and adapted for children
; inevitably losing something by the adaptation. 'The Fellowship' gives us
at last the lineaments of that myth 'in their true dimensions like themselves
'. Misunderstanding on this point might easily be encouraged by the
first chapter, in which the author (taking a risk) writes almost in the manner
of the earliest and far lighter book. With some who will find the main body
of the book deeply moving, this chapter may not be a favourite.
Yet there were good reasons for such an opening; still more for the
Prologue (wholly admirable, this) which precedes it. It is essential that
we should first be well steeped in the 'homeliness', the frivolity, even (in
its best sense) the vulgarity of the creatures called Hobbits; these
unambitious folk, peaceable yet almost anarchical, with faces "good-natured
rather than beautiful" and "mouths apt to laughter and eating" [Ibid], who
treat smoking as an art and like books which tell them what they already know.
They are not an allegory of the English, but they are perhaps a myth that only
an Englishman (or, should we add, a Dutchman?) could have created. Almost the
central theme of the book is the contrast between the Hobbits (or 'the Shire')
and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called, the terrifying
discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for
granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary
accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which
Hobbits dare not imagine, that any Hobbit may find himself forced out of the
Shire and caught up into that high conflict. More strangely still, the event
of that conflict between strongest things may come to depend on him, who is
almost the weakest.
What shows that we are reading myth ,not allegory, is that there are no
pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological
application. A myth points ,for each reader, to the realm he lives in most.
It is a master key ;use it on what door you like. And there are other themes
in 'The Fellowship' equally serious.
That is why no catchwords about 'escapism' or 'nostalgia' and no distrust
of 'private worlds' are in court. This is no Angria, no dreaming; it is sane
and vigilant invention ,revealing at point after point the integration of the
author's mind. What is the use of calling 'private' a world we can all walk
into and test and in which we can find such a balance? As for escapism, what
we chiefly escape from are the illusions of our ordinary life. We certainly
do not escape anguish. Despite many a snug fireside and many an hour of good
cheer to gratify the Hobbit in each of us, anguish is ,for me, almost the
prevailing note. But not ,as in the literature most typical of our age ,the
anguish of abnormal or contorted souls: rather that anguish of those who were
happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see
it gone.
Nostalgia does indeed come in; not ours nor the author's, but that of the
characters. It is closely connected with one of Professor Tolkien's greatest
achievements. One would have supposed that diuturnity was the quality least
likely to be found in an invented world. And one has ,in fact, an uneasy
feeling that the worlds of the 'Furioso' or 'The Water of the Wondrous Isles'
weren't there at all before the curtain rose. But in the Tolkienian world you
can hardly put your foot down anywhere from Esgaroth to Forlindon or between
Ered Mithrin and Khand, without stirring the dust of history. Our own world
,except at certain rare moments, hardly seems so heavy with its past. This is
one element in the anguish the characters bear. But with their anguish comes
also a strange exaltation. They are at once stricken and upheld by the memory
of vanished civilisations and lost splendour. They have outlived the second
and third Ages [sic]; the wine of life was drawn long since. As we read we
find ourselves sharing their burden; when we have finished ,we return to our
own life not relaxed but fortified.
But their is more in the book still. Every now and then ,risen from sources
we can only conjecture and almost alien (one would think) to the author's
habitual imagination, figures meet us so brimming with life (not human life)
that they make our sort of anguish and our sort of exaltation seem unimportant
. Such is Tom Bombadil , such the unforgettable Ents [ a giveaway of C.S Lewis
's privileged access to the then unpublished manuscripts!]. This is surely the
utmost reach of invention, when an author produces what seems to be not even
his own ,much less anyone else's. Is mythopoiea ,after all, not the most ,but
the least , subjective of activities?
Even now I have left otu almost everything - the silvan leafiness, the
passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could
hardly convey them. After all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps
also its deepest: "there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great
valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain." [ tFotr ,Bk. I, ch. 2.].
'Not wholly vain' - it is the cool middle point between illusion and
disillusionment. '
For a fuller view of C.S Lewis's opinions on fairy-tales, myths and literture
I refer those interested to the source-book of these essays given 'Of This
and Other Worlds' (published in the uk by Fount ,edited by Walter Hooper).
Matthew Woodford
Subject: Re: C.S Lewis's Review of 'The Lord of the Rings'
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The second and final part of this review of Lotr:-
' When I reviewed the first volume of this work I hardly dared to hope
it would have the success which I was sure it deserved. Happily I am proved
wrong. There is ,however, one piece of false criticism which had better be
answered; the complaint that the characters are all either black or white.
Since the climax of Volume I was mainly concerned with the struggle between
good and evil in the mind of Boromir, it is not easy to see how anyone could
have said this. I will hazard a guess. 'How shall a man judge what to do in
such times?" asks someone in Volume II. "As he has ever judged," comes the
reply. "Good and ill have not changed ... nor are they one thing among Elves
and Dwarves and another among Men." [The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 2. It was...
no you work it out for yourselves.].
This is the basis for the whole Tolkienian world. I think some readers
,seeing (and disliking) this rigid demarcation of black and white, imagine
they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people. Looking at
the squares, they assume (in defiance of the facts) that all the pieces must
be making bishops' moves which confine them to one colour. But even such
readers will hardly brazen it out through the two last volumes. Motives, even
in the right side, are mixed. Those who are now traitors usually began with
comparatively innocent intentions. Heroic Rohan and Imperial Gondor are partly
diseased. Even the wretched Smeagol, till quite late in the story, has good
impulses; and (by a tragic paradox) what finally pushes him over the brink is
an unpremeditated speech by the most selfless character of all.
There are two Books in each volume and now that all six are before us the
very high architectural quality of the romance is revealed. Book I builds up
the main theme. In Book II that theme, enriched with much retrospective
material, continues. Then comes the change. In III and IV the fate of the
company ,now divided, becomes entangled with a huge complex of forces which
are grouping and re-grouping themsleves in relation to Mordor. The main theme
,isolated from this , occupies IV and the early part of VI ( the latter part
of course giving all the resolutions). But we are never allowed to forget the
intimate connection between it and the rest. On the one hand, the whole world
is going to war; the story rings with galloping hoofs, trumpets, steel on
steel. On the other hand ,very far away , miserable figures creep (like mice
on a slag heap) through the twilight of Mordor. And we know the fate of the
world depends far more on the small movement that on the great. This is a
structural invention of the highest order: it adds immensely to the pathos,
irony, and grandeur of the tale.
Yet those Books are not in the least inferior. Of picking out great moments
(such as the cock-crow at the Siege of Gondor) there would be no end; I will
mention two general (and totally different) excellences. One, surprisingly,
is realisms. This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It
is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the
front when 'everything is now ready', the flying civilians, the lively, vivid
friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground
, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco 'salvaged' from
the ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy tale was
wakened into maturity by active service ['On Fairy Stories' -JRRT]; that ,no
doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf), "there
is good rock here. This country has tough bones." [TTT, Bk. III, ch. 2.]. The
other excellence is that no individual, and no species, seems to exist only
for the sake of the plot. All exist in their own right and would have been
worth creating for their mere flavour eben if they had been irrelevant.
Treebeard would have served any other author (if any other could have
conceived him) for a whole book. His eyes are "filled up with ages of memory
and long, slow ,steady thinking" [Ibid., Bk. III, ch. 4.]. Through these ages
his name has grown with him , so that he cannot now tell it; it would, by now,
take too long to pronounce. When he learns that the thing they are standing on
is a hill, he complains that this is but "a hasty word" [Ibid.] for that which
has so much history in it.
How far Treebeard may be regarded as a 'portrait of the artist' must remain
doubtful; but when he hears that some people want to identify the Ring with
the hydrogen bomb, and Mordor with Russia, I think he might call it a 'hasty'
word. How long do people think a world like his takes to grow? Do they think
it can be done as quickly as a modern nation changes its Public Enemy Number
One or as modern scientists invent new weapons? When Professor Tolkien began
there was probably no nuclear fission and the contemporary incarnation of
Mordor was a good deal nearer our shores. But the text itself teaches that
Sauron is eternal; the war of the Ring is only one of a thousand wars against
him. Every time we shall be wise to fear his ultimate victory ,after which
there will be "no more songs". Again and again we shall have good evidence
that "the wind is setting East ,and the withering of all woods may be
drawing near" [Ibid.]. Every time we win we shall know that our victory is
impermanent. If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its
moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that
hard ,yet not quite desperate, insight into Man's unchanging predicament by
which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest
; hammer-strokes, but with compassion.
'But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious somment to make on the
real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never
land of your own?' Because , I take it, one of the main things the author
wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic
quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterisation. Much that
in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done
simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined
beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as
a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all until we see
that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? In the book Eomer rashly contrasts
"the green earth" with "legends". Aragorn replies that the green earth itself
is "a mighty matter of legend" [Ibid., Bk. III, ch. 2.].
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores
to them the rich significance which has been hidden by 'the veil of
familiarity'. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by
pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the
child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been
dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you
are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread,
gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from
reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real
things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to
bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and
our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he
could have done it any other way.
This book is too original and too opulent for any final judgement on a
first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not
quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our re-readings,
I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the
indispensables. '
stephen swann
>
>For a fuller view of C.S Lewis's opinions on fairy-tales, myths and literture
>I refer those interested to the source-book of these essays given 'Of This
>and Other Worlds' (published in the uk by Fount ,edited by Walter Hooper).
God, Lewis is a beautiful writer. He says all the things about Tolkien
that I would have said if I were just eloquent enough.
--
Steve Swann * Speak to me in many voices; make
sw...@cs.buffalo.edu * them all sound like one... -BOC