translated from the original Italian by Jimmy Bishop
emailed January 13, 2009
This is a collection of pieces – 23 in all – by
Tom Shippey, most already published, grouped together under “arboreal”
headings (“The Roots” for Tolkien’s
predecessors, “Heartwood” for philology, “The Trunk” for The Lord of the Rings and The
Silmarillion, “Twigs and Branches” for minor works). In the Introduction
Shippey notes that a topic on which much still remains to be written is that of
proximate (i.e. 19th and 20th century) literary forbears,
with regard both to similarities and contrasts.
An essay in the “Roots”
section is about the author of Beowulf,
who, although Christian, does not refer explicitly to Christianity and whose
characters are rather un-pagan pagans – “virtuous pagans”. The following piece
deals with connections with the Edda
and Kalevala. The next paper is on
the West Midlands, where Tolkien lived as a boy: these five English counties
near Wales conserved at least until the Edwardian period the majority of what
was for Tolkien the “true tradition” of English mythology and poetry, elsewhere
in the country destroyed by foreign influences. Local places and words provided
imaginative inspiration for the Shire, the Woses and Rohan. Tolkien’s emotional
life during his early years was centred here; he lost first his father and then
his mother, and the area became for him a sort of paradise lost. Everything,
though, was transformed by his philological imagination.
There follows a piece
on the poet who wrote Gawain, and
another concerning the 19th century inventions of nationalist
mythology by the Dane Grundtvig and the German Grimm: here Shippey describes
how these formidable scholars succeeded in stimulating the appreciation of medieval
literary texts on the part of a European public which until the 18th
century knew nothing of them (being familiar only with classical and biblical
mythology); their aim was to exalt their own literary tradition and reconcile
it with Christianity. In the next essay, on Wagner, Shippey criticizes
Tolkien’s remark concerning the German composer (“the only resemblance between
my Ring and that of Wagner is that both are round”): not only was Tolkien most
interested in the central problem of 19th century philology, the
relationship between the various texts which contain the Nibelung Sagas, but he
also took characters from these (such as Mim the Petty-dwarf) and above all the
Wagnerian characteristics of the Ring, central and maleficent throughout the
saga. The real great difference between Tolkien and Wagner is in the moral
evaluation of the Ring: Wagner sympathizes with the desire for it, though with
“ifs” and “buts”, whilst Tolkien rejects this without qualification. Between
the two there had been two world wars and all that was associated with these.
The following paper
discusses how the Goths, Huns and other northern cultures were rediscovered in
the 19th century: to philologists at this time (and to Tolkien) it
seemed possible at least to get close to reconstructing the “lost worlds” of
these peoples. It was hoped that philology itself, with its reconstructive
approach, would lead to this romantic conclusion – which today may be judged
impossible to reach on the basis of so few surviving texts. If these “dark
ages” are to be reconstructed, it can only be done by means of the novelist’s
imagination, as first William Morris and then Tolkien himself were to attempt.
The first piece in
the “Heartwood” section uses a phrase of Galadriel as its title: “Fighting the
Long Defeat”. Here Shippey blends his own experience with the story of his hero
Tolkien in a way that is both moving and, I think, of great interest as cultural
history: both during their long lives had the opportunity to be competent,
involved witnesses of the second part of the historical parabola of a venerable
human science, Philology. The first part of this history – although its
earliest roots were amongst the erudite scholars in the Hellenistic period (4th
– 2nd century BC) and further impetus was given by inquiring 15th-century
humanists – dates from its foundation as a systematic discipline and rapid
growth during the 19th century, above all in Germany, reaching a
maximum in the first decade of the 20th century. The second part – a
decline that was rapid in the 1920s and even more precipitous after the Second
World War – coincided with the entire careers of Tolkien and then Shippey (who
retired from his university post last year). Shippey writes of a long battle
that took place during Tolkien’s life between the Language (philology) and
Literature departments of all the universities in the English-speaking world:
the struggle ended with the defeat of the side on which Tolkien and Shippey
himself had fought, philology. Shippey outlines this story and attempts a
description of the “heart” of Venerable Comparative Philology; he does this by
means of a discussion of a “notorious and unresolved philological crux”, the translation of several verses
of Beowulf regarding the curse
associated with the dragon’s treasure. Conjunctions and verb classes are
examined in an attempt to understand whether the curse was introduced into the
treasure from outside by something or someone, or whether the curse resulted
directly from the unnatural greed the treasure provoked. Shippey thinks that
according to Tolkien the malediction was caused by both factors, but he
emphasizes that there is no conclusive grammatical or historical evidence. This
example serves, he explains, purely to illustrate how in the minds of the
philologists the discussion of the conjunctions became identified with the
mythological and moral content of the tale. But this was a fundamental error on
the part of the philologists: they did not make this connection clear,
explicit; they did not explain that the research into conjunctions had no sense
without a strong motivation to understand the mythological and moral truth of
the stories. Thus, in the hands of workers more superficial than Tolkien,
phonetic shifts and a thousand other linguistic details lost contact with myths
and became mere components of erudite, but pedantic, inventories: this was the
beginning of the “long defeat”, because external observers of such pedantry
could not fail to notice its irrelevance to culture, together with the
accompanying strange and haughty collective isolation of the practitioners. In
this way was lost the comprehension that a single word can open an enormous
field of hypotheses which might explain historical occurrences, and that
thousands such words might throw light on connections between various and
dissimilar works of poetry and chronicles, not only ancient and medieval, but
also modern. The external observers (from the “Literature” side) thought that
all right was on their side: that historical and philological research were
irrelevant to so-called “poetic inspiration” or even that they were an obstacle
to or destructive of it. At the level of academic politics these were the
results: when Tolkien began his teaching career at Leeds with a programme of
philological studies he had 150 students, whereas during the last year
that this programme was taught (1983)
there were only 8! Tolkien the academic was defeated, even though outside of
academia he triumphed thanks to the huge worldwide success of his fiction
(which, of course, was squarely based on Germanic philology). The many
novelists who imitate his work have understood (and Shippey gives precise
examples) that philology gives depth to a narrative, and this depth helps to
sell books! On the other hand, the winners of this academic war – the modern
scholars of Literature – although victorious in academia, lost much of their
outside readership in the decades that followed the fifties, and were
ultimately also defeated within the academic world itself. In fact, Shippey taught
his last years in the US, and reports that there the number of students in the
departments of English literature has fallen to two-thirds of that in Tolkien’s
time. Popular interest should not be completely separated from scholarly study,
on the pain of failure of the academic field which, for reasons of snobbery or
ideological pathology, instigated the divorce in the first place! I asked Tom
Shippey if now, as far as he knows (and he is certainly competent in this
field), there exist today young researchers able to prepare “critical editions”
of ancient or medieval texts (such as those
– Loeb Classics – which I read in
my youth as a student at the Scuola Normale di Pisa), and Tom replied that no,
there are not, at least in the English-speaking world! A reply which at first
amazed me. But then again, I recalled that thirty years ago at the Normale I
became friends with a school-mate who was a researcher in Romance philology
under a professor considered at the time the foremost scholar in the field, Gianfranco
Contini. We have remained friends and recently, during a conversation about the
current state of Romance philology, he (now a Carmelite monk and theology
teacher) told me a similar thing: critical editions are no longer made! I don’t
want to exaggerate this point since I don’t know how much or in what way
Romance philology is pursued in France or Spain, and I didn’t ask Tom how and
to what extent Germanic philology is studied in Germany or Norway. However,
these two pieces of evidence made me reflect a little on the cultural history
of the 20th century…
Let’s return to the
review: the next essay is about “History in Words”, defined as Tolkien’s ruling
passion and of which Shippey gives numerous detailed examples. Here too,
though, he comments on modern life, observing that although for some years it
has been fashionable in universities to “change the canon” with regard to the
authors read in literature courses (and for study, précis etc.), in truth
nothing of the sort actually happens as a result of such talk; on the contrary,
the canon of authors read (etc.) does not change, but rather – at least with
respect to the number of writers – is progressively reduced! A further piece
deals with Tolkien and Iceland; Shippey compares the Second World War Years,
when evil appeared to spring back stronger than ever from its ashes and those
who fought it seemed to do so on principle rather than to win: this situation
brings to mind the pre-Christian Icelandic sagas of Early Medieval age in which
wise and courageous men fight knowing that they will lose, but maintain their
courage nonetheless. The next paper is an evaluation of Tolkien’s current
academic reputation, and concludes that he produced few writings on philology,
but at least half of these had great success among specialists in the subject,
and that this was not due to the fame he acquired from his fiction, but to the
intrinsic merits of his academic work, which was always highly accurate and
often innovative.
The “Trunk” section
discusses themes from the major works, The
Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. The essay which
interested me most concerns the wicked characters: Orcs, Wraiths and Wights.
The Orcs represent age-old human behaviour, cynical and debased in certain
circumstances. The Wraiths seem to Shippey to resemble quite specific
contemporary figures: powerful men whose choice to serve power has made them
inhuman, becoming almost automata in their machine-like reactions and in part
invisible to normal men, hidden by their ideological propaganda. These are the
great bureaucrats of 20th-century totalitarian states, which started
out with the good intentions of bringing order, progress and knowledge, were
devoured by the “cause” in which they believed. The Orcs and Wraiths share the
idea of Boethius (Augustinian and Neo-Platonic) of Evil as the corruption of
Good. Whereas the Wights seem to embody
the Manichean vision of Absolute Evil, an Evil with no motivation beyond that
of causing evil itself. A Wight is not a ghost of one of the corpses buried in
the Barrows (these are the bodies of the good Men of the West who in time gone
by had fought Sauron), but an entity which tries to make their old triumph over
the Men of the West live on in the Hobbits. Where did they come from? As Tom
Bombadil says: “from where the gates stand forever shut, till the World is
mended”. Not from humans, but rather
from an Idea which infests the time of men, returning through the
centuries. How can it have happened – Shippey wonders – that in the heart of
the “civilized” 20th century things materialized that were
considered impossible only shortly before, such as state torture, extermination
camps, genocide, ethnic cleansing? Almost as if “Ideas of Destruction”, which
were present in latent form in the human race, continually sought and at times
found the great bureaucrats (Wraiths, and Saruman who was becoming one of them)
who directed operations so as to make them real (allowing them to escape from
the gates “forever shut”) and Orcs ready to put them into practice.
Another piece deals
with Tolkienian solutions to the problem of heroism. It begins by noting a
difficult dilemma for Tolkien: his work as a scholar of Early Medieval sagas
concerned tales replete with courage and honour, but also full of great
cruelty. On the other hand, it seemed to him that admitting that heroism could
exist without delicacy, forgiveness and a sense of humour was contrary to
civilized values. The oscillation between these two poles gives Tolkien’s
writing a force and vitality which is often missing from that of his imitators.
Tolkien knew what our Germanic ancestors were really like – courageous and
cruel – and that even if in cruelty we find nothing to admire, the fact remains
that it coexisted with the pride and bravery which we do admire. The solution
was to construct a myth (if it is true that the purpose of myths is to produce
conciliation between irreconcilable cultures), a 20th-century myth
in which Tolkien asks himself if in a Christian world there can be a noble
non-Christian idea, if a person can have a fully developed moral sense without
the support of faith and revelation, if pagan virtues can be separated from
pagan vices. These questions of Tolkien appear to Shippey to be increasingly
appropriate, as the West enters a post-Christian age. In practice, Tolkien
makes different styles of heroism coexist in his myth: Aragorn and Denethor,
Frodo and Gimli, and Faramir as well as Boromir.
A following essay on
social classes in Tolkien’s world analyzes the Shire, Gondor and the Mark in this respect. Another
considers the proverbs to be found in the writings of Tolkien, including many
Tolkien originals together with others based on traditional forms. A group of
Tolkien’s own proverbs (spoken by various different characters) address the
theme of ignorance, of lack of knowledge about things. Gandalf says to Frodo
that even the wisest cannot see ultimate ends and Frodo remembers these words
when he has to decide what to do with Gollum; at an intermediate point Gandalf
recounts a variant to the Council of Elrond, “despair is only for those who see
the end beyond all doubt”, and Legolas, near Fangorn Forest says, “few can
foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end”. These
proverbs tell us first that you may never know your destiny, and second that
others (for example enemies) have also their own problems. A further point is
that one should not act on the basis of what one thinks others are doing,
because this can only result in deviation, the forgetting of duty and falling into
desperation. Another group of proverbs regards the idea of Providence – which
for Shippey is the “ideological core” of The
Lord of the Rings – and shows us how it works through people, who differ in
their capacities and intentions. These various intentions, good or evil, are
used for a higher-level synthesis by a
superior power, and this synthesis is hidden even from the wisest: the pinnacle
of wisdom is to understand the limits of wisdom itself.
The section entitled
“Twigs and Branches” covers Tolkien’s lesser works. In a piece on the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Shippey
comments that Tolkien thought the theme of pagan heroism had become dangerous
during the time of Hitler, and this was why he felt critical of the medieval
variety. He also thought that an effective image of Christian heroism was
lacking, and that the spirit of the Vikings and Berserkers had again become
popular and seductive at this time, just as it had ensnared many minds in
centuries past, and had once more to be fought against. He therefore proposed
alternative images of heroism such as Aragorn, Theoden and Sam Gamgee. Another
paper is about a poem by Tolkien first called The Griphon and then re-entitled The Hoard and included in The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which regards the question of “dragon sickness”
or greed. A further piece concerns the question of the ways in which Smith of Wooton Major is allegorical,
and to what extent. And another is on the idealized anarchy of everyday life in
a similarly idealized England which is described in Mr Bliss.
The last essay deals
with Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. Shippey makes various observations: although
68 years ago the English might well have believed that the forces of good were
quantitatively superior to those of evil (the Battle of Britain), at the
beginning of the 21st century after a long period of US military
supremacy, spectators need to be told that the forces of good are weakened by
desperation and disunited. In order to achieve this, Jackson shows (for
example) Denethor in a worse state than that described by Tolkien: the beacon
that would have called for help from Rohan is not lit. Another modernization is
the “democratic” role given by Jackson to Sam when he makes him prophet with a
“philosophical message” who talks to Frodo at Osgiliath and even converts
Faramir from his previous opinions. Jackson oversimplifies at several points
when it is said that Evil could be destroyed forever, whereas in Tolkien the
“wise” characters are well aware that this is impossible, since it remains latent
and ready to re-emerge.
The main criticism
that Shippey makes of the director concerns his handling of the Palantiri: in
the book the characters are “lost” not just in the literal sense of being lost
on paths in real woods, but above all in the existential sense of not knowing
where they will end up or how to arrive at their destination, or even if there
is a destination. Tolkien repeatedly demonstrates the disastrous effect of the
use of the Palantiri (Seeing Stones) and of attempting to escape from the state
of bewilderment by trying to foresee the future by making a “speculation”. Too
much speculation about the future in general erodes the will to act in the
present. Tolkien shows that the destiny of the characters depends instead upon
assistance which comes from completely unexpected directions and sources. The
Palantiri lead the characters astray by causing unjustified fear, whereas the
entire structure of The Lord of the Rings
indicates that decisiveness and perseverance in doing what one must do (and not
speculation on what is happening or will happen elsewhere) can be rewarded more
than could have been hoped for. For Shippey this (and not the themes of Power
or Death) is the “philosophical core” of The
Lord of the Rings: Providence, a Providence which does not have dominion
over free will but resides in the very decisions and actions of the characters.
In Tolkien chance does not exist, and neither coincidence. Characters’
understanding of events as chance or coincidence is due only to their inability
to see how they are interconnected. Now, Shippey observes, Jackson first weakens the sense of
“ bewilderment” present in the novel (for example by narrating the entire story
of the Ring from the beginning), then removes all of Tolkien’s warnings against
speculation, makes little use of the Palantiri and then makes a decisive error:
he creates a scene in which rather than Sauron seeing Pippin and making a mistaken speculation, Pippin sees Sauron
and draws a correct conclusion.
Furthermore, Jackson removes Tolkien’s theme of apparent coincidences (and real
connections): for example the tie between Denethor’s attempt to kill Faramir
and the doom of Theoden becomes invisible – without Denethor’s act Theoden’s
death would not have occurred – but Jackson hides this mechanism. Are these serious errors in Jackson’s work?,
Shippey asks at the end. And he concludes: in reality the great majority of
readers of the book do not notice these messages, and Jackson – on the other
hand – has managed to bring to the screen a considerable number of more obvious
Tolkenian messages, at times going against the norms of Hollywood: the
difference between “primary action” and “subsidiary action”, the differences
between the styles of heroism, the need for both piety and courage, the
vulnerability of good, the real cost of evil; and besides, he did well in
remaining faithful to the sad, mute and ambiguous finale of the original,
hinting at all that in both novel and film remains unsaid.
[translated from Italian into English by Jimmy Bishop]