Master of Middle Earth (3 page)

Nobody knows
better than Tolkien that languages are not static but change continually. Hence
part of the function of Appendix E is to trace some of the developments of the
original Elvish spoken and written speech into Númenorean, and thence into
Westron, the "Common Speech" of the West. Inevitably, I suppose, the
laws of linguistic evolution which Tolkien sees at work on Middle-earth are the
same as those discovered by modern philology to have governed the development
of the Indo-European tongues in recent millennia on Earth. In this way another
parallel is drawn, this time in the realm of philology, between events on
ancient Middle-earth and those known to have taken place among us in our own
era.

The linguistic
history of Middle-earth corroborates and fleshes out other aspects of its
history, with a corresponding gain in the credibility of all. In language, as
in much else, the Noldor elves who have crossed the sea to Valinor are the
fountainhead of culture. They carry back with them to Middle-earth the noble
Quenya speech and the first written alphabet, invented by their most brilliant
genius, Fëanor, who also made the
Silmarilli.
Cultural contact with the
Sindar elves, who have remained behind on the continent, enriches both groups,
modifies their speech and writing, and spreads their influence eastward among
the Edain of the north and the dwarves of Moria to the south. Even the ores are
affected. When given the island of Númenor the Edain, too, abandon their former
linguistic patterns in favor of the Elvish. It is a sign of the arrogance and
rebellion to come that gradually they cast off all things Elvish and revert to
a version of their former tongue. Out of this in later years after their
destruction emerges in the Gondor lands they have settled the
lingua franca
of the west known as Westron, bearing the mark of influences of the more
primitive human tribes already there as well as others from commerce with
remaining colonies of elves. The rivalry between Westron and Sauron's Black
Speech, spoken by all his servants, typifies the enmity of the two cultures, if
Sauron's tyranny can be called a culture. This bald summary can give but a
paltry idea of the profusion of detail poured in by Tolkien to show how the
languages of Middle-earth both shape and reflect the destinies of those who use
them.

Already noticed in
the foregoing pages are many instances of Tolkien's art in gaining credence for
his history of Middle-earth by introducing episodes of various sorts that tease
us with their resemblance to episodes that we know have actually occurred in
our not too distant past. A few more parallels, which designedly are never
quite parallel, deserve mention too because they skirt the edges of large
events in the history of western civilization.
¹¹
Just as Earth has
seen wave after wave of tribal migrations into Europe from east and north, so
on Middle-earth the elves, the Edain, the Rohirrim, and the hobbits have
drifted west at various periods from the same directions. Also, our Europe has
warred from early times against Arabs from the south and Persians, Mongols,
Turks from the near or far east. Similarly Gondor resists Easterlings and
Southrons, who have pressed against its borders for millennia and have become
natural allies of Sauron. The Haradrim of the south even recall Saracens in
their swarthy hue, weapons, and armor, and suggest other non-European armies in
their use of elephant ancestors, while the Wainriders from the east come in
wagons rather like those of the Tartar hordes. The men of Gondor live and fight
in a kind of legendary Arthurian, proto-medieval mode, and the Rohirrim differ
from early Anglo-Saxons mainly in living by the horse, like Cossacks.

The Tolkien style
in creating secondary worlds did not spring full-blown but developed out of his
experience in writing
The Hobbit,
his first attempt at narrative. In
that story Bilbo travels from Shire to Rivendell, as Frodo does, and meets
Gandalf, Elrond, Gollum, and other characters who appear also in the epic. But
the world of
The Hobbit
is not called Middle-earth, its vegetation and
creatures are not visualized in patient detail, and it has no larger
geographical or historical context whatever. Nor are the characters the same,
although they bear the same names. Gandalf is merely a funny old wizard, for
instance. And in a mistaken attempt to please an audience of children Tolkien
trivializes and ridicules his elves and dwarves in precisely the manner he
later comes to deplore. To call
The Lord of the Rings
a sequel to this
childhood tale, as Tolkien does for the sake of continuity in the Ring plot, is
to disguise the immense progress in technique evident in his epic fantasy.

Having once found
his characteristic combination of the familiar with the unfamiliar, Tolkien
never departed from it in any of the short verse and prose fiction he wrote
after finishing the epic.
¹²
"The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth"
is an imagined sequel to the battle of Maldon between Vikings and Saxons in
Essex in
a.d
. 991. "Farmer
Giles of Ham" is set in the valley of the Thames in pre-Arthurian Britain.
"Smith of Wootton Major" takes place in an essentially medieval
English village, slightly hobbitized, which is a point of departure and return
for excursions into a country called Faery. "Imram" tells of St. Brendan's
sea voyage into the West in the sixth century. It starts and ends in Ireland.
"The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" is a Breton lay centering on the south
coast of Britain in the chivalric age. "Leaf by Niggle" shows us a
modern English village complete with neighbors, bicycles, housing regulations,
a town council, and the rest, before taking off into a rather minutely pictured
landscape where the soul after death goes through purgation.

In his unfinished
The Silmarillion
Tolkien faces the same problem in naturalizing the
potentially fabulous happenings of Middle-earth's First Age.

This earliest
of Tolkien's prose
fictions, published in 1937, was so popular that when he started writing
The
Lord of the Rings
soon afterward he called the latter a sequel. Such a
designation of the two works as prologue and sequel respectively is a pity for
a number of reasons. For one thing, many potential readers approaching Tolkien
for the first time have inferred that they must tackle
The Hobbit
first.
Unfortunately that work often puzzles, sometimes repels outright. Those who
managed to get past it are likely to go on to the later epic with
preconceptions which they find they must rapidly discard. The result can be
equally disconcerting for those who move in reverse order from the heights and
depths of the War of the Ring to the unilinear simplicities of Bilbo's
"adventure." Not that
The Hobbit
is by any means a bad book.
It is a misunderstood book, misunderstood in its purpose and its execution.
Despite its surface connections with
The Lord of the Rings
the two works
are so unlike fundamentally as to be different in kind.
The Hobbit
is a
story for children about the stealing of a dragon's hoard by some dwarves with
the reluctant aid of a little hobbit.
The Lord of the Rings,
on the
other hand, stretches the adult imagination with its account of a world in
peril. Each work has virtues proper to its kind, but they had better be read
independently of each other as contrasting, if related, specimens of the fantasy
writer's art.

The beginning of
wisdom in understanding
The Hobbit
is to think of Tolkien, or another
adult, in a chair by the fireside telling the story to a semicircle of children
sitting on the floor facing him. From the opening paragraphs hardly a page goes
by in which the narrator does not address the children directly in the first
person singular. Since the breed of hobbits has just sprung freshly minted from
his brain, he loses no time in telling his young listeners about how they look
and behave, notably their shyness "when large stupid folk like you and me
come blundering along," and he ends his description by, "Now you know
enough to go on with. As I was saying . . ."
¹
Sometimes he uses
the direct address technique to create anticipation, as in introducing Gandalf:
"Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him,
and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be
prepared for any sort of remarkable tale." Sometimes his remarks to the
child audience take on a genial, joking tone, as in pointing out the flaw in
Bilbo's plan for freeing the captive dwarves by putting them into barrels (his
inability to put himself into one): "Most likely you saw it some time ago
and have been laughing at him; but I don't suppose you would have done half as
well yourselves in his place." Then, there are jocular interjections of no
special moment, but aimed at maintaining a playful intimacy: "If you want
to know what
cram
is, I can only say that I don't know the recipe; but
it is biscuitish ..."

Tolkien also makes
the technique work for him expositorily in making clear to the youngsters
important shifts in the plot sequence. Normally he describes every scene from
Bilbo's point of view, and describes none in which Bilbo himself is not
present. But Chapter XIV diverges to report what happened at Lake-town, while
Bilbo and the dwarves were shut inside Erebor, when Smaug the dragon attacked
the town and was killed by Bard the archer. So Tolkien opens the chapter with
the sentence: "Now if you wish, like the dwarves, to hear news of Smaug,
you must go back again to the evening when he smashed the door and flew off in
a rage, two days before." Incidentally, this careful score-keeping of days
elapsed at every stage of his tale is typical of Tolkien. Having narrated
events at Lake-town he steers his young audience back to their hero with the
words, "Now we will return to Bilbo and the dwarves." And, on
occasion, in order to remind them of an important fact, already explained some
time before, which they may have forgotten, he repeats it. Thus when the Master
in Lake-town judges Thorin's claim to the treasure by inheritance to be a fraud
Tolkien reiterates what Gandalf and Elrond acknowledged earlier: "He was
wrong. Thorin, of course, was really the grandson of the king under the
Mountain . . ." This care in keeping the plot crystal clear is adapted to
the possible squirmings and short attentiveness of the children he is speaking
to.

Also for their
benefit is Tolkien's method all through
The Hobbit
of prefacing the
introduction into the story of each new race with a paragraph or so setting
forth in plain words whatever needs to be known about its looks, its habits,
its traits, and whether it is good or bad. He has started this practice off
with the hobbits. He extends it to trolls, dwarves, goblins, eagles, elves, and
lakemen as each of these makes its entry. These little capsules of racial
qualities are enlivened usually with personal interjections: "Yes, I am
afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each"; or
"Eagles are not kindly birds," but they did come to the rescue of
Bilbo's party, and "a very good thing too!" Goblins are wicked and
bear a special grudge against dwarves "because of the war which you have
heard mentioned, but which does not come into this tale." Elves are
hunters by starlight at the edges of the wood and are "Good People."
After such set pieces no small auditor will be in any doubt as to which people
he should cheer for. The whole tale gives him a very firm moral framework by
which to judge.
²
Another minor but persistent device in the manner
of its telling likewise is meant to delight childish ears. The prose is full of
sound effects, which the eye of the reader might miss but the hearing of the
listener would not. Bilbo's doorbell rings
ding-dong-a-ling-dang;
Gandalf's
smoke rings go
pop!;
the fire from his wand explodes with a
poof;
Bombur falls out of a tree
plop
onto the ground; Bilbo falls
splash!
into the water, and so on at every turn. Nor are these sound effects limited to
the prose. Many of the poems are designed more for onomatopoeic purposes than
for content. One prime example is the song of the goblins underground after
their capture of Bilbo and the dwarves, with its
Clash! crash! Crush, smash!
and
Swish, smack! Whip crack
and
Ho, ho, my lad.
The elves'
barrel-rolling song has all the appropriate noises, from
roll-roll-rolling
to
splash plump!
and
down they bump!
Tolkien knows that up to a
certain age children like their stories to be highly audible.
³

But the question
as to what age Tolkien is addressing cannot be long deferred. Probably he
himself had no precise answer in mind, but the very nature of the tale and the
methods of its telling draw the principal parameters. The children listening to
its recital must be young enough not to resent the genial fatherliness of the
I-You technique, the encapsulated expositions, sound effects, and the rest, yet
old enough to be able to cope with the fairly stiff vocabulary used on many
occasions and to make at least something of the maturer elements that keep
cropping up in what they hear. For, although
The Hobbit
is predominantly
juvenile fiction, it is not all of a piece. Much of the confusion about it
arises from the fact that it contains episodes more suited to the adult mind
than the child's.

One such is Bard's
claim to a share in Smaug's treasure after he has killed the dragon, a claim
made not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of the elves and the people
of Lake-town. Tolkien has built up here a very pretty conundrum in law, equity,
and morals. The treasure consists of a hoard gathered by Thorin's ancestors,
but Smaug has mingled with it unstimated valuables belonging to Bard's
forebears in the city of Dale. So Bard has a clear legal claim to some unclear
fraction. The Lake-town men have no title in law to any portion but rest their
case on the argument that Thorin owes them an equitable share because the
dwarves roused Smaug to destroy their town, leaving them now destitute; and besides
they helped to outfit the dwarf expedition when it was penniless. Bard invokes
for them, in fact, the general principle that the wealthy "may have pity
beyond right on the needy that befriended them when they were in want."
And what of the elves' contention that the dwarves stole the treasure from them
in the first place, as against the dwarf reply that they took it in payment for
goldsmith work for the elves under a contract which their king later refused to
honor? A Solomon might well pick his way gingerly among these claims and
counterclaims, especially when faced with Thorin's answer that he is not
responsible for Smaug's devastations, and will not bargain under threat of
siege by an army anyway. If so, what is even the wise child to make of it all?