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Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 8

© Michael Martinez

And yet, in Letter 217 Tolkien pointed out, in response to a request for help with a translation of The Lord of the Rings into Polish, that "as [the translator] perceives, this is an English book and its Englishry should not be eradicated." Well, that's a rather peculiar thing to say, coming from a person who on more than one occasion denied any particular fondness for English literature. Heroic romances, in Tolkien's opinion, go all the way back to Homer, and realized their most widespread popularity in Medieval literature. So Tolkien may only have been denying himself a place in both modern English and Medieval literature. He didn't say the book was Medieval, or Anglo-Saxon. In fact, it's not either. A Medieval or Anglo-Saxon reader probably would not understand most of what was going on in the story. But a modern Anglo-Saxon reader might. Not simply an Englishman, but an Anglo-Saxon Englishman. Tolkien was certainly no stranger to "what if" literature. His time traveling story-tellers, and his numerous essays pondering the philosophical aspects of Middle-earth, make it clear that Tolkien enjoyed wandering through the halls of What Might Have Been or What Could Be. The Lord of the Rings may be the culmination of a theory of literature which had been slowly brewing under his care and consideration for more than twenty years. The Lord of the Rings may be Tolkien's attempt define the modern English heroic romance as it might have evolved from an uninterrupted Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. Such a tradition could not have helped avoid importing influences from abroad. Anglo-Saxon authors would eventually have been introduced and reintroduced to the classics as the centuries unfolded. As Tolkien devised alternative plural forms for words such as "dwarf" ("dwarrows" and "dwarves" instead of the traditional "dwarfs"), so he may have sought to devise an alternative model for English literature. Eschewing the 'novel', he brought the heroic romance forward and gave it the framework that a rich literary tradition would have to provide. He could pick and choose from the best traditions that western literature has to offer. Why not? Anglo-Saxon authors throughout the past 1,000 years would not have ignored so many important steps in the evolution. Especially not when England became the dominant power in the world, and the English provoked their thought with ideas from around the globe. Just as The Lord of the Rings is set in an imaginary time in our past, so it purports to be a translation of an ancient work, The Red Book of Westmarch. In fact, it may be a fictitious work on another level, an example of how the English might have carried forward their heroic traditions, and adopted models from other traditions, had there been no 1066 invasion. In "On the Cold Hill's Side", chapter 8 of The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey writes "Tolkien liked to bring 'philologist-figures' into his fiction" and he provides several examples. Shippey discerns double-entendre throughout Tolkien's works, and perhaps rightly so. Whether by intent or applicability, Tolkien's characters often speak on two levels.

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