This surprised me greatly.
Hearing that Lin Carter was an expert on the history and genre of fantasy, I was curious to read what he had to write about Tolkien. An online bookstore sent me the long out of print Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings (1969). As one of the first literary treatments of Tolkien’s masterpiece, it was strange reading a book that seemed as if it was trying to “introduce” me to this now famous and almost ubiquitous work. It took me a week to get through it, and I found it an enjoyable trip, not without some startling revelations.
Permit me to correct your image of me with a few statements. Next to the Bible, the LotR was the most incredible, moving, influential thing I’ve ever read. It had a lot to do with when I read it (meaning, my chronological age, on the brink of “manhood,” to use an old-fashioned term) and what was going through my personal life at the time (parent’s divorce, new schools, etc). But that doesn’t mean I believe it’s true. I don’t dress up as an elf and prance around in the forest with a wooden sword and other delusional folk. I don’t speak Quenyan (though, interestingly, I still remember the term … ). I did not think Peter Jackson’s trio of movies was the be-all and end-all of cinema. If anything, I’d grade them a solid B. But what Professor Tolkien created for me was a little world, an authentic and very realistic world, so much more preferable to the one I was stuck in, a world I could escape to for a couple of hours every day over the course of a spring, summer, and fall.
For years I believed that the entirety of Middle-earth sprung from Tolkien’s mind. What a genius that mind had to have been! I have read – or perhaps I just thought I read – that he formulated a lot of the story in the trenches in WWI. I have no idea whether or not he fought in the trenches during the Great War. I have also read that he test-marketed his ideas and tales on his children at bedtime. I only tell my Little One stories of Leroy the Persian Longhair; I need to up my game, I suppose. But I have always believed that the names, places, languages, things of magic, histories, themes and stories have come straight from Professor Tolkien’s genius, regardless when or where.
Not true.
Or rather, yes but no.
What got me was how much of Tolkien is based on older, lesser known “Tolkiens” of centuries past. The kindest way of putting it would be acknowledging the Professor’s debt and influence to such ancient works and authors as Homer, Virgil, Gilgamesh, Amadis of Gaul, the Elder Edda, and the Siegfried / Niebelungen legends made most famous in Wagner’s Ring Cycle * of operatic works. After all, aren’t all authors simply the product of their reading and studying? Or, more precisely, their genius working upon both their history plus their originality, to varying degrees?
A less charitable way would be realizing that Tolkien cribbed a lot of material from long-dead authors.
The most startling example, to me, came in a chapter Carter tells of this discovery: while searching through the Elder Edda, a 13th century Icelandic medieval manuscript, for an accurate quotation in which to begin a chapter for one of his fantasy novels, Carter stumbled upon the names
Durin, Dwalin, Dain, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Thrain, Thorin, Thror, Fili, Kili, Fundin, Gloin, Dori, Ori, and – Gandalf
the names of sixteen of Tolkien’s dwarves plus good old Gandalf, all in six consecutive verses of a work 800 years old!
That, to say the very least, absolutely floored me.
Carter gives more examples of the genesis of names and events of the LotR from earlier works. Frodo and Gandalf are paired in certain Danish and Swedish epic tales dating from the Middle Ages. Dragons whose only weakness is a missing single scale (Smaug) are not uncommon. And, of course, the whole idea of the One Ring of Power – as well as its ability to cause the wearer to disappear – originate from the Niebelungenlied, which Wagner himself developed for his operas.
But even more interesting, to me, was the “contemporary” history of the genre Carter describes. I now have a good half-dozen works to search out, fantasy epics from the late 19th century to a few concurrent with Tolkien. Writers such as James Cabell, Lloyd Alexander, Robert E. Howard, E. R. Eddison, Fletcher Pratt, William Morris, and Lord Dunsany … I have a lot of seeking to do now for their out-of-print works on those online used book websites.
It seems to me thar’s gold to be mined there …
This is not to make you think Carter’s book made me think less of Professor Tolkien. No; if anything, I am marveling even more at his genius, his ability to take from so many diverse sources and distill something magical, something archetypical, something like what Joseph Campbell talks about when he writes books about “the hero with a thousand faces.” It is something that appeals to the best in all of us, something timeless and epic. Something wonderful.
[If you’re interested, his my short take on The Silmarillion, from the early days of the Hopper …]
* Speaking of Wagner’s Ring Cycle: I listened intently (through headphones and with libretto) to the 16 hours plus of the four operas – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdamerung – during the tribulation that was the first summer in my new house. With a pregnant wife disallowed from assisting me, I painted nine rooms mostly by myself (a buddy helped with two). After working a full day I’d come home, paint for two or three hours, drink some beers, then soak in a hot tub to Wagner. Needless to say, they left a very strong impression on me. (And not because of the beer I was drinking – Spaaten.) I hope to one day own high-quality set of the Ring Cycle, once money is flowing more easily. I would also like to see them, live, but the wife has put her foot down to four-hour opera in German, even for my birthday.
Hearing that Lin Carter was an expert on the history and genre of fantasy, I was curious to read what he had to write about Tolkien. An online bookstore sent me the long out of print Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings (1969). As one of the first literary treatments of Tolkien’s masterpiece, it was strange reading a book that seemed as if it was trying to “introduce” me to this now famous and almost ubiquitous work. It took me a week to get through it, and I found it an enjoyable trip, not without some startling revelations.
Permit me to correct your image of me with a few statements. Next to the Bible, the LotR was the most incredible, moving, influential thing I’ve ever read. It had a lot to do with when I read it (meaning, my chronological age, on the brink of “manhood,” to use an old-fashioned term) and what was going through my personal life at the time (parent’s divorce, new schools, etc). But that doesn’t mean I believe it’s true. I don’t dress up as an elf and prance around in the forest with a wooden sword and other delusional folk. I don’t speak Quenyan (though, interestingly, I still remember the term … ). I did not think Peter Jackson’s trio of movies was the be-all and end-all of cinema. If anything, I’d grade them a solid B. But what Professor Tolkien created for me was a little world, an authentic and very realistic world, so much more preferable to the one I was stuck in, a world I could escape to for a couple of hours every day over the course of a spring, summer, and fall.
For years I believed that the entirety of Middle-earth sprung from Tolkien’s mind. What a genius that mind had to have been! I have read – or perhaps I just thought I read – that he formulated a lot of the story in the trenches in WWI. I have no idea whether or not he fought in the trenches during the Great War. I have also read that he test-marketed his ideas and tales on his children at bedtime. I only tell my Little One stories of Leroy the Persian Longhair; I need to up my game, I suppose. But I have always believed that the names, places, languages, things of magic, histories, themes and stories have come straight from Professor Tolkien’s genius, regardless when or where.
Not true.
Or rather, yes but no.
What got me was how much of Tolkien is based on older, lesser known “Tolkiens” of centuries past. The kindest way of putting it would be acknowledging the Professor’s debt and influence to such ancient works and authors as Homer, Virgil, Gilgamesh, Amadis of Gaul, the Elder Edda, and the Siegfried / Niebelungen legends made most famous in Wagner’s Ring Cycle * of operatic works. After all, aren’t all authors simply the product of their reading and studying? Or, more precisely, their genius working upon both their history plus their originality, to varying degrees?
A less charitable way would be realizing that Tolkien cribbed a lot of material from long-dead authors.
The most startling example, to me, came in a chapter Carter tells of this discovery: while searching through the Elder Edda, a 13th century Icelandic medieval manuscript, for an accurate quotation in which to begin a chapter for one of his fantasy novels, Carter stumbled upon the names
Durin, Dwalin, Dain, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Thrain, Thorin, Thror, Fili, Kili, Fundin, Gloin, Dori, Ori, and – Gandalf
the names of sixteen of Tolkien’s dwarves plus good old Gandalf, all in six consecutive verses of a work 800 years old!
That, to say the very least, absolutely floored me.
Carter gives more examples of the genesis of names and events of the LotR from earlier works. Frodo and Gandalf are paired in certain Danish and Swedish epic tales dating from the Middle Ages. Dragons whose only weakness is a missing single scale (Smaug) are not uncommon. And, of course, the whole idea of the One Ring of Power – as well as its ability to cause the wearer to disappear – originate from the Niebelungenlied, which Wagner himself developed for his operas.
But even more interesting, to me, was the “contemporary” history of the genre Carter describes. I now have a good half-dozen works to search out, fantasy epics from the late 19th century to a few concurrent with Tolkien. Writers such as James Cabell, Lloyd Alexander, Robert E. Howard, E. R. Eddison, Fletcher Pratt, William Morris, and Lord Dunsany … I have a lot of seeking to do now for their out-of-print works on those online used book websites.
It seems to me thar’s gold to be mined there …
This is not to make you think Carter’s book made me think less of Professor Tolkien. No; if anything, I am marveling even more at his genius, his ability to take from so many diverse sources and distill something magical, something archetypical, something like what Joseph Campbell talks about when he writes books about “the hero with a thousand faces.” It is something that appeals to the best in all of us, something timeless and epic. Something wonderful.
[If you’re interested, his my short take on The Silmarillion, from the early days of the Hopper …]
* Speaking of Wagner’s Ring Cycle: I listened intently (through headphones and with libretto) to the 16 hours plus of the four operas – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdamerung – during the tribulation that was the first summer in my new house. With a pregnant wife disallowed from assisting me, I painted nine rooms mostly by myself (a buddy helped with two). After working a full day I’d come home, paint for two or three hours, drink some beers, then soak in a hot tub to Wagner. Needless to say, they left a very strong impression on me. (And not because of the beer I was drinking – Spaaten.) I hope to one day own high-quality set of the Ring Cycle, once money is flowing more easily. I would also like to see them, live, but the wife has put her foot down to four-hour opera in German, even for my birthday.
2 comments:
My bubble bursteth
Uncle
I tried to work in the forest and trees analogy into the post somehow, but forgot.
"Though the overall lie of the forest may be similar to those dark and dreadful woods of his predecessors, the sheer number and specie, color, size, shape and overall beauty of every tree and bush are entirely of his creation."
Bubble restored? Even a smaller one?
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