Speaking Clock
2003-11-23 17:24:10 UTC
This is from today's Sunday Times (UK) - available online at
www.sunday-times.co.uk but only for UK readers.
Speaking Clock
*****************************
Review: Cover book: Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth
HUMPHREY CARPENTER
TOLKIEN AND THE GREAT WAR: The Threshold of Middle-earth
by John Garth
HarperCollins £20 pp398
In a hole in 20th-century literature there lives a Tolkien. He lurks
there disconcertingly, disrupting lazy assumptions, confounding academic
clichés. Were it not for him, we could declare without fear of
contradiction that the century that has just ended saw the unchallenged
triumph of the literature of modernism, and that T S Eliot and James
Joyce ushered in an era that had no room for fairy stories. But there he
dwells, puffing on his pipe, muttering about dragons and goblins,
mocking all those English-faculty Marxists, feminists and
post-structuralists with his maps of Middle-earth, and - for which they
will never forgive him - pulling in the crowds.
Who doubts that when BBC2's Big Read reaches its climax on December 13,
with the long-awaited party at which the poll results will be announced,
the book that has been voted the nation's favourite will turn out, yet
again, to be his? Time and again, The Lord of the Rings has proved
unbeatable in such polls. (All right, there is a loyal Tolkien claque
doing its best to ensure that he wins again, but I doubt that you can
really rig the vote to that extent.) Once more, Dickens, Jane Austen and
the rest will have to concede victory to the tweed-clad Oxford professor
who wrote his stories on the backs of old exam papers. And no prizes for
prophesying what will be the most popular film this Christmas.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," is one of the most
memorable, charmingly diffident debut lines in the history of
literature, and the book that begins with this line can scarcely be
bettered as a work of children's fiction. It is regrettable that the
success of the film of The Lord of the Rings has tended to push The
Hobbit out of the limelight. Peter Jackson, the film's director, should
have made four Tolkien films rather than three, beginning with the
adventures of Bilbo Baggins, the burglar-hobbit who helps a wandering
band of dwarves to regain their ancestral treasure from a wily old
dragon.
The Hobbit is beguilingly unpretentious, delightfully funny, and
splendidly restrained in its use of magic - compare J K Rowling's
spell-on-every-page approach, and judge for yourself which is the more
effective. Bilbo's journey from his cosy village across risky territory
to the Misty Mountains with their goblin-infested caverns, and to the
dragon-haunted Lonely Mountain beyond, provides the geographical and
narrative matrix for Frodo's quest in the sequel.
Moreover (as an academic friend once pointed out to me), The Hobbit is a
neat little parable about the first world war. Plucked from his rural
idyll and catapulted into a brutal and totally unnecessary conflict,
Bilbo soon discovers the futility of old-style heroism, and learns that
the best place for him is out of it all. He manages to get walloped on
the head, and spends most of the battle unconscious - just as his
creator Tolkien caught trench fever on the Somme, and was safely
invalided out of the carnage.
The importance of the first world war as a catalyst for Tolkien is now
the subject of an entire book. My own authorised biography of Tolkien,
published in 1977, was based on unlimited access to his papers, which
were then in the hands of his family. Not long after the book came out,
however, these papers were deposited in the Bodleian Library at Oxford,
without (for the time being) any provision for other would-be writers
about Tolkien to be allowed to see them. Consequently, any new accounts
of Tolkien's life tended to lack fresh source material, and to depend
heavily on my biography and the selection of Tolkien's letters that I
had edited with his son and literary executor, Christopher.
John Garth is the first writer to have been permitted to inspect certain
parts of the Tolkien papers in the Bodleian. (Aspiring Tolkien scribes
should not, however, rush to that library; no further giving of
permission is currently planned.) Garth has chosen to hold a magnifying
glass to the part of Tolkien's life that leads up to the outbreak of war
in 1914, and to follow Tolkien's war experiences in detail, together
with those of his close friends Robert Gilson, Geoffrey Smith, and
Christopher Wiseman. These three, along with Tolkien, were all old boys
of King Edward's School, Birmingham, where they had formed a group
called the TCBS (meaning "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", because they
made tea illicitly in the school library, and also feasted at Barrow's
department store).
Gilson and Smith died in Flanders. Wiseman survived to tell me about the
TCBS, and now Garth has considerably enlarged my account from he
letters of the TCBS members. He is absolutely right that this was a
crucial period for Tolkien, and it is also a moving story - I dedicated
my biography "To the memory of the TCBS". When Tolkien first teamed up
with the others, his study of ancient Germanic languages was still in
its apprentice stage, and he was only just beginning to invent his own
"Elvish" languages - a crucial part of his imaginative process, which
bore fruit not just in the numinous names in The Lord of the Rings, but
also in the sense of a vast history and culture lying behind that story.
Having an audience in his fellow-TCBS members, Tolkien was encouraged to
write abundantly (he would never have such an audience again until C S
Lewis convened the Inklings many years later). Garth quotes liberally
from the fairy poetry that Tolkien was pouring out just before he began
his spell as a signaller on the Somme - "fairy" in the modern as well as
the 16th-century sense, for some of it is influenced by J M Barrie
(Peter Pan as an influence on The Lord of the Rings - now there's a
thesis topic for you).
A little of this poetry goes a very long way, and Garth gives us an
awful lot of it. His book, I'm afraid, is often quite literally
plodding, since he follows relentlessly in the steps of Tolkien and the
TCBS as they converge on the Western Front. A few fresh ideas are
scattered here and there, but these tend to be swamped by the Rupert
Brooke-like correspondence of the protagonists as they vow to do great
things for their country.
This is some of the soil from which The Lord of the Rings grew - but
only some. My biography of Tolkien was an apprentice work, portraying
him very much as he saw himself, and leaving out several difficult
issues (Margaret Drabble, reviewing it, rightly castigated it as
"polite"). If the Bodleian is ever able to open its Tolkien coffers
fully, a magnificent new biography could be written. Meanwhile Garth's
book will please a few hardcore Tolkienites, with its excerpts from his
early poetry and prose; but it leaves the cunning old professor
unscathed in his hobbit-hole.
www.sunday-times.co.uk but only for UK readers.
Speaking Clock
*****************************
Review: Cover book: Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth
HUMPHREY CARPENTER
TOLKIEN AND THE GREAT WAR: The Threshold of Middle-earth
by John Garth
HarperCollins £20 pp398
In a hole in 20th-century literature there lives a Tolkien. He lurks
there disconcertingly, disrupting lazy assumptions, confounding academic
clichés. Were it not for him, we could declare without fear of
contradiction that the century that has just ended saw the unchallenged
triumph of the literature of modernism, and that T S Eliot and James
Joyce ushered in an era that had no room for fairy stories. But there he
dwells, puffing on his pipe, muttering about dragons and goblins,
mocking all those English-faculty Marxists, feminists and
post-structuralists with his maps of Middle-earth, and - for which they
will never forgive him - pulling in the crowds.
Who doubts that when BBC2's Big Read reaches its climax on December 13,
with the long-awaited party at which the poll results will be announced,
the book that has been voted the nation's favourite will turn out, yet
again, to be his? Time and again, The Lord of the Rings has proved
unbeatable in such polls. (All right, there is a loyal Tolkien claque
doing its best to ensure that he wins again, but I doubt that you can
really rig the vote to that extent.) Once more, Dickens, Jane Austen and
the rest will have to concede victory to the tweed-clad Oxford professor
who wrote his stories on the backs of old exam papers. And no prizes for
prophesying what will be the most popular film this Christmas.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," is one of the most
memorable, charmingly diffident debut lines in the history of
literature, and the book that begins with this line can scarcely be
bettered as a work of children's fiction. It is regrettable that the
success of the film of The Lord of the Rings has tended to push The
Hobbit out of the limelight. Peter Jackson, the film's director, should
have made four Tolkien films rather than three, beginning with the
adventures of Bilbo Baggins, the burglar-hobbit who helps a wandering
band of dwarves to regain their ancestral treasure from a wily old
dragon.
The Hobbit is beguilingly unpretentious, delightfully funny, and
splendidly restrained in its use of magic - compare J K Rowling's
spell-on-every-page approach, and judge for yourself which is the more
effective. Bilbo's journey from his cosy village across risky territory
to the Misty Mountains with their goblin-infested caverns, and to the
dragon-haunted Lonely Mountain beyond, provides the geographical and
narrative matrix for Frodo's quest in the sequel.
Moreover (as an academic friend once pointed out to me), The Hobbit is a
neat little parable about the first world war. Plucked from his rural
idyll and catapulted into a brutal and totally unnecessary conflict,
Bilbo soon discovers the futility of old-style heroism, and learns that
the best place for him is out of it all. He manages to get walloped on
the head, and spends most of the battle unconscious - just as his
creator Tolkien caught trench fever on the Somme, and was safely
invalided out of the carnage.
The importance of the first world war as a catalyst for Tolkien is now
the subject of an entire book. My own authorised biography of Tolkien,
published in 1977, was based on unlimited access to his papers, which
were then in the hands of his family. Not long after the book came out,
however, these papers were deposited in the Bodleian Library at Oxford,
without (for the time being) any provision for other would-be writers
about Tolkien to be allowed to see them. Consequently, any new accounts
of Tolkien's life tended to lack fresh source material, and to depend
heavily on my biography and the selection of Tolkien's letters that I
had edited with his son and literary executor, Christopher.
John Garth is the first writer to have been permitted to inspect certain
parts of the Tolkien papers in the Bodleian. (Aspiring Tolkien scribes
should not, however, rush to that library; no further giving of
permission is currently planned.) Garth has chosen to hold a magnifying
glass to the part of Tolkien's life that leads up to the outbreak of war
in 1914, and to follow Tolkien's war experiences in detail, together
with those of his close friends Robert Gilson, Geoffrey Smith, and
Christopher Wiseman. These three, along with Tolkien, were all old boys
of King Edward's School, Birmingham, where they had formed a group
called the TCBS (meaning "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", because they
made tea illicitly in the school library, and also feasted at Barrow's
department store).
Gilson and Smith died in Flanders. Wiseman survived to tell me about the
TCBS, and now Garth has considerably enlarged my account from he
letters of the TCBS members. He is absolutely right that this was a
crucial period for Tolkien, and it is also a moving story - I dedicated
my biography "To the memory of the TCBS". When Tolkien first teamed up
with the others, his study of ancient Germanic languages was still in
its apprentice stage, and he was only just beginning to invent his own
"Elvish" languages - a crucial part of his imaginative process, which
bore fruit not just in the numinous names in The Lord of the Rings, but
also in the sense of a vast history and culture lying behind that story.
Having an audience in his fellow-TCBS members, Tolkien was encouraged to
write abundantly (he would never have such an audience again until C S
Lewis convened the Inklings many years later). Garth quotes liberally
from the fairy poetry that Tolkien was pouring out just before he began
his spell as a signaller on the Somme - "fairy" in the modern as well as
the 16th-century sense, for some of it is influenced by J M Barrie
(Peter Pan as an influence on The Lord of the Rings - now there's a
thesis topic for you).
A little of this poetry goes a very long way, and Garth gives us an
awful lot of it. His book, I'm afraid, is often quite literally
plodding, since he follows relentlessly in the steps of Tolkien and the
TCBS as they converge on the Western Front. A few fresh ideas are
scattered here and there, but these tend to be swamped by the Rupert
Brooke-like correspondence of the protagonists as they vow to do great
things for their country.
This is some of the soil from which The Lord of the Rings grew - but
only some. My biography of Tolkien was an apprentice work, portraying
him very much as he saw himself, and leaving out several difficult
issues (Margaret Drabble, reviewing it, rightly castigated it as
"polite"). If the Bodleian is ever able to open its Tolkien coffers
fully, a magnificent new biography could be written. Meanwhile Garth's
book will please a few hardcore Tolkienites, with its excerpts from his
early poetry and prose; but it leaves the cunning old professor
unscathed in his hobbit-hole.