This article originally appeared in issue 3 of Death Ray magazine.
Fifty years separate publication of The Lord of the Rings and The Children of Húrin, and in that time there have remained three constants: 1) that Tolkien’s books have remained undeniably popular, 2) that critics have remained baffled by this popularity, and, 3) countless would-be successors have tried and failed to emulate this success. The reasons for all three of these may, surprisingly, be one and the same, says Matt Keefe.
Criticism of The Children of Húrin was inevitable, and continued in much the same vein as that which has long been levelled at Tolkien’s most famous work, The Lord of the Rings: ‘…the characters are straightforwardly conventional. The wise are wise; the brave, brave; the noble, noble; and the wicked, wicked’ bemoaned the Sunday Times’ Tom Deveson adding that, ‘here we are too often escorted through monotonous passages of annalistic prose’. He’s correct, but such criticism entirely misses the point.
A renowned philologist and Professor of English, Tolkien’s own understanding of narrative storytelling stemmed not from creative writing theory of the kind which abounds today, but from an earlier time when the novel was but one of many literary forms. Alongside it the epic and the romance (as distinct from their novel imitators of the modern day), the chanson and the ballad, the annals, the chronicle and the saga all held sway over a crowded storytelling landscape. Today, new examples of these older forms are almost unheard of. For the modern reader, one form alone predominates to the point of virtual monopoly: the novel.
And yet, having supplanted all these varied literary forms, the modern novel takes very little from them; something in subject it inherits, perhaps, much less in form or style. In prose fiction, a relatively narrow view of good storytelling now predominates – third-person narration of the limited kind, by and large, with the first-person perspective (and its offspring the epistolary) offering occasional variation; heavy on dialogue, description mostly of the visual kind and the scale of depiction and passing of time generally constant. This then, is the starting point for critics and authors alike, but not for Tolkien.
That Tolkien’s epic tales were heavily inspired by myth is widely acknowledged, but that his very writing is just as intimately bound up with the forms taken by those ancient tales is often overlooked. Not merely are Tolkien’s stories of the ilk of Beowulf, Kalevala or Le Chanson de Roland, but they are tales told in that very form. Understanding that Tolkien follows in traditions such as these, and not merely in that of popular fiction, is key to giving the man and his work a fair hearing.
The Lord of the Rings may hardly be awash with brilliant metaphor, insightful characterisation and vivid realism – and to judge such stories, or try to tell them, in these terms really does miss the point – but what Tolkien’s work really provides is stories of fate, spun deftly like few others.
Fate. Fate is that thing which has elements of both the (more modern) concepts of character and plot, but in truth is neither and can’t be constructed by simple wedding of the two. Depictions of fate are characteristic of the epics and sagas of old, but not easily rendered in the modern novel and in fact seldom attempted by their creators, little valued by their critics. Tolkien knew fate well. Herein also lies the reason so many have failed to truly emulate Tolkien’s success, for all their ostensible similarity in style and subject.
The basic ingredients for Tolkien’s magic formula appear obvious, but they are, like so much about his work, easily misunderstood. The essential hallmarks – long, multi-volume works with epic stories set in worlds described in mind-boggling detail – are replicated by many, but without real success. Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist and David Eddings, amongst others, have all made careers from such lengthy sagas spread over numerous books, along with their attendant prequels and sequels (indeed, try finding a fantasy author attempting anything other than these lengthy series), but none have ever have succeeded in creating anything like Tolkien’s instantly recognisable Middle-earth.
Here again it is the work’s deeper form and not its content or mere physical characteristics that prove telling. Without Tolkien’s intimate knowledge of the epic and the saga, later fantasy novelists are forced to render their tales in the all too familiar shape of the modern novel. Tales aspiring to the mythological are told with characters who are realistic and events that are believable according to more mainstream writing theory, not at all soaked in the abstracted notion of fate in which Tolkien’s more ancient style excels, and it doesn’t really work.
‘…I had in mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and fairly cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story … I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme and sketched…’
So says Tolkien in an excerpt reproduced in The Children of Húrin. Informed by the epic and saga – both of which often presumed a greater knowledge on the part of their readers, or a familiarity with connected works, and would frequently reference myths and legends well beyond the scope of the main narrative without ever properly explaining them – Tolkien’s style is ideal for rendering these ‘vast backcloths’ in just a few omniscient paragraphs, that which is absent proving as telling as that which is laboriously recounted, replacing the conventional modern narrative with the fitting grandeur of ancient saga, and not merely a hollow imitation thereof.
For many others, however, dozens of convoluted sub-plots are required to create stories with the scope to which Tolkien’s imitators aspire; lengthy scenes gathered together in volumes totalling several hundred pages are needed to depict even small episodes. For all the apparent similarity, these works are nothing like Tolkien. Feist’s Midkemia, for example, originally conceived as the setting for a roleplaying game, is now described in detail across some twenty-odd books and yet for all that conjures up none of the feel of a convincing, all-encompassing mythology woven so easily by Tolkien.
Tolkien’s great skill then was not in rendering in great detail some mythological world, but in creating a mythology fit for our own and, crucially, a mythology whose stories might be told in a form altogether unlike anything we are used to today.
At the heart of all of this, though, is not the critic or the aspirant, but the reader, the public at large – the figure most overlooked in almost all discussion of what is or isn’t any good. A truism of the modern world, some would have us believe, is that all the public can now be sold is the Hollywood blockbuster, the catchy, radio-friendly pop song with the flashy MTV video, the over-packaged DVD boxed set, the latest videogame, the hottest trend and, most importantly here, the paperback novel, literary or throwaway (or even, for effect, pressed between two hard covers). But this, mercifully, is a lie.
That stories so utterly unlike any of these things, so wholly indebted to the sagas, epics, annals and legends of centuries and millennia past, continue to command such unrivalled popularity amongst a public itself so unknowing of any of these things, proves it to be a lie. And in this case, the truth is an encouragingly contrary thing.
