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Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

It is almost regarded as axiomatic that Tolkien drew strictly upon northern resources in fashioning his mythologies. Why should he refer to Homer twice when describing the (then as-yet unpublished) cycle if everything, as people like Tom Shippey argue, is cleanly derived from Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Finnish sources? The best answer to that unanswerable question may lie in the 1991 paper by Jonathan Glenn, titled To translate a hero: The Hobbit as Beowulf retold. Although Glenn stresses the importance of "Beowulf" in the Tolkien tradition, he takes the unusual position of disagreeing with classical Tolkien analysis. That is, he doesn't think Tolkien was lifting his ideas quite so cleanly from "Beowulf". "...studies of these issues are with few exceptions flawed in three dangerous ways," Glenn writes in his introduction. "By the general critical sin of Sloppy Statements, by a tendency to simple-minded and profligate Parallel-Hunting, and by the Voilà Syndrome, whereby the critic impressively points to something but fails to ask that first of all critical questions, 'So what?'" He proceeds to rip into Bonniejean Christensen's treatment of Tolkien and "Beowulf" and then offers an argument in favor of a completely different reading: that Bilbo and Beorn are not following the models others have proposed for Tolkien. Rather, Glenn believes that Tolkien was devising "an alternative hierarchy" to the northern world's traditional hierarchy, one in which Tolkien substitutes the Adventurer for the Warrior and the Leader for the Hero. Such a substitution is easily recognizable in many analyses of Aragorn's character, who is indeed more and an adventurer and leader than warrior and hero. But Aragorn is not equated with Beowulf, whereas Bilbo has been so identified in critical literature. To support his thesis, Glenn more than once draws upon Biblical examples which would easily have been available to Tolkien, the devout Catholic. Now, Tolkien admitted freely that "Beowulf is among my most valued sources" to The Observer in 1937 after The Hobbit was published, although he pointed out that "it was not conciously present to the mind in the process of writing, in which the episode of the theft [of the cup from Smaug's hoard] arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances." If Tolkien was not consciously borrowing from "Beowulf" when he wrote about the cup-theft, then it must be equally true that he did not keep a copy of his essay, "On Fairy-Stories", in front of him as he wrote either The Hobbit (impossible, since the essay was first composed and presented as a lecture in 1938) or The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien never mentions the essay or the theory of story construction which he explains in it in any of his notes or letters from the period 1938-52, when he worked on The Lord of the Rings. Some people seem to feel he felt completely bound by the principles he set forth. But by the time Tolkien began to write The Lord of the Rings, he was bound by other material which had appeared in print, and which he had been working on or had worked on throughout the previous twenty-two years.

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