The Storyteller's Spell: Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings

The first part of a series of screen adaptations of Tolkien's classic The Lord of The Rings is scheduled for release on December 19. Colin Duriez reflects on the abiding popularity of these elven tales.

The word 'spell' comes from an early English word meaning 'story'. Hence 'Gospel' was originally 'God's spell' - God's story. The spell that Tolkien's storytelling has cast is enormous.

The readership of his books is estimated at over 150 million (the print run of the first US paperback edition of The Silmarillion alone was reportedly over two million). He is read throughout the world in numerous languages. Several polls of readers have made The Lord of the Rings their first choice. The bookshop chain, Waterstones, and a network TV programme, Book Choice, commissioned a poll of readers to determine the five books 'you consider the greatest of the century'. The response was impressive. Around 26,000 readers responded, with 5,000 giving the first place to The Lord of the Rings, placing it in the number one position as the book of the century. Other polls repeated this preference.

The start of a genre...

Tolkien's immediate impact is evident whenever one enters a bookstore. The existence of its Fantasy and Science Fiction section owes more to Tolkien, perhaps, than to any other contemporary writer. Many have tried to emulate him, and the better writers have often learnt much from him, especially writers of fantasy. His works have spun off into other media - audiotape and CD, computer and board games, illustration (by such as Rodney Matthews, John Howe, Ted Naismith, and Alan Lee), drama adaptations, and film. His portrayal of power, and its renunciation by the humble and overlooked, strikes chords today in our suspicion of powerful interest groups.

Tolkien's status as a global phenomenon is likely to be reinforced by the appearance this Christmas of a three-part film by Peter Jackson (2001ù3), each part representing a volume of The Lord of the Rings. Using the latest computer techniques, and filmed in the unspoiled landscapes of New Zealand, it employs actors of the calibre of Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Christopher Lee as Saruman, Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Liv Tyler as Arwen, Ian McKellan as Gandalf, and Bernard Hill as Th·oden. Peter Jackson described the work as 'the holy grail of cinemaƒ I really think it would have been impossible to do The Lord of the Rings before the advent of computersƒ With computers, we've arrived at a time when anything you can imagine can be put on to film, and ... anything Tolkien could imagine can be put on film.'

What is reality?

Explorations of virtual reality, particularly in film, have opened up the big philosophical and theological questions about the scope of reality. Does it ex-tend beyond what can be measured, and beyond what can be seen, touched and heard? The denials of modern thought, which tried to put reality into a closed box, seem increasingly hollow. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy about actual reality. Underpinning it is Tolkien's carefully worked out idea of sub-creation - the creation of a secondary world - in which the human maker imagines God's world after him. For Tolkien, the moral and spiritual world is as real as the physical world - indeed, each is part of one creation, and a successful sub-creation like the world of Middle-earth captures them all in an organic whole. The result is an image of reality that is making a claim to reliable knowledge.
The idea of making a secondary world, a possible world, applies far beyond fantasy. Any story, even a novel set in the real world, if it is any good at all creates a possible world. It is then a big metaphor. Metaphors speak of one thing by another. In the proverb 'love is blind' blindness illumines an aspect of love. The world created by the story is about something other than itself, shedding insights into the very nature of reality.

Biblical motifs

Why is Tolkien, a Christian writer, so popular throughout the world? In the first place The Lord of the Rings is a superb story, rooted in the central elements of what Tolkien called the Fairy Story, or the elven tale. Storytelling is universal and stories of myth, legend and popular folk tale contain archetypes or universal elements, like the motifs of the quest and the journey. Tolkien seems to have seen the elements of a good story most articulated in the Bible; certainly he saw this in the gospels. The Bible, of course, is the most global book in history, translated into all written languages. Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings is fast becoming one of the most globally read books after the Bible. Though rooted in many biblical motifs and themes (like providence, the problem of evil, sacrifice, redemption) Tolkien masterfully sets the events in a pre-Christian world, supposedly northern European in geographical location. Thus his Christian elements are transformed into a shape that is attractive without raising barriers with those who don't share his Christian beliefs.

In the second place, Tolkien's story is given many dimensions by his creation of another, secondary world. Middle-earth is replete with its own languages, geography and history. The vividness and depths of this 'sub-created' world undoubtedly reinforces the appeal of his The Lord of the Rings. Like the vastness of the cosmos, Tolkien's richly invented world opens up possibilities, hopes and dreams. He helps to formulate in his readers a sense of disenchantment with our secular culture. People today have an uneasy sense that there are dimensions to life untapped by our materialist culture, and that most of us are missing these dimensions. Tolkien's underlying archetypes (such as the quest and the journey), I think, focus the longing of people throughout the world, based upon the aspirations of our common humanity.

Note of warning

Tolkien, I believe, intended The Lord of the Rings to sound a warning to the Western world that it has abandoned the 'Old Western' values that provided its vitality. It is marked by a realistic portrayal of evil. It seems to belong with several other post-war writings (including Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, Golding's The Lord of the Flies, and C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength), in redefining fiction to come to terms with the horror of palpable evil revealed in modern, global warfare. Tolkien's work (like those other books) is more relevant to understanding the events of September 11 than much so-called realistic, naturalistic fiction. This is a deep irony, given that critics often dismiss Tolkien's fiction as escapist.

Who was the man behind Middle-earth? John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa of English parents in 1892. After his father's death he and his mother and brother moved permanently to the West Midlands. He attended Birmingham's King Edward VI Grammar School, then located near the city centre, and was familiar with Worcestershire and the Vale of Evesham. It is suggested that the Malvern Hills helped to inspire the mountains of Gondor in Middle-earth. His mother died and in 1908 the young orphaned brothers lodged at Duchess Road, in Birmingham. Here Tolkien fell in love with another lodger, Edith Bratt.

After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1915, and marrying Edith in the next year, he saw bitter action in the First World War, losing all but one of his best friends. It was during the Great War years that Tolkien began working on The Silmarillion, writing 'The Fall of Gondolin' in 1917 while convalescent. In fact, in general plot, and in several major episodes, most of the legendary cycle of The Silmarillion was already constructed before 1930 - before the writing and publication of The Hobbit, the fore-runner of The Lord of the Rings.

University career

After the Great War, Tolkien began university teaching in Leeds, after a period working on the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. After a few years he moved to Oxford to become Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon; this was in 1926. It was in this year that he met C.S. Lewis. Their long friendship was soon to begin. Lewis had then been an English don at Magdalen College for one year. They met at the English Faculty Meeting on May 11 1926. Within a year or so they were meeting in each other's rooms and talking far into the night.

Lewis fortunately recorded the gist of one of the long conversations in a letter to his Ulster friend Arthur Greeves in October 1931. It was a crucial factor in Lewis's conversion to Christianity. Tolkien had argued that human stories tend to fall into certain patterns, and can embody myth. In the Christian gospels there are all the best elements of good stories, including fairy-stories, with the astounding additional factor that everything is also true in the actual, primary world. It combines imaginative and historical, factual truth, with no divorce between the two. C.S. Lewis's conversion deepened the friendship between the two men.

Scholarly storyteller

The Professor's famous children's story, The Hobbit, came out in 1937. He continued with its adult sequel, The Lord of the Rings, more and more leaving aside his first love, The Silmarillion. During the Second World War years, and afterwards, he read portions to a group of literary friends, The Inklings, or simply to Lewis alone.

In 1945 Tolkien was honoured by a new Chair at Oxford, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, reflecting his by now wider interests. Tolkien retained the Chair until his retirement in 1959. The scholarly storyteller's retirement years were spent revising the Ring trilogy, brushing up and publishing some shorter pieces of story and poetry, and intermittently working on various drafts of The Silmarillion, which was published in condensed form after his death. It was edited by his son Christopher, followed by many volumes of drafts and fragments about the tales, history, geography, and languages of Middle-earth, opening up layer upon layer of that remarkable invented world.