Tolkien scholars embark on a quest for legitimacy in academe
Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Michael D.C. Drout, an associate professor of English at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, and editor of the journal Tolkien Studies, about whether scholars of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, can win legitimacy for their work in academe.By SCOTT McLEMEE
The worldwide audience for J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of the struggle between good and evil in the ancient world of Middle-earth now numbers quite literally in the hundreds of millions, thanks to the Oscar-winning screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. Literary scholars have been analyzing his cosmos since the mid-1960s. But there is a difference between success with the motion-picture academy and legitimacy in academe, as those working in the field of Tolkien studies are only too well aware.
“At first we were going to self-publish,” says Michael D.C. Drout, an editor of Tolkien Studies, an annual journal that made its debut in April. “I spent a summer doing layout and other technical stuff that I wasn’t really qualified to do, but had to learn.” The plan, says Mr. Drout, an associate professor of English at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass., was to get the first issue out, and then perhaps find an academic publisher willing to take it on.
As things worked out, Tolkien Studies was able to skip a step. The journal found a home last year with West Virginia University Press, and the second and third issues are now in preparation. Still, as Mr. Drout discusses the quest to create the first scholarly journal devoted solely to Tolkien, one gets a sense of what must be the most nagging problem facing anyone in his field. As he describes his and his colleagues’ efforts to edit and design the journal, it calls to mind the image of a group of Tolkien enthusiasts (possibly dressed as hobbits or orcs) gathering at a photocopy shop to assemble a fanzine.
Even a glance at the journal reveals how unfair such assumptions are. The first issue of Tolkien Studies offers material only a philologist could love, such as an analysis of the influence of Finnish folklore on the mythos of Middle-earth. But academics working on Tolkien inevitably fall under suspicion of being fans, distinguished from Trekkies only by their taste for the quasi-medieval. After all, the passion with which readers and moviegoers have plunged into Tolkien’s “legendarium” renders some of them averse to leaving it. One need not look very far in cyberspace to find the work of amateur authors inspired to write, say, the memoirs of Gollum, a hobbit corrupted by the power of the Ring of Sauron.
Such expressions of creativity and devotion have their place, says Mr. Drout, but not in a scholarly journal. “Someone can write an article like the one I’m hoping to run soon that offers a poststructuralist-psychoanalytic reading of Gollum,” he says. “It’s brilliant. It’s up there with the best critical work you might find written about Faulkner or Hemingway or Toni Morrison. But if you put that article next to somebody’s pencil sketch of Queen Galadriel’s mirror, or an article about ‘stir-fried Balrog’s wings,’ no one will take it seriously.”
For those outside the fold, there may be a natural tendency to think of Tolkien scholarship as yet another case of academics’ appropriating a work of mass culture and eagerly foisting their theoretical preoccupations upon it. (Think back, for example, to the early 1990s, the golden age of Madonna studies.) But in the case of Tolkien, the relationship between the imaginative work and the field of scholarship proves rather more complex than that. While his tales and fantasies have found a lasting place in the popular culture, their roots lie deep in academe.
Indeed, as the author himself recounted it, he stumbled into Middle-earth at some point in the early 1930s, while grading examination papers. Taking a break from his labors, he scribbled down a sentence about hobbits and sketched a map of an imaginary land. A respected philologist who became a professor of English at the University of Oxford, Tolkien was known to his peers for his study of Chaucer’s use of 14th-century regional dialects in “The Reeve’s Tale” -- and for a hard-hitting paper that criticized the state of Beowulf scholarship, still considered a landmark in the field, that appeared in 1937.
The Hobbit, offering readers a first foray into Middle-earth, was published that same year. Over the next dozen years, Tolkien worked on and off on a kind of sequel that soon turned into an epic, The Lord of the Rings, published from 1954 to 1955. Well received among readers, the trilogy provoked the scorn of some critics. Edmund Wilson, whose essays on Proust, Joyce, and other modernist writers had influenced generations of literary opinion, denounced Tolkien’s work as the fare preferred by readers with “a life-long appetite for juvenile trash.”
Other critics, noting that Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, took his quasi-medieval world to express decidedly reactionary, if not fascist, political longings. (In fact, the author himself seems to have been an almost classic example of the apolitical don, capable of pronouncing himself both an anarchist and a monarchist within the same sentence, perhaps revealing that he’d prefer not to think about ideology at all, if possible.)
The modernist poet W.H. Auden rose to Tolkien’s defense, arguing that the trilogy offered an up-to-date embodiment of the tradition of the quest story, of which the Arthurian tales of the search for the Holy Grail are the most famous example. Besides offering a “literary mimesis of the subjective experience” of moral and psychological growth, wrote Auden, the books carried distinctly 20th-century political overtones. “The Shire of the hobbits is a kind of small-town democracy,” he wrote, while “Sauron’s kingdom of Mordor is, of course, a totalitarian and slave-owning dictatorship.”
A variant of that interpretation caught on among Tolkien’s young readers during the 1960s. For the counterculture, Mordor was the military-industrial complex, with the pipe-smoking hobbits being, in effect, very short hippies. (What gives this away is their enthusiasm upon discovering what Tolkien describes as a barrel of tobacco, also known in Middle-earth as “the halflings’ weed,” hint, hint.)
The Philology of Fantasy
The decades-old dispute over whether Tolkien’s work counts as serious literature is still alive. So are the debates over how to interpret the cultural politics of his imaginary world. But even before the author’s death, in 1973, some readers were beginning to wonder about a different set of questions: how to understand the relationship between Tolkien’s storytelling and his scholarship.
The final volume of The Lord of the Rings contains more than 130 pages of appendixes on the history and linguistics of Middle-earth, described with all the dry precision of an encyclopedia entry. In stray remarks, Tolkien himself indicated that he had first created a set of imaginary languages, then worked out the cultural history of how they had influenced one another, drawing on his expertise as a scholar of Old English, Finnish, and other literatures. In Middle-earth, the line between philology and fantasy was quite thin.
“In the 1970s,” says Jane Chance, a professor of English at Rice University, “I started teaching courses on Tolkien. There was such student demand for them, as there still is. So I went to the library and read the scholarship on him, but couldn’t find what I wanted on the parallels between his work and Old English literature.” Her research culminated in Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England, first published in 1979 and reissued three years ago in a revised edition from the University Press of Kentucky.
In an anthology edited by Ms. Chance, Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, also recently published by Kentucky, other scholars have followed her lead in exploring Tolkien’s allusions to Old Norse and Finnish writings, as well as classical and medieval Latin literature. For some scholars, whether amateur or professional, exploring Tolkien’s artificial languages offers its own pleasures, rather like mastering Esperanto or Klingon.
But the inner structure and history of the author’s imaginary tongues also provide clues to some of his sources. Tolkien modeled the Elvish dialect of Sindarin, for example, on Welsh, while the other Elvish dialect, Quenya, derives from Finnish and Latin. In consequence, his work reads less like an adventure story, pure and simple, and more like a fairly complex synthesis of some of the oldest traditions in European literature.
“The more we learn about Tolkien,” says Ms. Chance, “the more we realize how extensive was his reading and how careful his appropriations were.” The scholar and the chronicler of Middle-earth formed “a unified, not a split self.”
Guarding the Gate
Whether or not Tolkien possessed a “unified self,” he has certainly generated a scholarly community that is close-knit. “When the three of us who edit Tolkien Studies started work on it,” says Mr. Drout, “we realized that, between us, we knew more or less everyone working in the field. I wish we didn’t. But that’s how it is.”
The situation created a number of problems, beginning with how to keep the selection of manuscripts from devolving into cronyism. “We send things out for anonymous review,” he says. The reviewers are accredited academics, of course, but not all are Tolkienists. “And for work by anyone on the editorial board,” he says, “it has to have two favorable outside reports. Other publications have accepted articles of mine with just one reader’s report. That’s OK if it’s the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. But when you are doing anything with Tolkien, you can’t afford to have it look like it’s not being done seriously.”
The same principle applies to another project Mr. Drout has in the works: a Tolkien encyclopedia, to be published by Routledge in 2006. His goal is to get as wide a range of scholars as possible to contribute the work’s projected 1,000 or so entries. However definitive a reference work Mr. Drout and his colleagues assemble, of course, it will undoubtedly be subjected to the closest possible scrutiny by readers whose knowledge of Tolkien is nothing if not encyclopedic.
Asked about the future of Tolkien scholarship, Mr. Drout says he expects scholars to spend less time defending the importance of the work. “And I’d like to think we are done with certain topics that have been hashed over for years,” he says. “If I don’t read another article about Good versus Evil in Tolkien -- it’s always capitalized -- that would be fine. There have also been lots of really bad interpretations that run something like, ‘Hippies liked Tolkien, therefore he means this.’ It’s just bad sociology, without the data.” He expects the global audience for the films to bring people from cultural studies into the discussion of Tolkien -- a prospect that could well spell conflict, albeit of a stimulating kind.
“One of the reasons people go into working on Tolkien,” he says, “is that they’re alienated from what’s considered mainstream literary studies. I have a lot of sympathy for that. But I think it’s time to incorporate the work that’s going on in linguistics, literary theory, sociology, or what have you. It would mean a larger audience for Tolkien scholarship.”
Either that, or corruption by the power of the academic Ring of Sauron. The epic continues.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 39, Page A11