Home » Reading & Literature » J.R.R. Tolkien » Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 7

Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

If Tolkien continuously explores the motif of cultural conflicts, he nonetheless invigorates the art by mingling his narrative sources. However, he chooses the elements carefully, selecting archetypes and symbols which go well together. His Rohirrim, depicting all that is best of the Northmen, thus demand representation in a northern language, and therefore why not Tolkien's beloved Anglo-Saxon? But the choice of Anglo-Saxon, Old English, as the language of Rohan forced Tolkien to lead the reader into making associatons which he later felt compelled to deny. Hence, the Rohirrim may be too much of a good thing for their own sake. In The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey concedes that "Tolkien did not approve of the academic search for 'sources'. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had 'got it all' from somewhere else." The pursuit of identifying and justifying the Anglo-Saxon connections consumes the reader, especially the well-read reader like Shippey. He feels compelled to defend Tolkien against what he himself might regard as "Sloppy Statements" and "simple-minded and profligate Parallel-Hunting". There is certainly nothing simple-minded in Shippey's own parallel-hunting, but he barely mentions the Bible and perhaps once mentions Greek tragedy at all during the process of convincing the world that Tolkien's literature nearly begins and ends with the Anglo-Saxon language. Finnish and the Kalevala are accorded some respect, since Tolkien himself pointed out the connections, but The Lord of the Rings owes a great deal more to the classics than most commentators have conceded. However, though the Anglo-Saxonists seeks something specifically English in Tolkien's work, Tolkien himself may have been working toward a pseudo-English literature. That is, just as it is undeniable that he used Anglo-Saxon nomenclature in The Lord of the Rings, and just as Shippey argues convincingly that there are strong parallels between snippets of Tolkien's story and numerous medieval sources, it remains nonetheless that Tolkien abandoned the mythology for England. He abandoned it long before he wrote The Lord of the Rings. But it may be that he did so because he realized there was a more desirable, and much more easily achieved, goal. Or perhaps a more necessary one. In Letter 329, Tolkien wrote "I have very little interest in serial literary history, and no interest at all in the history of present situation of the English 'novel'. My work is not a 'novel', but an 'heroic romance' a much older and quite different variety of literature." In Letter 142 he wrote, "certainly I have not been nourished by English literature, in which I do not suppose that I am better read than you; for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer...."

The copyright of the article Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 7 in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Michael Martinez. Permission to republish Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 7 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.